CBSE Class 9 English Sample Paper 2026 (with Solutions) — Free PDF
This is a full-length CBSE Class 9 English (Language and Literature) paper built to the board's own pattern: 80 marks in 3 hours, split as 20 marks of read
TL;DR: This is a full-length CBSE Class 9 English (Language and Literature) paper built to the board's own pattern: 80 marks in 3 hours, split as 20 marks of…
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This is a full-length CBSE Class 9 English (Language and Literature) paper built to the board's own pattern: 80 marks in 3 hours, split as 20 marks of reading, 20 of writing and grammar, and 40 of literature. Both reading passages are printed in full on this page, so every comprehension question can actually be answered from what is in front of you. The literature section refers to the prescribed textbooks Beehive and Moments and asks for your own words rather than reproduced extracts. Every question is followed by a full model answer, and the longer answers set out what a full-credit response needs to contain.
Board: CBSE · Class: Class 9 · Subject: English · Total: 80 marks · Time: 3 hours
Section A — Reading: Passage I (10 marks) — 10 marks
Read the passage given above and answer the questions that follow. Each question carries the marks shown against it.
The oldest living thing in the district is not in the forest. It stands at the edge of a bus stand, behind a tea stall, and it is a tamarind tree that the municipal records list simply as an obstruction.
Nobody planted it on purpose. An old woman who sold tamarind in the market is said to have spat out a seed there some time before Independence, and the seed did what seeds do. The tree grew crookedly, because a wall was built too close to it in 1962 and it had to lean out over the road to find light. That lean is now the most useful thing about it: the whole bus stand sits in its shadow, and on an afternoon in May the difference between standing under the tamarind and standing four steps outside it is the difference between waiting and suffering.
A tree of this size moves an extraordinary quantity of water. On a hot day a large tamarind can lift more than two hundred litres from the soil and release it through its leaves as vapour, and every litre that evaporates carries heat away with it. This is why the air under a big tree is cooler than the air under a tin roof of the same size. The roof only blocks the sun. The tree blocks the sun and runs a pump.
The tea stall owner, Kamala, has kept the tree alive twice. Once she argued with a contractor who wanted to cut it for a wider footpath, and once she paid, out of her own takings, for the concrete to be broken open around its base, because the roots were being strangled and the upper branches had begun to die back. She does not describe either act as conservation. She says that people sit longer where it is cool, and that a person who sits longer drinks two teas instead of one.
Q1. How did the tamarind tree come to grow at the bus stand? (1 mark) (1 mark)
Answer: Nobody planted it deliberately. An old woman who sold tamarind in the market is said to have spat out a seed at that spot some time before Independence, and the seed germinated and grew.
Q2. Why does the tree lean out over the road, and why is that lean useful? (2 marks) (2 marks)
Answer: A wall was built too close to the tree in 1962, so it had to grow outwards over the road to reach the light. The lean is useful because it places the tree's canopy over the bus stand, so the whole waiting area now falls within its shade.
Q3. Explain the difference the writer draws between a tree and a tin roof of the same size. (3 marks) (3 marks)
Answer: A tin roof only blocks the sun, so it stops direct radiation but does nothing to lower the temperature of the air beneath it. A tree does both: it blocks the sun and, in addition, draws water up from the soil and releases it through its leaves as vapour. Because evaporation absorbs heat, every litre that leaves the leaves carries heat away with it, so the tree actively cools the air rather than merely shading it — the writer sums this up by saying the tree 'blocks the sun and runs a pump'.
Q4. What two things has Kamala done to keep the tree alive? (2 marks) (2 marks)
Answer: She argued with a contractor who intended to cut the tree down in order to widen the footpath, and she paid from her own earnings to have the concrete around its base broken open, because the roots were being strangled and the upper branches had started to die back.
Q5. What does Kamala's explanation of her actions tell us about her? (2 marks) (2 marks)
Answer: She refuses to describe what she did as conservation and explains it in plain commercial terms — people sit longer where it is cool, and someone who sits longer buys two teas instead of one. This suggests a practical, unsentimental woman who does not claim any nobler motive than she has; it also quietly makes the writer's point that protecting a tree and acting in one's own interest need not be opposed.
Section A — Reading: Passage II (10 marks) — 10 marks
Read the passage given above and answer the questions that follow. Each question carries the marks shown against it.
