General English

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce B.Com. 2014 V Sem General English Question Paper PDF Download

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St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)

End Semester Examination – SEPT / Oct. 2014

B.COM  (Travel and Tourism) – I semester

GENERAL ENGLISH

Duration:  3 hours                                                                                               Max Marks: 100                                                                                                      

Section -A

 

  1. Write short notes on the following in about 100 words.                                    (4×5 =20)  

 

  1. Cordoba House Project.
  2. Fei Xiaotong, the first Chinese intellectual.
  3. The tombs of Cain and Abel – The Great Railway Bazaar.
  4. Ending of the story Shooting an Elephant.

 

  1. Answer the following questions in about 250 words.            (4×10 =40)

 

  1. Describe the native people’s behaviour towards Orwell in the story Shooting an Elephant. Why did Orwell kill the elephant against his will? Do you think he took the right decision?

 

  1. Why did Paul Theroux board on a slow passenger train to reach his destination? Describe any particular observation made by him during his travel that you find interesting and why?

 

  1. 7. Give an account of the description of India made in Western Literature. Compare and contrast it with the nineteenth century description of India in the essay India in Mind.

 

  1. What is the debate surrounding the proposed Islamic centre? Why has it become a testing zone of ‘religious freedom’ and ‘limits of tolerance’ in the United States?

 

 

Section – B

III. Read the following passage and answer the following questions in about three paragraphs.

Is there anyone in any part of India who does not admire China? asked Yi Jing in  the seventeenth century, on returning from India to China. Yi Jing may have fallen a little for exaggerated rhetoric, but there was certainly much intellectual interest about China in India at that time, as there was about India in China. Yi Jing had just spent ten years at the institute of higher learning, Nalanda, which attracted many scholars from outside India, in addition to domestic students.

Yi Jing, who studied medicine in Nalanda in addition to Buddhist philosophy and practice, was one of the many Chinese scholars who visited India in the first millennium to study Bhuddism and other subjects ( and also to collect Sanskrit documents) , and many of them spent a decade or more in India . In the other direction, hundreds of Indian scholars went to China and worked there between the first century and the eleventh. They were engaged in variety of work, which included translating Sanskrit documents into Chinese (mostly Buddhist writing), but also other activities, such as the pursuit of mathematics and science. Several Indian mathematicians and astronomers held high positions in China’s scientific establishment, and an Indian scientist called Gautama Siddhartha, became the president of the official Board of Astronomy in China in the eighth century.

Intellectual links between China and India, stretching over much of the first millennium and beyond, were important in the history of the two countries. And yet they are hardly remembered today. What little notice they do get tends to come from those interested in religious history, particularly Buddhism. But religion is only one part of a much bigger story of Sino – Indian connections over the first millennium, and there is need for a broader understanding of the reach of these relations. This is important for a fuller appreciation not only of the history of a third of the world’s population, but also for the continuing relevance of these connections, linked as they are with contemporary political and social concerns.

It is certainly correct to see religion as a major for the historical closeness of China and India, and to appreciate the central role of Buddhism in initiating the movement of people and ideas between the two countries. However, even though Buddhism served as a critically important influence, the intellectual interactions between the two countries initiated by Buddhism were not confined to religion only. The non –religious (or what in current terminology, may be called secular) consequences of these relations stretched well into science, mathematics, literature, linguistics, architecture, medicine and music.

It is not, however, easy to rescue the variety and reach of early Sino Indian intellectual relations from their interpretational confinement in the religious basket. Indeed, religious reductionism has been re enforced in recent years by the contemporary obsessions with classifying the world populations into distinct ‘civilizations’ like Western civilization, Islamic civilization, Hindu Civilization and Buddhist civilization.

 

Answer the following questions in about three paragraphs.

 

  1. Comment on the India China relationship as mentioned in the passage. (Write it in your own words). Compare and contrast it with the present description of China as written by Ramachandra Guha in the text A Nehruvian in China.                                                                                                                                                             (15 Marks)

                          

  1. What are the two important factors that strengthened the Indo China bond in the past centuries? Reflect on the word ‘multiculturalism’ and describe the words ‘pluralism’ and ‘diversity’ and ‘religious reductionism’ in the context India and China. Use the above passage and your reading of the essay A Nehruvian in China to elaborate your answer.                                                                                                              (15 Marks)

Section – C

 

  1. Write a narrative in about 100 to 150 words of your unplanned trip to some destination of your choice.                                                             (10 Marks)

 

 

 

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce B.Com. 2014 I Sem General English Question Paper PDF Download

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St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)

End Semester Examination – SEPT / OCT. 2014

B.Com –I Semester

General English

Duration: 3 Hours                                                                                       Max. Marks: 100

 

Note:  Read the questions carefully and answer.

Do not exceed the paragraph limit.

            Each paragraph should contain at least four sentences.

 

SECTION – A

  1. Answer ANY TWO in about three paragraphs each.                      (2 x 15 = 30)
  1. Look at the story ‘A Flowering Tree’ from the perspective of the woman who turns into a flowering tree and try to describe the kind of society in which she lived.
  2. Narrate one experience of how reading a magazine article has helped you in understanding an issue or an idea better. You can use classroom readings or an independent reading that you have done in your response.
  3. You have read three short stories as part of your course: ‘The Last Leaf’, ‘The Stone Women’ and ‘A Flowering Tree’. Think of new titles for each story and give appropriate reasons for the choice of the new titles.

 

  1. Answer ANY ONE question in about four paragraphs.        (1 x 20 = 20)
  1. The narrator in the story ‘The Stone Women’ is in a constant state of confusion regarding her behaviour and opinions. She does not know whether to agree with her husband or not. At the end of the story it seems that she has finally found the courage to defy her husband, yet we do not know what she does with the tune that comes to the tip of her tongue.

What may be the reasons for her constant state of confusion? How do you look at the ending of the story: as one filled with hope for the narrator or as a hopeless situation where she is permanently tied to the wishes of her husband?

  1. An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies? As globalisation sweeps around the world, it is perhaps natural that small communities come out of their isolation and seek interaction with the wider world. The number of languages may be an unhappy casualty, but why fight the tide?

What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people. Languages are living, breathing organisms holding the connections and associations that define a culture. When a language becomes extinct, the culture in which it lived is lost too.

What is the understanding of ‘Language’ that you have acquired through the readings done as part of your course? Also comment on the relationship between language and culture. Use your experiences and observations in your response.

SECTION – B

Read the folk stories below and answer the questions.

 

Story One

How many Ramayanas! Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas, a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been? And there are stories that answer the question. Here is one.

One day when Rama was sitting on his throne, his ring fell off. When it touched the earth, it made a hole in the ground and disappeared into it. It was gone. His trusty henchman, Hanuman, was at his feet. Rama said to Hanuman, ‘Look, my ring is lost. Find it for me.’

Now Hanuman can enter any hole, no matter how tiny. He had the power to become the smallest of the small and larger than the largest thing. So he took on a tiny form and went down the hole. He went and went and went and suddenly fell into the netherworld. There were women down there. ‘Look, a tiny monkey! It’s fallen from above!’ Then they caught him and placed him on a platter (thali). The King of Spirits (bhut), who lives in the netherworld, likes to eat animals. So Hanuman was sent to him as part of his dinner, along with his vegetables. Hanuman sat on the platter, wondering what to do. While this was going on in the netherworld. Rama sat on his throne on the earth above. The sage Vasistha and the god Brahma came to see him. They said to Rama, ‘We want to talk privately with you. We don’t want anyone to hear what we say or interrupt it. Do we agree?’

‘All right,’ said Rama, ‘we’ll talk.’

Then they said. ‘Lay down a rule. If anyone comes in as we are talking, his head should be cut off.’

‘It will be done,’ said Rama.

Who would be the most trustworthy person to guard the door? Hanuman had gone down to fetch the ring. Rama trusted no one more than Laksmana, so he asked Laksmana to stand by the door. ‘Don’t allow anyone to enter,’ he ordered. Laksmana was standing at the door when the sage Visvamitra appeared and said, ‘I need to see Rama at once. It’s urgent. Tell me, where is Rama?’ Laksmana said, ‘Don’t go in now. He is talking to some people. It’s important.’ ‘What is there that Rama would hide from me?’ said Visvamitra. ‘I must go in, right now.’

Laksmana said, ‘I’ll have to ask his permission before I can let you in.’ ‘Go in and ask then.’ ‘I can’t go in till Rama comes out. You’ll have to wait.’

‘If you don’t go in and announce my presence, I’ll burn the entire kingdom of Ayodhya with a curse,’ said Visvamitra. Laksmana thought, ‘If I go in now, I’ll die. But if I don’t go, this hotheaded man will burn down the kingdom. All the subjects, all things living in it, will die. It’s better that I alone should die.’

So he went right in. Rama asked him, ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Visvamitra is here.’ ‘Send him in.’

So Visvamitra went in. The private talk had already come to an end. Brahma and Vasistha had come to see Rama and say to him, ‘Your work in the world of human beings is over. Your incarnation as Rama must now be given up. Leave this body, come up, and rejoin the gods.’ That’s all they wanted to say.

Laksmana said to Rama, ‘Brother, you should cut off my head.’ Rama said, ‘Why? We had nothing more to say. Nothing was left. So why should I cut off your head?’

Laksmana said, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t let me off because I’m your brother. There’ll be a blot on Rama’s name. You didn’t spare your wife. You sent her to the jungle. I must be punished. I will leave.’ Laksmana was an avatar of Sesa, the serpent on whom Visnu sleeps. His time was up too. He went directly to the river Sarayu and disappeared in the flowing waters.

When Laksmana relinquished his body. Rama summoned all his followers, Vibhisana, Sugriva, and others, and arranged for the coronation of his twin sons, Lava and Kusa. Then Rama too entered the river Sarayu. All this while, Hanuman was in the netherworld. When he was finally taken to the King of Spirits, he kept repeating the name of Rama. ‘Rama Rama Rama

Then the King of Spirits asked, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Hanuman.’ ‘Hanuman? Why have you come here?’ ‘Rama’s ring fell into a hole. I’ve come to fetch it.’

The king looked around and showed him a platter. On it were thousands of rings. They were all Rama’s rings. The king brought the platter to Hanuman, set it down, and said, ‘Pick out your Rama’s ring and take it.’ They were all exactly the same. ‘I don’t know which one it is,’ said Hanuman, shaking his head. The King of Spirits said, ‘There have been as many Ramas as there are rings on this platter. When you return to earth, you will not find Rama. This incarnation of Rama is now over. Whenever an incarnation of Rama is about to be over, his ring falls down. I collect them and keep them. Now you can go.’  So Hanuman left.

