ST.

JOSEPH’S COLLEGE OF COMMERCE (AUTONOMOUS)

END SEMESTER EXAMINATION – NOVEMBER 2020
B.COM –I SEMESTER
GENERAL ENGLISH
Duration: 2 Hours 30 Mins Max. Marks: 50

Note: Read the questions carefully and answer.

Do not exceed the word limit.
Do not copy sentences from the passage to your answers.

NAME: ABEL CHERIAN THOMAS

REGISTER NO. 20SJCCC003

DATE: 19-11-2020

SECTION A

READING COMPREHENSION

Read the passage and answer the questions.

YouTube addiction: binge watching videos became my 'drug of choice'

Domingo Cullen recalls how the site’s recommendation engine left him ‘entranced by
thoroughly useless information’

The wild elephants turn back to salute the men who have saved their baby from the
ditch. They raise their trunks aloft with wondrous grace in a moment shared
between man and beast. I don’t blink, hardly twitch. Lit by the glow of the laptop
screen, my face shows no flicker of emotion. The video finishes and the next one
begins to load. “Electrocuted squirrel gets CPR by kind man.”

Unbeknownst to me, the daylight has faded across to the other side of the Earth, and
I am in darkness. I am lying on my bed in the fetal position, as I have been for three
hours straight … watching YouTube.

I don’t know exactly how long I’ve had a YouTube problem.

The first chapters of addiction are often written in the pen of innocence. Mine started
in the same way all others must – with a joy unforeseen. A music video with a new
friend behind the sofa at some party one unending summer night. An email in my
inbox linking a highlight reel of Messi’s greatest dribbles, coming in off the right
wing, scything through tackles.

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If I’m scrupulous, I admit it started long before that, in the time before the internet.
My parents didn’t let us watch much television as kids. My answer to this
deprivation was to flick through the channels like a drone whenever they were
away, hoping to land on something that gripped my attention for longer than the
split second it took me to glean, ignore, and plough onward. Alone, I never watched
anything for longer than two minutes.

Years later, an interview with the writer David Foster Wallace struck me deeply.

Wallace fought depression for most of his adult life. He suffered with different types
of addictions, but said his primary addiction, as unsexy as it sounded, was
television. He said he was so afraid of watching it, he couldn’t have a TV in his
house. Hearing this for the first time opened my mind to the idea that the YouTube
thing, as it moved silently along the forest floor of my impulses like a fox on his feet
of silk, demanded a seriousness I was unwilling to give it.

Every addiction balances on the fulcrum of denial. The decline before the fall is
colored by a lake of awareness. I was unaware the habits I was slowly slipping into
weren’t OK. At first it was just weekends. I was single and lived alone; if I woke up
hungover, it was easy to turn my back on anything productive or social. One
weekend I became fascinated by the internal politicking of the WTA tennis tour.
Another weekend it was American high school track and field. A man in
Pennsylvania fashioned knives out of rusted wrenches. I was in.

There were times I wouldn’t communicate with anyone all day. It was isolationist
and repetitive and hypnotic. I would sit entranced, swelling my command of
thoroughly useless information as YouTube gently wove its spell on me, drawing me
deeper and deeper into its pixelated underworld. As one video finished, another one
on a similar topic loaded, sucking me in for another five or 10 minutes. Half hours
became hours became half days. And outside my window, the world whizzed on.

A lot of people think they don’t know how to watch YouTube. “I wouldn’t know
what to look for,” my friend Milly once told me. “Talking dog’s unique bark helps
him get adopted” is good, I thought. I shrugged and said nothing.

A system of recommendations based on previously viewed videos appears as if by

magic at the top of your screen, which means the table is always laid. If you’ve been
watching videos on the Anunnaki and ancient alien space-traveling civilizations,
YouTube will show you more of where you last left off when you next click on.

Even when I wiped my recommendations, the subjects my dark side needed to feed
on were etched in my memory.

All that was left was to type them into the search bar.

To be addicted is to be completely at the whim of your impulses. Tick. To realize you
are no longer in control of your decisions. Tick. To be aware that the behaviors you
are undergoing are harmful to you, tick, are making you unhappy, tick, and in spite

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of this, you are repeating them nonetheless. Tick. I was losing control over my ability
to not watch YouTube, and in doing so, I was losing days of my life I wasn’t going to
get back. But still, somehow, I wasn’t giving the situation the seriousness it
deserved.

