English Olympiad Class 8 - Sample paper 10

Passage 1

I am a leftie. Out of every ten people walking down the street one is a leftie. This simply means there are many people like me in the world. Yet the world wants to ignore us! Everywhere we go, we come across tools, doors, flushes, baseball gloves, etc. designed (deviously, I would say) for the right-handed people.

Fortunately, we left-handed people learn early on that we need to survive in a world meant for the right-handed. I’m sure most of you who read this article are right-handed. Why don’t you try this simple task? Get hold of a pair of scissors and hold them in your left hand. Now, try to cut a piece of paper with it. Tell me how you feel. Doesn’t it feel awkward? I am glad you tried because that’s exactly how I feel when I use your pair of scissors with my right hand.

Of late, I am relieved to notice that online stores have begun to peddle paraphernalia for us. At least they see us as worthy customers! Left-handed camcorders, left-handed tools, left-handed stationery… the range is quite satisfying. I remember my grandfather saying that being left-handed was extremely difficult when he was my age. He had no choice but to use things meant for right-handed people. He also says that the world was outright cruel to people of our kind. As a child when my grandfather tried to write or eat with his left hand, he was rapped on the knuckles. His parents, his teachers, his siblings, almost everyone who ‘cared’ for him, treated him with the utmost unkindness.

Fortunately, nowadays parents and teachers are more accepting and understanding. The little kid who sits next to me on the school bus says that no one asks him to write with his right hand. I am glad to learn that the world is becoming a slightly better place for us.

I am keen to know why I am left-handed. My curiosity stems from my suffering. You may have noticed that people with some disease always try to find out what caused that condition. Well, I don’t have a disease but no one fails to make me feel miserable about my condition! So, my research into medical sciences says that people can be either handed for no particular reason. Just as you have black hair or brown hair; love Sudoku or hate it; like strawberry ice cream or detest it, I can be left-handed or right-handed. It just happens.

One piece of information that makes me really happy is: most intelligent and creative people are left-handed. Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Charlie Chaplin … see, the list is really long. So, though life isn’t really easy for me, I know I am in good company.

Passage 2

Once, there lived a well-to-do farmer and opposite his house lived a poor barber. The barber thought that if he tried to cultivate the vacant land behind his house, he might get similar results as the farmer’s. So every day he made some pretext to visit the farmer’s house and hear what work he was going to do the next day, and he exactly imitated the farmer. He yoked his cattle and unyoked them, he ploughed and sowed and transplanted just when the farmer did and the result was good, for that year he got a very fine crop.

But he was not content with this and resolved to continue to copy the farmer; the farmer suspected what the barber was doing and did not like it. So he resolved to put the matter to the test and at the same time teach the barber to mind his own business. In January they both planted sugarcane, and one day when the crop was half grown the barber was sitting at the farmer’s house and the farmer gave orders to his servants to put the leveller over the crop the next day and break it down; this was only a pretence of the farmer but the barber went away and the next day crushed his sugarcane crop with the leveller, the whole village laughed to see what he had done; but it turned out that each root of the barber’s sugarcane sent up a number of shoots and in the end he had a much heavier crop than the farmer.

Another day the farmer announced that he was going to sow pulse and therefore ordered his servants to bring out the seeds and roast them well, that they might germinate quickly; and the barber hearing this went off and had his pulse seeds roasted and the next day he sowed them, but only a very few seeds germinated, while the crop of the farmer which had not really been roasted sprouted finely. The barber asked the farmer why his crop had not come up well, and the farmer told him that it must be because he had not roasted the seeds enough; the few seeds that had come up must have been those which had been roasted most. But in the end the laugh was against the farmer, for the few seeds of the barber’s, which germinated, produced such fine plants that when he came to thresh them out he had more grains than the farmer, and so in three or four years the barber became the richer man of the two.

Passage 3

It was a raw, cold day in early April. Since morning, the clouds had been gathering, which now hung, dark and heavy, over both land and sea. The wind, which had been steadily increasing for hours in violence, now blew little short of a gale. It evidently was going to be a terrible night, and that night was nearly at hand.

No one realised this more than the boy who, with a small bundle in one hand and a stout staff in the other, was walking rapidly along the road, in sight of Long Island Sound, from New Haven to New London.

He was a youth that would have attracted attention anywhere. Tall for his age, and not more than eighteen years, he was also of good proportions. He walked with an ease and stride which suggested reserved strength and muscular development. But it was the boy’s face that was most noticeable. Frank, open, of singular beauty in feature and outline, there was also upon it unmistakable evidences of intelligence, resoluteness and honesty of purpose. A close observer might also have detected traces of suffering or of sorrow.

The boy was warmly clad for the chilly air and piercing wind. Now and then, he drew his light overcoat about him, as though even his rapid walking did not make him entirely comfortable. He, moreover, looked eagerly ahead, like one who was watching for some signs of his destination. Reaching at length the foot of a long hill, he drew a sigh of relief, and said, aloud: “I must be near the place now. They said it was at the top of the first long hill I came to, and this must be it.”

As he spoke, he quickened his pace to a run and soon reached the summit, quite out of breath, but with genial warmth in his body that he had not experienced for some hours.

Pausing now for a moment to catch his breath, he looked about him. Dim as was the light of the fast-falling evening, he could not help giving an exclamation of delight at the view he saw. To the west of him he saw the twinkling lights of several villages, through which he had already passed. To the north, there was a vast stretch of land, shrouded in darkness. To the south was the sound, its tossing waves capped with white, its islands like so many gems on the bosom of the angry waters. “It must be a beautiful place to live in, and I hope to find a home here,” he remarked, as he resumed his journey.