Story Two

The Golden Key (Collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm)

Once in the wintertime when the snow was very deep, a poor boy had to go out and fetch wood on a sled. After he had gathered it together and loaded it, he did not want to go straight home, because he was so frozen, but instead to make a fire and warm himself a little first. So he scraped the snow away, and while he was thus clearing the ground he found a small golden key. Now he believed that where there was a key, there must also be a lock, so he dug in the ground and found a little iron chest. “If only the key fits!” he thought. “Certainly there are valuable things in the chest.” He looked, but there was no keyhole. Finally he found one, but so small that it could scarcely be seen. He tried the key, and fortunately it fitted. Then he turned it once, and now we must wait until he has finished unlocking it and has opened the lid. Then we shall find out what kind of wonderful things there were in the little chest.

Story Three

A Storyteller of Messer Azzolino (Italy)

Messer Azzolino had a storyteller whom he made tell him tales during the long nights of winter. It happened that one night the storyteller had a great desire to sleep, while Azzolino urged him to tell tales.

The storyteller began a tale of a countryman who had a hundred byzantines [ancient coins] of his own which he took with him to the market to buy sheep at the price of two per byzantine. Returning with his sheep he came to a river he had passed before much swollen with the rains which had recently fallen. Standing on the bank, he saw a poor fisherman with a boat, but of so small a size that there was only room for the countryman and one sheep at a time. Then the countryman began to cross over with one sheep, and he began to row. The river was wide. He rowed and passed over.

And here the storyteller ceased his tale.

Azzolino said, “Go on!”

And the storyteller replied, “Let the sheep cross over, and then I will tell you the tale.”

Since the sheep would not have crossed in a year, he could meanwhile sleep at his ease.

  • Answer the following in about two paragraphs each                    (2 x 10 = 20)
  1. In story one Lakshmana was instructed not to allow anyone inside while Rama was talking to sage Vasistha and the god Brahma. What made Lakshmana break the rule and permit Vismamitra to enter the palace? Comment on Lakshmana’s actions: do you think what he did was right?
  2. Story one begins with ‘How many Ramayanas! Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas, a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been? And there are stories that answer the question. Here is one.’

Does the story provide an answer to the question about the number of Ramayanas that exist? If so what is that answer and do you agree with it?

  1. Answer ANY TWO questions in about three paragraphs          (2 x 15 = 30)
  1. Story two ‘The Golden Key’ ends abruptly without telling us what’s inside the chest. What may be the reasons for such an abrupt ending? Try to recollect other stories/movies which have such an abrupt ending. In case you fail to recollect any write about an ending that has impressed you well.
  2. Read story three and tell whether this story also has an abrupt ending. Compare story two and story three and comment on the similarities and differences between both the stories.
  3. How have the stories that you read or heard in your childhood influenced you? Narrate at least one experience to supplement your response.

 

 

 

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce General English Question Paper PDF Download

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St.Joseph’s College of commerce (AUTONOMOUS)

END SEMESTER EXAMINATION – MARCH /APRIL 2015

B.B.M. – II SEMESTER

GENERAL ENGLISH

Duration: 3Hrs                                                                                                   Max. Marks: 100

 

SECTION-A

  1. Answer any five of the following questions in a word phrase or a sentence

                                                                                                                          (5×2=10)

  1. What should the merchants make sure of, before they leave the market place, according to Khaleel Gibran?
  2. Name the author of “Eco Junk”.
  3. What was the woman’s question to the fat old man at the end of the story “War”?
  4. In Arundhati Roy’s essay what does the word ‘deterrence’ mean?
  5. How old was Natalia Stepanovna?
  6. Why was the fir tree discontented and unsatisfied at the beginning of the story?

 

  1. Write short notes on any four of the following:                                    (4×5=20) 
  2. Green consumerism.
  3. The title of Arundhati Roy’s essay.
  4. Henessy’s bird in ‘ My Wood’.
  5. The element of humour and satire in Checkov’s “The Proposal”.
  6. The ending of the story, “War”.

 

 

  • Answer any three of the following in about two pages.      (3×10=30)

 

  1. Write a critical summary of the poem ‘Buying and Selling’.
  2. How is the story “Fir tree” an allegory? What in your opinion are the lessons that can be drawn from reading this story. Use details from the text in your answer.
  3. Comment on the nature of the conversation between Natalya and Lomov in Checkov’s play. What insights does this offer on the true nature of man- woman relationship in the context of marriage?
  4. What are the chief concerns raised by the author in “ Eco Junk” ? Do you think they are justified? Give your reasons.

 

 

 

SECTION-B

  1. Read the following passage carefully and then answer questions set on it.

 

When we look at the historical side, at all times it had many races, many languages and many religions. There was never any question of saying that this group is the biggest or that is not the biggest. The idea was to accommodate all, and to harmonise all faiths. Even a very conservative legislator like Manu tells us that all the people should learn their own particular traditions. We never believed that all the people should learn their own particular traditions. We never believed that we are a chosen race. We never believed that ours is a chosen religion or a chosen tribe. The historical tradition of each race, of each community, of each tribe were preserved and taught to them. It was this attitude of acknowledging every path, community that has been the tradition which governed the history of our country. You find similarities in the Koran. There it is said: “O mankind, we created you from a single pair of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes that you may know each other, not that you may despise each other.”  So it was question of what may be regarded as “Sarva- mata –samanvaya- integration of all religions and faiths.

In the greatest periods of our history, when we were able to make a mark, we adopted this attitude of toleration and goodwill. Ashoka sent missionaries to far off countries.  He had his great cut out in rock: “Samanvaya Sudha”- concord alone is meritorious. In the next great empire of the country, the Golden Age of the Guptas, Fa Hien, a Chinese traveller, who spent ten years in India, was impressed by the toleration of the people. He testifies that he was allowed to go and do whatever he wanted, and that the people of India never believed in the superiority of their own religion. Harsha Vardhana also followed the religion of freedom.

 

  1. Answer the following in a sentence or two.        (5×2=10)  

 

  1. Who was a conservative legislator?
  2. What is meant by the word ‘chosen’ as used in the passage?
  3. What is Sarva- mata –samanvaya?
  4. Which scripture of a major world religion is mentioned in the passage?
  5. What would be a suitable title for the passage?

 

  1. What do you think is the overall perspective of the passage about matters concerning religion? How is it relevant to the present day world? (1×10=10)

 

 

 

 

 

SECTION – C

  1. Re-write as directed.                   (5×2=10)

 

  1. The gates opened. People rushed in. (Re-write the sentence using No sooner … than)
  2. This cloth is very ________ as it is made out of Khadhi. (course, coarse) Choose the right word to fill in the blank.
  3. South Africa is a very good cricket team. It has never won the world cup.  (Change into a complex sentence)
  4. This building was constructed by them two years ago. (Change into active voice)
  5. He is working in Infosys for the last five years. (Identify the specific tense of the verb in this sentence)

 

 

  1. Correct the errors if any, in the following sentences.                                (3×2=6)

 

  1. Please return back by 7 p.m.
  2. None of them know swimming.
  3. There was a dramatic turn over in the last ball of the match.

 

  1. Use  any two of the following idioms correctly in sentences of your own.                                                                                                                                                       (2×2=4)
  2. To cut things too fine.
  3. To be head and shoulders above others.
  4. To turn tables.

 

 

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St. Joseph’s College of Commerce II Sem General English Question Paper PDF Download

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St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)

End Semester Examination – march / April 2015

B.COM (T & T) – II Semester

 C2 12 2GE: GENERAL ENGLISH

Duration:  3 hours                                                                                       Max Marks: 100  

Section -A

  1. Answer the following in a word, phrase or a sentence.   (5×2= 10)

 

  1. Where did the two old men decide to go on a pilgrimage?
  2. Who is a Magi in the poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’?
  3. What is the meaning of the word Enterprise?
  4. Describe the appearance of Sir Mohan Lal in the introduction to the story Karma?
  5. To which city of Rajasthan, does Alex Shoumatoff travel in search of Gypsy Music?

 

  1. Answer the following questions in about 250 words.    (5×10 =50)

 

  1. Describe any two Christian symbolisms used in the poem The Journey of the Magi. Give reasons why the poem ends on the note “I should be glad of another death”.
  2. “Travel, most people believe, is best when shared- an attitude that makes the solitary traveler one of life’s losers.” In the article Not a Tourist, how does Tom Swick bring out the difference between a tourist and a travel writer? Discuss.
  3. Compare and contrast the characters of Efim and Sir Mohan Lal. Do you think they share any common traits? Discuss the significance of ‘Karma’ on their lives.
  4. Discuss the three phases of the religious expedition in the poem Enterprise. Bring out at least one similarity and a difference in the spiritual journey as portrayed in the poem The Journey of the Magi and Enterprise
  5. Describe the landscape, society and culture of Rajasthan as reflected in the article Tracing the Roots of Rajasthani Music by Alex Shoumatoff. What made the writer accept that “the language of music is universal”?

 

Section – B

Read the passage and answer the following questions.

 

ONE of Europe’s oldest pilgrimage centres should be a place of rejoicing at this time of year, especially for the travellers who have trudged hundreds of miles to reach Santiago de Compostela in time for the annual feast day of Saint James, whose earthly remains have been a focus of veneration for many centuries. Instead the Spanish town has been plunged into mourning by the horrific train crash which occurred on its outskirts on Wednesday, the eve of the saint’s day. Some of the people who have walked to the town will find themselves not celebrating but offering succour to victims and their families.

Only a few weeks ago, thousands of people, many of them tourists or Hindu pilgrims, are thought to have lost their lives in floods which afflicted the north Indian state of Uttarakhand and led to one of the largest-ever air rescue operations.

Across the world, at least 200m people go on pilgrimage every year, according to the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, a British-based organization which is currently holding a meeting in Norway to consolidate the work of the Green Pilgrimage Network. That is an association of pilgrim cities and sacred sites which want to make religious travel friendlier to the environment. At the current session, Santiago de Compostela is one of 15 locations (along with Iona and Canterbury in Britain and the Indian city of Varanasi, formerly Benares), which are in the process of signing up to the project. The founding members included India’s Amritsar, Italy’s Assisi and Jerusalem. Participants in the Norwegian meeting lit candles in memory of the people who died in Spain and Uttarakhand.

Has the advent of affordable high-speed transport made pilgrimage an even more hazardous business (for both the travelers themselves, and others) than ever? Perhaps certain dangers are growing more acute, such as the risk of epidemics spreading not only among pilgrims but in their home countries when they return. The annual Muslim pilgrimage or hajj to Mecca attracts up to 3m people. In recent years there have been outbreaks of meningitis among the pilgrims, and last year there was a surge of worry after a Saudi national died from the shadowy corona virus which can cause deadly pneumonia. That is not a new problem; in 1865 there was a cholera epidemic in Mecca which spread to other countries. But air travel obviously increases the danger of a global pandemic. Last year the Saudi authorities felt obliged to offer an assurance that all necessary preventive measures were being taken.

