List of top Questions asked in Maharashtra Board Class XII Exam

Read the following extract and complete the activities given below:
Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work. It has been tried again and again; by the people of the Middle Ages, and also by the French Revolution, a secular movement which reasserted the Brotherhood of Man. And it has always failed. The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard — it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. ‘Love is what is needed,’ we chant, and then sit back and the world goes on as before. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something much less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance. Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things. No one has ever written an ode to tolerance, or raised a statue to her. Yet this is the quality which will be most needed after the war. This is the sound state of mind which we are looking for. This is the only force which will enable different races and classes and interests to settle down together to the work of reconstruction. 

The world is very full of people— appallingly full; it has never been so full before, and they are all tumbling over each other. Most of these people one doesn’t know and some of them one doesn’t like. Well, what is one to do? If you don’t like people, put up with them as well as you can. Don’t try to love them; you can’t. But try to tolerate them. On the basis of that tolerance a civilized future may be built. Certainly, I can see no other foundation for the post-war world.

Read the extract and complete the activities given below:
This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear” — disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: “The ideal travel book,” Christopher Isherwood once said, “should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.” And it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that you can never quite find.
I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully through my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.
When we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.
All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips, and “being transported” by private as well as public means; all saw that “ecstasy” (“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come when we’re not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it.
1. Read and rewrite the following sentences and state whether they are True or False : 
(a) A traveller may sink in love with his travel - memoirs. 
(b) One gets inspected as he inspects the world around him. 
(c) Quest for something may end in more mystery. 
(d) Staying in comfort at home gives one more happiness than travelling.

2. Match the persons given in column 'A' with opinions/ characteristics given in column 'B':

3. Give reasons:
    "We are objects of scrutiny," because ___________
     (i)  _____________________________
     (ii) ______________________________
4. "Travelling is an interesting teacher." Write your views in 3-4 sentences.
5. Do as directed :
(i) I like I visit. to ask questions of the places (Choose the correct tense form of the above sentence from the following options and rewrite.) 
   (a) Simple past tense 
   (b) Simple present tense 
   (c) Past perfect tense 
   (d) Present perfect tense 
(ii) I would come back to my apartment in New York. (Choose the correct option using 'used to' for the given sentence and rewrite.) 
   (a) I use to come back to my apartment in New York. 
   (b) I have used to come back to my apartment in New York. 
   (c) I used to come back to my apartment in New York. 
   (d) I had used to come back to my apartment in New York.
6. Find out the words from passage which mean:
    (i) reminiscence 
    (ii) exhilaration