Practice

Passage 1: The Cycling Movement

In the district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, cycling became a social movement. In eighteen months more than one lakh rural women, most of them newly literate, learnt to ride a bicycle. The idea came from the district collector, who saw that a woman who could not travel could not be free. She persuaded the banks to give small loans so that the women could buy cycles, and the literacy movement ran the training camps. When ladies' cycles ran short, the women rode gents' cycles instead. On International Women's Day in 1992, more than fifteen hundred of them rode through the town with flags on their handlebars. A cycle dealer said his sales had gone up by more than three hundred and fifty per cent in a single year. For the women, the gain was not only money. One of them said she hired a cycle every evening simply to feel independent.

Questions and answers

Passage 2: Water

Water covers nearly three-fourths of the earth, and yet less than one per cent of it can be drunk. In many villages it is the women who fetch it, walking several kilometres with heavy pots on their heads. When a well runs dry, girls are the first to be kept away from school, because someone must walk further for the water. Scarcity also brings disease, for families then use whatever water they can find. Governments have tried to help by digging borewells, but a borewell that is not maintained soon fails. Experts say the cheapest answer is the oldest one: catch the rain where it falls. A village that harvests its rainwater leaves no stone unturned to protect its tanks and ponds, and in a few years its wells begin to fill again.

Questions and answers

Passage 3: Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet and critic, and is often called the father of modern African writing. He was born in 1930 and grew up between two worlds, the Igbo traditions of his village and the English education of the mission school. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, was published in 1958 and has since been translated into more than fifty languages. Achebe said he wrote it because the Africa he met in English novels was not the Africa he knew. His later books, among them Arrow of God and A Man of the People, look at what politics did to a newly independent country. He taught in universities in Nigeria and the United States, and he kept writing until his death in 2013. His style is plain, but it carries the proverbs and folk stories of the Igbo, which he once called the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

Questions and answers

*(Question (i) is worth a second look: an antonym must match the sense used in the passage. Here *plain* means simple in style, so the opposite is ornate, not patterned or ugly.)*

Poem: A Village Well

The women rise before the sun, their empty pots against the hip, and walk four miles along the ridge to where the last well has not dried.

They do not speak of thirst. They speak of weddings, prices, someone's son, and balance on their steady heads the weight the village cannot lift.

The children wait beside the door. The school bell rings across the field, and one girl, hearing it, looks back, then turns and follows with her pot.

Questions and answers

What the poem asks of you. Even the one slightly figurative line, the weight the village cannot lift, is answered by saying what it stands for in the poem itself, the water. You are not asked whether the poem is sad, or what the poet feels about the girl; keep to what the lines say.

Vocabulary Drill

[Exam Tip] — Work through the nine questions in the order printed. They follow the order of the text, so each answer is a little further down the page than the last. If you find yourself searching backwards, you have probably skipped a question.