Still, the fact is that religious journeys have always been risky. As historian Andrew Holt writes in the Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, pious people on the move “were often poorly equipped to deal with the hazards of brigands, thieves, hunger, thirst, sickness and the various physical injuries that often resulted from their travels.”

And many people making journeys with a spiritual purpose have been well prepared for the possibility that they are making their last earthly journey. One of the classic accounts of religious travel was penned by the British writer Stephen Graham who went to the Holy Land with a boatload of Russian peasants in 1912, and joined the thousands of subjects of the Tsar who thronged Jerusalem every Easter. Their purpose in travelling, he noted, was to prepare for a blessed death. They would plunge into the river Jordan wearing the white shrouds in which they ultimately expected to be buried. “They hope to die in the Holy Land, preferably near the Dead Sea where the final judgment will take place…[and if] they return to their native villages in Russia, it will be to put their affairs in order and await death.”

It has been said that every parting between friends is a foretaste of death. Perhaps that is especially true when a traveler bids farewell to a native land in the hope of finding a resting-place for the soul.

 

Answer all the questions in about three paragraphs each.                                  (3×10=30)

 

  1. In the above passage what is the writer’s perspective on the religious journey? Do you think the journey to the pilgrim centers is worth the cause? Discuss.

 

  1. What is the co relation between religion and the journey to the pilgrimage centre? Do you think religion will collapse if the visit to the pilgrimage center is not made an essentiality? Give a detailed answer to explain your view points.

 

  1. What are the different risks involved in a religious journey mentioned in the passage? Compare it with the risks detailed in the lessons of your text books. According to you what makes the notion popular that a person should visit a pilgrimage centre to die blessed? Give a reasoned answer.

 

 

Section – C

(10 Marks)

14.

 

“Love is not love

“Which alters when it alteration finds”

The notion of love has spanned through many centuries in the form of oral traditions to romantic literature to history and to the politics involved and to the laws that legislate it. Give your view points to bring out the multiple perspectives of love from the standpoint of different cultures, disciplines and attitude. Write your answer in about 100 words

 

 

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St. Joseph’s College of Commerce II Sem General English Question Paper PDF Download

by

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)

End Semester Examination – March /APRIL 2015

B.Com –II Semester

c1 12 2 ge: GENERAL ENGLISH

Duration: 3 Hours                                                                                       Max. Marks: 100

                                                                

Note:  Read the questions carefully and answer.

Do not exceed the paragraph limit.

            Each paragraph should contain at least four sentences.

 

SECTION – A

Read the passages below and answer the questions.

Passage One

College Has Been Oversold – Alex Tabarrok

Education is the key to the future: You’ve heard it a million times, and it’s not wrong. Educated people have higher wages and lower unemployment rates, and better educated countries grow faster and innovate more than other countries.

But going to college is not enough. You also have to study the right subjects. And American students are not studying the fields with the greatest economic potential.

Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50%. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has been flat.

Moreover, many of today’s STEM graduates are foreign-born and taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries. Consider computer technology. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago.

The story is the same in other technology fields. The United States graduated 5,036 chemical engineers in 2009, no more than we did 25 years ago. In mathematics and statistics there were 15,496 graduates in 2009, slightly more than the 15,009 graduates of 1985.

Few fields have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?

If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying? In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

The story is the same in psychology, which graduates about 95,000 students a year, more than double the number of 25 years ago and far in excess of the number of available jobs.

Perhaps most oddly, despite the decline in the number of news media jobs, especially in the print media, the number of students in communication and journalism also has nearly doubled since 1985.

There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math.

As a result, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees. Baggage porters and bellhops don’t need college degrees, but in 2008 17.4% of them had at least a bachelor’s degree and 45% had some college education. Mail carriers don’t need a college education, but in 2008 14% had at least a bachelor’s degree and 61% had some college education.

 

Passage Two

Cultivating the Imagination – Martha Nussbaum

Cuts in the humanities are bad for business and bad for democracy. Even if a nation’s only goal were economic prosperity, the humanities supply essential ingredients for a healthy business culture.

Why is the U.S. moving away from the humanities just at the time that our rivals are discovering their worth?

Nations such as China and Singapore, which previously ignored the humanities, are now aggressively promoting them, because they have concluded that the cultivation of the imagination through the study of literature, film, and the other arts is essential to fostering creativity and innovation. They also have found that teaching critical thinking and argumentation (a skill associated with courses in philosophy) is essential in order to foster healthy debate inside a business world that might too easily become complacent or corrupt.

We in the U.S. are moving away from the humanities just at the time that our rivals are discovering their worth. But a healthy business culture is not all that life in America is about.

We also pride ourselves on our open democracy, and on the freedoms of speech and the press that make our political life one in which the people rule. To keep democracy vital, we urgently need the abilities that the humanities foster. First, we need critical thinking: the ability to debate respectfully with others, to tell a good argument from a bad one, to examine tradition and prejudice in a Socratic spirit.

Second, we need history: a knowledge of the world and its many cultures and religions. Knowledge is not a guarantee of good political behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior. In a world full of simple stereotypes, we will only preserve democratic values of debate and mutual respect if we try hard to understand the past and the present.

Finally, we need the imaginative ability to put ourselves in the positions of people different from ourselves, whether by class or race or religion or gender. Democratic politics involves making decisions that affect other people and groups. We can only do this well if we try to imagine what their lives are like and how changes of various sorts affect them. The imagination is an innate gift, but it needs refinement and cultivation; this is what the humanities provide.

“But my child needs a job,” a parent might say.Yes, but preparing for a job and learning the lessons of the humanities are not mutually exclusive. The American system of higher education, unlike almost all other higher education systems in the world — where students enter university to study just a single subject — encourages students to major in one subject, often one related to future work, while taking general education courses in a variety of disciplines.

The future engineer or computer programmer can still learn skills of argument from Plato’s dialogues and gain a deeper grasp of the lives of others through literature and the arts.

If we cut the humanities, our nation will be the loser, both economically and politically.

 

  1. Answer ALL in about one paragraph each:                         (4X5=20)
  2. Why does Alex Tabarrok think that ‘college has been oversold’?
  3. Why does he think that going to college is not enough but one also has to study the right subjects?
  4. Why does Martha Nussbaum say that ‘cuts in the humanities are bad for business and bad for democracy’?
  5. What are the abilities that the humanities foster according to her?

 

 

 

  1. Answer ALL in about three to four paragraphs each:                      (2 x 15 =30)

 

  1. Point out any three major differences between Alex Tabarrok and Martha Nussbaum in their ideas on education. Comment on the differences by giving your own opinion on each of them.
  2. The context of the above debate on education is United States of America. If the same debate on the relevance of humanities education (literature, philosophy, art and cinema) were to happen in India what would be your position on it? Respond to the question as a commerce student who is also required to do four semesters of General English and Language papers.

SECTION – B

  • Answer ALL in about three or four paragraphs each.          (2 X15=30)
  1. Read the extract from the essay ‘What clash of Civilization?’ by AmartyaSen

A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be found in Samuel Huntington’s influential 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The difficulty with Huntington’s approach begins with his system of unique categorization, well before the issue of a clash—or not—is even raised. Indeed, the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines, which closely follow religious divisions to which singular attention is paid. Huntington contrasts Western civilization with “Islamic civilization,” “Hindu civilization,” “Buddhist civilization,” and so on. The alleged confrontations of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of hardened divisiveness.

In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other partitions, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to “the Islamic world,” “the Western world,” “the Hindu world,” “the Buddhist world,” the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.

As an individual living in a city like Bangalore do you think that one’s identity is only with one’s religion? How would you relate the above excerpt on religious classification of the world with your life in Bangalore and your identity as an individual?

  1. Compare the essays ‘Mona’s Story’ by Urvashi Bhutalia and ‘What Clash of Civilization?’ by AmartyaSen and see if there are any similarities or differences in terms of the themes discussed and the style of the writing.

SECTION – C

  1. Answer ALL in about two paragraphs each.         (2 x10=20)
  2. Pick any two poems among all the poems that you have read from your textbook, one which was very interesting and the other which was utterly boring (less interesting). Now, give any two reasons as to why the first one was interesting and the second one boring. What kind of a poem gets your attention and interest?
  3. When she left me
    after lunch, I read
    for a while.
    But I suddenly wanted
    to look again
    and I saw the half-eaten
    sandwich,
    bread,
    lettuce and salami,
    all carrying the shape
    of her bite.
  • K. Ramanujan

Read the above poem carefully and answer the below questions by using your imagination.

  1. Why did the speaker want to ‘look again’, suddenly?
  2. Why does the ‘shape of her bite’ on the food she had left half eaten get his attention so much?

 

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

 

 

 

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce B.Com. 2015 General English Question Paper PDF Download

by

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce(Autonomous)

End Semester Examination – Sept/Oct. 2015

B.COM(T.T.)- I Semester

 C2 15 1GE:GENERAL ENGLISH

Duration: 3 Hours                                                                                           Max. Marks: 100

Section -A

  1. Write short notes on the following in about 100 words.     (4×5= 20)
  2. The setting of Moulmein in Shooting an Elephant .
  3. Paul Theroux’s two ambitions on his way to Ceylon.
  4. Herodotus and Megesthenes’s portrayal of India
  5. Fei Xiaotong, Mao Zedong and Communism

 

 

  1. Answer the following questions in about 250 words.    (5×10 =50)
  2. India in Mind by Pankaj Mishra portrays India from the perspective of historians, travelers and writers. Discuss any one of the writer’s portrayal of India which you feel is real and true. You can use contemporary incidents to elaborate your answer.
  3. Imagine yourself to be a travel writer, and rewrite any one part of the journey that you would like to change from the narration of Paul Theroux’s travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar?
  4. “As I stood with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East.” What is the irony that Orwell poses being a representative of the Colonial power?
  5. The text The Legacy of the Looming Tower, talks about how a proposed Islamic centre becomes a testing ground for religious tolerance and freedom. Keeping the text as a backdrop write about any other event or incident that has posed a challenge to inter-faith cooperation and religious integration in a society.
  6. “Supporters say the Cordoba House project will be a venue for reconciliation between Islam and the West…….”. What is the Project that has been highlighted in the text by Bashrat Peer in The legacy of the Looming Tower? Discuss your stance on the project? Suggest an alternative way that could have promoted interfaith relations.

.

 

Section – B

Read the passage and answer the following questions.

