SSC Selection Post 2023 PYQ — Question 2

 Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

 “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they
 live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they
 stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some
 weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs
 the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they
 struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their
 own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is
 more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked
 death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its
 trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all
 the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years,
 the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm-boy knows that the hardest
 and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing
 danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.