Extract:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Identify the stages in man's life from the given description and complete the table:
Show Hint
Each stage is symbolic of human behavior at different life phases.
Solution and Explanation
\[\begin{array}{|c|c|} \hline \textbf{Actions} & \textbf{Stage} \\ \hline \text{(i) Full of strange oaths} & \text{The Soldier} \\ \hline \text{(ii) Creeping like a snail} & \text{The Schoolboy} \\ \hline \text{(iii) Sighing like furnace} & \text{The Lover} \\ \hline \text{(iv) Having fair round belly} & \text{The Justice} \\ \hline \end{array}\]
Step 1: Understanding the Seven Ages of Man
- Shakespeare describes seven stages in life:
1. The Infant
2. The Schoolboy
3. The Lover
4. The Soldier
5. The Justice
6. The Old Man
7. Second Childishness (Death)
Step 2: Matching Descriptions to Stages
- Full of strange oaths: Represents The Soldier, who is passionate, quick to anger, and obsessed with honor.
- Creeping like a snail: Describes The Schoolboy, who unwillingly goes to school.
- Sighing like furnace: Matches The Lover, who is deeply emotional and obsessed with love.
- Having fair round belly: Represents The Justice, who is mature, wise, and content in life.
Write down the similarities between the first and the 7th (last) stage of man's life:
Show Hint
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Understanding the First Stage (Infancy)
- An infant is helpless, relies on others for survival, and lacks speech and motor control.
- The infant is described as "mewling and puking in the nurse's arms" in the poem.
Step 2: Understanding the Last Stage (Second Childhood)
- The elderly person in the last stage is described as "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."
- This means that in old age, a person loses teeth, vision, and physical abilities, similar to an infant.
Step 3: Drawing Similarities
- Both lack independence and need assistance.
- Both are vulnerable and weak.
- Both struggle with communication and coordination.
Choose the correct alternative to identify the figure of speech used in the following line:
All the world's a stage.
All the world's a stage.
Show Hint
- A simile uses "like" or "as" (e.g., "Life is like a journey").
- A metaphor makes a direct comparison (e.g., "Life is a journey").
- Simile
- Metaphor
- Personification
- Alliteration
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Understanding the given sentence
- The sentence "All the world's a stage" is comparing the world to a stage where people act out different roles in life.
Step 2: Identifying the figure of speech
- A simile uses "like" or "as" to compare two things, but this sentence does not contain those words.
- A metaphor directly compares two things without using "like" or "as". Since "world" is being compared to a stage, it is a metaphor.
- Personification gives human qualities to non-living things, but that is not happening in this sentence.
- Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds, which is not present here.
Final Answer: The sentence uses a metaphor as it directly compares the world to a stage without using "like" or "as".
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- Acrucial moderating factor in how people experience comparisons is self-esteem. Individuals with high self-esteem are more likely to interpret upward comparison as informative rather than threatening. They are more resilient in the face of others’ success and more likely to believe they can reach their own goals. In contrast, people with low self-esteem are more prone to interpret comparison as judgment, reinforcing negative self-views and triggering feelings of inadequacy.
This dynamic creates a self-reinforcing loop. People with high self-esteem are less vulnerable to upward comparison, which intensifies those doubts. Those with a secure sense of self are more likely to use comparison as a learning tool. The same external stimulus—a colleague’s achievements, a friend’s popularity—can have radically different effects depending on internal stability.
Self-esteem also influences how people choose their comparison targets. Research has found that individuals often engage in “selective comparison,” seeking out those who confirm their existing beliefs about themselves. This can become a subtle form of self-sabotage. Someone who feels unworthy may subconsciously seek out targets that reinforce that sense, perpetuating a narrative of inferiority. One of the most promising antidotes to social comparison is temporal comparison—evaluating oneself not against others, but against one’s own past. This method has been shown to increase motivation and satisfaction, especially when individuals can see concrete progress. Temporal comparison activates the same reward circuits as social comparison but avoids the threat systems associated with social ranking. It also reinforces agency: individuals focus on what they can control and improve rather than what others control. In therapeutic and coaching settings, temporal comparison is used to help clients build self-efficacy and track growth over time.
