NEB Class 11 · Past paper
The official NEB Class 11 model questions for English, all 327 questions with solved model answers.
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Describe the astrologer's appearance and his "professional equipment".
The astrologer sets up at midday under a tamarind tree on the path through the Town Hall Park. His equipment is a dozen cowrie shells, a square piece of cloth printed with mystic charts, a notebook and a bundle of palmyra writing. His fo...
Why is the astrologer successful even though he knows nothing about astrology?
The astrologer succeeds through shrewdness rather than knowledge. He understands that everyone's troubles come from the same few sources: marriage, money and the tangles of human relationships. He lets a client talk for at least ten minu...
Why does the astrologer try to leave when the stranger lights his cheroot?
When the stranger lights a cheroot, the match flame lights up his face for a moment. In that flash the astrologer recognises the man as Guru Nayak, the very person he had stabbed and thrown into a well years earlier in his village. He has believed all these years that he killed him, and seeing him alive and standing in front of him is a terrible shock. Frightened that he may be recognised in turn, he immediately feels uncomfortable, says he is not interested in the bet, and tries to gather his things and go home. Guru Nayak, however, grips his wrist and forces him to stay and answer the challenge.
What does the astrologer tell Guru Nayak, and why does Guru Nayak believe him?
The astrologer tells Guru Nayak that he was once stabbed with a knife, left for dead and thrown into a well in a field, and that he escaped only because a passer by happened to look into the well. He then calls the stranger by his name, ...
How does the story end, and what is the significance of the astrologer's last words to his wife?
The story ends at the astrologer's home late at night. His wife has been waiting anxiously, and he hands her the coins Guru Nayak threw at him. She counts twelve and a half annas and is delighted, planning to buy jaggery and coconut for ...
Discuss the theme of appearance versus reality in "An Astrologer's Day".
The contrast between how things appear and what they really are runs through every part of "An Astrologer's Day", and Narayan uses it both for humour and for the surprise ending.
The theme is established in the opening description of the astrologer. With sacred ash and vermilion on his forehead, a saffron turban and gleaming eyes, he looks like a holy man with prophetic powers. The narrator quickly tells us the reality: he knows no more about the stars than his customers, and his cowrie shells, mystic charts and palmyra writing are mere stage property. His success rests on watching faces and guessing the common troubles of marriage, money and family.
The setting supports the theme. The path beside the Town Hall Park is full of vendors whose goods are not what they seem, from a groundnut seller who renames his wares daily to a dealer in stolen hardware. With no municipal lights, the astrologer works in a criss cross of light and shadow that hides him and lets people see only what he wants them to see.
The encounter with Guru Nayak brings the theme to a climax. Guru Nayak thinks he is testing a fraud and expects to win his bet. When the astrologer describes the stabbing, the well and the passer by, and then speaks his name, Guru Nayak believes he is in the presence of a real seer. The reality, hidden from him but revealed to the reader in the last scene, is that the astrologer knows these facts because he himself was the attacker. The flame of the cheroot shows the astrologer the truth about the stranger, while the stranger remains in the dark about the astrologer.
Finally, the ending turns the theme on the reader. We have seen the astrologer as a harmless cheat; we now discover that he fled his village believing himself a murderer, and that his trade and his hiding in shadows grew out of guilt. The story we thought was about a clever fraud is really about a man freed from a burden. Even the lie he tells Guru Nayak, that his enemy died under a lorry, produces a genuine good: it ends the quest for revenge and gives both men peace.
Through these layers Narayan suggests that people are rarely what they seem and that the line between deception and mercy can be very thin.
Sketch the character of the astrologer.
The astrologer is the central figure of Narayan's story and one of the memorable characters of Indian English fiction, though he is never given a name. Outwardly he is a picture of holiness and wisdom. His forehead is marked with sacred ...
Explain the role of irony in "An Astrologer's Day".
Irony, the gap between what is expected or believed and what is actually the case, is the main source of both humour and meaning in the story. The first irony is in the astrologer's profession. A man who claims to read the future knows n...
Describe the setting of the story and explain why it is important.
The story is set in a busy South Indian town, on a path that runs through the Town Hall Park, under a spreading tamarind tree. The path is crowded from midday until night with vendors selling medicines, stolen hardware, cheap cloth, magi...
Why does Jonathan Iwegbu consider himself "extraordinarily lucky" after the war?
Jonathan considers himself extraordinarily lucky because he has come through the Nigerian Civil War with what he calls five inestimable blessings: his own head, the head of his wife Maria, and the heads of three of their four children. A...
How did Jonathan save his bicycle during the war, and what use did he make of it afterwards?
During the war an officer dressed in rags, with only a pair of army boots to show his rank, tried to commandeer Jonathan's bicycle. Jonathan doubted that the man was genuine and bribed him with two pounds to let him keep it. To protect i...
What is the "egg-rasher"? Why does Jonathan keep his hand in his pocket after collecting it?
The "egg-rasher" is the local mispronunciation of "ex gratia", the payment of twenty pounds that the Nigerian government gave to people in exchange for the rebel Biafran currency they had turned in after the war. For Jonathan's family it is a windfall, like Christmas. He keeps his hand firmly in his pocket after collecting the money at the Treasury because he has just seen another man robbed of his egg-rasher outside the same building. That man collapsed in tears, helpless and half mad with grief. Jonathan knows that thieves are watching people leaving the Treasury, so he guards the money carefully until he reaches home.
Describe the robbery scene. Why do the neighbours not come to help?
On the night after Jonathan collects his egg-rasher, he goes to bed early with the money. In the middle of the night he is woken by a heavy knocking on the door. When he asks who is there, a voice answers in Pidgin English, "Na tief-man ...
Explain the significance of the title "Civil Peace".
The title "Civil Peace" is ironic, and understanding this irony is the key to Achebe's story. The phrase is a twist on "civil war". The Nigerian Civil War has just ended, and the government and people speak of peace, but the story shows ...
Sketch the character of Jonathan Iwegbu.
Jonathan Iwegbu is the hero of "Civil Peace" and one of Achebe's most likeable characters. He is an ordinary man, a former miner with the Coal Corporation in Enugu, husband of Maria and father of four children, one of whom died in the wa...
"Nothing puzzles God." Discuss the meaning of this refrain in the story.
"Nothing puzzles God" is the saying with which Jonathan Iwegbu meets every event in "Civil Peace", and Achebe places it at both the beginning and the end of the story so that it frames the whole tale. Jonathan first uses it when he think...
How does the Iwegbu family rebuild its life in Enugu after the war?
When the family returns to Enugu, Jonathan finds his little zinc house of no regrets in Ogui Overside still standing, though the roof, doors and windows have been torn out. He collects old zinc, wood and cardboard, hires a carpenter and ...
What does the story suggest about the aftermath of war? Explain with reference to "Civil Peace".
"Civil Peace" is set in the weeks after the Nigerian Civil War, and although Achebe never describes a battle, the whole story is about what war leaves behind. Through the experiences of Jonathan Iwegbu and his family he offers a detailed picture of the aftermath.
First, the story shows the scale of loss. Jonathan has lost one of his four children, buried in the refugee clearing. In Enugu the rich contractor's concrete house is a mound of rubble, and Jonathan's own house has lost its roof, doors and windows. The Coal Corporation mines are shut, so former miners queue uselessly, and Biafran money must be handed in for a small ex gratia payment. Achebe conveys all this calmly, through Jonathan's eyes, which makes it more striking.
Second, the story shows how ordinary people survive by improvisation. Jonathan buries his bicycle and later turns it into a taxi, earning one hundred and fifteen pounds in a fortnight. He rebuilds his house with scrap zinc, wood and cardboard. The children sell mangoes to soldiers' wives, Maria sells akara balls, and Jonathan opens a palm wine bar. The whole family becomes a small business. Achebe honours this energy and inventiveness as the real force of recovery.
Third, the story exposes the lawlessness that follows war. The greeting "Happy survival!" is cheerful, but the daylight robbery outside the Treasury and the night visit of armed thieves show that violence has simply changed its form. The thieves carry automatic weapons, mock the family's cries for help and speak of "civil peace" while committing a crime. The police never appear, and frightened neighbours stay indoors. The state cannot protect people, and the bonds of community have weakened.
Fourth, and most importantly, the story suggests that human strength lies in the attitude with which people meet these conditions. Jonathan measures every loss against the worst that has already happened and finds he can bear it. He gives up the twenty pounds to save his family and is back at work the next morning, saying "Nothing puzzles God."
Achebe's picture of the aftermath of war is therefore double: outwardly a time of ruin and insecurity in which the promised peace is only a name, inwardly a time of gratitude, hard work and faith. This balance gives "Civil Peace" its lasting power.
Why did Aksionov's wife not want him to go to the Nizhny fair?
Aksionov's wife begged him not to travel because she had a frightening dream the night before he left. In it she saw him return from the town with his hair turned quite grey, and she took this as a sign that some evil would befall him on...
How was Aksionov arrested for the murder of the merchant?
After sharing an inn with a merchant he knew, Aksionov left before dawn and drove about twenty-five miles before stopping to feed his horses. A troika then arrived carrying a police officer and two soldiers. The officer questioned him cl...
Why did Aksionov give up petitioning for his release?
Aksionov's wife came to the prison with their children and told him that her petition to the Czar had been rejected. Then, stroking his hair, she asked him to tell her the truth, whether it was not he who had killed the merchant. That hi...
Describe Aksionov's life in Siberia and the change it brought about in him.
Aksionov spends twenty-six years as a convict in the mines of Siberia, and the man who emerges is almost unrecognisable from the merry young merchant of Vladimir. Physically he is broken. His hair, once fair and curly, turns white as sno...
How did Aksionov come to believe that Makar Semyonich was the real murderer?
The truth surfaces almost by accident, through Makar's own careless talk. When a new gang of convicts arrives after twenty-six years, one of them, Makar Semyonich, tells the others that he comes from Vladimir and has been sent to Siberia...
Why did Aksionov refuse to tell the Governor about the tunnel?
When the soldiers discover the escape tunnel, the Governor questions all the prisoners, and every one of them denies knowledge of it. Those who know will not betray Makar because they fear he would be flogged nearly to death. The Governo...
Justify the title of the story "God Sees the Truth, but Waits".
The title of Tolstoy's story is a Russian proverb, and it sums up both the plot and the moral in a single sentence. Each half of the proverb corresponds to a movement in the story. The first half, that God sees the truth, is established ...
Sketch the character of Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov.
Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov, the protagonist of Tolstoy's story, undergoes one of the most complete transformations in short fiction, from a lively young merchant to a saintly old convict.
At the beginning he is a prosperous, handsome man of Vladimir who owns two shops and a house. He is fair-haired and curly-headed, full of fun and very fond of singing. In his youth he drank heavily and became riotous when in liquor, but since his marriage he has reformed, drinking only occasionally. He is affectionate and light-hearted, laughing at his wife's warning dream and promising to bring presents from the fair.
His arrest reveals both his weakness and his honesty. Confronted with the blood-stained knife, he turns pale, trembles and stammers, and his very innocence makes him look guilty. He protests the truth but has no means of proving it. The turning point of his character comes in prison, when his wife asks whether he committed the crime. Her doubt convinces him that human beings can never know the truth, and he resolves to appeal to God alone. From this moment he ceases to fight for himself and accepts his fate.
Twenty-six years in Siberia complete the change. His hair turns white, his back stoops, and he becomes grave, quiet and devout. He makes boots to buy The Lives of the Saints, reads the lessons in the prison church, and is trusted by officials and prisoners alike, who call him Grandfather and The Saint and choose him as their spokesman. He is patient and humble, yet not without feeling: when Makar Semyonich appears, the old wounds bleed again, and he suffers sleepless nights longing for revenge.
His greatness lies in the way he resolves that struggle. Before the Governor he refuses to expose Makar, saying it is not God's will that he should tell. When Makar confesses and begs pardon, Aksionov first answers bitterly, then, moved by the man's tears, declares that God will forgive him and that he himself may be a hundred times worse. At that moment his heart grows light and he no longer longs for home. He dies before the pardon arrives, but he has already found the only freedom that matters.
Aksionov is therefore Tolstoy's ideal of Christian endurance: a man whom injustice could break physically but whom faith made unbreakable in spirit.
What is ironic about the ending of the story?
The ending of the story is deeply ironic. After Makar Semyonich confesses to the murder, the authorities finally issue the order for Aksionov's release, the very thing he prayed for and his wife petitioned for twenty-six years earlier. But by the time the order arrives, Aksionov is already dead. Earthly justice comes too late to be of any use to the man it was meant to serve. The irony is softened, however, by what Tolstoy has shown just before. Once Aksionov forgives Makar, his heart grows light and he no longer longs for home. He has already received an inner release that no official paper could give, so the pardon is redundant in spiritual terms even as it is tragic in human terms. The ending thus insists that God's justice and man's justice run on different clocks.
Why did the narrator and Pedro take shelter in the chateau?
The narrator had been badly wounded and was travelling through the Apennines in a feverish condition. His valet, Pedro, did not want his master to spend the night in the open air in such a state, so he forced an entry into an abandoned c...
Describe the turret room in which the narrator spent the night.
The narrator and Pedro chose a small apartment in a remote turret of the chateau. Its decorations were rich but tattered and antique. The walls were hung with tapestry and decorated with many trophies of arms, and, above all, with an unu...
How did the narrator come to notice the oval portrait?
The narrator did not notice the portrait at first. In his feverish state he asked Pedro to close the shutters, light the tall candelabrum at the head of the bed and throw back the black velvet curtains, so that he could gaze at the paint...
Describe the oval portrait and the effect it had on the narrator.
The oval portrait is the picture of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. It is painted as a vignette, in the manner of the American artist Thomas Sully, so that only the head and shoulders are shown, and the arms, bosom and the end...
Sketch the character of the painter in "The Oval Portrait".
The painter is the central figure of the tale told in the small volume, and Poe draws him in a few sharp strokes. He is described as passionate, studious and austere, a man who already has a bride in his Art before he takes a human bride...
Discuss the theme of the conflict between art and life in "The Oval Portrait".
The conflict between art and life is the heart of Poe's tale, and he develops it so that art is shown not merely competing with life but feeding on it and finally replacing it. From the beginning the painter's marriage is presented as a ...
Discuss "The Oval Portrait" as a Gothic tale and comment on its narrative structure.
"The Oval Portrait" displays almost every convention of Gothic fiction in a very small space, and Poe arranges those conventions inside a story within a story that doubles the effect of dread.
The setting is classically Gothic. The narrator and his valet Pedro force their way into an abandoned chateau in the Apennines, a pile of gloom and grandeur that the narrator himself compares to the imagination of Mrs Radcliffe, the eighteenth-century queen of Gothic romance. Inside, they occupy a small remote turret hung with tattered tapestries, trophies of arms and countless paintings in golden arabesque frames. The inner tale unfolds in a similar dark, high turret where light drips only from overhead, so that both stories share the same enclosed, tomb-like space.
The narrator is a typical Gothic witness: wounded, feverish and, by his own admission, in incipient delirium. His unreliable state makes the reader uncertain whether the portrait's lifelikeness is real or imagined, and this doubt is part of the horror. The subject matter is equally characteristic. Poe returns to what he considered the most poetical of all topics, the death of a beautiful young woman, and gives it a supernatural tint through the suggestion that her life has literally passed into the picture.
The structure intensifies these effects. The tale has two layers. The outer frame is told in the first person by the narrator, who describes his arrival, the room, the accidental shift of the candelabrum, and his hour of appalled study before the portrait. The inner tale is quoted from the small volume found on the pillow, told in the more distant voice of a chronicler, and relates the history of the painter and his bride. The frame gives the reader the mysterious effect first, the lifelikeness that startles the narrator awake, and only then supplies the cause. This order produces suspense.
The two layers mirror each other. Both take place in a turret, both concern a man gazing intently at an image, and both end in a moment of terrible recognition. The narrator turns from the picture to the book; the painter turns from the picture to his dead wife. Poe ends the whole tale with the painter's discovery, refusing to return to the frame, so that the reader is left inside the horror rather than safely outside it. This deliberate incompleteness is the final Gothic touch.
What is the significance of the painter's words "This is indeed Life itself!"?
The painter's cry comes at the moment he places the final tint on the portrait. He has laboured for weeks, growing wild with the ardour of his work, and when he stands entranced before the finished canvas he exclaims that it is indeed Life itself. On the surface the words are the artist's triumph: he has produced a picture so lifelike that it seems to breathe. But Poe gives the sentence a terrible double meaning. The next instant the painter turns to his beloved and finds her dead. The life he has captured on the canvas is the life he has drained from his wife, tint by tint, from her cheeks. The exclamation therefore marks the exact point at which art and life exchange places. It also links the inner tale to the frame story, explaining the absolute lifelikeness that so appalled the narrator when he first saw the portrait.
Why did the children love to play in the Giant's garden?
The children loved the Giant's garden because it was large and lovely and gave them a perfect place to play after school. It had soft green grass, beautiful flowers like stars that peeped up through the grass, and twelve peach trees that...
Why did Spring not come to the Giant's garden?
Spring did not come to the Giant's garden because the Giant had selfishly shut the children out. After returning from the Cornish ogre, he drove the children away, built a high wall and put up a notice board saying "Trespassers will be p...
How did the Giant realise that he had been selfish?
One morning the Giant, lying awake in bed, heard a little linnet singing outside his window, the first birdsong he had heard in years. The Hail stopped, the North Wind fell silent, and a sweet perfume came through the casement. Looking o...
Who was the little boy the Giant loved? Describe the Giant's last meeting with him.
The little boy is the mysterious child whom the Giant lifted into the frozen tree in the farthest corner of the garden. He was too small to climb, and the Giant's pity for his tears was what melted the Giant's heart. After the Giant plac...
Sketch the character of the Giant, showing how he changes in the course of the story.
The Giant is the central character of Wilde's fairy tale, and he is the only character who truly changes. When we first meet him he is gruff, possessive and cold. He has spent seven years with the Cornish ogre, whose company was so dull ...
Discuss "The Selfish Giant" as a Christian allegory. What do the little boy, the garden, the wall and the seasons symbolise?
An allegory is a story in which characters, places and events stand for deeper moral or spiritual ideas. "The Selfish Giant" reads perfectly well as a children's fairy tale, but Wilde has built into it a clear Christian allegory of sin, ...
"Selfishness leads to loneliness and barrenness, while love and generosity bring joy." Discuss this statement with reference to "The Selfish Giant."
Oscar Wilde's fairy tale is built on a sharp contrast between two states of the same garden and two states of the same heart. The statement above sums up its moral precisely, and every stage of the plot can be used to support it.
At the start, the garden is a place of shared joy. The children play there every afternoon, the peach trees blossom and bear fruit, and the birds sing so sweetly that the children stop to listen. This happiness depends on openness: the Giant is away and the garden is, in practice, common to all. The Giant's return changes everything. His words "My own garden is my own garden" express pure selfishness, and his high wall and notice board turn beauty into private property. The immediate result is loss for the children, who are left with a dusty road full of hard stones, but the deeper result is loss for the Giant himself. Spring refuses to enter his garden, the birds will not sing, the trees forget to blossom, and only Snow, Frost, the North Wind and Hail are glad to stay. The Giant sits alone at his window, cold and puzzled, while every other garden enjoys golden fruit. Wilde makes the consequences of selfishness physical: it produces an endless winter, silence and solitude. Even the Giant's earlier seven years with the Cornish ogre, in which he ran out of things to say, suggest a life without warmth or real friendship.
The turning point shows the opposite truth. When the Giant pities the crying boy and lifts him into the tree, the tree bursts into blossom instantly, the birds return to sing on it, and the child kisses him. When he knocks down the wall and gives the garden to the children, Spring comes back with them, and the people going to market see the most beautiful garden they have ever known. Generosity does not impoverish the Giant; it enriches him. He gains playmates, laughter and love, and in his old age he sits contentedly watching the children, whom he calls the most beautiful flowers of all. He even stops hating Winter, because a loving heart sees it only as Spring asleep.
The ending gives the statement its highest form. Because the Giant once let a small child play in his garden, that child, who bears the wounds of Love, invites him to Paradise. His single act of kindness earns him eternal joy, and he dies covered in white blossoms. Wilde's message is therefore clear and complete: the selfish person walls himself into a cold and lonely world, while the loving person opens his heart, finds that the world blossoms around him, and is finally rewarded with heaven.
