Tribhuvan University

Question Setting Guidelines

Compulsory English I

Level: BA
Year: First Full Marks: 70
Subject: Compulsory English—Paper I Pass marks: 28
Course Title: Reading and Writing in English Time: 3 Hours
Course Code: ENGL 401

Long Question

Answer any 02 out of 03 questions. 02x15=30

1. An essay question from outside Patterns of College Writing, and sometimes based on ―Writing
Workshop‖, but on the genres taught in this book.
2. Application of four levels of interacting with a text from outside the prescribed course books.
3. Heuristics of reading and writing from Patterns of College Writing.

Questions from Reading

Answer any 04 out of 05 questions. 04x10 = 40

4. Note–making of a reading passage from Flax Golden Tales or elsewhere.

5. Comprehension passage from outside the prescribed books. Five questions (to be answered
in full) will follow the passage. This question will be compulsory.
6. Questions from Patterns of College Writing
i. Literal: 1 question for 02 marks
ii. Purpose & Audience: 1 question for 04
iii. Style question: 1 question for 04 marks
7. A medium length question (part-wise) from either Patterns of College Writing or Flax Golden
Tales.
8. Question on either the vocabulary (meaning and use in a sentence in the sense of the meaning
given) or terms related to writing—07 items to be given but only 05 to be answered.

Internal evaluation 30

Total of 30 marks of the internal evaluations can be divided into these categories.

Attendance and Participation 05

Project, Presentation, Portfolio* 05
Mid-term 10
End-term 10

* Any writing project that assesses the progress of a student as a writer over the year. The final essay,
FOUR to FIVE pages in length, must follow the MLA documenting style as given in Patterns of College
Writing.
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 Tribhuvan University
Model Question Set
Compulsory English I

Level: BA
Year: First Full Marks: 70
Subject: Compulsory English –Paper I Pass marks: 28
Course Title: Reading and Writing in English Time: 3 Hours
Course Code: ENGL 401

Candidates are required to give their answers in their own words as far as practicable. The figures in the
margin indicate full marks.

Section A: Long Question 02x15=30

Answer any TWO questions, but no. 2 is compulsory.
1. Write an essay in which you describe a food that is as meaningful for you as pulao is for Lahiri. Make
sure that your essay has a clear thesis and that it includes at least one reference to Jhumpa Lahiri‘s
essay. Be sure that you document all the materials that you borrow from Lahiri‘s essay.
2. Apply four levels of reading to Anton Chekhov‘s story ―The Student‖ given below.

At first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by
something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and
the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get
dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank
into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the
forest. There was a whiff of winter.

Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, returning home from
shooting, kept walking on the path by the water-logged meadows. His fingers were numb and his face
was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed
the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening
darkness was falling more rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The
only light was one gleaming in the widows‘ gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away,
and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student
remembered that, as he had left the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the
entryway, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday
nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he
thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the of Ivan the Terrible and Peter,
and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs
with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same
feeling of oppression—all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand
years would make life no better. And he did not want to go home.

The gardens were called the widows‘ because they were kept by two widows, mother and daughter. A
campfire was burning brightly with a crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the ploughed
earth. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a man‘s coat, was standing by and looking
thoughtfully into the fire; her daughter Lukerya, a little pockmarked woman with a stupid-looking
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face, was sitting on the ground, washing a cauldron and spoons. Apparently they had just had supper.
There was a sound of men‘s voices; it was the laborers watering their horses at the river.

―Here you have winter back again,‖ said the student, going up to the campfire. ―Good evening.‖

Vasilisa started, but at once recognized him and smiled cordially.

―I did not know you; God bless you,‖ she said. ―You‘ll be rich.‖

They talked. Vasilisa, a woman of experience who had been in service with the gentry, first as a wet-
nurse, afterwards as a children‘s nurse expressed herself with refinement, and a soft, sedate smile
never left her face; her daughter Lukerya, a village peasant woman who had been beaten by her
husband, simply screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing, and she had a strange expression
like that of a deaf-mute.

