WBCS Main (2023) Questions
ENGLISH LETTER WRITING, DRAFTING OF REPORT, PRECIS WRITING, COMPOSITION AND TRANSLATION
Paper-II
Time Allowed — 3 Hours Full Marks — 200
If the questions attempted are in excess of the prescribed number, only the questions attempted first up to the prescribed number shall be valued and the remaining ones ignored.
1. (a) Write a letter to the Additional District Magistrate (ADM) of your district requesting him to issue an Economically Weaker Section (EWS) certificate in favour of you. You have furnished all the necessary documents those are to be needed to issue the same. (Word limit: 150 words) 40
Or,
(b) You are an aspirant of civil service. Now, you would like to avail the coaching and the guidance provided at the Satyendranath Tagore Civil Services Study Centre (SNTCSSC), Saltlake, Kolkata. Write a letter to the Chairman, SNTCSSC, expressing your wish to join the centre and to avail the library, hostel and other facilities provided there. (The Letter should be written within 150 words.) 40
2. Draft a report on “Effect of Global Warming of Planet Earth”, a Symposium organized by your college. (Within 200 words.) 40
3. Write a composition on any one of the following topics: 40
(a) National Education Policy (NEP) 2020; Highlights and Implementations.
(b) Kanyashree Project, a Govt. initiative: A model for woman empowerment and emancipation.
(c) Ageing.
(d) Literature and the representation of reality.
4. Write a precis on the following and add a suitable title for it. 35 + 5
Shakespeare is the greatest manipulator of the English tongue in poetry and his popularity abroad would seem to contradict the generalization that is being made. It can, however, be truly said that Shakespeare, as all poets, loses much of his original force in translation, and the number of foreigners who have understood his language in all its innumerable associations is far less than those who have enjoyed the plays.
He succeeds because, he is so good a dramatist that he remains alive even when the poetic element in his work has been distorted, or even destroyed. Further, his verse has often a meaning so well grounded in human experience that it retains interest even when translation has destroyed much of the original beauty of expression. Thus to quote a single example, Hamlet, at the end of the tragedy, says to Horatio, ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile’, a phrase which to English minds is of illimitable suggestion. Translate the construction and let Hamlet merely say, ‘In memory of his tragedy refrain for a little while from pleasure and happiness’, and he is still speaking good sense though he has ceased to speak poetry. Or it may be that Hamlet in that final moment, his stress tragically resolved was referring to death itself as ‘felicity’. Should this be the meaning, the problem of translation still remains equally difficult.
5. Translate any one of the following passage into English. 40
(Who opted Bengali for Paper-I)