English Language · English

Read the following passage and answer the question: Ernest Rutherford was the son of a Scottish emigrant to New Zealand. His parents had 12 children, of whom Ernest was the fourth. His education was in a state primary school from which children at the age of 13 could get grants of scholarships to secondary schools and to the universities. Rutherford had no intention of following an academic career. He was no bookworm. He was good in any rough-and-tumble and a keen football player. But he was good at Latin and he had a passion for music and a mechanical bent of mind. At Nelson College, a state boarding school, he was an outstanding pupil; he sat for a scholarship to Canterbury College, and this was because his masters expected it of him, and he won it. There, Rutherford as a student was fascinated by Hertz's work on radio waves and he began to conduct his own experiments in the cloakroom of the college, where the students hung their gowns. Rutherford was his parents' ________ child.