CBSE Class 12 English Core Sample Paper 2021 Set A

CBSE Class 12 English Core Sample Paper 2021 Solved Set A. CBSE issues sample papers every year for students for Class 12 board exams. Students should solve the CBSE issued sample papers to understand the pattern of the question paper which will come in class 12 board exams this year. The sample papers have been provided with marking scheme. It’s always recommended to practice as many CBSE sample papers as possible before the board examinations. Sample papers should be always practiced in examination condition at home or school and the student should show the answers to teachers for checking or compare with the answers provided. Students can download the sample papers in pdf format free and score better marks in examinations. Refer to other links too for latest sample papers.

SECTION - A (READING)

1. Read the passage given below carefully:

My father died when I was ten, and for the next few years books became a scarce commodity in my life, for my mother and stepfather were not great readers. In my rather lonely early teens I was to discover that books could be good friends, reliable companions, and I seized upon almost any printed matter that came my way, whether it was a girl’s classic like ‘Little Women’, or a ‘Hotspur’ or ‘Champion comic’, or a detective story, or ‘The Naturalist on the River Amazons’ by Henry Walter Bates. The only books I balked at reading were collections of sermons (amazing how often they turned up in those early years) and self improvement books, since I hadn’t the slightest desire to improve myself in any way.

I think it all began in the forest rest-house in the Shivalik Hills, a sub-tropical range cradling the Doon valley in northern India. Here my stepfather and his guntoting friends were given to hunting birds and animals that roamed those forests. He was a poor shot so he cannot really be blamed for the absence of wild life today; but he did his best to eliminate every creature that came within his sight.

On one of these shikar trips, we were staying in a rest house near the Timli Pass. My stepfather and his friends were after tigers (You were out of fashion if you weren’t after big game) and set out every morning with an army of paid villagers to ‘beat’ the jungle, that is to make enough noise with drums, whistles, tin trumpets and empty kerosene tins, to disturb the tiger and drive the unwilling beast into the open where he could conveniently be dispatched. Truly bored by this form of sport, I stayed behind in the rest-house and in the course of the morning exploration of the bungalow discovered a dusty but crowded book shelf half hidden in the corner of the back veranda.

Who had left them there? A literary forest officer? A memsahib who had been bored by her husband’s camp-fire boasting? Or someone like me who had no enthusiasm for the ‘manly’ sport of slaughtering wild animals, and brought his library along to pass the time? Possibly the poor fellow had gone into the jungle one day, as a gesture towards his more bloodthirsty companions and had been trampled by an elephant or gored by a wild boar, or ( more likely) accidentally shot by one of his companions – and they had taken his remains away and left his books behind. Anyway, there they were – a shelf of some fifty volumes, obviously untouched for several years. I wiped the dust off the covers and examined the titles. As my reading tastes had not yet formed, I was ready to try anything. The bookshelf was varied in its contents – and my own interests have remained equally wide- ranging.

On that fateful day in the forest rest-house, I discovered two very funny books. One was P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘Love among the Chickens’ an early Ukridge story and still one of my favourites. The other was ‘The Diary of a Nobody’ by George and Weedon Grossmith, who spend more time on the stage than in the study but are now remembered mainly for this hilarious book. It isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Recently I lent my copy to a Swiss friend, who could see nothing funny about it. I must have read it a dozen times; I pick it up whenever I am feeling low and on one occasion it even cured me of peptic ulcer! Anyway, back to the rest-house. By the time the perspiring hunters came back late in the evening, I had started on M.R. James’s ‘Ghost Stories of an Antiquary’ which had me hooked on ghost stories for the rest of my life.

                                                                                                                                                    Ruskin Bond’s ‘Adventures of a Book Lover’

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