FEDERAL PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION COMPETITIVE EXAMINATION FOR RECRUITMENT TO POSTS IN BPS-17 UNDER THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, 1995 ENGLISH (Précis and Composition)
Time allowed: 3 hours Maximum marks: 100
Q1. Make a Précis of the following passage and suggest a suitable title:
When you see a cockroach or a bed-hug your first reaction is one of disgust and that is immediately, followed by a desire to exterminate the offensive creature. Later, in the garden, you see a butterfly or a dragonfly, and you are filled with admiration at its beauty and grace. Man’s feelings towards insects are ambivalent. He realizes that some of them for example, flies and cockroaches arc threats to health. Mosquitoes and tsetse flies have in the past sapped the vitality of entire tribes or nations. Other insects are destructive and cause enormous losses. Such arc locusts, which can wipe out whole areas of crops in minutes; and termites, whose often insidious ravages, unless checked at an early stage, can end in the destructing of entire rows of houses.
Yet men’s ways of living may undergo radical changes if certain species of insects were to become extinct. Bees, for example, pollinate the flowers of many plants which are food sources. In the past, honey was the only sweetening agent known to man in some remote parts of the world. Ants, although they bite and contaminate man’s food are useful scavengers which consume waste material that would otherwise pollute the environment. Entomologists who have studied insect fossils believe them to have inhabited the earth for nearly 400 million years. Insects live in large numbers almost everywhere in the world, from the hottest deserts and the deepest caves to the peaks of-high mountains and even the snows of the polar caps.
Some insect communities are complex in organizations, prompting men to believe that they possess an ordered intelligence. But such organized behaviour is clearly not due to developed brains. If we have to compare them to humans, bee and ant groups behave like extreme totalitarian societies. Each bee or ant seems to have a determined role to play instinctively and does so without deviation. The word “instinct” is often applied to insect behaviour. But some insect behaviour appears so clear that one tends to think that some sort of intelligence is at work. For example, the worker bee, upon relating to the hive after having found a new source of nectar, communicates his discovery by a kind of dance which tells other bees the direction and distance away of the nectar.
Q2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow it. Use your own English as much as possible -otherwise, you will not score high marks:
A political community may be viewed as a group of people living together under a common regime, with a common set of authorities to make important decisions for the group as a whole. To the extent that the regime is “legitimate,” we would further specify that the people have internalized a common set of rules. Given the predominantly achievement-oriented norms which seem to be a necessary concomitant of industrial society, these rules must apply equally to the entire population or Precisely those criteria (e.g. language) which are a basis for blocking individual social mobility, can become the basis for cleavage which threatens the disintegration of the political community.
Among post-tribal multilingual populations where the masses are illiterate, generally unaware of national events, and have low expectations of social and economic mobility, the problems is largely irrelevant even if such populations have a linguistically distinct elite group. In contrast, when the general population of a society is going through the early stages of social mobilization, language group conflicts seem particularly likely to occur; they may develop animosities which take on a life of their own and persist beyond the situation which gave rise to them. The degree to which this happens may be significantly affected by the type of policy which the government adopts during -the transitional period.
The likelihood that linguistic division will lead to political conflict is particularly great when the language cleavages are linked with the presence of dominant group which blocks the social mobility of members of a subordinate group, partly, at least, on the basis of language factors. Where a dominant group holds the positions of power at the head of the major bureaucracies in modern society and gives preference in recruitment to those who speak the dominant language, any submerged group has the options of assimilations, non-mobility or group-resistance. If an individual is overwhelmed numerically or psychologically by the dominant language, if his group is proportionately too small to maintain a self-contained community within the society, assimilation usually occurs. In contrast, if one is part of a numerous or geographically concentrated minority group, assimilation is more difficult and is more likely to seem unreasonable. If the group is numerous and mobilized, political resistance is likely.
a. A political community is identified as a group of people who have three things in common; What are they?
b. Why are the rules important7
c. Give another word or paraphrase for i. cleavage; ii, disintegration.
d. In the second paragraph, the authors distinguish between two types of society: What are they?
e. What problem is irrelevant to the first type?
f. What is likely to happen to the second?
g. When will language create political conflict?
h. What is assimilation and when does it occur?
i. When does group resistance occur?
j. Give the opposite of the term “dominant group” used in the text.
Q3. Using about 250 words, comment on One of the following subjects: 25
a. Conscience is the basis of justice.
b. The Industrial Society has reached its logical end.
c. Eye for eye and tooth for tooth, has gone on too long in the world.
d. In freedom lies the happiness of the individual.
e. Children have no childhood in Pakistan.
f. To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Q4. A woman is talking to her next-door neighbour about an elderly married couple she knows, and about their personalities. Using only Adjectives, complete the blanks according to the explanations she gives either before or afterwards. Vague words like “good”, etc. will not-be acceptable. Write out the passage in your answer books underlying the words you have filled in: 20
“Well, yesterday I met old Mrs. Ahmad. Lovely old lady she is, always cheerful and helpful and ever so– which is more than I can say about that husband of her’s. He is so—–, arguing and shouting and complaining all the time. And I thought my husband was —— until I saw the way he holds on to his money! Not that she worries or complains. I have never known any one so—- But he is really’ ,I mean he never thinks about her or what she wants. He’s got no feelings at all, the —— old devil! They are just so different: If you tell her about your problems, she listens and tries to understand and gives you advice, you now, very—–. And it’s only because of her that children have turned so polite and charming, such —— young people. He just gave them discipline, told them what they couldn’t do like some —– school master. Still, Mrs. Ahmad keeps smiling and happy. I don’t think I’d be that —–, married to him!”
Q5. Finish each of the following sentences in such a way that it means exactly the same as the sentence printed before it: 10
a. One of the local development authority’s responsibilities is town planning. The local development authority —
b. Pop tars are corrupted by the adulation of their fans. It’s the way their —–
c. There was little contact-between these small groups. These small groups —
d. I find funny clothes the most irritating about the modem Youth, What ——
e. He sounds as if he spent all his life abroad. He gives —
f. Apart from Muhammad Ali, every one else at the meeting was a party member. With —
g. He was driving very fast because he didn’t know the road was icy. If —
h. Whenever you are on a bus, you hear someone talking about politics. You can’t go —
i. How long is it since they went to Gilgit? When —–
j. Most of the theories use the methods of experimental science without first paying attention to play’s aesthetic quality Most of theories do not take —