English II End Term: 3 September 2023, Set QPF1-S2 (May 2023 term)

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.
I don’t think it’s a ___________ that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.
Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

Choose the correct statements from the following.

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.
I don’t think it’s a ___________ that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.
Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

Choose the antonym for the bolded word ‘indebted’.

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.
I don’t think it’s a ___________ that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.
Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

Choose an appropriate replacement for the word ‘triumphal.’

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.
I don’t think it’s a ___________ that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.
Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

What is unique about the novel Ulysses?

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.
I don’t think it’s a ___________ that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.
Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

Choose an appropriate word to fill the blank in the passage.

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.
I don’t think it’s a ___________ that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.
Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

Choose the correct statements from the following.

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.
I don’t think it’s a ___________ that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.
Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

Choose an appropriate replacement for the word ‘upheaval’.

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.
I don’t think it’s a ___________ that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.
Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

Choose the antonym for the bolded word ‘innovative.’

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.
I don’t think it’s a ___________ that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.
Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

Choose an appropriate word that means the opposite of the word ‘superseding’.

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.
I don’t think it’s a ___________ that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.
Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

The writer is ___________ .

Listen to the audio and answer the given subquestions:

885_640653_0_1984128_hs1002etqe2s1a2.mp3

Who is a critic?

Listen to the audio and answer the given subquestions:

885_640653_0_1984128_hs1002etqe2s1a2.mp3

Which among the following is a possible antonym of the word 'idiot' ?

Listen to the audio and answer the given subquestions:

885_640653_0_1984128_hs1002etqe2s1a2.mp3

What is the meaning of 'play the fool' ?

Listen to the audio and answer the given subquestions:

885_640653_0_1984128_hs1002etqe2s1a2.mp3

What is the meaning of 'boob tube' ?

Listen to the audio and answer the given subquestions:

885_640653_0_1984128_hs1002etqe2s1a2.mp3

What is the meaning of 'screwed-up' ?

Listen to the audio and answer the given subquestions:

885_640653_0_1984128_hs1002etqe2s1a2.mp3

What is the meaning of the word 'intelligentsia'?

Listen to the audio and answer the given subquestions:

885_640653_0_1984128_hs1002etqe2s1a2.mp3

As per the audio, who was interviewing Allen Ginsberg?

Listen to the audio and answer the given subquestions:

885_640653_0_1984128_hs1002etqe2s1a2.mp3

Which among the following is a possible antonym of the word 'unreliable'?

Listen to the audio and answer the given subquestions:

885_640653_0_1984128_hs1002etqe2s1a2.mp3

As per the audio, what was the name of the interview programme conducted by William F Buckley?

Listen to the audio and answer the given subquestions:

885_640653_0_1984128_hs1002etqe2s1a2.mp3

Which among the following is the song that Allen Ginsberg sang in the interview?

Read the following exchange between an interviewer and an interviewee and answer the given subquestions:
A: Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to interview for this position.
B: Hello, have a seat. I'm Mani Sharma. I am assuming you found your way here with no trouble? A: Actually, I am very familiar with the area so there was absolutely no problem.
B: I am curious as to why you want to leave your current employer.
A: I am interested in switching fields.
B: Do you feel that you are exceptionally good at anything in particular?
A: I am good at pulling together teams of people to accomplish a task.
B: What are you not good at?
A: I am impatient with myself at times and am hard on myself.
B: We appreciate hearing that about you!

Select true or false for the following statement.
The conversation between A and B is informal in nature.

Read the following exchange between an interviewer and an interviewee and answer the given subquestions:
A: Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to interview for this position.
B: Hello, have a seat. I'm Mani Sharma. I am assuming you found your way here with no trouble? A: Actually, I am very familiar with the area so there was absolutely no problem.
B: I am curious as to why you want to leave your current employer.
A: I am interested in switching fields.
B: Do you feel that you are exceptionally good at anything in particular?
A: I am good at pulling together teams of people to accomplish a task.
B: What are you not good at?
A: I am impatient with myself at times and am hard on myself.
B: We appreciate hearing that about you!

