English Olympiad Class 10 - Sample question paper 3

Passage 1 - Artist Peter Fuller talks about his hobby

There’s a popular idea that artists are not supposed to be into sport, but mountain biking is a huge part of my life. It gets me out of my studio, and into the countryside. But more importantly, racing along as fast as you can leaves you no time to worry about anything that’s going on in your life. You’re too busy concentrating on not crashing. The only things you pay attention to are the pain in your legs and the rocks on the path in front of you. I’m in my sixties now, but I started cycling when I was a kid. In the summer my friends and I would ride our bikes into the woods and see who was brave enough to go down steep hills, or do big jumps. The bikes we had then weren’t built for that, and often broke, so I used to draw pictures of bikes with thick tyres that would be strong enough for what we were doing. They looked just like modern mountain bikes.

However, it wasn’t until many years later that someone actually invented one. By the 1980s, they were everywhere. At that time I was into skateboarding. I did that for a decade until falling off on to hard surfaces started to hurt too much. Mountain biking seemed a fairy safe way to keep fit, so I took that up instead. I made a lot of friends, and got involved in racing, which gave me a reason to train hard. I wanted to find out just how fit and fast I could get, which turned out to be fairly quick. I even won a couple of local races. In the end I stopped racing, mainly because I knew what it could mean to my career if I had a bad crash. But I still like to do a three-hour mountain bike ride every week. And if I’m out cycling in the hills and see a rider ahead, I have to beat them to the top. As I go past I imagine how surprised they would be if they knew how old I am.

Passage 2 - Thick black smoke curling out of smokestacks, horrible–tasting chemicals in your drinking water, pesticides in your food –– these are salient examples of pollution. Pollution is any contamination of the environment which causes harm to the environment or the inhabitants of the environment. There are many kinds of pollution, and there are many pollutants. Some obvious kinds of pollution are air, soil, and water. Some less obvious or well-known kinds of pollution are radioactive, noise, light pollution, and greenhouse gases.

Air pollution can be caused by particles, liquids, or gases that make the air harmful to breathe. There are two main types of air pollutants: Primary and secondary. Primary pollutants enter the air directly, like smoke from factories and car exhaust. Secondary pollutants are chemicals that mix together to pollute the air, like mixtures of emissions, or waste output from vehicles and factory smoke that change to form more dangerous pollutants in the air and sunlight.

Soil pollution can be caused by pesticides, leakage from chemical tanks, oil spills, and other chemicals which get into the soil by dumping or accidental contamination. Soil pollution can also cause water pollution, when underground water becomes contaminated by coming into contact with the polluted soil.

Water pollution can be caused by waste products, sewage, oil spills, and litter in streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Some scientists believe that water pollution is the largest cause of death and disease, causing about 14,000 deaths in the world each day.

Passage 3 - Scientists are making new (1) about the universe all the time. Daily, we read about new (2) that they say will have a great (3) on our daily lives.