English – Yearwise Questions – Precis Writing – W.B.C.S. Mains Examination.

Continue Reading English – Yearwise Questions – Precis Writing – W.B.C.S. Mains Examination.

WBCS Main Question Paper – 2019

4. Write a precis of the following passage and add suitable title : 35 +

5 = 40

The chief record of Wordsworth’s College life is to be found in ‘The

Prelude’. Wordworth did not distinguish himself as a scholar and if his

life had any incidents, they were of that interior kind which rarely

appear in biography, though they may be of controlling influence upon

the life. Hes speaks of reading Shaucer, Spencer and Milton while at

Cambridge but no reflection from them is visible in his earliest

published poems. The greater part of his vacations was spent in his

native Lake-Country, where he is only sister, Dorothy, was the

companion of his rambles. She was a woman of large, natural

endowment, chiefly of the respective kind and had march to do with

the formation and tendency of the poet’s mind. It was she who called

forth the shyer sensibilities of his nature and taught an originally harsh

and austere imagination to surround itself with fancy and feeling, as

the rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns. Though the greater

part of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical conscience to him.

WBCS Main Question Paper – 2018

4. Write a precis of the following passage and add a suitable title :

40

The balance of nature is a very elaborate and very delicate system of

checks and counter-checks. It is continually being altered as climate

change, as new organism evolve, as animals or plants permeate to

new areas. But the alterations have in the past, for the most part, been

slow, whereas with the arrival of civilized man, their speed has been

multiplied manifold.

Everywhere man is altering the balance of nature. He is facilitating the

spread of plants and animals into new regions, sometimes

deliberately, sometimes unconsciously. He is covering huge areas with

new kinds of plants or with houses, factories, slag-heaps and other

products of his civilization. He exterminates some spaces on a large

scale, but favours the multiplication of others. In brief, he has done

more in five thousand years to alter the biological aspects of the planet

than has nature in five million. (145 words)

WBCS Main Question Paper – 2017

4. Make a precis of the following passage and add a suitable title: 40

Culture is a forbidding word. I have to use it, knowing of none better to

describe the various beautiful and interesting objects which man have

made in the past and handed down to us and which some of us are

hoping to hand on. Many people despise them. They argue with force

that cultural stuff takes up a great deal of room and time and better be

scrapped.

Cultivated people are like drops in ocean. They mix easily and

generally with other drops, for those exclusive days are over when

cultivated people made only cultivated friends and became tongue-tied

or terror-struck in the presence of anyone whose make-up was

different from their own. Culture, thank goodness, is no longer a social

asset, it can no longer be employed either as a barrier against the

mob or as a ladder into the aristocracy.

All the same we are a drop in the ocean. Few people share our

enjoyment so far. Strictly between ourselves and keeping our limited

circulation in mind, let up put our heads together and consider for a

moment our special problem, our special blessings, our special woes.

No one need listen us who does want to. We whisper in the corner of a

world which is full of others’ noises and louder ones.

Come closer, our problem, as I see it is what We have got worth

passing on. What we have is (roughly speaking) a little knowledge

about books, pictures, tunes, and a little skill in their interpretation.

Seated beside our grass-fires and beneath our electric bulbs, we

inherit a tradition which has lasted for about three thousand years.

WBCS Main Question Paper – 2016

4. Make a precis of the following passage and add a suitable title. 40

In reality, the soldier who is engaged in armed combat in a national

war deliberately measures from day to day the sum of all degradation

inflicted upon many by colonial oppression. The man of action has

sometimes the exhausting impression that he must restore the whole

of his people that he must bring every one of them up out of the pit

and out of the shadows. He very often sees that his task is not only to

hunt down the enemy forces but also to overcome the kernel of

despair which has hardened in at the native’s being. The period of

oppression is painful, but the conflict ; by reinstating the downtrodden,

sets on foot a process of reintegration which is fertile and decisive in

the extreme. A people’s victorious fight not only consecrates the

triumph of its rights ; it also gives to that people consistence,

coherence and homogeneity. For colonialism has not simply

depersonalized the individual it has colonized; the depersonalization is

equally felt in the collective sphere, on the level of social structures.

The colonizes people find that they are reduced to a body of

individuals who only find cohesion when in the presence of colonizing

nation.

The fight carried on by a people for its liberation leads it, according the

circumstances, either to refuse or else to explode the so-called truths

which have been established in its consciousness by the colonial civil

administration, by the military occupation, and by economic

exploitation. Armed conflict alone can really drive out these falsehoods

created in man which force into inferiority the liveliest minds among us

and which, literally, mutilate us.

WBCS Main Question Paper – 2015

4. Make a precis of the following passage and add a suitable title. 40

I quite understand that food and the utensils to eat it out of are both

needful to man. But where there is a “shortage of food, a parsimony in

re gard to utensils also becomes necessary. To make the paraphernalia

of our Education so expensive that Education itself becomes difficult of

attain ment would be like squandering all one’s money in buying

money-bags.

We in the East have had to arrive our own solution of the problem of

life. We have, as far as possible, made our food and clothing unburden

some; and this our very climate has taught us to do. We require

openings in the walls more than the walls themselves. Light and air

have more to do with our wearing apparel than the weavers’ loom. The

sun makes for us the heat-producing factors which elsewhere are

required from food-stuffs. All these natural advantages have molded

our life to a particular shape, which I cannot believe it will be profitable

to ignore in the case of our education.

I do not seek to glorify poverty. But simplicity is of greater price than

the appendages of luxury. The simplicity of which I speak is not merely

the effect of a lack of superfluity : it is one of the signs of perfection.

When this dawns on mankind, the unhealthy fog which now

besmirches civilization will be lifted. It is for lack of this simplicity that

the necessaries of life have become so rare and costly.

Most things in the civilized world, such as eating and merry-making,

education and culture, administration and litigation, occupy more than

their legitimate space. Much of their burden is needless; and in

bearing it civilized man may be showing great strength, but little skill.

To the gods, viewing this from on high, it must seem like the

floundering of a giant who has got out of his depth and knows not how

to swim. (317 words)

WBCS Main Question Paper – 2014

2. Make a precis of the following passage and add an appropriate title

: 40

Not a few of our troubles are the result of acting before thinking; we do

our thinking afterwards – and too late. It would be difficult to reckon

how many friendships have been broken up simply because one of the

friends did not use his head. He ought to have known; he did not

know, but he simply did not think; and what he did or said cannot be

undone or unsaid. Afterwards we recall the matter and wonder why we

were such fools; and then we get out and play the same fool trick for

the thousand – and – first time. A little thinking might save a thousand

useless regrets.

It is a difficult lesson to learn, but it can be mastered. It will not be

easy, but it can be done, and it will repay a thousand fold all the labour

necessary for its accomplishment. To learn to think just before we

speak, just before we act, is something which thousands never learn,

and all their life time they regret the fact because of its inevitable

consequences; and yet they might have learnt the lesson in early life

and have saved themselves and their friends much necessary worry.

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