What role do Snow, Frost, the North Wind and Hail play in the story?
Snow, Frost, the North Wind and Hail are personified forces of winter who occupy the Giant's garden after he shuts the children out. When Spring refuses to enter, they are the only ones pleased, and they decide to live there all the year...
Explain the meaning of the child's words, "these are the wounds of Love."
The child speaks these words when the aged Giant sees the prints of two nails on his hands and feet and angrily asks who has dared to wound him. The marks are the wounds of the Crucifixion, and they identify the child as Christ, who, according to Christian belief, suffered and died on the cross out of love for humanity. His wounds were not inflicted by an enemy to be slain with a sword; they were accepted willingly, as an act of love. The phrase reveals the story's allegorical meaning, changes the Giant's anger into awe, and prepares for the child's promise to take the Giant to his own garden, Paradise, as a reward for the love the Giant once showed him.
What was the child doing at the beginning of the story? How does this lead to the game?
At the beginning of the story the child is sitting alone on the stairs of his house. Under the palm of his hand he notices an old scab on his knee and begins to pick at it slowly with his fingernail until it comes away, leaving a small c...
What did the red, black and yellow parts of the carpet stand for in the child's game?
In the child's game the three colours of the hall carpet become three kinds of ground. The red parts are lumps of burning coal, red-hot, so that if he touches red he will be burnt up completely. The black parts are poisonous snakes, and if he touches black he will be bitten and die. Only the yellow parts are safe, so he must cross the entire carpet from the bottom of the stairs to the front door stepping on yellow alone. The colours are ordinary, but the child's imagination gives them terrible meanings, and Dahl describes the red as glowing with heat and the black as shining and shifting like the wet bodies of snakes. The rules make the crossing feel like a genuine matter of life and death.
What wish did the boy make, and how did he plan to achieve it?
The boy's wish was to be given a puppy for his birthday, which was the next day. He made a private bargain with fate: if he could cross the whole hall carpet from the stairs to the front door without touching a single patch of red or bla...
Describe the boy's journey across the carpet and how it ends.
Once the child has fixed the rules of his game, he steps down from the stairs and begins the crossing. At first the yellow is broad and the going is easy. He moves slowly and deliberately, placing each foot only on the safe colour and ke...
How does Roald Dahl show the power of a child's imagination in "The Wish"?
"The Wish" is a story in which almost nothing happens in the real world, and yet it is full of suspense. This is possible only because Dahl takes the child's imagination completely seriously and makes the reader share it. The game begins...
Interpret the ending of "The Wish." What actually happens to the boy, and why does Dahl end the story with the mother?
The ending of "The Wish" is deliberately ambiguous, and its uncertainty is the whole point of Dahl's design. The story follows the boy's crossing in painstaking detail, then breaks off at the exact moment of his fall. He stretches to cro...
"The Wish" shows how fear can grow from nothing until it becomes overwhelming. Discuss the theme of self-created fear in the story.
In "The Wish" Roald Dahl studies a fear that has no external cause at all. There is no villain, no accident and no real danger anywhere in the story. A small boy sits on the stairs of his own home on a sunny day. Everything frightening that follows is created inside his head, and yet by the end his terror is so real that the reader shares it. The story is therefore a precise study of how fear is manufactured and how it grows.
The fear begins in idleness. The boy is alone and bored, picking a scab from his knee. When the flicked scab lands on the carpet, his attention fastens on the pattern of red, black and yellow, and he begins to assign meanings to the colours. This is the first stage: the mind, with nothing else to do, invents a danger. The red is burning coal, the black is poisonous snakes, the yellow alone is safe. At this point the boy is still in control, because he is the one making the rules.
The second stage is the wish. By deciding that a successful crossing will earn him a puppy for his birthday tomorrow, the boy raises the stakes of his game. It is no longer idle play; it is a test with a real prize and, in his mind, a real penalty. This bargain locks him into the game. He can no longer simply step off the carpet, because to do so would be to give up the puppy.
The third stage is the crossing itself, during which the imagined danger takes on a life of its own. Dahl describes how the red seems to glow with heat and how the black shines and shifts like the wet bodies of snakes. The boy freezes and has to command himself not to look at the snakes. Each careful step makes the next one harder, because the more he believes, the more frightening the carpet becomes. The fear now controls the boy instead of the other way round, and his body responds as if the danger were real: he sways, waves his arms, and loses his balance.
The final stage is the fall. His hand lands on black, and he cries out as though he had truly been bitten. Dahl refuses to release the tension by reminding us that it is only a carpet. Instead he cuts to the boy's mother, searching in the sunshine outside, unaware of anything wrong. The contrast shows how completely private and self-made the boy's terror is. In this way Dahl demonstrates that fear does not need an object; it needs only belief, and a child's belief is total. The story is both a sympathetic portrait of childhood and a quiet warning about the traps the imagination can set for anyone.
Comment on the point of view and narrative technique used in "The Wish."
Dahl tells "The Wish" in the third person, but the narrator stays so close to the child's mind that we experience the carpet almost entirely through the boy's eyes. We are given his thoughts and decisions directly, often in language that...
Why did Luc and Jean go to the same spot every Sunday? What did they do there?
Luc Le Ganidec and Jean Kerderen were peasant boys from Brittany serving as soldiers in Paris. The city was strange and lonely to them, so every Sunday they walked out through Courbevoie and along the road towards Bezons to a quiet spot ...
Describe the peasant girl and explain how she became part of the soldiers' Sunday.
The girl is a young peasant from a farm near the soldiers' resting place. She is never named, but she is strong, healthy and kind, and every Sunday she leads her cow past the two soldiers to pasture and milks it in the field. At first Lu...
How does Maupassant show that Luc has changed?
Maupassant shows the change through behaviour rather than explanation. Luc, who has never before gone anywhere without Jean, begins to ask for leave on weekdays and goes out alone. He returns distracted and says nothing about where he ha...
What happens to Jean at the end of the story? Do you think he fell or threw himself into the river? Give reasons.
After Luc goes off with the girl, Jean sits alone, stunned, and the two friends walk back towards Paris in silence. As they come to the Seine, Jean leans over the water and goes in. Luc runs to the bank, shouting for help and calling his...
Discuss friendship and loneliness as the central themes of "Two Little Soldiers".
"Two Little Soldiers" is, above all, a story about a friendship so complete that it cannot survive being shared. Luc Le Ganidec and Jean Kerderen are Breton peasant boys posted to Paris. They are poor, shy and awkward, they speak a dialect the city does not understand, and they have nothing in common with the life around them. Their loneliness in the capital is the soil in which their friendship grows. Each is the other's only link to home, and Maupassant shows this through their Sunday ritual: the same walk through Courbevoie towards Bezons, the same bread and sausage, the same spot by the Seine, the same quiet talk about Plounivon. They do not need to say much; simply being together is enough.
Maupassant makes the reader feel both the beauty and the danger of such a bond. It is beautiful because it is loyal, simple and sincere. It is dangerous because it leaves no space for anything else. The arrival of the peasant girl with her cow exposes this. At first she joins the friendship rather than threatening it: she stops, talks and shares her milk with both boys, and both are happy. But love is not something two people can share equally. Luc begins to meet her secretly on weekdays, and on the Sunday when he kisses her and walks off arm in arm, Jean is left alone with the cow. In that moment his loneliness returns, but now it is far worse than before, because he has lost the one thing that protected him from it.
The tragedy is deepened by silence. Neither boy can speak about his feelings. Luc cannot confess, and Jean cannot accuse. Their friendship was built on quiet understanding, and when understanding fails there are no words to repair it. Jean's death in the Seine, whether accident or suicide, is the final expression of a grief that has no voice. Luc's shouts for help on the bank come too late, and he is left as lonely as Jean had been.
Through this small story Maupassant suggests that loneliness is not cured by friendship but only postponed, and that the deepest attachments are also the most fragile. The story asks us to notice the silent people around us, whose suffering is real even when they cannot say it.
Write a character sketch of Jean Kerderen.
Jean Kerderen is one of the two Breton soldiers in Maupassant's story, and he is its true tragic centre. Like his friend Luc, he is a simple peasant boy, poor, shy and homesick in Paris. He finds comfort in routine: the same Sunday walk,...
Is Luc Le Ganidec to blame for Jean's death? Give your view with reference to the story.
Luc Le Ganidec is not a villain, but his behaviour sets in motion the events that destroy his friend, and the story invites us to weigh his responsibility carefully. On one side, Luc does nothing wicked. He is a young man far from home w...
Comment on the significance of the title "Two Little Soldiers".
The title points to the two friends, Luc and Jean, and to the way the story sees them. The word "little" suggests not only their youth and low rank but also their smallness in the great city of Paris: they are shy peasant boys who matter to nobody but each other. The word "soldiers" reminds us that they are far from home under military discipline, which explains their homesickness and the importance of their Sunday freedom. The number "two" is the heart of the story; the friendship works only as a pair, and when a third person, the peasant girl, comes between them, the pair is broken and one of the two is lost. The title therefore carries the whole tragedy: two small lives that cannot bear to become one.
Why does the speaker ask the reader to listen without pity?
The speaker rejects pity because it does nothing for her. Pity is a comfortable feeling for the person who gives it, but it leaves the mattress stained, the children hungry and the officials unhelpful. She says plainly that she cannot us...
"Hot water is a luxury." Explain this statement and what it reveals about the speaker's life.
The speaker says this while answering people who claim that anybody can be clean. For most readers hot water is an ordinary part of the day, but for her it is a luxury because heating water costs fuel, and fuel costs money that she does ...
Explain the lines: "Poverty is an acid that drips on pride until all pride is worn away. Poverty is a chisel that chips on honor until honor is worn away."
These two metaphors describe the inward damage of poverty. Acid does not destroy at once; it drips and slowly eats through whatever it touches. A chisel removes stone one small piece at a time. In the same way poverty does not take away ...
What does the speaker fear for her children's future?
The speaker calls poverty "looking into a black future", and the future she means is her children's. She fears that her boys, shut out by children like the reader's, will turn to other boys who steal to get what they want, and that she w...
Describe the speaker's experience of asking for help. What does it reveal about the way society treats the poor?
Asking for help is, in the speaker's words, one of the things that poverty is. She frames the paragraph with a question to the reader: have you ever had to ask for help, knowing your children will suffer if you do not get it? Then she de...
How does the repeated phrase "Poverty is" shape the essay? Discuss its effect.
The title asks a question, and the essay answers it with a single sentence pattern repeated many times: "Poverty is". Poverty is getting up every morning from a stained mattress. Poverty is being tired. Poverty is dirt. Poverty is stayin...
"What Is Poverty?" does not define poverty so much as make the reader feel it. Discuss how Jo Goodwin Parker achieves this.
Jo Goodwin Parker's essay is called a definition, but it works on the reader's senses and conscience rather than on the intellect. It achieves this through direct address, physical detail, the refrain, honest emotion held in check, and an ending that turns the reader from listener into the one being questioned.
The essay begins by placing the speaker physically in front of the reader. "You ask me what is poverty? Listen to me," she says, and then describes herself as dirty and smelly, without proper underwear, with rotting teeth close to the reader's face. From the first lines the reader cannot keep a polite distance. She uses "you" throughout, anticipates the reader's own objections, such as the claim that anybody can be clean, and answers them one by one. The reader is made a participant in a conversation, not an observer of a case.
The details are chosen so that the reader can smell, touch and feel them. Poverty is a mattress stained with dirt and illness, the smell of urine and sour milk, worms, chronic anemia, insects crawling over sleeping children, newspaper on the walls that could catch from one spark, diapers made from old sheets that will not dry in the rain. Even the economic facts are given as bodily experiences: heat bought means food not bought, so poverty is cooking without food and cleaning without soap.
The refrain "Poverty is" gives these details a rhythm that the reader cannot escape. Its insistence reproduces the endlessness of poverty itself, which returns every morning.
The emotion is real but controlled. The speaker refuses pity, reports the officials' words without exaggeration, and describes her husband's leaving in a plain sentence. Her restraint makes the reader do the feeling for her. Where she does use figurative language, it is sharp and physical: acid on pride, a chisel on honor, prison bars against the bars of poverty.
Finally, the ending takes the feeling the essay has built and hands it back with a demand. She did not come from another place or time; people like her are all around. She wants anger, not tears, and she closes by asking whether the reader can be silent as the poor are. Having been made to feel poverty, the reader is now made to feel responsible for it. That combination of sensation and responsibility is what makes the essay a felt experience rather than a definition.
What is the purpose of "What Is Poverty?", and how does the ending of the essay fulfil that purpose?
The purpose of the essay is stated in its opening lines and completed in its final ones. The speaker has been asked a question and she agrees to answer it, but on her own terms: the reader must listen, listen without pity, and listen with understanding. Her goal is not to be felt sorry for. It is to make comfortable readers understand what poverty actually is, to make them angry about it, and to make them speak and act. Everything between the opening and the close serves that aim.
The body of the essay builds understanding through concrete testimony. Each paragraph beginning "Poverty is" adds a piece of her life: waking on a stained mattress, being permanently tired with anemia and worms she cannot treat, washing her child's only clothes each night without hot water or soap, sitting up to watch the fire on cold nights, choosing between fuel and food, being sent from office to office and lectured for having children, remembering the school she left because of other children's cruelty and the husband who did not come home, and fearing prison, drink or a life like hers for her children. By the end of these paragraphs the reader knows poverty through the senses.
The ending then converts this knowledge into a demand. The speaker says she has come out of her despair to tell the reader all this, a reminder that speaking has cost her. She insists that she does not come from another place or another time; people like her live all around the reader, which removes the excuse of distance. She asks the reader to look at her with an angry heart, and she defines the anger she wants: anger that will help you help me, anger that will make you tell of me. This separates useful anger from useless pity. The last lines are a challenge: the poor are always silent, can you be silent too? The question turns the reader's own silence into a moral choice.
The ending therefore fulfils the purpose exactly. The reader who listened, as instructed at the start, has been given understanding; now that understanding is asked to become anger and then voice. The essay offers no solution, because the speaker cannot provide one. It ends by placing the responsibility where it belongs, with the people who have hot water, clean clothes, and the freedom to speak.
Why does Steve Jobs say he dropped out of Reed College?
Jobs dropped out after six months because he could not see the value in what he was studying. He had no idea what he wanted to do with his life or how college would help him find out, and he was spending all the money his working class p...
What does Jobs mean by "connecting the dots"?
Connecting the dots is Jobs's image for how the separate events of a life join into a meaningful pattern. His example is the calligraphy course he took after dropping out. At the time it had no practical use, yet ten years later everythi...
Why does Jobs call being fired from Apple the best thing that could have happened to him?
Jobs was fired at thirty from the company he had founded, and at first the loss was devastating; he felt he had failed publicly and thought of leaving Silicon Valley. He came to see the dismissal as the best thing that happened to him be...
What is the significance of the phrase "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."?
The phrase was the farewell message on the back cover of the final issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, a publication Jobs loved in his youth. He uses it to close the speech and to wish the graduates the same attitude. Staying hungry means never being satisfied, always wanting to learn and do more. Staying foolish means keeping the courage to try things that sensible people would avoid, to follow curiosity and intuition rather than convention. Together the two commands sum up the lessons of his three stories: follow your heart, love your work, and do not let fear or the opinions of others limit you.
How does the awareness of death shape Jobs's view of how to live? Explain with reference to the third story.
The third story of the speech is about death, and Jobs treats mortality not as something to fear but as the most useful tool he has for making the big decisions of life. He begins with a saying he encountered at seventeen: if you live ea...
Discuss the structure of the speech and explain how it helps Jobs persuade his audience.
Jobs announces his plan in the opening lines: he will tell three stories from his life, and no more. The rest of the speech follows that plan exactly. Each story has a name (connecting the dots, love and loss, death), a narrative told in...
"The only way to do great work is to love what you do." Explain this idea as Jobs develops it in the second story.
The second story is about love and loss, and its central claim is that love for one's work is the only reliable foundation for doing anything great. Jobs builds the idea from his own experience of failure. He and Wozniak began Apple in h...
Summarise the three stories Jobs tells in "How to Live Before You Die" and state the lesson he draws from each. How far do you find his advice useful for a student in Nepal today?
Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address is built around three stories from his own life, each ending in a lesson for the graduates.
The first story, about connecting the dots, begins with his adoption and his parents' promise that he would attend college. He enrolled at Reed College but dropped out after six months because he could not see its value and did not want to spend his parents' savings. Staying on campus as a drop-in, he followed his curiosity into a calligraphy class that seemed to have no practical use. Ten years later that knowledge shaped the typography of the first Macintosh. The lesson is that the dots of a life can only be connected looking backward, so one must trust one's curiosity and intuition and follow them even when the path is uncertain.
The second story, about love and loss, tells how he built Apple from a garage into a large company and was then fired from it at thirty. After the initial shock, he realised he still loved his work, and the loss freed him to be a beginner again. He founded NeXT and Pixar, met his wife, and later returned to Apple. The lesson is that failure can be a release rather than an ending, and that only love for one's work carries a person through it. Keep looking for that work, and do not settle.
The third story is about death. Since his youth Jobs had asked himself each morning whether he would do the day's work if it were his last day. His 2004 cancer diagnosis made the question real. The lesson is that remembering death clears away pride, fear and other people's expectations, leaving only what is important, so one should not waste a limited life living someone else's. He ends with the words stay hungry, stay foolish.
For a student in Nepal today, the advice is useful in some ways and needs adjustment in others. The call to follow curiosity and to value learning that has no immediate use is a healthy corrective to a system that often rewards memorisation and a narrow choice of streams. The idea that failure, such as a poor result or a rejected application, can open a more creative path is genuinely encouraging. The reminder that time is limited and that one should not live according to other people's expectations speaks directly to students under heavy family pressure about careers and going abroad.
At the same time, Jobs spoke from a position of unusual talent, an American economy full of opportunity, and a safety net of friends and family. Dropping out is far riskier for a Nepali student whose family has borrowed for fees and who faces a much narrower job market. The wise reading of the speech is therefore not to imitate his choices but to adopt his attitude: stay curious, choose work you can love within the real options available, treat setbacks as beginnings, and make important decisions with the awareness that life is short. Taken this way, the speech remains valuable advice.
What does the title "Scientific Research Is a Token of Humankind's Survival" mean?
A token is a sign or a pledge of something. By calling scientific research a token of humankind's survival, Keilis-Borok means that continued research is both the evidence and the guarantee that humanity will go on living. The threats fa...
What problems does Keilis-Borok say humankind faces, and why does he believe only fundamental research can meet them?
Keilis-Borok points to a set of dangers that threaten humankind as a whole: natural disasters such as earthquakes, the problem of energy, the degradation of the environment, and disease. These are not passing troubles. They grow with the...
How does the author describe fundamental research, and what drives it?
In the essay, fundamental research is the study of nature undertaken in order to understand it, not to produce an immediate practical result. What drives it is curiosity, the scientist's wish to know how things work. Because it follows questions rather than targets, it often advances by chance, and a researcher may discover something quite different from what was being sought. Keilis-Borok treats this apparent aimlessness as a strength rather than a weakness. Research directed only at known goals can produce only expected results, whereas curiosity-driven research produces the unexpected discoveries on which the great practical advances of history have rested. That is why he calls it the token of humankind's survival.
What lesson does Keilis-Borok draw from the history of science?
Keilis-Borok's lesson from the history of science is that the greatest practical benefits science has given humankind came from research that had no obvious application when it was done. The scientists responsible were not trying to be u...
Explain the roles of curiosity and chance in scientific discovery as presented in the essay.
Curiosity and chance are, in Keilis-Borok's account, the two forces that actually move science forward, and understanding them is the key to understanding why he defends fundamental research so strongly. Curiosity comes first. The scient...
Why does Keilis-Borok refer to his own field of earthquake prediction? How does it strengthen his argument?
Keilis-Borok was a seismologist who spent his life working on the prediction of earthquakes, and his reference to this field is one of the most persuasive features of the essay. To begin with, it gives him authority. When he claims that ...
"Scientific research is a necessity, not a luxury." Discuss this statement with reference to Keilis-Borok's essay.
The claim that scientific research is a necessity rather than a luxury is the thesis of Keilis-Borok's essay, and the whole piece is an attempt to justify it. A luxury is something a society enjoys when it can afford it and gives up when...
How far is Keilis-Borok's argument relevant to a country like Nepal? Discuss with reference to the essay.