When a violin is played well, no part of it is doing anything complicated. A horsehair bow, coated with resin, is dragged across a stretched string. The resin makes the hair grip the string and pull it sideways until the tension is too great; the string snaps back, is caught again, and pulled again. This happens some hundreds of times a second, and the ear hears it not as a series of catches and releases but as a single steady note.
The string itself moves almost no air, and on its own it would be nearly inaudible. What makes the sound is the body of the instrument. The vibration passes through the bridge, a thin piece of maple standing on the belly of the violin, and sets the whole wooden shell shaking. Inside, a small rod called the sound post — held in place by nothing but pressure, and never glued — carries the vibration from the front plate to the back. Move that rod two millimetres and the instrument changes voice.
This is why a violin cannot be fully designed. The maker can control the arching of the plates, their thickness, the density of the spruce and the maple, but the finished sound emerges from the interaction of all of them, and it is not predictable in advance. Makers proceed by tapping the plates and listening, thinning them a shaving at a time, and stopping when the tone seems right — a method that would embarrass an engineer.
And yet the instruments that are most prized are three hundred years old, made in a small Italian town by men who had no acoustics, no measurement, and no way to see what they were doing. Every attempt to explain their superiority — the varnish, the density of Alpine wood grown in a cold century, the shape of the f-holes — has been argued for and argued against. It is possible that the real answer is duller and more humbling: that they made a very great number of violins, listened carefully, and kept what worked.
Q1. Describe briefly how a bow makes a violin string sound. (2 marks) (2 marks)
Answer: The bow's horsehair is coated with resin, which makes it grip the string and drag it sideways until the tension becomes too great. The string then snaps back, is caught by the hair again and pulled again. This catching and releasing happens hundreds of times a second.
Q2. Why does the ear hear a steady note rather than a series of catches? (1 mark) (1 mark)
Answer: Because the catch-and-release cycle repeats so rapidly — some hundreds of times a second — that the ear cannot separate the individual events and merges them into one continuous note.
Q3. What is the function of the bridge and the sound post? (3 marks) (3 marks)
Answer: The string by itself moves almost no air and would be nearly inaudible, so the sound must come from the body of the instrument. The bridge, a thin piece of maple standing on the belly of the violin, carries the string's vibration down into the wooden shell and sets the whole of it shaking. The sound post, a small rod inside the instrument held only by pressure and never glued, transmits that vibration from the front plate through to the back, so that the entire body resonates — and because its position is so critical, moving it two millimetres changes the instrument's voice.
Q4. Why does the writer say that a violin 'cannot be fully designed'? (2 marks) (2 marks)
Answer: Because although the maker can control individual variables — the arching of the plates, their thickness, the density of the spruce and maple — the finished sound arises from the interaction of all of them together, and that result cannot be predicted in advance from the parts. Makers therefore work by tapping the plates, listening, and removing a shaving at a time until the tone seems right, rather than by calculation.
Q5. What 'duller and more humbling' explanation does the writer offer for the excellence of the old Italian violins? (2 marks) (2 marks)
Answer: That there may be no secret at all — no special varnish, wood or shape. The makers may simply have produced a very large number of violins, listened carefully to each, and kept what worked, so that the excellence came from patient trial and selection rather than from any hidden knowledge.
Section B — Writing and Grammar (20 marks) — 20 marks
Answer all questions. Marks are shown against each question.
Q1. You are Ananya/Aditya, Head Boy/Head Girl of Green Valley School, Nagpur. Write a notice in about 50 words informing students of a tree-plantation drive to be held on the school grounds next Saturday, with timings and what to bring. (5 marks) (5 marks)
Answer: A full-credit notice is enclosed in a box, with the school name at the top, the word NOTICE centred, the date on the left, and a short underlined heading such as 'Tree Plantation Drive'. The body, in about fifty words, states what is happening, when, where, who should come and what to bring: for example that a tree-plantation drive will be held on the school grounds on Saturday, 24 August, from 8.00 a.m. to 11.00 a.m.; that students of classes VIII to X may participate; that they should report in sports uniform and bring a small spade or trowel and a water bottle; and that names must be given to the class teacher by Thursday. It ends with the writer's signature, name and designation — Ananya/Aditya, Head Girl/Head Boy. The notice uses no first person and no complete-sentence storytelling; it is brief and factual.
