OJS Main Exam 2012 General English Question Paper is given below. These English questions were asked in the OPSC OJS Main Exam 2012. The full mark of the exam was 150 Mark and Time duration of exam was 2 Hour. If you are preparing for the Odisha Judicial Service Main Exam, then it will help you a lot.
OJS Main Exam 2012 General English Question Paper
GENERAL ENGLISH
Time : 2 hours
Full Marks : 150
The figures in the right-hand margin indicate maths.
Answer all questions.
1. Translate the following into English : 25
2. Translate the following into Oriya : 25
We are in conflict with ourselves. On the one hand, we yearn for the ideal way of life in peaceful coexistence. At the same time, we are out to destroy the earth. The pursuit of comfort at the cost of the environment is the other side of humanity that may take us all down along with our planet.
Sometimes, the ultimate test of a civilisation’s greatness comes at the time of adversity. Not a single culture or nation exists that has not been struck by natural or man-made disasters. The world’ has survived wars, natural calamities and pestilence. In most instances, what brought the nation back on its feet was the sense of community that compelled people *to help one another. We have seen that during communal flare-ups and terror attacks, when people took it upon themselves to do extraordinary acts of selflessness, offering succour and solace where needed.
3. Write a short essay in about 150 (one hundred and fifty) words on any one of the following : 50
- (a) In Praise of Idleness
- (b) Privatisation of Education
- (c) Women in Politics
- (d) Terrorism in India
- (e) Advertisements and Social Responsibility
4. Make a precis of the following passage in about 100 (one hundred) words : 25
The duty of every citizen to safeguard the health of society is most neglected today. Everyone wants to have a benign society and wants it served on a platter. At the same time, people endorse socially disruptive agendas to bolster their vested interests. We pay lip-service to values ; but we assume that values are, most often, for others to follow for our benefit. No principle is welcome when upholding it goes against our interests. We want the courts, for example, to be impartial, but we throw a tantrum when judicial impartiality goes against our calculations. We seem to have lost the ability to look beyond our noses. We are doing everything imaginable to erode the health and wholeness of our society. And we are, today, paying the price for it.
A society, not less than the individuals who comprise it, is vulnerable to ill-health. Disharmony between tt4 constituent parts is the pattern of illness in both the cases. Physical illness implies organic anarchy. The same pattern applies to macro-systems like societies and nations. When these symptoms of collective pathology are neglected over time, societies begin to degenerate and collapse into anarchy.
Our foremost need as a nation, faced with unprecedented challenges and pressures in the wake of globalisation, is to enunciate and internalise a shared vision for the country in harmony with the spirit of the Constitution. Given how integral religious plurality and cultural diversity are to the history and ethos of India, a project of religious and cultural homogenisation is sure to turn India into a Sri Lanka, ten times over. Religious minorities, numbering some 200 million, and dalits of an even larger chunk cannot be wished away or browbeaten into submission forever. There is room enough in this country for all ; or there will be room for none. That is the truth, unless the logic of history has changed for the sake of some misguided elements who happen to enjoy official patronage today. But the rest of us cannot afford to entertain any illusion on this count : precipitating social anarchy is a singular act of national subversion : it is terrorism from within, which is far more dangerous than cross-border terrorism of the worst kind.
5. Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow : 5×5 = 25
Ahimsa has been part of the Indian religious tradition for centuries : Hindu, Jain and Buddhist. It was Gandhi’s genius that transformed, what had been an individual ethic into a tool of social and political action. This he did in the course of his twenty-year long struggle against racialism in. South Africa. Since 1894, he had been pleading with the colonial regime for the removal of iniquitous curbs and disabilities from which Indian immigrants in Natal and Transvaal suffered.
He made little headway. In 1906 an exceptionally humiliating law was enacted for registration of Indians in the Transvaal ; Gandhi foulnd hi had reached a dead end. The colonial government in Pretoria, supported by the dominant European Community, was adamant ; the Government of India was indifferent, and the imperial government in London reluctant to intervene. A stage was reached in Gandhi’s agitation when something more than reasoning and persuasion were demanded. It was at this critical juncture that he stumbled upon a new technique of fighting social and political injustice. He called it satyagraha (holding on to truth). Its principles were to gradually evolve in the ensuing years ; its author was a man for whom theory was the handmaiden of action. Of one thing Gandhi had no doubt ; it was to be a method without hatred and without violence. During the next eight years he used this method with a measure of success until 1914 when he reached an agreement with the South African Government and left for India. It was as the author and sole practitioner of satyagraha that he entered the Indian political scene in 1919-20, which he was to dominate for the next three decades.
Gandhi’s ideas have quelled not only struggles against foreign domination and tyrannical rule, but also crusades against the piling up of nuclear weapons and the havoc being wrought by developed countries through wanton and wasteful use of the resources of the planet. Petra Kelly, a leader of the Green Peace Movement in Germany who was influenced by the ideas of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, denounced methods of production which depended upon a ceaseless supply of raw materials and were leading to the exhaustion of natural resources and threatening ecological devastation. Speaking almost in the Gandhian, idiom, she said, ‘We cannot solve any political problem, without also addressing spiritual ones.’
Despite these examples of non-violent struggles over the past two decades, which have highlighted the power potential of the oppressed, it must be admitted that Gandhi’s ideas and methods are still appreciated by only a small enlightened minority in the world. Gandhi himself had no illusions about their ready acceptance. He did not claim finality for his views, which he regarded within a broad ethical framework as aids for bettering the lives of his fellow men ; they could be altered if they did not work. Though he expounded his philosophy of life in hundreds of articles and letters, he never tried to build it into a system. Nevertheless, the truth is that more than sixty years after his death, his deepest concerns have become the concerns of thinking men and institutions working for a peaceful and humane world.
(i) How did Gandhi transform the Indian concept of AhLimsa ?
(ii) Explain the South African origin of the principle of Satyagraha.
(iii) What is Satyagraha ? Comment on its effectiveness.
(iv) How have Gandhi’s ideas influenced the Green Peace Movement in Germany ?
(v) What was Gandhi’s attitude to his own views and ideas ?
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