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Question
‘But the peasant bowed and prayed to God ...........’ What could he have prayed for?
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Solution
The peasant must have prayed for the well-being of all human beings and asked God to help everyone to bear their troubles bravely.
RELATED QUESTIONS
Read the extract and do the following activities :
B1 Likes and dislikes :
(i) The child likes eating _______
(ii) The child dislikes eating _______
They won’t eat peas, don’t like your bread -
For something in it crunches;
They gag on fat, the gravy’s gross,
They won’t eat grapes in bunches.
Tomatoes, onions, peppers, fish
Garlic nor cottage cheese;
Oh, it’s a dish uncommon rare
That truly seems to please.
No red sauce may the ice cream have,
“It’s bleeding,” they will say;
And gravely hand it to their mum
To take it to clean away
But let us speak of chocolate cake,
It must be frosted o’er;
They’ll devour three full slabs,
And calmly ask for more.
Oh, I do so always love to eat
With picky little pests,
Whose parents joy to make them
The most undesirable guests!
B2 What message does the poem convey for children?
B3 Pick out two pairs of rhyming words from the poem.
Read the following passage carefully and do the given activities:
A.1) True or False:
Write the statements and state whether they are true or false:
(i) Those who choose to live well must help others.
(ii) If neighbors grow inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily improve the quality.
(iii) The farmer grew award-winning corn.
(iv) The reporter discovered that the farmer didn’t share his seed corn with his neighbors.
There once was a farmer who grew award-winning corn. Each year he entered his corn in the state fair where it won a blue ribbon. One year a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learned something interesting about how he grew it. The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his sweet corn with his neighbors. “How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbors when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?” the reporter asked.
“Why sir”, said the farmer, “didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grow inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbors grow good corn.” He is very much aware of the connectedness of life. His corn cannot improve unless his neighbor's corn also improves. So it is with our lives. Those who choose to live in peace must help their neighbors to live in peace. Those who choose to live well must help others to live well, for the value of a life is measured by the lives it touches.
The lesson for each of us is this: if we are to grow good corn, we must help our neighbors grow good corn.
A.2) Consequences:
Write the consequences:
(i) The farmer shares the corn.
(ii) The farmer doesn’t share the corn.
A.3) Antonyms:
Find out the words opposite in meaning from the passage:
(i) superior x _______
(ii) lost x _______
(iii) improve x _______
(iv) inconstantly x _______
A.4) Language study:
(i) We must help our neighbors. (Replace the modal auxiliary showing advice).
(ii) The wind picks up pollen from ripening corn and swirls it field to field. (Use “not only…….. but also” and rewrite)
A.5) Personal Response:
What do you learn from the story? Suggest a suitable title.
Read the text below and summarise it.
The Great Desert Where Hippos Once Wallowed
The Sahara sets a standard for dry land. It’s the world’s largest desert. Relative humidity can drop into the low single digits. There are places where it rains only about once a century. There are people who reach the end of their lives without ever seeing water come from the sky.
Yet beneath the Sahara are vast aquifers of fresh water, enough liquid to fill a small sea. It is fossil water, a treasure laid down in prehistoric times, some of it possibly a million years old. Just 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was a much different place.
It was green. Prehistoric rock art in the Sahara shows something surprising: hippopotamuses, which need year-round water.
“We don’t have much evidence of a tropical paradise out there, but we had something perfectly liveable,” says Jennifer Smith, a geologist at Washington University in St Louis.
The green Sahara was the product of the migration of the paleo-monsoon. In the same way that ice ages come and go, so too do monsoons migrate north and south. The dynamics of earth’s motion are responsible. The tilt of the earth’s axis varies in a regular cycle — sometimes the planet is more tilted towards the sun, sometimes less so. The axis also wobbles like a spinning top. The date of the earth’s perihelion — its closest approach to the sun — varies in cycle as well.
At times when the Northern Hemisphere tilts sharply towards the sun and the planet makes its closest approach, the increased blast of sunlight during the north’s summer months can cause the African monsoon (which currently occurs between the Equator and roughly 17°N latitude) to shift to the north as it did 10,000 years ago, inundating North Africa.
Around 5,000 years ago the monsoon shifted dramatically southward again. The prehistoric inhabitants of the Sahara discovered that their relatively green surroundings were undergoing something worse than a drought (and perhaps they migrated towards the Nile Valley, where Egyptian culture began to flourish at around the same time).
“We’re learning, and only in recent years, that some climate changes in the past have been as rapid as anything underway today,” says Robert Giegengack, a University of Pennsylvania geologist.
As the land dried out and vegetation decreased, the soil lost its ability to hold water when it did rain. Fewer clouds formed from evaporation. When it rained, the water washed away and evaporated quickly. There was a kind of runaway drying effect. By 4,000 years ago the Sahara had become what it is today.
No one knows how human-driven climate change may alter the Sahara in the future. It’s something scientists can ponder while sipping bottled fossil water pumped from underground.
“It’s the best water in Egypt,” Giegengack said — clean, refreshing mineral water. If you want to drink something good, try the ancient buried treasure of the Sahara.
Staff Writer, Washington Post
This play, written in the 1950s, is a humorous and satirical depiction of the status of the mother in the family.
Do you think it caricatures these issues or do you think that the problems it raises are genuine? How does the play resolve the issues? Do you agree with the resolution?
Fill in the gap, choosing a word from the bracket to make an appropriate comparison.
(tall / quiet / humble / merry / busy / slippery / fast / sly / slow / big)
as ______ as an elephant
Wash your handkerchief clean. Hang it with a peg to dry in the wind. Watch how it flutters.
List the various people and places mentioned in the passage. The places Milo visits and the people he meets have unusual names. Write the meanings of those names.
Try to write interesting time tables for imaginary people or creatures.
Read the word. Write the words that combine to make it.
springtime
Find words from the passage which mean the same as the following.
- a malevolent desire for revenge (para 1)
- tactful (para 2)
- despise (para 3)