―At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself,‖ said the student, stretching out his hands to
the fire, ―so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An
utterly dismal long night!‖

He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and asked:

―No doubt you have heard the reading of the Twelve Apostles?‖

―Yes, I have,‖ answered Vasilisa.

―If you remember, at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, ‗I am ready to go with Thee into darkness
and unto death.‘ And our Lord answered him thus: ‗I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock croweth
thou wilt have denied Me thrice.‘ After the supper Jesus went through the agony of death in the
garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and faint, his eyelids were heavy and he could
not struggle against sleep. He fell asleep. Then you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and
betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest and beat Him, while Peter,
exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm, hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful
was just going to happen on earth, followed behind. He loved Jesus passionately, intensely, and
now he saw from far off how He was beaten. ―

Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.

―They came to the high priest‘s,‖ he went on; ―they began to question Jesus, and meantime the
laborers made a fire in the yard as it was cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood with them
near the fire and warmed himself as I am doing. A woman, seeing him, said: ‗He was with Jesus,
too‘—that is as much as to say that he, too, should be taken to be questioned. And all the laborers that
were standing near the fire must have looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he was confused
and said: ‗I don‘t know Him.‘ A little while after again someone recognized him as one of Jesus‘
disciples and said: ‗Thou, too, art one of them,‘ but again he denied it. And for the third time someone
turned to him: ‗Why, did I not see thee with Him in the garden today?‘ For the third time he denied it.
And immediately after that time the cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus,
remembered the words He had said to him in the evening He remembered, he came to himself,
went out of the yard and wept bitterly—bitterly. In the Gospel it is written: ‗He went out and wept
bitterly.‘ I imagine it: the still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly audible, smothered
sobbing ‖
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 The student sighed and sank into thought. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly gave a gulp, big tears
flowed freely down her cheeks, and she screened her face from the fire with her sleeve as though
ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya, staring immovably at the student, flushed crimson, and her
expression became strained and heavy like that of someone enduring intense pain.

The laborers came back from the river, and one of them riding a horse was quite near, and the light
from the fire quivered upon him. The student said good-night to the widows and went on. And again
the darkness was about him and his fingers began to be numb. A cruel wind was blowing, winter
really had come back and it did not feel as though Easter would be the day after tomorrow.

Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed tears all that had happened to Peter
the night before the Crucifixion must have some relation to her. . . .

He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the darkness and no figures could be seen
near it now. The student thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been
troubled, it was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had happened nineteen
centuries ago, had a relation to the present—to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all
people. The old woman had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter
was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter‘s soul.

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. ―The past,‖ he
thought, ―is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.‖ And it
seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other
quivered.

When he crossed the river by the ferryboat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and
towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and
beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had
continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human
life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigor—he was only twenty-two—
and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took
possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvelous, and full of lofty
meaning.

3. Discuss, with at least three suitable examples for each, how a student-writer can edit a draft for the
following:
a. Awkward phrasing
b. Concise sentences
c. Varied sentences
d. Word choice
Section B: Short Question
Answer any FOUR questions, but no. 5 is compulsory. 04x10=40
4. Make notes of the following passage by using headings and sub-headings:

The prejudice against Nnaemeka‘s marriage was not confined to his little village. In Lagos, especially
among his people who worked there, it showed itself in a different way. Their women, when they met
at their village meeting, were not hostile to Nene. Rather, they paid her such excessive deference as to

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 make her feel she was not one of them. But as time went on, Nene gradually broke through some of
this prejudice and even began to make friends among them. Slowly and grudgingly they began to
admit that she kept her home much better than most of them.

The story eventually got to the little village in the heart of the Ibo country that Nnaemeka and his
young wife were a most happy couple. But his father was one of the few people in the village who
knew nothing about this. He always displayed so much temper whenever his son‘s name was
mentioned that everyone avoided it in his presence. By a tremendous effort of will he had succeeded
in pushing his son to the back of his mind. The strain had nearly killed him but he had persevered,
and won.

