CBSE Class 12 English — NCERT Solutions

Franz was expected to be prepared with the rule for participles for school that day. He says M. Hamel had said he would question them on participles, and Franz did not know them.

Franz noticed that the school was not in its usual bustle. Instead of noise, desk-opening, and lessons repeated in unison, everything was still, quiet, and solemn. He also saw that the village people were sitting on the back benches, which was unusual.

Yes, the third level was a medium of escape for Charley. He lives in the modern world full of insecurity, fear, war, worry and stress, and the third level offers him an imagined route to a more peaceful past, especially 1894 Galesburg. Even though he says he is just an ordinary man and not consciously trying to escape, his desire to reach the third level shows a deep wish to get away from present-day tensions. His interest in old-style currency, stamps, and the peaceful past also supports this. So, the third level is both a literal mystery and a psychological escape from reality.

From Sam's letter, we infer that Sam has also experienced the third level and has reached 1894 Galesburg. The letter shows that he first doubted Charley, then came to believe him, and finally found the third level himself. It also suggests that Sam found the past attractive and peaceful, so much so that he wants Charley and Louisa to come back and keep looking. The ending reveals an important twist: Sam was Charley’s psychiatrist, so the letter also hints that Sam had himself wanted escape from modern life.

The author recognised her by the snake ring with emerald eyes on the woman’s hand. He had seen a similar ring on Frau Frieda’s right forefinger many years earlier in Vienna, so the discovery of the ring in the newspaper made him suspect that the dead woman was the same person.

He left Vienna after Frau Frieda told him, with complete conviction, that she had dreamed about him and that he must leave at once and not come back for five years. Her certainty was so strong that he obeyed, boarded the last train to Rome that night, and later never returned.

Saheb is scrounging in the garbage dumps for things of value—sometimes even a rupee or a ten-rupee note. He is in Seemapuri on the outskirts of Delhi, and he has come from Dhaka in Bangladesh, where storms destroyed his family’s fields and homes.

The author uses dramatic irony by making the reader know the truth while the Maharaja believes the opposite. The most important example is that astrologers warn him that he will die because of a tiger, and the Maharaja spends his life trying to kill tigers to escape death. He feels triumphant after supposedly killing the hundredth tiger, but the reader later learns that the tiger was only fainted, not dead. Similarly, the Maharaja thinks he has defeated fate, but in the end he dies from a sliver of the wooden tiger, which is the very object connected with the tiger theme. This creates irony because his proud confidence is continually undercut by the real situation, which the reader can see before he does.

Eveline reviews the familiar objects at home because she is about to leave her home and is thinking about the life she is giving up. Looking at the objects makes her remember how long she has lived there and how attached she is to the house and its memories.

The “misadventure” is the time when a big bruiser of a boy picked Douglas up and threw him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. pool. He sank to the bottom, struggled for breath, panicked, and nearly drowned.

Antarctica is useful for studying the Earth because it holds clues to geological history and to the planet’s past, present and future. Its ice cores contain half-million-year-old carbon records, which help scientists study climate change, the ozone layer, carbon levels, and changes in temperature over time. The region also helps us understand big geological events like the breakup of Gondwana, the formation of the Himalayas, and the role of the circumpolar current in keeping Antarctica cold. So, studying Antarctica helps us understand how the Earth has changed and what may happen in the future.

The Senciminers were the people who had come from Sencimin, Dr Margolin’s old hometown. Many of them had survived the war and later came to America, and they belonged to the bride’s family and the groom’s family at the wedding.

The chapter says that while he was plodding along the road, he had fallen into a line of thought and suddenly got the idea that the whole world was like a big rattrap. So the idea came from his own thinking.

The story shows a conflict between personal duty and national loyalty. As a doctor, Sadao’s first duty is to save a dying man, even if he is an enemy soldier. As a citizen of Japan during wartime, he ought to hand the prisoner over to the authorities. He is torn between these two responsibilities throughout the story. In the end, his humanity as a doctor wins first, but he also tries to remain loyal to his country by informing the police and later arranging for the man to leave safely. The story suggests that in such situations a person may have to choose between the demands of the heart and the demands of the state, and that human compassion can sometimes stand above narrow national hatred.

Captain Hagberd came to Colebrook after his wife had died, and the letter he received about a seafaring man led him to search for his lost son, Harry. He then settled there and kept advertising for him.

Rajkumar Shukla was described as a sharecropper, poor, and illiterate. So the statements that are not true are a politician, delegate, and a landlord. The only true statement is a sharecropper.