India & China                           

                                                                                                                             Amartya Sen

‘Is there anyone in any part of India who does not admire China?’ asked Yi Jing in the seventh century, on returning from India to China.  Yi Jing may have fallen a little for exaggerated rhetoric, but there was certainly much intellectual interest about China in India at that time, as there was about India in China. Yi Jing had just spent ten years at the institute of higher learning, Nalanda, which attracted many scholars from outside India, in addition to domestic students.

Yi Jing, who studied medicine in Nalanda, in addition to Buddhist philosophy and practice, was one of many Chinese scholars who visited India in the first millennium to study Buddhism and other subjects (and also to collect Sanskrit documents), and many of them spent a decade or more in India. In the other direction, hundreds of Indian scholars went to China and worked there between the first century and the eleventh. They were engaged in a variety of work, which included translating Sanskrit documents into Chinese (mostly Buddhist writings) , but also other activities, such as the pursuit of mathematics and science. Several Indian mathematician and astronomers held high position in China’s scientific establishment, and an Indian scientist called Gautama Siddartha even became the president of the official Board of Astronomy in China in the eighth century.

Intellectual links between China and India, stretching over much of the first Millennium and beyond, were important in the history of the two countries. And yet they are hardly remembered today. What little notice they do get tends to come from those interested in religious history, particularly Buddhism. But religion is only one part of a much bigger story of Sino –Indian connections over the first millennium, and there is a need for a broader understanding of the reach of these relations. This is important for a fuller appreciation not only of the history of a third of the world’s population, but also for the continuing relevance of these connections, linked as they are with contemporary political and social concerns.

The extensive contacts that were generated between India and China through Buddhist connections were not confined to the subject matter of Buddhism only. As it happens, Buddhism was not only a vehicle of Sino- Indian relations, which began almost certainly with trade. Indian traders were engaged in importing goods from China for re- export to Central Asia more than two thousand years ago. Indian intermediation in trade between China and West continued over the centuries, though the commodity pattern went on changing. Silk was important initially, but by the eleventh century … porcelain had already replaced silk as the leading Chinese commodity transshipped through India.

 

 

Answer all the questions in about three paragraphs each. Do not copy sentences or paragraphs form the passage.                                                                                  (3×10=30)

 

  1. Discuss the reasons highlighted in the above passage that helped to create a strong link between India and China? Elaborate on the key ideas that different nations and civilizations can incorporate to transcend religious and ethnic barrier in the contemporary scenario.
  2. Compare and contrast the approach of Ramchandra Guha in Nehruvian in China and Amartya Sen in the above passage. Discuss the role of Nehruvian ideology in the context of China from the text A Nehruvian in China.
  3. Compare the present situation of minorities in India and China using references from the text A Nehruvian in China as well as from your personal readings. Based on your understanding of the above Passage and the text A Nehruvian in China, discuss the challenges that a society faces to maintain the ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity.

 

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St. Joseph’s College of Commerce General English Question Paper PDF Download

by

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)

End Semester Examination – October 2015

B.Com – I Semester

GENERAL ENGLISH

Duration: 3 Hours                                                                                           Max. Marks: 100

                                                                

Note:  Read the questions carefully and answer.

Do not exceed the paragraph limit.

            Each paragraph should contain at least four sentences.

            Do not copy sentences or paragraphs from the passage.

            A glossary of difficult words is given at the end of the paper.

SECTION – A

Read the passage below and answer the questions.

When a Relationship Becomes a Game

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and Kamakshi Zeidler, a 34-year-old plastic surgeon in Los Gatos, California, is explaining how to fill up a “love tank.”

“If you do little things for your partner… you get signals your love tank is full. And if you don’t, you’ll get signals that your love tank is almost empty. It’s based on how much you love each other. Well, through the app,” she adds.

Zeidler and her husband Brendon form a satisfied, if busy, pair. Both work long hours and have little time for spontaneous romantic gestures.

The “love tank” Kamakshi describes is one feature of a “couples’ app” called Kahnoodle. A 2011 addition to the app market, couples’ apps target spouses in a demographic sweet spot—old enough to need reinvigoration in their relationships, but still young enough to be tech-savvy—and offer a counterintuitive, strangely Anthony Weiner[1]-friendly service: an intimate social network, built for two.

But San Francisco-based Kahnoodle explores a new frontier of couples-app potential.

“It’s basically gamification of your relationships,” says Sonja Poole, a pleased Kahnoodler and 43-year-old associate professor at the University of San Francisco.

Gamification is a buzzword referring to the use of game concepts, like point rewards and badges, to engage users in non-game, or “real life,” situations. The website Lumosity gamifies intelligence training through animated exercises, and loyalty-based businesses like Belly use reward programs and badges to pull customers into affiliated restaurants. Foursquare encourages loyalty by awarding mayorships to frequent visitors of stores and restaurants.

Consumers respond very well to gamification in other sectors; businesses report increases in “engagement” by hundreds of percentage points when they gamify.

Using gamification, Kahnoodle wants to make maintaining your relationship automatic and easy—as easy as tapping a button. Its options include sending push notifications to initiate sex; “Koupons” that entitle the bearer to redeemable movie nights and kinky sex; and, of course, the love tank, which fills or empties depending on how many acts of love you’ve logged.

“Novelty works like an endorphin,” says Zuhairah Scott Washington, the company’s founder. “Couples have a desire to go out and do something new, but oftentimes they’re tired. The mobile app… incorporates a lot of research on what makes relationships successful but gamifies it to make it fun, makes it fun to do the work required to keep relationships fresh.”

Poole’s husband, Damone, has a demanding job that “keeps his attention away from the relationship.” She estimates that he checks his smartphone upwards of 50 times a day, mostly for work. She likes Kahnoodle because “it reminds him, ‘I need to do something for her,’” she says. “Any little bit helps.”

By many measures, the app should work. But the relationship between a man and his Starbucks[2] reward history is a lot less complex than the relationship between Sonja and Damone. Right?

Psychologist Eli Finkel of Northwestern University certainly thinks so. According to Finkel, you run into a couple of problems when you gamify love. Kahnoodle’s “Kudos” service, which allows one partner to reward another for a romantic gesture, might foster an “exchange mentality,” a tit-for-tat view of interaction that can be harmful in romantic situations—exchange mentality is commonly seen in cases of date rape, for example.

Finkel also says relationships are supposed to be tricky.

“Much of the benefit of doing considerate things is linked to the fact that those things required thoughtfulness and effort,” Finkel writes in an email. “Take the thoughtfulness out of the acts and they lose much of their meaning.”

Social psychologist and CEO of mental health network Psych Central John Grohol agrees. “You can’t substitute gamification for those core things people strive for,” he says. “Filling up a love tank isn’t the same as having a personal connection.”

Yet from a psychological perspective, human relationships “are inherently game-like,” says Professor Andrew Colman, a psychologist and game theory expert at University of Leicester in the U.K. According to a 2009 study that analyzes dating in terms of game theory, humans assess potential mates according to investments, risk-reward behaviors, and other factors that mirror the way we analyze a game. Game theory, for instance, explains why we love “the chase.” “A male’s willingness to court for a long time is a signal that he is likely to be a good male,” study author Robert Seymour writes.

This explains why women who wait for sex usually end up finding a better match. You want the higher reward; you stay in the game longer. Like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And online dating apps like Let’s Date and Zoosk have already seen positive results from gamification.

Of course, online dating is a far cry from your 20th anniversary. But the game of love is “still a game after decades of living together,” Colman says. “It doesn’t mean you’re trivializing it.”

Predictably, he says, the objection most people will have to Kahnoodle is that it’s mechanized game-playing; it takes the creativity and spontaneity out of relationship maintenance.

But as it turns out, spontaneity and creativity don’t necessarily predict lasting relationships. Relationships that are built on a “solid, comfortable, interesting, and pleasurable bed of reality” succeed above all others, according to an article by relationship psychologists John Adams and Constance Avery-Clark.

Adams and Avery-Clark stress the importance of “de-emphasizing over-romantic notions of super-compatibility in favor of a rational approach to relationships.” In other words, it’s not about whether spouses want to smooch endlessly on street corners or read separate newspapers at breakfast. They just need to be on the same page about what they do want, and how to go about getting it.

Zeidler and her husband seem to be.

“We’re busy, working professionals,” she reiterates. The love tank makes it “a little easier to constantly think about each other.” And Kahnoodle Concierge, a recently launched service that plans surprise-filled date nights for as little as $20 a month, is a godsend. “If my husband and I can simply show up to the same place, it’s great.”

Kahnoodle keeps the Zeidlers engaged. And in a world where couples spendmore time with their smartphones than each other, that’s no easy feat.

  1. Answer the following in ONE paragraph each. (5 x 3 = 15)

 

  1. What have you understood by the term ‘gamification’? Describe it in your own words.
  2. What does Eli Finkel mean by ‘exchange mentality’? Give an example and explain the concept.
  3. What insight has Game Theory offered to the study of human relationships? Does it make any sense to you?

 

  1. Answer the following in about THREE or FOUR paragraphs each. (15 x 2 = 30)
  2. The article above presents two contrasting views on human relationship. What are these two views? Which view makes sense to you the most? Use experiences, observations or fictional narratives in your response to make your point.
  3. The above article just seems to be an advertisement for the new app Kahnoodle.What do you think is the position of the writer of the article with regard to technology and human relationships? What do you have to say about the way in which technology is altering human relationships? Use experiences and observations in your answer.

SECTION – B

Read the story and answer the questions.

Dolls

In a certain town there lived a couple. The husband would bring home a bushel of fish every day. His wife would eat up all the middles of the fish and leave him only fish heads and fish tails. She did this every day.

What did he do? He had a sister in town. He went to her house one day and said, “Sister, every day I bring home a bushel of fish. When I come to eat, the fish have only heads and tails, no middles.

What shall I do?”

His sister told him, “If that’s the case, Brother, go to the carpenter, and ask him to make three dolls for you. Place one doll next to the cooking fire. Place another with the pots and pans. Put the third one in the niche in the wall. After you’ve done that, bring home as usual your bushel of fish and then leave. Let’s see what happens.”

He did exactly what his sister told him to do. He went to the carpenter and got three dolls made. He placed one near the cooking fire, a second one among the pots, and another in the wall niche. And he brought in his daily bushel of fish, gave it to his wife, and went out as usual.

She cooked the fish in a hurry, and was going to pick up a platter when the doll among the pots piped up and asked, “Why a platter?”

The doll in the wall answered, “To eat like a thief.”

The doll near the cooking fire added, “Without her husband!”

She gasped, “They talk, and like that!”

