(Download) CBSE Class-12 Sample Paper 2024-25: English Elective

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(Download) CBSE Class-12 Sample Paper 2024-25 : English Elective

Sample Question Paper (Term-1) 2024-25
Subject Name : English Elective
Time Allowed: 90
Subject Code: 301
Minutes Maximum Marks: 40

English elective

1. Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow: 12x1=12

(1) The postmaster’s office was located in the village of Ulapur. He was a young man from Calcutta. Stationed here, away from the known limits of civilisation, he often felt like a fish out of water. The plantation workers nearby seemed to have their own community. Social miscegenation between two different classes of people seemed all but impossible.

(2) In truth, the boy from the city wasn’t good at mixing with people. Uprooted and exiled to a foreign land, his feelings oscillated between arrogance and shame. He rarely met any of the villagers. At times, he tried writing. He wrote poems: poems in which the marrow of life seemed to resonate with the faint tremble of young leaves, where the memory of existence was rejuvenated by the sight of rain clouds—and yet, in his heart of hearts, he knew that the only way he’d welcome the sight of a new life would be if some fantastical djinn from the Arabian Nights arrived at night, unawares, and secretly swept away this maze of maddening vegetation. He longed for the security of metalled roads, of tall houses which blocked the sight of clouds in the open sky. The city was spreading its tentacles, calling him back.

(3) The postmaster’s salary was meagre. He had to cook his own meals and his housework was under the care of an orphan girl called Ratan. Ratan was thirteen years old and called him dadababu. Her marital prospects seemed bleak.
Evenings would arrive with plumes of smoke rising from the cowshed. The postmaster would light his lamp. The flame would sputter as he’d call out, “Ratan?”
Ratan would be waiting for this call. But on its arrival, she’d rush into the room, feigning surprise.
“You called, dadababu?”
“Are you busy?”
“Well, I need to go and make the fire . . .”
“You can afford to do that later, can’t you? Do be a dear and dress my tobacco..”

(4) Ratan would enter with the coal-filled hookah, blowing on it feverishly. The postmaster would snatch it from her hands and ask, quite suddenly, “Ratan, do you remember your mother?” Memories would flow back in. Her father, she remembered, loved her more than her mother. She remembered his smile clearly, the smile he’d carry home when he returned every evening. His face would return to her like a revenant, and the little girl, still lost in thought, would proceed to sit on the floor by the postmaster’s feet. Looking at the young man, she’d remember how she had a brother once. She’d remember the past like it was only yesterday;
how they’d played by that old pond, using a branch as a fishing pole! She’d find herself remembering bits of insignificant things. The larger tragedies of life were murky.

(5) There were days of magnetic nostalgia—sitting on the wooden plank by the hut, the postmaster would find himself remembering his own history—as he’d think of his little brother, his sister, of everyone he’d left behind. He was infinite and infinitesimal, engulfed by a gaping emptiness—if only, if only he had someone to share this with! And just like that, all of nature was echoing his abyssal vacancy. My heart is in free fall. Won’t anyone catch it?

(6) On one afternoon during monsoons, Ratan walked into the postmaster’s room and found him lying on his cot under a pile of blankets and was running a fever. Something was happening to Ratan. The pale fire of steady resolution crackled under her skin. In the force of an instant, she assumed the authority of a mother.
Rushing out of the hut, she called the local doctor, stayed awake for the entirety of the night, crushing herbs, and feeding them to her patient, punctuating the stillness of this frightening night with the words, “Are you feeling better, dadababu?”