CBSE Class 12 English Core Question Paper 2007 (1)

CBSE Class 12 English Core Question Paper 2007 (1). Students can download the last year question papers using the link below. Free download of examination question papers with solutions.Last 10 year question papers should be practised to get better marks in examinations.

1. Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow :

1. Millions of men and women, thousands of leaders, a succession of social, religious and political movements - it is impossible to draw up a full list of the makers of India even on a limited 1000-year basis. “All that can be attempted here is to present a few representative names, some of them inspirational still. All of them remind us of the course we have traversed, and how we have come to where we are. Let us make a start with the best ever Indian.

2. Implied in Toynbee’s assessment was the deduction that Gandhi was not just an Indian phenomenon. No doubt India derived unequalled benefit from his leadership. By fitting the freedom struggle into the framework of a philosophy of justice and fairness, he achieved for India a stature that was denied to other countries, including China, that won independence around the same time. That the stature was quickly lost by the governments that came to power on the labours of Gandhi is a different matter. The decline of India did not amount to any repudiation of Gandhi. Indeed, it was seen as a consequence of the betrayal of Gandhi by his supposed followers.

3. The true measure of his impact on history is that it is not dependent on the successful completion of his mission in India. The others who soldiered on with him in the epic war of independence - Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel included - will be remembered for what they did in India and for India; they were essentially Indian personalities.So,for that matter, was Jinnah whose life’s work boiled down to the creation of a state on what rapidly proved to be a dubious premise.

4. Gandhi soared above them all because he dealt essentially with ideas and theories relevant to all mankind. Like Buddhism,Gandhism lost ground in the land out of which it evolved.But,like Buddhism, it has been embraced by distant peoples who see in its tenets the promise of a meaningful life. It was as though Gandhi’s involvement with India was merely incidental to his larger involvement with what he persistently called Truth. Raja Rao put it pithily when he wrote: “For Gandhi India was only the symbol of a universal principle.All countries were, for Gandhi, India.” When we look at him in this perspective, we realise that it was his universality,the transcendent quality of his life and thought, that made Gandhi Gandhi.

5. He will be greater than not just Stalin and Hitler - two characters who are rather too one-dimensional to be contrasted with the vastness that was Gandhi. Gandhi personifies the greatness of the time-honoured propo sition that Love is superior to Hatred, that Good is better than Evil. Great personages of history who based their “greatness” on Hatred and Evil, on conquests and oppression, have all gone under. The Byzantines and the Ottomans, the Mongols and the Mughals, the British and the Spanish once strode the earth as if they owned it. Today only Britain and Spain survive, and that as second-class entities confined to Europe. Alexander, the first king in history to be called “The Great,” died a lonely death as a disillusioned and defeated man at the incredible age of 33. Nothing of his greatness remains today even in his native Macedonia which is now but an appendage to the horrible tragedy of Yugoslavia.

6 Greatness built on murder and acquisition passes. Greatness rising out of compassion and service abides. The Buddha abides. Christ abides. The great unknown thinkers of the Upanishads abide. Gandhi carried that tradition through to our times. He might have been let down by the “Gandhians” who, armed with political power, have turned India into a mess. That too is parallel to the way quarrelling Buddhists, exploitative Christians and lately-intolerant Hindus have been letting down their preceptors. But their smallness does not detract from the true greatness of the sages who opened the path of enlightenment for them and for the world. They abide because they gave without taking.They were not men of arms. They were men of ideas. Parithranaya sadhunam,they appear from age to age. They appear to teach us that the world can be conquered, not with force, but with ideas. It was the lesson of this Millennium too - taught by the Man of the Millennium.

(a) (i) What did Gandhi achieve through his philosophy of justice and fairness ? 

(ii) How will Jawahar Lal Nehru and Sardar Patel be remembered ? 

(iii) According to Raja Rao, what did Gandhi represent ? 

(iv) The author talks of two types of greatness. Which one is much appreciated and admired ? 

(v) What was the lesson of this millennium ? 

(b) Pick out one word from the passage that means the same as : 

(i) continuous decrease/fall (para 2)

(ii) strong effect (para 3)

(iii) rose quickly (para 4)

Please click the link below to download pdf file of CBSE Class 12 English Core Question Paper 2007 (1).