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Question
Add im- or in- to each of the following words and use them in place of the italicised words in the sentences given below.
| patient, proper, possible, sensitive, competent |
He appears to be without sensitivity. In fact, he is very emotional.
Solution
He appears to be insensitive. In fact, he is very emotional.
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RELATED QUESTIONS
Match the meanings with the words/expressions in italic, and write the appropriate
meaning next to the sentence.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw the bull coming towards him.
You can find more information about Robert Frost at the following websites.
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=1961.
Hear the poet (who died almost forty years ago!) reading the poem at
http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm ?prmID= 1645
To view a beautiful New England scene with each poem on this web site: "Illustrated
Poetry of Robert Frost":
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/1487/index.html
a) Read the second stanza again, in which Wordsworth compares the solitary
reaper's song with the song of the nightingale and the cuckoo. On the basis of
your reading (and your imagination), copy and complete the table below. (Work
in groups of four, then have a brief class discussion.
| Place | Heard by | Impact on listener | |
| Solitary Reaper | Scottish Highlands | the poet | holds him spellbound |
| Nightingale | |||
| Cuckoo |
b) Why do you think Wordsworth has chosen the song of the nightingale and the
cuckoo, for comparison with the solitary reaper's song?
c) As you read the second stanza, what images come to your mind? Be ready to
describe them in your own words, to the rest of the class. (Be imaginative
enough and go beyond what the poet has written.)
It was my business to cross the bridge, explore the bridge head 3 beyond and find out to what point the enemy had advanced. I did this and returned over the bridge. There were not so many carts now and very few people on foot, but the old man was still there.’’Where do you come from?” I asked him.
“From San Carlos,” he said, and smiled.
That was his native town and so it gave him pleasure to mention it and he smiled.
“I was taking care of animals,” he explained.
“Oh,” I said, not quite understanding.
“Yes,” he said, “I stayed, you see, taking care of animals. I was the last one to leave the town of San Carlos.”
He did not look like a shepherd nor a herdsman and I looked at his black dusty clothes and his gray dusty face and his steel rimmed spectacles and said, “What animals were they?”
“Various animals,” he said, and shook his head. “I had to leave them.”
Read the extract given below and answer the question that follow.
What gave the old man pleasure?
He looked at me very blankly and tiredly, and then said, having to share his worry with someone, “The cat will be all right, I am sure. There is no need to be unquiet about the cat. But the others. Now what do you think about the others?”
“Why they’ll probably come through it all right.”
“You think so?”
“Why not,” I said, watching the far bank where now there were no carts.
“But what will they do under the artillery when I was told to leave because of the artillery?”
“Did you leave the dove cage unlocked?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then they’ll fly.”
“Yes, certainly they’ll fly. But the others. It’s better not to think about the others,” he said.
Read the extract given below and answer the question that follow.
Which animal is the old man least concerned about?
Of the seven hundred villages dotting the map of India, in which the majority of India’s five hundred million live, flourish and die, Kritam was probably the tiniest, indicated on the district survey map by a microscopic dot, the map being meant more for the revenue official out to collect tax than for the guidance of the motorist, who in any case could not hope to reach it since it sprawled far from the highway at the end of a rough track furrowed up by the iron-hooped wheels of bullock carts. But its size did not prevent its giving itself the grandiose name Kritam, which meant in Tamil coronet or crown on the brow of the subcontinent. The village consisted of fewer than thirty houses, only one of them built from brick and cement and painted a brilliant yellow and blue all over with
gorgeous carvings of gods and gargoyles on its balustrade, it was known as the Big House. The other houses, distributed in four streets, were generally of bamboo thatch, straw, mud and other unspecified material. Muni’s was the last house in the fourth street, beyond which stretched the fields. In his prosperous days Muni had owned a flock of sheep and goats and sallied forth every morning driving the flock to the highway a couple of miles away.
Read the extract given below and answer the question that follow.
How many houses were there in the village?
From the day, perhaps a hundred years ago when he sun had hatched him in a sandbank, and he had broken his shell, and got his head out and looked around, ready to snap at anything, before he was even fully hatched-from that day, when he had at once made for the water, ready to fend for himself immediately, he had lived by his brainless craft and ferocity. Escaping the birds of prey and the great carnivorous fishes that eat baby crocodiles, he has prospered, catching all the food he needed, and storing it till putrid in holes in the bank. Tepid water to live in and plenty of rotted food grew him to his great length. Now nothing could pierce the inch-?thick armoured hide. Not even rifle bullets,
which would bounce off. Only the eyes and the soft underarms offered a place. He lived well in the river, sunning himself sometimes with other crocodiles-muggers, as well as the long-? snouted fish-?eating gharials-on warm rocks and sandbanks where the sun dried the clay on them quite white, and where they could plop off into the water in a moment if alarmed. The big crocodile fed mostly on fish, but also on deer and monkeys come to drink, perhaps a duck or two.
Read the extract given below and answer the question that follow.
What posed a danger to him when he was young?
Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass. “What’re you looking at ?” said William. Margot said nothing. “Speak when you’re spoken to.” He gave her a shove. But she did not move; rather she let herself be moved only by him and nothing else. They edged away from her, they would not look at her. She felt them go away. And this was because she would play no games with them in the echoing tunnels of the underground city. If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and did not follow. When the class sang songs about happiness and life and games her lips barely moved. Only when they sang about the sun and the summer did her lips move as she watched the drenched windows.
Read the extract given below and answer the question that follow.
