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