Keilis-Borok's essay was written by a Russian seismologist for a general audience, but its argument applies with special force to Nepal.
Nepal lies on the boundary where the Indian plate pushes beneath the Eurasian plate, the collision that raised the Himalaya. This makes it one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world. The Gorkha earthquake of 25 April 2015, of magnitude 7.8, killed nearly nine thousand people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes. The problem that Keilis-Borok spent his life on, understanding and predicting earthquakes, is therefore not a distant scientific puzzle for Nepalis but a matter of daily safety. His claim that fundamental research on the earth is tied to survival needs no translation here.
The other dangers he names are equally present. Nepal faces floods and landslides every monsoon, glacial lakes swollen by a warming climate, air pollution in the Kathmandu Valley, and pressure on forests and water. Its energy future rests on hydropower, which demands knowledge of rivers, geology and climate. Its public health still contends with infectious disease. Each of these is a problem that existing knowledge has not solved and that only continued research can address.
The essay also carries a warning that is relevant to a developing country. It is tempting, when resources are scarce, to regard science as a luxury for rich nations and to fund only what promises quick returns. Keilis-Borok shows why this is short-sighted. The knowledge that will protect Nepal's cities, rivers and people will come from basic research into how the earth, the atmosphere and living things behave, research whose payoff cannot be scheduled. A country that neglects it makes itself dependent on knowledge produced elsewhere, often unsuited to its own conditions.
Finally, the essay reminds young Nepali readers that scientific curiosity is not an escape from national problems but a way of meeting them. Investment in universities, research institutes and the training of scientists is, in the author's terms, an investment in survival. For a nation that has already felt the ground move beneath it, his argument is less a theory than a description of its own situation.
Who was Frank LaPena, and what is the main subject of his essay Sharing Tradition?
Frank LaPena (1937-2019) was a Native American artist, poet, traditional singer and dancer, and professor. He belonged to the Nomtipom Wintu people of northern California and taught art and ethnic studies at California State University, ...
Why is oral tradition fragile, according to LaPena?
Oral tradition is fragile because it exists only in people. Stories, songs, ceremonies and the meaning of places are not written down in LaPena's community; they live in the memories of elders and are handed on by speaking, showing and d...
What responsibilities does the young learner have in receiving tradition?
According to LaPena, receiving tradition is an active duty, not a passive one. The young learner must first be present: he or she must make time to be with the elders instead of giving all attention to school, work and entertainment. Sec...
How does the modern world threaten tradition in LaPena's essay?
LaPena shows that young Native people live in two worlds. The modern world offers schooling, jobs, cities and popular culture, and all of these compete for the time and attention that learning from elders requires. Tradition is passed on slowly, through personal contact and patient listening, while modern life moves quickly and values convenience. As a result the young may not be present when the elders are ready to share, and the elders may die before the sharing takes place. The author does not condemn modern life, but he recognises that its rhythm works against the survival of oral tradition unless people deliberately make room for the old ways.
Summarise the essay Sharing Tradition in your own words.
In "Sharing Tradition" Frank LaPena reflects on how the traditions of his Native American community survive from one generation to the next. He begins by observing that tradition in his community is oral. Stories, songs, ceremonies and t...
Tradition exists only as long as it is shared. Discuss this statement with reference to Sharing Tradition.
The statement captures the central message of Frank LaPena's essay. LaPena writes about a Native American community in which tradition is oral. Nothing is written down; the songs, stories, ceremonies and knowledge of places live in the m...
What difficulties does LaPena face in receiving and passing on tradition?
Frank LaPena stands between the generations in his community: he has received tradition from elders and must now pass it on. The essay is honest about the difficulties of this position. The first difficulty is receiving the tradition at ...
Compare the way tradition is passed on in LaPena's community with the way it is passed on in your own community in Nepal. What does the essay teach a Nepali student?
In "Sharing Tradition" Frank LaPena describes a Native American community in which tradition is oral. Songs, stories, ceremonies and the meaning of places are not written down; they are held by elders and handed to the young through speech, example and shared participation. The process depends entirely on personal contact, so when an elder dies without sharing, the knowledge is lost for ever. LaPena also notes that modern schooling, work and popular culture pull the young away from the patient listening that tradition requires.
Much of this is true of Nepal. In many Nepali communities, folk songs, festival rituals, herbal knowledge, farming practices, local histories and the mother tongue itself are passed on by grandparents and community elders rather than through books. Deuda songs, Tamang selo, Newar guthi ceremonies, Tharu dances and the ritual knowledge of village priests and shamans are learned by watching and doing over many years. A child who sits with a grandmother during Tihar learns not only the steps of a ritual but why it matters. As in LaPena's community, the death of an old singer or ritual specialist can silence a whole body of knowledge.
There are differences too. Nepal has a long written tradition in Sanskrit and Nepali, so some religious and literary knowledge is preserved in texts. Yet the written record does not cover the local, everyday knowledge that gives each community its character, and that knowledge is as fragile as anything LaPena describes. Nepal also faces its own version of the modern pressures he identifies: migration for work and study takes the young away for years, English-medium schooling replaces local languages, and phones and television compete for attention.
The essay teaches a Nepali student that tradition is not preserved automatically; it survives only when someone shares and someone listens. The responsibility belongs to the young as much as to the old, and respect for elders must mean making time to learn from them. What is learned should be passed on faithfully, not reshaped to be fashionable. Finally, modern education and tradition need not be enemies. LaPena himself was a professor who painted, wrote poems and danced in the traditional way. A Nepali student can likewise use recording and writing to support, rather than replace, living contact with elders. Tradition exists only as long as it is shared, and each generation must choose to be the link rather than the gap.
What kind of work does Haldane require from life, and why?
Haldane's first and most important requirement is work, but not work of any kind. He wants work that he enjoys and that is useful to other people. For him this means scientific research and teaching. He insists on both conditions togethe...
Why does Haldane not want to be rich?
Haldane requires a certain minimum of health and comfort: enough food, warmth, rest and fitness to be able to think and work. But he draws a firm line between this modest comfort and wealth. He argues that beyond a fairly low level, more...
Why is freedom of thought and speech so important to Haldane?
Haldane treats freedom of thought and speech as a necessity on the same level as food and health, not as a luxury. He wants to be free to think as he pleases and to say and write what he thinks without fear of punishment. As a scientist ...
What does Haldane mean when he says he requires adventure and variety?
Haldane does not want a safe, predictable existence in which every day repeats the last. He requires some element of risk and novelty, which he calls adventure, and enough change in his activities to keep life interesting, which he calls...
List and explain the things Haldane requires from life.
In "What I Require from Life" J. B. S. Haldane sets out, one by one, the conditions he believes his own life needs. He stresses that he speaks for himself rather than for everyone.
His first requirement is work that he enjoys and that is useful to others. For him this means scientific research and teaching. He places work first because he believes a life that contributes nothing is not satisfying, however comfortable it may be.
His second requirement is a minimum of health and physical comfort: enough food, warmth, rest and fitness to think and work well. He distinguishes this sharply from luxury. Beyond a modest level, comfort does not add to happiness, and great wealth brings anxieties of its own. He therefore does not want to be rich.
His third requirement is freedom to think as he pleases and to say and write what he thinks. As a scientist he regards this as essential, because science depends on ideas being openly tested and criticised.
Fourth, he requires adventure and variety. He does not want a safe and repetitive life, and he finds that some risk and change are part of living fully.
Fifth, he requires friendship and a place in society. He wants friends whose company he values and who value his, and he wants to belong to a community that regards his work as worthwhile. He rejects wealth and high social status as aims in themselves.
Finally, Haldane connects these personal needs to society. He argues that most people in his day are denied even these modest requirements, and that a socialist organisation of society, using science, could provide them for all. Above everything he wants the chance to go on being useful and to keep learning until his life ends.
How does Haldane connect his personal requirements to his socialist beliefs?
"What I Require from Life" begins as a personal list but ends as a social argument, and the link between the two is the modesty of what Haldane asks for. He requires useful and enjoyable work, a minimum of health and comfort, freedom of ...
How far do you agree with Haldane's view that useful work matters more than wealth? Give reasons.
Haldane places enjoyable and useful work at the top of his requirements and puts wealth near the bottom, arguing that beyond a modest level of comfort, money adds nothing to happiness while useful work gives life its meaning. I largely a...
In the manner of J. B. S. Haldane, write an essay on what you require from life.
J. B. S. Haldane, in "What I Require from Life", listed his needs plainly: useful and enjoyable work, a minimum of health and comfort, freedom of thought and speech, adventure and variety, friendship and a place in society. He refused wealth and status as aims. Following his example, I shall set out what I require, speaking only for myself.
First, like Haldane, I require work that I enjoy and that is useful. I do not want to spend my life doing something that could be left undone without anyone noticing. I want to end each day knowing that something is better because of what I did, and I want the work to interest me, because forty years of boredom is a heavy price for a salary.
Second, I require health and enough comfort to work well: clean water, decent food, a warm room in winter and the medical care that many Nepalis still cannot count on. I do not require a large house or a car. Haldane was right that beyond a modest level such things bring worry rather than joy.
Third, I require the freedom to think and to say what I think. Nepal has won this freedom at some cost, and I do not want to lose it. I want to question a teacher, criticise a politician and change my mind without fear. Like Haldane, I believe that knowledge grows only where ideas can be openly tested.
Fourth, I require some adventure. I do not want a life in which every year repeats the last. I want to see the high mountains and other countries, and to attempt things I might fail at. Safety is good, but it is not the purpose of living.
Fifth, I require friends and a place in my community: people I can trust and who trust me, and work that is recognised as worth doing. I do not require fame.
Finally, like Haldane, I recognise that most of what I ask for depends on the kind of society I live in. Useful work, health care, free speech and security cannot be enjoyed by one person while others lack them, so I require a country that makes them possible for all, and I accept that I must help to build it. If I can spend my life being useful, learning something new each year, and living among friends in a free society, I shall count it well spent.
To what two things does the speaker compare his beloved in the first stanza, and what does each comparison suggest?
In the opening stanza the speaker compares his beloved to two quite different things. First she is like a red rose that has newly sprung in June, an image of fresh, living beauty caught at the very peak of its season, with the doubled wo...
Explain the meaning and effect of the phrase about the sands of life running.
The phrase compares a human lifetime to sand running steadily through an hourglass, so it is a metaphor for the passing of the speaker's own days. Its effect in the poem is important. It arrives immediately after two impossible boasts, t...
Why does the speaker say farewell in the last stanza, and how does the poem end?
The last stanza reveals the situation that lies behind the whole poem. The speaker is going away and must take leave of his beloved, so he bids her farewell, calls her his only love and asks that the parting be only a short one. He then promises that he will come back to her again even if his journey should stretch to ten thousand miles. The poem therefore ends not on the grief of separation but on the certainty of return, and that choice changes the mood of the ending. The repeated farewell, which might have sounded mournful, turns into a pledge, and the reader is left with confidence rather than loss. It also explains the earlier praise and oaths, which were spoken to reassure someone about to be left behind.
How does the song like quality of the poem come from its form, rhyme and diction?
The poem was written as a song, and almost every feature of its form serves that purpose. It is made of four quatrains in the ballad measure of Scottish popular song, with longer four stress lines alternating with shorter three stress li...
Discuss the figures of speech used in A Red, Red Rose and show how they build the meaning of the poem.
The poem is short and its vocabulary is plain, so almost all of its power comes from figures of speech carefully placed. It opens with two similes. The beloved is like a red rose newly sprung in June, and she is like a melody sweetly pla...
Constancy of love is the central theme of A Red, Red Rose. Justify this statement with reference to the poem.
The theme of constancy is what holds the poem together, and every stanza contributes to it in a different way. The first stanza appears to be simple praise, but it already prepares the theme. A rose newly sprung in June and a tune played...
Trace the development of thought and feeling through the four stanzas of the poem.
The poem develops in a clear curve, moving from praise to promise and from promise to parting, and the feeling deepens at every turn. It opens in admiration. The speaker looks at his beloved and reaches for comparisons, calling her a fre...
A Red, Red Rose owes its lasting appeal to the simplicity of its language and the extravagance of its feeling. Discuss.
The statement identifies the real paradox of Burns's lyric. Its words are among the plainest in English poetry, yet the emotion they carry is enormous, and the tension between the two has kept the song alive for more than two centuries.
The simplicity is easy to demonstrate. The poem has four short stanzas and hardly a word in it that a child could not understand. Its whole furniture is a rose, a month, a tune, the sea, a rock, the sun, sand and a road. The form is equally modest, the ballad measure of Scottish song, with longer lines alternating with shorter ones and rhyme falling only on the second and fourth lines of each stanza. The diction is lightly Scots, which keeps the poem close to ordinary speech.
The extravagance lies in what this plain language is made to say. The beloved is a rose at the exact moment of its opening and a melody played perfectly in tune. The speaker will love her till the seas go dry and till the rocks melt in the sun, and he will walk ten thousand miles to stand beside her again. In a more sophisticated poem such boasts might sound ridiculous.
They do not, and the reasons are worth stating. The exaggeration is honest about being exaggeration, since nobody expects the sea to dry up, so the impossible conditions confess that ordinary measurement cannot hold what the speaker feels. The poem also grounds its boasts in one quiet metaphor, the sands of life running, which admits that the lover is mortal and limits his pledge to the length of his own days. Most important of all, the last stanza reveals the situation, since he is leaving, and praise offered at a parting is not vanity but comfort.
The two qualities therefore depend on each other. Grand claims in grand language would invite disbelief, while these claims, spoken by an ordinary man in ordinary words to a tune anyone can hum, sound like something a real person might say at a real farewell. Repetition helps, because the doubled colour word, the returning vow and the repeated goodbye all belong to song, and song persuades by feeling rather than by proof. The lasting appeal of the poem is that it refuses to choose, keeping the language of the cottage and the emotion of the epic in the same four stanzas.
Who speaks these lines, and in what situation are they spoken?
The lines are spoken by Jaques, the melancholy courtier who has followed the banished Duke into the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It. They belong to the second act of the play, at the moment when Orlando arrives car...
Name the seven ages of man in order and give one detail for each.
The speech divides life into seven ages. The first is the infant, who only cries and brings up milk in the nurse's arms. The second is the schoolboy, who whines, carries his satchel and creeps to school as slowly as a snail. The third is the lover, who sighs like a furnace and writes a mournful ballad to his mistress's eyebrow. The fourth is the soldier, full of strange oaths, bearded like a leopard, and ready to face the cannon for a reputation as fragile as a bubble. The fifth is the justice, a prosperous magistrate with a round, well fed belly, a severe eye and a stock of wise old sayings. The sixth is the thin, slippered old man with spectacles, shrunken legs and a voice returning to a childish treble. The seventh is a second childishness and then oblivion, without teeth, eyes, taste or anything at all.
What does the speaker mean by calling reputation a bubble?
The phrase belongs to the description of the soldier, who is willing to march into the very mouth of the cannon in order to win honour. By calling that honour a bubble the speaker uses a metaphor of the most deflating kind. A bubble look...
Comment on the effect of the closing lines of the speech.
The speech ends with the seventh age, described as a second childishness followed by mere oblivion, and then with a list of what has been lost: teeth, eyes, taste and everything. The effect depends on two devices working together. The fi...
Discuss the figures of speech employed in All the World's a Stage.
The passage owes its lasting fame chiefly to the figures of speech that organise it, and they work at two levels, one large and several small. The large one is the extended metaphor, or conceit, announced in the opening statement that th...
How does the comparison of the world to a stage help the speaker express his view of human life?
The comparison is not decoration. It is the instrument through which the speaker delivers his whole view of human existence, and it works in several ways at once. First, a stage implies a script. If the world is a playhouse and all men a...
Examine the tone of the speech and show how it changes as the seven ages proceed.
The tone of the speech is best described as detached, satirical and, at the last, bleak, and it does not stay the same from beginning to end. The opening is calm and almost lecture like. The claim that the world is a stage and that all m...
The seven ages of man present human life as a cycle of growth and decay. Discuss this theme with reference to the structure and imagery of the speech.
The speech presents a human life as an arc that rises and then falls back to its starting point, and structure and imagery work together to make that argument.
The structure is announced at once. If the world is a stage and each person plays many parts, then a life can be divided into acts, and the speaker gives seven. The first two are ages of dependence, the infant helpless in a nurse's arms and the schoolboy driven unwillingly to a duty he resents. The next three are ages of power, since the lover has feeling, the soldier has courage and strength, and the justice has wealth and authority. The last two reverse the climb, showing a lean figure in slippers and spectacles with shrunken legs, and then a second childishness that ends in nothing.
That word second turns a straight line into a circle. The man of the last age has no teeth, and neither had the infant. He cannot see or taste or manage himself, and neither could the child. The speech ends where it began, the difference being that one figure arrives and the other leaves. Growth is not an achievement that lasts but the first half of a movement that undoes it.
The imagery follows the same curve. The theatrical metaphor makes every part provisional, since a player must exit. The similes chart the rise physically, from the snail's creep of the schoolboy to the furnace of the lover, the leopard's beard of the soldier and the round belly of the justice. Then the images shrink to spectacles, slippers, a purse and a shrunk shank, and the manly voice becomes a pipe, so the vocabulary diminishes as the life diminishes.
The imagery also insists the summit is hollow, which deepens the theme. The lover's passion is addressed to an eyebrow, the soldier's honour is a bubble, and the justice's wisdom is a collection of old sayings. If the high ages are that empty, the decay that follows takes away less than it seems.
The closing repetition of loss, ending on the word everything, gives the theme its hardest statement, for no afterlife or fame is offered, only an exit. Through a structure that rises and falls, images that swell and shrink, and a final metaphor of oblivion, life is shown as one brief performance in which growth and decay are halves of the same act.
Who is the speaker of the poem, and whom does the speaker address?
The speaker is the coronavirus itself. The poet personifies the virus and allows it to talk in the first person, so that the thing everybody fears is given a voice and a case to argue. Its listener is humankind as a whole, addressed directly and kept silent for the length of the poem. The choice of speaker matters. Because the accused party does the talking, the familiar picture of an innocent human world attacked by a cruel disease is reversed, and the reader is placed in the position of the one being accused. The poem is therefore a dramatic monologue in which the virus defends itself and brings charges of its own against human beings.
Why does the virus refuse to accept the blame that human beings place on it?
The virus refuses the name of villain because it believes the record of human behaviour is far worse than its own. It points out that people have cut down forests, polluted the rivers and the air, killed animals and built weapons which t...
How does the poem describe the condition of the earth while human beings are shut indoors?
While people are locked inside their houses, the world outside begins to recover. The virus observes that the air has grown clearer, the water cleaner, and that other creatures move about more freely than they have for a long time. The d...
Identify the main figures of speech used in the poem and explain how each contributes to its meaning.
The poem rests on personification. A virus has no mind, no memory and no morals, yet here it speaks, remembers, judges and advises, and this single device makes everything else in the poem possible. Closely tied to it is apostrophe, sinc...
Discuss the central theme of the poem, that human greed and not the virus is the real destroyer.
The governing theme of the poem is human responsibility for the ruin of the natural world. The pandemic supplies the occasion, but the subject is the long record of human damage that the pandemic interrupts, and the poet argues his case ...
What does the virus mean when it tells human beings to learn humility?
The virus is asking for a change of attitude rather than a change of policy alone. Human beings have treated themselves as the masters and owners of the earth, entitled to clear its forests, use its rivers and air as drains, and kill its...
The poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by the coronavirus. Discuss the poet's choice of speaker and the effect it has on the poem's argument.
The whole strength of the poem lies in the decision about who speaks. A poem about the pandemic written in an ordinary human voice would almost certainly have described fear, illness, closed streets and grief, and it would have treated the virus as an invader. By handing the poem instead to the virus and letting it talk in the first person to a silent humankind, the poet turns a complaint into a trial and puts human beings in the dock.
Several consequences follow from that choice. The first is the reversal of sympathy. Readers open the poem expecting to hear about a monster and instead hear the monster speak calmly and reasonably, refusing the name it has been given. Because it argues rather than threatens, it earns a hearing, and once it has been heard its charges are difficult to dismiss.
The second consequence is the authority the poem gains from its accuser. When a human poet lists deforestation, polluted rivers, dirty air, dead animals and wars, the list sounds like preaching. When the accused party recites the same list in its own defence, the charges land as evidence rather than sermon, and the reader is placed in the uncomfortable position of the defendant who cannot reply. The silence of the addressee is essential to this effect, for humankind is present in every line and speaks in none.
