Elective Course in English

                                UNDERSTANDING PROSE (BEGE – 105)

                                            Based on Blocks 1-7

                                                                                                                        Programme : BDP

                                                                                                Course Code: BEGE-105/2019-20

                                                                                                                    Maximum Marks: 100

Answer All Questions

1. Comment on the dominant variety of prose (narrative, expository or descriptive) present in each of the following passages. Write a brief critical appreciation of each passage in about 250 words each:

a) Smoking is hazardous and the dangers of smoking are very serious. It can lead to both major and minor health problems for smokers. A smoker inhales a substance containing about 43 cancer-causing compounds besides four hundred other toxins including nicotine and tar. Nicotine leads to smoking addiction. Tar clogs the lungs and inhibits the body’s capacity to breathe; it causes lung and throat cancer, heart disease, emphysema, bronchitis, and lung disorders. Another thing is people who don’t smoke also suffer the effects of passive smoking through breathing in “second-hand smoke” from smoker’s cigarettes. There may still be smoke particles in the air even if it doesn’t seem smoky. One of the dangers of passive smoking is that particles from smoke in the air are smaller than in smoke drawn directly from a cigarette and can penetrate deeper into the lungs. A non-smoker who lives with a smoker may be exposed to about 1% of their tobacco smoke from passive smoking. This can increase their chances of developing lung cancer or dying from a heart attack. The same applies to people who work in a smoky atmosphere. These are the reasons why I think that smoking is very dangerous.

b) The sun was still red and large; the sky above cloudless, and light blue glaze poured over the baking clay. But close over the ground, a dirty grey haze hovered. As they followed the lane towards the sea they came to a place where, yesterday, a fair-sized spring had bubbled up by the roadside. Now it was dry again, although gurgling inwardly to itself. But the group of children was hot, far too hot to speak to one another and they sat on their ponies as loosely as possible, longing for the sea. The morning advanced. The heated air grew quite easily hotter, as if from some enormous furnace from which it could draw at will. Bullocks only shifted their stinging feet when they could bear the soil no longer; even the insects were too lethargic to pipe, the basking lizards hid and panted. It was so still you could have heard the least buzz a mile off. Not a naked fish would willingly move his tail. The ponies advanced because they must. The children ceased even to think.

c) One of my favorite family experiences was when I went to see Anne Frank’s ( a Jewish victim of the Nazi persecution during World War II) hideout in Amsterdam, Holland. I had read Anne’s published diary when I was younger, so I was extremely thrilled to actually have the chance to see where she and her family hid from the Germans for so many months. I walked up the stairs of an apartment building and into a room with only a bookshelf in it. From what I remembered from reading the diary, there was a doorknob behind the books. I found the doorknob and turned it and there was the secret annex. When I stepped into the room behind the bookshelf, I felt as if I had stepped 5 back into history. I found Anne’s room still with pictures of her favorite celebrities on her walls. The Frank family’s furniture was still placed where they had left them in the rooms, everything just as described in the diary. I toured each room in awe of actually seeing how they had lived, yet with sadness to know how it all ended. Anne’s diary was no longer just a book to me, but a truly heartfelt, emotional life story was written by a girl I felt I almost knew.        (10x3=30)

2. Comment on the significance of the title ‘Misery’ by Anton Chekhov, with a detailed reference to the story. (10)

3. Attempt a character sketch of Urmi from the novel The Binding Vine. (10)

4. Identify examples of sarcasm, irony, and pathos in the essay “On Seeing England for the First Time.” (10)

5. Explain the theme of the essay “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig”.                                        (10)

6. Laurence displays a moral responsibility in her speech “My Final Hour”. What are her major concerns? (10)

7. Comment on the art and craft of writing a diary with reference to The Diary of a Young Girl. (10)

8. Define and describe autobiography as a form of prose with reference to Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth. (10)