Grade – 13
English Language
Name: ………………………………………………. Time: 3hrs
1. Write an essay on one of the following topic. (30 marks)
1.Discuss your views of the truly liberated woman or of the truly liberated man.
2.Film for children should be produced more.
3.Is what is lawful always right? And is what is right always lawful?
4.Difficulties Encountered by Sri Lankan Students Studying English Literature.
2. Write a precis of the following passage using your own words as far as possible. Divide your paper into 5 columns and number the lines from 1-8, write the precis in approximately 137 words. Supply a title. (25 marks)
For the first time in forty years many people are going to the cinema in Britain. The decline began with the return of television after the World War ll, but it really accelerated with the introduction of colour television and the opening of the Independent Television Service.
Now the situation is changing. There is a new approach by cinema owners. In both U.S.A and Europe there were several long standing problems that kept people away from the cinema, apart from the attractions of TV and Video. Little money had been spent on the cinema buildings for many years, and as a result many were dirty and old- fashioned with worn, uncomfortable seats, poor sound equipment and small, old screens.
As audiences grew smaller, cinema owners had raised ticket prices to maintain their income. As ticket prices rose to about double over ten years, even fewer people came, so a vicious circle built up.
Increasing street crime at night and more and more car parking restrictions made people unwilling to leave home and go into the city at night, especially with their children.
Finally, a cinema offering just one film at a time could not compete with variety of entertainment on several TV channels at home, not to mention the almost unlimited choice offered by video.
The refreshment, basically sweets and ice-cream offered at most cinemas was attractive and insufficient. Cinema owners are now meeting these problems in two ways.
In the inner cities they are redecorating and refurnishing and older cinemas, splitting them into three or four smaller auditoriums to offer a choice of films each night. These are now clear sound systems, large screens and bright, attractive entrance lobbies with a wide choice of freshly packed fast foods and sandwiches. People can be well fed as well as comfortably seated. Cheap tickets for afternoon performances for any seat are attracting people back too.
Lack of space and the price of land in city centers, however still leave the problem of parking and crime in the streets at night, the theft of items from cars or the vandalizing or theft of the cars themselves.
The biggest changes now in cinema building are moved to the edge of town where land is cheaper. Here the cinema owners are constructing large leisure areas called ‘multiplex' centers. These centers may have up to fifteen auditoriums to show fifteen different films together, with acres of free car parking.
3. Read the following passage and answer the questions below it using your own words as far as possible. (20 marks)
She served supper and sat listening. There is not one maize plant left, she heard. Not one. The men would get the planters out the moment the locusts were gone. They must start all over again. “But what’s the use of that?” Margret wondered, if the whole farm was going to be crawling with hoppers. But she listened while they discussed the new government pamphlet, which said how to defeat the hoppers. You must have meant all the time moving over the farm to watch for movements in the grass. When you find a patch of hoppers small lively things, like crickets, then you dig trenches around the patch or spray them with poison from pumps supplied by the government. The government wanted them to co-operate in a world plan for eliminating this plague forever. You should attack locusts at the source hoppers in short. The men were talking as if they were planning a war, and Margret listened, amazed.
The night it was quite no sign of the settled armies outside, except sometimes a branch snapped or a tree could be heard crashing down.
Margret slept badly in the bed beside Richard, who was sleeping like a dead, exhausted with the afternoon’s fight. In the morning she woke to yellow sunshine lying across the bed, clear sunshine with an occasional blotch of shadow moving over it. She went to the window. All Stephen was ahead of her. Then she stood outside, gazing down over the bush. And she gazed astounded and entranced, much against her will; for it looked as if every tree, every bush, all the earth was lit with red flames. The locusts were fanning their wings to free them of the night dew. There was a shimmer of red tinged gold light everywhere. She went out to join the old man, stepping carefully among the insects. They stood and watched. Overhead the sky was blue, blue and clear.
“Pretty,” said all Stephen with satisfaction.
“Well” thought Margret, “we may be bankrupt, but not everyone has seen an army of locusts fanning their wings at dawn.”
Questions
1.From whose viewpoint is the attack of the locusts seen?
2.What effect is gained by the use of such terms as “defeat”, “armies’ war”, “fight” etc?
3.What does stepping carefully among the insects suggest?
4.What contrasting attitudes to the locusts’ invasion are established in the passage?
5.What contradictory aspects for nature does the passage evoke?
4. Read the poem below and respond to the questions. (20 marks)
Choirmaster’s Burial.
By Thomas Hardy
He often would ask us
That when he died
After playing so many
To their last rest
If out of us any
Should hear abide
And it would not task us
We would play our lutes
Play over him
By his grave grim
The Psalm he liked best
The one whose sense suits
“Mount Ephraim”-
And perhaps we should seen
To him in deaths’ dream
Like the seraphim.
As soon as I knew
That his spirit was gone
I thought that his due
And spoke there upon.
“I think” said the vicar
“A real service quicker
Than viols out – of doors
In these frosts and hors
That old fashioned way
Requires a fine day
And it seem to me
It had better not be.”
Hence that afternoon
Though never knew he
That his wish could not be
To get through it faster,
They buried the master
Without any tomb.
But it was said that, when
At the dead of next night
The vicar looked out
There struck on his ken
Thronged roundabout,
Where the frost was graying
The head stone grass
A band all in white
Like the saints in church-glass
Singing and playing
The ancient stave
By the choirmaster’s grave.
Questions
1. Do you think that the unfulfilled wish of the choirmaster has any effect on the poet?
2. What is the attitude of the vicar towards the last wish of the choirmaster?
3. Do you justify the vicar’s action at the funeral service?
4. Discuss the techniques and the tone of the poem.
5. What’s the central idea of the poem?
3. Read the poem below and respond to the questions. (20 marks)
An Extra Unseen Poem
Mutterings over the Crib of a Deaf Child
“How will he hear the bell at school
Arrange the broken afternoon,
And know to run across the cool
Grasses where the starlings cry,
Or understand the day is gone?”
Well, someone lifting curious brows
Will take the measure of the clock.
And he will see the birchen boughs
Outside sagging dark from the sky,
And the shade crawling upon the rock.
“And how will he know to rise at morning?
His mother has other suns to waken,
She has the stove she must build to burning
Before the coals of the nighttime die;
And he never stirs when he is shaken”
I take it the air affects the skin,
And you remember, when you were young,
Sometimes you could feel the dawn begin.
And the fire would call you by and by,
Out of the bed and bring you along.
“Well, good enough. To serve his needs
All kinds of arrangements can be made.
But what will you do if his finger bleeds?
Or a bobwhite whistles invisibly
And flutes like an angel off in the shade?”
He will learn pain. And, as for the bird,
It is always darkening when that comes out.
I will putter as though I had not heard,
And lift him into my arms and sing
Whether he hears my song or not.
*putter – to occupy oneself in a casual manner.
*sag- sink or curve down in the middle under weigh
Questions
1. Who is the speaker and what are the speaker’s feelings about the child?
2. What compensations does the deaf child have? How are they conveyed?
3. Explain with reference to the rest of the poem the use of the word “mutterings” in the title.
4. How will the child “learn pain”?
5. Comment on the different tones and voices in the poem.
