Past Papers

2013 June UGC NET Solved Question Paper in English Paper 2

1. In Pinter’s Birthday Party, Stanley is given a birthday present. What is it?

(A) A toy

(B) A piano

(C) A drum

(D) A violin

Answer: (C)

 

2. How does Lord Jim end?

(A) Jim is shot through the chest by Doramin.

(B) Jim kills himself with a last unflinching glance.

(C) Jim answers “the call of exalted egoism” and betrays Jewel.

(D) Jim surrenders himself to Doramin.

Answer: (A)

 

3. “Where I lacked a political purpose, I wrote lifeless books.” To which of the following authors can we attribute the above admission?

(A) Graham Greene

(B) George Orwell

(C) Charles Morgan

(D) Evelyn Waugh

Answer: (B)

 

4. Modernism has been described as being concerned with “disenchantment of our culture with culture itself”. Who is the critic?

(A) Stephen Spender

(B) Malcolm Bradbury

(C) Lionel Trilling

(D) Joseph Frank

Answer: (C)

 

5. “Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.”

The above lines are quoted from

(A) “Tintern Abbey Revisited”

(B) “Michael”

(C) “Frost at Midnight”

(D) “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison”

Answer: (C)

 

6. Which one of the following modern poems employs ottava rima?

(A) “Among School Children”

(B) “In Praise of Limestone”

(C) “The Wild Swans at Coole”

(D) “The Shield of Achilles”

Answer: (A)

 

7. John Dryden in his heroic tragedy All for Love takes the story of Shakespeare’s

(A) Troilus and Cressida

(B) The Merchant of Venice

(C) Antony and Cleopatra

(D) Measure for Measure

Answer: (C)

 

8. Arrange the following works in the order in which they appear. Identify the correct code:

I. No Longer at Ease

II. Things Fall apart

III. A Man of the People

IV. Arrow of God

The correct combination according to the code is:

Code:

(A) III, IV, II, I

(B) IV, III, I, II

(C) II, I, IV, III

(D) I, II, III, IV

Answer: (C)

 

9. Samuel Pepys kept his diary from

(A) 1660 to 1669

(B) 1649 to 1660

(C) 1662 to 1689

(D) 1660 to 1689

Answer: (A)

 

10. In the Defence of Poetry, what did Sydney attribute to poetry?

(A) A magical power whereby poetry plays tricks on the reader.

(B) A divine power whereby poetry transmits a message from God to the reader.

(C) A moral power whereby poetry encourages the reader to evaluate virtuous models.

(D) A realistic power that cannot be made to seem like mere illusion and trickery.

Answer: (C)

11. An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot presents portraits of the following contemporary individuals:

(A) Addison and Lord Hervey

(B) Dryden and Rochester

(C) Swift and Steele

(D) Smollett and Defoe

Answer: (A)

 

12. Match the following authors with their works:

List – A                                   List – B

(Authors)                                 (Works)

I. Alice Walker                        1. Invisible Man

II. Ralph Ellison                      2. The Colour Purple

III. Richard Wright                 3. Their Eyes Were Watching God

IV  Zora Neale Hurston          4. Native Son

Which is the correct combination according to the code?

Code:

       I II III IV

(A) 2 1 3 4

(B) 3 4 2 1

(C) 4 3 1 2

(D) 1 2 4 3

Answer: (Wrong question)

 

13. Which of these plays by Shakespeare does not use ‘cross-dressing’ as a device?

(A) As You Like It

(B) Julius Caesar

(C) Cymbeline

(D) Two Gentlemen of Verona

Answer: (B)

 

14. Which of the following works cannot be categorised under postcolonial theory?

(A) Nation and Narration

(B) Orientalism

(C) Discipline and Punish

(D) White Mythologies

Answer: (C)

 

15. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a classic statement of _________ Philosophy.

(A) Aesthetic

(B) Empiricist

(C) Nationalist

(D) Realist

Answer: (B)

 

16. “Power circulates in all directions, to and from all social levels, at all times.” Who said this?

(A) Edward Said

(B) Michel Foucault

(C) Jacques Derrida

(D) Roland Barthes

Answer: (B)

 

17. Which one of the following is not written by an Australian Aboriginal writer?

(A) Kath Walker

(B) Peter Carey

(C) Robert Bropho

(D) Jack Davis

Answer: (B)

 

18. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey jointly brought out Tottel’s Miscellany during the Renaissance.

