English Olympiad Class 9 - Sample question paper 11

Passage 1 - Untied shoelaces are one of the persistent problems for people worldwide. The pesky knots magically appear to come apart at the worst of times, e.g. in the final part of a long run or just before a crucial point in a game. However, while there has been a lot of research conducted into when the problems happen to the various types of knots, nobody has ever investigated the basic question – why do laces come undone? Now, thanks to a team of researchers at the University of California, there is finally a scientific explanation to this problem, which affects both young and old alike.

If you do an online search about how to tie lace you may find thousands or more pages about how to tie the ‘perfect knot’. But until recently, there has been very little information available about why they always come undone. Scientists have begun to research this problem and have come up with some interesting ideas that suggest there is no solution to the problem and it is just something we will have to continue to live with, no matter how good we think we are at tying knots.

The study required over 100 hours of testing various ways that could loosen the knot. A keen runner and engineering professor spent hours jogging on a treadmill, allowing her colleagues to film her shoes in slow motion so they could capture detailed images of the shoelaces loosening, and, eventually, coming completely undone.

The results of the research, published in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society, reveals the invisible forces that help untie laces during an activity. According to the engineers, when you run or walk, your foot hits the ground with quite a large amount of force. This impact makes the knots in your laces stretch and loosen. The laces’ free ends then swing as the leg moves upwards, and this causes them to slip further. It is the combined action that eventually leads to the untangling of even the tightest of knots. So, no matter how well you tie them, they will eventually come undone.

Interestingly this problem doesn’t seem to happen for people who ride bicycles because the forces at play are very different. When a team of researchers then tried to copy the forces by sitting at a table and swinging their legs for half an hour, and then stomping on the ground for the same period of time, their shoelaces remained firmly tied each time. This is because the forces needed to untie a lace need to happen simultaneously and this really only happens when we are either walking or running. This means that we all need to stop walking and running or perhaps a better solution is to just create a different way of fastening our shoes.

While the study has finally solved the intriguing mystery, its implications go beyond that one researcher, “When you talk about knotted structures, if you can start to understand the shoelace, then you can apply it to other things, like DNA or microstructures that fail under dynamic forces. This is the first step toward understanding why certain knots are better than others, which no one has really done.” Who knew solving the mystery of loosening shoelaces could one day lead to further significant scientific discoveries.

Passage 2 - Lady boss assigns stringent deadlines to her team. Then she goes home, cooks several dishes for dinner and phones the husband asking him to come home soon. The husband has a lot of work to finish because he happens to be in a team where the boss has cracked the whip. Of course, his boss is the wife and this is the new India where women are smart, powerful and accomplished and husbands don’t have to tussle with their egos to report to their wives, at work. The Airtel ad, whose plot line is described above, should have warmed our hearts, but it has not.

Feminists are frothing at the mouth because the Ad depicts that even successful career women have to eventually conform to traditional roles. To my mind, this is a truly blinkered view. Liberal attitudes towards women imply that they should be free to do whatever they like. In this case, here was a successful and smart woman who likes to cook. And when she’s finished the cooking, she would like her husband to be home so they could eat together. What is regressive about that?

A lot has changed for the urban Indian women in the last year-and-a-half. Safety and equality have come to the forefront of discussions. While a lot remains to be done, it is not just the glass half –full view that things are changing for the better. Yet, these knee-jerk reactions to what constitutes women’s roles are mindless hysteria, not measured analysis.

It isn’t feminism to demand that women only do what they haven’t traditionally done. It is feminism to demand that women be able to choose what they want to do- whether it is pulling an all-nighter at work, heading out for a drink and a dance, tending to a sick child at home or cooking a meal for the family. Sometimes this requires superhuman skills in juggling schedules and planning ahead. Often, some of it is near impossible. Yet, the sheer fact that the woman is doing something because she chooses to is all the evidence of liberation one needs. It’s cutting the nose to spite the face to suggest that a successful career woman should not be allowed to go home and indulge in an activity she enjoys. Even if it happens to be playing the role of a ‘traditional’ wife.

Passage 3 - On September 9, 2014, Google commemorated the 186th birth anniversary of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) the Russian author and philosopher, with a slide show showcasing his greatest works. One of the giants of Russian literature, he wrote his first great novel, War and Peace in the 1860s. Generally, thought to be one of the greatest novels ever written, remarkable for its dramatic breadth and unity, its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. In 1873, Tolstoy set to work on the second of his best known novels, Anna Karenina. He continued to write fiction throughout the 1880s and 1890s.

His fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived. Anna Karenina (1877) tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner, who works alongside the peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives. Tolstoy not only drew from his life experiences, but also created characters in his own image, such as Pierre and Prince Andrei in War and Peace, and Levin in Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy served as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment during the Crimean war. His experiences in battle helped stir his subsequent pacifism, and gave him material for a realistic depiction of the horrors of war, in his later work.

His contemporaries paid him lofty tributes. Dostoevsky thought him the greatest of all living novelists. Gustave Flaubert, on reading a translation of War and Peace, exclaimed, “What an artist and what a psychologist”.

Later critics and novelists continue to bear testament to Tolstoy’s art. Virginia Woolf declared him to be the greatest of all novelists. James Joyce noted that “He is never dull, never stupid, never pedantic, never theatrical!” Thomas Mann wrote of Tolstoy’s seemingly guileless artistry. “Seldom did art work so much like nature.”

Such sentiments were shared by Proust, Faulkner and Nabokov. The latter heaped superlatives upon Anna Karenina; he questioned, however, the reputation of “War and Peace”.

In 1908, Tolstoy wrote ‘A Letter to a Hindu,’ outlining his belief in non-violence, as a means for India to gain independence from British colonial rule. In 1909, Gandhi wrote to the famous writer, and in his autobiography, acknowledged Tolstoy as “the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced.”