5 Exercises for Precis Writing with Hints for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Unsolved Exercises with Hints

Exercise 1

A significant improvement in employment opportunities for women is linked up with an overall improvement in the employment situation. Nevertheless, it should be possible for the employment policy to work towards a rise in the share of women in the organised sector (comprising the public sec-tor and the private corporate sector) which generally provides more secure and better paid employment than the unorganised sector. At present their share is very low (about 12 per cent). To raise this share, it will be necessary, firstly, to induce and encourage employers to overcome the bias against employment of women, which, to an extent, still persists though it is on the wane. Secondly education and training opportunities for women should be further expanded, diversified made more easily accessible.

Thirdly, residential accommodation for working mothers should be increased several fold. Fourthly, there should be much greater availability of creches and other facilities for child care during the working hours of mothers. Finally, public opinion should be educated to shed the traditional bias against female education, training and work away from home. This bias continues to be quite strong in some parts of the country.

Hints: Main Ideas: 

1. To provide more employment opportunities to women overall employment situation must improve.
2. Women’s employment share in the organised sector must be raised (which at present is only 12 percent).
3. To raise this share, the employers must give up bias against employment of women; more training opportunities should be provided to women; there should be increase in residential accommodation and facilities for child care for working mothers etc.

Exercise 2

This enormous increase of population will create immense problems. By A.D. 2000, unless something desperate happens, there will be as many as 7,000,000,000, people on the surface of this earth! So this is a problem which you are going to see in your life-time.

Why is this enormous increase in population taking place? It is really due to the spread of the knowledge and the practice of what is coming to be called Death control. You have heard of Birth control? Death control is something rather different. Death control recognizes the work of the doctors and the nurses and the hospitals and the health services in keeping alive people who, a few years ago, would have died of some of the incredibly serious killing diseases, as they used to be. Squalid conditions, which we can remedy by an improved standard of living, caused a lot of disease and dirt.

Medical examinations at school catch dis-eases early and ensure healthier school children. Scientists are at work stamping out malaria and other more deadly diseases. If you are seriously ill there is an ambulance to take you to a modern hospital. Medical care helps to keep people alive longer. We used to think seventy as a good age; now eighty, ninety, it may be, are coming to be recognized as a normal age for human beings. Death control, and fewer children are dying, so the population of the world is shooting up.

Hints: Main Ideas

1 The population of the world is expected to be 7,000,000,000 by A.D. 2000.

2. It is increasing at a rapid pace due to Death control through medical aid.
3. Because of medical check-ups at school, diseases are detected and controlled early.
4. Now fewer children die and average life of man has greatly increased.

Exercise 3

Where the sea is concerned, we are scarcely, at the present time, out of the old stone age. In the Stone Age, the people simply went out, killed wild animals-if they were lucky-and had a good meal; if they were unlucky they just went hungry. At the present day, we do almost the same thing in the sea, hunting •wild fish from boats. In the future, perhaps, we shall cultivate the sea; we shall grow small fish and fish spawn in tanks, take them to the part of the ocean where we want them, let them grow to the right size, and harvest them. This is not fantasy, because, at the present time, fish are being cultivated like that in ponds and tanks in India, and various parts of the far east so that the people there have a supply of protein. There is a great development possible.

A lot of things are going to happen in next fifty years. It is enormously important to increase the yield of grain plants and a great deal has happened through the work of the geneticists in the last few years. For instance, there has been an enormous world increase in the production of what Americans call corn (maize to us) due to the development of new strains, Throughout agriculture geneticists are improving plants to get higher yields.

Hints: Main Ideas: 

1 At present, we hunt wild fish from boats, as in the Stone Age the people hunted wild animals.

2. In the future, the fish are likely to be cultivated in the ocean.
3. Even at present they are being cultivated in India and the Far East and provide protein to their people.
4. In the last few years, the geneticists have greatly helped in developing new varieties of grain yielding plants.
5. The next fifty years are crucial in this respect.

Exercise 4

By far the most logical step to relieve the house-wife of routine, is to provide a robot slave which can be trained to the requirements of a particular home and can be programmed to carry out half a dozen or more standard operations (for example, scrubbing, sweeping and dusting, washing up, laying tables, making beds), when so switched by the house-wife. It will be a machine having no more emotions than a car. but having a memory for instructions and a limited degree of instructed or built-in adaptability according to the positions in which it finds various types of objects. It will operate other more specialized machines, for example, the vacuum cleaner or clothes-washing machine.

There are no problems in the production of such a domestic robot to which we do have already the glimmering of a solution. When I have discussed this kind of device with housewives, some 90 percent of them have the immediate reaction, ‘How soon can I buy one?’ The other 10 percent have the reaction, ‘I would be terrified to have it moving about my house’-but when one explains to them that it could be switched off or unplugged or stopped without the slightest difficulty, or made to go and put itself away, in a cupboard at any time, they quickly realize that it is a highly desirable object.

Hints: Main points

1. To relieve the house-wife of routine, she should be provided with a robot.
2. The robot can be programmed to do all the common household chores.
3. It can operate other specialized ma-chines, such as the vacuum cleaner and the clothes-washing machine.
4. There is no difficulty. in producing such a robot.
5. Such a robot can be easily switched off, unplugged or packed away in a cupboard.
6. A overwhelming majority of women have welcomed the idea of such a robot.

Exercise 5

Most of the people who appear most often and most gloriously in the history books are great conquerors and generals and soldiers, whereas the people who really helped civilization forward are often never mentioned at all. We do not know who first set a broken leg, or launched a seaworthy boat, or calculated the length of the year, or manured a field; but we know all about the killers and destroyers. People think a great deal of them, so much so that on all the highest pillars in the great cities of the world you will find the figure of a conqueror or a general or a soldier. And I think most people believe that the greatest countries are those that have beaten in battle the greatest number of other countries and ruled over them as conquerors. It is just possible they are, but they are not the most civilized. Animals fight; so do savages; hence to be good at fighting is to be good in the way in which an animal or a savage is good, but it is not to be civilized. Even being good at getting other people to fight for you and telling them how to do it most efficiently – this, after all, is what conquerors and generals have done – is not being civilized. People fight to settle quarrels. Fighting means killing, and civilized people ought to be able to find some way of settling their disputes other than by the seeing side can kill off the greater number of the other side, and then saying that side which has killed most has won. And not only has won, but because it has won, has been in the right. For that is what going to war means; it means saying that might is right.

Hints: Main Ideas: 

1 The conquerors, generals and soldiers who are, in fact, killers, find their names in history books and their statues on pillars in big cities the world over.

2. The people who really did immense good to humanity are forgotten.
3. The fighters fight like animals and cannot be called civilized.
4. The civilized people are expected to settle disputes without fighting.
5. The tragedy is that the side which kills the greater number of the other side wins and is known to be right. Might is right.