I did take a knife to my internet connection three times.

Sports bloopers. Russian road traffic accidents. Dogs protecting newborn

babies. Sebaceous cyst extractions. Ancient civilizations that scientists and historians
refuse to talk about. A grizzly bear took a shotgun blast at close range. A man stayed
awake for 11 days. A fish evolved to be completely transparent. And on and on and
on.

My weekend YouTube habit morphed into weeknights and then into the day. Work
deadlines were affected. As I spent time alone in front of my computer, the slightest
sniff of procrastination would send me spiraling into the depths, and I’d emerge an
hour later, all the wiser, burdened under the weight of information I didn’t need to
know.

Eating disorders are often difficult because traditional mealtimes mean the “lion is
let out of the cage” three times a day. When most of our time is spent looking at
screens, internet addiction means the lion never has a cage to begin with. It feels like
it comes down to willpower and impulse control. Both of which are low on my list of
virtues.

Not having a smartphone and not being on any social media granted me a certain
type of freedom, but it also meant all my wrath and self-loathing were concentrated
into one place. Alone in front of my laptop, I would make up for lost time.

I was acting out. YouTube was my drug of choice.

Strangely, when I was acting out with YouTube, I couldn’t watch anything I enjoyed.
I couldn’t sit down and watch an hour-long documentary about winemaking or the
pyramids of Giza. That was the truly pathological nature of it. I had to watch short
clips, back to back to back to back, about absolutely nothing. Almost everything I
watched in the grips of my YouTube habit didn’t improve my life in any way. It was
the American History X moment over and over again: “Has anything you’ve done
made your life better?”

The ridiculousness of it all feels laughable. But maybe I laugh to keep from crying.
Because if you take away the politics of the Women’s Tennis Association and
fashioning knives from wrenches and elephants raising their trunks aloft to thank
the men for saving their baby elephant from a ditch, what you’re left with is
somebody alone in their flat, in the dark, willing unhappiness on themselves. In
ignorance of the life going on outside the window they are walling themselves up
against. In defiance of the light from the phone on the table beside them that is
ringing and they won’t answer.

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Some poisons go to work more slowly than others. They hide in plain sight all
around us, masquerading as tools to make our lives more accessible, more
comfortable, and more immediate. One day we wake up and they’ve wormed their
way inside our minds, ossifying our imaginations, crowding our every moment.
And before we know it, we can’t breathe without them.

“I’ve got this,” we tell ourselves. But they’ve got us.

Wallace described the moment when we finally find ourselves alone and the dread
that comes with that, that comes to us when we have to be quiet. When you walk
into public spaces these days, there is always music playing. It seems significant that
we don’t want things to be quiet any more, he said. And this is happening now more
than ever, when the purpose of our lives is immediate gratification and getting
things for ourselves. We are moving moving moving – all the time moving.

At the same time, there is another part of us that feels the opposite. That is hungry
for silence and quiet and thinking very hard about the same thing for maybe half an
hour or more, rather than just 30 seconds. Of standing and looking at the branches of
a tree or listening to the birds singing. And this part of us doesn’t get fed.

And this thing makes itself felt in our bodies, as a kind of dread, deep inside us.
Every year it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read a book or listen
to a complex piece of music that takes work to understand. Because in computer and
internet culture, everything is so fast. And the faster things go, the more we feed that
part of ourselves that needs something immediate, that needs instant stimulation,
and we don’t feed the part of ourselves that needs quiet.

The part of us that can live in quiet.

