What is the main point of this passage?

Boredom can spark creativity and should not always be escaped (The author argues boredom 'may be doing something useful' by prompting the mind to invent and create.)

In this passage, 'numb' most nearly means to

dull or deaden (To 'numb every empty moment' means to deaden the feeling of boredom by filling it, dulling it away.)

According to the passage, what does the couch become in the bored child's game?

A ship (The text says "the floorboards become a river and the couch becomes a ship.")

The Uses of Boredom: Level 3 Reading Comprehension Questions

Q: Why does the author mention the bored child?

To illustrate that empty time teaches invention (A child who is never bored 'never learns to make a game out of nothing,' showing boredom's creative value.)

Boredom feels like an empty room, and our first instinct is to fill it. We reach for a screen, a snack, a conversation, anything at all to escape the small discomfort of having nothing to do. We treat the feeling as a problem to be solved as quickly as possible.

But boredom may be doing something useful precisely when it feels most useless. It is the mind, having run out of easy stimulation from the outside, beginning to turn inward and invent its own. Many of our best ideas arrive not while we are busy and focused but during the dull, undirected stretches that a busy life leaves no room for. Think of a child left alone with nothing: before long, the floorboards become a river and the couch becomes a ship.

A child who is never bored never learns to make a game out of nothing, never discovers that the imagination can supply what the world withholds. If we numb every empty moment the instant it appears, soothing it away with a glowing screen, we may be trading away the very restlessness that creativity needs in order to begin.

Comprehension questions