Derry is drawn towards Mr Lamb because Mr Lamb treats him with kindness, patience, and acceptance instead of pity or fear. He does not stare at Derry’s burnt face or avoid him. Instead, he talks to him naturally, listens to him, asks him questions, and makes Derry feel that he is not ugly or rejected as a whole person. Mr Lamb also shares his own disability, which makes Derry feel understood. His garden, his bees, the open gate, and his wise way of looking at life create a space where Derry feels free, accepted, and interested in the world again.

Tao Ying judged the conductor's behaviour. If he looked responsible, she felt she should pay. If he seemed casual and careless, she did not buy a ticket, treating it as a small punishment for him and a saving for herself.

The phrase means the extreme discomfort caused by heavy make-up in the make-up room. The lights were all incandescent, so the room was very hot, and the make-up made people look and feel miserable.

Both accounts share the theme of oppression and the loss of dignity experienced by children from marginalised communities. In both stories, the girls become aware of unfair treatment in different social systems: Zitkala-Sa faces cultural oppression in a boarding school that tries to suppress Native American identity, while Bama faces caste-based discrimination in everyday life. Both narratives also show a growing sense of resistance and a desire to assert one’s self-respect.

The shadows before noon are the shadows that accompany the lovers as they walk in the morning or early part of the day. They are called the shadows that “were made to blind Others”—that is, they hide the lovers from the eyes of other people. The shadows after noon are the longer shadows that come when the sun is past the head; these do not hide the lovers from others so much as they “work upon our selves” and blind the lovers’ own eyes. So the first kind of shadow represents the secrecy and concealment of early love, while the second represents the self-deception, fading, and dishonesty that can come when love grows weak.

The chapter suggests several positive views of interviews. Some people consider them a source of truth in their highest form and even an art in practice. They are also seen as a useful and serviceable medium of communication, because through interviews we get vivid impressions of contemporary people and important information about events and personalities.

The poet contrasts Time’s rapid flight with the slow movement of hours and clock-work to show how impatient and destructive Time seems. By calling the hours “lazy” and “leaden-stepping” and comparing them to the slow pace of a plummet, Milton suggests that Time may move on and consume what is false and mortal, but it cannot touch what is truly good and eternal.

The story says they were both earmarked for the biscuit factory after school, so that was the most likely place they would find work.

The two poems are matched opposites. The Divine Image presents the Song of Innocence view of human beings: people are naturally linked with Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, and the divine is seen in human goodness. The Human Abstract gives the Song of Experience view: these same virtues become twisted when human beings are ruled by fear, selfishness, cruelty, mystery, and deceit.

So, in Innocence, the human being is shown as kind, loving, and godlike; in Experience, he or she is shown as fallen, divided, and morally distorted. Blake suggests that both sides can exist in an average human being: the ideal, compassionate side and the dark, selfish side. Human life contains both innocence and experience.

The poet feels a deep emotional pain caused by seeing her mother growing old and frail. It is also the childhood fear of losing her mother or being separated from her, which comes back to her when she notices her mother’s ageing face.

Counting up to twelve and keeping still will help us pause from our hurried lives and experience a moment of quiet introspection. In that silence, people may gain self-understanding, feel unity with others, and stop harming nature and one another, even if only for a short time.

Yes. The poem has a real geographical base in the imagined court of Kubla Khan at Xanadu, and it also refers to real-sounding places like the sacred river Alph and Mount Abora. But Coleridge mixes the real with the imaginary to create a surreal effect: the palace, river, caverns, gardens, and sea are described in vivid, dreamlike language; the river runs through “caverns measureless to man” and sinks into a “sunless sea”; the “savage place” is both “holy and enchanted”. The poem keeps shifting between concrete detail and fantasy, so the landscape seems half-real, half-dream. That fusion of fact and imagination gives the poem its magical, uncanny atmosphere.

The poem mentions many things of beauty: the sun, the moon, old and young trees, daffodils, clear rills (small streams), the mid-forest brake with musk-rose blooms, the grandeur of the mighty dead, lovely tales heard or read, and the endless fountain of immortal drink from heaven.

The poet uses vivid visual and auditory imagery to paint the Summer’s day: the trees “like Tassels” swinging, the “Tune” rising from “Miniature Creatures,” the “Psalteries of Summer” that charm the ear, the Sun shining “whole at intervals — / Then Half — then utter hid,” a bird on the fence, a snake winding round a stone, and bright flowers that seem to “soar upon a Stem.” These images make the scene lively, musical, and changing, so it seems more beautiful than any painting.

The lines are:

> “The polished traffic passed with a mind ahead,
> Or if ever aside a moment, then out of sorts
> At having the landscape marred with the artless paint
> Of signs that with N turned wrong and S turned wrong”

These lines show that the city people hardly noticed the stand. If they did notice it, they were annoyed because the signs were wrongly painted and they thought the roadside stand spoiled the beauty of the landscape. Their complaint was about the poor, untidy-looking signs and the way the stand seemed to mar the scenery.

