English Language through Literature-II — DU B. A. (Prog) English Previous Year Question Papers

2. This paper contains 3 unseen passages and questions based on them. 4. Questions in Part A carry 10 marks each and questions in Part B carry 20 marks each. It is a matter of some satisfaction to all of us interested in the conservation of Nature that there is now, at last, a growing awareness and interest in India in the preservation of wildlife and wild places. What is now required is the understanding of the fact that human ecology is an integral part of Nature conservation and all who take a view of life on earth must realise that man's future cannot be considered separately from that of other life. From the time that man became an agriculturalist and husbandman, thereby enabling himself to overcome the natural constraints that had kept the numbers of his predecessor- the hunter and forager- within the environmental capacity, man's impact on his environment has been largely disastrous. As examples, one could consider the Cradle of Civilisation, West Asia, now largely arid, as a monument to man's misuse of the land. A number of ancient civilisations seem to have culminated in deserts in the same way- Egypt, the kingdoms of West Asia, Carthage and the Indus Valley civilisation. All seem to have gone to ruin down the same drain. None has profited from the knowledge of earlier disasters. Unfortunately, the same sorry process continues today, only that improvements in communication and technology now permit man to exercise his expertise as a creator of deserts on a global scale and at a more accelerated tempo. As far as forests and wildlife are concerned, there can be hardly any doubt that we in India have been living prodigiously off an abundant capital. A study on any endangered natural resource shows that the basic problem in every case is human population, leading to a constant erosion of that resource. The loss in the productivity of the land and the consequent degradation of the environment is nowhere more clearly shown than in the history of some of our endangered species of wildlife. The distribution of the Great Indian Rhinoceros sufficiently illustrates this point. This ponderous animal, now restricted to the swampy riverine forests of a few sanctuaries in Assam, West Bengal and Nepal, was found in historic times from Peshawar - where the Moghul Emperor Humayun hunted it-eastward across the Gangetic Plain to Assam. The fact that the rhinoceros requires a swampy grass jungle to exist is a pointer to the conditions then existing in areas which are now practically desert.