Reading Comprehension Passage 33 MCQ Test With Answers – DYING YOUNG

(Please note: The following questions are related to a specific reading passage, which is available solely before the first question. Remember, it may be helpful to refer back to the reading text while answering the questions to ensure accuracy.)

DYING YOUNG

Gordon reaches over across the car and I'm startled, not so much by his touching me as that I hadn't realized the car was stopped and thought for a second that Gordon had simply abandoned the steering wheel and we would crash into the next telephone pole. But now I see that we are in a driveway, the same driveway I have watched him walk down many times in the past two and a half weeks.

The car is off, the parking brake pulled up. Gordon sweeps my hair to one side and kisses the back of my neck. He has strong lips; I wonder if his kisses are making red marks on my skin. I wonder if he will kiss my mouth like that. I speculate: What should I do now? How should I touch him? Does he think we are going to do this thing in the car? There are a thousand things I want to ask him all of a sudden. I want to find out what high school he went to, what his friends' names are, his favourite books, how he spent, say, the last ten years of his life. I want to know him.

Somewhere there is a puppy wandering away from his new home, never to be found. A steamboat is charging up the river with passengers on board, waving. A new pilot is nervous at his first landing. At NASA they are on the verge of a discovery.

I think that someday, after I die, I will go somewhere and be sitting across a card table from another dead person, playing hearts and saying, "When I was twenty-three I wanted to be a veterinarian but couldn't get into a vet school. ... When I was twenty-seven I fell in love with a man named Victor and then met a man named Gordon..." Sometimes I don't think I can ever tell a story of my life accurately because life is still continuing and there's no way to objectively portray it. I could try but it's like trying to pick up an endless pane of glass -- I can't even get a grip on it. How should I know if I'm doing the right thing as I let the porch door slam behind me and enter Gordon's house? Maybe when I'm dead my soul will sit somewhere, map out everything I did and be able to tell exactly where I erred. Maybe in some other life, I'll determine the secret to correctness, to doing things right, to knowing that one can do things right.

Marti LEIMBACH, Dying Young.

The first-person narrator, in the very opening of the passage, is startled because

Gordon, in the opening of the story,

She talks of the puppy wandering away from its home to emphasize

She would like to

This is most probably a passage from ............... a(n) novel.