(Download) CBSE Class-10 Sample Paper (English Communicative)
2016
Section A
Reading
Q1. VSA (1 mark each)
Read the following passage carefully
First introduced in 1927, The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories are
a series of books about the adventures of brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, teenaged
detectives who solve one baffling mystery after another. The Hardy Boys were so
popular among young boys that in 1930 a similar series was created for girls
featuring a sixteen-year-old detective named Nancy Drew. The cover of each
volume of The Hardy Boys states that the author of the series is Franklin W.
Dixon; the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories are supposedly written by Carolyn Keene.
Over the years, though, many fans of both series have been surprised to find out
that Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene are not real people. If Franklin W.
Dixon and Carolyn Keene never existed, then who wrote The Hardy Boys and Nancy
Drew mysteries?
The Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew books were written through
a process called ghostwriting. A ghostwriter writes a book according to a
specific formula. While ghostwriters are paid for writing the books, their
authorship is not acknowledged, and their names do not appear on the published
books .Ghostwriters can write books for children or adults, the content of which
is unspecific. Sometimes they work on book series with a lot of individual
titles, such as The Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew series.
The initial idea for both the Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew
series was developed by a man named Edward Stratemeyer, who owned a publishing
company that specialized in children’s books. Stratemeyer noticed the increasing
popularity of mysteries among adults, and surmised that children would enjoy
reading mysteries about younger detectives with whom they could identify.
Stratemeyer first developed each book with an outline describing the plot and
setting. Once he completed the outline, Stratemeyer then hired a ghostwriter to
convert it into a book of slightly over 200 pages. After the ghostwriter had
written a draft of a book, he or she would send it back to Stratemeyer, who
would make a list of corrections and mail it back to the ghostwriter. The
ghostwriter would revise the book according to Stratemeyer’s instructions and
then return it to him. Once Stratemeyer approved the book, it was ready for
publication. Because each series ran for so many years, Nancy Drew and The Hardy
Boys both had a number of different ghostwriters producing books; however, the
first ghostwriter for each series proved to be the most influential. The initial
ghostwriter for The Hardy Boys was a Canadian journalist named Leslie McFarlane.
A few years later, Mildred A. Wirt, a young writer from Iowa, began writing the
Nancy Drew books. Although they were using prepared outlines as guides, both
McFarlane and Wirt developed the characters themselves. The personalities of
Frank and Joe Hardy and Nancy Drew arose directly from McFarlane’s and Wirt’s
imaginations. For example, Mildred Wirt had been a star college athlete and gave
Nancy similar athletic abilities. The ghostwriters were also responsible for
numerous plot and setting details. Leslie McFarlane used elements of his
small Canadian town to create Bayport, the Hardy Boys fictional hometown.
