Ball Poem Extra Questions Answers Class 10 English CBSE

Class 10 ‘Ball’ poem extra questions given here include questions from CBSE official question Bank (Q.B) and questions from other previous Board exams. Some other extra questions with answers are also given.

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Ball Poem Tutorial

CBSE Question Bank – 2021

Answer the following in 20-30 words

1. If you were the poet, which toy would you use, instead of a ball. Give a reason for your response.
2. Do you think the ‘I’ in the poem is the poet or an observer? Give a reason for your choice of response.
3. Explain how, “Out of sight, out of mind” might apply to the boy, towards the end of the poem.
4. A popular quote states: Responsibility is self-taught. How does the poem address this thought?

Answers

Ans.1. Toys have a very special place in the lives of children. If I were a poet, I would use a doll instead of a ball. The reason for using a doll would be that a child keeps the doll with extreme care and love as a baby. A doll appears soft and harmless and Children connect by befriending their dolls. The loss of doll would express the pain and difficulty in accepting the bitter truth more efficiently

Ans.2. The ‘I’ in the poem, is the poet as in a few lines the poet says that he doesn’t want to intrude on the inconsolable boy. Instead, he wants to leave the boy alone to develop a new sense of responsibility.

Ans.3. . Towards the end of the poem, the boy saw his ball going ‘out of his sight’. With that, he recalled the time that he spent with the ball in his past childhood days. However, the ball is no more with the boy and slowly, it will get ‘out of his mind’ too.

Ans.4. The responsibility referred in the poem is how to stand up or bear the loss through self-understanding and trying to console oneself on his own as the boy who lost his ball was trying to do.

Answer the following in 40-50 words

1. Suggest a suitable by-line for ‘The Ball Poem” with a reason for your choice. [CBSE OD, 2020]

2. Recount your reaction to the loss of a favourite object as a very young child. Would you have behaved the same way now? Explain with reason.

3. What feelings do you think, might be experienced, at the loss of a mobile phone, for a youngster today? Explain how these would be different from those felt by the boy in the poem. [CBSE OD, 2020]

4. When we think of losses, we generally think of people or possessions. Time is considered a very precious commodity.
Explain why time can probably be one of the things people bitterly regret losing/wasting. [CBSE OD, 2020]

5. Imagine you are the boy’s elder sibling. He tells you about the loss of the ball on reaching home. How would you assure him?
You may begin your reply like this:
I don’t think you should take this to heart. You see…

Answers

Ans.1. The by-line can be ‘Loss growing up and Transformation, This is something of a coming of age that is seen through the lens of loss and suffering. The child comes to understand the world better when he understands that he is never going to get his lost ball back. It is gone for good and there is nothing anyone can do about it. The child undergoes a transformation.

Ans.2. Once as a young child, I lost my favourite piggy bank that my father brought from abroad. It was a beautiful giraffe-shaped money bank. I cried for hours on losing it. But today, as I remember that incident, I feel my reaction at that time was natural as it was my new experience of losing beloved things. I wouldn’t have reacted the same way now as I have grown-up and understood that loss is a part and parcel of life

Ans.3. The feelings of a youngster on the loss of his mobile phone today would be very different from those felt by the boy in the poem. The boy in the poem was a little kid. It was his first experience of losing a thing beloved to him. However, a youngster today might not react in such a sad way as kids today are not so attached with their possessions. They have become more materialistic with time.

Ans.4. ‘A stitch on time saves nine’. ‘The time that flies, comes back never’. So, we should not waste our precious time because time doesn’t work according to us best, we need to work according to time we should utilize the present fully because we can’t do anything about the time that has passed and the future is uncertain.

Ans.5. I don’t think you should take this to heart. You see there will be several moments when a person will have to suffer the bitter loss of their beloved possessions. That’s a part and parcel of life. Losses are inevitable. People do lose materials and even relations. But that doesn’t bring life to standstill, right? People move on. I want you to be brave enough to accept the reality and get over it

Answer in 100-120 words (beyond text and across texts)

1. The poem deals with a child understanding loss for the first time. Matches and championships too, deal with a different sense of loss.
Explain how games and sports are a good way to train children to take losses in their stride

2. If the Buddha were to summarise the life lesson of “The Ball Poem’, what would that sermon be? Think and create this address for people of your age.

Answers

Ans.1. Sports are an amazing way to teach children how to accept the losses and failures in life. Life is full of inevitable happenings, losses and failures. In the same way, games and sports are full of uncertainties and losses. A player may win a tournament one day, and lose it the other day. However, no strong player may ever stop playing due to his/her failure in the match. He will definitely take advantage of his failure to learn his shortcomings and work even harder for the next tournament. In the same way, when a loss of a beloved possession takes place in life, a person shouldn’t bring his/her life to a standstill. He should accept his loss bravely and move on in life.

Ans.2. Losses are integral part of life. We must look at them in totality. First of all, we must always keep in mind that life’s each and everything is God’s gift for which we must be thankful. The things which God has given can be taken back anything. We must not be attached with these gifts. Once these attached gifts are taken away, we become sad we feel the lost thing is irreplaceable with any other things.

The lost ball stands for the general losses a human being suffers as he grows old. The losses may be the loss of a personal possession or the death of a dear one or separation from a beloved one. As long as there is life, there will be many types of losses; what each one has to learn is bearing those losses.

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