Reading Comprehension

What, according to the passage, is the essence of an essay?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

There is a pleasant story of an itinerant sign-painter who while going his rounds came to a village inn upon whose signboard he had had his eye for some months and had watched with increasing hope and delight its rapid progress to blurred and faded dimness. To his horror he found a brand-new vanished sign. He surveyed it with disgust, and said to the innkeeper, who stood nervously by hoping for a professional compliment, ‘This looks as if someone had been doing it himself.’
That sentence holds within it the key to the whole mystery of essay-writing. An essay is a thing which someone does himself; and the point of the essay is not the subject, for any subject will suffice, but the charm of personality. It must concern itself with something ‘jolly’, as the schoolboy says, something smelt, heard, seen, perceived, invented, thought, but the essential thing is that the writer shall have formed his own impression, and that it shall have taken shape in his own mind; and the charm of the essay depends upon the charm of the mind that has conceived and recorded the impression. It will be seen, then, that the essay need not concern itself with anything definite; it need not have an intellectual or a philosophical or a religious or a humourous motif; but equally none of these subjects are ruled out. The only thing necessary is that the thing or the thought should be vividly apprehended, enjoyed, felt to be beautiful, and expressed with a certain gusto. It need conform to no particular rules. All literature answers to something in life, some habitual form of human expression. The stage imitates life, calling in the services of the eye and the ear; there is the narrative of the teller of tales or the minstrel; the song, the letter, the talk—all forms of human expression and communication have their antitypes in literature. The essay is the reverie, the frame of mind in which a man says, in the words of the old song, ‘Says I to myself, says I’.
It is generally supposed that Montaigne is the first writer who wrote what may technically be called essays. His pieces are partly autobiographical, partly speculative, and to a great extent ethical. But the roots of his writings lie far back in literary history. He owed a great part of his inspiration to Cicero, who treated of abstract topics in a conversational way with a romantic background; and this he owed to Plato, whose dialogues undoubtedly contain the germ of both the novel and the essay. Plato is in truth far more the forerunner of the novelist than of the philosopher. He made a background of life, he peopled his scenes with bright boys and amiable elders—oh that all scenes were so peopled!—and he discussed ethical and speculative problems of life and character with a vital rather than with a philosophical interest. Plato’s dialogues would be essays but for the fact that they have a dramatic colouring, while the essence of essay is soliloquy. But in the writings of Cicero the dramatic interest is but slight, and the whole thing approaches far more nearly to the essay than to the novel. Probably Cicero supplied to his readers the function both of the essayist and the preacher, and fed the needs of so-called thoughtful readers by dallying, in a fashion which it is hardly unjust to call twaddling, with familiar ethical problems of conduct and character. The charm of Montaigne is the charm of personality—frankness, gusto, acute observation, lively acquaintance with men and manners. He is ashamed of recording nothing that interested him; and a certain discreet shamelessness must always be the characteristic of the essayist, for the essence of his art is to say what has pleased him without too prudently considering whether it is worthy of the attention of the well-informed mind. (AC Benson’s The Art of the Essayist)

On removal of which of the following, the dialogues of Plato, according to the passage, could become essays?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

There is a pleasant story of an itinerant sign-painter who while going his rounds came to a village inn upon whose signboard he had had his eye for some months and had watched with increasing hope and delight its rapid progress to blurred and faded dimness. To his horror he found a brand-new vanished sign. He surveyed it with disgust, and said to the innkeeper, who stood nervously by hoping for a professional compliment, ‘This looks as if someone had been doing it himself.’
That sentence holds within it the key to the whole mystery of essay-writing. An essay is a thing which someone does himself; and the point of the essay is not the subject, for any subject will suffice, but the charm of personality. It must concern itself with something ‘jolly’, as the schoolboy says, something smelt, heard, seen, perceived, invented, thought, but the essential thing is that the writer shall have formed his own impression, and that it shall have taken shape in his own mind; and the charm of the essay depends upon the charm of the mind that has conceived and recorded the impression. It will be seen, then, that the essay need not concern itself with anything definite; it need not have an intellectual or a philosophical or a religious or a humourous motif; but equally none of these subjects are ruled out. The only thing necessary is that the thing or the thought should be vividly apprehended, enjoyed, felt to be beautiful, and expressed with a certain gusto. It need conform to no particular rules. All literature answers to something in life, some habitual form of human expression. The stage imitates life, calling in the services of the eye and the ear; there is the narrative of the teller of tales or the minstrel; the song, the letter, the talk—all forms of human expression and communication have their antitypes in literature. The essay is the reverie, the frame of mind in which a man says, in the words of the old song, ‘Says I to myself, says I’.
It is generally supposed that Montaigne is the first writer who wrote what may technically be called essays. His pieces are partly autobiographical, partly speculative, and to a great extent ethical. But the roots of his writings lie far back in literary history. He owed a great part of his inspiration to Cicero, who treated of abstract topics in a conversational way with a romantic background; and this he owed to Plato, whose dialogues undoubtedly contain the germ of both the novel and the essay. Plato is in truth far more the forerunner of the novelist than of the philosopher. He made a background of life, he peopled his scenes with bright boys and amiable elders—oh that all scenes were so peopled!—and he discussed ethical and speculative problems of life and character with a vital rather than with a philosophical interest. Plato’s dialogues would be essays but for the fact that they have a dramatic colouring, while the essence of essay is soliloquy. But in the writings of Cicero the dramatic interest is but slight, and the whole thing approaches far more nearly to the essay than to the novel. Probably Cicero supplied to his readers the function both of the essayist and the preacher, and fed the needs of so-called thoughtful readers by dallying, in a fashion which it is hardly unjust to call twaddling, with familiar ethical problems of conduct and character. The charm of Montaigne is the charm of personality—frankness, gusto, acute observation, lively acquaintance with men and manners. He is ashamed of recording nothing that interested him; and a certain discreet shamelessness must always be the characteristic of the essayist, for the essence of his art is to say what has pleased him without too prudently considering whether it is worthy of the attention of the well-informed mind. (AC Benson’s The Art of the Essayist)

Where, according to the passage, lay the real solution of the problem that utopian socialism could not indicate?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

Over one-third of the population of the globe has done away with capitalist social relations and has either built or is building socialism. Progressive forces in all the advanced capitalist countries are working for socialism. More and more nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, just emerged from colonial and semi-colonial oppression, rejected the capitalist way and set their sights on socialism.
Capitalism stands exposed as a social system that has brought mankind immense calamities. Exploitation of millions upon millions of working people by a handful of financial and industrial magnates; colonialism, ruthlessly oppressing and decimating the population of the colonies; two world wars, which took tens of millions of human lives, and a third world war being prepared by the ultra-reactionary circles of the capitalist states which threatens mankind with disastrous consequences—such is the face of capitalism as it stands in the dock of history. 
Today’s broad and mighty movement towards socialism is a natural and inevitable process, which explains the tremendous interest we find all over the globe in scientific socialist theory.
This collection of Lenin’s writings gives readers the opportunity to find out about the main propositions of scientific socialism and to understand the transition from pre-Marxian unscientific utopian socialist views to the science worked out by Marx, whose conclusions are backed up by profound and comprehensive theoretical analysis of social relations and have been borne out by the whole course of history.
What then is socialism?
The term was first used by the French utopian socialist Pierre Leroux in 1833. Socialism is a society based on social property in the means of production, without antagonistic classes or exploitation. Visions of such a society had tantalized the minds of men long before Leroux wrote about it, and were a reflection of the passionate protest of the oppressed and exploited masses against their intolerable condition.
Humanity’s best minds—the Englishman Thomas Moore in the 16th century, the Italian Tommaso Campanella in the 17th century, the Frenchmen Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, the Englishman Robert Owen and the Russian Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky in the 19th century—proclaimed the need to restructure society on socialist lines and gave much thought to what it should be like. Many of their projections are naïve and unacceptable in the light of our own day, but they have also made some brilliant predictions.
The weakest side of these utopian socialist doctrines was how to go about realising this social ideal and whether it was at all possible. There the utopian socialists proved to be quite helpless. They held that all the defects of capitalism sprang from private property, and they were quite right. But they had no answer as to how private property came to be established in human society, or how it was to be eliminated. They confined themselves to spreading socialist ideas, appealing to the powers that be, and so on. The main flaw of the utopian socialism was the inability to find the way to socialism and failure to realize that the struggle for socialism must rest on a definite social force. Utopian socialism, said Lenin, “criticized capitalist society, it condemned … it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation. But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution”.
Where was it to be found? There was only one answer: the forces and means of transforming society were to be sought in society itself. But this required an understanding of the laws which govern society, in general, and capitalist society in particular. (Extracted from the articles and speeches of Lenin on Utopian and Scientific Socialism)

Which of the following cannot be considered as the view of the author of this passage?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

