Model Question Set : Compulsory English I : Level: BA Year: First

 Model Question Set   Compulsory English I  BA   First Year

Tribhuvan University

Model Question Set

Compulsory English I

Level: BA

Year: First

Subject: Compulsory English –Paper I                                                 Full Marks: 70

Course Title: Reading and Writing in English                                   Pass marks: 28

Course Code: ENGL 401                                                                          Time: 3 Hours

 

Candidates are required to give their answers in their own words as far as practicable. The figures in the margin indicate full marks.

Section A: Long Question 02x15=30

Answer any TWO questions, but no. 2 is compulsory.

1. Write an essay in which you describe a food that is as meaningful for you as pulao is for Lahiri. Make sure that your essay has a clear thesis and that it includes at least one reference to Jhumpa Lahiri‘s essay. Be sure that you document all the materials that you borrow from Lahiri‘s essay.

2. Apply four levels of reading to Anton Chekhov‘s story ―The Student - given below.

At first, the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.

Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a clerical academy student returning home from shooting, kept walking on the path by the water-logged meadows. His fingers were numb and his face was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The only light was one gleaming in the widows‘ gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that, as he had left the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression—all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. And he did not want to go home.

The gardens were called the widows‘ because they were kept by two widows, mother and daughter. A campfire was burning brightly with a crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the ploughed earth. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a man‘s coat, was standing by and looking thoughtfully into the fire; her daughter Lukerya, a little pockmarked woman with a stupid-looking face, was sitting on the ground, washing a cauldron and spoons. Apparently they had just had supper. There was a sound of men‘s voices; it was the laborers watering their horses at the river.

―Here you have winter back again,‖ said the student, going up to the campfire. ―Good evening.‖ Vasilisa started, but at once recognized him and smiled cordially.

 ―I did not know you; God bless you, she said.―You‘ll be rich.‖ They talked. Vasilisa, a woman of experience who had been in service with the gentry, first as a wet nurse, afterwards as a children‘s nurse expressed herself with refinement, and a soft, sedate smile never left her face; her daughter Lukerya, a village peasant woman who her husband had beaten, screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing, and she had a strange expression like that of a deaf-mute.

―At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself,‖ said the student, stretching out his hands to the fire, ―so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!‖ He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and asked:

―No doubt you have heard the reading of the Twelve Apostles?‖

―Yes, I have,‖ answered Vasilisa.

―If you remember, at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, ‗I am ready to go with Thee into darkness and unto death.‘ And our Lord answered him thus: ‗I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock croweth thou wilt have denied Me thrice.‘ After the supper Jesus went through the agony of death in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and faint, his eyelids were heavy and he could not struggle against sleep. He fell asleep. Then you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm, hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going to happen on earth, followed behind. He loved Jesus passionately, intensely, and now he saw from far off how He was beaten. ―

Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.

―They came to the high priest‘s,‖ he went on; ―they began to question Jesus, and meantime the laborers made a fire in the yard as it was cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood with them near the fire and warmed himself as I am doing. A woman, seeing him, said: ‗He was with Jesus, too‘—that is as much as to say that he, too, should be taken to be questioned. And all the laborers that were standing near the fire must have looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he was confused and said: ‗I don‘t know Him.‘ A little while after again someone recognized him as one of Jesus‘ disciples and said: ‗Thou, too, art one of them,‘ but again he denied it. And for the third time someone turned to him: ‗Why, did I not see thee with Him in the garden today?‘ For the third time he denied it. And immediately after that time the cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus, remembered the words He had said to him in the evening He remembered, he came to himself, went out of the yard and wept bitterly—bitterly. In the Gospel it is written: ‗He went out and wept bitterly.‘ I imagine it: the still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly audible, smothered sobbing ‖

 

The student sighed and sank into thought. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly gave a gulp, big tears flowed freely down her cheeks, and she screened her face from the fire with her sleeve as though ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya, staring immovably at the student, flushed crimson, and her expression became strained and heavy like that of someone enduring intense pain.

The laborers came back from the river, and one of them riding a horse was quite near, and the light from the fire quivered upon him. The student said good-night to the widows and went on. And again the darkness was about him and his fingers began to be numb. A cruel wind was blowing, winter really had come back and it did not feel as though Easter would be the day after tomorrow.

Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed tears all that had happened to Peter the night before the Crucifixion must have some relation to her. . . .

He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the darkness and no figures could be seen near it now. The student thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present—to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter‘s soul.

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. ―The past,‖ he thought, ―is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.‖ And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

When he crossed the river by the ferryboat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigor—he was only twenty-two— and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvelous, and full of lofty meaning.

