English — Set 35

Context: Question No. (12-16) based on the following passage: Today perhaps your only association with the word 'polio' is the Sabin Oral Vaccine that protects children from the disease. Fifty five years ago this was not so. The dreaded disease, which mainly affects the brain and spinal cord, causing stiffening and weakening of muscles, crippling and paralysis - which is Why I am in a wheelchair today. If somebody had predicted, when I was born, that this would happen to me, no one would have believed it. I was seventh child in a family of four pairs of brothers and sisters, with huge 23 year gap between the first and last. I was so fair and brown haired that I looked more look like a foreigner than a Dawood Bohri. I was also considered to be the healthiest of the brood.

Context: Three-fourths of the surface of our planet is covered by the sea, which both separates and unites the various races of mankind, the sea is the great highway along which man may journey at his will, the great road that has no walls or hedges hemming it in, and that nobody has to keep it in good repair with the aid of pickaxes and barrels of tar and steamrollers. The sea appeals to man's love of the perilous and the unknown, to this love of conquest, his love of knowledge, and his love of gold. It's green, grey, blue and purple water calls to him and bid him fare fort in quest of fresh fields. Beyond their horizon he has found danger and death, glory and gain. In some great continents such as America and Australia, there are towns and villages many thousands of miles from the coast, whose children have never seen or heard - or felt - the waves of the sea. But in the British Isles it is nowhere much more than a hundred miles from the most inland spot. The love of the sea is in the very blood of the British people.

Context: It is to progress in the human sciences that we must look to undo the evils which have resulted from a knowledge of physical world hastily and superficially acquired by population unconscious of the changes in themselves that the new knowledge has imperative. The road to a happier world than any known in the past lies open before us if atavistic destructive passions can be kept in leash while the necessary adaptations are made. Fears are inevitable in time, but hopes are equally rational and far more likely to bear good fruit. We must learn to think rather less of the dangers to be avoided than of the good that will lie within our grasp if we can believe in it and let it dominate our thoughts. Science, whatever unpleasant consequences it may have by the way, is in its very nature a liberator, a liberator of bondage to physical nature and in time to come, a liberator from the weight of destructive passions. We are on the threshold of utter disaster or unprecedented glorious achievement. No previous age has been fraught with problems so momentous; and it is to science that we must look for a happy future.