FEDERAL PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION
COMPETITIVE EXAMINATION FOR RECRUITMENT
TO POSTS IN BPS-17 UNDER THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, 1971
ENGLISH (Précis and Composition)
Time allowed: 3 hours Maximum marks: 100
- Make a precis of the following passage in about 250 words.
The essence of poetry that it deals with events which concern a large number of people and can be grasped not as immediate personal experience but as matter known largely from heresy and presented in simplified and often abstract forms. It is thus the antithesis of all poetry which deals with the special, individual activity of the self and tries to present this as specially and as individually as it can. The poet who deals with public themes may himself be affected, even deeply, by contemporary events at some point in his own being, but to see them in their breadth and depth he must rely largely on what he hears from other men and from mass instruments of communication. From the start of his impulse to write about them is different from any impulse to write about his own affairs. It may be just as strong and just as compelling, but it is not of the same kind. He has to give his own version of something which millions of others may share with him, and however individual he may wish to be, he cannot avoid relying to a large extent on much that he knows only from second hand.
Fundamentally this may not matter, for after all what else did Shakespeare do: but the political poet does not construct an imaginary past; he attempts to grasp and interpret a vast present. Between him and his subject there is a gap which can never completely cross, and all his attempts to make events part of himself must be to some extent hampered by recalcitrant elements in them, which he does not understand or cannot assimilate or find irrelevant to his creative task. In such poetry selection which is indispensable to all art, has to be made from an unusually large field of possibilities and guided by an exacting sense of what really matters and what does not. On one side he may try to include too much and lose himself in issues where he is not imaginatively at home, on the other side he may see some huge event merely from a private angle which need not mean much to others. Political poetry oscillates between these extremes, and its history in our time has been largely attempts to make the best of one or the other of them or to see what compromises can be made between them.
- Rewrite the following poem in simple prose and then comment on the differences between the poetic achievement in the poem and the literal rendering in prose made by you.
War is not a life, it is a situation,
One which may neither be ignored or accepted
A problem to be met with ambush and stratagem,
Enveloped or scattered
The enduring is not a substitute for the transient
Neither one for the other. But the abstract conception
Of private experience as its greatest intensity
Becoming universal which we call “poetry”
May be affirmed in verse. -
(a) Use the following words in at least TWO senses, either as a verb or as a noun or as an adjective or as both
(i) Clear
(ii) Face
(iii) Energy
(iv) Value
(v) Build
(b) Use the following idiomatic expressions in illustrative sentences.
(i) Carry out
(ii) Taken over
(iii) Bring about
(iv) Beat out
(v) Bear with
- “The unity of a country depends on the historical consciousness of its people of a common past, but it depends more on the acceptance by people of common value-system on which their future is based.” Discuss
OR
Suggest ways and means of removing bitterness and improving good relationship between East and West Pakistan. -
Analyse the causes of Youth Rebellion in the world today and suggest ways and means of removing those causes.
OR
“West is West and East is East
And Never the twain shall meet?
(Kipling)
Write an imaginary conversation between Kipling and a highly modernized Pakistani who has seen how modern technologically oriented Western Civilization completely changing the attitude of a modern man.