Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.

My father, Janakinath Bose, had migrated to Orissa in the eighties of the last century and had settled down at Cuttack as a lawyer. There I was born on Saturday, the 23rd January, 1897. My father was descended from the Boses of Mahinagar, while my mother, Prabhabati (or rather Prabhavati) belonged to the family of the Dutts of Hatkhola. I was the sixth son and the ninth child of my parents.

In these days of rapid communication, a night’s journey by train southwards along the eastern coast takes one from Calcutta to Cuttack and on the way there is neither adventure nor romance. But things were not quite the same sixty years ago. One had to go either by cart and encounter thieves and robbers on the road, or by sea and brave the wrath of the winds and the waves. Since it was safer to trust in God than in brother man, it was more common to travel by boat. Sea-going vessels would carry passengers up to Chandbali where transhipment would take place and from Chandbali, steamers would get to Cuttack through a number of rivers and canals. The description I used to hear from my mother since childhood of the rolling and pitching and the accompanying discomfort during the voyage would leave no desire in me to undergo such an experience. At a time when distances were long and journey by no means safe, my father must have had plenty of pluck to leave his village home and go far away in search of a career. Fortune favours the brave even in civil life and, by the time I was born, my father had already made a position for himself and was almost at the top of the legal profession in his new domicile.

Though a comparatively small town with a population in the neighbourhood of 20,000, Cuttack had an importance of its own owing to a variety of factors. It had an unbroken tradition since the days of the early Hindu Kings of Kalinga. It was the de facto capital of Orissa which could boast of such a famous place of pilgrimage as Puri (or Jagannath) and such glorious art-relics as those of Konarak, Bhuvaneswar, and Udaigiri. It was the headquarters not only for the British administration in Orissa, but also for the numerous ruling chiefs in that province. Altogether, Cuttack afforded a healthy environment for a growing child, and it had some of the virtues of both city and country life.

Ours was not a rich, but what might be regarded as a well-to-do, middle-class family. Naturally, I had no personal experience of what want and poverty meant and had no occasion to develop those traits of selfishness, greed, and the rest which are sometimes the unwelcome heritage of indigent circumstances in one’s early life. At the same time, there was not that luxury and lavishness _____ our home which has been the ruin _____ so many promising but pampered young souls or has helped to foster a supercilious, highbrow mentality in them. In fact, considering their worldly means, my parents always erred– and, I daresay, rightly too– on the side of simplicity in the upbringing of their children.

Excerpted from: Bose, Subhas Chandra. An Indian Pilgrim: An Unfinished Autobiography and Collected Letters 1897-1921.

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions:

The Easy ‘A’

As opposed to the ‘true sciences,’ the social sciences are often seen as an “extra,” like an appendage to the main body. Even the content in liberal arts and humanities courses is considered to be supplementary. Such biases stem from the colonial mindset of “empiricism” as the metric for “good” or valuable research. Shibashis Chatterjee, a senior professor at the Department of International Relations at Jadavpur University states that the study of humanities and social sciences has been in a state of worldwide crisis for a while now: “Subjects that do not use quantification are labelled as easy.” However, the professor feels that the idea of a competition amongst arts, science and technology is wrong. “These are complementary fields. To me, it is an identification problem. If natural sciences set the bar and humanities must measure up to it, there is no way they can meet the standards. Unless we agree to create our own standards, these accusations would never end. Hence, we must stop making these comparisons,” he states. The professor of political thought and critical theory also adds that how society looks at knowledge is a political question. “From resource allocation to salaries, the logic of instrumentality trumps everything else,” Chatterjee states. The narratives through which liberal arts courses are shunned are all too familiar. Social sciences never had democratic equality with the

natural/biological sciences and technological education. They are dismissed either as questionable or as useless. Modern education is predicated upon science and technology. It has increasingly reduced the space for criticality and reflective variations on the theme of instrumentality, and humanities and social sciences are automatically downgraded.

In capitalist societies, education is just another financial sector and the loftier philosophical goals of education – the pursuance of knowledge and happiness in knowing – lie discarded. It is significant that the students who pursue humanities do not study for the money. Humanities cannot be made more appealing by tying it to vocational needs. “That would be sounding the death knell to liberal education,” states Chatterjee. Humanities can flourish when democratic values thrive in society, the spirit of questioning is highly regarded, and liberalism enjoys legitimacy. In other words, if philosophy matters to our lives, humanities is indispensable. But most researchers and students of humanities do not think that any autocratic state would be fundamentally interested in reviving humanities and social sciences since these disciplines encourage critical thinking and questioning of authority structures. The more authoritarian states become, the less tolerant they will be of humanities and social sciences.

Excerpted from:

Bose, Rakhi. “The Easy ‘A’.” Outlook, 11 Jul. 2023, pp. 46-50.

Match the words in List A with those in List B that are similar in meaning to them.

Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Based on the above data answer the given subquestions.

Match Column A with suitable options in Column B. (Hint: Word collocation)

Column A: 1. Bank · 2. Strong · 3. Lazy · 4. Short · 5. Ancient

Column B: a. Temper · b. Account · c. Ruins · d. Afternoon · e. Coffee

Match the words in List A with the correct synonyms in List B.

List A: (i) Prove · (ii) Maladroit · (iii) Tired · (iv) Coach · (v) Coarse

List B: (a) Wearied · (b) Counsel · (c) Gravelly · (d) Establish · (e) Clumsy

Match Column A with suitable options in Column B. (Hint: Word collocation)

Column A: 1. Sports · 2. Library · 3. Garden · 4. Job · 5. Fishing

Column B: a. Card · b. Offer · c. Equipment · d. Rod · e. Hose

Match Column A with suitable options in Column B. (Hint: Word collocation)

Column A: 1. Land · 2. Moral · 3. Final · 4. Weather · 5. Unanimous

Column B: a) Forecast · b) Decision · c) Acquisition · d) Blow · e) Decay