Over one-third of the population of the globe has done away with capitalist social relations and has either built or is building socialism. Progressive forces in all the advanced capitalist countries are working for socialism. More and more nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, just emerged from colonial and semi-colonial oppression, rejected the capitalist way and set their sights on socialism.
Capitalism stands exposed as a social system that has brought mankind immense calamities. Exploitation of millions upon millions of working people by a handful of financial and industrial magnates; colonialism, ruthlessly oppressing and decimating the population of the colonies; two world wars, which took tens of millions of human lives, and a third world war being prepared by the ultra-reactionary circles of the capitalist states which threatens mankind with disastrous consequences—such is the face of capitalism as it stands in the dock of history. 
Today’s broad and mighty movement towards socialism is a natural and inevitable process, which explains the tremendous interest we find all over the globe in scientific socialist theory.
This collection of Lenin’s writings gives readers the opportunity to find out about the main propositions of scientific socialism and to understand the transition from pre-Marxian unscientific utopian socialist views to the science worked out by Marx, whose conclusions are backed up by profound and comprehensive theoretical analysis of social relations and have been borne out by the whole course of history.
What then is socialism?
The term was first used by the French utopian socialist Pierre Leroux in 1833. Socialism is a society based on social property in the means of production, without antagonistic classes or exploitation. Visions of such a society had tantalized the minds of men long before Leroux wrote about it, and were a reflection of the passionate protest of the oppressed and exploited masses against their intolerable condition.
Humanity’s best minds—the Englishman Thomas Moore in the 16th century, the Italian Tommaso Campanella in the 17th century, the Frenchmen Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, the Englishman Robert Owen and the Russian Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky in the 19th century—proclaimed the need to restructure society on socialist lines and gave much thought to what it should be like. Many of their projections are naïve and unacceptable in the light of our own day, but they have also made some brilliant predictions.
The weakest side of these utopian socialist doctrines was how to go about realising this social ideal and whether it was at all possible. There the utopian socialists proved to be quite helpless. They held that all the defects of capitalism sprang from private property, and they were quite right. But they had no answer as to how private property came to be established in human society, or how it was to be eliminated. They confined themselves to spreading socialist ideas, appealing to the powers that be, and so on. The main flaw of the utopian socialism was the inability to find the way to socialism and failure to realize that the struggle for socialism must rest on a definite social force. Utopian socialism, said Lenin, “criticized capitalist society, it condemned … it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation. But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution”.
Where was it to be found? There was only one answer: the forces and means of transforming society were to be sought in society itself. But this required an understanding of the laws which govern society, in general, and capitalist society in particular. (Extracted from the articles and speeches of Lenin on Utopian and Scientific Socialism)

According to the passage, it can well be inferred that the forces that are working for capitalism are

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

Over one-third of the population of the globe has done away with capitalist social relations and has either built or is building socialism. Progressive forces in all the advanced capitalist countries are working for socialism. More and more nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, just emerged from colonial and semi-colonial oppression, rejected the capitalist way and set their sights on socialism.
Capitalism stands exposed as a social system that has brought mankind immense calamities. Exploitation of millions upon millions of working people by a handful of financial and industrial magnates; colonialism, ruthlessly oppressing and decimating the population of the colonies; two world wars, which took tens of millions of human lives, and a third world war being prepared by the ultra-reactionary circles of the capitalist states which threatens mankind with disastrous consequences—such is the face of capitalism as it stands in the dock of history. 
Today’s broad and mighty movement towards socialism is a natural and inevitable process, which explains the tremendous interest we find all over the globe in scientific socialist theory.
This collection of Lenin’s writings gives readers the opportunity to find out about the main propositions of scientific socialism and to understand the transition from pre-Marxian unscientific utopian socialist views to the science worked out by Marx, whose conclusions are backed up by profound and comprehensive theoretical analysis of social relations and have been borne out by the whole course of history.
What then is socialism?
The term was first used by the French utopian socialist Pierre Leroux in 1833. Socialism is a society based on social property in the means of production, without antagonistic classes or exploitation. Visions of such a society had tantalized the minds of men long before Leroux wrote about it, and were a reflection of the passionate protest of the oppressed and exploited masses against their intolerable condition.
Humanity’s best minds—the Englishman Thomas Moore in the 16th century, the Italian Tommaso Campanella in the 17th century, the Frenchmen Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, the Englishman Robert Owen and the Russian Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky in the 19th century—proclaimed the need to restructure society on socialist lines and gave much thought to what it should be like. Many of their projections are naïve and unacceptable in the light of our own day, but they have also made some brilliant predictions.
The weakest side of these utopian socialist doctrines was how to go about realising this social ideal and whether it was at all possible. There the utopian socialists proved to be quite helpless. They held that all the defects of capitalism sprang from private property, and they were quite right. But they had no answer as to how private property came to be established in human society, or how it was to be eliminated. They confined themselves to spreading socialist ideas, appealing to the powers that be, and so on. The main flaw of the utopian socialism was the inability to find the way to socialism and failure to realize that the struggle for socialism must rest on a definite social force. Utopian socialism, said Lenin, “criticized capitalist society, it condemned … it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation. But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution”.
Where was it to be found? There was only one answer: the forces and means of transforming society were to be sought in society itself. But this required an understanding of the laws which govern society, in general, and capitalist society in particular. (Extracted from the articles and speeches of Lenin on Utopian and Scientific Socialism)

Instead of beginning with a definition at the very outset, the author recounts a story of an itinerant sign-painter. What objective, if any, does the author achieve by this?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

There is a pleasant story of an itinerant sign-painter who while going his rounds came to a village inn upon whose signboard he had had his eye for some months and had watched with increasing hope and delight its rapid progress to blurred and faded dimness. To his horror he found a brand-new vanished sign. He surveyed it with disgust, and said to the innkeeper, who stood nervously by hoping for a professional compliment, ‘This looks as if someone had been doing it himself.’
That sentence holds within it the key to the whole mystery of essay-writing. An essay is a thing which someone does himself; and the point of the essay is not the subject, for any subject will suffice, but the charm of personality. It must concern itself with something ‘jolly’, as the schoolboy says, something smelt, heard, seen, perceived, invented, thought, but the essential thing is that the writer shall have formed his own impression, and that it shall have taken shape in his own mind; and the charm of the essay depends upon the charm of the mind that has conceived and recorded the impression. It will be seen, then, that the essay need not concern itself with anything definite; it need not have an intellectual or a philosophical or a religious or a humourous motif; but equally none of these subjects are ruled out. The only thing necessary is that the thing or the thought should be vividly apprehended, enjoyed, felt to be beautiful, and expressed with a certain gusto. It need conform to no particular rules. All literature answers to something in life, some habitual form of human expression. The stage imitates life, calling in the services of the eye and the ear; there is the narrative of the teller of tales or the minstrel; the song, the letter, the talk—all forms of human expression and communication have their antitypes in literature. The essay is the reverie, the frame of mind in which a man says, in the words of the old song, ‘Says I to myself, says I’.
It is generally supposed that Montaigne is the first writer who wrote what may technically be called essays. His pieces are partly autobiographical, partly speculative, and to a great extent ethical. But the roots of his writings lie far back in literary history. He owed a great part of his inspiration to Cicero, who treated of abstract topics in a conversational way with a romantic background; and this he owed to Plato, whose dialogues undoubtedly contain the germ of both the novel and the essay. Plato is in truth far more the forerunner of the novelist than of the philosopher. He made a background of life, he peopled his scenes with bright boys and amiable elders—oh that all scenes were so peopled!—and he discussed ethical and speculative problems of life and character with a vital rather than with a philosophical interest. Plato’s dialogues would be essays but for the fact that they have a dramatic colouring, while the essence of essay is soliloquy. But in the writings of Cicero the dramatic interest is but slight, and the whole thing approaches far more nearly to the essay than to the novel. Probably Cicero supplied to his readers the function both of the essayist and the preacher, and fed the needs of so-called thoughtful readers by dallying, in a fashion which it is hardly unjust to call twaddling, with familiar ethical problems of conduct and character. The charm of Montaigne is the charm of personality—frankness, gusto, acute observation, lively acquaintance with men and manners. He is ashamed of recording nothing that interested him; and a certain discreet shamelessness must always be the characteristic of the essayist, for the essence of his art is to say what has pleased him without too prudently considering whether it is worthy of the attention of the well-informed mind. (AC Benson’s The Art of the Essayist)

What is the main idea of the passage?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

