NTSE Stage 2 MAT 2017 Question Paper

Directions (Q. 51-55) : Read the following passage and answer the questions based on it. Choose the most appropriate answer .It is taken for granted by the advocates of oriental learning that no native of this country can possibly, attain more than amere smattering of English. They do not attempt to prove this. But they perpetually insinuate it. They designate the education which their opponents recommend as amere spelling-book education. They assumeit as undeniable that the question is between a profound knowledge of Indian and Arabic literature and science on the one side, and superficial knowledge of the rudiments of English on the other. This is not merely an assumption, but an assumption contrary to all reason and experience. We know that foreigners of all nations do learn our language sufficiently to have access to all the most abstruse knowledge which it contains sufficiently to relish even the more delicate graces of our most idiomatic writers. There are, in this very town, natives who are quite competent to discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language. I have heard the very question on which I am now writing discussed by native gentlemen with a liberality and an intelligence which would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public Instruction. Indeed it is unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the Continent, any foreigner who can express herself/himself in English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Indians. Nobody, I suppose, will contend that English is so difficult to an Indian as Greek to an Englishman. Yet an intelligent English youth, in a much smaller number of years than our unfortunate pupils pass at the Sanskrit College, becomes able to read, to enjoy, and even to imitate not unhappily the compositions of the best Greek authors. Less than half the time which enables an English youth to read Herodotus and Sophocles ought to enable an Indian to read Hume and Milton