UTET Exam 29 September 2026 Paper – I (Second Language – English) (Answer Key)

Explanation: In this context, “fancy” means imagination, mental perception, or subjective mindset, whereas “fate” refers to unavoidable destiny or external circumstances. The author argues that people suffer not because life actually dealt them a harsher fate, but because their own negative thinking magnifies their troubles (as reinforced by the next line: “Many would be well off if they could but think so”).

Explanation: In the metaphor, the “garden” represents an individual’s character or inner life, and the “herbs to make it with” represent the virtue of patience. This directly parallels the preceding sentence: “All men praise patience, but few can practise it.” Therefore, saying not every garden grows it means that very few people actually cultivate and possess patience.

Explanation: The passage explicitly states: “It is medicine which is good for all diseases, but it is not every garden that grows the herbs to make it with.”

Explanation:

• Patience is the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, difficulty, or suffering without getting angry or upset—making endurance (the ability to withstand hardship or adversity) its closest synonym.
• Anger, Hurry, and Fear are unrelated or opposite emotional states.

Explanation:

• “Lest” means “with the intention of preventing something undesirable; to avoid the risk of.”
• Grammatically, lest is paired with the modal verb should (or a subjunctive bare infinitive): “lest + subject + should + V1”.

Explanation:

• Colossal means extraordinarily large in size, extent, or degree; gigantic, huge, or immense.
• Immense means extremely large or great, especially in scale or degree, making it the correct synonym.

Explanation:

• Reporting verb: “said to” changes to “told” followed by the object (the team).
• Modal transformation: When expressing present obligation or necessity, “must” generally shifts in reported speech to past tense “had to”.
• Pronouns and time/place adverbs:
  • “We” changes to “they”.
  • “this” changes to “that”.
  • “tomorrow” changes to “the next day” / “the following day”.

Explanation:

• Interrogative to Assertive order: In indirect Wh-questions, the question form (auxiliary before subject) changes to normal statement word order (Subject + Verb). Do not retain “did she park”.
• Tense shift: The direct speech is in Simple Past (“did you park”), which shifts to Past Perfect (“had parked”).
• Pronoun shift: “you” refers to his sister, so it becomes “she”.

Explanation: “Run into” (past: ran into) means to meet someone by chance or unexpectedly.

Explanation: Language acquisition follows the standard natural sequence: LSRW (Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing). Phonological and phonemic awareness begins with auditory input—a learner must hear and discriminate between sounds, stress patterns, and intonations before being able to replicate and pronounce them accurately.

Explanation:

• When an ongoing background action in the past is interrupted by a shorter, completed action, the ongoing action takes the Past Continuous Tense (was/were + V-ing), and the interrupting action takes the Simple Past (went out).
• The subject is “I”, which takes the singular auxiliary verb “was”  “was doing”.

Explanation:

• The sentence describes an activity that was actively in progress at a specific past moment when another event interrupted it (“when the doorbell rang”).
• The subject “my family and I” is plural, requiring the plural auxiliary verb “were” + present participle: “were listening”.

Explanation: A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in speech that distinguishes one word from another (e.g., the /p/ and /b/ sounds distinguishing pat from bat).

Explanation:

• In educational assessment: Diagnostic tests function like medical diagnoses—they pinpoint specific learning gaps, misconceptions, and areas needing remedial teaching.

Explanation:

• Cooperate denotes an action—working together toward a shared aim.
• Grammatically, it follows the auxiliary verb phrase “did not” (do-support for negation in the past simple tense), which always requires the base form of the main verb (did + not + base verb).

Explanation: The Direct Method (sometimes called the Natural Method) completely prohibits the use of the learner’s mother tongue (L1). All teaching and classroom communication must take place exclusively in the target language (L2) through demonstration, mime, visuals, and direct association without translation.

Explanation:

• First blank: Refers to “The professor” (a person) who serves as the grammatical object of the relative clause (“we [subject] all respect [verb] whom [object] highly”). Therefore, the objective relative pronoun whom is grammatically correct.
• Second blank: Refers to “a new book” (an inanimate object/thing) set off by a comma in a non-defining (non-restrictive) relative clause. In standard non-defining clauses modifying things, which is required (that is not used after a comma in non-restrictive clauses).
• Hence, the correct pair is whom, which.

Explanation:

• An adverb modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb by answering questions such as how, when, where, or to what degree.
• In this sentence, “softly” answers the question how does she speak? by describing the manner in which the action of the verb (“speaks”) is performed (an Adverb of Manner).