A survey of language, however superficial, makes it evident that when we speak of style, we have to take into account those qualities of national character which are embodied in national speech. If two men could be born of precisely the same physical, mental, and moral nature, at precisely the same moment of history, and under precisely the same social conditions; and if these men learned different languages in the cradle, and used those languages in after life, they would be unable to deliver exactly the same message to the world through literature. The dominant qualities of each mother-tongue would impose definite limitations on their power of expressing thoughts, however similar or identical those thoughts might be.
We cannot conceive two men born with the same physical, mental, and moral nature, at the same moment, under precisely the same conditions, and using the same language. They would be identical; and everything they uttered would be clothed with exactly the same words. The absurdity of this conception brings home to us the second aspect of style. Style is not merely a sign of those national qualities which are generic to established languages, and which constitute the genius of a race. It is also the sign of personal qualities, specific to individuals, which constitute the genius of a man.  Whatever a man utters from his heart and head is the index of his character. The more remarkable a person is, the more strongly he is differentiated from the average of human beings, the more salient will be the characteristic notes of his expression. But even the commonest people have, each of them, a specific style. The marks of difference become microscopical as we descend from Dante or Shakespeare to the drudges of the clerk’s desk in one of our great cities. Yet these marks exist, and are no less significant of individuality than the variations between leaf and leaf upon the lime-trees of an avenue.
It may be asked whether the manner of expression peculiar to any person is a complete index of his character—whether, in other words, there is ‘an art to find the mind’s construction’ in the style. Not altogether and exhaustively. Not all the actions and the utterances of an individual betray the secret of his personality. You may live with men and women through years, by day, by night, yet you will never know the whole about them. No human being knows the whole about himself.
The deliberate attitude adopted by a literary writer implies circumspection; invites suppression, reservation, selection; is compatible with affection, dissimulation, hypocrisy. So much cannot be claimed for critical analysis as for that we should pretend to reproduce a man’s soul after close examination of his work. What we may assert with confidence is that the qualities of style are intimately connected with the qualities and limitations of the writer, and teach us much about him. He wrote thus and thus, because this or this. In the exercise of style it is impossible for anyone to transcend his inborn and acquired faculties of ideation, imagination, sense-perception, verbal expression—just as it is impossible in the exercise of strength for an athlete to transcend the limits of his physical structure, powers of innervations, dexterity, and courage. The work of art produced by a writer is therefore, of necessity, complexioned and determined by the inborn and acquired faculties of the individual. This is what we mean by the hackneyed epigram: ‘Le style c’est l’homme. ’ This means ‘style is the man.’ (From Personal Style by JA Symonds)

Compared to capitalism, the author’s attitude towards socialism is one of

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

Over one-third of the population of the globe has done away with capitalist social relations and has either built or is building socialism. Progressive forces in all the advanced capitalist countries are working for socialism. More and more nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, just emerged from colonial and semi-colonial oppression, rejected the capitalist way and set their sights on socialism.
Capitalism stands exposed as a social system that has brought mankind immense calamities. Exploitation of millions upon millions of working people by a handful of financial and industrial magnates; colonialism, ruthlessly oppressing and decimating the population of the colonies; two world wars, which took tens of millions of human lives, and a third world war being prepared by the ultra-reactionary circles of the capitalist states which threatens mankind with disastrous consequences—such is the face of capitalism as it stands in the dock of history. 
Today’s broad and mighty movement towards socialism is a natural and inevitable process, which explains the tremendous interest we find all over the globe in scientific socialist theory.
This collection of Lenin’s writings gives readers the opportunity to find out about the main propositions of scientific socialism and to understand the transition from pre-Marxian unscientific utopian socialist views to the science worked out by Marx, whose conclusions are backed up by profound and comprehensive theoretical analysis of social relations and have been borne out by the whole course of history.
What then is socialism?
The term was first used by the French utopian socialist Pierre Leroux in 1833. Socialism is a society based on social property in the means of production, without antagonistic classes or exploitation. Visions of such a society had tantalized the minds of men long before Leroux wrote about it, and were a reflection of the passionate protest of the oppressed and exploited masses against their intolerable condition.
Humanity’s best minds—the Englishman Thomas Moore in the 16th century, the Italian Tommaso Campanella in the 17th century, the Frenchmen Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, the Englishman Robert Owen and the Russian Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky in the 19th century—proclaimed the need to restructure society on socialist lines and gave much thought to what it should be like. Many of their projections are naïve and unacceptable in the light of our own day, but they have also made some brilliant predictions.
The weakest side of these utopian socialist doctrines was how to go about realising this social ideal and whether it was at all possible. There the utopian socialists proved to be quite helpless. They held that all the defects of capitalism sprang from private property, and they were quite right. But they had no answer as to how private property came to be established in human society, or how it was to be eliminated. They confined themselves to spreading socialist ideas, appealing to the powers that be, and so on. The main flaw of the utopian socialism was the inability to find the way to socialism and failure to realize that the struggle for socialism must rest on a definite social force. Utopian socialism, said Lenin, “criticized capitalist society, it condemned … it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation. But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution”.
Where was it to be found? There was only one answer: the forces and means of transforming society were to be sought in society itself. But this required an understanding of the laws which govern society, in general, and capitalist society in particular. (Extracted from the articles and speeches of Lenin on Utopian and Scientific Socialism)

Going by the author's exposition of the style, which of the following statements is untrue?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

A survey of language, however superficial, makes it evident that when we speak of style, we have to take into account those qualities of national character which are embodied in national speech. If two men could be born of precisely the same physical, mental, and moral nature, at precisely the same moment of history, and under precisely the same social conditions; and if these men learned different languages in the cradle, and used those languages in after life, they would be unable to deliver exactly the same message to the world through literature. The dominant qualities of each mother-tongue would impose definite limitations on their power of expressing thoughts, however similar or identical those thoughts might be.
We cannot conceive two men born with the same physical, mental, and moral nature, at the same moment, under precisely the same conditions, and using the same language. They would be identical; and everything they uttered would be clothed with exactly the same words. The absurdity of this conception brings home to us the second aspect of style. Style is not merely a sign of those national qualities which are generic to established languages, and which constitute the genius of a race. It is also the sign of personal qualities, specific to individuals, which constitute the genius of a man.  Whatever a man utters from his heart and head is the index of his character. The more remarkable a person is, the more strongly he is differentiated from the average of human beings, the more salient will be the characteristic notes of his expression. But even the commonest people have, each of them, a specific style. The marks of difference become microscopical as we descend from Dante or Shakespeare to the drudges of the clerk’s desk in one of our great cities. Yet these marks exist, and are no less significant of individuality than the variations between leaf and leaf upon the lime-trees of an avenue.
It may be asked whether the manner of expression peculiar to any person is a complete index of his character—whether, in other words, there is ‘an art to find the mind’s construction’ in the style. Not altogether and exhaustively. Not all the actions and the utterances of an individual betray the secret of his personality. You may live with men and women through years, by day, by night, yet you will never know the whole about them. No human being knows the whole about himself.
The deliberate attitude adopted by a literary writer implies circumspection; invites suppression, reservation, selection; is compatible with affection, dissimulation, hypocrisy. So much cannot be claimed for critical analysis as for that we should pretend to reproduce a man’s soul after close examination of his work. What we may assert with confidence is that the qualities of style are intimately connected with the qualities and limitations of the writer, and teach us much about him. He wrote thus and thus, because this or this. In the exercise of style it is impossible for anyone to transcend his inborn and acquired faculties of ideation, imagination, sense-perception, verbal expression—just as it is impossible in the exercise of strength for an athlete to transcend the limits of his physical structure, powers of innervations, dexterity, and courage. The work of art produced by a writer is therefore, of necessity, complexioned and determined by the inborn and acquired faculties of the individual. This is what we mean by the hackneyed epigram: ‘Le style c’est l’homme. ’ This means ‘style is the man.’ (From Personal Style by JA Symonds)

Montaigne, the first essayist according to the author, owed much to Cicero who also drew on Plato. Platonic inspiration is seen on Cicero in his

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

There is a pleasant story of an itinerant sign-painter who while going his rounds came to a village inn upon whose signboard he had had his eye for some months and had watched with increasing hope and delight its rapid progress to blurred and faded dimness. To his horror he found a brand-new vanished sign. He surveyed it with disgust, and said to the innkeeper, who stood nervously by hoping for a professional compliment, ‘This looks as if someone had been doing it himself.’
That sentence holds within it the key to the whole mystery of essay-writing. An essay is a thing which someone does himself; and the point of the essay is not the subject, for any subject will suffice, but the charm of personality. It must concern itself with something ‘jolly’, as the schoolboy says, something smelt, heard, seen, perceived, invented, thought, but the essential thing is that the writer shall have formed his own impression, and that it shall have taken shape in his own mind; and the charm of the essay depends upon the charm of the mind that has conceived and recorded the impression. It will be seen, then, that the essay need not concern itself with anything definite; it need not have an intellectual or a philosophical or a religious or a humourous motif; but equally none of these subjects are ruled out. The only thing necessary is that the thing or the thought should be vividly apprehended, enjoyed, felt to be beautiful, and expressed with a certain gusto. It need conform to no particular rules. All literature answers to something in life, some habitual form of human expression. The stage imitates life, calling in the services of the eye and the ear; there is the narrative of the teller of tales or the minstrel; the song, the letter, the talk—all forms of human expression and communication have their antitypes in literature. The essay is the reverie, the frame of mind in which a man says, in the words of the old song, ‘Says I to myself, says I’.
It is generally supposed that Montaigne is the first writer who wrote what may technically be called essays. His pieces are partly autobiographical, partly speculative, and to a great extent ethical. But the roots of his writings lie far back in literary history. He owed a great part of his inspiration to Cicero, who treated of abstract topics in a conversational way with a romantic background; and this he owed to Plato, whose dialogues undoubtedly contain the germ of both the novel and the essay. Plato is in truth far more the forerunner of the novelist than of the philosopher. He made a background of life, he peopled his scenes with bright boys and amiable elders—oh that all scenes were so peopled!—and he discussed ethical and speculative problems of life and character with a vital rather than with a philosophical interest. Plato’s dialogues would be essays but for the fact that they have a dramatic colouring, while the essence of essay is soliloquy. But in the writings of Cicero the dramatic interest is but slight, and the whole thing approaches far more nearly to the essay than to the novel. Probably Cicero supplied to his readers the function both of the essayist and the preacher, and fed the needs of so-called thoughtful readers by dallying, in a fashion which it is hardly unjust to call twaddling, with familiar ethical problems of conduct and character. The charm of Montaigne is the charm of personality—frankness, gusto, acute observation, lively acquaintance with men and manners. He is ashamed of recording nothing that interested him; and a certain discreet shamelessness must always be the characteristic of the essayist, for the essence of his art is to say what has pleased him without too prudently considering whether it is worthy of the attention of the well-informed mind. (AC Benson’s The Art of the Essayist)

