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Precis and Composition Examination 1976

Time allowed: 3 hours
Maximum marks: 100

Question No 1 1. Make a précis of the following extracts:

The present-day industrial establishment is a great distance removed from that of the last century or even of twenty-five years ago. This improvement has been the result of a variety of forces-government standards and factory inspection: general technological and architectural advance by substituting machine power for heavy or repetitive manual, labor, the need to compete for a labor force: and union intervention to improve working conditions in addition to wages and hours.

However, except where the improvement contributed to increased productivity, the effort to make work more pleasant has bad to support a large burden of proof. it was permissible to seek the elimination of hazardous, unsanitary, unhealthful, or other wise objectionable conditions of work. The speed up might be resisted-to a point. But the test was not what was agreeable but what was unhealthful or, at a minimum, excessively fatiguing. The trend toward increased leisure is not reprehensible, but we resist vigorously the notion that a man should work less hard on the job. Here older attitudes are involved. We are gravely suspicious of any tendency to expand less than the maximum effort, for as has long been a prime economic virtue.

In strict logic there is as much to be said for making work pleasant agreeable as for shortening hours. On the whole it is probably as important for a wage-earner to have pleasant working conditions as a pleasant home. To a degree, he can escape the latter but not the former—though no doubt the line between an agreeable tempo and what is flagrant feather-bedding is difficult to. Draw. Moreover it is a commonplace of the industrial scene that the dreariest and most burdensome tasks, requiring as they do a minimum of thought and skill frequently have the largest number of takers. The solution to this problem lies, as we shall see presently, in driving up the supply of crude manpower at the bottom of the ladder. Nonetheless the basic point remains, the case for more leisure is not stronger on purely primacy grounds than the case for making labor-time itself more agreeable. The test, it is worth repeating, is not the effect on productivity it is not seriously argued that the shorter work week increases productivity- that men produce more in fewer hours than they would in more. Rather it is wither fewer hours are always to be prefers to more but pleasant ones.

Question No 2 a) Write a comment on the major idea of the following poem in about 50 words :( 10 marks)
b) Also write a short note on the language the poet has used in the poem. (10 marks)
                                                                                                                                                                                    If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long.
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song, -
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we are appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.
If we could find our happiness entirely
Ira somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering lire alarms
But, as ii is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of love entirely.
And if the world were black or white entirely.
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of trigger fish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

Question No 3 a) Use Faye of the following pairs of words in your own sentences so as to bring out the difference in their meaning:
Par, at a par, compliment, complement, Complacent, complaisant. State, government, eminent, prominent, below, beneath, portly, comely, set up, set upon, shall, will, sink, drown.   (10 marks)
                                                                                                                                                                                                          b) Use the following words, expressions and idioms in your own sentences so as to being out their meaning: Rudge along, point-blank, in the doldrums, dole out, at cross purposes, check by jowl, succinctly, hilarious detract from, plain sailing.(10 marks)

Question No 4 Bring out in about 200 words the achievements of a great scientist r writer of the twentieth century. OR
Write a letter to the editor of a newspaper commenting on the achievements of a political hero of the modern times. (20 marks)

Question No 5 briefly discuss the role that Pakistan is playing vis-a-vis the Third World today. OR
Write about 200-300 words on the value of sports and game in an educational System, with particular reference to Pakistan.