The third consequence is the moral standing that personification lends the speaker. Given a mind and a judgement, the virus can do more than report. It can observe that the earth heals while people are shut indoors, it can trace the pandemic to human greed and arrogance, and it can instruct humanity to learn humility. Coming from something invisible and unarmed which has nevertheless halted the whole human world, that instruction carries an authority no human preacher could claim.
The monologue form also controls the tone. Since the poem has only one voice and that voice is neither frightened nor cruel, its steadiness becomes disturbing, and the final assurance that it too will pass can be offered as consolation and as warning at the same time. Choosing this speaker is therefore not a trick of presentation. It is the argument itself.
What is the significance of the virus telling humankind that it too will pass?
The assurance works in two directions at once. On the surface it is a comfort, given at the time when people most needed one: the emergency is not permanent, the virus is subject to the same impermanence as everything else, and ordinary ...
Who is the speaker of the poem, and whom does she address?
The speaker is a woman whose lover, a soldier, has been killed in the war, and she addresses the dead man himself at his grave. The poem is therefore a monologue spoken to a listener who cannot answer, which is the figure of speech called apostrophe. This arrangement shapes everything in the poem. Because she speaks to him and not about him, the loss stays intimate and immediate rather than becoming a public statement about war, and because he can never reply, the exchange of gifts she describes remains permanently unbalanced. The reader overhears a private conversation, and the silence on the other side of it carries much of the poem's grief.
What gifts does the speaker offer her lover, and what has she received from him in return?
She brings him the gifts a living woman can give. She offers flowers at his grave, her love, her youth, which was spent in waiting and is now gone, her tears and her faithfulness. What she has received in return is made entirely of what ...
Why is the title of the poem ironic?
A gift is something given freely out of love, and the word ordinarily belongs to weddings, festivals and courtship. The poem keeps the word but fills it with the opposite of what it promises. What the woman receives as a gift consists of bullet holes, blood, the smell of death, a medal and the loss of everything she had, so the vocabulary of love is made to carry the content of war. The irony also exposes the unfairness of the exchange, because she gives flowers, youth, tears and devotion and gets back only destruction. By setting the two sides in the language of gift giving, the title makes war's accounting look not merely cruel but absurd.
Explain the figures of speech and images that the poet uses in the poem.
The poem is built on irony, beginning with its title. Gifts belong to love and ceremony, yet everything the speaker receives is a wound, a smell, a decoration or a loss, so the word is turned against itself, and the reader is asked to me...
Discuss the theme of the poem. What does it say about war and about those who survive it?
The theme of the poem is the cost of war as it is paid by the living. The soldier's death would occupy a single line of a casualty list, and the poem is not interested in his last moments or in the battle that killed him. It begins after...
Comment on the significance of the war medals in the poem.
The medals are the state's answer to the soldier's death, the official honour handed to the family in exchange for a life. The poem gives them no special place. They appear in the same list as the bullet holes, the blood and the smell of...
How does the poem use the language of gifts and exchange to make its protest against war? Discuss in detail.
The poem takes a single idea, that of the gift, and holds to it throughout, and this steady metaphor does all the work that outcry might otherwise have attempted. Gift giving belongs to love, to courtship and to ceremony, and it assumes that two people give freely and that each is enriched. By keeping that vocabulary while filling it with the material of war, the poet creates a framework in which war can be judged without being denounced.
The first effect is structural. Because the poem is an account of gifts, it falls into two columns and the reader begins comparing them at once. What the woman brings is everything a living person can offer: flowers laid at the grave, her love, her youth, which was consumed in waiting, her tears and her constancy. What she receives is the whole content of war: the bullet holes in his body, his blood, the smell of death, the medals given for his service, and the loss of all she had. Love is answered by wounds, youth by a grave, devotion by metal. The imbalance is arithmetic, and the reader performs the sum without being told the answer.
The second effect is moral, since calling these things gifts forces the reader to ask who is doing the giving. A lover gives flowers; the war gives corpses and decorations and calls the transaction an honour. The medal is the clearest case, because a medal exists precisely to make a death look like a gift, and the speaker undoes that pretence by listing it beside the blood and the smell of death, where its emptiness is visible. This is the poem's central protest, made by placement rather than by accusation.
The third effect is emotional. Because the poem is addressed to the dead man himself, the language of gifts keeps the loss tender even while it grows bitter. She is not arguing against war at his grave; she is telling him what they gave each other, and the accusation reaches us as overheard grief.
The metaphor also makes the ending possible. Since everything has been framed as exchange, the closing wish takes the same form: that they might meet again in peace, or that she might return the war and receive him living. It is a bargain that cannot be struck, and its impossibility measures how total the loss is.
What does the speaker wish for at the end of the poem, and why is that wish important?
At the close the speaker looks beyond this life and asks that when she and her lover meet again it should be in peace, in a world with no war in it, and she voices the longing that the exchange could be undone, that she might hand the wa...
Who is the "little i" in the poem, and how old is the child said to be?
The "little i" is the speaker himself as a small boy, remembered from a distance of many years. The poem is an adult's address to his own childhood self, which is why the pronoun is a first person one and yet is questioned as if it belon...
What does the child see from the window, and when does the scene take place?
The child is peering out of a high window and what he sees is the gold of a November sunset, the last warm light spread over the closing day. The scene is therefore doubly late: late in the day, because the sun is going down, and late in the year, because November stands just before winter. Nothing else happens in the picture. There is no other person, no action and no conversation, only a small child high up at a window giving his whole attention to the colour of the sky. That bareness is what allows the final thought about day and night to carry so much weight.
What does the child feel as he watches the day end, and why is his feeling important?
The child does not feel fear or sorrow at the loss of the light. He feels instead that if day has to become night, then this is a beautiful way for it to happen. Two things are joined in that feeling. First there is acceptance: the words...
Why does Cummings write the pronoun "i" in lower case, and what does the choice add to the poem?
In ordinary English the first person is the one pronoun that is always capitalised, so it stands up taller than every word around it. Cummings takes that away. Written small, the pronoun looks modest on the page and it is literally littl...
Discuss the imagery and figures of speech used in "who are you,little i".
For so short a poem, Cummings uses very few images and makes each one do a great deal. The governing image is visual: the gold of a November sunset. The single colour word carries warmth, richness and lateness at once, and gold is also t...
"The poem holds childhood wonder, memory and the acceptance of endings together." Discuss the themes of the poem.
The first theme is the wonder of childhood. The child does nothing at all except look, and the looking is presented as enough. He has no use for the sunset, no words with which to praise it and no wish to own it, and precisely because of...
How do the form, punctuation and typography of the poem contribute to its meaning?
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no metre, and it is made of only a handful of very short lines. That shortness is functional. Each phrase is left alone on its line, so the reader is slowed almost to the speed of looking, and th...
"who are you,little i" is a poem about memory and mortality as much as about a sunset. Discuss, with reference to its themes, imagery and style.
On the surface this is a poem about a small boy at a window watching the sun go down. Almost nothing is described and nothing at all happens, yet the way the scene is framed turns it into a meditation on memory and on the end of life, and it does so without a single abstract statement.
The frame is the first clue. The poem does not describe a child; it addresses one, and the child addressed is the speaker himself at five or six, which makes the poem an act of memory rather than a piece of description. The opening question carries two opposite truths at once, insisting on continuity, since the small self is still called i, and admitting distance, since a person we know well does not need to be asked who he is.
The imagery then loads the remembered moment with time. The light is a sunset and the month is November, so the scene stands at the end of a day and near the end of a year. The high window lifts the child up and sets him apart, framing the view as memory frames the moment and marking a threshold between the safe inside and the changing light outside. The gold of the sunset is warm, precious and already fading. No detail is heavily symbolic, but all of them point one way.
The close makes that direction explicit. The child feels that if day has to become night, this is a beautiful way, and day becoming night is the oldest figure in poetry for a life moving towards its end. The words that leave the day no choice accept the necessity of the ending, and the judgement that follows finds the manner of it lovely. Because the adult quotes the child without correcting him, a five year old's calm stands as the poem's wisdom, and the older man, much nearer that close than the boy was, adds no word of fear.
Style completes the argument. The lower case pronoun keeps the self small against a large sky, the brackets lower the voice at the moment the poem says the most, and the narrow column of short lines makes the eye fall as the light falls. The sunset is what the child saw, memory is what the man has, and the acceptance of endings is what the poem quietly offers the reader.
Where is the play set, and who are the four characters?
The whole action takes place on one bright morning in a quiet, sunny corner of a park in Madrid, with a bench as the only important piece of furniture. There are four characters. Dona Laura is an elderly lady who comes to this corner eve...
How does the quarrel between Dona Laura and Don Gonzalo begin?
Don Gonzalo comes into the park in a bad temper because the priests have taken the bench he wanted and there is nowhere else for a gentleman to sit. He is obliged to take the far end of the bench where Dona Laura is already sitting, and he begins by frightening away the pigeons she has been feeding. She objects to this, he replies that the park does not belong to her, and from there they snap at each other about the crumbs, about his loudness and about the room each is taking on the bench. The fight is petty on purpose, and it is funny because the two combatants are so old and so dignified.
What story does each of them tell about the lovers of the old romance, and why?
Once the talk has reached the place near Valencia, each speaks of the romance as if it had happened to a friend. Dona Laura says that her friend Laura, left alone when the young man had to flee after a duel with her cousin, went down to ...
Why do the two old people not admit that they have recognised each other?
Recognition would force both of them to measure the present against the past, and neither can face that. Each has carried a picture of a beautiful girl or a dashing young man for forty years, and to be identified now would replace that p...
Discuss the use of dramatic irony in "A Sunny Morning".
Dramatic irony is the engine of the play, and the playwrights use it in layers. The first layer is the simplest. Two old people quarrel over a bench like strangers, and the audience gradually learns that they are not strangers at all but...
Sketch the character of Dona Laura as she appears in the play.
Dona Laura is first shown as a creature of habit and of quiet pleasures. She comes every morning to the same sunny corner of the park, sits on the same bench and throws crumbs to the pigeons, which she has come to regard as hers, even di...
How does the play treat the themes of time, memory and illusion?
The play begins from a simple and rather cruel fact about time. The two people on the bench were once young lovers, and they are now a lame, grumbling old gentleman and a white haired lady arguing about pigeons. The playwrights get their...
"A Sunny Morning is a comedy with a touch of pathos." Discuss the statement with reference to the action, the characters and the dramatic technique of the play.
The description fits the play exactly, because the Quintero brothers build their scene so that laughter comes first and feeling comes after, and neither cancels the other.
The comedy is there from the opening. The situation is trivial by design: an old lady feeding pigeons, an old gentleman who cannot find a seat because the priests have taken the other bench, and a bench that will have to be shared. The quarrel that follows is about crumbs, noise and elbow room, and it is funny because it is conducted with such energy by two people of such an age and such dignity. The stage business adds to it, from the scattering of the pigeons to the snuff that marks the truce.
The turn comes with the talk of the place near Valencia, and here the play changes key without changing its manner. As each speaks of the young people whose romance belonged to that place, the details begin to fit and both recognise the person beside them. The audience watches both recognitions and sees that each believes the other has noticed nothing, so the polite surface of the dialogue is now stretched over something painful.
The invented deaths are where comedy and pathos meet. Dona Laura reports that her friend Laura threw herself into the sea, and Don Gonzalo that his friend Gonzalo died a hero in the war. As inventions they are transparent, and the audience may smile at them, since both of the supposedly dead are on the bench. Yet the reason for them is not funny: each has decided that the other must be allowed to keep a beautiful memory.
Character deepens the effect. Both are proud, quick tempered and lonely, and both show unexpected delicacy at the crisis. The technique is economical throughout: one act, one bench, one morning, and a backward glance from each that carries what the dialogue refuses to say.
The ending settles the question. They part with elaborate courtesy and arrange to meet the next morning, each still pretending and each privately certain. That is a comic resolution, since nothing is lost and both will have company, yet it is quietly sad too, because the reunion of a lifetime has to be conducted behind a pretence. The touch of pathos is what makes the play stay in the memory.
Why does Wasserkopf come back to his old school after eighteen years?
Wasserkopf comes back to demand a refund. He wants the school to return the whole of the tuition fee that his father paid for him during his years there. His reason is that the education was worthless to him. He claims that he learned no...
What does the Principal find in the school regulations, and why does it matter?
When reasoning with Wasserkopf fails, the Principal turns to the school's regulations and finds a clause that covers exactly this situation. It allows a former pupil to be repaid his fees if he can prove that he learned nothing at the sc...
How do the masters plan to save the school's money, and how does the plan work in practice?
The masters see at once that the school cannot afford to hand back years of fees, so they agree among themselves on a defence that costs nothing. They will hold the examination that Wasserkopf has asked for, and they will treat every ans...
Why does Wasserkopf grow more and more furious as the examination goes on?
Wasserkopf has come to prove that he is ignorant, so praise is the last thing he wants. Every time he gives a ridiculous answer a master finds a reading that makes it correct and congratulates him on it. He tries answering wildly, then r...
Sketch the character of Wasserkopf as he appears in the play.
Wasserkopf is the whole engine of the play, and almost everything comic and everything unpleasant in it belongs to him. He is a middle aged man who left the school eighteen years ago and has made nothing of his life since. He earns littl...
Discuss the theme of education treated as a purchase in "Refund".
The central idea of the play is Wasserkopf's assumption that education is something bought over a counter. His father paid the fees, so in his view the school sold him a product, and since the product has not worked he is entitled to his...
What is ironic about the ending of the play, and how does the title fit it?
The ending is a complete inversion of everything Wasserkopf worked for. He came to prove that he was ignorant and he leaves with a distinction. He came for money and he leaves with congratulations. The examination that was meant to be his evidence becomes the school's evidence, and the clause he relied on defeats him, because it required him to prove that he had learned nothing and he has instead been shown, on paper, to have learned a great deal.
There is a second irony in the way the verdict is reached. The masters know perfectly well that his answers are nonsense. His distinction is a lie awarded to protect the school's funds, so the paper that saves the institution is also the clearest proof that its examinations are worthless. The audience sees an honest question, whether this man learned anything, answered by an entirely dishonest process.
A third irony lies in the defeat itself. Wasserkopf loses not because he is stupid but because he is clever, since the trick he invented invited a better trick in reply. He is beaten with his own weapon, and the fury he leaves in is the most satisfying part of the comedy.
The title carries all of this. On the surface "Refund" names the money Wasserkopf demands, so it announces the plot in a single word. Beneath that it names what he actually receives, which is his own trick handed back to him with interest. It also works as a comment on his whole way of thinking, the notion that an education can be returned like a coat that does not fit, and on a school that answers such a claim with accounts rather than with any belief in learning. The word promises a repayment, and the play delivers one, though not in the currency he expected.
"Refund is a farce, but its laughter has a target." Discuss the play as a farce and as a satire.
"Refund" works on two levels at once. It is a farce in its construction and its effect, and a satire in its purpose, and the two support each other, because the wilder the situation grows the clearer the target becomes.
As a farce the play is almost a model. It rests on a single improbable premise, that a man may demand his school fees back on the ground that he learned nothing, and it never adds a second complication. The action stays in one room and one continuous stretch of time, the pace is fast, and the characters are broad types rather than studies. Wasserkopf shouts and bullies, the Principal is all caution and regulations, and the masters are interchangeable in their bland courtesy. Most of the laughter comes from everyone on stage behaving as though this preposterous business were ordinary school routine.
The farce rests on a clean reversal, and that is where the satire begins to show. Everything normally true of an examination is turned upside down, since the candidate wants to fail, the examiners insist he shall pass, ignorance earns compliments and insults earn marks. Once that inversion is on stage the audience can see what a straightforward play could hardly show, that the result depends on what the examiners decided in advance, so the certificate Wasserkopf carries out of the room measures nothing at all.
The satire has more than one target. Wasserkopf is one, the man who blames the world for his own failure, who reckons his education as goods bought with a guarantee, and who will advertise himself as worthless if there is money in it. The school is treated no more gently. Its regulations produce the absurd clause, its head meets a question about the value of education by calculating the cost of losing the case, and its whole staff then lie in chorus to save the funds, without one of them suggesting that learning might be worth defending for its own sake.
Karinthy keeps the tone light enough that none of this turns sour. The dialogue is quick, the irony constant, and the ending a punchline rather than a judgement. But the amusement has done its work, because a farce about a man who cannot manage to fail an examination leaves a real doubt about what examinations prove.
Why have the men come to the Wright farmhouse, and why are the two women there?
John Wright has been found strangled in his bed with a rope round his neck, and his wife has been taken into custody. The County Attorney and the Sheriff have come to the farmhouse to look over the scene and to find a motive that will su...
What does Mr Hale report about his visit to the house?
Mr Hale says that he called at the farmhouse to speak to John Wright about sharing a telephone line. When he went in he found Mrs Wright sitting in her rocking chair, pleating her apron, oddly quiet and unmoved. He asked for her husband, and she told him that Wright was upstairs and that he was dead, with a rope round his neck. When Hale asked who had done it she said she did not know, and she added that she had been asleep on the inside of the bed and had heard nothing. His account opens the play and supplies both the facts of the discovery and the strange calm of the accused woman that the men cannot explain.
What do the two women notice in the kitchen that the men overlook, and why do the men miss it?
The women notice the interrupted work, the bread left out of its box and the table wiped only half way across, which tells them that something broke into an ordinary morning. They notice the jars of fruit burst by the frost in an unheate...
Explain the significance of the bird cage and the dead canary.
The cage and the bird are the key to the play. The women find an empty bird cage whose little door has been broken and one hinge pulled apart, and then the canary itself in a box, wrapped in silk, with its neck twisted. As evidence this ...
Why is the play called "Trifles"? Discuss the significance of the title.
The word of the title belongs to the men. It is their name for the kitchen and everything in it, and for the concerns of the two women who have been left there. When Mrs Wright is reported to have been anxious about her jars of fruit fre...
Sketch the character of Mrs Hale and her part in the play.
Mrs Hale is the neighbouring farmer's wife, and she is the stronger and more outspoken of the two women in the kitchen. She is a practical countrywoman who knows exactly what the work of such a house involves, and that knowledge is what ...
Discuss the theme of loneliness and isolation in "Trifles".
Loneliness is not a background in this play, it is the cause of the crime, and Glaspell establishes it before anyone mentions a motive. The Wright farm lies down in a hollow where the road cannot be seen, so that Mrs Hale calls it a lone...
The men search the house officially and find nothing, while the women find everything. Discuss how the play develops this contrast, and consider whether the women were right to hide the dead bird.
The design rests on one fact of staging. The men go upstairs to look for a motive and the women are left in the kitchen, where the motive is. Nothing is concealed; they stand in the room that holds the answer and walk away from it.
The contrast is built out of the same objects seen twice. The County Attorney sees a dirty towel, unwashed pans and a half wiped table and concludes that Mrs Wright was a poor housekeeper, while Mrs Hale sees interrupted work and knows that something broke into an ordinary morning. The men find it comic that she worried about her jars of fruit; the women see a winter's labour burst by frost in a cold house. The men glance at a sewing basket; the women find one block of wild stitching and read in it the moment a mind gave way. Then come the cage with its door forced and the canary with its neck twisted, and the case is finished.
The difference is knowledge, not cleverness. The women have lived the life that made these marks and can read them, while the men have decided that such things are trifles and so never look. Glaspell turns their contempt into their defeat: the Attorney says there is nothing in the kitchen but kitchen things while standing beside the evidence, and jokes about trifles to a woman carrying the dead bird.
Whether the women were right to hide the bird the play leaves open. Against them stands the plain fact that they suppress evidence in a murder case. A man has been strangled in his sleep, and the decision is taken privately by two women who have appointed themselves judges, one of them the sheriff's wife.
For them stands everything the kitchen has told the audience. They know what no court would have heard, that thirty years of silence in a house in a hollow, with no children and no visitors, reduced a girl who sang in the choir to the woman pleating her apron, and that the killing of her one companion ended it. Mrs Hale adds that she stayed away from that lonely house for years and calls her own neglect a crime. Glaspell does not settle it, ending on a small domestic joke and leaving the audience holding both the illegality of the act and the justice of the women's understanding.
Why, according to the unit's treatment of the theme, do human beings create art at all?