A survey, however methodical and painstaking, can, according to the passage, also be

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

A survey of language, however superficial, makes it evident that when we speak of style, we have to take into account those qualities of national character which are embodied in national speech. If two men could be born of precisely the same physical, mental, and moral nature, at precisely the same moment of history, and under precisely the same social conditions; and if these men learned different languages in the cradle, and used those languages in after life, they would be unable to deliver exactly the same message to the world through literature. The dominant qualities of each mother-tongue would impose definite limitations on their power of expressing thoughts, however similar or identical those thoughts might be.
We cannot conceive two men born with the same physical, mental, and moral nature, at the same moment, under precisely the same conditions, and using the same language. They would be identical; and everything they uttered would be clothed with exactly the same words. The absurdity of this conception brings home to us the second aspect of style. Style is not merely a sign of those national qualities which are generic to established languages, and which constitute the genius of a race. It is also the sign of personal qualities, specific to individuals, which constitute the genius of a man.  Whatever a man utters from his heart and head is the index of his character. The more remarkable a person is, the more strongly he is differentiated from the average of human beings, the more salient will be the characteristic notes of his expression. But even the commonest people have, each of them, a specific style. The marks of difference become microscopical as we descend from Dante or Shakespeare to the drudges of the clerk’s desk in one of our great cities. Yet these marks exist, and are no less significant of individuality than the variations between leaf and leaf upon the lime-trees of an avenue.
It may be asked whether the manner of expression peculiar to any person is a complete index of his character—whether, in other words, there is ‘an art to find the mind’s construction’ in the style. Not altogether and exhaustively. Not all the actions and the utterances of an individual betray the secret of his personality. You may live with men and women through years, by day, by night, yet you will never know the whole about them. No human being knows the whole about himself.
The deliberate attitude adopted by a literary writer implies circumspection; invites suppression, reservation, selection; is compatible with affection, dissimulation, hypocrisy. So much cannot be claimed for critical analysis as for that we should pretend to reproduce a man’s soul after close examination of his work. What we may assert with confidence is that the qualities of style are intimately connected with the qualities and limitations of the writer, and teach us much about him. He wrote thus and thus, because this or this. In the exercise of style it is impossible for anyone to transcend his inborn and acquired faculties of ideation, imagination, sense-perception, verbal expression—just as it is impossible in the exercise of strength for an athlete to transcend the limits of his physical structure, powers of innervations, dexterity, and courage. The work of art produced by a writer is therefore, of necessity, complexioned and determined by the inborn and acquired faculties of the individual. This is what we mean by the hackneyed epigram: ‘Le style c’est l’homme. ’ This means ‘style is the man.’ (From Personal Style by JA Symonds)

According to the passage, a mother tongue

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

A survey of language, however superficial, makes it evident that when we speak of style, we have to take into account those qualities of national character which are embodied in national speech. If two men could be born of precisely the same physical, mental, and moral nature, at precisely the same moment of history, and under precisely the same social conditions; and if these men learned different languages in the cradle, and used those languages in after life, they would be unable to deliver exactly the same message to the world through literature. The dominant qualities of each mother-tongue would impose definite limitations on their power of expressing thoughts, however similar or identical those thoughts might be.
We cannot conceive two men born with the same physical, mental, and moral nature, at the same moment, under precisely the same conditions, and using the same language. They would be identical; and everything they uttered would be clothed with exactly the same words. The absurdity of this conception brings home to us the second aspect of style. Style is not merely a sign of those national qualities which are generic to established languages, and which constitute the genius of a race. It is also the sign of personal qualities, specific to individuals, which constitute the genius of a man.  Whatever a man utters from his heart and head is the index of his character. The more remarkable a person is, the more strongly he is differentiated from the average of human beings, the more salient will be the characteristic notes of his expression. But even the commonest people have, each of them, a specific style. The marks of difference become microscopical as we descend from Dante or Shakespeare to the drudges of the clerk’s desk in one of our great cities. Yet these marks exist, and are no less significant of individuality than the variations between leaf and leaf upon the lime-trees of an avenue.
It may be asked whether the manner of expression peculiar to any person is a complete index of his character—whether, in other words, there is ‘an art to find the mind’s construction’ in the style. Not altogether and exhaustively. Not all the actions and the utterances of an individual betray the secret of his personality. You may live with men and women through years, by day, by night, yet you will never know the whole about them. No human being knows the whole about himself.
The deliberate attitude adopted by a literary writer implies circumspection; invites suppression, reservation, selection; is compatible with affection, dissimulation, hypocrisy. So much cannot be claimed for critical analysis as for that we should pretend to reproduce a man’s soul after close examination of his work. What we may assert with confidence is that the qualities of style are intimately connected with the qualities and limitations of the writer, and teach us much about him. He wrote thus and thus, because this or this. In the exercise of style it is impossible for anyone to transcend his inborn and acquired faculties of ideation, imagination, sense-perception, verbal expression—just as it is impossible in the exercise of strength for an athlete to transcend the limits of his physical structure, powers of innervations, dexterity, and courage. The work of art produced by a writer is therefore, of necessity, complexioned and determined by the inborn and acquired faculties of the individual. This is what we mean by the hackneyed epigram: ‘Le style c’est l’homme. ’ This means ‘style is the man.’ (From Personal Style by JA Symonds)

The author said that “many of their projections are naïve and unacceptable in the light of our own day.” He described them as

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

Over one-third of the population of the globe has done away with capitalist social relations and has either built or is building socialism. Progressive forces in all the advanced capitalist countries are working for socialism. More and more nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, just emerged from colonial and semi-colonial oppression, rejected the capitalist way and set their sights on socialism.
Capitalism stands exposed as a social system that has brought mankind immense calamities. Exploitation of millions upon millions of working people by a handful of financial and industrial magnates; colonialism, ruthlessly oppressing and decimating the population of the colonies; two world wars, which took tens of millions of human lives, and a third world war being prepared by the ultra-reactionary circles of the capitalist states which threatens mankind with disastrous consequences—such is the face of capitalism as it stands in the dock of history. 
Today’s broad and mighty movement towards socialism is a natural and inevitable process, which explains the tremendous interest we find all over the globe in scientific socialist theory.
This collection of Lenin’s writings gives readers the opportunity to find out about the main propositions of scientific socialism and to understand the transition from pre-Marxian unscientific utopian socialist views to the science worked out by Marx, whose conclusions are backed up by profound and comprehensive theoretical analysis of social relations and have been borne out by the whole course of history.
What then is socialism?
The term was first used by the French utopian socialist Pierre Leroux in 1833. Socialism is a society based on social property in the means of production, without antagonistic classes or exploitation. Visions of such a society had tantalized the minds of men long before Leroux wrote about it, and were a reflection of the passionate protest of the oppressed and exploited masses against their intolerable condition.
Humanity’s best minds—the Englishman Thomas Moore in the 16th century, the Italian Tommaso Campanella in the 17th century, the Frenchmen Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, the Englishman Robert Owen and the Russian Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky in the 19th century—proclaimed the need to restructure society on socialist lines and gave much thought to what it should be like. Many of their projections are naïve and unacceptable in the light of our own day, but they have also made some brilliant predictions.
The weakest side of these utopian socialist doctrines was how to go about realising this social ideal and whether it was at all possible. There the utopian socialists proved to be quite helpless. They held that all the defects of capitalism sprang from private property, and they were quite right. But they had no answer as to how private property came to be established in human society, or how it was to be eliminated. They confined themselves to spreading socialist ideas, appealing to the powers that be, and so on. The main flaw of the utopian socialism was the inability to find the way to socialism and failure to realize that the struggle for socialism must rest on a definite social force. Utopian socialism, said Lenin, “criticized capitalist society, it condemned … it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation. But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution”.
Where was it to be found? There was only one answer: the forces and means of transforming society were to be sought in society itself. But this required an understanding of the laws which govern society, in general, and capitalist society in particular. (Extracted from the articles and speeches of Lenin on Utopian and Scientific Socialism)