Identify the name of the Earl of Surrey from the following:

(A) Thomas Lodge

(B) Thomas Nashe

(C) Thomas Sackville

(D) Henry Howard

Answer: (D)

 

19. Match the following lists:

List – I                                    List – I

(Novelists)                               (Novels)

I. Margaret Laurence              1. Surfacing

II. Margaret Atwood              2. The Stone Angel

III. Sinclair Ross                     3. Medicine River

IV. Thomas King                    4. As for Me and My House

Which is the correct combination according to the code?

Code:

      I II III IV

(A) 1 4 3 2

(B) 3 2 1 4

(C) 4 3 2 1

(D) 2 1 4 3

Answer: (D)

 

20. The dramatic structure of Restoration comedies combines in it the features of

I. The Elizabethan Theatre

II. The Neoclassical Theatre of Italy and France

III. The Irish Theatre

IV. The Greek Theatre

The correct combination according to the code is

Codes:

(A) I and IV are correct.

(B) III and IV are correct.

(C) II and III are correct.

(D) I and II are correct.

Answer: (D)

21. Which American poet wrote: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”?

(A) Robert Lowell

(B) Walt Whitman

(C) Wallace Stevens

(D) Langston Hughes

Answer: (B)

 

22. The etymological meaning of the word “trope” is

(A) Gesture

(B) Turning

(C) Mirror

(D) Desire

Answer: (B)

 

23. Who among the following English poets defined poetic imagination as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite ‘I AM’ ”?

(A) Blake

(B) Wordsworth

(C) Coleridge

(D) Shelley

Answer: (C)

 

24. Little Nell is a character in Dickens’

(A) David Copperfield

(B) The Old Curiosity Shop

(C) Bleak House

(D) Great Expectations

Answer: (B)

 

25. Match the following:

List – A                                                                                   List – B

(Schools/Concept of Criticism)                                               (Critics)

I. Formalism                                                                            1. John Crow Ransom

II. New Critics                                                                        2. The Jungians

III. Psychological Theory of the Value of Literature                         3. Victor Shklovsky

IV. Literary art as archetypal image                                       4. I.A. Richards

The correct combination according to the code is:

Code:

      I II III IV

(A) 3 1 4 2

(B) 2 4 1 3

(C) 4 1 2 3

(D) 3 2 1 4

Answer: (A)

 

26. In the late seventeenth century a “Battle of Books” erupted between which two groups?

(A) Cavaliers and Roundheads

(B) Abolitionists and Enthusiasts for slaves

(C) Champions of Ancient and Modern Learning

(D) The Welsh and the Scots

Answer: (C)

 

27. “Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day Love’s pleasure drives his love away…” In the above quote the last line is an example of

(A) Allusion

(B) Pleonasm

(C) Paradox

(D) Zeugma

Answer: (C)

 

28. Match the author with the work:

List – I                                    List – II

(Authors)                                 (Works)

I. Kingsely Amis                     1. Saturday and Sunday Morning

II. Allan Silletoe                     2. The Golden Note Book

III. Doris Lessing                    3. The Left Bank

IV. Jean Rhys                                     4. Lucky Jim

Which is the correct combination according to the code?

Code:

      I II III IV

(A) 3 4 1 2

(B) 4 1 2 3

(C) 2 3 1 4

(D) 1 2 3 4

Answer: (B)

 

29. In which of Hardy’s novels does the character Abel Whittle appear?

(A) Far from the Madding Crowd

(B) The Return of the Native

(C) A Pair of Blue Eyes

(D) The Mayor of Caster bridge

Answer: (D)

 

30. The phrase “dark satanic mills” has become the most famous description of the force at the centre of the industrial revolution. The phrase was used by

(A) William Wordsworth

(B) William Blake

(C) Thomas Carlyle

(D) John Ruskin

Answer: (B)

 

31. “Five miles meandering with a mazy motion through wood and dale the scared river ran.” Where does this ‘sacred river’ directly run to?

(A) A lifeless ocean

(B) The caverns measureless

(C) A fountain

(D) The waves

Answer: (AB)

 

32. Who is the twentieth century poet, a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature who rejected the label “British” though he has always written in English rather than his regional language?

(A) Douglas Dunn

(B) Seamus Heaney

(C) Geoffrey Hill

(D) Philip Larkin

Answer: (B)

 

33. Which of the following statements best describes Sir Thomas Browne’s Religion Medici?

(A) It is a story of conversion or providential experiences.