She was scared of the dolls and rushed out of the house, and didn’t get back till her husband came home. When he came home, she fed him, and then ate her own dinner. The fish were whole, as whole as when they were brought.

Her husband said nothing. He finished his meal, and went to his sister’s house. He said to her, “Sister, I did as you told me to. Today, all the fish were whole.”

One interpretation of the above story goes this way: ‘this tale seems to express an understanding of the phenomenon of “projection,” in which a rejected inner voice or impulse is attributed to an external object or person.’

 

  • Answer the question in about THREE or FOUR paragraphs. (1 x 15 = 15)
  1. a) Why do you think the wife was scared of the dolls?
  2. Do you agree with the above interpretation of the story as an expression of the phenomenon of ‘projection’?
  3. What would be your interpretation of the above story?

 

 

 

 

SECTION – C

  1. The below questions are based on the texts that you have read in the classroom. Answer the questions in about FIVE paragraphs each. (2 x 20 = 20)

 

  1. “Words shape how I see the world, how I move through problems, how I relax. They give me comfort, order and structure” says Hannah Giorgis.
  2. Do you think there is a relationship between the language you speak and your thoughts, dreams and actions? How has the language that you speak shaped your opinions, beliefs or perspectives?
  3. What kind of a relationship do you have with the languages you speak? Do you like them? Do you think about them often? How did you learn them?

 

  1. “We go on talking but I can see a faint shadow on his face- he is puzzled and doesn’t know what is puzzling him. I move closer to him, into his arms and the shadow is gone. And the tune comes back, flows into my mind, to the tip of my tongue. “
  2. What do you think she does when the tune comes back again? Why do you think the writer of this story has given this kind of an ending? Does it make you look at the whole story any differently?
  3. Among all the characters in all the three stories that you have read in the class room to which one were you able to relate well and why? Write about similar characters that you have encountered in real life or fiction.

 

Glossary:

spouses: a husband or wife, considered in relation to their partner.

demographic: relating to the dynamic balance of a population especially with regard to density and capacity for expansion or decline; a portion of a population, especially considered as consumers.

reinvigorate: give new energy or strength to.

savvy: shrewd and knowledgeable; having common sense and good judgement

intuitive: based on feelings rather than facts or proof

novelty:the quality of being new, original, or unusual

Endorphin: a ​chemical ​naturally ​released in the ​brain to ​reduce ​pain, that in ​large ​amounts can make you ​feel ​relaxed or ​full of ​energy

inherent:​existing as a ​natural or ​basic ​part of something

 

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

[1]American politician Anthony Weiner, former member of the United States House of Representatives from New York City, was involved in two sexual scandals related to sexting, or sending explicit sexual material by cell phone. The first, sometimes dubbed Weinergate,[ led to his resignation as a congressman in 2011. The second, during his attempt to return to politics as candidate for mayor of New York City, involved three women Weiner admitted having sexted after further explicit pictures were published in July 2013.

[2]Starbucks Corporation, doing business as Starbucks Coffee, is an American coffee company and coffeehouse chain based in Seattle, Washington. Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world ahead of UK rival Costa Coffee, with 22,551 stores in 65 countries and territories, including 12,739 in the United States, 1,868 in China, 1,395 in Canada, 1,117 in Japan and 830 in the United Kingdom.

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce 2015 General English Question Paper PDF Download

by

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)

End Semester Examination – October 2015

B.Com – I Semester

General English

Duration: 3 Hours                                                                                           Max. Marks: 100

                                                                

Note:  Read the questions carefully and answer.

Do not exceed the paragraph limit.

            Each paragraph should contain at least four sentences.

            Do not copy sentences or paragraphs from the passage.

            A glossary of difficult words is given at the end of the paper.

SECTION – A

Read the passage below and answer the questions.

When a Relationship Becomes a Game

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and Kamakshi Zeidler, a 34-year-old plastic surgeon in Los Gatos, California, is explaining how to fill up a “love tank.”

“If you do little things for your partner… you get signals your love tank is full. And if you don’t, you’ll get signals that your love tank is almost empty. It’s based on how much you love each other. Well, through the app,” she adds.

Zeidler and her husband Brendon form a satisfied, if busy, pair. Both work long hours and have little time for spontaneous romantic gestures.

The “love tank” Kamakshi describes is one feature of a “couples’ app” called Kahnoodle. A 2011 addition to the app market, couples’ apps target spouses in a demographic sweet spot—old enough to need reinvigoration in their relationships, but still young enough to be tech-savvy—and offer a counterintuitive, strangely Anthony Weiner[1]-friendly service: an intimate social network, built for two.

But San Francisco-based Kahnoodle explores a new frontier of couples-app potential.

“It’s basically gamification of your relationships,” says Sonja Poole, a pleased Kahnoodler and 43-year-old associate professor at the University of San Francisco.

Gamification is a buzzword referring to the use of game concepts, like point rewards and badges, to engage users in non-game, or “real life,” situations. The website Lumosity gamifies intelligence training through animated exercises, and loyalty-based businesses like Belly use reward programs and badges to pull customers into affiliated restaurants. Foursquare encourages loyalty by awarding mayorships to frequent visitors of stores and restaurants.

Consumers respond very well to gamification in other sectors; businesses report increases in “engagement” by hundreds of percentage points when they gamify.

Using gamification, Kahnoodle wants to make maintaining your relationship automatic and easy—as easy as tapping a button. Its options include sending push notifications to initiate sex; “Koupons” that entitle the bearer to redeemable movie nights and kinky sex; and, of course, the love tank, which fills or empties depending on how many acts of love you’ve logged.

“Novelty works like an endorphin,” says Zuhairah Scott Washington, the company’s founder. “Couples have a desire to go out and do something new, but oftentimes they’re tired. The mobile app… incorporates a lot of research on what makes relationships successful but gamifies it to make it fun, makes it fun to do the work required to keep relationships fresh.”

Poole’s husband, Damone, has a demanding job that “keeps his attention away from the relationship.” She estimates that he checks his smartphone upwards of 50 times a day, mostly for work. She likes Kahnoodle because “it reminds him, ‘I need to do something for her,’” she says. “Any little bit helps.”

By many measures, the app should work. But the relationship between a man and his Starbucks[2] reward history is a lot less complex than the relationship between Sonja and Damone. Right?

Psychologist Eli Finkel of Northwestern University certainly thinks so. According to Finkel, you run into a couple of problems when you gamify love. Kahnoodle’s “Kudos” service, which allows one partner to reward another for a romantic gesture, might foster an “exchange mentality,” a tit-for-tat view of interaction that can be harmful in romantic situations—exchange mentality is commonly seen in cases of date rape, for example.

Finkel also says relationships are supposed to be tricky.

“Much of the benefit of doing considerate things is linked to the fact that those things required thoughtfulness and effort,” Finkel writes in an email. “Take the thoughtfulness out of the acts and they lose much of their meaning.”

Social psychologist and CEO of mental health network Psych Central John Grohol agrees. “You can’t substitute gamification for those core things people strive for,” he says. “Filling up a love tank isn’t the same as having a personal connection.”

Yet from a psychological perspective, human relationships “are inherently game-like,” says Professor Andrew Colman, a psychologist and game theory expert at University of Leicester in the U.K. According to a 2009 study that analyzes dating in terms of game theory, humans assess potential mates according to investments, risk-reward behaviors, and other factors that mirror the way we analyze a game. Game theory, for instance, explains why we love “the chase.” “A male’s willingness to court for a long time is a signal that he is likely to be a good male,” study author Robert Seymour writes.

This explains why women who wait for sex usually end up finding a better match. You want the higher reward; you stay in the game longer. Like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And online dating apps like Let’s Date and Zoosk have already seen positive results from gamification.

Of course, online dating is a far cry from your 20th anniversary. But the game of love is “still a game after decades of living together,” Colman says. “It doesn’t mean you’re trivializing it.”

Predictably, he says, the objection most people will have to Kahnoodle is that it’s mechanized game-playing; it takes the creativity and spontaneity out of relationship maintenance.

But as it turns out, spontaneity and creativity don’t necessarily predict lasting relationships. Relationships that are built on a “solid, comfortable, interesting, and pleasurable bed of reality” succeed above all others, according to an article by relationship psychologists John Adams and Constance Avery-Clark.

Adams and Avery-Clark stress the importance of “de-emphasizing over-romantic notions of super-compatibility in favor of a rational approach to relationships.” In other words, it’s not about whether spouses want to smooch endlessly on street corners or read separate newspapers at breakfast. They just need to be on the same page about what they do want, and how to go about getting it.

Zeidler and her husband seem to be.

“We’re busy, working professionals,” she reiterates. The love tank makes it “a little easier to constantly think about each other.” And Kahnoodle Concierge, a recently launched service that plans surprise-filled date nights for as little as $20 a month, is a godsend. “If my husband and I can simply show up to the same place, it’s great.”

Kahnoodle keeps the Zeidlers engaged. And in a world where couples spendmore time with their smartphones than each other, that’s no easy feat.

  1. Answer the following in ONE paragraph each. (5 x 3 = 15)

 

  1. What have you understood by the term ‘gamification’? Describe it in your own words.
  2. What does Eli Finkel mean by ‘exchange mentality’? Give an example and explain the concept.
  3. What insight has Game Theory offered to the study of human relationships? Does it make any sense to you?

 

  1. Answer the following in about THREE or FOUR paragraphs each. (15 x 2 = 30)
  2. The article above presents two contrasting views on human relationship. What are these two views? Which view makes sense to you the most? Use experiences, observations or fictional narratives in your response to make your point.
  3. The above article just seems to be an advertisement for the new app Kahnoodle.What do you think is the position of the writer of the article with regard to technology and human relationships? What do you have to say about the way in which technology is altering human relationships? Use experiences and observations in your answer.

SECTION – B

Read the story and answer the questions.

Dolls

In a certain town there lived a couple. The husband would bring home a bushel of fish every day. His wife would eat up all the middles of the fish and leave him only fish heads and fish tails. She did this every day.

What did he do? He had a sister in town. He went to her house one day and said, “Sister, every day I bring home a bushel of fish. When I come to eat, the fish have only heads and tails, no middles.

What shall I do?”

His sister told him, “If that’s the case, Brother, go to the carpenter, and ask him to make three dolls for you. Place one doll next to the cooking fire. Place another with the pots and pans. Put the third one in the niche in the wall. After you’ve done that, bring home as usual your bushel of fish and then leave. Let’s see what happens.”

He did exactly what his sister told him to do. He went to the carpenter and got three dolls made. He placed one near the cooking fire, a second one among the pots, and another in the wall niche. And he brought in his daily bushel of fish, gave it to his wife, and went out as usual.

She cooked the fish in a hurry, and was going to pick up a platter when the doll among the pots piped up and asked, “Why a platter?”

