Reg. No.

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Mid-Term Examinations, April 2021

Programme : B.Tech Semester : Winter 2021
Course : Technical Writing & Composition Code : ENG 1001
Faculty : Dr. Anita Yadav Slot/Class No. : B 13 / 0433
Time : 1½ hours Max. Marks : 50

Answer all the Questions

Q. No. Question Description Marks

1 Is the COVID-19 pandemic a perfect opportunity for humans to introspect? Write your views in
150 words. 10

2 Read the following passages and paraphrase it by putting it into your own words.
It has never been denied that Dante the political philosopher as well as Dante the poet
assimilated to the full the political doctrines by which his century was moved. In fact, Dante
held a key-position in the political and intellectual discussions around 1300, and if in a
superficial manner he has often been labelled reactionary, it is simply the prevalence of the
10
imperial idea in Dante’s works—different though it was from that of the preceding
centuries—, which obscured the overwhelmingly unconventional features of his moral-
political outlook. From Ernst H. Kantorowicz. The King’s Two Bodies. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981.

3 Read the following passage and write a summary. Also mention the number of words you have
used in making a precis of the original:
“Around midnight on December 2, 1984 . . . I went to bed. Before I fell asleep, I felt a sharp pricking
sensation in my throat. I thought I was going to catch a cold. But a few minutes later, I was coughing
and had difficulty breathing. I then heard loud sounds from outside. Looking out of the window, I
saw people running. And then I smelt a very strong, foul odour. I moved back to the bedroom to
find my wife coughing too. I realised there was something terribly wrong . . . and called the police
control room. When someone responded, I could hear him gasp for breath and cough. “What’s
happened?” I asked. “Sahab, Union Carbide ki gas tankee phoot gayee hai. Dam ghut raha hai. (Sir,
a Union Carbide gas tank has exploded. I am suffocating).”
-- Raajkumar Keswani in the Outlook magazine 10

The events narrated in this terrifying account by Keswani, a journalist working in Bhopal in the
1980s, marked the beginning of one of the world’s biggest industrial disasters on the intervening
night of December 2 and December 3, 1984.
The “very strong, foul odour” was that of the deadly methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas and other
poisonous substances that had leaked from the American firm Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in
Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, killing around 3,800 people, according to government estimates. Other
estimates have put the death toll at a minimum of 8,000 within two weeks of the disaster, and an
equal number in the years to follow. Besides the thousands who died, more than 5 lakh people were
affected by the gas leak.

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 It’s not as if there were no prior warnings. Keswani himself had written two articles in local
publications in the years before the tragedy on the dangers that the plant posed to residents of
Bhopal, but “[n]o one listened to me”.
On that cold December night, terrified residents tried to run away from the site but thousands were
dead by the morning hours. Mass funerals and cremations were carried out, and bodies dumped
into the Narmada river. The New York Times reported on December 3, 1984: “Witnesses said
thousands of people had been taken to hospitals gasping for breath, many frothing at the mouth,
their eyes inflamed. The streets were littered with the corpses of dogs, cats, water buffalo, cows
and birds…Doctors from neighbouring towns and the Indian Army were rushed to the city…where
hospitals were said to be overflowing with the injured. Most of the victims were children and old
people who were overwhelmed by the gas and suffocated…”
According to witnesses, a “densely populated area of about 15 square miles was turned into ‘one
vast gas chamber’”, The Guardian reported.

4 Suppose you are the teacher in a university. Prepare a set of power point slides to deliver it in front
of your students on the topic ‘How to write a paragraph’. 10

5 On the basis of the visual and verbal inputs given below write an article on the topic: Girls: An
Asset and No longer a Burden.

10

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