Select the correct option.
Why did the interviewee want to leave his current employer?

Read the following exchange between an interviewer and an interviewee and answer the given subquestions:
A: Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to interview for this position.
B: Hello, have a seat. I'm Mani Sharma. I am assuming you found your way here with no trouble? A: Actually, I am very familiar with the area so there was absolutely no problem.
B: I am curious as to why you want to leave your current employer.
A: I am interested in switching fields.
B: Do you feel that you are exceptionally good at anything in particular?
A: I am good at pulling together teams of people to accomplish a task.
B: What are you not good at?
A: I am impatient with myself at times and am hard on myself.
B: We appreciate hearing that about you!

Fill in the blank.
During the interview, the interviewee highlights ____________ as his good quality.

Read the following exchange between an interviewer and an interviewee and answer the given subquestions:
A: Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to interview for this position.
B: Hello, have a seat. I'm Mani Sharma. I am assuming you found your way here with no trouble? A: Actually, I am very familiar with the area so there was absolutely no problem.
B: I am curious as to why you want to leave your current employer.
A: I am interested in switching fields.
B: Do you feel that you are exceptionally good at anything in particular?
A: I am good at pulling together teams of people to accomplish a task.
B: What are you not good at?
A: I am impatient with myself at times and am hard on myself.
B: We appreciate hearing that about you!

Choose the correct option.
Identify the synonym of the word “impatient”

Read the following exchange between an interviewer and an interviewee and answer the given subquestions:
A: Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to interview for this position.
B: Hello, have a seat. I'm Mani Sharma. I am assuming you found your way here with no trouble? A: Actually, I am very familiar with the area so there was absolutely no problem.
B: I am curious as to why you want to leave your current employer.
A: I am interested in switching fields.
B: Do you feel that you are exceptionally good at anything in particular?
A: I am good at pulling together teams of people to accomplish a task.
B: What are you not good at?
A: I am impatient with myself at times and am hard on myself.
B: We appreciate hearing that about you!

Select true/false for the following statement.
The interviewee was familiar with the area so he could easily get to the location for giving the interview.

Fill in the blanks with correct expressions of numbers/values/quantity and answer the given subquestions
A survey was conducted to know about students’ favorite subjects around the world. Mathematics was the (1)____________ popular subject overall, selected by 38% of respondents worldwide and by 37% of respondents included in this analysis. The popularity of Mathematics persists amongst respondents at the country level, with (2)____________ 11% of included respondents listing it as a favorite in each of the countries in the chart. English Language was the second most popular choice with 37% worldwide and 31% of included respondents selecting it as a favorite. The popularity of the English Language differs by country, however, with the (3)___________ proportion, 6%, in the USA and the(4)___________ , 22%, in Indonesia. Mathematics and English Language were also the two (5)____________ studied subjects among respondents.

Choose the correct answer for blank (1).

Fill in the blanks with correct expressions of numbers/values/quantity and answer the given subquestions
A survey was conducted to know about students’ favorite subjects around the world. Mathematics was the (1)____________ popular subject overall, selected by 38% of respondents worldwide and by 37% of respondents included in this analysis. The popularity of Mathematics persists amongst respondents at the country level, with (2)____________ 11% of included respondents listing it as a favorite in each of the countries in the chart. English Language was the second most popular choice with 37% worldwide and 31% of included respondents selecting it as a favorite. The popularity of the English Language differs by country, however, with the (3)___________ proportion, 6%, in the USA and the(4)___________ , 22%, in Indonesia. Mathematics and English Language were also the two (5)____________ studied subjects among respondents.

Choose the correct answer for blank (2).

