Passage:
One morning in a small apartment in Bombay, a girl of about sixteen looked up from the newspaper and said excitedly, "Pandit Ravi Shankar's playing tomorrow at Shanmukhananda auditorium."
"Sh-sh," said her mother, pointing to the figure sleeping on the bed. "You'll wake him up. You know he needs all the sleep and rest he can get."
But the boy on the bed was not asleep. "Pandit Ravi Shankar!" he said. "Pandit Ravi Shankar, the sitar maestro?" He raised himself up on his elbows for one second and then fell back. But his eyes were shining. "We mustn't miss the chance," he said. "I've - I've always wanted to hear him and see him ..."
Smita bit her lip in self-reproach. She had been so excited at seeing the announcement that she had not remembered that her brother was very ill. She had seen how the doctors had shaken their heads gravely. Somewhere deep inside, Smita had known the frightening truth—that Anant was going to die.
State whether the given statements are true or false:
(i) The age of the girl was six.
(ii) The boy on the bed was fast asleep.
(iii) Pandit Ravi Shankar was a tabla maestro.
(iv) She had seen how the doctors had shaken their heads gravely.
(i) The age of the girl was six.
(ii) The boy on the bed was fast asleep.
(iii) Pandit Ravi Shankar was a tabla maestro.
(iv) She had seen how the doctors had shaken their heads gravely.
Show Hint
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Verifying Statement (i)
- The passage states that the girl was about"sixteen", not six.
- Correct Answer: False.
Step 2: Verifying Statement (ii)
- The passage mentions that "the boy was not asleep" but was excited about Pandit Ravi Shankar.
- Correct Answer: False.
Step 3: Verifying Statement (iii)
- The passage states that "Pandit Ravi Shankar was a sitar maestro, not a tabla maestro."
- Correct Answer: False.
Step 4: Verifying Statement (iv)
- The passage confirms that "Smita had seen the doctors shaking their heads gravely", indicating her brother was seriously ill.
- Correct Answer: True. "
Complete the following statements giving reasons:
(i) Anant was better than his sister in playing sitar because \(\underline{\hspace{2cm}}.\)
(ii) The girl was excited because \(\underline{\hspace{2cm}}\).
Complete the following statements giving reasons:
(i) Anant was better than his sister in playing sitar because \(\underline{\hspace{2cm}}.\)
(ii) The girl was excited because \(\underline{\hspace{2cm}}\).
Show Hint
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Understanding why Anant was better at playing sitar
- The passage mentions that Anant was learning to play sitar along with his sister.
- However, he was more skilled and could compose his own tunes, which surprised their Guru.
- Final Answer: Anant had more talent and astonished their Guru with his compositions.
Step 2: Understanding why the girl was excited
- The passage states that Smita (the girl) read about Pandit Ravi Shankar's concert.
- She knew that Anant always wanted to see him perform, so she became excited.
- Final Answer: The girl saw the concert announcement and knew how much it meant to Anant.
(i) Find any two adverbs from the passage ending with 'ly'.
(ii) Find any two compound words from the passage.
(ii) Find any two compound words from the passage.
Show Hint
Compound Words: These are formed by joining two words to create a new meaning (e.g., classroom, sunlight, newspaper).
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Identifying adverbs ending with 'ly'
The passage contains the words "gravely" and "endlessly", both of which are adverbs ending in 'ly'.
Step 2: Identifying compound words
The passage contains "newspaper" (news + paper) and "self-reproach" (self + reproach).
Do as directed:
(i) "I've always wanted to hear him and see him," he said.
(Change into indirect speech.)
(ii) His mother sprang to his side.
(Add a question tag.)
(i) "I've always wanted to hear him and see him," he said.
(Change into indirect speech.)
(ii) His mother sprang to his side.
(Add a question tag.)
Show Hint
Present Perfect → Past Perfect.
Question Tags:
- Positive statements take negative tags.
- Negative statements take positive tags.
- Past tense verbs use "did" in question tags.
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Converting Direct to Indirect Speech
- The given sentence is in direct speech.
- Rules for conversion:
- Remove quotation marks.
- Change present perfect tense (I've wanted) into past perfect tense (he had wanted).
- Keep the meaning intact.
-
Final Answer: He said that he had always wanted to hear him and see him.
Step 2: Adding a Question Tag
- The sentence"His mother sprang to his side. is an affirmative statement in the past tense.
- Rules for question tags:
- Use a negative question tag after a positive statement.
- The helping verb for past simple tense is "did".
- Convert "sprang"to "did" in the tag form.
-
Final Answer: His mother sprang to his side, didn't she?
Describe your experience of any musical concert that you have attended.
Show Hint
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Choosing a Musical Concert Experience
- Think about a real or imaginary concert that left a strong impact.
- Mention the artist, venue, and type of music performed.
Step 2: Describing the Experience
- Talk about the ambience and audience's reaction.
- Describe the music, instruments used, and performance quality.
- Mention your feelings and emotions during the concert.
Step 3: Concluding the Experience
- Express how the experience changed or inspired you.
- End with a memorable takeaway from the concert.
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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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