FEDERAL PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION
COMPETITIVE EXAMINATION FOR RECRUITMENT
TO POSTS IN BPS-17 UNDER THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, 1976
ENGLISH (Précis and Composition)
Time allowed: 3 hours Maximum marks: 100
- Make a precis of the following extract.
The present-day industrial establishment is a great distance removed from that of the last century or even of twenty-five years ago. This improvement has been the result of a variety of forces — government standards and factory inspection: general technological and agricultural advance by substituting machine power for heavy or repetitive manual, labour, the need to compete for a labour force: and union intervention to improve working conditions in addition to wages and Hours.
However, except where the improvement contributed to increased productivity, the effort to make more pleasant has to do support a large burden of proof. It was permissible to seek the elimination of hazardous, unsanitary, unhealthful, or otherwise objectionable conditions of work. The speedup might be resisted to a point. But the test was not what was agreeable but what was unhealthful or at minimum, excessively fatiguing. The trend toward increased leisure is not reprehensible, but we resist vigorously that notion that a man should work less hard on the job. Here older attitudes are involved. We are gravely suspicious of any tendency to expand less than the maximum effort, for this has long been a prime economic virtue.
In strict logic there is as much to be said for making work pleasant and agreeable as for shortening Hours. On the whole it is probably as important for a wage-earner to have pleasant working conditions as a pleasant home. To a degree, he can escape the latter but not the former — though not doubt the line between an agreeable tempo and what is flagrant feather-bedding is difficult to draw.
Moreover, it is a commonplace of the industrial scene that the dreariest and most burdensome tasks, require as they do a minimum of though and skill frequently have the largest number of takers. The solution to this problem lies, as we shall see presently, in driving up the supply of crude manpower at the bottom of the ladder. Nonetheless the basic paint remains, the case for more leisure is not stronger on purely prima facie grounds than the case for making labour-time itself more agreeable. The test, it is worth repeating, is not the effect on productivity — It is not seriously argued that the shorter work week increases productivity — that men produce more in fewer Hours than they would in more. Rather it is whether fewer Hours are always to be preferred to more but pleasant ones.
- (a) Write a comment on the major idea of the following poem in about 50 words.
(b) Also write a short note on the language the poet has used in the poem.
ENTIRELY
If we could get the hand of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of songs,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences ti is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we are appropriate
Even a phrase entirely
If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of love entirely
And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer when we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.
- (a) Use FIVE of the following pair of words in your own sentences so as to bring out the difference in their meaning.
(i) Par, At a par (ii) Compliment, Complement (iii) Complacent, Complaisant (iv) State, Government (v) Eminent, Prominent (vi) Below, Beneath (vii) Portly, Comely (viii) Set up, Set upon (ix) Shall, Will (x) Sink, Drown
(b) Use the following words, expressions and idioms in your own sentences so as to bring out their meaning.
(i) Trudge along (ii) Point-blank (iii) In the doldrums (iv) Dole out (v) At cross purposes (vi) Cheek by jowl (vii) Succinctly (viii) Hilarious (ix) Detract from (x) Plain-sailing
- Bring out in about 200 words in the achievements of a great scientist or writer of the twentieth century.
OR
Write a letter to the editor of a newspaper commenting on the achievements of a political hero of the modern times. -
Briefly discuss the role that Pakistan is playing vis-a-vis the Third World today.
OR
Write about 200-300 words on the value of sports and games in an educational system, with particular reference to Pakistan.