 

3. Discuss, with at least three suitable examples for each, how a student-writer can edit a draft for the following:

a. Awkward phrasing

b. Concise sentences

c. Varied sentences

d. Word choice

 

Section B: Short Question

Answer any FOUR questions, but no. 5 is compulsory. 04x10=40

4. Make notes of the following passage by using headings and sub-headings:

 

The prejudice against Nnaemeka‘s marriage was not confined to his little village. In Lagos, especially among his people who worked there, it showed itself in a different way. Their women, when they met at their village meeting, were not hostile to Nene. Rather, they paid her such excessive deference as to make her feel she was not one of them. But as time went on, Nene gradually broke through some of this prejudice and even began to make friends among them. Slowly and grudgingly they began to admit that she kept her home much better than most of them.

The story eventually got to the little village in the heart of the Ibo country that Nnaemeka and his young wife were a most happy couple. But his father was one of the few people in the village who knew nothing about this. He always displayed so much temper whenever his son‘s name was mentioned that everyone avoided it in his presence. By a tremendous effort of will he had succeeded in pushing his son to the back of his mind. The strain had nearly killed him but he had persevered, and won.

Then one day he received a letter from Nene, and in spite of himself he began to glance through it perfunctorily until all of a sudden the expression on his face changed and he began to read more carefully.

Our two sons, from the day they learnt that they have a grandfather, have insisted on being taken to him. I find it impossible to tell them that you will not see them. I implore you to allow Nnaemeka to bring them home for a short time during his leave next month. I shall remain here in Lagos . . .

The old man at once felt the resolution he had built up over so many years falling in. He was telling himself that he must not give in. He tried to steal his heart against all emotional appeals. It was a reenactment of that other struggle. He leaned against a window and looked out. The sky was overcast with heavy black clouds and a high wind began to blow, filling the air with dust and dry leaves. It was one of those rare occasions when even Nature takes a hand in a human fight. Very soon it began to rain, the first rain in the year. It came down in large sharp drops and was accompanied by the lightning and thunder which mark a change of season. Okeke was trying hard not to think of his two grandsons. But he knew he was now fighting a losing battle. He tried to hum a favorite hymn but the pattering of large raindrops on the roof broke up the tune. His mind immediately returned to the children. How could he shut his door against them? By a curious mental process he imagined them standing, sad and forsaken, under the harsh angry weather—shut out from his house.

That night he hardly slept, from remorse—and a vague fear that he might die without making it up to them.

 

5. Read the following passage and answer the questions given under it:

 

Sunlight flooded the cabin as the plane changed course. It was a bright, clear morning. Robyn looked out of the window as England slid slowly by beneath them: cities and towns, their street plans like printed circuits, scattered over a mosaic of tiny fields, connected by the thin wires of railways and motorways. Hard to imagine at this height all the noise and commotion going on down there. Factories, shops, offices, schools, beginning the working day. People crammed into rush hour buses and trains, or sitting at the wheels of their cars in the traffic jams, or washing up breakfast things in the kitchens of pebble-dashed semis. All inhabiting their own little worlds, oblivious of how they fitted into the total picture. The housewife, switching on her electric kettle to make another cup of tea, gave no thought to the immense complex of operations that made that simple action possible: the building and maintenance of the power station that produced the electricity, the mining of coal or pumping of oil to fuel the generators, the laying of miles of cable to carry the current to her house, the digging and smelting and milling of ore or bauxite into sheets of steel or aluminum, the cutting and pressing and welding of the metal into the kettle's shell, spout and handle, the assembling of these parts with scores of other components—coils, screws, nuts, bolts, washers, rivets, wires, springs, rubber insulation, plastic trimmings; then the packaging of the kettle, the advertising of the kettle, the marketing of the kettle to wholesale and retail outlets, the transportation of the kettle to warehouses and shops, the calculation of its price, and the distribution of its added value between all the myriad people and agencies concerned in its production. The housewife gave no thought to all this as she switched on her kettle. Neither had Robyn until this moment, and it would never have occurred to her to do so before she met Vic Wilcox.

 

a. Where does Robyn describe the scenic beauty of the landscape from?

b. How does the passage define and illustrate the primary sector of economy?

c. How does the passage explain the secondary sector of economy?

d. How does the passage describe the tertiary sector of economy?

e. What could be the next paragraph about?

 

6. Answer the following questions briefly and to the point:

a. What does Cox mean when he says that the end of air-conditioning will bring paperweights back to American offices? (02 marks)

b. What preconceptions about Chinese mothers does Chua think Westerners have? Do you think she is right about this? (04 marks)

c. Smith-Yackel could have outlined her mother`s life without framing it with the telephone conversation. Why do you think she includes this frame? (04 marks)

 

7. Is the essay ―Why Chinese Mothers are Superior‖ a point-by-point comparison, a subject-by-subject comparison, or a combination of the two organizational strategies? Why does Amy Chua arrange her comparison the way she does?

 

8. Give the meanings of any FIVE of the following words and then use each of them in sentences of your own (in the same sense of meaning you have given): lurid, tangible, connotation, niche, suffice, connoting, gusto