Fill in the blanks with correct expressions of numbers/values/quantity and answer the given subquestions
A survey was conducted to know about students’ favorite subjects around the world. Mathematics was the (1)____________ popular subject overall, selected by 38% of respondents worldwide and by 37% of respondents included in this analysis. The popularity of Mathematics persists amongst respondents at the country level, with (2)____________ 11% of included respondents listing it as a favorite in each of the countries in the chart. English Language was the second most popular choice with 37% worldwide and 31% of included respondents selecting it as a favorite. The popularity of the English Language differs by country, however, with the (3)___________ proportion, 6%, in the USA and the(4)___________ , 22%, in Indonesia. Mathematics and English Language were also the two (5)____________ studied subjects among respondents.

Choose the correct answer for blank (3)

Fill in the blanks with correct expressions of numbers/values/quantity and answer the given subquestions
A survey was conducted to know about students’ favorite subjects around the world. Mathematics was the (1)____________ popular subject overall, selected by 38% of respondents worldwide and by 37% of respondents included in this analysis. The popularity of Mathematics persists amongst respondents at the country level, with (2)____________ 11% of included respondents listing it as a favorite in each of the countries in the chart. English Language was the second most popular choice with 37% worldwide and 31% of included respondents selecting it as a favorite. The popularity of the English Language differs by country, however, with the (3)___________ proportion, 6%, in the USA and the(4)___________ , 22%, in Indonesia. Mathematics and English Language were also the two (5)____________ studied subjects among respondents.

Choose the correct answer for blank (4).

Fill in the blanks with correct expressions of numbers/values/quantity and answer the given subquestions
A survey was conducted to know about students’ favorite subjects around the world. Mathematics was the (1)____________ popular subject overall, selected by 38% of respondents worldwide and by 37% of respondents included in this analysis. The popularity of Mathematics persists amongst respondents at the country level, with (2)____________ 11% of included respondents listing it as a favorite in each of the countries in the chart. English Language was the second most popular choice with 37% worldwide and 31% of included respondents selecting it as a favorite. The popularity of the English Language differs by country, however, with the (3)___________ proportion, 6%, in the USA and the(4)___________ , 22%, in Indonesia. Mathematics and English Language were also the two (5)____________ studied subjects among respondents.

Choose the correct answer for blank (5).

Identify the most appropriate sentence to use in the following social context, from the given options.
Context: At a shop, the buyer to the seller.
Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

About the working hours.

Identify the most appropriate sentence to use in the following social context, from the given options.
Context: At a shop, the buyer to the seller.
Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Returning a faulty product.

Identify the most appropriate sentence to use in the following social context, from the given options.
Context: At a shop, the buyer to the seller.
Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Declining an offer.

Identify the most appropriate sentence to use in the following social context, from the given options.
Context: At a shop, the buyer to the seller.
Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Informing the manager of spelling mistakes in the name board.

Identify the most appropriate sentence to use in the following social context, from the given options.
Context: At a shop, the buyer to the seller.
Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

When requesting assistance with finding a particular item.

Fill in the blanks with the correct discourse markers.
(1)___________ , the sun is a huge ball of gases. (2)___________ it is full of gases, it has a diameter of 1.3927 million kms. It is incomprehensibly massive, and, (3)___________ , it can hold millions of planets inside it. The Sun is mainly made up of hydrogen and helium gas. The surface of the Sun is known as the photosphere. (4)___________ , the photosphere is surrounded by a thin layer of gas known as the chromospheres. Without the Sun, there would be no life on Earth. There would be no plants, no animals and no human beings. (5)___________ , all the living things on Earth get their energy from the Sun for their survival.
Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Choose the correct answer for blank (1).

Fill in the blanks with the correct discourse markers.
(1)___________ , the sun is a huge ball of gases. (2)___________ it is full of gases, it has a diameter of 1.3927 million kms. It is incomprehensibly massive, and, (3)___________ , it can hold millions of planets inside it. The Sun is mainly made up of hydrogen and helium gas. The surface of the Sun is known as the photosphere. (4)___________ , the photosphere is surrounded by a thin layer of gas known as the chromospheres. Without the Sun, there would be no life on Earth. There would be no plants, no animals and no human beings. (5)___________ , all the living things on Earth get their energy from the Sun for their survival.
Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Choose the correct answer for blank (2).

