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.

Fill in the blanks in List A using appropriate idioms from List B

Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Complete the telephonic conversation given below with the most polite and correct responses in the given subquestions.

Ravi: Hello, Sneha. It’s Ravi. Are you free? (1)_________________________________

Sneha: Yes, Ravi. I’m free now, please tell me.

Ravi: I need to reschedule our project meeting. Something urgent has come up.

Sneha: I understand. (2) _______________________________

Ravi: Instead of tomorrow morning, how about we have the meeting on Thursday at 2 PM? Sneha: Let me check... Yes, I’m available then. But we need to make sure everyone else can make it too.

Ravi: (3) _________________ I’ll send an email to confirm with the rest of the team.

Sneha: Sounds good. I’ll tentatively block my calendar for Thursday at 2 PM.

Ravi: Yes, Sneha. (4) ______________________________

Sneha: No problem, Ravi. Just let me know if the time works for everyone.

Ravi: (5) ______________________________

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions:

During the Depression, when milk supply exceeded demand, the US government bought milk to keep its price stable and support dairy farmers. Then, trying to find a way to store or get rid of the surplus, it started stockpiling cheese, which lasts longer than milk.

The government bought so much cheese that it eventually filled every cold storage in the country. But there was still more excess milk. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) rented half an acre in a Kansas cave and filled it floor to ceiling with blocks of cheese. At its height, the US had 2lbs of stored cheese for every resident.

Eventually, the USDA turned to its nutrition programs to dispose of excess cheese. Despite most Indigenous peoples’ inability to digest milk, commodity cheese became the centerpiece of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). Musician Wade Fernandez, a member of the Menominee nation, sings Commodity Cheese Blues, lamenting, “I went downtown to the commod shop / Met the blues ’cause they were out of stock. Tell me please when I’ll get my commod cheese.”

Nicknamed “pasteurized gold”, the bright orange cheese bricks sometimes operate as currency to buy other foods or goods. The irony of this treasure is not lost on critics. In 2006, an Indian Country Today article observed: “Some Lakota still say to this day that the only brick of gold the Lakota people got out of the Black Hills is the brick of cheese rationed out on commodity day.” Funneling surplus cheese into nutrition programs like FDPIR and school lunches was not enough to save the dairy industry, which accounts for 3.5% of the US gross domestic product – half a percentage more than the auto industry. President Jimmy Carter vowed to increase the price of milk by six cents a gallon in 1977 and committed to buying as much dairy as necessary to prop up the industry. When government-purchased cheese began to mold, the plan to get it out of storage became urgent.

In 1981, a USDA official told the Washington Post: “We’ve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible ... Probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean.”

Instead, President Reagan’s administration came up with a way to solve the problem without affecting the demand for or price of cheese. It created the Dairy Distribution Program, sending truckloads of cheese blocks to poor neighborhoods around the country.

Inevitably, government cheese entered popular culture as a marker of poverty.

Fill in the blank with appropriate options.

“Mrs Pumphrey hastened (1)_______ explain, “He was so listless, Mr Herriot. He seemed to have no energy. I thought he must be suffering(2)____________malnutrition, so I have been giving him some little extras between meals(3)______ build him up, some malt and cod-liver oil and a

bowl(4)____________ Horlicks (5)________ night to make him sleep — nothing much really.” (Source: Herriot, James. “A Triumph of Surgery.” Footprints Without Feet, National Council Of Educational Research And Training, 2022, p. 1.)

Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Fill in the blanks with the correct form of the verb. Your chosen verbs should agree with their respective subjects and should be fitting and meaningful within the context of the passage and answer the given subquestions.

“The first of your tasks [i] _____ to bring me the skin of the Nemean lion,” said the King of Greece to Hercules. “Neither weapon nor stone [ii] _____ the flesh of the Nemean lion,” whispered the people amongst themselves. “If he [iii] _____ to no weapon, I will tear off his hide with his own claws,” said Hercules, and that was exactly how he defeated the ferocious Nemean lion. Out of the lion’s skin, a coat of mail, and out of his neck, a helmet [iv] _____ prepared. Neither this labor nor any of the other labors assigned to him by the King of Greece [v] _____ impossible for the mighty Hercules.

Complete the telephonic conversation given below with the most polite and correct responses.

Ravi: Hello, Sneha. It’s Ravi. Are you free? (1)_________________________________

Sneha: Yes, Ravi. I’m free now, please tell me.

Ravi: I need to reschedule our project meeting. Something urgent has come up.

Sneha: I understand. (2) _______________________________

Ravi: Instead of tomorrow morning, how about we have the meeting on Thursday at 2 PM? Sneha: Let me check... Yes, I’m available then. But we need to make sure everyone else can make it too.

Ravi: (3) _________________ I’ll send an email to confirm with the rest of the team.

Sneha: Sounds good. I’ll tentatively block my calendar for Thursday at 2 PM.

Ravi: Yes, Sneha. (4) ______________________________

Sneha: No problem, Ravi. Just let me know if the time works for everyone.

