CBSE Class 12 English Elective Sample Paper 2014

READING

Q.1 a) Read the following passage and answer the questions.

1. In India as elsewhere every girl or boy has fond and warm memories of his childhood, from the day hebegins to talk to his mother and father in broken syllables. Invariably a child learns and recognizes the faces of his mother and father, of sisters and brothers who play with him constantly or the servants who prepare his meals or watch him play in the nursery. He must also remember the rich colours of the butterflies and birds which children everywhere always love to watch with open eyes. I say must, because when I was three and a half, all these memories were expunged, and with the prolonged sickness I started living in a world of four senses-that is, a world in which colours and faces and light and darkness are unknown.

2. If my age and the length of the sickness deprived me of the treasured memories of sight, they also reduced things which are valued so much in the sighted world to nothing more than mere words, empty of meaning. I started living in a universe where it was not the flood of sunshine streaming through the nursery window or the colours of the rainbow, a sunset or a full moon that mattered, but the feel of the sun against the skin, the slow drizzling sound of rain, the feel of the air just before the coming of the quiet night, the smell of the grass on a warm morning. It was a universe where at first – but only at first – I made my way fumbling and faltering.

3. It was good that I lost my sight when I did, because having no memories of seeing there was nothing to look back to, nothing to miss. I went blind in November 1937. At that time we were living in Gujarat, in the province of Punjab in northern India. After my sickness we moved to Lahore, a few miles away, but the procession of relatives who came to sympathize made my father ask for another transfer, this time to Karnal, where we had neither friends nor relatives. There we got a cottage on the canal bank, built in very peaceful and quiet surroundings.

4. As might be expected, in the beginning it was tough for all of us – for my mother and my father, for my three sisters and my brother and for me, too. The illness had left me weak. The servants shirked me as though I was an evil eye personified. My sister treated me with care, as though I were a fragile doll, and my mother wept. My father, who was a doctor in the public health service, was grateful that my spine had been tapped in time, for a delay in the lumber puncture would have affected my mind or endangered my  life. But he, like that rest, despaired.

5. A state of complete inaction therefore followed my blindness. In part this was due to the immediate shock of the illness, but more important still, the impasse was caused by ignorance of the potentialities of a blind child, since the only blind persons my parents saw were beggars.

1. What are some of the things children every where learn and recognise?

2. Why did the family move form Lahore to Karnal?

3. Why does the author say ‘It was good that I lost my sight when I did’?

4. What were the reasons of author’s complete inaction?

5. Why did the servants shirk the author?

6. Why was the author’s childhood different from the others?

Q. 1 b) Read the following poem and answers the questions that follow: 

This is a poem by a war poet - Siegfried Sassoon. It describes the atmosphere when peace was finally declared after World War - II, so evocatively...

EVERYONE SANG

Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As poisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight. Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun ; My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away...O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

1. List out any four things that people felt when peace was declared after World War II 

2. Setting of sun is a common sight. What makes it special on that day? 

3. Point out a simile in the poem. 

4. Give an example of alliteration from the poem 

5. Complete the following:- 

When peace was established everyone suddenly began to .The song filled the poet with great happiness just as the when they are set free. They fly across the sky. The whole thing was so beautiful that the poet was moved to . The horror of war gradually drifted away. Every one, like a bird sang songs that had no words and the singing seemed never to end. 

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