Q1. Write the following in about 60-80 words.

a. Describe in brief how the old lady died peacefully.

b. What problems did Howard Carter face with regard to Tut’s mummy? How did he solve them?

c. How did Rajendra rationalize the professor’s experience?

d. Give a brief account of Mourad’s adventure with the white home.

e. Give a brief life-sketch and achievement of Dr Andrew Manson.

Q2. Refer to context.

a. Now she’s been dead nearly as many years

as that girl lived. And of this circumstance

There is nothing to say at all.

Its silence silences.

(i) How many years ago had the poetess’s mother died?

(ii) What does ‘this circumstance’ refer to?

(iii) Explain Its silence silences.

b. She stokes it fully, then flirts out to a branch-end

Showing her barred face identity mask

Then with eerie delicate whistle-chirrup whisperings

She launches away, towards the infinite

And the laburnum subsides to empty.

(i) Who does ‘she’ refer to? What does she stoke?

(ii) What is the identification mask of the bird?

(iii) What do you notice about the beginning and the ending of the poem?

c. When did my childhood go?

Was it the time I realised that adults were not

all they seemed to be,

They talked of love and preached of love,

But did not act so lovingly,

Was that the day!

(i) What is the poet’s first shocking observation about the grown-ups?

(ii) What does the poet put on the top of human virtues?

(iii) What does he regret?

d. Yet have I killed

The seed I spent or sown it where

The land is his and none of mine?

We speak like strangers, there’s no sign

Of understanding in the air.

This child is built to my design

Yet what he loves I cannot share.

(i) What is the poet’s fear of his broken relationship?

(ii) What is the poet’s problem?

(iii) How can the gap between father and son be narrowed or bridged?

Q3. Answer the following in about 100-120 words.

a. The lesson ‘We’re not afraid to die…………..if we can all be together’ depicts a grand lesson ‘United we
stand, divided we fall’. Explain the idea.

b. Rain does its duty unmindful of any recognition. A great lesson is hidden here. What is that?

c. The narrator thought that the snow was both beautiful and dangerous as well. Justify.

d. What were the narrator’s experience and reaction when she went to Mrs Dorling’s house a second
time?

e. Give your brief comments on the five main characters in the play Mother’s Day.

f. How does a melon become the ruler of the state? Why are the people happy with him?