They connect with the poet’s present mood and stage of life. The autumn beauty, dry paths, October twilight, and still sky suggest quietness, ageing, and the fading of things, which reflect Yeats’s own feeling that time has passed and that life is becoming more silent and reflective. The scene outside mirrors the poet’s inner condition.

Denizens means inhabitants, so it suggests the tigers belong naturally to their green world. Chivalric means noble, brave and courteous. Together, these words show the tigers as confident, fearless, and majestic. They move with an effortless dignity and are not afraid of anyone.

At first, the poem seems to be about clocks and timekeeping in a city. The opening lines describe clocktowers, gongs, and different timings, so the reader initially thinks the poet is simply talking about how clocks work in an old well-managed city.

The description is authentic because the poet gives specific, concrete details of decay: the cracked and torn walls, moisture by rains, fallen tiles, whining windows, rats, holes, and the snake-shrine dark with weeds. Such details make the house feel real, not imaginary.

Yes, this kind of decay can be seen in many old village houses in the context of rapid urbanisation, when old family homes are neglected as people move away in search of better lives. The poem suggests just such a decline of an ancestral house.

The poet seems to be speaking from actual experience, because she writes in the first person and recalls her childhood, her great-grandmother, and the family house with intimate familiarity. The poem feels personal and remembered rather than invented.

Natural jobs are the things we must do to live, such as sleeping, eating, dressing and moving about. Because we must do them, we also have to do the work needed to provide for them. This means labour begins with the need to satisfy these natural needs. If another person controls the food, clothes, house or work that we need, that control can turn into slavery. So, the link is: natural needs lead to labour, and when labour and its products are controlled by others, slavery begins.

The mark starts a chain of free-associating thoughts. The narrator moves from the mark to the fire, cigarette smoke, the crimson flag and red knights, then to guesses about the mark itself, lost possessions, the accidental nature of life, the contrast between life and death, the world after death, the dust on the mantelpiece, the tree outside, Shakespeare, self-image, generalisations, rules and traditions, old tablecloths, Whitaker’s Almanack, antiquaries, knowledge, professors, and finally back to the mark when it turns out to be a snail. The whole essay shows the mind moving by sudden leaps from one idea to another.

Bergman remembers several childhood experiences that later influenced his film-making. He recalls sitting under his grandmother’s dining-room table and “listening” to the sunshine, the cathedral bells, and the way light seemed to have sound. He also remembers seeing a picture of Venice come alive when sunlight moved over it, so that the canal seemed to flow and people seemed to move and speak. Another important memory is growing up in a vicarage, where he became familiar with life, death, funerals, marriages, baptisms, sermons, and the idea of the devil. He also cherished his magic lantern with coloured slides, and later his first film projector, which fascinated him and made a great success with its tiny film of a sleeping girl. These memories helped develop his imagination and his love of visual illusion.

The chapter says that all things that are alive are amazing and contrasts the living with the dead or inanimate. So the mark of the animate is being alive, with life/activity as opposed to dead stillness.

Faring forward means going ahead in action even if one ignores the consequences; it is Krishna’s view in the Gita, where duty should be done irrespective of results. Faring well means paying attention to the human consequences of action—avoiding suffering, destruction and injustice as far as possible. Sen argues that Krishna’s stress on duty is important, but it must be supplemented by Arjuna’s concern for what actually happens to people.

Asimov draws a parallel between myths and legends and science fiction by saying that both satisfy the same human desire for wonder and both depict life as we don’t know it. The difference is only in the background: myths work in a prescientific Universe ruled by gods, demons and magic, while science fiction works in a Universe ruled by impersonal laws of nature and their scientific understanding.

Prakriti’s mother reacts with alarm, disbelief, and fear. She cannot understand Prakriti’s excitement, warns her that there will be a price to pay for speaking to the monk, and reminds her of her caste. At first she thinks Prakriti has become intoxicated or bewitched. Later, though she is frightened of the wrong she is asked to do, she still agrees to help her daughter because she loves her and wants to save her from suffering.

Manjula’s love for her sister appears genuine and deep. She says she loved Malini, missed her after her death, and recalls that she nursed her and was with her in her last months. Her eyes moisten when she speaks of her. At the same time, the play also shows that her feelings are mixed with self-awareness, pride, and some rivalry: she admits Malini was more attractive, more intelligent and more vivacious, and she often compares herself with her. So her love is real, but not sentimental or simple; it is affectionate, painful, and tied to her own sense of being the “second best.”