Question

Each crowd had a language of its own and spoke among themselves without the fear of being overheard. Something as ubiquitous as dal tasted like sambar in the South, gaining its dalness as we climbed up to Orissa; tea was called, chya, chai and sa, while coffee was kafi, kaapi, and koffee. For a person with limited skills when it comes to learning and understanding new languages, this was my Train of Babel.

But I was clearly in a minority. The train had in it soldiers from the south going back to patrol borders far away from home, and workers from the east going back home on a much-
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need break – both serving as the connection between various parts of the country. These were the polyglots, speaking in
tongues that had no relation with their own, at times in functional, curt phrases, or with flourish.

On the train, it was soon clear how important this was for those from the South and Northeast. Every second passenger was a defence personnel, a majority of them belonging to the oldest regiment of Indian Army, the Madras regiment, and the Assam Rifles. The other half was made up of labourers from the east and further east – the seven sisters of the Northeast. The former protects, the latter serves.

The third kind of passengers were those from the North and Northeast, forced to come down thousands of kilometers for quality medical care. P. Gupta, the patriarch of a family from Dimapur, Nagaland, had come to the CMC Hospital in Vellore, where he underwent check-ups for his various ailments.





Find words from the passage which mean: 2
a) Very common
b) Knowing or using many languages ​

Answer 1

Explanation:

b) knowing or using many languages