Art is presented as a human need rather than a luxury. A community uses painting, carving, song and dance to record what it believes and remembers, so that its history survives even where writing does not. Art also gives shape to feeling...
How are traditional crafts learned and passed on, and why is their survival uncertain?
Traditional crafts are learned by doing rather than from books. A young person watches an experienced artisan in a family workshop, copies small tasks, is corrected, and repeats the work for years until the hand is trained; the knowledge...
Explain the meaning of the following words as they are used in writing about art: composition, medium, motif, patron, improvise.
Composition is the arrangement of the parts within a single work, that is, where the figures, shapes and spaces are placed so that the eye moves through the picture as the artist intends. A medium is the material or method an artist work...
Rewrite the following sentences in the passive voice. (a) A local artisan carved this window frame. (b) They are repairing the old temple. (c) Someone has stolen the bronze statue. (d) The museum will display the paintings next month.
(a) This window frame was carved by a local artisan. (b) The old temple is being repaired. (c) The bronze statue has been stolen. (d) The paintings will be displayed by the museum next month.
The tense of the original verb is carried by be, which is why the four answers use was, is being, has been and will be, while the main verb stays in its third form throughout. In (b) and (c) the agents they and someone are indefinite and add nothing, so they are dropped; a passive sentence names the doer after by only when that information matters. Note also that be agrees with the new subject, which is singular in (a) and (c) and plural in (d).
Describe the process by which a clay pot is made, using the passive voice where the doer is unimportant.
A clay pot is made in a sequence of stages, and the process is usually described in the passive, because the same stages are followed by every potter and the individual maker is not the point. First the clay is dug from a pit or a riverb...
Discuss the view that art is a necessity rather than a luxury in human life.
It is easy to treat art as a luxury, something a society enjoys once food, shelter and work have been secured. The treatment of this theme suggests the opposite, and the evidence lies in how old and how universal the impulse to create is...
Write an essay on the importance of preserving Nepal's traditional arts and crafts.
Nepal's traditional arts and crafts are among the few things the country possesses that cannot be bought, imported or quickly rebuilt. The carved wood and cast metal of the Kathmandu Valley, the paubha and thangka painting traditions and the pottery of Bhaktapur were developed over centuries by families who taught the work by hand. Preserving them is not sentimentality about the past; it is the protection of knowledge, of income and of identity.
The first reason is that this knowledge exists nowhere else. It was never written down. A woodcarver learns proportion and pattern by watching, copying and being corrected for years, and a potter learns the feel of centred clay in the same way. Where a book can be reprinted from records, a craft dies with the last trained pair of hands.
The second reason is economic. Craft work supports households in towns and villages where salaried employment is scarce, and it supports the tourism on which much of the economy depends. A craft tradition is a working industry rather than a museum exhibit, so letting it decay is a loss of livelihood as well as of beauty.
The third reason is identity. A pattern on a window or a step in a local dance tells people where they belong, and for young Nepalis working abroad these forms are the most durable link to home.
The threats can be named. Artisans earn less than they would in other work, so their children choose differently. Cheap machine made copies undercut handmade goods. Earthquakes and careless rebuilding damage old structures, and training is left to families instead of being supported by institutions.
The remedies are equally practical. Craft training deserves a place in school and vocational education, with stipends that make apprenticeship possible. Artisans need fair prices, cooperative marketing and honest labelling that separates handwork from machine work. Restoration should use traditional techniques and local craftsmen. Documentation through photographs, measured drawings and recorded interviews should be undertaken while the masters are still working.
A country is remembered by what it has made. Nepal has made a great deal, and much of it is still alive in working hands. Preserving it is a decision for this generation, because the alternative is not a delay but an ending.
What does the word heritage mean, and why is the loss of a traditional art described as irreversible?
Heritage means the art, buildings, skills and traditions that one generation inherits and holds in trust for the next. It covers both what can be touched, such as temples and paintings, and what cannot, such as a style of singing or the ...
Distinguish between a job and a career.
A job is a particular post that a person holds for wages at a particular time, with fixed duties and a fixed employer; a person may hold several jobs in succession, and some of them may have nothing to do with one another. A career is th...
What qualities does a successful entrepreneur need?
The qualities named are ordinary rather than heroic. An entrepreneur needs initiative, since nobody assigns the work, and the willingness to put in long and irregular hours in the early period. Patience with small beginnings matters, bec...
Explain the following terms in the context of a new business: capital, market research, viable, turnover.
Capital is the money and the assets used to start or to expand a business, whether it comes from savings, family, a cooperative or a bank loan; working capital is the part that pays day to day costs such as stock and wages. Market resear...
Complete the sentences with the present perfect or the present perfect continuous form of the verb in brackets. (a) She (run) her tailoring shop for six years. (b) They (just, launch) their first product. (c) I (never, take) a bank loan. (d) We (look) for an investor since Baisakh.
(a) She has been running her tailoring shop for six years. (b) They have just launched their first product. (c) I have never taken a bank loan. (d) We have been looking for an investor since Baisakh.
Sentences (a) and (d) carry duration phrases, for six years and since Baisakh, so the present perfect continuous is used to stress an activity that began in the past and still continues. Sentences (b) and (c) report a result and an experience rather than a stretch of activity, and the adverbs just and never stand between the auxiliary and the participle. Remember that for takes a length of time while since takes a starting point, and that a finished past time such as last year would require the past simple instead.
Why do many new small businesses fail, and what can a new entrepreneur do to reduce the risk?
Most failures have ordinary causes, and a surprising number of them are decided before the shop ever opens. The first is the absence of real demand. An owner likes an idea, assumes that others will like it too, and then discovers that th...
Discuss whether young Nepali graduates should look for jobs or try to create them.
The question is put as a choice, but for most graduates the honest answer is a matter of sequence and of temperament rather than a single decision taken once and for all. The case for looking for a job is real. Employment gives a settled...
Write an essay on entrepreneurship as a response to youth unemployment in Nepal.
Every year a large number of young Nepalis finish their studies and begin looking for work, and every year the number of formal salaried posts falls well short of that number. The result is visible in the queues outside recruitment offices and in the departure of young people for work abroad. Against this background entrepreneurship is often proposed as the answer. It is a serious answer, but it deserves to be argued rather than chanted.
The strongest argument is arithmetic. An economy cannot employ its young people unless somebody creates the posts, and in a country with a small public sector and few large firms most new posts will be created by small enterprises. Every workshop, dairy, guest house or agro-processing unit that becomes viable employs its founder and then a few others, and that is the only movement which changes the total.
The opportunities are genuine and local. Agriculture adds very little value before sale, so grading, packaging, storage and processing are open ground. Tourism needs accommodation, food and guiding away from the crowded centres, and information technology services can be sold from a small town to clients anywhere. None of this requires a novel invention; each requires somebody willing to organise the work properly. An enterprise built here also keeps the skill and income where they were earned, which work abroad cannot do.
The obstacles must be stated plainly. Capital is hard to raise without collateral, and informal credit is expensive. Registration and taxation are unfamiliar. Roads, electricity and market access remain uneven. Families often regard self-employment as a failure to obtain a proper post. Above all, business skill is not taught in most degree courses, so graduates can pass examinations but cannot keep accounts or price a product.
What would help is specific: teaching of accounting, costing, pricing and market research rather than motivational talk; seed funding with mentoring instead of charity; simpler registration for small businesses; and cooperative marketing so that small producers gain bargaining power. Students can begin now by keeping simple accounts and testing an idea on real customers.
Entrepreneurship will not absorb every graduate, and no honest account should promise that it will. What it can do is enlarge the number of posts rather than redistribute those that exist, and that makes it the most useful response open to a country whose greatest asset is a young population still waiting for work.
What should a business plan contain, and why is it written before the business starts?
A business plan should state, in short sections, what the business will sell and to whom; the evidence that those customers exist and what they are willing to pay; who the competitors are and how this business will differ; how much capit...
What is communication, and what are the essential elements of the communication process?
Communication is the exchange of information, ideas or feelings between people, and more exactly the transfer of meaning from one mind to another. It has four essential elements. A sender has something to say and shapes it into a message...
What are the main barriers to effective communication, and how can they be reduced?
Barriers are anything that stops a message from being received as it was intended, and they fall into three groups. Physical barriers include noise, a weak signal, unclear handwriting and a crowded room. Linguistic barriers include jargon the listener does not share, ambiguity, and words that carry a different shade of meaning for each speaker. Personal and social barriers include shyness, anger, prejudice, a wide gap of age or status, and the habit of planning a reply instead of listening.
They can be reduced by thinking about the listener before the message: choosing plain words, matching the register to the person addressed, and inviting feedback so that misunderstanding is caught early. A speaker willing to say the same thing a second way, and a listener who gives full attention and asks for clarification, remove most barriers between them.
Why is non-verbal communication important, and what happens when it contradicts the words spoken?
Non-verbal communication is everything we convey without words: tone of voice, facial expression, posture, gesture, physical distance and even silence. It is important because it carries the attitude behind the message, telling the liste...
Why is listening as important as speaking in communication?
Communication is complete only when a message has been received and understood, so listening is half the work rather than a passive pause. A listener who gives full attention notices the speaker's tone and hesitation as well as the words...
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: feedback, jargon, rapport.
Feedback: the response of a listener or reader that shows how a message has been received. The teacher asked for feedback at the end of the class to check whether the lesson had been clear. Jargon: specialised words used inside a particu...
Change the following sentences into indirect speech.
(a) She said, "I am writing a letter to the editor." (b) He said, "I have lost my phone in the bus today." (c) The visitor asked, "Where do you learn English?" (d) My friend asked, "Have you read the notice on the board?" (e) The teacher said to us, "Listen carefully and do not shout."
(a) She said that she was writing a letter to the editor. (b) He said that he had lost his phone in the bus that day. (c) The visitor asked where I learnt English. (d) My friend asked whether I had read the notice on the board. (e) The t...
Write an essay in about 300 words on "How Social Media Has Changed Communication Among Young People".
How Social Media Has Changed Communication Among Young People
A generation ago a student in a hill district who wanted to reach a relative in Kathmandu wrote a letter and waited a week for a reply. Today the same student sends a message that arrives before the pen would have been capped. Social media has changed not only the speed of communication but its whole character, and young people have felt the change first.
The gains are large. Messaging and social platforms have made contact almost free, so families divided by work and migration talk daily instead of monthly, and friendships survive the move from school to college in another city. Students reach teachers, notes, recorded lessons and expert opinion that no local library could supply. Young people who are shy in a classroom often find a voice online, and groups form around study, music, sport and social causes that would never have found one another face to face.
The losses are just as real. A written message carries no tone of voice and no expression, so a short reply reads as rudeness and a joke reads as an insult, and quarrels begin over sentences nobody meant. Rumour and misinformation spread as quickly as fact, and a false claim about an examination or a disaster can reach a whole district before it is corrected. Constant notification crowds out the slow, attentive conversation on which real friendship depends, and many young people now measure their worth by likes rather than by the people who actually listen to them.
The sensible conclusion is not to reject these tools but to use them with judgement. A young person who checks a message before forwarding it, who says difficult things in person rather than in text, and who keeps some hours of the day free of the screen enjoys the reach of social media without losing the depth of ordinary human contact.
Discuss the theme of this unit: why does good communication matter in a student's life and in society?
The theme of this unit is that communication is a learned skill rather than a natural gift, and that almost everything else depends on it. For a student the dependence is immediate. Every examination answer is an act of communication: th...
How has communication technology changed over time, and what has been gained and lost in the change?
Communication has moved from messengers and letters to the telegraph and telephone, and then to mobile phones, the internet and social media. Each stage made messages faster, cheaper and able to reach more people at once, until a message...
What is critical thinking? Explain why the word critical does not mean fault finding.
Critical thinking is careful and reasoned judgement about what to believe and what to do, based on evidence rather than on feeling, habit or authority. A critical thinker asks what exactly is being claimed, what evidence supports it, whe...
Distinguish between a fact, an opinion, an assumption and an inference, with an example of each.
A fact is a statement that can be checked against evidence: Nepal lies between India and China. An opinion expresses a preference or a judgement and cannot be checked in the same way: Nepali is the most beautiful language in the world. A...
What are the main obstacles to clear thinking, and how can a student overcome them?
The obstacles are partly logical and partly emotional. Logically, people treat one striking example as proof of a general rule, take a sequence of events as proof of cause, attack the person instead of the argument, and accept two choices when several exist. Emotionally, we believe most readily what we wish were true and what is said confidently or repeated often, and respect for authority adds to the pressure.
A student overcomes them by slowing the judgement down: asking how the speaker could know, looking for the source of a claim, looking for evidence rather than agreement, and thinking of one other explanation for the same facts. Above all, be willing to change an opinion when the evidence goes against it, which is the habit that makes all the others useful.
Why is critical thinking especially important in the age of social media?
Young people now meet more claims in a single day than an earlier generation met in a month, and most of them arrive through social media, where anyone can publish and nothing is checked before it is shared. A rumour about an examination...
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: assumption, bias, inference.
Assumption: something accepted as true without proof, often without being noticed. His assumption that the questions would repeat from last year cost him twenty marks. Bias: an unfair leaning that distorts judgement. A report written by ...
Complete or rewrite the following as conditional sentences of the type indicated.
(a) If you heat ice, ... (zero conditional) (b) You check the source. You avoid many mistakes. (first conditional) (c) People do not question their assumptions, so they argue bitterly. (second conditional) (d) You will spread the rumour if you do not verify the message. (rewrite using "unless") (e) He did not check the facts. He forwarded the rumour. (third conditional)
(a) If you heat ice, it melts. (b) If you check the source, you will avoid many mistakes. (c) If people questioned their assumptions, they would not argue so bitterly. (d) Unless you verify the message, you will spread the rumour. (e) If...
Write an essay in about 300 words on "Critical Thinking: A Necessary Skill for Students Today".
Critical Thinking: A Necessary Skill for Students Today
Critical thinking is the habit of weighing a claim before accepting it, whether the claim comes from a book, a teacher, a forwarded message or our own comfortable belief. It is not a subject on the timetable, yet it decides how much every subject on that timetable is worth.
In study, critical thinking is what turns memorising into understanding. A student who copies a definition can repeat it in the examination but cannot use it on an unfamiliar question. A student who asks why a formula works, how a historian reached a conclusion, or what a poem leaves unsaid, learns more deeply and remembers longer. Examiners reward this directly: marks go to the answer that reasons towards a conclusion, not to the one that recites a paragraph.
Outside the classroom the need is more urgent. Young people are surrounded by advertisements, political claims and social media posts, many of them one sided and some of them simply false. A rumour about a leaked question paper or an untested medicine can cross a district in an hour and do real harm. The student who checks the source, asks how the writer could know, and waits for confirmation before forwarding a message is protecting other people as well as himself.
Critical thinking also shapes character. It asks for honesty about the limits of what we know, humility about our own certainty, and courage to hold an unpopular conclusion or to give up a comfortable one. These are the qualities a citizen needs to vote thoughtfully and a professional needs to advise honestly.
The skill can be built by ordinary practice: reading writers we expect to disagree with, asking why and how do I know after every strong claim, looking for one alternative explanation, and being ready to change our minds. A student who forms these habits at sixteen carries an advantage into every examination, every job and every argument of adult life.
Discuss the theme of this unit: how does critical thinking protect people from misinformation, and what happens in a society where it is missing?
The theme of this unit is that a claim should be weighed before it is believed, and misinformation is where the cost of ignoring that rule is clearest. False information spreads because it is easy to pass on and because it is written to ...
What is democracy, and what conditions must a state satisfy before it can properly be called democratic?
Democracy is government by the people. The word means rule of the people, and in a modern state that rule is usually exercised indirectly, because citizens elect representatives who make law on their behalf and who can be removed at the ...
What are human rights, and why are they said to belong to every person equally?
Human rights are entitlements that a person holds by virtue of being human. They are not privileges granted by a ruler or rewards for good behaviour, and this is exactly why they belong to everyone equally. Since the only qualification for holding them is being a human being, they cannot be earned, bought or forfeited, and no difference of caste, sex, religion, language, ability or wealth can reduce a person's claim to them. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, set these rights out in a single document, and states have since written them into their own constitutions so that courts can enforce them. Rights so understood limit what any government may lawfully do to the people it governs, and they also protect each person against the power of neighbours, employers and even a majority of fellow citizens.
How does a written constitution protect human rights? Illustrate your answer with reference to Nepal.
A written constitution protects rights by turning them from moral claims into enforceable law. Because the constitution is the supreme law of the state, any ordinary law or official act that conflicts with a right written into it can be ...
Why do rights imply duties? Explain with examples.
Rights imply duties because every right I hold is held equally by everyone around me, so my exercise of it must leave theirs intact. Freedom of speech, for instance, is a right, but it does not license defamation or the incitement of hat...
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: accountability, franchise, impunity.
Accountability means the obligation of those who hold power to explain their decisions and answer for them. Regular public audits are the simplest way of enforcing accountability in local government. Franchise means the right to vote in ...
Complete the sentences with the most suitable expression of obligation, permission or prohibition, choosing from must, must not, do not have to, should and are allowed to. Explain your choices.
(a) Every citizen ______ respect the fundamental rights of others. (b) You ______ pay any fee to file a complaint about a violation of your rights, because the service is free. (c) Journalists ______ attend the public hearing, since the law permits it. (d) A voter ______ read the manifesto before deciding, though nobody can force him to do so. (e) Officials ______ demand money for a service the state provides free of charge.
(a) Every citizen must respect the fundamental rights of others. (b) You do not have to pay any fee to file a complaint about a violation of your rights, because the service is free. (c) Journalists are allowed to attend the public heari...
Write an essay in about 300 words on "Democracy Is More Than Voting".
Elections are the most visible part of a democracy, and in a country that fought hard for them they are rightly celebrated. Yet voting alone does not make a state democratic. A vote decides who shall hold power; democracy is about how that power may then be used, and a state that votes and afterwards silences its critics has kept the form and lost the substance.
The first reason is the rule of law. Democracy means that the same law binds the governed and the governing, and that an official who breaks it can be brought before a court like anyone else. Without an independent judiciary a majority in parliament becomes an authority answerable to nobody between elections, and five years is a long time to wait for a remedy.
The second reason is open argument. A citizen can vote sensibly only if she knows what the government has actually done, which means a free press, access to official information, and the freedom to criticise ministers without fear. Where journalists are threatened and records are hidden, an election becomes a choice made in the dark, and a choice made in the dark is not really a choice.
The third reason is the protection of minorities. Counting heads settles most questions, but it cannot be allowed to settle whether a community keeps its language, its religion or its dignity. Nepal's constitution recognises this by placing fundamental rights beyond the reach of an ordinary majority and by giving every citizen the right to go to court when a right is violated.
Democracy, then, is a daily practice rather than an event held once in five years. It lives in courts that function, offices that answer questions, newspapers that investigate, local bodies that consult, and citizens who inform themselves and speak. Voting opens the door; everything that matters happens after it is opened.
Discuss the theme of this unit. Why do democracy and human rights matter in the daily life of an ordinary citizen?
The theme of the unit is that democracy and human rights are not distant constitutional abstractions but the conditions under which an ordinary person lives an ordinary day, and the unit is best understood by asking what their absence wo...
Why is a free press important in a democracy?
A free press is important because a democracy depends on citizens who know what their government is actually doing, and most citizens cannot find that out for themselves. Journalists attend hearings, read budgets, visit districts and pub...
What is ecology, and what is meant by an ecosystem?
Ecology studies how living things relate to one another and to the surroundings that keep them alive. Its central idea is the ecosystem, which means a community of living things together with the physical surroundings on which they depen...
What is sustainable development, and why is it difficult to achieve in a poor country?
Sustainable development is commonly defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In practice it means treating the environment as part of a project's cost rather than as something outside the accounts, assessing impact before work begins, and preferring renewable energy, treated waste and public transport.
It is difficult in a poor country because the benefits of restraint arrive late while the costs arrive at once. A household without fuel cuts firewood today and cannot wait for a plantation to mature; a district that needs a road cannot afford the slower, safer alignment; a government under pressure to create jobs is reluctant to refuse an industry that pollutes. Sustainability therefore has to be built into development rather than offered as an alternative to it.
Why do ecologists consider biodiversity worth protecting?
Biodiversity means the variety of plant and animal life found in a place. Ecologists value it because a system containing many species has more ways of absorbing a shock than one reduced to a single crop or a single tree. If a disease, a...