I. Answer ALL in about 200-250 words each. 2 x 10 = 20

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1. “The first chapters of addiction are often written in the pen of innocence.”
What do you think is the meaning of this sentence? Comment on the way in
which the writer describes the beginnings of his addiction to YouTube by
examining the writing style. If you were to write about such a topic how
would you begin?
ANSWER: The writer begins his narrative on a comfortable and self-confident note,
which as we proceed further turns out to be only an illusion that the writer is watching
videos on YouTube because he wants to and not because he is unaware of the deep pit of
despair he is in. The line “The first chapters of addiction are often written in the pen of
innocence” aptly describes the way he lead himself into being an addict.
The writer tries to normalise his path to addiction by saying that every forest fire starts
with a spark, and that spark in his life was his inability to take the pleasure in watching
television when he was younger because of his parents. He is reiterating that it was not by
choice that he wanted to be trapped in this immeasurable mess, but more like an
unavoidable habit inculcated from the early stages in his life. Through his choice of
words it can be observed that fear and impatience were the key attributes of his
childhood, which eventually lead to a drastic decrease in his interest in any one topic for
two minutes at the least. In short, he was drawn in by the simple yet inevitable aspects of
his childhood, that landed him in the clutches of addiction.
The writer makes a bold choice and comes out honestly about the truth and origin of the
mishaps in his life, which I feel is quite a difficult task to do. On that note, I would say
that if I had to write about a topic like this, I would take my time in revealing the
important aspects of it, and reveal only till the part I am comfortable in opening up.

2. ““I’ve got this,” we tell ourselves. But they’ve got us.” What does the author
mean by this sentence? What according to the writer were the reasons for his
YouTube addiction? Are there other reasons that the writer may have
overlooked? Comment on the way in which the writer concludes the article.

ANSWER: The writer admits of how deep he had sunk in his life at that point of self-
realization. “I’ve got this,” we tell ourselves. But they’ve got us” is not a remark of
control or assurance, it is sheer despair. He is reminding us that you will only know how
low you’ve fallen when you hit the ground. Whenever we proudly assume we are in
control of a lost-cause situation, it becomes clearer that those are mere lies said to re-
assure ourselves from giving in wholly. We think we have it all settled, sorted out, taken
care of, and absolutely nothing to worry about when reality is that you’re neck deep in
this quicksand called addiction .
The reasons to fall into addiction, again, go all the way back to age of the blissful
unawareness of it. He also reveals the true realities of why he chooses to immerse himself
in meaningless videos. There is always some sort of void in everybody’s life that has to
be filled in order to have a balance for themselves and for the writer that was nothing but
YouTube. It was merely a distraction from the real world and the inescapable fact that he
was a lonely person, which gives him the need to derive his pleasure and joy through the

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 solace of cute animal videos. There are psychological factors involved in greater amounts
which may have been not considered by the writer.
Towards the end, the writer gives out a tone that seems to be regretting and hopeful for
the series of events happening around him. He concludes on the note that the pleasure of
solitude is still alive and will continue to grow vastly in him.

SECTION B

GENERAL WRITING TASKS

II. Answer ANY TWO in about 200-250 words each. 2 X 10 = 20

3. Write about an interesting conversation that you had with your friend, family
member or a stranger. (The conversation may have been a pleasant one or a
bitter one)
ANSWER: My tone and verbal usage varies from person to person just like anybody
else, but the people who are really close to me would be able to clearly differentiate my
conversations as it come become very distant very quick. I recall a conversation I recently
had with a friend which came as a surprise that affected me.
We were as usual talking about our common interests like the recent football and NBA
matches and how we hate particular players and teams for no reason at all. It is hard to
remember how, but we ended up transitioning the conversation to the something about
LGBTQ+ community. He mentioned something rather peculiar. He said that he saw a
picture online of a page from a kindergarten book, which showed three different kinds of
families. Father-mother-child, Mother-mother-child, Father-father-child. Well the
peculiar part was what came after. He said how people abroad are normalising the fact
that the second and third families are okay in their society. He went on to say about how
homosexuality was not promoted or mentioned about in the Bible and as Christians we
should not as well. I was stunned and absolutely speechless yet I asked whether or not he
was against the idea and purpose of the LGBTQ+ community. Unsurprisingly, he said no

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he wasn’t and that he had no objection against them but only wanted to remind me that it
isn’t ‘good’ or ‘correct’ for us.
I should have added in the start that that conversation was one-sided. I had to walk away
to keep my thoughts together. It was my job to make him aware and snatch that ignorance
before he spreads it around, but at times you just know that nothing would change even if
you try and that was that moment for me. Well in a way I’m glad that happened so I can
now be aware and makes a choice regarding the people I hang out with.

