Scribd
Upload
7 views4 pages

IGCSE/ X /literature in English/2024-25 of

The document is a practice paper for the Half Yearly Examination in Literature in English for Class X at The Shriram Millennium School, Noida. It includes instructions for answering questions from poetry and prose sections, with specific questions related to poems by Anne Stevenson and Judith Wright, as well as prose excerpts from Stories of Ourselves. The total marks for the examination are 50, and students are required to answer one question from each section.

Uploaded by

b.z.
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
7 views4 pages

IGCSE/ X /literature in English/2024-25 of

The document is a practice paper for the Half Yearly Examination in Literature in English for Class X at The Shriram Millennium School, Noida. It includes instructions for answering questions from poetry and prose sections, with specific questions related to poems by Anne Stevenson and Judith Wright, as well as prose excerpts from Stories of Ourselves. The total marks for the examination are 50, and students are required to answer one question from each section.

Uploaded by

b.z.
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 4

The Shriram Millennium School, Noida

Half Yearly Examination (PRACTICE PAPER)


Subject: Literature in English (0475/12)
Class: X
Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
Max. Marks: 50
Name ______________________________ Roll no. _________

FIRST READ THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY

• Answer two questions in total:


Section A: answer one question.
Section B: answer one question.
• The number of marks is given in the brackets [ ] at the end of each question or part of a question.
• The total number of marks for this Question Paper is 50.
• All questions are worth equal marks.
• The extract from the prose section will be marked in the class

IGCSE/ X /Literature in English/2024-25 Page 1 of 4


SECTION A: POETRY

Answer one question from this section.

SONGS OF OURSELVES VOLUME 1: from Part 4

Remember to support your ideas with details from the writing.

Either 1. Read this poem, and then answer the question that follows it:

The Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument

The spirit is too blunt an instrument


to have made this baby.
Nothing so unskilful as human passions
could have managed the intricate
exacting particulars: the tiny
blind bones with their manipulating tendons,
the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient
fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae,
the chain of the difficult spine.

Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent


fingernails, the shell-like complexity
of the ear, with its firm involutions
concentric in miniature to minute
ossicles. Imagine the
infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections
of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments
through which the completed body
already answers to the brain.

Then name any passion or sentiment


possessed of the simplest accuracy.
No, no desire or affection could have done
with practice what habit
has done perfectly, indifferently,
through the body's ignorant precision.
It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent
love and despair and anxiety
and their pain.
(Anne Stevenson)

Explore the ways in which Stevenson memorably conveys the speaker’s thoughts and feelings in The
Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument. [25]

IGCSE/ X /Literature in English/2024-25 Page 2 of 4


Or 2. How does Wright strikingly explore ideas of female agency and artistic expression?
[25]

Request To a Year

If the year is meditating a suitable gift,


I should like it to be the attitude
of my great- great- grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,

who having eight children


and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland

and from a difficult distance viewed


her second son, balanced on a small ice flow,
drift down the current toward a waterfall
that struck rock bottom eighty feet below,

while her second daughter, impeded,


no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way).

Nothing, it was evident, could be done;


And with the artist's isolating eye
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by.

Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned,


Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.

(Judith Wright)

IGCSE/ X /Literature in English/2024-25 Page 3 of 4


SECTION B: PROSE
Answer one question from this section.

from Stories of Ourselves Volume 2

Remember to support your ideas with details from the writing.

Either 3. How does Rossetti make Nick such a memorable character? [25]

Or 4. How does Schreiner make this such a significant moment in the story? [25]

IGCSE/ X /Literature in English/2024-25 Page 4 of 4

You might also like