How has community forestry in Nepal helped both people and forests?
Community forestry hands the management of a nearby forest to a group of local users, who decide how much fuelwood, fodder and timber may be taken and when the forest must be left alone. It has helped the forests because the people livin...
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: biodiversity, degradation, renewable.
Biodiversity means the variety of plant and animal life found in a place or on the earth as a whole. The wetland supports a biodiversity that no plantation could replace. Degradation means the gradual worsening in quality of soil, land, ...
Complete each sentence with the most suitable future form of the verb in brackets, using will, be going to, the present continuous or the present simple. Give a reason for each choice.
(a) The bus for the tree planting camp ______ (leave) at half past six tomorrow morning. (b) Look at the smoke over the kiln. The air in the valley ______ (get) worse tonight. (c) Scientists believe the glaciers ______ (continue) to retreat through this century. (d) Our class ______ (plant) saplings on the hillside next Saturday, since the permission has already been granted. (e) When the monsoon ______ (arrive), the rivers will rise quickly.
(a) The bus for the tree planting camp leaves at half past six tomorrow morning. (b) Look at the smoke over the kiln. The air in the valley is going to get worse tonight. (c) Scientists believe the glaciers will continue to retreat throu...
Write an essay in about 300 words on "Can Nepal Develop and Protect Its Environment at the Same Time?"
Nepal needs roads, electricity, clinics and jobs, and it also needs its forests, rivers and clean air. The two demands are usually presented as a choice, but the choice is false, because each of them fails without the other.
Consider first why development cannot simply be postponed for the sake of the environment. Poverty is itself a cause of environmental damage. A household with no other fuel cuts firewood; a family with no other land farms a slope too steep to hold; a district with no employment loses its young people and lets its terraces fall in. A country that stays poor does not thereby stay green.
Consider next why development that ignores ecology defeats itself. A road driven carelessly across a hillside starts landslides that close the same road each monsoon. Building that swallows farmland and wetland removes the drainage that protected the new houses. In the Kathmandu Valley, where the hills trap the winter air, vehicle exhaust, brick kilns, dust and burning waste produce an air quality problem that costs the city in illness and lost work. The environment is not a luxury added after growth; it is the ground growth stands on.
What reconciles the two is sustainable development, which means counting environmental cost inside a project rather than outside it. Nepal already has instances that work. Community forestry gave local user groups both the management and the harvest of nearby forest, and cover recovered while households kept their fuel and fodder. Hydropower offers renewable electricity, provided each scheme is weighed honestly against its effect on river flow, fish and displaced families.
The answer, then, is yes, but only on conditions: impact assessed before work begins, renewable energy and public transport preferred, waste treated, slopes replanted, and the community nearest a resource given a stake in keeping it. Nepal can develop and conserve together, and in the long run it cannot do either alone.
Discuss the theme of this unit. How should a student weigh the claims of development against those of ecology?
The theme of the unit is the relationship between ecology and development, and its first lesson is that the two are not opposites. Ecology studies how living things depend on one another and on soil, water, air and sunlight, while develo...
Why is air quality in the Kathmandu Valley a matter of concern, and what could reduce the problem?
Air quality in the Kathmandu Valley is a concern partly because of the valley's shape. Hills surround it, and in the cold months the air near the ground is trapped rather than carried away, so whatever is released stays over the city. In...
What does this unit mean by education, and how is education different from mere literacy?
Education, as the unit understands it, is the whole process by which a person gains knowledge, skill, judgement and values. It includes what a school teaches, but it also includes the shaping of character that goes on at home, in work an...
Why does the unit argue that knowledge separated from humane values is dangerous? Give reasons.
Knowledge, in the unit's argument, is a tool, and a tool serves whoever holds it. Training gives a person power over other people's money, health, information or safety, but it does not decide how that power will be used, which is why a ...
How does an examination-centred system affect the way students learn? Explain with examples from the Nepali context.
Where one set of results decides admission, employment and family honour, teaching narrows to whatever the paper asks. Teachers finish the prescribed answers rather than the subject, students memorise passages they cannot explain, and co...
What qualities does a humane education try to develop in a student?
A humane education tries to develop, first, the intellectual qualities that make learning honest: careful reading, clear reasoning, and the willingness to change an opinion when the evidence is against it.
Second, it develops qualities of feeling. Empathy allows a student to understand another person's position, and compassion turns that understanding into help rather than pity. Third, it develops qualities of conduct: integrity, which means doing right when nobody is watching, fairness in dealing with people weaker than oneself, and the discipline to finish work properly.
Finally, it develops a sense of responsibility beyond the self, so that a student sees education as something owed back to a family, a community and a country. Knowledge, sympathy and conduct together make up what the unit means by a humane education.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: curriculum, empathy, integrity.
Curriculum: the planned course of study prescribed for a grade or a subject. The new curriculum gives more time to project work and less to memorised definitions. Empathy: the ability to understand and share another person's feelings. A ...
Join or rewrite the following as instructed, using relative clauses.
(a) The teacher taught us grammar. She has retired. (join with a defining relative clause) (b) My uncle retires next year. He teaches in a community school. (join with a non-defining relative clause) (c) The book is on the shelf. You lent it to me. (join, then omit the relative pronoun) (d) This is the girl. Her essay won the prize. (join using whose) (e) Rewrite using where: The school in which she studies has no library.
(a) The teacher who taught us grammar has retired. (b) My uncle, who teaches in a community school, retires next year. (c) The book which you lent me is on the shelf. Omitting the pronoun: The book you lent me is on the shelf. (d) This i...
What practical steps could a school in Nepal take to make its education more humane? Suggest measures and justify them.
The first measure costs nothing. A school can decide that how a student behaves is reported alongside how he scores, so that honesty in examinations, care of younger students and willingness to help are recorded and praised. What a schoo...
"Education should make us more human, not only more employable." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
The purpose of education is one of the oldest arguments in the subject, and it is urgent in Nepal, where a degree is widely treated as a ticket to employment at home or abroad. In my view education must certainly make a student employable, but it fails if it does nothing more, because the skills it supplies are neutral and the person who uses them is not.
The first reason is the simplest. Knowledge is a tool, and a tool serves whoever holds it. Training in accounts can keep a cooperative honest or empty it; training in medicine can heal a patient or overcharge one; training in writing can inform a district or spread a rumour through it in an afternoon. What decides between these uses is not the training but the character of the person trained, and character is formed, or neglected, in the years of schooling.
The second reason concerns learning itself. A student who studies only to be employed studies only what is examined, and rote learning is the result: answers reproduced without understanding, coaching in place of curiosity, and a syllabus treated as a list to be finished. Such an education is not even efficient on its own terms, since employers complain precisely of graduates who hold certificates and cannot solve an unfamiliar problem.
The third reason is social. Nepali life depends on trust that no contract enforces: a shopkeeper's weights, a contractor's cement, an official's file. Where education has trained skill without integrity, every one of those transactions becomes more expensive and more bitter.
The objection deserves an answer. A family that has sold land to send a daughter to college is not being narrow when it asks about her salary. But employability and humanity are not rivals for the same hours, since honesty, clear thinking and the ability to work with people are exactly what employers say is missing, and they are humane qualities before they are commercial ones.
I conclude that the two aims belong together, with the human aim in the senior position. A school should send out students who can earn a living and be trusted with it.
What is fantasy? How does it differ from realistic fiction?
Fantasy is writing that sets aside one or more of the rules of the actual world, using magic, the supernatural, talking animals or invented lands, and then obeys the rules it has put in their place. A carpet flies, a door opens on a coun...
Distinguish between myth, legend and folk tale, giving an example of each.
A myth is a traditional story about gods, origins and beginnings, told to explain why the world is as it is. The stories of Rama and Ravana in the Ramayana belong to this class. A legend fastens itself to a real place or a real person an...
What is meant by the suspension of disbelief, and why does it matter to a writer of fantasy?
The suspension of disbelief is the reader's willing agreement to accept the impossible for the sake of the story. A reader who begins a tale about a flying carpet decides not to object that carpets do not fly, and gives the writer that much credit at the start.
It matters because the agreement has two sides. In return for the reader's trust, the story must not cheat: the invented world has to stay consistent with the rules it announced, and its difficulties must be solved by means the reader already knows about. A rescue performed by magic that is invented on the last page breaks the agreement, and once broken the reader stops caring. This is why consistency, rather than the size of the marvel, is the real discipline of the genre.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: allegory, supernatural, quest.
Allegory: a story whose characters and events stand for something else, such as ideas or political events. The tale of the animals who drive out their farmer is usually read as an allegory of revolution. Supernatural: beyond the laws of ...
Complete or rewrite the following sentences using the unreal past.
(a) I do not have a flying carpet. (begin: I wish ...) (b) I do not know the way out of the forest. (begin: I wish ...) (c) I am not taller. (begin: I wish ...) (d) I did not listen to the old woman's warning. (begin: I wish ...) (e) He owns nothing, but he talks in a lordly way. (use: as if)
(a) I wish I had a flying carpet. (b) I wish I knew the way out of the forest. (c) I wish I were taller. (d) I wish I had listened to the old woman's warning. (e) He talks as if he owned the palace. Each answer follows the same principle...
Why have folk tales survived for generations, and what value do they still have?
Folk tales have survived because their form suits the mouth rather than the page. They are short, built on repetition and on threes, peopled by types instead of complicated individuals, and shaped so that a listener can carry one home af...
How would you build a convincing imaginary world in a story of your own? Explain the choices you would make.
The first choice is how much to invent. A convincing imaginary world breaks one rule of the real world, not all of them, because a story in which anything may happen can surprise the reader but cannot worry him. If my rule were that a ce...
"Fantasy is not an escape from reality but another way of understanding it." Discuss this statement with reference to the kinds of story you know.
Fantasy has long been defended and attacked in the same terms. Its critics call it escapism, a flight into a world where wishes come true. In my view the charge fits the weakest examples and misses what the strongest ones do, because distance from the real world is precisely what allows a story to examine it.
The clearest evidence is allegory. A story whose characters and events stand for something else can say what a direct statement could not. A tale about a kingdom of animals that overthrows its master can examine power, betrayal and the way revolutions are captured by new masters, and it can do so where a direct attack on a government could not circulate. The invention is not a retreat from politics but the means of discussing it safely and memorably.
Folk tales, the oldest fantasy most of us meet, carry the same double character. The jackal who outwits a stronger animal is a fiction about animals and a lesson about survival by wit where strength is unequal. The youngest brother who succeeds where his elders failed speaks to every child who has been overlooked in a large household. Nobody listening believes in the talking animal, and everybody recognises the situation.
Magic realism makes the point from the other direction. It drops one impossible event into an ordinary street, reported as flatly as the weather, and the effect is to expose the ordinary life around it. When people respond to a marvel with curiosity, profit and then boredom, it is human behaviour, not the marvel, that the reader is left thinking about.
Even the quest, the commonest shape of the genre, is a study of something real. A character leaves home, is tested and returns changed, which is the pattern of growing up, of migration for work, of any hard undertaking. The dragons are invented; the fear, the loneliness and the return are not.
It is fair to concede that some fantasy is pure escape, and that a reader who lives only in invented worlds is avoiding his own. But the best work in the genre earns the harder description. Its subjects are fear, greed, courage, loss and the wish to be someone else, examined at a distance that makes them easier to look at. Fantasy, at its best, is therefore not a door out of reality but a longer road into it.
What is globalisation? Mention the main forces that have driven it.
Globalisation is the process by which countries become so closely connected through trade, travel, technology and the movement of people that a decision taken in one of them is quickly felt in the others. It has an economic side, in good...
What does the word diaspora mean, and how does a diaspora community keep its identity in a new country?
Diaspora comes from a Greek word meaning a scattering. It names a community that lives away from the homeland of its ancestors while keeping a shared identity with it, and it includes not only those who left but their children as well. A...
How does foreign labour migration affect the families left behind in Nepal? Discuss both sides.
The first effect is financial and it is real. Money sent home pays school fees, buys medicine, repairs a roof or adds a piece of land, and reaches households no local wage would have lifted. The cost is paid in another currency. A parent...
What is brain drain, and why does it worry a developing country?
Brain drain is the loss a country suffers when its educated and skilled people, such as doctors, engineers, nurses and teachers, leave to work permanently abroad.
It worries a developing country for three reasons. The first is cost. Public money has already been spent on educating those people, so one country pays for the training and another receives the benefit. The second is service. A doctor who emigrates is not replaced quickly, and the shortage is felt hardest in rural districts already short of staff. The third is the loss of example. Skilled people train the next generation, and when the ablest leave, the young are taught less well and learn to believe that success means departure.
The answer is not to forbid people to go, which no free country can do, but to make staying reasonable through decent pay, working equipment and a career that can advance at home.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: remittance, assimilation, interdependence.
Remittance: money sent home by a person who is working in another country. The remittance arrived on the first of the month and paid both her daughters' school fees. Assimilation: the process by which a minority community gradually takes...
Rewrite or complete the following as instructed, using the grammar of comparison.
(a) Air travel today is cheap. It has never been cheaper. (rewrite as one sentence using as ... as) (b) Of the two brothers, Hari is the eldest. (correct the error) (c) This year's harvest is more better than last year's. (correct the error) (d) A country trades more. It depends more on its partners. (join using the more ... the more) (e) Nepal's exports are smaller than India. (correct the error) (f) Money moves quickly. Goods move less quickly. (rewrite as one sentence using a comparative adverb)
(a) Air travel is as cheap today as it has ever been. (b) Of the two brothers, Hari is the elder. (c) This year's harvest is better than last year's. (d) The more a country trades, the more it depends on its partners. (e) Nepal's exports...
Suggest practical measures by which Nepal could gain more from labour migration and lose less. Justify each measure.
The first measure is training before departure. A worker who leaves with a trade, a certificate and enough of the destination language to read his own contract earns more than an unskilled labourer and is much harder to cheat. Skill is t...
"Globalisation has given Nepal more than it has taken away." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
Globalisation is the close connection of countries through trade, travel, technology and the movement of people, so that a decision in one is felt in the others. Judged on the whole it has given Nepal more than it has taken, but the balance is narrower than the claim suggests and depends on choices still to be made.
The clearest gain is work and the income it sends home. Large numbers of Nepalis work abroad, particularly in the Gulf countries and Malaysia, and their remittances form a substantial share of the national economy. In individual households it pays school fees, medicine and repairs, and reaches families no local wage was going to lift. A second gain is access. Imported goods and global brands reach local markets at prices a small town shopkeeper can stock, and a mobile phone connects a village to information that once required a journey. A third gain is knowledge. Nepali students, doctors and engineers train abroad and bring methods back, and Nepali products, from tea and handicrafts to trekking, reach buyers who had never heard of them.
The costs are equally concrete. Migration separates parents from children for years, and the household that gains an income loses a father or a mother to a telephone. Some leave in debt to an agent and return with little to show, and the weakest are poorly protected against dishonest employers. Open trade that lowers prices also undersells the local craftsman and small farmer, so a gain to the consumer is a loss to the producer beside him. The departure of trained people leaves clinics and classrooms short of staff after the public has paid for their education, and borrowed fashions can crowd out local dress, music and food.
Weighing the two, the gains are broader, and the costs come largely from the terms on which Nepal has taken part rather than from connection itself. Remittances have reduced real poverty faster than any policy available to a landlocked country of this size could have done. The costs, however, are avoidable in a way the gains are not. Training before departure, capped recruitment fees, enforceable contracts and real support for returning workers would preserve the benefit and remove much of the harm.
My conclusion is therefore a qualified yes. The margin, however, is the work of policy, and a country that joins the process without preparing its own people simply exports them.
What does this unit mean by health? Why is health more than the absence of disease?
The unit treats health as a condition of physical, mental and social well-being, not merely as the state of having no illness. A healthy person has a body that can do a day's work without collapsing, a mind able to concentrate and to rec...
What benefits does regular exercise bring to the body and to the mind?
The bodily benefits come first. Regular activity makes the heart and lungs work more efficiently, so the same effort costs less breath, and it builds stamina for ordinary work. It strengthens muscle and bone, which protects a person agai...
Why are many students today less active than their parents were, and what can be done within an ordinary school day?
Three changes explain it. Distances once walked are now covered by bus or motorcycle, and traffic makes walking and cycling less pleasant. Study hours have lengthened, with coaching and homework filling the evening that once held games. ...
What is a balanced diet? Illustrate your answer from an ordinary Nepali meal.
A balanced diet is one that supplies, in the right proportions, all the substances the body needs: carbohydrate for energy, protein for growth and repair, a little fat, vitamins and minerals for the body's processes, fibre for digestion, and enough water.
An ordinary Nepali meal illustrates it well. Rice supplies carbohydrate, lentils and any meat, fish, egg or curd supply protein, seasonal vegetables and greens supply vitamins, minerals and fibre, a little oil or ghee supplies fat, and fruit taken through the day completes it. The traditional plate is therefore already close to a balanced diet.
What unbalances it is what is added around it. Packaged snacks, fried food taken daily and sugary drinks supply energy with little nourishment, and they crowd out the vegetables and fruit rather than adding to them. Variety and moderation, not an unfamiliar diet, are what the balance depends on.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: sedentary, stamina, metabolism.
Sedentary: involving much sitting and little physical activity. A sedentary routine of classes, coaching and screens leaves a student tired without having moved all day. Stamina: the strength to keep up a physical or mental effort for a ...
Complete the following with the correct form of the verb in brackets, using a gerund or an infinitive, and answer the question in (f).
(a) He stopped ... (smoke) two years ago and his cough has gone. (b) Remember ... (lock) the gate before you leave for the morning walk. (c) She is good at ... (swim) but she avoids ... (run). (d) They decided ... (walk) instead of ... (take) a taxi. (e) I look forward to ... (hear) from you. (f) What is the difference in meaning between He stopped smoking and He stopped to smoke?
(a) smoking (b) to lock (c) swimming, running (d) to walk, taking (e) hearing (f) He stopped smoking means that he gave up the habit altogether, so smoking is what ended. He stopped to smoke means that he interrupted some other activity,...
How does examination stress affect a student's health, and how can exercise, sleep and routine help? Suggest practical measures.
Examination stress works on the whole person. A worried student sleeps badly, and short sleep weakens memory and concentration, which increases the worry that caused it. Appetite changes, meals are skipped or replaced by tea and packaged...
"Prevention is better than cure." Discuss this saying with reference to health and exercise, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
The saying holds that it is wiser to keep illness away than to treat it after it arrives. Applied to health and exercise, it is true in almost every practical sense, though it is not an argument against medicine, and it asks more of a society than it first appears to.
The first reason is cost. Prevention is nearly free while cure is expensive. Walking, cycling, stretching, sleeping properly and eating an ordinary balanced meal of rice, lentils and vegetables cost a household nothing beyond attention, whereas a long illness costs consultation fees, medicines, travel to a city hospital and lost earnings. For a family whose income is modest, and in a country where many households depend on a single earner, that difference can decide whether children stay in school.
The second reason is that cure is often incomplete. Habits maintained over years leave damage that treatment can manage but not undo, and a patient who recovers is seldom returned to exactly the condition he was in before. Strength, breath and fitness are built slowly and lost quickly, so the body kept in condition has an advantage no prescription supplies.
The third reason is that prevention protects the mind as well. Regular activity, adequate sleep and a steady routine reduce the anxiety and exhaustion that examinations bring, and no medicine treats those as cheaply. A student who walks daily and sleeps properly is defending his concentration as much as his heart.
The saying has limits, however, and an honest answer should admit them. Disease is not always the result of neglect: infection, accident and inherited conditions strike the careful as well as the careless, and blaming the sick for their illness is both unkind and untrue. Prevention also depends on circumstances a person does not control, such as safe places to walk, clean water and a reasonable working day, so it is a public duty as well as a private one. And when illness does come, treatment must not be delayed by pride in one's own good habits.
My own view is that prevention is better than cure, but that the two are partners rather than rivals. The sensible course is to build the cheap daily habits that keep most illness away, and to go to a health worker promptly when something is wrong, since delay is what turns a small complaint into an expensive one.
What do the words history and culture mean, and how are the two connected?
History is the record and the interpretation of what happened in the past, put together from whatever evidence survives: inscriptions, coins, chronicles, land grants, buildings and the memories people pass on in speech. Culture is the wa...
Distinguish between tangible and intangible cultural heritage, with examples from Nepal.