An essay, in a nutshell, as per the passage, can briefly be described as

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

There is a pleasant story of an itinerant sign-painter who while going his rounds came to a village inn upon whose signboard he had had his eye for some months and had watched with increasing hope and delight its rapid progress to blurred and faded dimness. To his horror he found a brand-new vanished sign. He surveyed it with disgust, and said to the innkeeper, who stood nervously by hoping for a professional compliment, ‘This looks as if someone had been doing it himself.’
That sentence holds within it the key to the whole mystery of essay-writing. An essay is a thing which someone does himself; and the point of the essay is not the subject, for any subject will suffice, but the charm of personality. It must concern itself with something ‘jolly’, as the schoolboy says, something smelt, heard, seen, perceived, invented, thought, but the essential thing is that the writer shall have formed his own impression, and that it shall have taken shape in his own mind; and the charm of the essay depends upon the charm of the mind that has conceived and recorded the impression. It will be seen, then, that the essay need not concern itself with anything definite; it need not have an intellectual or a philosophical or a religious or a humourous motif; but equally none of these subjects are ruled out. The only thing necessary is that the thing or the thought should be vividly apprehended, enjoyed, felt to be beautiful, and expressed with a certain gusto. It need conform to no particular rules. All literature answers to something in life, some habitual form of human expression. The stage imitates life, calling in the services of the eye and the ear; there is the narrative of the teller of tales or the minstrel; the song, the letter, the talk—all forms of human expression and communication have their antitypes in literature. The essay is the reverie, the frame of mind in which a man says, in the words of the old song, ‘Says I to myself, says I’.
It is generally supposed that Montaigne is the first writer who wrote what may technically be called essays. His pieces are partly autobiographical, partly speculative, and to a great extent ethical. But the roots of his writings lie far back in literary history. He owed a great part of his inspiration to Cicero, who treated of abstract topics in a conversational way with a romantic background; and this he owed to Plato, whose dialogues undoubtedly contain the germ of both the novel and the essay. Plato is in truth far more the forerunner of the novelist than of the philosopher. He made a background of life, he peopled his scenes with bright boys and amiable elders—oh that all scenes were so peopled!—and he discussed ethical and speculative problems of life and character with a vital rather than with a philosophical interest. Plato’s dialogues would be essays but for the fact that they have a dramatic colouring, while the essence of essay is soliloquy. But in the writings of Cicero the dramatic interest is but slight, and the whole thing approaches far more nearly to the essay than to the novel. Probably Cicero supplied to his readers the function both of the essayist and the preacher, and fed the needs of so-called thoughtful readers by dallying, in a fashion which it is hardly unjust to call twaddling, with familiar ethical problems of conduct and character. The charm of Montaigne is the charm of personality—frankness, gusto, acute observation, lively acquaintance with men and manners. He is ashamed of recording nothing that interested him; and a certain discreet shamelessness must always be the characteristic of the essayist, for the essence of his art is to say what has pleased him without too prudently considering whether it is worthy of the attention of the well-informed mind. (AC Benson’s The Art of the Essayist)

He calls “England ten times herself, intoxicatingly unforeign”. He is being

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

An English soldier whose fortunes, for most of the war, were not out of the common, left England and landed in France by the same ports as Falstaff and Henry V on their journey to Agincourt. He disembarked on the quay where Burne-Jones and Morris, walking there in their youth, had vowed themselves to the careers by which they were to tint the mind of educated England for a generation. He first marched up into the line across the country of Dumas’s Three Musketeers, passing the belfry of Bethune and tramping the road to Cambrin, which the son of Athons had ridden to join the staff of Conde. Dulled for a time by the effect of combustion, his hunger for seeing the sights revived in a tent in the park of Versailles, near the Petit Trianon, where countless bunches of mistletoe sat still, like pheasants, on the boughs of trees that had been young with Marie-Antoinette. When convalescent, he sojourned under canvas for two winter months upon the sands where Napoleon had mustered his grand armada of flat-bottomed craft for the projected descent upon England. Restored for a season to his own friends in the line, he was presently sent travelling again, this time by trench fever. He came to his wits, warm and at rest, in a marvellous tent lined with silk and double-walled, the gift of an Indian Prince to an Emperor.  Beneficent and inscrutable powers bore him away to a regal city where Joan of Arc had been burnt and King John had murdered Prince Arthur. When he could walk on a deck, genies carried him down to a quay and put him on board a black ship, to glide for a whole sunny April day down the unwinding coils of a river, so divinely puissant and so fringed with diverse delights to the eye, that a lifetime’s loyalty to our queenly Thames was for some dizzy moments seriously imperiled. Falling early to sleep, the serene infant sleep of health reborn, he awoke to the sound of water lapping quietly under opened potholes—Southampton. Water rippling and shining, fringed with inviolate trees, the unshelled houses gleaming white and red among them: England ten times herself, intoxicatingly unforeign. And the English trains, smooth movers along well-wheeled tracks through cuttings vivacious with the English primrose, to drop the impersonally conducted tourist in a new dwelling-place of wonder, with Plymouth Sound below his window and Drake’s bowling-green above his chimneys.
To charm him next there came a month of guarding on the Firth of Forth, of living in a half-dismantled ancient fort, a fort of Walter Scott, with Edinburgh Castle lifting to the skies above the great smoke in the south, and the first Highland hills to the north-west stretched out pensive in the long midsummer sunsets that always had the gaunt queer lines of the Forth Bridge laid down on them monstrously black; and once the great fleet streaming out in slow procession from its guarded haunt above the bridge, and returning a day or two later, diminished and bringing its wounded, some ships in tow, some with their funnels knocked awry, and moving slowly, as with pain; some with a first-aid dressing of red-painted bedding stuffed into holes in their sides; and then the first leave men coming chuckling ashore at the pier and telling the soldiers off duty how they had knocked Fritz at Jutland; their voices are audible still, and the laughter mingling in the summer night with a plashing of oars and elfish summer lightning while the sentry searchlight, grave, alert and steady on its post, wheels to and fro across the gateway of the Firth.
The spectacle of many battles followed—defeat and victory, always in illustrious places; the Somme with its sultry months of slaughter-house smell and flies and frustration; Arras, petering out in futile attrition after its first wondrous morning of tempest, rain and wasted valour, when the battle, seen from above, wrote itself clear in legible letters of flame on the blackboard of a moonless last hour of night; Messines, where all the British mines, exploding together in the flight’s first moment, shook the little hill from which our soldier looked down upon the fight as if it were a little boat on a choppy sea; and Flanders, Cambrai, St Quentin and all the great days of the three months of triumph.  (from The Right Place by CE Montague)

The author said 'whatever a man utters from his heart and head is the index of his character'. It, therefore, leads to the conclusion that

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

A survey of language, however superficial, makes it evident that when we speak of style, we have to take into account those qualities of national character which are embodied in national speech. If two men could be born of precisely the same physical, mental, and moral nature, at precisely the same moment of history, and under precisely the same social conditions; and if these men learned different languages in the cradle, and used those languages in after life, they would be unable to deliver exactly the same message to the world through literature. The dominant qualities of each mother-tongue would impose definite limitations on their power of expressing thoughts, however similar or identical those thoughts might be.
We cannot conceive two men born with the same physical, mental, and moral nature, at the same moment, under precisely the same conditions, and using the same language. They would be identical; and everything they uttered would be clothed with exactly the same words. The absurdity of this conception brings home to us the second aspect of style. Style is not merely a sign of those national qualities which are generic to established languages, and which constitute the genius of a race. It is also the sign of personal qualities, specific to individuals, which constitute the genius of a man.  Whatever a man utters from his heart and head is the index of his character. The more remarkable a person is, the more strongly he is differentiated from the average of human beings, the more salient will be the characteristic notes of his expression. But even the commonest people have, each of them, a specific style. The marks of difference become microscopical as we descend from Dante or Shakespeare to the drudges of the clerk’s desk in one of our great cities. Yet these marks exist, and are no less significant of individuality than the variations between leaf and leaf upon the lime-trees of an avenue.
It may be asked whether the manner of expression peculiar to any person is a complete index of his character—whether, in other words, there is ‘an art to find the mind’s construction’ in the style. Not altogether and exhaustively. Not all the actions and the utterances of an individual betray the secret of his personality. You may live with men and women through years, by day, by night, yet you will never know the whole about them. No human being knows the whole about himself.
The deliberate attitude adopted by a literary writer implies circumspection; invites suppression, reservation, selection; is compatible with affection, dissimulation, hypocrisy. So much cannot be claimed for critical analysis as for that we should pretend to reproduce a man’s soul after close examination of his work. What we may assert with confidence is that the qualities of style are intimately connected with the qualities and limitations of the writer, and teach us much about him. He wrote thus and thus, because this or this. In the exercise of style it is impossible for anyone to transcend his inborn and acquired faculties of ideation, imagination, sense-perception, verbal expression—just as it is impossible in the exercise of strength for an athlete to transcend the limits of his physical structure, powers of innervations, dexterity, and courage. The work of art produced by a writer is therefore, of necessity, complexioned and determined by the inborn and acquired faculties of the individual. This is what we mean by the hackneyed epigram: ‘Le style c’est l’homme. ’ This means ‘style is the man.’ (From Personal Style by JA Symonds)

What purpose does the writer serve by naming historical figures?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