Ravi: (5) ______________________________

Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions

In the village of Chandpur, Munshi Ramsevak was a very rich man and he was full of all the special qualities of very rich men. The foibles of human nature provided the foundation of his living. He could be seen every day seated on a broken bench under a neem tree within the precincts of the open-air small-pleas court, his satchel crammed with papers opened up in front of him. Nobody had ever seen him presenting a brief before the tribunal or arguing a case; but everyone called him ‘attorney’. It might blow up a storm, rain or hail, but the attorney could not be budged from his bench. Whenever he made his way to the open court the villagers crowded after him. He was regarded by everyone with respect and trust, and he was renowned for possessing the eloquence of the divine Saraswati herself. Call it an attorneyship or a legal practice, but it was only maintaining a family tradition. He had no very great income; people might talk about silver coins but even copper coins rarely came his way. Though there was no doubt about Ramsevak’s legal knowledge, he was compelled by complications to forgo a real lawyer’s job. Anyway, whatever it was, his profession was kept up only for the sake of continuing the family tradition. In actual fact his real means of livelihood was provided by widows without family but rich in the good things of life and by old men with lots of money and little sense. The widows handed over their money to him for safe-keeping and old men who feared their wastrel sons entrusted their wealth to him. But once any money went into his fist it forgot the way to come out again. When the need arose he himself would borrow — after all, without borrowing whose work would make any headway? He borrowed in the morning to give back by evening, but the evening never came. In brief, Munshi Ramsevak knew how to borrow but not to give.

(From The Power of a Curse, by Munshi Premchand)

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions

My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone. When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all—we were wet. Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick.The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year’s Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. It provoked cures galore; to ease the catarrh you boiled onions in milk blackened with pepper; for the congested passages you made a paste of boiled flour and nettles, wrapped it in a rag, and slapped it, sizzling, on the chest.

From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried: tweed and woolen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations. In pubs, steam rose from damp bodies and garments to be inhaled with cigarette and pipe smoke laced with the stale fumes of spilled stout and whiskey and tinged with the odor of piss wafting in from the outdoor jakes where many a man puked up his week’s wages.

The rain drove us into the church—our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest-drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flowers and candles. Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.

Excerpted from: McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir. E-book ed., Scribner, 1996, pp.11-12.

Read the excerpt given below and fill in the blanks with those forms of the verbs which best fit the passage from the options provided. Your chosen answer should maintain the tense consistency of the excerpt.

Wasobiowe [i] _____ in the neighbourhood of Nagasaki. He loved nothing better than to spend his days far out at sea, fishing from a little boat. Once, when the eighth full moon [ii] _____—which in Japan is called the “bean moon” and is the most beautiful of all—Wasobiowe started on a long voyage. Leisurely he [iii] _____ the coast, and rejoiced in the bold outlines of the rocks seen by the light of the moon. But, without warning, black clouds gathered overhead. The storm [iv] _____, the rain poured down, and darkness fell. The waves were lashed into fury, and the little boat was driven swift as an arrow before the wind. For three days and nights the hurricane raged. As dawn [v] _____ on the fourth morning, the wind was stilled, and the sea grew calm.

Excerpted from: Old-World Japan: Legends of the Land of the Gods. Retold by Frank Rinder, The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, 2014, p. 77.

Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Fill in the blanks in List A with the most appropriate options in List B. There is only one fitting answer for each blank.

Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

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.

Read the following letter and answer the given subquestions

The General Secretary

Narmada Hostel for Boys

Pondicherry Central University

XX/YY/ZZZZ

The Dean, Hostel Affairs

Pondicherry Central University

Unavailability of Necessary Facilities in Narmada Hostel

Respected Sir,

I am writing to you to draw your attention to some necessary student facilities which are found to be lacking in Narmada Hostel. The washing machines on all floors have stopped working, but the hostel authorities have not taken any measures to get them repaired despite repeated pleas by the student community.

One of the elevators in the hostel ceased to work a year ago and has not yet been repaired. Consequently, there is overcrowding in the one available elevator, which, in addition to being inconvenient, is a grave safety hazard. Several toilets in the hostel do not have operational flushes. This causes unsanitary living conditions in the hostel and does not aid the cause of the residents’ well-being.

Inedible and possibly hazardous materials such as strands of a steel scrubber, insects and glass shards have lately been found in the mess food. A sickly looking rat was seen scurrying through the mess hall during dinner time. The green moong dal served in the mess in the past two weeks tasted discernibly stale. As evident from these instances, the mess management is unscrupulously lax in the discharge of their duties.

The newly admitted students have been accommodated in rooms without almirahs, tables and chairs. Even after the newly ordered furniture reached the hostel, no provisions were made for its being shifted to the rooms in need.

I kindly request you to address these pressing concerns with the hostel management and enable their hasty redressal.

Yours sincerely,

[Sign]

XYZ General Secretary

Ph: 1234567890

Fill in the blank with appropriate options. Maintain the tense consistency.

Rhea _____ (1) to spend her afternoon in the park. She brought a book to read and sat _____ (2) a bench near the pond. As she was reading, a dog _____ (3) by her, chasing a ball thrown by its owner. After a while, Rhea walked over ______ (4) the ice cream stand to get a treat. She enjoyed her ice cream while sitting under a large oak tree, savouring _____ (5) peaceful moment. Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

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.

Complete the telephonic conversation given below with most polite and correct responses. Receptionist: Good morning, Dr. Agarwal's office. How can I help you today?

Patient: Hello, (i) ___________________________________________

Receptionist: Certainly. May I have your name, please?

Patient: Sure, it's ....................

Receptionist: (ii)_________________________________

Patient: Sure. My name is Neha Kumar.

Receptionist: Ms. Kumar. Are you a new patient or have you visited Dr. Agarwal before? Patient: (iii)__________________________

Receptionist: Great. When would you like to schedule your appointment?

Patient: (iv)__________________________________

Receptionist: Sure. Your appointment with Dr. Agarwal is scheduled for 10:30 AM tomorrow. Patient: (v)_______________

Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.