CBSE Class 12 English Core Sample Paper 2014 Solved Set B

Section A

Reading

Q. 1. Read the passage given below and then answer the questions which follow:

1 In spite of all the honours that we heaped upon him, Pasteur, as has been said,remained simple at heart. Perhaps the imagery of his boyhood days, when he drew the familiar scenes of his birthplace, and the longing to be a great artist, never wholly left him. In truth he did become a great artist, though after his sixteenth year he abandoned the brush forever. Like every artist of worth, he put his whole soul and energy into his work, and it was this very energy that in the end wore him out. For him, each sufferer was something more than just a case that was to be cured. He looked upon the fight against hydrophobia as a battle, and he was absorbed in his determination to win. The sight of injured children, particularly, moved him to an indescribable extent. He suffered with his patients, and yet he would not deny himself a share in that suffering. His greatest grief was when sheer physical exhaustion made him give up his active work. He retired to the estate at Villeneuve Etang, where he had his kennels for the study of rabies, and there he passed his last summer, as his great biographer, Vallery Radot, has said, “practicing the Gospel virtues.”

2 “He revered the faith of his fathers, “says the same writer, “and wished without ostentation or mystery to receive its aid during his last period.”

3 The attitude of this man to the science he had done so much to perfect can be best summed up in a sentence that he is reputed once to have uttered, concerning the materialism of many of his contemporaries in similar branches of learning to his own: “The more I contemplate the mysteries of Nature, the more my faith becomes like that of a peasant.”

4 But even then in retirement he loved to see his former pupils, and it was then he would reiterate his life principles: “Work, “he would say, “never cease to work.” So well had he kept this precept that he began rapidly to sink from exhaustion.

5 Finally on September 27, 1895, when someone leant over his bed to offer him a cup of milk, he said sadly: “I cannot, “and with a look of perfect resignation and peace, seemed to fall asleep. He never again opened his eyes to the cares and sufferings of a world, which he had done so much to relieve and to conquer. He was within three months of his seventy-third birthday.

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