Q1.
I. Write a paragraph about a place that you have visited which has stayed in your memory.
Remember to mention the following:
• Why did you go there?
• Who did you travel with?
• How did you prepare for the travel?
• Where did you stay?
• What activities did you do there?
Answer
What the task asks for: one paragraph — a single unbroken block — that answers all five questions without reading like a form. The way to do that is to keep them in the order given but hide the joins: purpose, company, preparation, stay, activities, and then one closing sentence saying why the place stayed with you.
Language to use: simple past for the events (we reached, we walked), past perfect for anything that happened earlier (we had booked, we had packed), and past continuous for the background (it was raining, the boats were rocking). Add sense detail — one sound, one smell, one colour — because a memory without a sense in it reads like an itinerary.
Sample answer:
The place I remember best is Majuli, the river island in the Brahmaputra, where we went in December because my father had been reading about the satras and wanted to see one before the erosion took more of the island. There were four of us — my parents, my younger sister and I — and we had prepared for a week, since nothing there can be arranged at the last minute: we had booked a bamboo cottage by email, borrowed a heavy quilt each from my aunt, and been warned that the last ferry from Nimati Ghat leaves before dark. The crossing itself took an hour and a half on a flat wooden boat loaded with two motorcycles and a great many people carrying vegetables, and my sister was certain we would sink. We stayed in a cottage on stilts at Garamur, with a bamboo floor that creaked all night and a window that opened straight on to a paddy field. In three days we cycled to Kamalabari satra and watched the monks rehearse a bhaona, sat through an afternoon of mask-making at Samaguri where an old man let my sister paint a demon’s eyebrow, and walked out at dawn to the wetlands where hundreds of migratory birds were feeding in the shallow water. What has stayed with me is not any one of those things but the silence at night — no traffic at all, only the river moving somewhere in the dark, and the knowledge that a little more of the island would be gone by the time I came back.
The place I remember best is Majuli, the river island in the Brahmaputra, where we went in December because my father had been reading about the satras and wanted to see one before the erosion took more of the island. There were four of us — my parents, my younger sister and I — and we had prepared for a week, since nothing there can be arranged at the last minute: we had booked a bamboo cottage by email, borrowed a heavy quilt each from my aunt, and been warned that the last ferry from Nimati Ghat leaves before dark. The crossing itself took an hour and a half on a flat wooden boat loaded with two motorcycles and a great many people carrying vegetables, and my sister was certain we would sink. We stayed in a cottage on stilts at Garamur, with a bamboo floor that creaked all night and a window that opened straight on to a paddy field. In three days we cycled to Kamalabari satra and watched the monks rehearse a bhaona, sat through an afternoon of mask-making at Samaguri where an old man let my sister paint a demon’s eyebrow, and walked out at dawn to the wetlands where hundreds of migratory birds were feeding in the shallow water. What has stayed with me is not any one of those things but the silence at night — no traffic at all, only the river moving somewhere in the dark, and the knowledge that a little more of the island would be gone by the time I came back.
Why this paragraph works: every one of the five required points is answered, but none of them is announced. The preparation arrives as a reason (“since nothing there can be arranged at the last minute”), the accommodation arrives with a detail that makes it real (a creaking bamboo floor), and the activities are three specific incidents rather than a list of nouns. The last sentence does the job the poem does — it says why the place matters, not what was in it.