An English soldier whose fortunes, for most of the war, were not out of the common, left England and landed in France by the same ports as Falstaff and Henry V on their journey to Agincourt. He disembarked on the quay where Burne-Jones and Morris, walking there in their youth, had vowed themselves to the careers by which they were to tint the mind of educated England for a generation. He first marched up into the line across the country of Dumas’s Three Musketeers, passing the belfry of Bethune and tramping the road to Cambrin, which the son of Athons had ridden to join the staff of Conde. Dulled for a time by the effect of combustion, his hunger for seeing the sights revived in a tent in the park of Versailles, near the Petit Trianon, where countless bunches of mistletoe sat still, like pheasants, on the boughs of trees that had been young with Marie-Antoinette. When convalescent, he sojourned under canvas for two winter months upon the sands where Napoleon had mustered his grand armada of flat-bottomed craft for the projected descent upon England. Restored for a season to his own friends in the line, he was presently sent travelling again, this time by trench fever. He came to his wits, warm and at rest, in a marvellous tent lined with silk and double-walled, the gift of an Indian Prince to an Emperor.  Beneficent and inscrutable powers bore him away to a regal city where Joan of Arc had been burnt and King John had murdered Prince Arthur. When he could walk on a deck, genies carried him down to a quay and put him on board a black ship, to glide for a whole sunny April day down the unwinding coils of a river, so divinely puissant and so fringed with diverse delights to the eye, that a lifetime’s loyalty to our queenly Thames was for some dizzy moments seriously imperiled. Falling early to sleep, the serene infant sleep of health reborn, he awoke to the sound of water lapping quietly under opened potholes—Southampton. Water rippling and shining, fringed with inviolate trees, the unshelled houses gleaming white and red among them: England ten times herself, intoxicatingly unforeign. And the English trains, smooth movers along well-wheeled tracks through cuttings vivacious with the English primrose, to drop the impersonally conducted tourist in a new dwelling-place of wonder, with Plymouth Sound below his window and Drake’s bowling-green above his chimneys.
To charm him next there came a month of guarding on the Firth of Forth, of living in a half-dismantled ancient fort, a fort of Walter Scott, with Edinburgh Castle lifting to the skies above the great smoke in the south, and the first Highland hills to the north-west stretched out pensive in the long midsummer sunsets that always had the gaunt queer lines of the Forth Bridge laid down on them monstrously black; and once the great fleet streaming out in slow procession from its guarded haunt above the bridge, and returning a day or two later, diminished and bringing its wounded, some ships in tow, some with their funnels knocked awry, and moving slowly, as with pain; some with a first-aid dressing of red-painted bedding stuffed into holes in their sides; and then the first leave men coming chuckling ashore at the pier and telling the soldiers off duty how they had knocked Fritz at Jutland; their voices are audible still, and the laughter mingling in the summer night with a plashing of oars and elfish summer lightning while the sentry searchlight, grave, alert and steady on its post, wheels to and fro across the gateway of the Firth.
The spectacle of many battles followed—defeat and victory, always in illustrious places; the Somme with its sultry months of slaughter-house smell and flies and frustration; Arras, petering out in futile attrition after its first wondrous morning of tempest, rain and wasted valour, when the battle, seen from above, wrote itself clear in legible letters of flame on the blackboard of a moonless last hour of night; Messines, where all the British mines, exploding together in the flight’s first moment, shook the little hill from which our soldier looked down upon the fight as if it were a little boat on a choppy sea; and Flanders, Cambrai, St Quentin and all the great days of the three months of triumph.  (from The Right Place by CE Montague)

This essay is the record of

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

An English soldier whose fortunes, for most of the war, were not out of the common, left England and landed in France by the same ports as Falstaff and Henry V on their journey to Agincourt. He disembarked on the quay where Burne-Jones and Morris, walking there in their youth, had vowed themselves to the careers by which they were to tint the mind of educated England for a generation. He first marched up into the line across the country of Dumas’s Three Musketeers, passing the belfry of Bethune and tramping the road to Cambrin, which the son of Athons had ridden to join the staff of Conde. Dulled for a time by the effect of combustion, his hunger for seeing the sights revived in a tent in the park of Versailles, near the Petit Trianon, where countless bunches of mistletoe sat still, like pheasants, on the boughs of trees that had been young with Marie-Antoinette. When convalescent, he sojourned under canvas for two winter months upon the sands where Napoleon had mustered his grand armada of flat-bottomed craft for the projected descent upon England. Restored for a season to his own friends in the line, he was presently sent travelling again, this time by trench fever. He came to his wits, warm and at rest, in a marvellous tent lined with silk and double-walled, the gift of an Indian Prince to an Emperor.  Beneficent and inscrutable powers bore him away to a regal city where Joan of Arc had been burnt and King John had murdered Prince Arthur. When he could walk on a deck, genies carried him down to a quay and put him on board a black ship, to glide for a whole sunny April day down the unwinding coils of a river, so divinely puissant and so fringed with diverse delights to the eye, that a lifetime’s loyalty to our queenly Thames was for some dizzy moments seriously imperiled. Falling early to sleep, the serene infant sleep of health reborn, he awoke to the sound of water lapping quietly under opened potholes—Southampton. Water rippling and shining, fringed with inviolate trees, the unshelled houses gleaming white and red among them: England ten times herself, intoxicatingly unforeign. And the English trains, smooth movers along well-wheeled tracks through cuttings vivacious with the English primrose, to drop the impersonally conducted tourist in a new dwelling-place of wonder, with Plymouth Sound below his window and Drake’s bowling-green above his chimneys.
To charm him next there came a month of guarding on the Firth of Forth, of living in a half-dismantled ancient fort, a fort of Walter Scott, with Edinburgh Castle lifting to the skies above the great smoke in the south, and the first Highland hills to the north-west stretched out pensive in the long midsummer sunsets that always had the gaunt queer lines of the Forth Bridge laid down on them monstrously black; and once the great fleet streaming out in slow procession from its guarded haunt above the bridge, and returning a day or two later, diminished and bringing its wounded, some ships in tow, some with their funnels knocked awry, and moving slowly, as with pain; some with a first-aid dressing of red-painted bedding stuffed into holes in their sides; and then the first leave men coming chuckling ashore at the pier and telling the soldiers off duty how they had knocked Fritz at Jutland; their voices are audible still, and the laughter mingling in the summer night with a plashing of oars and elfish summer lightning while the sentry searchlight, grave, alert and steady on its post, wheels to and fro across the gateway of the Firth.
The spectacle of many battles followed—defeat and victory, always in illustrious places; the Somme with its sultry months of slaughter-house smell and flies and frustration; Arras, petering out in futile attrition after its first wondrous morning of tempest, rain and wasted valour, when the battle, seen from above, wrote itself clear in legible letters of flame on the blackboard of a moonless last hour of night; Messines, where all the British mines, exploding together in the flight’s first moment, shook the little hill from which our soldier looked down upon the fight as if it were a little boat on a choppy sea; and Flanders, Cambrai, St Quentin and all the great days of the three months of triumph.  (from The Right Place by CE Montague)

This essay is more like story of a soldier who vividly records historical events while

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

An English soldier whose fortunes, for most of the war, were not out of the common, left England and landed in France by the same ports as Falstaff and Henry V on their journey to Agincourt. He disembarked on the quay where Burne-Jones and Morris, walking there in their youth, had vowed themselves to the careers by which they were to tint the mind of educated England for a generation. He first marched up into the line across the country of Dumas’s Three Musketeers, passing the belfry of Bethune and tramping the road to Cambrin, which the son of Athons had ridden to join the staff of Conde. Dulled for a time by the effect of combustion, his hunger for seeing the sights revived in a tent in the park of Versailles, near the Petit Trianon, where countless bunches of mistletoe sat still, like pheasants, on the boughs of trees that had been young with Marie-Antoinette. When convalescent, he sojourned under canvas for two winter months upon the sands where Napoleon had mustered his grand armada of flat-bottomed craft for the projected descent upon England. Restored for a season to his own friends in the line, he was presently sent travelling again, this time by trench fever. He came to his wits, warm and at rest, in a marvellous tent lined with silk and double-walled, the gift of an Indian Prince to an Emperor.  Beneficent and inscrutable powers bore him away to a regal city where Joan of Arc had been burnt and King John had murdered Prince Arthur. When he could walk on a deck, genies carried him down to a quay and put him on board a black ship, to glide for a whole sunny April day down the unwinding coils of a river, so divinely puissant and so fringed with diverse delights to the eye, that a lifetime’s loyalty to our queenly Thames was for some dizzy moments seriously imperiled. Falling early to sleep, the serene infant sleep of health reborn, he awoke to the sound of water lapping quietly under opened potholes—Southampton. Water rippling and shining, fringed with inviolate trees, the unshelled houses gleaming white and red among them: England ten times herself, intoxicatingly unforeign. And the English trains, smooth movers along well-wheeled tracks through cuttings vivacious with the English primrose, to drop the impersonally conducted tourist in a new dwelling-place of wonder, with Plymouth Sound below his window and Drake’s bowling-green above his chimneys.
To charm him next there came a month of guarding on the Firth of Forth, of living in a half-dismantled ancient fort, a fort of Walter Scott, with Edinburgh Castle lifting to the skies above the great smoke in the south, and the first Highland hills to the north-west stretched out pensive in the long midsummer sunsets that always had the gaunt queer lines of the Forth Bridge laid down on them monstrously black; and once the great fleet streaming out in slow procession from its guarded haunt above the bridge, and returning a day or two later, diminished and bringing its wounded, some ships in tow, some with their funnels knocked awry, and moving slowly, as with pain; some with a first-aid dressing of red-painted bedding stuffed into holes in their sides; and then the first leave men coming chuckling ashore at the pier and telling the soldiers off duty how they had knocked Fritz at Jutland; their voices are audible still, and the laughter mingling in the summer night with a plashing of oars and elfish summer lightning while the sentry searchlight, grave, alert and steady on its post, wheels to and fro across the gateway of the Firth.
The spectacle of many battles followed—defeat and victory, always in illustrious places; the Somme with its sultry months of slaughter-house smell and flies and frustration; Arras, petering out in futile attrition after its first wondrous morning of tempest, rain and wasted valour, when the battle, seen from above, wrote itself clear in legible letters of flame on the blackboard of a moonless last hour of night; Messines, where all the British mines, exploding together in the flight’s first moment, shook the little hill from which our soldier looked down upon the fight as if it were a little boat on a choppy sea; and Flanders, Cambrai, St Quentin and all the great days of the three months of triumph.  (from The Right Place by CE Montague)