Tangible heritage is inheritance that has a physical body. In Nepal it includes the palaces, courtyards and carved wooden temples of the durbar squares of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur, the pilgrimage site at Lumbini, and the stupas, st...
Why does the unit insist that history is not the same as the past? Explain.
The past is everything that happened, and it is gone beyond recovery. History is the account we construct from the small part of it that survives, so the two can never be identical. The first reason is that the evidence is incomplete. On...
What are the main threats to a country's heritage today? Mention any four.
The first threat is natural damage. Earthquakes, monsoon rain, damp and fire attack old brick, timber and lime, and the earthquake of 2015 damaged a great many monuments in Nepal at one stroke.
The second is unsuitable rebuilding. Repairing a historic building in concrete because it is quicker and cheaper preserves the outline and destroys the thing itself, and the artisans who know the old techniques are growing scarce.
The third is unplanned development. Road widening, tall concrete construction beside old squares and the pressure of commerce crowd monuments and change the settings that gave them meaning.
The fourth is neglect of intangible heritage. When a language stops being spoken at home, or a craft finds no apprentice, the loss is complete, because such heritage lives only in the people who practise it.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: heritage, artefact, indigenous.
Heritage: what a community inherits from earlier generations, both its buildings and objects and its customs, crafts and knowledge. The carved windows of the old town are part of a heritage that no new construction can replace. Artefact:...
Rewrite or complete the following, using the correct past tense in each case.
(a) The craftsmen (repair) the temple when the rain began. (b) By the time the team arrived, the roof (collapse). (c) They (restore) the courtyard for two years when the funding stopped. (d) While she (read) the inscription, her brother photographed the doorway. (e) Correct if necessary: The temple has been rebuilt last year.
(a) The craftsmen were repairing the temple when the rain began. (b) By the time the team arrived, the roof had collapsed. (c) They had been restoring the courtyard for two years when the funding stopped. (d) While she was reading the in...
What practical steps could a school or a student take to preserve the history and culture of the local area? Suggest measures and justify them.
The first measure needs nothing but a notebook. Students can record the oral history of their own locality by interviewing the oldest residents about festivals, floods, migrations, trades and the names of places, and by writing the accou...
"A community that loses its history and culture loses itself." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
The claim sounds sentimental until one asks what a community would be without its past, and in Nepal the question is practical, since old settlements are being rebuilt in concrete and the young are leaving for work abroad. In my view the statement is broadly true, though it needs a qualification: what a community must keep is not every inherited practice but the memory and the judgement that let it choose among them.
The first reason is that identity rests on continuity. A community knows who it is by knowing where it came from, which is why people trace descent, keep genealogies, return home for Dashain and repair the temple their grandfathers built. Take away the record and the practices, and what remains is a set of people occupying the same place with nothing held in common to explain why they should trust or help one another.
The second reason is that culture carries knowledge no book has replaced. The old building techniques of the Kathmandu Valley, in brick, timber and lime, were developed for its soils and its earthquakes, and the argument over how to restore the monuments damaged in 2015 turned partly on the fact that fewer artisans now hold it. The same is true of farming practices, seed varieties and medicine kept in oral tradition, and a language lost takes all of it away at once.
The third reason is that a people with no history is easy to mislead. Where the record is thin, whoever is loudest can supply a convenient past, and a community with no way of checking a claim about its own origins is defenceless against the uses such claims are put to.
The objection is serious and should be stated fairly. Cultures have always contained cruelties, and much of what was handed down in South Asia sorted people by caste and by gender and called the arrangement sacred. Preservation for its own sake would protect the injustice along with the craft. But the answer is not to discard the inheritance; it is to know it well enough to judge it, and a community that has forgotten its history cannot even see what it is repeating.
I conclude that the statement holds. A community that keeps its monuments, festivals, crafts and languages, and keeps them honestly, retains both the means to understand itself and the standing to decide what it will change.
What does the unit mean by home life, and why is the family called a person's first school?
Home life, in the unit's sense, is the whole of what goes on inside a household: the people who share the roof, the work and the income divided between them, the meals and routines that fill the day, and the affection and the authority t...
Compare the joint family and the nuclear family, stating the advantages and disadvantages of each.
In a joint family brothers, their wives, their children and their parents share one roof and one income. Labour is divided, so a field can be harvested while an infant is watched; illness or a bad season is absorbed by several earners ra...
What is meant by the generation gap, and why does it arise?
The generation gap is the difference in attitudes, tastes and habits between the older and the younger members of a family, and it shows itself in disagreements about dress, marriage, money, study, religious observance and the use of time.
It arises chiefly because the two generations grew up in different worlds. Parents whose childhood was spent in a village with little schooling, no electricity and work fixed by the farming year acquired one set of assumptions, and children raised with schools, towns, wage work and the internet acquired another.
That is why the quarrel is so hard to settle. It is not really a dispute about right and wrong but a disagreement about what is obvious, and each side treats its own assumptions as needing no argument. Listening, rather than winning, is what narrows the gap.
How has labour migration changed family relationships in Nepal? Explain.
Labour migration has produced a household shape the older textbooks did not describe, one in which the chief earner lives abroad for years at a time. The gains should be stated first. Money sent home pays school fees, medical bills, loan...
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: kinship, upbringing, breadwinner.
Kinship: the relationship between people connected by blood, marriage or adoption. Kinship still decides who is invited to a wedding and who is expected to help pay for it. Upbringing: the way a child is cared for and taught at home duri...
Rewrite or complete the following, using used to, would, be used to or the present simple with a frequency adverb, as appropriate.
(a) We (live) in a joint family, but we moved to Kathmandu five years ago. (b) Every Dashain my uncles (arrive) a day early and stay for a week. (c) She has shared a room since childhood, so she (share) a room. (d) Correct if necessary: I am used to live alone now. (e) My father (take) tea before the news. (always)
(a) We used to live in a joint family, but we moved to Kathmandu five years ago. (b) Every Dashain my uncles would arrive a day early and stay for a week. (c) She has shared a room since childhood, so she is used to sharing a room. (d) I...
What can the members of a family do to keep their relationships strong? Suggest measures and justify them.
The first measure is the shared meal. A household that eats together once a day, with the television off and the phones away, gives every member a fixed occasion on which to be heard, and most family quarrels begin in things that were ne...
"The joint family is disappearing in Nepal, and something valuable is being lost with it." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
The joint household of brothers, their wives, their children and their parents under one roof is no longer the ordinary Nepali arrangement, and the reasons are not mysterious. Land divided among heirs until no share will feed a family, salaried work in the towns, schooling that fixes children in one place and labour migration abroad have all pulled in the same direction. In my view something valuable is indeed being lost, but it is a price paid for real gains, and the sensible response is to keep the functions of the joint family rather than mourn its form.
The first thing lost is shared risk. A joint household was an insurance company that asked no premium. An illness, a crop failure or the loss of a job was absorbed by several earners. A nuclear family has no such cushion, which is why a single hospital bill can undo years of saving.
The second is the care of the old and of the very young. In a joint house a grandparent was looked after without anybody deciding to look after him, and a small child was never short of an adult. In a scattered family both must now be arranged deliberately, and elderly parents living alone while their children work abroad has become a familiar sight.
The third is the transmission of the family's own culture. Cousins raised together, festivals kept in one house, and the history or the craft an old person hands on in conversation all belonged to the joint household, and Dashain and Tihar are when their absence is most obvious.
The other side deserves a fair statement. The joint family also concentrated authority in its senior men, denied young couples any say in their own lives, and loaded the daughters-in-law with the household's work while giving them the least voice in it. Its passing has freed a great many people, women above all, and nobody who remembers that will want it back unaltered.
My conclusion is therefore qualified. What deserves preserving is not the single roof but what the single roof used to do. Families that live apart can still pool money against emergencies, share the care of their parents by a fair arrangement, keep a fixed habit of contact across distance, and gather in one house at least once a year. Kept in that spirit, the valuable part survives the form, and the injustices do not.
What is humour, and how does satire differ from it?
Humour is the quality in a person, a situation or a piece of writing that makes people laugh or smile. In its broadest form it is kindly, inviting the reader to enjoy human oddity, and it wishes nobody any harm.
Satire uses the same comic means for a purpose beyond laughter. The satirist ridicules folly, vice, hypocrisy or corruption so that the audience sees it plainly and is moved to be ashamed of it.
The difference therefore lies in aim rather than in method. Humour is content to amuse, while satire has a target and a standard, laughing at what is wrong by implying what would be right. A joke about a forgetful uncle is humour; the same joke aimed at an office that forgets its duties becomes satire.
Distinguish between irony and sarcasm, with an example of each.
Irony is a gap between what is said and what is meant, or between what a character expects and what happens. It is a structure of meaning rather than a mood, and it may be gentle or affectionate. When a speaker looks at a downpour and re...
What purpose does satire serve? Explain with reasons.
The first purpose of satire is exposure. Folly, hypocrisy and corruption protect themselves with respectable language, and the satirist strips it away by exaggerating what lies beneath until the audience sees it for what it is. The secon...
Name and explain any four devices a satirist commonly uses.
Irony is the first. The satirist says the opposite of what is meant, praising a failing in solemn terms so that the reader supplies the criticism. Exaggeration, or hyperbole, is the second. A fault is enlarged far past its real size unti...
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: wit, parody, caricature.
Wit: quick, clever verbal humour that makes its point in a few well chosen words. Her reply was so full of wit that even the person she had corrected laughed. Parody: a close imitation of a style or a work, exaggerated until the original...
Add suitable question tags, or complete as directed.
(a) You have read the sketch, ...? (b) I am late, ...? (c) Let us begin, ...? (d) Nobody complained, ...? (e) He never apologises, ...? (f) There is a mistake, ...? (g) Rewrite as a negative question to express surprise: You have not finished yet.
(a) You have read the sketch, haven't you? (b) I am late, aren't I? (c) Let us begin, shall we? (d) Nobody complained, did they? (e) He never apologises, does he? (f) There is a mistake, isn't there? (g) Haven't you finished yet? The ans...
Are there limits to humour? Explain when a joke becomes unacceptable, giving reasons.
Humour does have limits, and they can be stated without pretending that comedy should be made safe. The test is not whether a joke offends somebody, since good satire is designed to offend its target, but whom it is aimed at and what it ...
"Satire reaches the fault that a sermon cannot touch." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
Every society has faults everybody knows about and nobody corrects: the office that asks for one more document, the notice written so that it cannot be understood, the promises renewed each season. Sermons against such things are delivered constantly and change very little. The claim under discussion is that comedy succeeds where complaint fails, and in my view it is largely true, though satire has limits the claim passes over.
The first reason is that satire cannot be argued with. A sermon states a position, and a position invites a reply, so the official accused of laziness explains his difficulties and the matter is left where it began. Ridicule offers nothing to reply to. A caricature that gives a man an enormous pocket and a very small notebook makes no accusation that can be answered, yet it fixes a judgement in the mind of everyone who sees it.
The second reason is attention. A moral lecture is easy to stop listening to, particularly when the audience agrees with it already, while a joke must be followed to the end to be understood. Comic sketches hold audiences who would switch off an editorial, and mockery in street theatre and festival performance carried criticism of authority to people who could not read a pamphlet.
The third reason is safety. Where plain criticism of the powerful carries a cost, comedy gives the critic room to move, since a joke can always be called only a joke. This is why satire in verse and prose has such a long history in Nepali writing as a way of commenting on rulers, officials and social custom.
The objection deserves a fair hearing. Laughter can also substitute for action, and an audience that has laughed at corruption may go home feeling that something has been done when nothing has. Satire destroys more easily than it builds, since it can show a policy is absurd without offering a better one, and it can be turned against the weak as readily as the strong, at which point it stops being satire and becomes abuse.
I conclude that the statement holds as a claim about reach rather than about repair. Satire gets past the defences that earnest criticism runs into, and it makes a fault visible and shameful as no sermon manages. What follows from that exposure is somebody else's work, and the report and the law are still needed.
Distinguish between a migrant, an immigrant and an emigrant.
A migrant is the widest of the three terms. It means anybody who moves from one place to another in order to live or work there, and the movement may be inside a country, as when a family moves from a hill district to a city, or across a...
How does a refugee differ from a person who migrates for work? Explain, and say what asylum means.
A person who migrates for work has made a choice, however narrow. Low wages, the absence of work at home or the hope of better pay draw such a person abroad, and the passport and the return journey remain open. A refugee has not chosen i...
Distinguish between assimilation and integration.
Assimilation is the process by which a minority community gives up its language, dress, food and customs for those of the society around it, and it is often complete by the third generation, when grandchildren no longer speak the languag...
Mention any four difficulties that immigrants commonly face in a new country.
The first difficulty is legal. Visas, work permits, residence papers and the fees and waiting that go with them cost time and money, and a person whose status is uncertain is easily exploited.
The second is work below one's level. A degree or a trade qualification earned in one country is often not recognised in another, so a trained teacher or nurse may spend years in unskilled work.
The third is language. A newcomer must learn a language in public, at the counter, in the hospital and in the classroom, while being judged on every mistake, and a strong accent invites the assumption that the speaker is slow.
The fourth is separation from family. Distance is felt hardest at illness, childbirth and death, when a person cannot be present or easily return.
To these may be added open hostility, met as abuse, discrimination in housing and hiring, or simple exclusion.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: diaspora, nostalgia, xenophobia.
Diaspora: a community living away from its ancestral homeland while keeping a shared identity with it. The Nepali diaspora in Britain and Australia raises money for schools in the districts its members left. Nostalgia: a longing, mixed w...
Complete or correct the following, using the right phrasal verb or preposition.
(a) They ......... (move) in next door only last month. (b) Her grandmother brought ......... (she) up after her parents went abroad. (c) He puts ......... a great deal of unfairness at work without complaining. (d) She has always looked ......... her elder sister. (e) He emigrated ......... Nepal at twenty and immigrated ......... Canada. (f) Correct if necessary: We arrived at Australia in July and moved in a small flat.
(a) They moved in next door only last month. (b) Her grandmother brought her up after her parents went abroad. (c) He puts up with a great deal of unfairness at work without complaining. (d) She has always looked up to her elder sister. ...
What can a receiving country and a sending country each do to make migration less costly for families? Suggest measures and justify them.
A receiving country can begin with the law. Clear rules on permits and residence, decided in reasonable time, remove the uncertainty that makes a newcomer easy to underpay, and a worker who cannot be threatened with the loss of status ca...
"A person who settles in another country is bound to lose their identity." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
Millions now live in a country other than the one they were born in, and Nepal is deeply involved in that movement, both as a country whose workers and students leave and as one that has received refugees. The claim under discussion is that such a move must cost a person their identity. In my view the claim is too strong: identity changes with migration, sometimes painfully, but it is usually remade rather than lost.
The case for the statement is not weak, and language is its clearest evidence. A family that arrives speaking one language at home finds its children answering in another, and by the third generation the first language is often reduced to greetings and food words, taking with it the songs and proverbs that lived only in it. Festivals lose their setting, since Dashain on a working day in a foreign city is not what it was in a village where everything else stopped. Pressure to fit in does the rest, as names are shortened, accents flattened and habits that draw attention quietly dropped.
Yet the same evidence points the other way when read further. Communities in the diaspora keep what they care about with determination, organising language classes, hiring halls for festivals, building temples and associations, and sending money back to districts they left decades ago. A second language and a second set of manners are added to the first rather than substituted for it, and the result is a double belonging the young often carry easily.
The deeper objection is that the statement treats identity as a fixed object to be mislaid. Identity is a relationship with language, family, place, religion and memory, and it alters through life whether one migrates or not. A villager who moves to Kathmandu is changed without being erased; migration intensifies that process rather than inventing it.
The honest qualification is that some losses are real: a language that stops being spoken at home is gone within two generations, and an immigrant kept in insecure status or met with hostility is pushed towards hiding what marks them out, a loss forced rather than chosen.
I conclude that settling abroad reshapes identity but does not doom it. What a migrant loses is the effortlessness of belonging, never having to explain oneself. Identity abroad becomes something held deliberately rather than taken for granted, a change of manner rather than a disappearance.
What different kinds of love does the unit distinguish? Explain briefly.
The unit treats love as a family of related affections rather than one emotion. Parental and filial affection comes first. It is given rather than chosen, begins before a child can return it, and shows itself mainly as work done for anot...
How does love differ from infatuation? Explain the difference.
Infatuation is a sudden and intense attraction, and its first mark is that it arrives already certain. It fastens on an impression, usually of appearance or manner, and supplies the rest of the person from imagination, so the feeling is ...
Why does literature usually place love against an obstacle? Give reasons.
Literature rarely shows love at rest, and there are three reasons for it. The first is structural. A narrative needs tension, and a love that meets no difficulty gives a writer nothing to narrate, since satisfied desire ends a story inst...
"Love is a practice, not a declaration." Explain what this means.
The statement means that love is properly measured by conduct over time rather than by the words used to announce it.
A declaration is cheap. It can be made in a moment, it costs the speaker nothing, and it can be sincere when spoken and followed by nothing at all.
A practice is a habit of acting. Parents who cook, pay fees and sit up through an illness may never use the word, and a friend who appears at a funeral without being asked has said more than a letter would. On this view love is a set of small, repeated, unwitnessed acts.
The practical value of the idea is that it gives a test. Judge an attachment, including your own, by what it has actually done for another person, not by how strongly it has been felt or how well it has been expressed.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: compassion, devotion, fidelity.
Compassion: sympathy for another person's suffering together with the wish to relieve it. The neighbours showed real compassion, sending food to the family for a month after the accident. Devotion: deep loyalty and care shown steadily ov...
Answer the following on sentence structure.
(a) Identify each sentence as simple, compound or complex: (i) Her mother waited at the gate. (ii) He wrote to her every week, but the letters arrived in pairs. (iii) Although the two families disagreed, the friendship continued. (b) Join each pair into one sentence using the conjunction given: (i) He was poor. He was generous. (although) (ii) She finished her studies. She married. (after) (c) Correct the following: (i) She loved him, she never said so. (ii) The letter came late, however he had already left.
(a) (i) Simple, because it has one independent clause with one finite verb. (ii) Compound, because two independent clauses are joined by the coordinating conjunction but. (iii) Complex, because the subordinate clause introduced by althou...
What changes are taking place in marriage and family relationships in Nepali society today, and how do they affect family affection? Discuss.
Several changes are visible at once, and they are uneven, since a single street can contain households living by quite different arrangements. The first is in how marriages are made. Marriage arranged by families is giving way, mostly in...
"A life without love is not merely lonely; it is incomplete." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
The sentence is easy to nod at and harder to defend, because it claims more than that loneliness is painful. It claims that something necessary is missing. In my view the claim holds, provided love is understood as the unit understands it, as a practice of care in all its forms rather than narrowly as romance.
The first reason is that a person is formed by being cared for. Nobody survives infancy without years of another person's labour, and the capacity to trust, to speak and to work with others is learned there. A life from which care was entirely absent is not a sadder version of an ordinary life; it lacks part of the equipment an ordinary life is built with.
The second reason is that love supplies the reasons for which people bear hardship. A parent takes an exhausting job abroad, a young woman postpones her marriage to nurse her grandmother, a neighbour carries food to a house in mourning. None of these acts is explained by self interest, and a life with nothing in it worth that kind of trouble is thin, whatever else it contains.
The third reason is that love is where a person is known. Friendship rests on being seen accurately and accepted anyway, which is why literature returns so often to the friend who stays through an illness and asks for nothing. Applause from strangers does not do the same work.
The objection deserves a hearing. People do live alone and live well, and to call such lives incomplete can be cruel, besides pressuring the young into marriage. It is also true that possessive or violent attachment does great harm, and that duty held on to after affection has gone can become a trap.
Neither objection overturns the claim. The person who lives alone is rarely without love, having friends, neighbours, kin and often the deliberate compassion of service, so solitude is not the absence of love. And the harm done by possessiveness is an argument about what love is, not evidence that it can be dispensed with.
I conclude that the statement is true when read carefully. A life may be complete without romance, and completeness is no debt the unmarried owe society. But a life in which nobody is cared for and nobody cares in return is missing the relationship in which human beings are made, sustained and known.
What is meant by mass media, and what are its main functions in a society?
Mass media are the channels through which a single message reaches a large and scattered audience at more or less the same time. They include print media such as newspapers and magazines, broadcast media such as radio and television, and...
Distinguish between print, broadcast and online media, and comment on their reach in Nepal.