The doll in the wall answered, “To eat like a thief.”

The doll near the cooking fire added, “Without her husband!”

She gasped, “They talk, and like that!”

She was scared of the dolls and rushed out of the house, and didn’t get back till her husband came home. When he came home, she fed him, and then ate her own dinner. The fish were whole, as whole as when they were brought.

Her husband said nothing. He finished his meal, and went to his sister’s house. He said to her, “Sister, I did as you told me to. Today, all the fish were whole.”

One interpretation of the above story goes this way: ‘this tale seems to express an understanding of the phenomenon of “projection,” in which a rejected inner voice or impulse is attributed to an external object or person.’

 

  • Answer the question in about THREE or FOUR paragraphs. (1 x 15 = 15)
  1. a) Why do you think the wife was scared of the dolls?
  2. Do you agree with the above interpretation of the story as an expression of the phenomenon of ‘projection’?
  3. What would be your interpretation of the above story?

 

 

 

 

SECTION – C

  1. The below questions are based on the texts that you have read in the classroom. Answer the questions in about FIVE paragraphs each. (2 x 20 = 20)

 

  1. “Words shape how I see the world, how I move through problems, how I relax. They give me comfort, order and structure” says Hannah Giorgis.
  2. Do you think there is a relationship between the language you speak and your thoughts, dreams and actions? How has the language that you speak shaped your opinions, beliefs or perspectives?
  3. What kind of a relationship do you have with the languages you speak? Do you like them? Do you think about them often? How did you learn them?

 

  1. “We go on talking but I can see a faint shadow on his face- he is puzzled and doesn’t know what is puzzling him. I move closer to him, into his arms and the shadow is gone. And the tune comes back, flows into my mind, to the tip of my tongue. “
  2. What do you think she does when the tune comes back again? Why do you think the writer of this story has given this kind of an ending? Does it make you look at the whole story any differently?
  3. Among all the characters in all the three stories that you have read in the class room to which one were you able to relate well and why? Write about similar characters that you have encountered in real life or fiction.

 

Glossary:

spouses: a husband or wife, considered in relation to their partner.

demographic: relating to the dynamic balance of a population especially with regard to density and capacity for expansion or decline; a portion of a population, especially considered as consumers.

reinvigorate: give new energy or strength to.

savvy: shrewd and knowledgeable; having common sense and good judgement

intuitive: based on feelings rather than facts or proof

novelty:the quality of being new, original, or unusual

Endorphin: a ​chemical ​naturally ​released in the ​brain to ​reduce ​pain, that in ​large ​amounts can make you ​feel ​relaxed or ​full of ​energy

inherent:​existing as a ​natural or ​basic ​part of something

 

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

[1]American politician Anthony Weiner, former member of the United States House of Representatives from New York City, was involved in two sexual scandals related to sexting, or sending explicit sexual material by cell phone. The first, sometimes dubbed Weinergate,[ led to his resignation as a congressman in 2011. The second, during his attempt to return to politics as candidate for mayor of New York City, involved three women Weiner admitted having sexted after further explicit pictures were published in July 2013.

[2]Starbucks Corporation, doing business as Starbucks Coffee, is an American coffee company and coffeehouse chain based in Seattle, Washington. Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world ahead of UK rival Costa Coffee, with 22,551 stores in 65 countries and territories, including 12,739 in the United States, 1,868 in China, 1,395 in Canada, 1,117 in Japan and 830 in the United Kingdom.

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce B.Com. 2015 I Sem General English Question Paper PDF Download

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St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)

End Semester Examination – October 2015

B.Com – I Semester

GENERAL ENGLISH

Duration: 3 Hours                                                                                           Max. Marks: 100

                                                                

Note:  Read the questions carefully and answer.

Do not exceed the paragraph limit.

            Each paragraph should contain at least four sentences.

            Do not copy sentences or paragraphs from the passage.

            A glossary of difficult words is given at the end of the paper.

SECTION – A

Read the passage below and answer the questions.

When a Relationship Becomes a Game

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and Kamakshi Zeidler, a 34-year-old plastic surgeon in Los Gatos, California, is explaining how to fill up a “love tank.”

“If you do little things for your partner… you get signals your love tank is full. And if you don’t, you’ll get signals that your love tank is almost empty. It’s based on how much you love each other. Well, through the app,” she adds.

Zeidler and her husband Brendon form a satisfied, if busy, pair. Both work long hours and have little time for spontaneous romantic gestures.

The “love tank” Kamakshi describes is one feature of a “couples’ app” called Kahnoodle. A 2011 addition to the app market, couples’ apps target spouses in a demographic sweet spot—old enough to need reinvigoration in their relationships, but still young enough to be tech-savvy—and offer a counterintuitive, strangely Anthony Weiner[1]-friendly service: an intimate social network, built for two.

But San Francisco-based Kahnoodle explores a new frontier of couples-app potential.

“It’s basically gamification of your relationships,” says Sonja Poole, a pleased Kahnoodler and 43-year-old associate professor at the University of San Francisco.

Gamification is a buzzword referring to the use of game concepts, like point rewards and badges, to engage users in non-game, or “real life,” situations. The website Lumosity gamifies intelligence training through animated exercises, and loyalty-based businesses like Belly use reward programs and badges to pull customers into affiliated restaurants. Foursquare encourages loyalty by awarding mayorships to frequent visitors of stores and restaurants.

Consumers respond very well to gamification in other sectors; businesses report increases in “engagement” by hundreds of percentage points when they gamify.

Using gamification, Kahnoodle wants to make maintaining your relationship automatic and easy—as easy as tapping a button. Its options include sending push notifications to initiate sex; “Koupons” that entitle the bearer to redeemable movie nights and kinky sex; and, of course, the love tank, which fills or empties depending on how many acts of love you’ve logged.

“Novelty works like an endorphin,” says Zuhairah Scott Washington, the company’s founder. “Couples have a desire to go out and do something new, but oftentimes they’re tired. The mobile app… incorporates a lot of research on what makes relationships successful but gamifies it to make it fun, makes it fun to do the work required to keep relationships fresh.”

Poole’s husband, Damone, has a demanding job that “keeps his attention away from the relationship.” She estimates that he checks his smartphone upwards of 50 times a day, mostly for work. She likes Kahnoodle because “it reminds him, ‘I need to do something for her,’” she says. “Any little bit helps.”

By many measures, the app should work. But the relationship between a man and his Starbucks[2] reward history is a lot less complex than the relationship between Sonja and Damone. Right?

Psychologist Eli Finkel of Northwestern University certainly thinks so. According to Finkel, you run into a couple of problems when you gamify love. Kahnoodle’s “Kudos” service, which allows one partner to reward another for a romantic gesture, might foster an “exchange mentality,” a tit-for-tat view of interaction that can be harmful in romantic situations—exchange mentality is commonly seen in cases of date rape, for example.

Finkel also says relationships are supposed to be tricky.

“Much of the benefit of doing considerate things is linked to the fact that those things required thoughtfulness and effort,” Finkel writes in an email. “Take the thoughtfulness out of the acts and they lose much of their meaning.”

Social psychologist and CEO of mental health network Psych Central John Grohol agrees. “You can’t substitute gamification for those core things people strive for,” he says. “Filling up a love tank isn’t the same as having a personal connection.”

Yet from a psychological perspective, human relationships “are inherently game-like,” says Professor Andrew Colman, a psychologist and game theory expert at University of Leicester in the U.K. According to a 2009 study that analyzes dating in terms of game theory, humans assess potential mates according to investments, risk-reward behaviors, and other factors that mirror the way we analyze a game. Game theory, for instance, explains why we love “the chase.” “A male’s willingness to court for a long time is a signal that he is likely to be a good male,” study author Robert Seymour writes.

This explains why women who wait for sex usually end up finding a better match. You want the higher reward; you stay in the game longer. Like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And online dating apps like Let’s Date and Zoosk have already seen positive results from gamification.

Of course, online dating is a far cry from your 20th anniversary. But the game of love is “still a game after decades of living together,” Colman says. “It doesn’t mean you’re trivializing it.”

Predictably, he says, the objection most people will have to Kahnoodle is that it’s mechanized game-playing; it takes the creativity and spontaneity out of relationship maintenance.

But as it turns out, spontaneity and creativity don’t necessarily predict lasting relationships. Relationships that are built on a “solid, comfortable, interesting, and pleasurable bed of reality” succeed above all others, according to an article by relationship psychologists John Adams and Constance Avery-Clark.

Adams and Avery-Clark stress the importance of “de-emphasizing over-romantic notions of super-compatibility in favor of a rational approach to relationships.” In other words, it’s not about whether spouses want to smooch endlessly on street corners or read separate newspapers at breakfast. They just need to be on the same page about what they do want, and how to go about getting it.

Zeidler and her husband seem to be.

“We’re busy, working professionals,” she reiterates. The love tank makes it “a little easier to constantly think about each other.” And Kahnoodle Concierge, a recently launched service that plans surprise-filled date nights for as little as $20 a month, is a godsend. “If my husband and I can simply show up to the same place, it’s great.”

Kahnoodle keeps the Zeidlers engaged. And in a world where couples spendmore time with their smartphones than each other, that’s no easy feat.

  1. Answer the following in ONE paragraph each. (5 x 3 = 15)

 

  1. What have you understood by the term ‘gamification’? Describe it in your own words.
  2. What does Eli Finkel mean by ‘exchange mentality’? Give an example and explain the concept.
  3. What insight has Game Theory offered to the study of human relationships? Does it make any sense to you?

 

  1. Answer the following in about THREE or FOUR paragraphs each. (15 x 2 = 30)
  2. The article above presents two contrasting views on human relationship. What are these two views? Which view makes sense to you the most? Use experiences, observations or fictional narratives in your response to make your point.
  3. The above article just seems to be an advertisement for the new app Kahnoodle.What do you think is the position of the writer of the article with regard to technology and human relationships? What do you have to say about the way in which technology is altering human relationships? Use experiences and observations in your answer.

SECTION – B

Read the story and answer the questions.

Dolls

In a certain town there lived a couple. The husband would bring home a bushel of fish every day. His wife would eat up all the middles of the fish and leave him only fish heads and fish tails. She did this every day.

What did he do? He had a sister in town. He went to her house one day and said, “Sister, every day I bring home a bushel of fish. When I come to eat, the fish have only heads and tails, no middles.

What shall I do?”

His sister told him, “If that’s the case, Brother, go to the carpenter, and ask him to make three dolls for you. Place one doll next to the cooking fire. Place another with the pots and pans. Put the third one in the niche in the wall. After you’ve done that, bring home as usual your bushel of fish and then leave. Let’s see what happens.”

