(Download) CAPF (AC) Exam, 2013 Paper - "General Studies, Essay & Comprehension"

Exam Name: CAPF (AC)

Year: 2013

Subject: General Studies, Essay & Comprehension

Q1. Write essays on any four of the following in about 300 words each :

(a) Nexus between Health practitioners and Pharmaceutical companies, a concern
(b) Inter-State water disputes in India
(c) Role of Social Reformers in the struggle for freedom
(d) Impact of falling value of rupee on Indian economy
(e) China's policy of aggressive dominance in South-East Asia
(f) Effect of media publicity on terrorism

Q2. Write arguments for and against each of the following statements in about 300 words:

(a) A casteless society becomes distant through issues raised by reservation policies.
(b) Women empowerment in India so far is an urban phenomenon.

Q3. Write reports on the following in about 200 words each :

(a) The Uttarakhand disaster and the role of Indian military.
(b) Crisis of ethics in the game of cricket.

Q4. Attempt a précis of the given passage of 450 words, in one-third of its length. Suggest a suitable title. Write the précis, as far as possible, in your own words. State the number of words at the end of the answer. Write the précis on the separate sheets provided and fasten them to the answer-book.

Indian literature has a long tradition and is a reflection of its culture through the ages. This fact is often overlooked, since literature in English is popular amongst the urban middle class. The British attempted to categorise the main regional languages. Despite the Orientalists' admiration of the Sanskrit tradition, the need to communicate with the locals or convert them to Christianity prompted the British to learn the local languages. As a result, a number of grammar books were written to understand these better. The nationalists also recognised the importance of regional languages. Members of the Congress party realised that if they only spoke in English, they were alienated from their own people, as it was considered to be synonymous with cultural domination.

In 1910, the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (Conference on Hindi Literature) was held by the conservatives of the Independence movement. In 1916 the Benares Hindu University was founded with a similar ideological aim — to defend the great Hindu tradition. Gandhi, who endorsed it in the era between the two world wars, disassociated himself from it in the 1940s, and reproached the conservatives for promoting a very Sanskritised Hindi. He advocated a synthesis, Hindustani, which could be used by all the speakers of Urdu and Hindi. After Independence, the government supported Hindi, which eventually became the official language of the nation and the mass media promoted a very Sanskritised form. Later, the increasing power of the Hindu nationalists also encouraged the use of Hindi. Paradoxically, the English-speaking intelligentsia also encouraged it as they did not want the communalists to monopolise the cultural traditions of the country.

The growing domination of Hindi, which is evident due to a demographic balance of power, has however not eclipsed other regional literatures. In 1954, the Sahitya Akademi was established by the government. It considers Indian literature as "a literature in several languages. Two of its fellows, U.R. Ananthamurthy and K. Satchidanandan, write in Dravidian languages – in fact, Ananthamurthy was awarded the Jnanpith Award in 1994 for his work in Kannada. If the Akademi makes allowances for Hindi literature, notably by giving prizes, it supports all other regional literatures equally. It acknowledges more languages than the Constitution, including Maithili, Dogri, Rajasthani and English, and tries hard to support them by following an active publications policy. The States Reorganisation Act of 1956 rearranged the states according to a linguistic principle. This too helped foster regional literature as the state governments supported it. The Sahitya Akademi seeks to focus on the common cultural traits that underlie literature written in Indian languages. The unity is associated with the structure of Indian society, its caste divisions, its religious communities and gender inequality. This social dimension of Indian literature is important.

Q5. Read the following passage and answer the questions :

Ever since the dawn of civilisation, class inequality has existed. Among savage tribes at the present day, it takes very simple forms. There are chiefs, and the chiefs are able to have several wives. Savages, unlike civilised men, have found a way of making wives a source of wealth, so that the more wives a man has the wealthier he becomes. But this primitive form of social inequality soon gave way to others more complex. In the main, social inequality has been bound up with inheritance, and therefore, in all patriarchal societies, with descent in the male line. Originally, the greater wealth of certain persons was due to military prowess. The successful fighter acquired wealth, and transmitted it to his sons.

Wealth acquired by the sword usually consisted of land, and to this day land-owning is the mark of the aristocrat, the aristocrat being in theory the descendant of some feudal baron, who acquired his lands by killing the previous occupant and holding his acquisition against all comers. This is considered the most honourable source of wealth. There are others slightly less honourable, exemplified by those who, while completely idle themselves, have acquired their wealth by inheritance from an industrious ancestor; and yet others, still less respectable, whose wealth is due to their own industry. In the modern world, the plutocrat who, though rich, still works, is gradually ousting the aristocrat, whose income was in theory derived solely from ownership of land and natural monopolies. There have been two main legal sources of property: one, the aristocratic source, namely, ownership of land; the other, the bourgeois source, namely, the right to the produce of one's own labour. The right to the produce of one's own labour has always existed only on paper, because things are made out of other things, and the man who supplies the raw material exacts a right to the finished product in return for wages, or, where slavery exists, in return for the bare necessaries of life. We have thus three orders of men — the land-owner, the capitalist, and the proletarian. The capitalist in origin is merely a man whose savings have enabled him to buy the raw materials and the tools required in manufacturing, and who has thereby acquired the right to the finished product in return for wages. The three categories of land-owner, capitalist, and proletarian are clear enough in theory; but in practice the distinctions are blurred. A land-owner may employ business methods in developing a seaside resort which happens to be upon his property. A capitalist whose money is derived from manufacture may invest the whole or part of his fortune in land, and take to living upon rent. A proletarian, in so far as he has money in the savings bank, or a house which he is buying on the installment plan, becomes to that extent a capitalist or a land-owner as the case may be. The eminent barrister who charges a thousand guineas for a brief should, in strict economics, be classified as a proletarian. But he would be indignant if this were done, and has the mentality of a plutocrat.

