CLAT Vocabulary Practice Questions With Solutions

From a very early age, I knew that when I grew up, I should be a writer. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound . I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject -matter will be determined by the age he lives in - at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own - but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job to discipline his temperament, but if he escapès from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They are: (i) Sheer egoism: Des ire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to.get your own back on grown -ups who snubbed you in childhood; (ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm: Desire to share an experience -which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed (iii) Hist orical impulse: Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up -for the use of posterity (iv) Political purpose : Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they shou ld strive after.

Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested, all your life. We must have life -building, man -making, character -making assimilation of ideas .... If education were identical with information, the libraries are the sages in the world and encyclopedias are the rishis. Getting by heart the thoughts of others in a foreign language and stuffing your brain with them and taking some University degree, you consider yourself educated. Is this education? Wh at is the goal of your education? Open your eyes and see what a piteous cry for food is rising in the land of Bharata, proverbial for its food. Will your education fulfill this want? We want that education by which character is formed, strength of mind is increased, the intellect is expanded and by which one can stand on one's own feet. What we need to study independent of foreign control, different branches of the knowledge that is ou r own, and with it the English language and Western science; we need technical education and all else that will develop industries so that men instead of seeking for service may earn enough to provide for themselves and save against a rainy day. The end of all education, all training, should be man -making. The end and aim of all training are to make the man grow. The training by which the current expression of will are brought under control and become fruitful, is called education. What our country now want s are muscles of iron and nerves of steel, gigantic wills, which nothing can resist, which. can penetrate into the mysteries and secrets of the universe and will accomplish their purpose in any fashion, even if it meant going down to the bottom of the ocea n, meeting death face to face. There is only one method of attaining knowledge. It is by concentration. The very essence of education is concentration of mind. From the lowest to the highest man, all have to use the same method to attain knowledge. The chemist who works in the laborator y concentrates on elements to analyze them. Knowledge is acquired by concentration.