He did exactly what his sister told him to do. He went to the carpenter and got three dolls made. He placed one near the cooking fire, a second one among the pots, and another in the wall niche. And he brought in his daily bushel of fish, gave it to his wife, and went out as usual.

She cooked the fish in a hurry, and was going to pick up a platter when the doll among the pots piped up and asked, “Why a platter?”

The doll in the wall answered, “To eat like a thief.”

The doll near the cooking fire added, “Without her husband!”

She gasped, “They talk, and like that!”

She was scared of the dolls and rushed out of the house, and didn’t get back till her husband came home. When he came home, she fed him, and then ate her own dinner. The fish were whole, as whole as when they were brought.

Her husband said nothing. He finished his meal, and went to his sister’s house. He said to her, “Sister, I did as you told me to. Today, all the fish were whole.”

One interpretation of the above story goes this way: ‘this tale seems to express an understanding of the phenomenon of “projection,” in which a rejected inner voice or impulse is attributed to an external object or person.’

 

  • Answer the question in about THREE or FOUR paragraphs. (1 x 15 = 15)
  1. a) Why do you think the wife was scared of the dolls?
  2. Do you agree with the above interpretation of the story as an expression of the phenomenon of ‘projection’?
  3. What would be your interpretation of the above story?

 

 

 

 

SECTION – C

  1. The below questions are based on the texts that you have read in the classroom. Answer the questions in about FIVE paragraphs each. (2 x 20 = 20)

 

  1. “Words shape how I see the world, how I move through problems, how I relax. They give me comfort, order and structure” says Hannah Giorgis.
  2. Do you think there is a relationship between the language you speak and your thoughts, dreams and actions? How has the language that you speak shaped your opinions, beliefs or perspectives?
  3. What kind of a relationship do you have with the languages you speak? Do you like them? Do you think about them often? How did you learn them?

 

  1. “We go on talking but I can see a faint shadow on his face- he is puzzled and doesn’t know what is puzzling him. I move closer to him, into his arms and the shadow is gone. And the tune comes back, flows into my mind, to the tip of my tongue. “
  2. What do you think she does when the tune comes back again? Why do you think the writer of this story has given this kind of an ending? Does it make you look at the whole story any differently?
  3. Among all the characters in all the three stories that you have read in the class room to which one were you able to relate well and why? Write about similar characters that you have encountered in real life or fiction.

 

Glossary:

spouses: a husband or wife, considered in relation to their partner.

demographic: relating to the dynamic balance of a population especially with regard to density and capacity for expansion or decline; a portion of a population, especially considered as consumers.

reinvigorate: give new energy or strength to.

savvy: shrewd and knowledgeable; having common sense and good judgement

intuitive: based on feelings rather than facts or proof

novelty:the quality of being new, original, or unusual

Endorphin: a ​chemical ​naturally ​released in the ​brain to ​reduce ​pain, that in ​large ​amounts can make you ​feel ​relaxed or ​full of ​energy

inherent:​existing as a ​natural or ​basic ​part of something

 

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

[1]American politician Anthony Weiner, former member of the United States House of Representatives from New York City, was involved in two sexual scandals related to sexting, or sending explicit sexual material by cell phone. The first, sometimes dubbed Weinergate,[ led to his resignation as a congressman in 2011. The second, during his attempt to return to politics as candidate for mayor of New York City, involved three women Weiner admitted having sexted after further explicit pictures were published in July 2013.

[2]Starbucks Corporation, doing business as Starbucks Coffee, is an American coffee company and coffeehouse chain based in Seattle, Washington. Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world ahead of UK rival Costa Coffee, with 22,551 stores in 65 countries and territories, including 12,739 in the United States, 1,868 in China, 1,395 in Canada, 1,117 in Japan and 830 in the United Kingdom.

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce 2015 General English Question Paper PDF Download

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St.Joseph’s College of commerce (Autonomous)

End semester examination – Sept/Oct. 2015

B.B.A. – I SEMESTER

M1 15 1GE: GENERAL ENGLISH

Duration: 3Hrs                                                                                                 Max marks: 100

SECTION-A

 

  1. Answer  the following questions in a word phrase or a sentence        (5×2=10)

 

  1. A poem should not mean But be. What do you think is the meaning of these words?
  2. Why does Wordsworth want to be a pagan’   ?
  3. When is a relationship merely an activity according to J. Krishnamurthy?
  4. Where was the husband in the story ‘Necklace’ employed?
  5. In the story “ An astrologer’s day’ what does the word ‘ paraphernalia’ mean?

 

  1. Write short notes on any four of the following                                         (4×5=20)

 

  1. The character of Gurunayak.
  2. The ending of the story ‘Necklace.’
  3. Artist’s life as depicted in “Last leaf”.
  4. The element of satire in the poem “ Saviors”
  5. Poet Wordsworth’s dissatisfaction and its cause.

 

 

  • Answer any three of the following in about two pages each. (3×10=30)

 

  1. Write your personal response to the poem ‘Ars Poetica’.
  2. Of the two short stories “Last leaf” and “Necklace”, which do you like more? Give reasons for your answer.
  3. What are some of the chief insights of J. Krishnamurthy on the topic of relationship? Do you agree or disagree with him ? Why?
  4. In the backdrop of K. Narayan’s “An Astrologers day”, examine the authour’s attitude towards astrology and astrologers. What is your own view on the subject?

 

SECTION-B

  1. Read the following passage carefully and then answer questions set on it.

It seems that the ancient Greeks knew better than we about the subject of love, at least in regard to distinguishing its categories. They identified several varieties: The love of parents for children, love between friends, the affection of comrades who have experienced much together, charitable love for humanity in general, obsessive love, erotic love and so on and gave each its own name and story. They thought that mania, what we call infatuation was a punishment sent by the gods: and they prized philia, the love between friends above all other kinds.

Interestingly, they did not single out the only kind of love that can be and often is, genuinely unconditional asking nothing in return and getting nothing in return, and which is unquestionably a matter of biology and, more accurately biochemistry, namely maternal love

Without question maternal attachment has been a constant since our remotest ancestors lived in trees, for everywhere in mammalian nature, mothers tend and protect their young untill the latter are able to survive alone, illustrating how essential maternal attachment is, to the continuance of life itself. One of the more poignant comparisons between human mother-child bonds and their existence among our relatives in nature is provided by chimpanzees: Jane Godall discovered when she studied the chimpanzees of Gombe in Tanzania that some young chimps die of grief when they loose their mothers.

Although mother-love is biological, it is not universal because it is not guaranteed in every case, atleast among humans. This is no contradiction. Not all women have the instinct, and it is known that the processes of pregnancy and childbirth that fully activate the instinct can sometimes be disrupted.

 

  1. Answer the following in a word, phrase or a sentence.                               ( 5×2=10)
  2. What term did the Greeks use for infatuation.
  3. What is the basis of maternal instinct?
  4. Which well known primatologist is mentioned in the passage?
  5. What form of love was the highest, in the opinion of the Greeks
  6. Suggest a suitable title for the passage.

 

  1. Love is many things to many people. Based on your understanding of the passage express your views on the possibilities and the limitations of Love as a human emotion.

(10 marks)

 

 

SECTION-C

  1. Re-write a directed. (5×2=10)
  2. It started raining. People ran for shelter. (Re-write the sentence using No sooner______ than)
  3. This ________ is very beautiful (alter, altar) Choose the right word to fill in the blank.
  4. Newzeland is a very good cricket team. It has never won the world cup.     (Change into a complex sentence)
  5. This building was constructed by them two years ago. (Change into active voice)
  6. He is preparing seriously for his exams. (Identify the specific tense of the verb in this sentence)

 

 

  1. Correct the errors if any, in the following sentences.          (3×2=6)

 

  1. He is the tallest of the two brothers.
  2. She came in Rajadhani express from Delhi.
  3. There was a dramatic turn over in the last ball of the match.

 

  1. Use the any two of the following idioms correctly in sentences of your own.

                                                                                                                                       (2×2=4)

  1. To see stars
  2. To be head and shoulders above others.
  3. To run from pillar to post.

 

 

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce II Sem General English Question Paper PDF Download

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REG NO:

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)

End Semester Examination – March /April 2016

B.COM (T.T.) – II Semester

C2 15 2 GE:  GENERAL ENGLISH

Duration: 3 Hours                                                                                          Max. Marks: 100

Section -A

  1. Write short notes on the following:                   (4×5= 20)
  2. Effim’s visit to Holy Sepulcher.
  3. The Manganiyar group described in Tracing the Roots of Rajasthani Music.
  4. Sir Mohan Lal’s English.
  5. “Another phase was reached when we

       Were twice attacked, and lost our way”. – Enterprise

Section -B

  1. Answer the following questions in about 250 words.       (4×10 =40)
  2. Describe the metaphorical significance of pilgrimage in the story Two Old Men. Comment on religious spaces, its architecture, serenity and religious symbols that you have seen during your visits.
  3. “He will not be engaged in the superficial pursuits of tourists but in the difficult task of trying to make sense of an alien culture”. According to Tom Swick what are the artificial pursuits of a tourist and how does he claim to be different from them? Elucidate your answer by giving examples from the text.
  4. 7. Karma had its wrath on Sir Mohan Lal. If you are asked to narrate the story after this event, how will you portray the wrath of karma on the two English soldiers who threw Sir Mohan Lal outside the compartment? Use your imagination to write the answer.
  5. What made Alex Shoumatoff state at the end of the text “As I listened, I eventually stopped imposing what I was looking for and began to enjoy the music for what it was: beautiful, alive and present”. Narrate an experience in which you have discovered a lifestyle that was not a part of the culture that you grew up with.

III. Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions in about two to three paragraphs each.                                                                                                 (4×10=40)

Objects that once adorned display cases in museums around the world are disappearing from view. In recent decades, dramatic wooden Iroquois face masks, crafted by the nations and tribes of indigenous people of North America, have been taken off the shelves. Rattles and masks made by the Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest, in British Columbia, have been moved to restricted areas of museum storerooms. And at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, ‘secret/sacred’ Aboriginal objects have been separated from the main collection: only tribal members of particular standing are permitted to see them.

Such removals are political, enacted in the name of decolonisation and the right to self-determination of Native peoples. By way of restitution, argues the museum scholar Janet Marstine of the University of Leicester, ‘Institutions need to develop long-term relationships with source communities built on trust.’ ‘Source communities’ is the buzzword for groups of people, or tribes, considered to be affiliated to the artefacts, and Marstine believes that they should control the interpretation of the past. That includes how cultural artefacts are understood, presented and stored in museums – and if they are displayed at all.

