St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)
End Semester Examination – APRIL 2015
B.Com – II Semester
ADDITIONAL ENGLISH
Duration: 3 Hours Max. Marks: 100
Section – A
- Answer any THREE of the following questions in about 200 words. (3×15=45)
- We all know that honesty is the best policy. But sometimes the truth hurts people’s feelings. In “Like the sun”, a school teacher is determined to be honest, even if it puts a strain on his relationships. What dilemma does Sekhar face in the story? How has Sekhar’s truthfulness affected his relationship with the headmaster?
- ‘When Akakiy returns from the dead, he appears to symbolize divine retribution or moral indignation. Like the Furies of ancient Greek mythology, he bedevils evildoers–in this case, the bureaucrats and aristocrats who prey on the weak. And he brings an implied warning from the author: Unless Russia changes, Akakiy will be millions, and he will bring down society itself’.
What was life like for lower-class Russians in the first half of the 19th Century?
In Gogol’s fantasy world, does Akakiy really rise from the dead? Or is the notorious cloak robber one of the bearded men who stole ….Akakiy’s cloak? - Compare narrations of Indian setting in the short stories of P Lankesh and Mohammed Basheer.
- What is the message that you infer from the short story ‘India is a Strange Country’, by Khuswanth Singh?
Section – B
- II) Answer any TWO of the following questions in about 150 words. (2×10=20)
- ‘Baudelaire, a sharp social critic, presents us with a narrator in isolation—a self-titled philosopher who, after claiming to have read many “fashionable” books about “public happiness,” has a startling revelation about how he can end poverty’.
What social commentary is Baudelaire trying to convey through his satire? What does Baudelaire think of philanthropy? - Wole Soyinka brings out a great use of irony and sarcasm in the poem ‘Telephone Conversation’. Do you think Soyinka’s poem is an effective way of making others aware of prejudice?
Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see
The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
Are a peroxide blond.
Comment on these lines from the poem.
- Comment on any two vachana’s from the text. What insights do you draw from them?
Section – C
Read the below passages and answer the questions.
Nurture your Brain cells
We live in a world with 300 exabytes (300 billion billion) of information, an amount that is rapidly expanding to ever greater amounts from this already brobdingnagian level. And yet the processing capacity of the conscious mind is a mere 120 bits per second. This presents a challenge to not only our processing capacity, but also our decision-making ability:
“Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductively and loss of drive can result from decision overload. Although most of us have no problem ranking the importance of decisions if asked to do so, our brains don’t automatically do this. … The mere situation of facing … many [small] decisions in daily life creates neural fatigue, leaving no energy for the important decisions. Recent research shows that people who were asked to make a series of meaningless decisions … showed poorer impulse control and lack of judgment about subsequent decisions. It’s as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are. One of the most useful findings in recent neuroscience could be summed up as: The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize.
“Today, we are confronted with an unprecedented amount of information, and each of us generates more information than ever before in human history. … Information scientists have quantified all this: In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986 — the equivalent of 175 newspapers. During our leisure time, not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes or 100,000 words every day. The world’s 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day as we watch an average of 5 hours of television each day, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video images. That’s not counting YouTube, which uploads 6,000 hours of video every hour. And computer gaming? It consumes more bytes than all other media put together, including DVDs, TV, books, magazines, and the Internet.
“Just trying to keep our own media and electronic files organized can be overwhelming. Each of us has the equivalent of over half a million books stored on our computers, not to mention all the information stored in our cell phones or in the magnetic stripe on the back of our credit cards. We have created a world with 300 exabytes (300,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces) of human-made information. If each of those pieces of information were written on a 3 x 5 index card and then spread out side by side, just one person’s share — your share of this information — would cover every square inch of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.
“Our brains do have the ability to process the information we take in, but at a cost: We can have trouble separating the trivial from the important, and all this information processing makes us tired. Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue. Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.
“The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time. While a great deal occurs below the threshold of our awareness, and this has an impact on how we feel and what our life is going to be like, in order for something to become encoded as part of your experience, you need to have paid conscious attention to it.
“What does this bandwidth restriction — this information speed limit mean in terms of our interactions with others? In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. Under most circumstances, you will not be able to understand three people talking at the same time. We’re surrounded on this planet by billions of other humans, but we can understand only two at a time at the most! It’s no wonder that the world is filled with so much misunderstanding. With such attention restrictions, it’s clear why many of us feel overwhelmed by managing some of the most basic aspects of life.”
Selection –from The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin.
III) Answer the following questions in about 150 words (2×10=20)
- Discuss the role of ‘Information’ technology in contemporary life? Do you think it curbs the growth of individual creativity and uniqueness? Justify.
- Has coding and decoding effected human mind? How do we manage ourselves in a changing world of technology?