As an essay it will be categorized as

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

An English soldier whose fortunes, for most of the war, were not out of the common, left England and landed in France by the same ports as Falstaff and Henry V on their journey to Agincourt. He disembarked on the quay where Burne-Jones and Morris, walking there in their youth, had vowed themselves to the careers by which they were to tint the mind of educated England for a generation. He first marched up into the line across the country of Dumas’s Three Musketeers, passing the belfry of Bethune and tramping the road to Cambrin, which the son of Athons had ridden to join the staff of Conde. Dulled for a time by the effect of combustion, his hunger for seeing the sights revived in a tent in the park of Versailles, near the Petit Trianon, where countless bunches of mistletoe sat still, like pheasants, on the boughs of trees that had been young with Marie-Antoinette. When convalescent, he sojourned under canvas for two winter months upon the sands where Napoleon had mustered his grand armada of flat-bottomed craft for the projected descent upon England. Restored for a season to his own friends in the line, he was presently sent travelling again, this time by trench fever. He came to his wits, warm and at rest, in a marvellous tent lined with silk and double-walled, the gift of an Indian Prince to an Emperor.  Beneficent and inscrutable powers bore him away to a regal city where Joan of Arc had been burnt and King John had murdered Prince Arthur. When he could walk on a deck, genies carried him down to a quay and put him on board a black ship, to glide for a whole sunny April day down the unwinding coils of a river, so divinely puissant and so fringed with diverse delights to the eye, that a lifetime’s loyalty to our queenly Thames was for some dizzy moments seriously imperiled. Falling early to sleep, the serene infant sleep of health reborn, he awoke to the sound of water lapping quietly under opened potholes—Southampton. Water rippling and shining, fringed with inviolate trees, the unshelled houses gleaming white and red among them: England ten times herself, intoxicatingly unforeign. And the English trains, smooth movers along well-wheeled tracks through cuttings vivacious with the English primrose, to drop the impersonally conducted tourist in a new dwelling-place of wonder, with Plymouth Sound below his window and Drake’s bowling-green above his chimneys.
To charm him next there came a month of guarding on the Firth of Forth, of living in a half-dismantled ancient fort, a fort of Walter Scott, with Edinburgh Castle lifting to the skies above the great smoke in the south, and the first Highland hills to the north-west stretched out pensive in the long midsummer sunsets that always had the gaunt queer lines of the Forth Bridge laid down on them monstrously black; and once the great fleet streaming out in slow procession from its guarded haunt above the bridge, and returning a day or two later, diminished and bringing its wounded, some ships in tow, some with their funnels knocked awry, and moving slowly, as with pain; some with a first-aid dressing of red-painted bedding stuffed into holes in their sides; and then the first leave men coming chuckling ashore at the pier and telling the soldiers off duty how they had knocked Fritz at Jutland; their voices are audible still, and the laughter mingling in the summer night with a plashing of oars and elfish summer lightning while the sentry searchlight, grave, alert and steady on its post, wheels to and fro across the gateway of the Firth.
The spectacle of many battles followed—defeat and victory, always in illustrious places; the Somme with its sultry months of slaughter-house smell and flies and frustration; Arras, petering out in futile attrition after its first wondrous morning of tempest, rain and wasted valour, when the battle, seen from above, wrote itself clear in legible letters of flame on the blackboard of a moonless last hour of night; Messines, where all the British mines, exploding together in the flight’s first moment, shook the little hill from which our soldier looked down upon the fight as if it were a little boat on a choppy sea; and Flanders, Cambrai, St Quentin and all the great days of the three months of triumph.  (from The Right Place by CE Montague)

This passage which comes in the form of an essay can be categorized as

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

The cat was made for love and warmth and softness. These bring out all her best qualities. She is nearest perfection sleeping in a fluffy coil by the fire, secure of the same warmth in one human heart. We must let sleeping dogs lie, but we can bury our face in a sleeping cat and she stirs only to purr. No waking thoughts were ever more innocent. She is as near as heaven as we can get on earth, blissful, quiet, content. She alone of animals knows how to luxuriate in perfect rest. As she lies in a bath of firelight, listening to the flames, breathing her low contented hum, she does not have to consider getting out and drying herself, but lays her mind to rock on a stream of gentle truthfulness. And when this beautiful petted cat awakes with a wide yawn, and stretches herself bit by bit as if to bring her wandering spirit back by some elaborate conjuror’s trick, she wakes to the life for which she is perfectly fitted. The cat needs human affection. It is not like a rabbit, pleased to eat and frisk in lonely nature and the farther from human notice the better, nor like a sparrow or a mouse, attracted to the haunts of man by crumbs. The wild domestic cat that dodges round corners or bolts up trees, whose claw is against every man and whom every dog chases, is not the natural un-reclaimed cat, but a poor outcast from its natural heritage. Deprived of its security in man’s love the cat becomes almost a nerve-shattered maniac; and yet a little affection will turn it into the fluffy darling.
Not instinct, but experience, makes animals afraid. The young thrush comes within a yard as we sit chatting on the garden seat. Old birds trust us less, except in a land of Buddha. The scared cat is circumstantial evidence of our brutality. Even cats and dogs have no natural antipathy. They get the reputation for it because their habits in the streets are complementary; the cat runs and the dog chases. Not once in a thousand dogs would know what to do with the cat if he caught her. When a cat strikes an attitude in his path, the dog draws round her a polite circle. In a state of nature they would live in perfect amity. A kitten and a puppy greet each other with unguarded trust. Dogs usually become catters only through thoughtlessness or the sporting instinct of their owners. Though always ready to chase anything that runs, they have much kindlier nature than men. A retriever puppy will watch a rabbit hop leisurely across the lawn within ten yards of him, who never saw one dart along the road without giving a chase. An Irish terrier was seen the other day playing with a mouse, and, till the little creature bit his too inquisitive nose, no instinct prompted him to kill it. The same terrier chased the flying beech leaves as if he would catch Autumn before he stopped. If dogs and cats are born with an ultimate hunting instinct, as many blue-eyed babies will ultimately have brown eyes, they certainly start life innocent.
Although cats do not learn tricks invented by their frivolous owners, they adapt themselves very quickly to strange circumstances. Cats imported into Jamaica cleared the country of vermin so effectively that they soon left nothing to eat but insects, and on these, an occasional appetizer in their natural diet, they now live. (The Cat by Katherine M. Wilson)

An animal that is pleased to eat and frisk in quiet away from the public glare is

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

The cat was made for love and warmth and softness. These bring out all her best qualities. She is nearest perfection sleeping in a fluffy coil by the fire, secure of the same warmth in one human heart. We must let sleeping dogs lie, but we can bury our face in a sleeping cat and she stirs only to purr. No waking thoughts were ever more innocent. She is as near as heaven as we can get on earth, blissful, quiet, content. She alone of animals knows how to luxuriate in perfect rest. As she lies in a bath of firelight, listening to the flames, breathing her low contented hum, she does not have to consider getting out and drying herself, but lays her mind to rock on a stream of gentle truthfulness. And when this beautiful petted cat awakes with a wide yawn, and stretches herself bit by bit as if to bring her wandering spirit back by some elaborate conjuror’s trick, she wakes to the life for which she is perfectly fitted. The cat needs human affection. It is not like a rabbit, pleased to eat and frisk in lonely nature and the farther from human notice the better, nor like a sparrow or a mouse, attracted to the haunts of man by crumbs. The wild domestic cat that dodges round corners or bolts up trees, whose claw is against every man and whom every dog chases, is not the natural un-reclaimed cat, but a poor outcast from its natural heritage. Deprived of its security in man’s love the cat becomes almost a nerve-shattered maniac; and yet a little affection will turn it into the fluffy darling.
Not instinct, but experience, makes animals afraid. The young thrush comes within a yard as we sit chatting on the garden seat. Old birds trust us less, except in a land of Buddha. The scared cat is circumstantial evidence of our brutality. Even cats and dogs have no natural antipathy. They get the reputation for it because their habits in the streets are complementary; the cat runs and the dog chases. Not once in a thousand dogs would know what to do with the cat if he caught her. When a cat strikes an attitude in his path, the dog draws round her a polite circle. In a state of nature they would live in perfect amity. A kitten and a puppy greet each other with unguarded trust. Dogs usually become catters only through thoughtlessness or the sporting instinct of their owners. Though always ready to chase anything that runs, they have much kindlier nature than men. A retriever puppy will watch a rabbit hop leisurely across the lawn within ten yards of him, who never saw one dart along the road without giving a chase. An Irish terrier was seen the other day playing with a mouse, and, till the little creature bit his too inquisitive nose, no instinct prompted him to kill it. The same terrier chased the flying beech leaves as if he would catch Autumn before he stopped. If dogs and cats are born with an ultimate hunting instinct, as many blue-eyed babies will ultimately have brown eyes, they certainly start life innocent.
Although cats do not learn tricks invented by their frivolous owners, they adapt themselves very quickly to strange circumstances. Cats imported into Jamaica cleared the country of vermin so effectively that they soon left nothing to eat but insects, and on these, an occasional appetizer in their natural diet, they now live. (The Cat by Katherine M. Wilson)