The idea that one culture ‘owns’ a particular heritage is having a profound impact on museums. Just as campaigners are urging the nations of Greece and Turkey to see themselves as the true owners of cultural artefacts – such as the Parthenon marbles, or sculptures from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, both in the British Museum – so too do activists and sympathetic museum professionals, who are facilitating these removals, consider certain indigenous peoples – Native Americans, Aboriginal people, First Nations – the primary, if not sole, arbitrator of their history and cultural artefacts. Lissant Bolton, a keeper at the British Museum, puts the point like this: ‘In the Australian context, this means that any Indigenous Australian is understood to have a greater right to speak about any Aboriginal object than any non-Indigenous Australian.’

The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), which opened on The Mall in Washington, DC in 1990, has been at the forefront of implementing new museums and policies that make formal concessions to particular groups on the basis of their ethnicity. The US arts journalist Edward Rothstein calls the NMAI and its ilk ‘identity museums’.

The devolving of authority at the NMAI embraced a range of activities, including who designed and built the museum, who selects what is in the collection, and how it is interpreted and presented – as well as how artefacts are conserved, and who can see them. In a similar spirit, in 1993 the Council of Australian Museum Associations endorsed a document, now titled Continuous Cultures, Ongoing Responsibilities, which set a new bar by compelling institutions to work collaboratively with indigenous groups on all aspects of running a museum. The premise behind this move was that indigenous people should be the ones to tell and organise their history: only Native Americans can speak for and tell the story of Native Americans. The Maori for the Maori. Aboriginal groups for the Aboriginal past.

The motives are understandable. Colonisation had a devastating impact on indigenous peoples. But the new identity museums are troubling on many levels – and not just because material is taken off display. Imagine if a museum was established, with public money (the NMAI is federally funded), where white people from one geographical area – sometimes only white men with status – were given the authority to decide what exhibits visitors could and couldn’t see. There would quite rightly be outrage.

Instead of decolonising museums, the new practices echo and reinforce a racial discourse. They present an idea of culture as fixed and immutable – something people own by virtue of biological ancestry. This racial view of the world should trouble us.

We need to ask who speaks for the relevant indigenous community, and on what basis. Even who qualifies as indigenous is a vexed question, as is the fact that ‘the indigenous’ rarely speak with one voice. Ethnocentric policies therefore tend to vest authority in anointed chiefs and elders (local equivalents of the privileged white male), without asking how many and which tribal members need to subscribe to the traditional view for it to remain authoritative. What about those who disagree? And what about those who want to change it, or challenge it from within?

It also follows, according to the logic of identity museum practice, that those outside the culture cannot truly understand it because they’ve never experienced it. It’s an approach that creates barriers between people. And also between people and artefacts. It advances the idea that cultures are separate and irreconcilable. When Seddon Bennington was chief executive of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington – formally a bi-cultural museum – he articulated precisely such a view: ‘There is a Western way of seeing the world and a Matauranga Māori way. The rest of the world cannot tap into Māori wisdom.’

But handing over the right to narrate history to those with the approved ethnicity is not the way that knowledge works. The pursuit of truth and the understanding of history must be open to everybody, regardless of class, ethnicity or gender. There must be universal access. That is how questions can be explored, and old forms of authority challenged.

We often hear about the problem of hidden histories, invisible and unheard because the stories of women and minorities have been written out of mainstream narratives. But identity museums are guilty of the same sin of omission, since surrendering the authority to shape museum collections to indigenous communities hinders the understanding of the very people it claims to help. It creates an idealized version of the past – one that never accounts for itself, because it cannot be questioned.

  • What is the author’s argument with regard to an ethnic group being the owner of cultural artifacts? Do you agree to his view?
  • What does the author mean by ‘decentralization of cultural artifacts’? Does it promote racism and separatism?
  • In a larger context do you think that in this segregation of cultural artifacts the third world countries will have a greater advantage over the First world countries? Also, give your opinion on whether it is a rightful demand to bring the Kohinoor Diamond which was taken away by the British, back to India.
  • Museums can recreate past in the minds of the visitors. They are also a way of understanding the past. Narrate your first impression of a visit to a museum or gallery of cultural artefacts. Do you think we, as a society, attach any importance to museums and galleries?

 

                                  &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce II Sem General English Question Paper PDF Download

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St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)

End Semester Examination – March /APRIL 2016

B.Com – II Semester

c1 15 2 ge: GENERAL ENGLISH

Duration: 3 Hours                                                                                      Max. Marks: 100

                                                                

Note:  Read the questions carefully and answer.

Do not exceed the paragraph limit.

            Each paragraph should contain at least four sentences.

 

SECTION – A

Read the passage below and answer the questions.

Freedom of speech: Is there really any difference between sedition and blasphemy?

Freedom of speech is one of the cornerstones of liberal government. In his famous philosophical work On Liberty, John Stuart Mill laid out the basic principle of how free speech should work:

If the arguments of the present chapter are of any validity, there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.

“However immoral”, though, is a high bar. What if a person’s speech and ideas are terribly odious to the people and society around him? Here Mill is even more emphatic:

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

Of course, the one ideology that this sort of unrestrained freedom of speech runs smack into is religion. It is rather easy to talk of offending everyone as long the discussion is about the more banal facets of human existence. However, once talk turns to gods, goddesses, prophets and seers, believers tend to get a bit more heated. As a result, even self-proclaimed liberal democracies have allowed the criminalisation of speech that seem to hurt religious sentiments. For example, England had a law that penalised the blaspheming of the Christian religion, which was on its books right till 2008. This was in spite of the fact that its 17th century Bill of Rights protected free speech.

Interestingly, the other thing that is usually shielded from freedom of speech is the state. Even countries which have liberalism as their ruling ideology have, through history, penalised offensive speech against the state. The United States, a country that almost fetishes free speech, has a sedition law on its books that it used to target people branded “anti-national”. This law was used against Communists and Nazi sympathisers in the 1940s but, within a decade, its judiciary had ruled that ideas, no matter how seemingly harmful, can never be a basis for charging someone with sedition. As a result, the Unites States’ sedition law has remained unused since 1961.

Free speech in India

Matters in India are a bit less promising. Free speech is curbed by a fairly stringent blasphemy law, Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, introduced by the British Raj in 1932. “Anti-national” speech is curbed by India’s sedition law, section 124A, also introduced by the Raj. There is however, a fair bit of opinion ranged against blasphemy laws. The United Nations, for example, recognises that blasphemy laws are incompatible with civil rights. In India too, while free speech has frequently been proscribed as a result of religion, ­there has also been a strong backlash against the blasphemy law within the framework of the modernist tradition that attempts to move beyond the irrationality of religion.

The question here, of course, is whether a liberal state should be in the business of outlawing speech just because people’s feelings are hurt? India’s sedition law itself has been read down and is fairly liberal on paper now, given that only speech that directly incites violence against the government is liable to be prosecuted as seditious.

(An edited excerpt of an article published in Scroll.in, Feb 12, 2016 by Shoaib Daniyal)

  1. Answer the following in about two paragraphs each. (2 x 10 = 20)
  2. What have you understood by the terms ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’? How is it relevant to Mill’s statement on free speech?
  3. In what cases does free speech come into direct conflict according to the above article? And, how are ‘liberalism’ and ‘free speech’ as ideas connected to each other?

Answer in about three or four paragraphs each.                                      (2 x 20 = 40)

  1. The word sedition means “the crime of saying, writing, or doing something that encourages people to disobey their government” and blasphemy means “great disrespect shown to God or to something holy”.

But Gandhi had this to say in a trial when he was charged under “Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code” in 1922 for sedition “Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite to violence.”

Is expressing disaffection towards the government, nation or religion the same as being seditious or blasphemous?  State your opinion and prove it through arguments and explanations.

  1. Here is a quote from Rosa Luxemburg on free speech: “the freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently”. In the above article the writer while commenting on free speech in India says “Matters in India are a bit less promising.”

What do you think is the status of ‘free speech’ in India? How would you make sense of Rosa Luxemburg’s quote on free speech in the Indian context? Use observations, readings and experiences in answering the question.

SECTION – B

  1. Answer the questions in about two paragraphs each. (2 x 10 = 20)

Read the extract from Amartya Sen’s “What Clash of Civilization?”

A person’s religion need not be his or her all-encompassing and exclusive identity. Islam, as a religion, does not obliterate responsible choice for Muslims in many spheres of life. Indeed, it is possible for one Muslim to take a confrontational view and another to be thoroughly tolerant of heterodoxy without either of them ceasing to be a Muslim for that reason alone.

The response to Islamic fundamentalism and to the terrorism linked with it also becomes particularly confused when there is a general failure to distinguish between Islamic history and the history of Muslim people. Muslims, like all other people in the world, have many different pursuits, and not all their priorities and values need be placed within their singular identity of being Islamic. It is, of course, not surprising at all that the champions of Islamic fundamentalism would like to suppress all other identities of Muslims in favor of being only Islamic. But it is extremely odd that those who want to overcome the tensions and conflicts linked with Islamic fundamentalism also seem unable to see Muslim people in any form other than their being just Islamic.

People see themselves—and have reason to see themselves—in many different ways. For example, a Bangladeshi Muslim is not only a Muslim but also a Bengali and a Bangladeshi, typically quite proud of the Bengali language, literature, and music, not to mention the other identities he or she may have connected with class, gender, occupation, politics, aesthetic taste, and so on. Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan was not based on religion at all, since a Muslim identity was shared by the bulk of the population in the two wings of undivided Pakistan. The separatist issues related to language, literature, and politics.

Similarly, there is no empirical reason at all why champions of the Muslim past, or for that matter of the Arab heritage, have to concentrate specifically on religious beliefs only and not also on science and mathematics, to which Arab and Muslim societies have contributed so much, and which can also be part of a Muslim or an Arab identity. Despite the importance of this heritage, crude classifications have tended to put science and mathematics in the basket of “Western science,” leaving other people to mine their pride in religious depths. If the disaffected Arab activist today can take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the many-sided richness of Arab history, the unique prioritization of religion, shared by warriors on both sides, plays a major part in incarcerating people within the enclosure of a singular identity.

  1. Do you agree with the statement “A person’s religion need not be his or her all-encompassing and exclusive identity.”? Comment on the concept of ‘singular identity’.

 

  1. Relate Mona’s Story with Amartya Sen’s idea of singular and multiple identities. Also, comment on the vachanas of Basavanna and Dasimmaiah that talk about gender identities.

 

SECTION – C

III. Answer the questions in about two paragraphs each.                      (2 x10 = 20)

  1. Write about any two themes/ideas/metaphors/images from the poems of Robert Frost and Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

 

  1. Write about a poem that you read in the class and that was very relatable to your experiences in life? What is your perspective on reading and writing poetry?
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