(B) It emphasizes Browne’s love of mystery and wonder.

(C) It is full of angst, melancholy and dread of death.

(D) It reports the facts of Browne’s life.

Answer: (AB)

 

34. Which of the following characters from Eliot’s Waste Land is not correctly mentioned?

(A) The typist

(B) Madam Sosostris

(C) The Merchant from Eugenides

(D) The Young Man Carbuncular

Answer: (C)

 

35. Which one of the following best describes the general feeling expressed in literature during the last decade of the Victorian era?

(A) Studied melancholy and aestheticism

(B) The triumph of science and morbidity

(C) Sincere earnestness and Protestant zeal

(D) Raucous celebration combined with paranoid interpretation

Answer: (A)

 

36. Which poem by Shelley bears the alternative title, “The Spirit of Solitude”?

(A) Mont Blanc

(B) “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

(C) “Adonais”

(D) Alastor

Answer: (D)

 

37. Which tale in The Canterbury Tales uses the tradition of the Beast Fable?

(A) The Knight’s Tale

(B) The Monk’s Tale

(C) The Nun’s Priest’s Tale

(D) The Miller’s Tale

Answer: (C)

 

38. At the end of Sons and Lovers Paul Morel

(A) Sets off in quest of life away from his mother.

(B) Considers the option of committing suicide.

(C) Joins his elder brother William in London.

(D) Embraces a Schopenhauer – like nihilism.

Answer: (A)

 

39. When you say “I love her eyes, her hair, her nose, her cheeks, her lips” you are using a rhetorical device of

(A) Enumeration

(B) Ant anagoge

(C) Parataxis

(D) Hypo taxis

Answer: (A)

 

40. The following are two lists of plays and characters. Match them.

List – I                                                List – II

(Plays)                                                 (Characters)

I. Women Beware Women                 1. Malevole

II. The Malcontent                              2. Beatrice

III. The City Madam                          3. Bianca

IV. The Changeling                            4. Doll Tear sheet

Which is the correct combination according to the code?

Code:

      I II III IV

(A) 3 1 4 2

(B) 2 1 2 4

(C) 1 2 3 4

(D) 4 3 2 1

Answer: (A)

 

41. With Bacon the essay form is

(A) An intimate, personal confession

(B) Witty and boldly imagistic

(C) The aphoristic expression of accumulated public wisdom

(D) Homely and vulgar

Answer: (C)

 

42. Evelyn Waugh’s Trilogy published together as Sword of Honour is about

(A) The English at War

(B) The English Aristocracy

(C) The Irish question

(D) Scottish nationalism

Answer: (A)

 

43. Who coined the phrase “The Two Nations” to describe the disparity in Britain between the rich and the poor?

(A) Charles Dickens

(B) Thomas Carlyle

(C) Benjamin Disraeli

(D) Frederick Engels

Answer: (C)

 

44. Milton introduces Satan and the fallen angels in the Book I of Paradise Lost. Two of the chief devils reappear in Book II. They are

I. Moloch

II. Clemos

III. Belial

IV. Thamuz

The correct combination according to the code is

Code:

(A) I and IV are correct.

(B) I and III are correct.

(C) I and II are correct.

(D) II and III are correct.

Answer: (B)

 

45. When Chaucer describes the Friar as a “noble pillar of order”, he is using

(A) Irony

(B) Simile

(C) Understatement

(D) Personification

Answer: (A)

 

46. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is an example of

(A) Drawing room comedy

(B) kitchen-sink drama

(C) Absurd drama

(D) Melodrama

Answer: (B)

 

47. Which character in Jane Eyre uses religion to justify cruelty?

(A) Blanche Ingram

(B) Mr. Brocklehurst

(C) Sir John Rivers

(D) Eliza Reed

Answer: (B)

 

48. Which Romantic poet defined a slave as ‘a person perverted into a thing’?

(A) Blake

(B) Coleridge

(C) Keats

(D) Shelley

Answer: (B)

 

49. John Suckling belongs to the group of

(A) Metaphysical poets

(B) Cavalier poets

(C) Neo-classical poets

(D) Religious poets

Answer: (B)

 

50. Sir Thomas More creates the character of a traveller into whose mouth the account of Utopia is put. His name is

(A) Michael

(B) Raphael

(C) Henry

(D) Thomas

Answer: (B)