Transformation of Sentences Questions and Answers

Direction for [ Question No: 1 To 1 ] :

Directions : Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct/most appropriate options.

Aimee had a painful childhood. She was born in 1975 with no shin bones. The doctors therfore had to amputate both her legs so that she would be able to walk later in life. Unfortunately, she had to undergo a number of surgeries at the age of two, five and eight, and had to spend a long time in a hospital. Aimee grew up with artificial legs. Her mother, however, treated her as a self-sufficient person who did not require any special treatment. She was gradually able to learn how to move and run, and even play various sports like softball and go swimming, hiking and skiing.

When she was in high school, Aimee discovered her passion for athletics. Towards the end of high school, she participated in the Boston track and field meet for the disabled. On arriving in Boston, she was surprised to discover that she was the only athlete wearing wooden legs. The rest of the athletes had metal, shock-absorbent legs that she didn't even know existed. Not to mention that all the other athletes had at least one normal leg. This fact did not shake her determination; instead it made her push herself harder to succeed. And succeed she did - she not only won, she also broke a national record in doing so. She decided to enter the long jump competition next, an event that double amputees were technically 'not supposed' to enter. A year later, she broke the world record in it.

Aimee was not happy with the way prosthetic legs were designed. So she invited innovators to combine science and art, and design unconventional prosthetic legs. She was soon wearing cheetah legs, handcrafted wooden legs, jellyfish legs and many more. She now began getting invitations from different parts of the world to talk about her life story and designer legs. The fashion and beauty industry took note of Aimee's talent and beauty and asked her to model for, or endorse beauty products. Today she is a global model for a leading brand of cosmetics.

Direction for [ Question No: 2 To 2 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow :

I have told you already about the formation of tribes. When agriculture came, and there was some division of work or labour, it became necessary for some person in the tribe to organise the work. Even before this, the tribes wanted someone to lead them to battle against another tribe. The leader was usually the oldest man in the group. He was called, or rather we call him now, the patriarch. As the oldest, he was supposed to be the most experienced and to have the most knowledge. This patriarch was not very different from the other members of the tribe. He worked with the others, and all the food that was produced was divided between all the members of the tribe. Everything belonged to the tribe. It was not like we have now, each person having his separate house and money and many other things. Whatever a man earned was divided up as it all belonged to the tribe. The patriarch or the organiser of the tribe did this dividing.

But changes came in slowly. There were new kinds of work, especially on account of agriculture, and the patriarch had to spend most of his time in organising and seeing that work was properly done by all the members of the tribe. Little by little, the patriarch gave up doing the ordinary work or labour of the people. He thus became quite different from the rest of the people. We see now another kind of division of work or labour : the patriarch doing the organizing and ordering people about, and the other people working in the fields and hunting and going to battle, and obeying the orders of their leader, the patriarch. If there was a war or fight between two tribes, the patriarch became even more powerful, for in wartime it was not possible to fight well without a leader. So the patriarch became very powerful.

Direction for [ Question No: 3 To 3 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow :

At that moment, we heard a big bang from outside, as if a bomb had exploded! We felt as if we were being thrown violently to the ground. From the shadow of a tree nearby, someone emerged and walked slowly towards the shop to stand before us. Everything had happened in the fraction of a second and seeing his face now, my throat went suddenly dry.

He was a young boy. Across his cheek ran a deep gash, from eye to lip made by a bullet or a sharp knife. There was blood and pus in it. The flesh under his lip looked as if it had been ripped open and we could see his teeth in the quavering light.

I went to the old woman and took her hand in mine, gripping it tightly. We were both shivering. The boy was wearing black jeans and a khaki jacket. And what was that in his hand ? A revolver ? Even in the smoky light of the kerosene lamp, the barrel shone. The old woman burst into a hysterical cry.

'Oh my Kanbap, my son! I told your father a thousand times to bring you from the railway track. Oh my son, what has happened to you ? Why are you bleeding like this ?'