Then one day he received a letter from Nene, and in spite of himself he began to glance through it
perfunctorily until all of a sudden the expression on his face changed and he began to read more
carefully.

Our two sons, from the day they learnt that they have a grandfather, have insisted on being taken to
him. I find it impossible to tell them that you will not see them. I implore you to allow Nnaemeka to
bring them home for a short time during his leave next month. I shall remain here in Lagos . . .

The old man at once felt the resolution he had built up over so many years falling in. He was telling
himself that he must not give in. He tried to steal his heart against all emotional appeals. It was a
reenactment of that other struggle. He leaned against a window and looked out. The sky was overcast
with heavy black clouds and a high wind began to blow, filling the air with dust and dry leaves. It was
one of those rare occasions when even Nature takes a hand in a human fight. Very soon it began to
rain, the first rain in the year. It came down in large sharp drops and was accompanied by the
lightning and thunder which mark a change of season. Okeke was trying hard not to think of his two
grandsons. But he knew he was now fighting a losing battle. He tried to hum a favorite hymn but the
pattering of large raindrops on the roof broke up the tune. His mind immediately returned to the
children. How could he shut his door against them? By a curious mental process he imagined them
standing, sad and forsaken, under the harsh angry weather—shut out from his house.

That night he hardly slept, from remorse—and a vague fear that he might die without making it up to
them.

5. Read the following passage and answer the questions given under it:

Sunlight flooded the cabin as the plane changed course. It was a bright, clear morning. Robyn looked
out of the window as England slid slowly by beneath them: cities and towns, their street plans like
printed circuits, scattered over a mosaic of tiny fields, connected by the thin wires of railways and
motorways. Hard to imagine at this height all the noise and commotion going on down there.
Factories, shops, offices, schools, beginning the working day. People crammed into rush hour buses
and trains, or sitting at the wheels of their cars in the traffic jams, or washing up breakfast things in
the kitchens of pebble-dashed semis. All inhabiting their own little worlds, oblivious of how they
fitted into the total picture. The housewife, switching on her electric kettle to make another cup of tea,
gave no thought to the immense complex of operations that made that simple action possible: the
building and maintenance of the power station that produced the electricity, the mining of coal or
pumping of oil to fuel the generators, the laying of miles of cable to carry the current to her house, the
digging and smelting and milling of ore or bauxite into sheets of steel or aluminum, the cutting and
pressing and welding of the metal into the kettle's shell, spout and handle, the assembling of these
parts with scores of other components—coils, screws, nuts, bolts, washers, rivets, wires, springs,
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 rubber insulation, plastic trimmings; then the packaging of the kettle, the advertising of the kettle, the
marketing of the kettle to wholesale and retail outlets, the transportation of the kettle to warehouses
and shops, the calculation of its price, and the distribution of its added value between all the myriad
people and agencies concerned in its production. The housewife gave no thought to all this as she
switched on her kettle. Neither had Robyn until this moment, and it would never have occurred to her
to do so before she met Vic Wilcox.

a. Where does Robyn describe the scenic beauty of the landscape from?
b. How does the passage define and illustrate the primary sector of economy?
c. How does the passage explain the secondary sector of economy?
d. How does the passage describe the tertiary sector of economy?
e. What could be the next paragraph about?

6. Answer the following questions briefly and to the point:

a. What does Cox mean when he says that the end of air-conditioning will bring paperweights back
to American offices? (02 marks)
b. What preconceptions about Chinese mothers does Chua think Westerners have? Do you think she
is right about this? (04 marks)
c. Smith-Yackel could have outlined her mother`s life without framing it with the telephone
conversation. Why do you think she includes this frame? (04 marks)
7. Is the essay ―Why Chinese Mothers are Superior‖ a point-by-point comparison, a subject-by-subject
comparison, or a combination of the two organizational strategies? Why does Amy Chua arrange her
comparison the way she does?
8. Give the meanings of any FIVE of the following words and then use each of them in sentences of
your own (in the same sense of meaning you have given):
lurid, tangible, connotation, niche, suffice, connoting, gusto

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