Moreover, people who focus on self-improvement rather than social dominance are less likely to fall into cycles of envy or self-pity. They can still use others as inspiration, but they do so without attaching their self-worth to the outcome. This is not to say they never compare—but that they focus on learning, rather than judgment. The most skilful approach to comparison may lie in eliminating it, but in reframing it as feedback. When we interpret comparison as information rather than a verdict, we can ask, “What can I learn from this?” This shift turns comparison into a growth tool. Teachers mentor their students, not as rivals. Psychologists emphasize that the key variable here is mindset.
A fixed mindset sees comparison as a threat. If someone else is better, it means we are worse. A growth mindset sees comparison as a map. If someone else has reached a certain level, it means the path exists. This reframing is not just a cognitive trick. It changes the emotional tone of comparison, making it more likely to inspire than to wound. Reframing also requires emotional regulation—the ability to notice an initial pang of envy or shame without reacting impulsively. With practice, individuals can learn to pause, reflect, and reinterpret their emotional responses. Over time, this builds resilience and self-trust, allowing comparison to become a learning tool rather than a cage.- XAT - 2026
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When people who are talking don’t share the same culture, knowledge, values, and assumptions, mutual understanding can be especially difficult. Such understanding is possible through the negotiation of meaning. To negotiate meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. You also need the flexibility in world view, and a generous tolerance for mistakes, as well as a talent for finding the right metaphor to communicate the relevant parts of unshared experiences or to highlight the shared experiences while demphasizing the others. Metaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in large measure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorize your experiences. Problems of mutual understanding are not exotic; they arise in all extended conversations where understanding is important.
When it really counts, meaning is almost never communicated according to the CONDUIT metaphor, that is, where one person transmits a fixed, clear proposition to another by means of expressions in a common language, where both parties have all the relevant common knowledge, assumptions, values, etc. When the chips are down, meaning is negotiated: you slowly figure out what you have in common, what it is safe to talk about, how you can communicate unshared experience or create a shared vision. With enough flexibility in bending your world view and with luck and charity, you may achieve some mutual understanding.
Communication theories based on the CONDUIT metaphor turn from the pathetic to the evil when they are applied indiscriminately on a large scale, say, in government surveillance or computerized files. There, what is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included, and it is assumed that the words in the file have meaning in themselves—disembodied, objective, understandable meaning. When a society lives by the CONDUITmetaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are the likely products.- XAT - 2026
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Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humanity such a burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons. Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might hide from the problems and the generals. To the contrary, there was a high insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coart forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, but always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
...Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.- XAT - 2026
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Questions Asked in Maharashtra Class X Board exam
- Pick out the infinitive from the following sentence :
He was asking to go for the concert.- Maharashtra Class X Board - 2025
- Grammar and Language Usage
- Out of the following which is a Pythagorean triplet ?
In the following figure \(\triangle\) ABC, B-D-C and BD = 7, BC = 20, then find \(\frac{A(\triangle ABD)}{A(\triangle ABC)}\).
- Maharashtra Class X Board - 2025
- Properties of Triangles
The radius of a circle with centre 'P' is 10 cm. If chord AB of the circle subtends a right angle at P, find area of minor sector by using the following activity. (\(\pi = 3.14\))
Activity :
r = 10 cm, \(\theta\) = 90\(^\circ\), \(\pi\) = 3.14.
A(P-AXB) = \(\frac{\theta}{360} \times \boxed{\phantom{\pi r^2}}\) = \(\frac{\boxed{\phantom{90}}}{360} \times 3.14 \times 10^2\) = \(\frac{1}{4} \times \boxed{\phantom{314}}\) <br>
A(P-AXB) = \(\boxed{\phantom{78.5}}\) sq. cm.
- Do as directed (Attempt any four). (1) Complete the following words by using correct letters:
br__ve
t__ach
box__r
fa__th- Maharashtra Class X Board - 2025
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