Suddenly the boy's eyes fell on the girl sitting in the corner and trembling with fear. He sped like a bullet towards the girl and grabbing her hair, rained blows and kicks on her stomach, shouting, 'I will smash your womb! I will kill the bastard child of that soldier you are carrying... Making love with a soldier, dirty bitch! Phooh! Phooh!

Direction for [ Question No: 4 To 4 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow.

What was this new state like? Fortunately, we have full accounts, both Indian and Greek. Megasthenes, the ambassador sent by Seleucus, has left a record and, much more important is that contemporary account - Kautilya's Arthashastra, 'the Science of Polity'. Kautilya is another name for Chanakya, and thus we have a book written, not only by a great scholar, but a man who played a dominating part in the establishment, growth and preservation of the empire. Chanakya has been called the Indian Machiavelli, and to some extent the comparison is justified. But he was a much bigger person in every way, greater in intellect and action. He was no mere follower of a king, a humble advisor of an all-powerful emperor. A picture of him emerges from an old Indian play - the Mudra-Rakshasa - which deals with this period. Bold and scheming, proud and revengeful, never forgetting a slight, never forgetting his purpose, availing himself of every device to delude and defeat the enemy, he sat with the reins of empire in his hands and looked upon the emperor more as a loved pupil than as a master. Simple and austere in his life, uninterested in the pomp and pageantry of high position, when he had redeemed his pledge and accomplished his purpose, he wanted to retire, to a life of contemplation.

There was hardly anything Chanakya would have refrained from doing to achieve his purpose; he was unscrupulous enough; yet he was also wise enough to know that this very purpose might be defeated by means unsuited to the end. Long before Clausewitz, he is reported to have said that war is only a continuance of state policy by other means. But, he adds, war must always serve the larger ends of policy and not become an end in itself; the statesman's objective must always be the betterment of the state as a result of war, not the mere defeat and destruction of the enemy. If war involves both parties in a common ruin, that is bankruptcy of statesmanship. War must be conducted by armed forces, but much more important than the force of arms is the high strategy which saps the enemy's morale and disrupts his forces and brings about his collapse, or takes him to the verge of collapse, before armed attack.

Direction for [ Question No: 5 To 6 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow.

The next morning, as I was about to leave the city, I saw peacocks on every tree, rock and hill. Their movements had the same peace, the same grace and the same beauty. As the evening shadows deepened, the air was filled with the song of peacocks. I thought they were there to both welcome and bid me farewell.

Whenever I recall that trip, my mind is filled with the images of those peacocks. I am surprised. Did I really see so many of them? Did the peacocks of Rajasthan actually come out to greet me? I wonder how they are now.

I try to imagine that city now, but all I can see is a picture of desolation. Shocked and disturbed, I am neither able to see the peacocks nor hear their song. Where have they all disappeared? In which corner of the world are they hiding? Suddenly, I have a vision of a lonely peacock on a distant hill. He seems battered and bruised. I walk quickly toward him but, before I can reach the hill, he rises into the sky screaming with terror and disappears.

Where has he gone? Where are his companions, those countless peacocks? Why is he sitting alone on that hill, the very picture of desolation? Why is he so despondent, so terrified? The sight of that dejected, bewildered peacock suddenly brings to mind another image of desolation that I had forgotten. On the far edge of a dark, oil-soaked sea, I see a forlorn duck covered with foul effluents, watching the waves in disbelief. Till yesterday, the sea was ambrosia, today it is poison. The wings of the duck are so heavy with slime that he can no longer fly. Poison flows through the veins in his body.

Direction for [ Question No: 7 To 8 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow.

We sallied out at three o'clock in the afternoon, having finished our tiffin and coffee. The main job for the day was to mount and frame the photograph. Uncle carried it in his hand delicately, enclosed in an old envelope, as if it were fragile and likely to perish at a finger's pressure. As we went down the street, a neighbour standing at his door hailed us and demanded, "Where are you taking the young fellow?" He was an engineer who worked in some distant projects on the hills, coming home once in a while and then again disappearing from our society. He was a particular friend of my uncle as they occasionally gathered for a game of cards in my house. He asked, "I am here for a few days. Can't we have a session some time?"