What, according to the passage, could turn a nerve-shattering maniac into a fluffy darling?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

The cat was made for love and warmth and softness. These bring out all her best qualities. She is nearest perfection sleeping in a fluffy coil by the fire, secure of the same warmth in one human heart. We must let sleeping dogs lie, but we can bury our face in a sleeping cat and she stirs only to purr. No waking thoughts were ever more innocent. She is as near as heaven as we can get on earth, blissful, quiet, content. She alone of animals knows how to luxuriate in perfect rest. As she lies in a bath of firelight, listening to the flames, breathing her low contented hum, she does not have to consider getting out and drying herself, but lays her mind to rock on a stream of gentle truthfulness. And when this beautiful petted cat awakes with a wide yawn, and stretches herself bit by bit as if to bring her wandering spirit back by some elaborate conjuror’s trick, she wakes to the life for which she is perfectly fitted. The cat needs human affection. It is not like a rabbit, pleased to eat and frisk in lonely nature and the farther from human notice the better, nor like a sparrow or a mouse, attracted to the haunts of man by crumbs. The wild domestic cat that dodges round corners or bolts up trees, whose claw is against every man and whom every dog chases, is not the natural un-reclaimed cat, but a poor outcast from its natural heritage. Deprived of its security in man’s love the cat becomes almost a nerve-shattered maniac; and yet a little affection will turn it into the fluffy darling.
Not instinct, but experience, makes animals afraid. The young thrush comes within a yard as we sit chatting on the garden seat. Old birds trust us less, except in a land of Buddha. The scared cat is circumstantial evidence of our brutality. Even cats and dogs have no natural antipathy. They get the reputation for it because their habits in the streets are complementary; the cat runs and the dog chases. Not once in a thousand dogs would know what to do with the cat if he caught her. When a cat strikes an attitude in his path, the dog draws round her a polite circle. In a state of nature they would live in perfect amity. A kitten and a puppy greet each other with unguarded trust. Dogs usually become catters only through thoughtlessness or the sporting instinct of their owners. Though always ready to chase anything that runs, they have much kindlier nature than men. A retriever puppy will watch a rabbit hop leisurely across the lawn within ten yards of him, who never saw one dart along the road without giving a chase. An Irish terrier was seen the other day playing with a mouse, and, till the little creature bit his too inquisitive nose, no instinct prompted him to kill it. The same terrier chased the flying beech leaves as if he would catch Autumn before he stopped. If dogs and cats are born with an ultimate hunting instinct, as many blue-eyed babies will ultimately have brown eyes, they certainly start life innocent.
Although cats do not learn tricks invented by their frivolous owners, they adapt themselves very quickly to strange circumstances. Cats imported into Jamaica cleared the country of vermin so effectively that they soon left nothing to eat but insects, and on these, an occasional appetizer in their natural diet, they now live. (The Cat by Katherine M. Wilson)

What lends support to the author's assertion in the passage that dogs are not the natural enemies of cats?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

The cat was made for love and warmth and softness. These bring out all her best qualities. She is nearest perfection sleeping in a fluffy coil by the fire, secure of the same warmth in one human heart. We must let sleeping dogs lie, but we can bury our face in a sleeping cat and she stirs only to purr. No waking thoughts were ever more innocent. She is as near as heaven as we can get on earth, blissful, quiet, content. She alone of animals knows how to luxuriate in perfect rest. As she lies in a bath of firelight, listening to the flames, breathing her low contented hum, she does not have to consider getting out and drying herself, but lays her mind to rock on a stream of gentle truthfulness. And when this beautiful petted cat awakes with a wide yawn, and stretches herself bit by bit as if to bring her wandering spirit back by some elaborate conjuror’s trick, she wakes to the life for which she is perfectly fitted. The cat needs human affection. It is not like a rabbit, pleased to eat and frisk in lonely nature and the farther from human notice the better, nor like a sparrow or a mouse, attracted to the haunts of man by crumbs. The wild domestic cat that dodges round corners or bolts up trees, whose claw is against every man and whom every dog chases, is not the natural un-reclaimed cat, but a poor outcast from its natural heritage. Deprived of its security in man’s love the cat becomes almost a nerve-shattered maniac; and yet a little affection will turn it into the fluffy darling.
Not instinct, but experience, makes animals afraid. The young thrush comes within a yard as we sit chatting on the garden seat. Old birds trust us less, except in a land of Buddha. The scared cat is circumstantial evidence of our brutality. Even cats and dogs have no natural antipathy. They get the reputation for it because their habits in the streets are complementary; the cat runs and the dog chases. Not once in a thousand dogs would know what to do with the cat if he caught her. When a cat strikes an attitude in his path, the dog draws round her a polite circle. In a state of nature they would live in perfect amity. A kitten and a puppy greet each other with unguarded trust. Dogs usually become catters only through thoughtlessness or the sporting instinct of their owners. Though always ready to chase anything that runs, they have much kindlier nature than men. A retriever puppy will watch a rabbit hop leisurely across the lawn within ten yards of him, who never saw one dart along the road without giving a chase. An Irish terrier was seen the other day playing with a mouse, and, till the little creature bit his too inquisitive nose, no instinct prompted him to kill it. The same terrier chased the flying beech leaves as if he would catch Autumn before he stopped. If dogs and cats are born with an ultimate hunting instinct, as many blue-eyed babies will ultimately have brown eyes, they certainly start life innocent.
Although cats do not learn tricks invented by their frivolous owners, they adapt themselves very quickly to strange circumstances. Cats imported into Jamaica cleared the country of vermin so effectively that they soon left nothing to eat but insects, and on these, an occasional appetizer in their natural diet, they now live. (The Cat by Katherine M. Wilson)

Why does the author say that the scared cat is circumstantial evidence of our brutality?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

The cat was made for love and warmth and softness. These bring out all her best qualities. She is nearest perfection sleeping in a fluffy coil by the fire, secure of the same warmth in one human heart. We must let sleeping dogs lie, but we can bury our face in a sleeping cat and she stirs only to purr. No waking thoughts were ever more innocent. She is as near as heaven as we can get on earth, blissful, quiet, content. She alone of animals knows how to luxuriate in perfect rest. As she lies in a bath of firelight, listening to the flames, breathing her low contented hum, she does not have to consider getting out and drying herself, but lays her mind to rock on a stream of gentle truthfulness. And when this beautiful petted cat awakes with a wide yawn, and stretches herself bit by bit as if to bring her wandering spirit back by some elaborate conjuror’s trick, she wakes to the life for which she is perfectly fitted. The cat needs human affection. It is not like a rabbit, pleased to eat and frisk in lonely nature and the farther from human notice the better, nor like a sparrow or a mouse, attracted to the haunts of man by crumbs. The wild domestic cat that dodges round corners or bolts up trees, whose claw is against every man and whom every dog chases, is not the natural un-reclaimed cat, but a poor outcast from its natural heritage. Deprived of its security in man’s love the cat becomes almost a nerve-shattered maniac; and yet a little affection will turn it into the fluffy darling.
Not instinct, but experience, makes animals afraid. The young thrush comes within a yard as we sit chatting on the garden seat. Old birds trust us less, except in a land of Buddha. The scared cat is circumstantial evidence of our brutality. Even cats and dogs have no natural antipathy. They get the reputation for it because their habits in the streets are complementary; the cat runs and the dog chases. Not once in a thousand dogs would know what to do with the cat if he caught her. When a cat strikes an attitude in his path, the dog draws round her a polite circle. In a state of nature they would live in perfect amity. A kitten and a puppy greet each other with unguarded trust. Dogs usually become catters only through thoughtlessness or the sporting instinct of their owners. Though always ready to chase anything that runs, they have much kindlier nature than men. A retriever puppy will watch a rabbit hop leisurely across the lawn within ten yards of him, who never saw one dart along the road without giving a chase. An Irish terrier was seen the other day playing with a mouse, and, till the little creature bit his too inquisitive nose, no instinct prompted him to kill it. The same terrier chased the flying beech leaves as if he would catch Autumn before he stopped. If dogs and cats are born with an ultimate hunting instinct, as many blue-eyed babies will ultimately have brown eyes, they certainly start life innocent.
Although cats do not learn tricks invented by their frivolous owners, they adapt themselves very quickly to strange circumstances. Cats imported into Jamaica cleared the country of vermin so effectively that they soon left nothing to eat but insects, and on these, an occasional appetizer in their natural diet, they now live. (The Cat by Katherine M. Wilson)