(i) inequality bound with How is social inheritance ?
(ii) What is the irony in the most honourable source of wealth?
(iii) What are the two legal sources of property ?
(iv) How does the writer distinguish the three orders of men ?
(v) Who is a plutocrat?

Q6. Read the following passage and answer the questions :

Gandhi's experience in South Africa was decisive: not only in his political, family, and social life, but also for his culture and religion, Two of his most faithful collaborators there, Henry Polak and Hermann Kallenbach, were secular Jews. Gandhi had occasion to meet exponents of diverse religions and denominations, including Christian ones; he held long discussions with them, and some tried to convert him. It was a Jainist poet and thinker from Bombay, Raychandbhai, who confirmed Gandhi in the faith of his fathers.

Gandhi met him on his return to India from England, and continued to correspond with him from South Africa, until the poet's premature death. In his autobiography, Gandhi wrote that only once in his life had he come close to choosing a personal guru: yes, Raychandbhai. He considered him “the best Indian of his time," and freely acknowledged his debt to the Jain. If his Christian friends in London had awakened in him “the thirst for a religious quest," Raychandbhai had taught him that religion was essentially the control of one's own spirit, and liberation from any attachment or aversion to people or things.

It was principally during his South African years that Gandhi became acquainted with writers whom he would consider masters for the rest of his life: Ruskin, Thoreau, Carpenter, Tolstoy. In 1904 he read Ruskin's Unto this Last, a book identifying the individual good with the common good, and speaking of the importance of work as the cornerstone of life; for Ruskin, all types of work have equal dignity and value, whether they be intellectual or manual, noble or humble. In 1907, Gandhi read Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," and was struck by its central theme: one's duty to refuse to obey a country's laws if one believes them to be unjust. Two years later, while in London, he read a volume written by the idealistic socialist, Edward Carpenter: Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure. He found it "enlightening," excellent in its analysis of civilisation. An advocate of the return to a simple life in harmony with nature, Carpenter condemned modern civilisation as degrading and corrupting; like Ruskin, he exalted the joy of manual work, which industrialism had separated from the creative project.

However, the author that struck Gandhi more than any other was Tolstoy. All during the rest of his life, Gandhi would recognize his debt to the Russian writer. He probably read Tolstoy for the first time during the London years of his youth, when he greatly admired the author's ideas and work. But his first great encounter with Tolstoy dates back to 1894, in South Africa, when a friend gave him a copy of God's Reign is within You. Gandhi's reading of it left an indelible impression on him. He felt for the book and its author the same admiration that he had held for the Sermon on the Mount. He found in it an admonition against responding to evil with violence, an exhortation to love one's neighbour and practise pacifism, and a confirmation of the ancient Indian commandment (Jainist, in particular) of ahimsa. He also found a brief story of the forerunners of non-violence, and a catalogue of its advocates and "militants" at that time: from the Quakers to Tom Paine, from the American abolitionists to the Russian duchobors.

In other books by Tolstoy which he read in the years that followed, Gandhi was led to agree more and more adamantly with the Russian's distillation of Christianity - and of every religious faith — to the commandment to love one's neighbour; the aspiration toward a profound moral rebirth of man; a highly critical attitude toward progress, science, luxury, and wealth, as well as toward the city, a place of alienation and destruction of man's deepest values.

(i) Why was Gandhi's experience in South Africa decisive ?
(ii) Who was Gandhi's personal guru and why did he consider him so ?
(iii) Who were the writers whom he considered as masters?
(iv) How did these masters influence Gandhi ? (v) How much was Gandhi impressed by Tolstoy?

Q7. (A) Answer the following as directed :

(i) Both of them did not partake in the function. (Correct the sentence)
(ii) As soon as the bell rang, the train started. (Rewrite the sentence using ‘No sooner")
(iii) She would not _ how old she was. (say, tell)
(iv) If it does not stop raining we cannot play. (Begin with "Unless')
(v) The cattle damaged both the fence and the crop. (Rewrite using ‘not only ... but also')
(vi) He shouted, “Let me go." (Change to Indirect Speech)
(vii) Give the order. (Change the voice)
(viii) Notwithstanding his hard work he did not succeed. (Rewrite the sentence using yet)
(ix) Durga is a brave girl. (Change to Exclamatory Sentence)
(x) He is as strong as his brother. (Change the degree of comparison without changing the meaning)

(B) Use the following phrasal verbs in sentences of your own :

(i) to do away with
(ii) to put up with
(iii) turn down
(iv) do without
(v) fall back upon

(C) Fill in the blanks with prepositions :

(i) She swims everyday the summer.
(ii) World War II lasted more than five years.
(iii) They work everyday - 7 a.m.
(iv) He spoke_ me.
(v) India became a Republic_

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