Read the given passage carefully and select the best answer to each question out of the four given alternatives. 

I think if there is a writer who had the greatest impact on me, it would have to be George Orwell. My introduction to Orwell was the famous novel ‘1984’ and I remember reading it simply because I believed I ‘ought’ to. Orwell is a major cultural figure here in England, indeed across the world too, and I felt guilty I had not even read a word of his, being English. This was many years ago and since then I have read most of Orwell’s life work. I have only to read ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’ and a couple of obscure essays. There is no other writer that had such a profound impact on me.

George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair was his real name) was born in British India in 1903. He came from a relatively wealthy family. Orwell described his upbringing as “lower-upper-middle class”. He wrote from an early age. He travelled in 1922 on board SS Herefordshire passing through the Suez Canal and beyond Ceylon to join the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. It was here where Orwell’s adventures began. He wrote about his experiences in his 1934 novel ‘Burmese Days’. This novel is a reflection of the withering of the British Empire. It is a personal account of an outsider struggling to fit in with the pomp and routine of the British professional class. ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936) is a short essay of his experience killing an elephant that had been rampaging through the town where Orwell was stationed. Orwell returned to England in 1927. He began exploring the poorer regions of London. For a short period, he went undercover as a tramp, abandoning his middle-class status and stayed in common lodgings where the conditions were particularly dreadful. It is at this point where Orwell began realizing the subject of poverty and empathising with the common man.