Courtesy: SCERT UPDATED QUESTION BANK
Extract No. 06
Page No. 70 [Line, “The other …………………collapsing”]
Read
the extract and do all the activities that follow:
The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents’ inheritance, or my own. Besides, even those who don’t move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you’re travelling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room-through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing.
All of us feel this
from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we
ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new
friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are
fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir
John Mandeville’s colourful 14th century accounts of a Far East he’d never
visited, it’s an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join
other borders in collapsing.
A1. Summarise : (02)
Find out two most appropriate sentences that summarise the extract.
a) The world is moving very quickly.
b) The extract deals with the fact how travelling seems to be fruitful to all of us.
c) The drawbacks of travelling are mentioned in the extract.
d) The writer believes that there is discrimination in the world in terms of Nationality.
A2. Find out : (02)
Write down four sentences with the
help of the text conveying the fact that travelling brings together the various
cultures of the different parts of the world.
Walk just six blocks, in queens or
Berkeley and you are travelling through several cultures in as many minutes,
get into a cab outside the white House, and you are often in a piece of Addis
Ababa.
Learning about home and learning about
a foreign world can be one and the same thing.
A3. Give reasons : (02)
The writer feels that he is a traveller by birth because………
The writer was born as the son of
Indian parents. He was born in England. He shifted to America at the age of
7.He could not call himself as Indian ,an American or an Englishman. He considered himself as a traveller.
A4. Personal Response : (02)
Do you think that the writer believed
in Universal brotherhood. Justify your answer with suitable examples.
(This is a Practice Activity for students.)
A5. Language study : (02)
a) They can travel around the world. (Use "be able to" and rewrite)
They are able to travel around the
world.
b) The world seems increasing in flux. (Frame
a Rhetorical question)
Doesn’t the world seem increasing in
flux ?
A6. Vocabulary : (02)
Find out examples of compound words from the extract.
Many-tongued,
CD-ROM,cyberspace,
air-conditioned etc.
A6. Vocabulary : (02)
Find out words from the extract which
mean the following:
a) Mixed descent = Mongrel
b) Legacy = inheritance
c) Misleading = deceptive
d) Ideas = Notions