4. Narrate in detail an incident in which you were either at the receiving end of
a prank or were the mastermind of a prank.
ANSWER:

5. Narrate in detail a fictional story that you remember from childhood.

ANSWER: This story goes all the way back to third grade to my grandparents’ home,
the epitome of fictional stories and ravishing food. All the stories that come out of that
house stay with you forever. It took me hours of pestering to get my grandmother to tell
me the story, but when she final did, it was all worth it. The story is called the ‘The
Elephant and The Tailor’.
Long time ago, in a land where all the creatures in the world lived in and peace (except
the hyenas, you’ll see why), there was a happy elephant called Pinku. One day Pinku
wandered all the way to town and ended up at tailor’s shop. Pinku was lost yet amazed at
the various items she found at the tailor’s place, like the balls of yarn, colourful fabrics
and so on. Suddenly, the elephant discovered a needle and accidentally snorted it. Help!
Help! She panicked, just in time for the tailor to return. The tailor, Ramu, ran and put his
hand into her trunk and tried pulling the needle out. Plop! The needle came out carefully.
Pinku squealed with joy and relief and made a promise to Ramu that she would help him
in time of need. Ramu smiled. The next day Ramu had to go all the way to the forest to
collect some seeds and necessities. He was scared all alone in the forest. Suddenly a
bunch of hyenas came around eyeing him viciously. He was sweating profusely but then
came out Pinku! The hyenas disappointed runs away immediately for their lives. Ramu is
relieved and happy and thanks Pinku for saving him. Pinku reminded him of her promise.
They were best friends forever.
The small child I was, I found it really fascinating and interesting that humans and
animals could be so different from each other, yet be such good friends. I’m grateful to
my grandmother for giving me a beautiful picture of friendship, although now I look at it,

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be it Pinku or any elephant, its not easy for them to live in a world where they are on the
verge of dying any time of the day. At moments like those, I wish tales and stories could
take life and prove us wrong

6. Describe in detail the neighbourhood you live in and comment on its unique
characteristics by comparing it to other neighbourhoods you’ve seen.
ANSWER:

7. What is happening in the cartoon below? What do you think is the statement
made by this cartoon? Do you think such cartoons capture the reality
adequately?

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ANSWER:

SECTION C
MEDIA LITERACY
III. Answer ANY ONE in about 200-250 words. 1 X 10 = 10
8. Comment on the way in which Indian news media covers incidents or stories
by writing about a particular story that you have followed in great detail.
Comment on the kind of biases and prejudices that can enter into news
coverage.
ANSWER:

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9. Why do you think there is a huge proliferation of fake or misleading news in
the present times? What do you think can be done to tackle this problem?
Respond by narrating instances where you have been able to identify
misleading or fake news and the method you employed to do it.
ANSWER: At this time and age, fake news has taken a widespread toll nationwide
because of the technological advancements and developments, aiding the smooth
communication of fake news. Fake news is not just a small-scale problem, it is a form of
terrorism. People take to spreading fake news for reasons varying from personal to
political, around the globe.
For instance, in the recent controversial deal in India, The Rafale Deal, what had to be a
straightforward deal, was converted to a highly complicated problem, involving millions
of dollars at stake, only because of the doings of a group of dishonest people, or as I
would like to call them – technological terrorists. The reason for creating such chaos and
problems is nothing else other than to sabotage or destroy the truth in order to attain a
self-loathing victory and to stand firm into your personal beliefs of banal. Though the
improvement of technology social media platforms brought about positive changes in the
world, the cons are getting clearer to visualize and interpret. It has become very easy and
efficient to cook up something from the top of your head and get a hundred thousand
people to ‘like’ it. It has become a matter of emergency now and the government of India
has to create scenarios where the citizens can live without fear of something that is never
going to happen, by regulating the social media laws stating serious penalties for those
involved in crimes of such.
I remember being part in something as such for my tenth grade school elections when I
stood for the head boy. I was called out for activities that had nothing to do with me, like
bringing in black votes and of the such. I could bring out the infiltrators with a series of
conversations and evidences that showed my innocence. It would be hard following the
same on a national level, but it’s a step and we have to go all the extra miles to eliminate
all sorts of fake news.

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