You are Bhai Bajrang/Radha Joshi, Principal, Basant Public School, Nashik. Your school has just decided to plant trees along the boundary wall of your school, for which you need saplings. You also want to place a large number of potted plants in all the corridors to help make the school green and reduce pollution. Write a letter in 120 – 150 words to the proprietor of Masjid Nursery, Nashik, wholesale suppliers of all kinds of saplings and indoor/outdoor plants, placing an order for saplings of plants for the school.

OR

Blue Waters Public School, Port Blair, urgently requires a Physical Education Teacher to teach the senior classes. The instructor should also be able to teach swimming. The school places an advertisement in ‘The National Express’. You are Bharat/Madhu Sharma, from 21, First Cross Street, Chennai. Draft a letter in 120 – 150 words along with your biodata for the advertised post.

Read the passage given below carefully and answer the questions that follow :

1 Occasional self-medication has always been part of normal behaviour in India. Only during the last hundred years or so has the development of scientific techniques made diagnosis possible. The doctor is now able to follow up the correct diagnosis of many illnesses — with specific treatment of their causes. In many other illnesses of which the cause remains unknown, he is still limited to the treatment of symptoms. The doctor is trained to decide when to treat symptoms only and when to attack the cause. This is the essential difference between medical prescribing and self-medication.

2 The advance of technology has brought about much progress in some fields of medicine, including the development of scientific drug therapy. In many countries public health organisation is improving and people’s nutritional standards have risen. Parallel with such beneficial trends are two trends which have an adverse effect: one is the use of high-pressure advertising by the pharmaceutical industry which has tended to influence both patients and doctors and has led to the overuse of drugs generally. The other is the emergence of the sedentary society with its faulty ways of life: lack of exercise, overeating, unsuitable eating, insufficient sleep, smoking and drinking. People with disorders arising from faulty habits such as these, as well as from unhappy human relationships, often resort to self-medication and so add the taking of medicines to the list. Advertisers go to great lengths to catch the market.

3 Clever advertising, aimed at chronic sufferers who will try anything because doctors have not been able to cure them, can induce such

faith in a preparation, particularly if steeply priced, that it will produce — by suggestion though — a very real effect in some people.

Advertisements are also aimed at people suffering from mild complaints such as simple cold and cough which clear up by themselves within a short time.

4 These are the main reasons why laxatives, indigestion-remedies, painkillers, cough mixtures, tonics, vitamins and iron tablets, etc. are found in many households. It is doubtful if taking these things ever improves a person’s health, it may even make it worse. Worse, because the preparation may contain unsuitable ingredients; worse because the taker may become dependent on them; worse because they might be taken in excess; worse because they may cause food poisoning and worst of all because symptoms of some serious underlying cause may be masked and therefore medical help may not be sought. Self-diagnosis is a greater danger than self-medication.

2.1 On the basis of your understanding of the above passage, make notes on it using headings and subheadings. Use recognisable abbreviations (wherever necessary – minimum four) and a format you consider suitable. Also supply an appropriate title to it.

2.2 Write a summary of the above passage in about 100 words.

You are Shahneela/Sameer Malik living at No. 4, Zakir Bagh, Meerut. You and your friends decide to host a dinner to honour the teachers who have taught you in Class XII. Draft a formal invitation in not more than 50 words to all your teachers to a grand dinner at your residence.

OR

You are Sutapa/Damodar Dey of 22, Kalinga Nagari, Bhubaneswar. You want to sell your car as you plan to buy a new one. Draft a suitable

advertisement in not more than 50 words to be published in a local newspaper in the classified columns.

You are Amir/Shikha and you love comics. Write an article in 150 – 200 words to be published in ‘The National Times’ on ‘Children’s love for comics and the role that comics play in every child’s life’.

OR

You are Yogita/Vignesh, Sports Captain, Maywood School, Chandigarh. You are very excited on hearing that Indian women wrestlers, Geeta and Babita have won many medals in Wrestling in Commonwealth Games. Write a speech in 150 - 200 words, which you will deliver in the school assembly on the occasion of your school’s Sports Day, in which you show your appreciation of the achievements made by Geeta and Babita under adverse circumstances and how they have become role models for women athletes in future.

The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is a sanitation programme that has caught everybody’s attention. Your school held a sanitation programme where students cleaned the school as well as the streets in the neighbourhood and collected and segregated garbage. You are Vinod/Asha of St. Agnes School, Kanpur. Write a report in 150 - 200 words for your school magazine giving details of the programme that was held. Add details wherever necessary.

OR

Write a debate in 150 – 200 words either for or against the motion:

‘A person himself is his own best career counsellor’.