SSC English ( Paper-II English Medium) – Study Material- Part VI
Read the passage given below. Then answer the questions that follow it. 5×1 = 5 Marks
Then suddenly he heard a blare of trumpets and the band striking up ‘God save the King’. There was a lot of rush and bustle around him. He turned his attention from the ant to his friends; they were already at the edge of the footpath standing in a line.
1. Who heard the blare of trumpets?
2. Why was there a lot of rush and bustle?
3. What were his friends doing?
4. What was he doing with the ant?
5. What is ‘God save the King’?
Answers:
1. Gopal and his friends heard the blare of trumpets.
2. There was a lot of rush and bustle as the children were rushing to have look at the Viceroy.
3. His friends were at the edge of the footpath standing in a line.
4. Gopal was playing with the ant.
5. ‘God save the King’ is the National Anthem of Britain, played in India during the days when India was under British rule.
Scrambled Sentences
A small passage is taken and the sentences in it are scrambled, i.e., jumbled up. The sentences are given in an order that doesn’t convey the idea the passage is intended to convey.
First, we have to recognize the sentence that should be the first sentence of the passage-The topic sentence.
Words like-Then, now, so –help in understanding the sequence of events.
Applying logic, we should understand which sentences should follow in sequence and finally decide which would be a fit to be the concluding sentence for the passage.
A few some simple rules of grammar will also help to derive the right order.
Example: The definite article ‘the’ generally follows a sentence where an indefinite article is used. Suppose two sentences are given as follows:
1. A man was standing at the door of a church.
2. The man seemed to be waiting for someone.
We can easily say that sentence 2 should follow sentence 1 because the definite article ‘the’ used in sentence 2 easily helps us identify that it is about the same man as mentioned in sentence 1.
Example: A noun precedes a pronoun, and the noun can help identify the pronoun it has to be followed by.
1. A man was standing at the door of a church.
2. He seemed very worried.
It can be understood that the pronoun ‘he’ refers to the man in the earlier sentence.
1. A dog was being chased by a group of children.
2. They were throwing stones at the dog.
3. Suddenly it turned back and snarled at them.
In the example given above, it is easy to understand that the ‘they’ in sentence 2 refers to the children in sentence 1 and the ‘it’ in sentence 3 refers to the dog.
Look at the following example:
A) He went to his friend and asked his advice.
B) “Look after this animal properly and it will look after your property.”, he said.
C) One day a man saw a thief near his house.
D) He gave the man his dog.
E) He thought that he was not safe there.
Clearly, the passage has to start with (C).
When the man saw a thief,
He panicked,
and took his friend’s advice.
The friend gave him a dog.
The friend advised that it would take care of his property if he looked after it.
The order has to be-C, E, A, D, B.
Now look at this example:
A. They had parked their car on Einbahnstrasse.
B. That’s when they got a lesson in German, Einbahnstrasse, he told them, means ‘one-way street’.
C. Two Englishmen were lost in Cologne, Germany.
D. But when they went to look for it, it seemed like every street had the same name.
E. They stopped a police officer and asked for help.
We can understand that the passage has to start with (C).
We can also find that the tenses of the sentences help us in identifying the order. Here the sentence (A) is in past perfect tense, which indicates that it happened before the other sentences which are in simple past tense. After understanding that (C) is the topic sentence, we can understand that the sequence of events is as follows:
Earlier, they parked their car and noted a word on a notice board,
found many streets with the same name,
took the help of a policeman and
then found the reason for their confusion!
So, the order is-C, A, D, E, B.