PUC II English

Two short verse extracts from William Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Romeo sees Juliet at Lord Capulet's feast and is overwhelmed by her beauty; Juliet waits impatiently for night to bring Romeo to her. Both speeches express the intensity of young love through vivid images of light shining against darkness.

Leo Tolstoy's satirical story, adapted from Guy de Maupassant, about the tiny kingdom of Monaco. A murderer is sentenced to death, but the Prince finds execution, imprisonment and even a guard too expensive, and finally pays the criminal a pension to go away. The story mocks a justice system ruled by money.

A prose poem from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. Asked to speak of children, the Prophet tells parents that children come through them but do not belong to them. Parents may give love and shelter but not their thoughts, and should be like a stable bow sending living arrows swift and far into the future.

Vandana Shiva's essay on how the forests of the Himalaya and the women of the Chipko movement taught her ecology. It moves from Chipko to biodiversity farming at Navdanya, the rights of nature, the Earth University and Tagore's idea that the forest teaches unity in diversity, enoughness and freedom.

A one-act comedy by the Spanish brothers Serafin and Joaquin Alvarez Quintero. Two old strangers quarrel over a park bench in Madrid, then discover they were lovers fifty years ago. Each recognises the other but hides it behind a romantic invented story, and they part as friends, promising to meet again on the next sunny morning.

A love poem by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. The speaker asks the woman he loves to imagine herself old, reading his poems by the fire. She will remember that many loved her beauty, but one man loved her pilgrim soul and the sorrows of her changing face, and she will murmur sadly how Love fled and hid among the stars.

P. Lankesh's Kannada story, translated by H.S. Raghavendra Rao. An old gardener tells his employer's wife the story of Tammanna and Basavaiah, whose healthy competition turned into a rivalry that gave their lives meaning and finally destroyed them, and then reveals that he himself is Tammanna.

A poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid. A child's foot dreams of being a butterfly or an apple, but life's hardships imprison it in a shoe, where it grows hard, misshapen and tired, walking without rest until death. The foot stands for every ordinary person whose dreams are crushed but who keeps going.

An interview with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges by Roberto Alifano. Borges speaks of his mother, of blindness as raw material for art, of the book as something beyond its author's intention, of poetry as an aesthetic act, and of why the book, an extension of imagination and memory, will never disappear.

A short lyric by Kuvempu, translated from Kannada by Prof. C. Naganna. The poet declares that heaven, gods and nymphs are not in a distant world but here on earth and within human beings. The beauty of streams, sunshine, gardens, harvest and moonlight makes the earth heaven, and the poet creates heaven through his poetry.

Humorous travel writing by the Hungarian author George Mikes. In Japan he finds exquisite courtesy that replaces privacy and a complicated hierarchy of bowing; in Brazil he finds leisurely, beauty-loving people who turn into speed-mad but good-tempered drivers. The lesson laughs gently at both cultures and at the confused foreigner.

Chinua Achebe's satire on electoral corruption in a Nigerian village. Roof, the trusted campaigner of Minister Marcus Ibe, buys the elders' votes with shillings, then takes five pounds from the rival party and swears on an iyi to vote for Maduka. Torn between loyalty and greed, he tears his ballot in two. The story shows the lure of money overpowering loyalty and ethics.

P. Sainath's report on how cycling became a social movement for neo-literate rural women in Pudukkottai, Tamil Nadu. Encouraged by the Arivoli literacy movement and the district collector Sheela Rani Chunkath, over 100,000 women learnt cycling and gained mobility, income, confidence and, above all, self-respect.

Challapalli Swaroopa Rani's free-verse poem, translated by Uma Bhrugubanda, in which water becomes a witness to caste injustice, a symbol of struggle from the Mahad agitation to Karamchedu, a destroyer in drought, flood and tsunami, and finally a multinational market commodity sold as mineral water.

The first grammar chapter: how the passive voice works and how the board tests it. Covers the three steps of conversion, the full tense table, modals, imperatives, questions, two-object verbs and common errors, then gives exam-format fill-in-the-blank paragraphs drawn from the lessons, with answers.

The 2-mark expressions question: what idioms and phrasal verbs are, every expression list the course book sets (from the travelogue, The Gardener, To the Foot from its Child and Where There Is a Wheel), other expressions the board favours, and a method of grammar fit, meaning fit and elimination, with the 2025 question solved and six practice sets.

The 5-mark pronoun question: how to match pronouns and relative words in a paragraph to the nouns they refer to. Covers antecedents, personal, possessive, reflexive and relative words, the three uses of 'it', eight rules for finding the referent, the solved 2025 question and four practice paragraphs built from the lessons.

The four-mark 'rewrite as directed' question: articles, subject-verb agreement, verb forms and jumbled segments. Each type is taught with rules and signal words, all four 2025 items are solved, and the practice section gives graded exercises and full four-item sets in the exam's own shape.

The 4-mark linker question, the alternative to 'Rewrite as directed': thirteen families of linkers with examples, the confusable pairs (although/but, in spite of/although, because/so, so that/such that), and a method based on position, direction of thought and grammar fit, with the 2025 Tammanna-Basavaiah paragraph solved and six practice paragraphs.

The two-mark Q32(A): how to add a question tag and how to frame a wh-question for an underlined word. Covers polarity, repeating the auxiliary, do/does/did, pronoun subjects and sixteen special cases, then the wh-word chart and the subject / non-subject shapes, with both 2025 items solved and thirty-two practice items.

The two-mark error-correction question: rewrite each sentence with its mistakes put right. Covers irregular plurals and uncountable nouns, capital letters, every day against everyday, prepositions of time and place, verbs that take no preposition, articles, subject-verb agreement, tense and double comparatives or negatives, with both 2025 sentences solved and forty-four practice items.

The two-mark note-making question, which has no internal choice: how to read the printed box skeleton as a flow chart, which phrase of the passage belongs in which box, and the three rules of lifting, shortening and one idea per box. The 2025 chocolate question is solved box by box, the linear-note format is given as a fallback, and seven practice passages follow.

The five-mark question with no choice: turning a printed dialogue into one paragraph of reported speech. Covers the tense-backshift table, pronoun and time-word changes, the different reporting verbs for statements, questions, commands and exclamations, and the words that are dropped. The 2025 Alifano-Borges conversation is solved line by line, with five more conversations from the lessons.

The three-mark dialogue question with no choice: filling blanks that must perform a named language function. Covers twenty-two functions with informal and formal expressions, and the four clues that fix every answer - the bracketed situation, the function named, the line before and, above all, the line after. The 2025 park dialogue is solved with alternatives, followed by six practice dialogues.

The nine-mark unseen passage or poem: how to read the questions first, find the sentence that holds each answer and write it in one line. Both 2025 options are solved question by question, the idiom and antonym items that carry two of the nine marks get their own lists, and four unseen texts follow with full answers.

The five-mark job application, the alternative to the speech: the full format from the sender's address to the enclosure line, what belongs in each of the three paragraphs, and the rule that the name and address are always written XXXX and YYYY. The 2025 Office Assistant advertisement is answered in full, with four more model letters and a bio-data.

The five-mark speech, the alternative to the letter of application: the four-part format, how to treat the printed hints as the plan and give each one a sentence or two in order, and the language that makes a speech sound spoken. The 2025 social-media question is answered in full, with four more model speeches and one to write unaided.