English 101: English I: Reading and Writing Skills

Paper Sample

Mid Term

Marks 25 Time 2 hours

Attempt Any 5 Questions. All Questions Carry Equal Marks

Q1. Identify topic sentence for each of the following paragraphs.

a. Adult education is essential for Democracy of India. The number of grown up illiterates
is great. All college and senior School students should come forward to visit villages in
the summer vacation. Each one will teach one there. This will remove illiteracy and
strengthen our democracy.
b. I happened to see a one day cricket match between Pakistan and Australia at Wankhade
Stadium, Mumbai. I went for a fun. But I witnessed a horrible sight. Two thousand
ticketless cricket fans gate crashed. There was a stampede. Three persons died and twenty
were injured.
c. City Anti-pollution Drive demands certain steps from all the citizens of ABC city. All
house-holders should pack the waste in a plastic bag and put the bag in front of their
house. The bag will be replaced with an empty bag by the Municipal van every morning.
They should maintain the cleanliness of the city. This will make the city pollution free.
d. My visit to a slum area after the rainy season was a sad affair. The pits were still full of
rain water. There was mud all around. The polluted water had caused various diseases.
There was no home without a sick person
e. I saw a man climbing down a water pipe. He had a knife in his hand. I hit his hand with a
brick. He fell down on the ground and I jumped upon him. Soon others reached there and
we handed him over to the police.

Q2. Skim the following passage into one half of its original length. (Total Words 113)

Did you know that water currents in the northern Pacific Ocean capture a huge amount of
garbage? Plastic and other types of man-made waste float on the surface and circulate below the
water. It is difficult to measure how much trash is in the ocean because a lot of the trash has
broken down into tiny pieces. As a result, this polluted region is more like “trash soup” than a
solid “island of trash” that is easy to see. Some reports estimate that this area, known as the
Pacific Garbage Patch, covers 700,000 square kilometers (270,000 square miles), while others
say the area is as big as 15,000,000 square kilometers (5,800,000 square miles).

Q3. What is Scanning and why is it considered most useful technique in Academic Reading?
Q4. Discuss some of the important tools and ways of inferring a text.

Q5. Identify Cohesive devices in the text given below.

Rhinos seem mythical or magical to some people. Maybe that is because they have a
horn. Actually, they have two horns, but one is more prominent. Maybe rhinos are behind the
idea of the unicorn. When people see something near-magical in an animal, they want that thing.
In the case of rhinos, it’s the horn. So people kill the rhinos and cut off their horns, even though
the horns are made of the same kind of protein that’s in your hair or fingernails. But people who
want magic horns don’t like to hear that. They don’t seem to care that there are only about
30,000 rhinos left in the world today.

Q6. Write about each sentence if it is a fact or an opinion.

a. Trees are very valuable.

b. Smoking is very injurious to health.
c. The workers often resorts to strikes to highlight their demands.
d. Those who are punctual are loved and liked by all.
e. There is no increase in our resources.

Q7. Give meanings for the underlined words from the context in which they are used

Rhinos have marvelous ears. Have you ever looked at a rhino ear? It is somehow like a
curled leaf, or flower petals, or a gracefully rolled paper cone for holding nuts.
Rhinos seem mythical or magical to some people. Maybe that is because they have a horn.
Actually, they have two horns, but one is more prominent. Maybe rhinos are behind the idea of
the unicorn.