- IV) The matchless career and woeful undoing of Bob Hope
Bob Hope was the most popular entertainer of the twentieth century, the only one who achieved the highest level of success in every major genre of mass entertainment: vaudeville, Broadway, movies, radio, television, popular song, and live concerts. His undoing began with his active support of the Vietnam war:
“By the time he died — on July 27, 2003, two months after his hundredth birthday –Hope’s reputation was already fading, tarnished, or being actively disparaged. He had, unfortunately, stuck around too long. …
“Hope never recovered from the Vietnam years, when his hawkish defense of the war, close ties to President Nixon (who actively courted Hope’s help in selling his Vietnam policies to the American people), and the country-club smugness of his gibes about antiwar protesters and long-haired hippies, all made him a political pariah for the peace-and-love generation. His tours to entertain US troops during World War II had made him a national hero. By the turbulent 1960s, he was a court-approved jester, the Establishment’s comedian — hardly a badge of honor in an era when hipper, more subversive comics, from Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce to George Carlin and Richard Pryor, were showing that stand-up comedy could be a vehicle for personal expression, social criticism, and political protest. Even before Hope became a doddering relic, he had become an anachronism.
“Yet the scope of Hope’s achievement, viewed from the distance of a few years, is almost unimaginable. By nearly any measure, he was the most popular entertainer of the twentieth century, the only one who achieved success — often No. 1 — rated success — in every major genre of mass entertainment in the modern era: vaudeville, Broadway, movies, radio, television, popular song, and live concerts. He virtually invented stand-up comedy in the form we know it today. … A tireless stage performer who traveled the country and the world for more than half a century doing live shows for audiences in the thousands, he may well have been seen in person by more people than any other human being in history. …
“He began in vaudeville, first as a song-and-dance man and then as an emcee and comedian, working his way up from the amateur shows of his Cleveland hometown to headlining at New York’s legendary Palace Theatre. He segued to Broadway, where he costarred in some of the era’s classic musicals, appeared with legends such as Fanny Brice and Ethel Merman, and introduced standards by great American composers such as Jerome Kern and Cole Porter. Hope became a national star on radio, hosting a weekly comedy show on NBC that was America’s No. 1 — rated radio program for much of the early 1940s and remained in the top five for more than a decade.
“He came relatively late to Hollywood, making his feature-film debut, at age thirty-four, in The Big Broadcast of 1938, where he sang ‘Thanks for the Memory’ — which became his universally identifiable, infinitely adaptable theme song and the first of many pop standards that, almost as a sideline, he introduced in movies. With an almost nonstop string of box-office hits such as The Cat and the Canary, Caught in the Draft, Monsieur Beaucaire, The Paleface, and the popular Road pictures with Bing Crosby, Hope ranked among Hollywood’s top ten box-office stars for a decade, reaching the No.1 spot in 1949. … ‘I grew up loving him, emulating him, and borrowing from him,’ said Woody Allen, one of the few comics to acknowledge how much he was influenced by Hope — though nearly everyone was. …
“When television came in, Hope was there too. Others, such as Milton Berle, preceded him. But after starring in his first NBC special on Easter Sunday in 1950, Hope began an unparalleled reign as NBC’s most popular comedy star that lasted for nearly four decades. … That would have been enough for most performers, but not Hope. Along with his radio, TV, and movie work, he traveled for personal appearances at a pace matched by no other major star.
“On a podium, no one could touch him. He was host or cohost of the Academy Awards ceremony a record nineteen times — the first in 1940, when Gone With the Wind was the big winner, and the last in 1978, when Star Wars and Annie Hall were the hot films. His suave unflappability — no one ever looked better in a tuxedo — and tart insider wisecracks (‘This is the night when war and politics are forgotten, and we find out who we really hate’) helped turn a relatively low-key industry dinner into the most obsessively tracked and massively watched event of the Hollywood year.
“The modern stand-up comedy monologue was essentially his creation. There were comedians in vaudeville before Hope, but they mostly worked in pairs or did prepackaged, joke book gags that played on ethnic stereotypes and other familiar comedy tropes. Hope, working as an emcee and ad-libbing jokes about the acts he introduced, developed a more freewheeling and spontaneous monologue style, which he later honed and perfected in radio. To keep his material fresh, he hired a team of writers and told them to come up with jokes about the news of the day — presidential politics, Hollywood gossip, California weather, as well as his own life, work, travels, golf game, and show-business friends.
“This was something of a revolution. When Hope made his debut on NBC in 1938, the popular comedians on radio all inhabited self-contained worlds, playing largely invented comic characters: Jack Benny’s effete tightwad, Edgar Bergen and his uppity dummy, Charlie McCarthy, the daffy-wife/exasperated-husband interplay of George Burns and Gracie Allen. Hope’s monologues brought something new to radio: a connection between the comedian and the outside world. … His monologues became the template for Johnny Carson and nearly every late-night TV host who followed him, and the foundation stone for all stand-up comics, even those who rebelled against him.”
Selection — from Hope by Richard Zoglin.
Answer the following question in about 200 words (15marks)
- How do you relate the passage with present comedians of world of cinema? What do you learn from the story of Bob Hope? Narrate your experience of watching humors scene from your favorite comedy.
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