CAT 2017 Reading Comprehension — Previous Year Question

Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:

Poor Elizabeth Beckford. She was 70 years old and her crime was stealing 12lb of Gloucester cheese. For that she could have been hanged. Hundreds did in those violent, vengeful days... But the state, in its mercy, saved her life, and gave her a punishment that some would see as worse than death. She was an unwilling passenger on a fleet of 11 ships that set out from England in 1787, the first of the convoys of the criminal underclass sent in chains to colonise new and dangerous shores on the other side of the world.

Those 736 sad souls on that pioneering voyage would establish a new world. Elizabeth was a founder member of a new country, Australia.

Dorothy Handland, a dealer in rags and old clothes, was 82. Elizabeth Powley, 22, had raided someone's kitchen for a few shillings' worth of bacon, flour and raisins. John Hudson, the youngest, was a nine-year-old chimney sweep condemned to seven years' exile for theft. James Grace, 11, had taken some ribbon and a pair of silk stockings. John Wisehammer, 15, snatched some snuff from a shop counter in Gloucester. William Francis stole a book about 'the flourishing state of the island of Tobago' from a gentleman in London.

The women arrived at the gangplank of their vessel, the Lady Penrhyn, 'in a situation that stamps them with infamy', according to Captain Arthur Phillip, officer in command of the expedition. As for the country they were going to, almost nothing was known except for the promise of Captain James Cook, its discoverer, that this 'New South Wales' was now British.