Directions (For the items which follow) : In this Section you have Eight short passages. After each passage, you will find several questions based on the passage. First, read a passage, and then answer the questions based on it. You are required to select your answers based on the contents of the passage and opinion of the author only. PASSAGE-VII Although Louis Braille died when he was only forty-three years old, he succeeded in devising a system of reading and writing for the blind which is now taught all over the world. Braille lost his sight accidentally as a child. Nevertheless, he was able to complete his education at a school for the blind in Paris and became a teacher. In his day, the few books that were available for blind people were printed in big, raised type, the letters used were those of the ordinary alphabet. The reading of such books required immense effort. Not only that, writing was almost impossible, for a blind person was still restricted to an alphabet which was extraordinarily difficult to reproduce on paper. Braille's idea was to use raised dots, instead of raised letters. He evolved a system, which made use of only six dots in all. By various combinations of these dots, it not only proved possible to represent each letter in the alphabet, but punctuation marks, numbers and musical notation as well. Reading and writing for the blind have thus become enormously simplified. The sensitive fingers of a blind person can travel rapidly over the dots, and there is a small machine, something like a typewriter, which enables the blind to write quickly and clearly. Before Braille's invention, the blind had difficulty in reading because :
