Page 100 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

English - II Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University

Notes Unit 6: Comprehension from Unseen Passages

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
6.1 Solved Examples
6.2 Further Readings

Objectives
After reading this unit, students will be able to
• Evaluate their skills in reading unseen passages.
• Understand the unseen passages and answer the questions that follows.

Introduction

Comprehension of an unseen passage means a complete and thorough understanding of the passage.
The main object of comprehension is to test one’s ability to grasp the meaning of a given passage
properly and also one’s ability to answer, in one’s own words, the questions based on the passage. A
variety of questions like short answer type questions, completion of incomplete sentences, filling the
blanks with appropriate words and exercises based on vocabulary are set forth for the purpose.
Before attempting to answer the questions on a passage, it is necessary to read the passage again and
again so that a general idea of the subject of the passage becomes clear. Once the passage is clear, it is
easy to answer the questions.

6.1 Solved Examples

1. Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below in the context of
the passage.

But for the fact that only higher education, the only education worth the name, has been received by
us through the English medium, there would be no need to prove such a self-evident proposition that
the youth of a nation to remain a nation must receive all instructions, including the highest, in its
own vernacular or vernaculars. Surely, it is a self-demonstrated proposition that the youth of a nation
cannot keep or establish a living contact with the masses unless their knowledge is received through
a medium understood by the people. Who can calculate the immeasurable loss sustained by the
nation owing to thousands of its young men having been obliged to waste years in mastering a
foreign language and its idiom, of which in their daily life they have the least use and in learning
which they had to neglect their own mother tongue and their own literature? There never was a
greater superstition than that a particular language can be incapable of expansion or of expressing
abstruse or scientific ideas. A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.
Among the many evils of foreign rule, this blighting imposition of a foreign medium upon the youth
of the country will be counted by history as one of the greatest. It has sapped the energy of the nation,
it has shortened the lives of the pupils, it has estranged them from the masses, it has made education
unnecessarily expensive. If this process is still persisted in, it bids fair to rob the nation of its soul. The
sooner, therefore, educated India shakes itself free from the hypnotic spell of the foreign medium, the
better it would be for them and the people. (Gandhi in Young India, 5 July, 1928).

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