Print media, that is newspapers and magazines, are the oldest form. They carry the most detail and the most considered comment and can be kept and re read, but they are slower, cost money to distribute, and need a literate reader. Broadc...
Distinguish between misinformation and disinformation, and explain why the difference matters.
Misinformation is false or misleading material circulated by people who believe it to be true. A neighbour who forwards a warning about a coming aftershock is not lying but has been deceived, and passes the error on in good faith. Disinf...
What is press freedom, and why is it protected?
Press freedom is the right of the media to gather, publish and comment on information without prior control by an authority and without fear of punishment afterwards. It is recognised as a right in the Constitution of Nepal and covers the reporter, the editor and the publisher alike.
It is protected because two of the media's functions cannot be performed without it. Citizens cannot be properly informed if somebody decides in advance what they may be told, and power cannot be watched by journalists who can be silenced by the people they are examining. Where the press is not free, criticism disappears before wrongdoing does.
The right is not an exemption from the law. It carries the duties of accuracy, of a fair chance to reply, and of restraint in matters of privacy and public safety, and a press that abandons those duties weakens the case for its own freedom.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: editorial, bias, sensationalism.
Editorial: an article in which a newspaper states its own opinion on an issue, normally published unsigned. The editorial argued that the new road contract should be examined by a parliamentary committee. Bias: a leaning towards one side...
Correct the following sentences where necessary and give the rule in each case.
(a) The radio gave us many informations about the flood. (b) The news are very disturbing this evening. (c) There is not much evidences for the claim. (d) He gave me two useful advices about checking sources. (e) The media has a duty to correct its mistakes. (f) Very little journalists were present at the briefing.
(a) The radio gave us much information about the flood, or a lot of information, or several pieces of information. (b) The news is very disturbing this evening. (c) There is not much evidence for the claim, or There is little evidence fo...
"Rumour travels faster than news during a disaster." What should the media and ordinary citizens do to limit the damage? Suggest measures with reasons.
The problem is real. In an earthquake or a flood the demand for information rises at the very moment when telephone lines, electricity and official sources are least reliable, and a frightening message spreads because fear makes people f...
"Social media has given everyone a voice, but it has not given everyone the truth." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
The remark catches the double character of the platforms that now carry much of Nepal's public conversation. My view is that it is fair to both halves: the gain in voice is real and should not be given up, and the loss of a shared, checked account of events is equally real and has to be repaired rather than accepted.
Consider the gain first. Publishing once needed capital, a printing press or a licence, so few people could be heard. A student with a telephone can now document a broken bridge, a missing teacher or the aftermath of a landslide and be seen by the whole country. Communities whose languages and concerns rarely reached the national press have built audiences of their own, migrant workers keep up a daily conversation with home, and misconduct recorded by a witness can reach the authorities before a reporter arrives.
The loss follows from the same feature. Publishing without an editor means publishing without verification, and the systems that decide what a user sees are built to hold attention rather than to establish what is true. Material that alarms or flatters therefore travels further and faster than material that is merely accurate, which is why a rumour about an aftershock outruns its correction. Audiences are also sorted into groups that mostly see their own opinions returned to them, so disagreement is met less often and argued with less well.
The strongest objection is that these faults are not new. Newspapers have always carried bias, propaganda and sensationalism, and censorship under earlier arrangements silenced far more than any platform does. There is force in this, but scale is itself a difference, because a false claim can now reach a million people in an hour with no editor anywhere in its path.
What follows is a set of duties. Platforms should be transparent about what they promote and prompt in removing coordinated deception. Professional journalism needs support, because verification is skilled work that somebody must pay for. Schools should teach students to check a source. The state should protect press freedom while resisting the temptation to answer falsehood with censorship, which silences criticism more reliably than it silences lies.
I conclude that social media has democratised the voice without democratising the truth, and that the answer is not to take the voice back but to rebuild the verification the old gatekeepers used to supply.
What is power, and how does authority differ from power?
Power is the capacity to make things happen: to get a decision taken, a rule obeyed, a road built or an objection dropped. It is not confined to government, since a head teacher, a landowner, a contractor and a household elder each holds...
What is legitimacy? On what grounds do people accept a government as rightful?
Legitimacy is the quality that makes people accept a government's right to rule, so that its decisions are obeyed because they are thought proper and not merely because disobedience is punished. The unit points to three grounds. The firs...
Explain what is meant by the separation of powers, and say why it matters.
The separation of powers is the division of the work of government among three distinct organs. The legislature makes law, the executive carries it out, and the judiciary interprets the law and settles disputes under it. Nepal's constitu...
Mention any four ways in which those who hold public power can be held accountable.
The first is the election. A periodic vote, open to every adult citizen, gives the people a regular and peaceful means of removing representatives who have not discharged their duties.
The second is scrutiny within the legislature. Members question ministers, committees examine the work of departments, and the opposition presses for explanations that a government would not volunteer.
The third is the law and the audit. An independent judiciary can declare an act unlawful and order a remedy, while the audit of public accounts shows whether money voted for one purpose was spent on it.
The fourth is publicity. A free press, the right to information and an active civil society bring a decision into the open, and power that has to be explained in public is already partly restrained.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: sovereignty, franchise, coalition.
Sovereignty: the supreme authority within a state, which in a democracy is said to rest with the people. The constitution declares that sovereignty is vested in the people and exercised through their elected representatives. Franchise: t...
Rewrite or complete the following, using the correct modal perfect in each case.
(a) The hall was full, so the notice (must / reach) every household. (b) She (cannot / vote) in that election, because she was not yet eighteen. (c) The committee (should / publish) the accounts before the meeting, but it did not. (d) The ward (could / hold) a public hearing, but it chose not to. (e) Explain the difference in meaning between: I should have taken my citizenship certificate. / I needn't have taken my citizenship certificate.
(a) The hall was full, so the notice must have reached every household. (b) She cannot have voted in that election, because she was not yet eighteen. (c) The committee should have published the accounts before the meeting, but it did not...
What practical steps can students and ordinary citizens take to make power more accountable in their own locality? Suggest measures and justify them.
The first step is to know what the local body is supposed to do. A ward and a municipality publish their annual plan, their budget and the list of works they have contracted, and a student who has read those documents can ask about a par...
"Power is safe only where it can be questioned." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
The claim looks like a complaint against authority, but it is really about how authority is kept useful. In my view it is sound, because the danger in power lies less in its existence than in its escaping examination. The question worth asking of any arrangement is not who holds power, but what happens when the holder is wrong.
The first reason is that every holder of power makes mistakes. Officials work from incomplete information and are exposed to pressure and self interest, and nothing in an appointment makes a person immune to error. A decision that can be questioned is corrected while the cost is still small, whereas a decision that cannot be questioned has to be defended, and a mistake defended long enough becomes a policy. A legislature that can summon a minister, an audit that can trace public money and a court that can quash an unlawful order are not obstacles to governing but the means by which governing is repaired.
The second reason is that questioning is what makes obedience reasonable. Authority differs from bare power in being recognised as rightful, and that recognition rests on legality, consent and performance, none of which can be tested unless somebody is permitted to ask. A government open to scrutiny gains the standing to make hard decisions, because citizens who can check a claim have a reason to believe it.
The third reason is that unexamined power decays into private advantage. Corruption is the use of public office for private gain, and it grows as audit, courts, a free press and civil society are weakened. Where nobody may ask what a contract cost, the cost is paid later in an unsafe road, by people who never saw the file.
The objection deserves a fair statement. Constant enquiry can slow decisions and can be used to obstruct needed work. But that argues for orderly means of questioning rather than for fewer of them: a question asks for an explanation within a fixed time, while an obstruction refuses every answer as insufficient. Regular elections, defined procedures, reasoned judgements and honest reporting keep questioning both limited and effective.
I conclude that the statement holds. Power is not made safe by being placed in better hands, since no hands stay reliable without a check; it is made safe by a standing expectation that its use will have to be explained.
How does the unit distinguish science from technology?
Science, as the unit presents it, is a method of producing reliable knowledge. It observes something that does not yet make sense, frames a hypothesis precise enough to be disproved, tests it by controlled experiment or systematic observ...
Explain the scientific method, and say why publication and repetition matter to it.
The scientific method begins in careful observation of something unexplained. From the observation a hypothesis is framed, which is a proposed explanation worded precisely enough that evidence could show it to be wrong. The hypothesis is...
Distinguish between discovery, invention and innovation, with an example of each.
A discovery finds something that already existed but was not known. The laws of motion, a new species of insect and a mineral deposit are discovered rather than made, because they were there before anyone described them. An invention mak...
What is the digital divide? Mention any four causes of it.
The digital divide is the gap between those who have access to devices, a network connection, electric power and the skill to use them, and those who have not, with the result that the benefits of technology reach some households and bypass others.
The first cause is income, since a smartphone, a computer and a monthly data package all have to be paid for. The second is infrastructure: a settlement without reliable electricity or a usable signal cannot use a service however cheap it becomes. The third is education, because reading, and often reading English, is needed before a device is of much use. The fourth is unequal opportunity within the household, as a rural family may share one phone between many members.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: hypothesis, automation, obsolescence.
Hypothesis: a proposed explanation, stated precisely enough to be tested and possibly disproved. The students framed a hypothesis about the effect of temperature on the reaction before they set up the apparatus. Automation: the use of ma...
Rewrite or complete the following, using the correct connective of cause, effect or purpose.
(a) The crop failed ........ the rain came late. (because / due to) (b) ........ the landslide, the supplies arrived a week late. (Owing to / Owing that) (c) The sample was contaminated, ........ the test was repeated. (so / therefore) (d) The data were published ........ other laboratories could repeat the experiment. (in order to / so that) (e) Correct if necessary: The class was cancelled due to the power failed.
(a) The crop failed because the rain came late. (b) Owing to the landslide, the supplies arrived a week late. (c) The sample was contaminated, so the test was repeated. (d) The data were published so that other laboratories could repeat ...
How can science and technology improve education and health in a country like Nepal? Suggest measures and justify them.
Education can be reached first, because much of what it needs is already in students' hands. Where a signal exists, recorded lessons, digital libraries and question banks let a student in a school with no physics teacher still hear physi...
"Technology is neither good nor bad in itself; everything depends on the use to which it is put." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
The statement is a familiar defence of the engineer and the scientist, and it is largely true, though it is not the whole truth. In my view technology is neutral in intention, since a tool has no purposes of its own, but it is never neutral in effect, because every design makes some uses easy and others difficult. The honest position lies between the two claims: the use decides the outcome, and the design decides which uses are likely.
The case for neutrality is strong. The same network that carries an online class to a village school carries rumour and fraud to the same handset. The same knowledge of chemistry raises the yield of a field and poisons a stream. In each pair the technology is identical and only the purpose differs, so blaming the instrument explains nothing and excuses the user, who is the party that actually chose.
The qualification is equally important. A technology arrives with tendencies built into it. Automation makes the replacement of manual work cheap, so it tends to displace workers even when no employer meant to dismiss anybody. A device designed so that it cannot be opened tends towards obsolescence and electronic waste, whatever the owner would prefer. These outcomes follow from the design, not from the wickedness of particular users, which is why ethics belongs in the laboratory as well as with the customer.
The unevenness of benefit makes the same point. Telemedicine and online classes are plainly good uses, yet both need a signal, a device and a charged battery, so both reach first the households already best placed. That is the digital divide, and it is not caused by anybody misusing a technology; it is the ordinary result of introducing one into an unequal society without asking who will be able to use it.
What follows is not suspicion of technology but judgement about it. The questions to put to any invention are who gains by it, who bears its costs, whether it can be repaired, what it does with information about its users, and whether it can be sustained by the resources available.
I therefore accept the statement with an amendment. Responsibility for use stays with the people who deploy a technology, and no invention is condemned merely by being misused, but responsibility reaches back to the choices made when the thing was designed and sold.
What is the difference between travel and tourism, and why do people travel?
Travel is simply movement from one place to another. People have always travelled out of necessity, to trade, to find work, to make a pilgrimage, to marry, or to escape hardship, and travel of this kind needs no industry behind it. Touri...
Explain the benefits that tourism brings to a country like Nepal.
The first benefit is foreign currency. Visitors pay for flights, permits, lodging, food and guides, and tourism is one of Nepal's major earners of foreign exchange, which the country needs to pay for what it imports. The second is employ...
Tourism also does harm. Explain the main costs a destination pays.
The first cost is environmental. Trekking routes accumulate plastic, discarded equipment and human waste at altitudes where nothing rots and nothing is carried down cheaply, and the demand for firewood, water and building land presses on...
What is meant by responsible tourism? Mention any four practices that make tourism responsible.
Responsible tourism means travelling in a way that leaves the destination and its people no worse off than it found them.
The first practice is carrying out whatever is carried in, so that no packaging or bottle is left on a trail.
The second is limiting numbers on fragile routes through permits and seasonal quotas, because crowding does the damage rather than the individual visitor.
The third is spending locally. A homestay or a locally owned lodge, local guides and porters on fair wages, and local food and crafts keep the earnings in the village.
The fourth is respect for the place. Asking before photographing people, dressing modestly at shrines, using water sparingly and treating a ceremony as worship rather than as a show cost nothing and preserve what the visitor came to see.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: itinerary, accommodation, souvenir.
Itinerary: a planned route for a journey, set out day by day with its stops, timings and things to see. Our itinerary allowed two nights in Pokhara before the walk began. Accommodation: the lodging a traveller stays in, such as a hotel, ...
Fill in the blanks with the correct prepositions, and add articles where they are needed.
(a) We arrived ___ Kathmandu ___ Tuesday morning. (b) The trekkers walked ___ the forest and then ___ a suspension bridge. (c) Our guide met us ___ the hotel gate ___ six ___ the morning. (d) They travelled ___ bus as far as Pokhara and then continued ___ foot. (e) Insert articles where necessary: We flew to ___ Nepal, drove through ___ Terai and trekked in ___ Himalayas near ___ Everest.
(a) We arrived in Kathmandu on Tuesday morning. (b) The trekkers walked through the forest and then across a suspension bridge. (c) Our guide met us at the hotel gate at six in the morning. (d) They travelled by bus as far as Pokhara and...
Suggest practical measures by which a community could develop tourism in its own area without harming it, and justify each measure.
The first measure is to find out what the place actually has. A community can list its own attractions honestly, a view, a lake, a forest walk, an old temple, a festival, a craft or a local dish, because a destination built on a real fea...
"Tourism does a country more good than harm." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
The question is a practical one in Nepal, where many households depend on visitors and where the trails and old towns they come to see are visibly under strain. My own view is that the statement is true, but conditionally: tourism does more good than harm when it is managed, and more harm than good when it is simply allowed to grow.
The first reason for the favourable verdict is the breadth of the benefit. Tourism earns foreign currency and, unlike most industries, it pays that money out to people who have little else to sell. A porter, a guide, a driver, a lodge keeper, a farmer supplying the lodge and a metal worker selling souvenirs are all paid from the same visitor's purse, and the work reaches hill districts where no factory will ever be built.
The second reason is that tourism gives an economic value to things a poor country might otherwise sacrifice. A forest that earns nothing is cut; a forest that brings visitors is guarded. When the durbar squares, Lumbini and the national parks of the Terai support the people living beside them, conservation becomes an interest rather than a charity.
The third reason is what comes with the visitors besides money. Roads, airfields and clinics built for tourism serve residents all year, and the contact gives young people reasons to learn languages and skills at home.
The case against is serious and must be granted. Trekking routes carry waste that cannot rot at altitude, the peak season crowds trails and squares while the rest of the year stands empty, prices rise beyond what residents of a famous town can pay, ceremonies performed for ticket holders lose their meaning, and a single earthquake or a period of travel restrictions can empty every lodge at a few days' notice.
But each of these harms answers to management rather than to abstention. Permits and quotas thin the crowds, waste deposits and carry out rules clear the trails, homestays and local ownership keep the earnings at home, and a diversified economy limits the damage when visitors stop coming.
I conclude that tourism deserves the favourable verdict, with the condition attached. It should be treated as a resource that can be used up, like a forest, and managed with the same care, so that the country still has something left to show the visitors who come after these ones.
What is peace? Is peace merely the absence of war? Explain briefly.
Peace is the condition in which people settle their differences without violence and can live, work and speak without fear of it. Peace is not merely the absence of war, though the absence of war is where it begins. It is usual to distin...
The cost of war is never confined to the battlefield. Explain.
The first cost beyond the battlefield falls on civilians. In modern conflicts their casualties are commonly the greater number, and families who leave home become refugees if they cross a border and displaced persons if they do not, ofte...
Explain how an armed conflict is usually brought to an end, and what must follow the signing of an agreement.
No two wars end alike, but the process has a shape. The fighting is halted by a truce or a ceasefire, often arranged by a mediator whom both sides accept, and negotiation follows. If it succeeds, a treaty records what each party has unde...
Mention any four ways in which ordinary civilians suffer during a war.
The first is direct harm. Civilians are killed and injured by fighting they did not choose, and in modern conflicts they usually account for the larger share of the casualties.
The second is displacement. Families abandon their homes and land to reach safety, becoming refugees in another country or displaced persons within their own, and many lose everything they could not carry.
The third is hunger and sickness. Markets close, fields are left unharvested, and clinics and water systems are destroyed, so shortage and disease spread even in districts where no battle was fought.
The fourth is the loss of schooling and of livelihood. Children stay out of school for years and never recover the learning, while shops, workshops and daily wage work disappear.
To these should be added the injury to the mind, since the grief and mistrust left by a war outlive the fighting by a generation.
Give the meanings of the following words and use each in a sentence of your own: ceasefire, reconciliation, amnesty.
Ceasefire: an agreement between opposing sides to stop fighting, usually for a stated period or while talks are held. A ceasefire was agreed so that relief supplies could reach the villages in the hills. Reconciliation: the rebuilding of...
Rewrite or correct the following sentences as directed.
(a) Join using although: The ceasefire held. The talks made no progress. (b) Rewrite using despite: Although the agreement was signed, the fighting continued in some districts. (c) Correct the error: Despite the talks failed, the mediator stayed in the country. (d) Correct the error: Although the treaty was signed, but the soldiers kept their weapons. (e) Join the two sentences with however, punctuating it correctly: The agreement ended the fighting. It did not remove the causes of the conflict.
(a) Although the ceasefire held, the talks made no progress. (b) Despite the signing of the agreement, the fighting continued in some districts. (Also acceptable: Despite the agreement's being signed, or Despite the fact that the agreeme...
What can a school and its students do to build a culture of peace? Suggest measures and justify them.
The first measure begins where students actually quarrel. A school can train a small group of senior students as mediators for disputes in the playground and the classroom, because a child who learns to settle a quarrel by listening and ...
"Peace is far harder to build than war is to begin." Discuss, supporting your view with reasons and examples.
Wars are begun quickly and ended slowly. A decision taken in a single week can take a generation to undo. In my view the statement is true, and the reason it matters is practical: if building peace is the harder task, it deserves more preparation and more patience than societies usually give it.
The first reason is that war needs only one side and peace needs both. A single group that decides to fight can compel everyone around it to respond, whereas a settlement requires every party to accept terms, to trust that the others will keep them, and to persuade its own followers that the terms are not a defeat. That is why negotiation takes months where the first attack took hours.
The second reason is that what war destroys cannot be rebuilt at the speed it was destroyed. A bridge, a clinic or a school falls in a day and is replaced over years, the debts outlast the conflict, and a generation of children who lost their schooling never quite recovers it.
The third and strongest reason is that the deepest damage is to trust. Reconciliation asks people who have lost to live beside those they hold responsible, and that is the slowest work of all. It needs the truth established first, then compensation and accountability for serious wrongs, and only after that the ordinary contact of markets and workplaces that makes neighbours of strangers again. Nepal came through an armed conflict ended by a peace agreement, and the transitional justice process set up afterwards has shown how long that reckoning takes even where the fighting has stopped.
There is a case on the other side and it should be granted. Beginning a war is not easy either, since it takes money, weapons and the persuasion of many people that violence is necessary, and a ceasefire can sometimes be arranged in days when both sides are exhausted.
Even so, the objection does not overturn the claim. What can be arranged in days is the silence of the guns, which is peace in its narrowest sense. Peace in its fuller sense, where the reasons for fighting have been addressed, has no short version. I conclude that the statement holds, and that its lesson is patience: a society should be as slow to begin a war as it will be obliged to be in repairing one.