PASSAGE PROBLEM SET - 3

Directions for Questions 1-5: Read the passage and answer the questions that follow on the basis of the information provided in the passage.

After his father's death, writer Laurence Yep returned to San Francisco to look for the apartment house where his family had lived, which also housed their grocery store. It had been replaced by a two-story parking garage for a nearby college. There were trees growing where the store door had been. I had to look at the street signs on the corner to make sure I was in the right spot. Behind the trees  was a door of solid metal painted a battleship gray Stretching to either side were concrete walls with metal grates bolted over the openings in the sides. The upper story of the garage was open to the air but through the grates I could look into the lower level. The gray, oil-stained concrete spread onward endlessly, having replaced the red cement floor of our store. Lines marked parking places where my parents had laid wooden planks to ease the ache and chill on their feet. Where the old-fashioned glass store counter had been was a row of cars. I looked past the steel I-beams that formed the columns and ceiling of the garage, peering through the dimness in an attempt to locate where my father's garden had been; but there was only an endless stretch of cars within the painted stalls. We called it the garden though that was stretching the definition of the word because it was only a small, narrow cement courtyard on the north side of our apartment house. There was only a brief time during the day when the sun could reach the tiny courtyard; but fuchsia bushes, which loved the shade, grew as tall as trees from the dirt plot there. Next to it my father had fashioned shelves from old hundred-pound rice cans and planks; and on these makeshift shelves he had his miniature flower patches growing in old soda pop crates from which he had removed the wooden dividers. He would go out periodically to a wholesale nursery by the beach and load the car with boxes full of little flowers and seedlings which he would lovingly transplant in his shadowy garden. If you compared our crude little garden to your own backyards, you would probably laugh; and yet the cats in the neighborhood loved my father's garden almost as much as he did--to his great dismay The cats loved to roll among the flowers, crushing what were just about the only green growing things in the area. Other times, they ate them-perhaps as a source of greens. Whatever the case, my father could have done without their destructive displays of appreciation. I don't know where my father came by his love of growing things. He had come to San Francisco as a boy and, except for a brief time spent picking fruit, had lived most of his life among cement, brick, and asphalt. I hadn't thought of my father's garden in years; and yet it was the surest symbol of my father. Somehow he could persuade flowers to grow within the old, yellow soda pop crates though the sun seldom touched them; and he could coax green shoots out of what seemed like lifeless sticks. His was the gift of renewal. However, though I stared and stared, I could not quite figure out where it had been. Everything looked the same; more concrete and more cars. Store, home and garden had all been torn down and replaced by something as cold, massive and impersonal as a prison. Even if I could have gone through the gate, there was nothing for me inside there. If I wanted to return to that lost garden, I would have to go back into my own memories. Award-winning author Laurence Yep did return to his father's garden in his memories. In 1991 he published The Lost Garden an autobiography in which he tells of growing up in San Francisco and of coming to use his writing to celebrate his family and his ethnic heritage.

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1. The author is searching for something as he looks through the window of a parking garage. What is he searching for?

A. A particular car

B. The red cement floor of an old store

C. Reminders of the past

D. Evidence of his father's financial success 

Ans: C

2. What kind of work did the author's father do?

A. He was a professional gardener

B. He worked in a parking garage.

C. He owned a restaurant.

D. He owned a store. 

Ans:D

3. What idea does the story suggest about the author's parents?

A. They both worked hard to support their family

B. They had encouraged their son to become a writer

C. They had not wanted to see a parking garage replace their home.

D. They had been farmers most of their lives. 

Ans:C

4. What do you know about the father's garden?

A. It grew in spite of being neglected.

B. The cats would eat all the plants before they grew

C. It flourished in an unlikely spot.

D. It didn't grow well because of lack of sun. 

Ans:D

5. Why are details about the neighborhood cats included in this story?

A. To show how much the garden meant to the family.

B. To show how important this garden was to the author's father.

C. To show how had the author worked at helping his father.

D. To show that the author's father loved animals as well as plants.