Fill in the blanks with the correct discourse markers.
(1)___________ , the sun is a huge ball of gases. (2)___________ it is full of gases, it has a diameter of 1.3927 million kms. It is incomprehensibly massive, and, (3)___________ , it can hold millions of planets inside it. The Sun is mainly made up of hydrogen and helium gas. The surface of the Sun is known as the photosphere. (4)___________ , the photosphere is surrounded by a thin layer of gas known as the chromospheres. Without the Sun, there would be no life on Earth. There would be no plants, no animals and no human beings. (5)___________ , all the living things on Earth get their energy from the Sun for their survival.
Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Choose the correct answer for blank (3)

Fill in the blanks with the correct discourse markers.
(1)___________ , the sun is a huge ball of gases. (2)___________ it is full of gases, it has a diameter of 1.3927 million kms. It is incomprehensibly massive, and, (3)___________ , it can hold millions of planets inside it. The Sun is mainly made up of hydrogen and helium gas. The surface of the Sun is known as the photosphere. (4)___________ , the photosphere is surrounded by a thin layer of gas known as the chromospheres. Without the Sun, there would be no life on Earth. There would be no plants, no animals and no human beings. (5)___________ , all the living things on Earth get their energy from the Sun for their survival.
Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Choose the correct answer for blank (4).

Fill in the blanks with the correct discourse markers.
(1)___________ , the sun is a huge ball of gases. (2)___________ it is full of gases, it has a diameter of 1.3927 million kms. It is incomprehensibly massive, and, (3)___________ , it can hold millions of planets inside it. The Sun is mainly made up of hydrogen and helium gas. The surface of the Sun is known as the photosphere. (4)___________ , the photosphere is surrounded by a thin layer of gas known as the chromospheres. Without the Sun, there would be no life on Earth. There would be no plants, no animals and no human beings. (5)___________ , all the living things on Earth get their energy from the Sun for their survival.
Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.

Choose the correct answer for blank (5).

‘Cool as a cucumber’ is an example of ___________ .

Choose the correct statements from the following
(i) Intonation helps in expressing emotions
(ii) Intonation is responsible for pitch variation
(iii) Intonation is responsible for correct tense
(iv) Intonation denotes agreement

Fill in the blank with a verb that is in the present continuous tense.
I ___________ this battle in order to be on the right side of history.

Identify the sentence adverb/adverbs in the following sentence.
Eventually, he went inside.

Identify the adverb in the following sentence.
My pet is not groomed.

Choose the correct nature of the dependent clause in the sentence ‘She went to bed after she finished her homework ':

Joe plays the guitar beautifully. Here the adjunct is ___________ .

‘When cats meow, dogs bark, and birds chirp’ is an instance of which of the following types of sentence?

How many dependent clauses are there in the sentence given below:
The cat climbed the tree, but he could not get down.

‘ The kid who lives next door is very interesting.’ The relative pronoun here is ___________ .

Fill in the blank with the most appropriate modal verb.
The theatre ___________ be open at this hour.

___________ you finish reading the book by tomorrow? (Context: future possibility)

Complete the given sentence with the most fitting question tag.
Let us take him alive to the camp, ______________

Identify the object of the verb ‘confirm’ in the given sentence.
It was too delicate a situation to confirm whether they would be able to keep the company.

Choose the appropriate option that can complete the sentence.
For a full minute, she couldn’t be sure ___________ what she saw was real or part of that dreadful dream.

If you bend it too hard, it will break. This is a ___________ sentence.

‘Do you like working in the field?’ he asked. Reported speech of the given sentence is ___________ .

He was sleeping ___________ the lecture was going on.

‘NATO’ is an example of ___________ .

‘The tsunami was so unexpected that there was very little time to evacuate people. ’ Here, tsunami is of ___________ origin.