What did Margot look like?
Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:
Richard Parker was so named because of a clerical error.
A panther was terrorizing the Khulna district of Bangladesh, just outside the Sundarbans. It had recently carried off a little girl. She was the seventh person killed in two months by the animal. And it was growing bolder. The previous victim was a man who had been attacked in broad daylight in his field. The beast dragged him off into the forest, and his corpse was later found hanging from a tree. The villagers kept a watch nearby that night, hoping to surprise the panther and kill it, but it never appeared.
The Forest Department hired a professional hunter. He set up a small, hidden platform in a free near a river where two of the attacks had taken place. A goat was tied to a stake on the river’s bank. The hunter waited several nights. He assumed the panther would be an old, wasted male with worn teeth, incapable of catching anything more difficult than a human. But it was a sleek tiger that stepped into the open one night: a female with a single cub. The goat bleated. Oddly, the cub, who looked to be about three months old, paid little attention to the goat. It raced to the water’s edge, where it drank eagerly. Its mother followed it. Of hunger and thirst, thirst is the greater urge. Only once the tiger had quenched her thirst did she turn to the goat to satisfy her hunger.
The hunter had two rifles with him: one with real bullets, the other with immobilizing darts. This animal was not the man-eater, but so close to human habitation she might pose a threat to the villagers, especially as she was with cub. He picked up the gun with the darts. He fired as the tiger was about to attack the goat. The tiger reared up and snarled and raced away. But immobilizing darts don’t bring on sleep gently—they knock the creature out without warning. A burst of activity on the animal’s part makes it act all the faster. The hunter called his assistants on the radio. They found the tiger about two hundred yards from the river. She was still conscious. Her back legs had given way and her balance on her front legs was shaky. When the men got close, she tried to get away but could not manage it. She turned on them, lifting a paw that was meant to kill. It only made her lose her balance. She collapsed and the Pondicherry Zoo had two new tigers. The cub was found in a bush close by, meowing with fear.
The hunter, whose name was Richard Parker, picked it up with his bare hands and, remembering how it had rushed to drink in the river, named it Thirsty. But the shipping clerk at the Howrah train station was evidently a man both confused and diligent. All the papers received with the cub clearly stated that its name was Richard Parker, that the hunter’s first name was Thirsty add that his family name was None Given. Richard Parker’s name stuck. I don’t know if the hunter was ever called Thirsty None Given!
(a) Give the meaning of each of the following words as used in the passage.
One word answers ob short phrases will be accepted.
- corpse (line 6)
- quenched (line 16)
- reared (line 20)
(b) Answer the following questions briefly in your own words.
- Why does the author say that the panther ‘was getting bolder’?
- Why did the Forest Department hire a professional hunter?
- What did the hunter expect to encounter? What did he actually encounter?
- What did the tiger do before turning to attack the goat? Why did it do that?
- Why did the hunter decide to shoot the tiger though he knew it was not the man-eater?
- What name did the hunter give to the cub? Why?
(c)
(i) In not more than 60 words narrrate how the hunter and his assistants captured the tiger and her cub.
(ii) Give a suitable title to your summary in 3(c). Give a reason to justify your choice.
Read the extract given below and answer the questions that follow :
One Sunday morning, which the animals assembled to receive their orders,
Napoleon announced that he had decided upon a new policy.
"From now onwards Animal Farm would engage in trade with the
neighboring farms: not, of course, for any commercial purpose, but
simply in order to obtain certain materials which were urgently necessary."
(i) Why did the animals need 'certain materials'? What arrangement had Napolean made to engage in trade with the neighboring farms?
(ii) Why did Napoleon's announcement make the animals uneasy?
(iii) What did Squealer say to the animals to ease their doubts and fears?
(iv) Who was Mr. Whymper? What had the agreed to do?
Why had he entered into this agreement with Napoleon?
(v) There was a change in the attitude of humans towards Animal Farm.
Comment on this change. What were the signs and symptoms of this change?
He used to work really hard to make each pair of shoe. But still everything he earned went on paying the rent of his shop and in buying leather. There wasn’t much money with him. He nearly killed himself working for hours at the shop without any food and rest.
Quality is an important aspect of business. Elaborate
Discuss these questions in small groups before you answer them.
When is a grown-up likely to say this?
Don’t talk with your mouth full.
Which word is the opposite of ‘badly’?
Fill in the blank in the sentence below with the words or phrases from the box. (You may not know the meaning of all the words. Look such words up in a dictionary, or ask your teacher.)
I started early to be on time, but I was ______. There was a traffic jam!
Put these sentences from the story in the right order and write them out in a paragraph. Don’t
refer to the text.
-
I shall be so glad when today is over.
-
Having a leg tied up and hopping about on a crutch is almost fun, I guess.
-
I don’t think I’ll mind being deaf for a day — at least not much.
-
But being blind is so frightening.
-
Only you must tell me about things.
-
Let’s go for a little walk.
-
The other bad days can’t be half as bad as this.
creatures lost their lives in the classic struggle between the cobra and the mongoose. Who were those victims?
Which is more desirable-friendship or enmity? When does a person hear strongly the voice of his conscience?
The hawker passes time _________.
The words helper, companion, partner and accomplice have very similar meanings, but each word is typically used in certain phrases. Can you fill in the blanks below with the most commonly used words? A dictionary may help you.
the thief’s ……………
Complete the following sentence by providing a reason:
In the poem, The Darkling Thrush, the poet thinks the bird had some awareness which the poet did not because ______.
