Main Idea & Central Theme — XAT Previous-Year Questions

Read the following poem and answer the TWO questions that follow.

In the darkened room
a woman
cannot find her reflection in the mirror

waiting as usual
at the edge of sleep

In her hands she holds
the oil lamp
whose drunken yellow flames
know where her lonely body hides

Read the poem and answer the TWO questions that follow.

The slow person you left behind when, finally,

you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command,

where is he while you

walked around the shaved lawn in your plus fours,

organizing with an electric clipboard

your big push to tomorrow?

Oh, I have come across him, yes, I have, more than once,

coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian,

Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished

not just in themselves but by the stories

we put in with beginnings, ends, surprises:

the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet

or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother

flailing in the millpond beyond the weir,

dragged down by her woolen skirt.

He doesn’t see you as a story, though.

He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines,

he chorteles. When your barometric pressure drops

and the thunder heads gather,

he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with

the study little pencil he steals from the public library.

He asks me to look out for you.

Read the poem carefully, and answer the TWO questions that follow.

It hurts to walk on new legs:
The curse of consonants. The wobble of vowels.
And you for whom I gave up a kingdom
Can never love that thing I was.
When you look into my past
You see
Only weeds and scales.
Once I had a voice.
Now I have legs.
Sometimes I wonder

Was it a fair trade?

Read the following poem and answer the two questions that follow.
Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.
You're twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead.
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll
Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.
The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day:
To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.

Read the following passage and answer the two questions that follow.
And that has to do with the question of uncertainty and doubt. A scientist is never certain. We all know that. We know that all our statements are approximate statements with different degrees of certainty; that when a statement is made, the question is not whether it is true or false but rather how likely it is to be true or false. We must discuss each question within the uncertainties that are allowed. And as evidence grows it increases the probability perhaps that some idea is right or decreases it. But it never makes absolutely certain one way or the other. Now, we have found that this is of paramount importance in order to progress. We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified- how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about or what the purpose of the world is or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.

Read the poem below and answer the 2 associated questions:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But, if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Read the following stanza and answer the question that follows:

​​​​​​​Invisible atoms coming together
Revealing themselves in visible forms
Seeds are hugged by the earth
Which renders them as gardens in bloom.
And yonder stars, are they not pearls
Floating on teeming seas?
Scattered, yet strung together in orderly constellations
Love binding them to one another
And each is perpetually seeking its like?

Read the following poem and answer the question that follows:

I sought a soul in the sea
And found a coral there
Beneath the foam for me
An ocean was all laid bare.

Into my heart’s night
Along a narrow way
I groped; and lo! The light,
An infinite land of day.​​​​​​​