"Of course, of course," said my uncle without much fervour, "I will let you know", and moved on.

"Won't aunt get angry?" I asked, remembering the arguments they had had after every card session. The card players would have been sitting around in the middle of the hall, demanding coffee and edibles, and playing far into the night. My aunt would complain after the company had dispersed, "Sitting there with your friends, you lock me up in the kitchen all day! What madness seizes you people when you touch a pack of cards, I wonder!" Worn out by her attacks, my uncle began to avoid his friends, the company gradually dwindled and disappeared. But it did not prevent them from dreaming about cards or luxuriating in visions of a grand session. Somewhere my uncle was supposed to have lost a lot of money through the card games, and my aunt was very definite that he should never go near cards again, although he kept saying, "We play only Twenty-eight, and not Rummy, after all, Twenty-eight...".

Direction for [ Question No: 9 To 9 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct/most appropriate options.

For a few days, no one knew where Venkatashami had gone. Enquiries revealed that he had run away with the Dombara girl. The leader of the troupe came to the Gowda to express his grief and went back to the camp. There was nothing that anyone could do. Four days later, a Gowda from a village some five miles away was passing this way, and he brought Venkatashami and left him at his parents' house. The boy was burning with fever. It seems the girl was with him when he became ill. She had been taken home by her father and Venkatashami had been brought back seriously ill.

The boy did not recover from that illness. He was a handsome boy with an open face. Dark, yes, but attractive. The black of his skin, that of his eyes, and of his moustache were of three different shades. When he smiled, it was like a flash of lightning among the clouds. His body was so well-built, no hammer could break it. The fever that had caught hold of him seemed unwilling to let go of such a fine physique. They call the fever by the name typhoid now and can diagnose it in no time. But those days, nobody was aware of such things. All they knew was that something was wrong with the tongue. He was given the traditional medicines and kept on a local diet. A fortnight later, Venkatashami passed away. His delirious mind rambled and his talk was all about his meeting with the girl. Whenever he was conscious, he kept asking them to call her. It would have been all right if he had been married to her. His request would have been treated with understanding and sympathy, and she would have been sent for. But does one bring the girl who had led him astray to his bedside in these circumstances ?

Direction for [ Question No: 10 To 10 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct/most appropriate options.

Lata stood outside the hall for a minute. Sunlight poured onto the stone steps. The edge of her middle finger was smeared with dark blue ink, and she looked at it, frowning. She was close to tears.

Other English students stood on the steps and chatted. A post-mortem of the paper was being held, and it was dominated by an optimistic and chubby girl who was ticking off on her fingers the various points she had answered correctly.

'This is one paper I know I have done really well,' she said. 'Especially the 'King Lear' question. I think that the answer was 'Yes'.' Others were looking excited or depressed. Everyone agreed that several of the questions were far harder than they had needed to be. A knot of history students stood not far away, discussing their paper, which had been held simultaneously in the same building. One of them was the young man who had brought himself to Lata's attention in the Imperial Book Depot, and he was looking a little worried. He had spent a great deal of time these last few months in extra-curricular activities - particularly cricket - and this had taken its toll upon his performance.

Lata walked to a bench beneath the gulmohar tree and sat down to collect herself. When she got home for lunch, she would be pestered with a hundred questions about how well she had done. She looked down at the red flowers that lay scattered at her feet. In her head, she could still hear the buzzing of the fly.

The young man, though he had been talking to his classmates, had noticed her walking down the steps. When she sat down on the far bench under the tree, he decided to have a word with her. He told his friends that he had to go home for lunch - that his father would be waiting for him - and hurried along the path past the gulmohar. As he came to the bench, he uttered an exclamation of surprise and stopped.