Q2. Write a short descriptive paragraph in about 100 words on 'A tree I pass every day', using at least three details of sight, sound or touch. (5 marks) (5 marks)
Answer: A strong answer chooses concrete detail over general praise. For example: The gulmohar at the corner of our lane is not a beautiful tree for most of the year. Its bark is grey and cracked, and a strip of it has been rubbed smooth where the milkman leans his cycle every morning. In April, though, it turns scarlet almost overnight, and for three weeks the road beneath it is covered with fallen petals that stick to the soles of your shoes after rain. Sparrows quarrel in it at six o'clock with a noise out of all proportion to their size. I have never once seen anyone stop to look at it. (About 100 words, with details of sight, sound and touch, and a closing observation rather than a summary.)
Q3. Fill in the blanks with the correct tense form: (i) The bell ______ (ring) before we reached the classroom. (ii) Water ______ (boil) at 100 degrees Celsius. (iii) Look! The baby ______ (cry). (3 marks) (3 marks)
Answer: (i) had rung — the past perfect, because the ringing was completed before the past action of reaching. (ii) boils — the simple present, used for a general or scientific truth. (iii) is crying — the present continuous, since 'Look!' signals something happening at this moment.
Q4. Combine each pair into a single sentence as directed: (i) He was tired. He continued walking. (Use 'although') (ii) She is honest. Everyone knows it. (Use a noun clause) (2 marks) (2 marks)
Answer: (i) Although he was tired, he continued walking. (ii) Everyone knows that she is honest.
Q5. Change the voice: (i) The gardener waters the plants every morning. (ii) A new bridge is being built across the river. (2 marks) (2 marks)
Answer: (i) The plants are watered by the gardener every morning. (ii) They are building a new bridge across the river. In the second the passive is turned into the active, and since the doer is not named an indefinite subject such as 'they' or 'workers' is supplied.
Q6. Correct the errors: (i) He is one of the best student in the class. (ii) I have went there yesterday. (iii) Each of the boys have a bag. (3 marks) (3 marks)
Answer: (i) 'student' should be 'students' — 'one of the' is followed by a plural noun: 'He is one of the best students in the class.' (ii) 'have went' should be 'went' — 'yesterday' fixes a finished past time, so the simple past is required: 'I went there yesterday.' (iii) 'have' should be 'has' — 'each' is singular, so the verb must be singular: 'Each of the boys has a bag.'
Section C — Literature (40 marks) — 40 marks
Answer all questions with reference to the prescribed textbooks Beehive and Moments. Marks are shown against each question. Answer in your own words; do not copy from the text.
Q1. In 'The Fun They Had', what does Margie find strange about the old kind of school, and what does she come to feel about it by the end? (4 marks) (4 marks)
Answer: Margie is astonished by almost everything in the old school. She cannot understand why children of different ages would be taught together in one building, why a man rather than a machine would be the teacher, or why a teacher would take the pupils' homework away instead of marking it instantly as her mechanical teacher does. She is puzzled that a man could know as much as a telebook teacher. By the end her puzzlement has turned into longing: she thinks about the children walking to school together, sitting in the same room, helping one another with their homework and laughing on the way home, and she realises they must have enjoyed it. The story's irony is that the mechanical teacher gives her a lesson while she is dreaming of the school that had no machines at all.
Q2. How does the poet present the wind in 'Wind', and what attitude does he finally recommend? (4 marks) (4 marks)
Answer: In the first part of the poem the wind is presented as a destructive bully: it breaks shutters, scatters papers, throws down books, and it crumbles weak houses, weak doors, weak rafters, weak bodies, weak hearts and weak lives. It mocks the frail and destroys them. But the poet observes that the wind does not damage what is strong — it only fans a strong fire and makes it roar and flourish. His conclusion is that we should not plead with the wind but prepare for it: build firm houses, strengthen the body, make the heart steadfast. The wind becomes a symbol of hardship, and the recommended attitude is not resistance or complaint but the building of strength, since adversity destroys the weak and improves the strong.
Q3. Why does the narrator call Evelyn Glennie's success 'a triumph of will' in 'The Sound of Music'? (4 marks) (4 marks)
Answer: Evelyn Glennie began to lose her hearing at the age of eight and was profoundly deaf by eleven, a condition that would ordinarily end any hope of a musical career. She refused to accept it. She persuaded a percussionist, Ron Forbes, to teach her, and he showed her to detect the notes not through her ears but through her body — feeling the higher drum from the waist up and the lower drum from the waist down. She learned to sense music through her fingertips, her cheekbones, her skin and her feet, sometimes playing barefoot so that the vibrations travelled up through the floor. Against her teachers' advice she applied to the Royal Academy of Music and won its highest awards, and she went on to become the world's first full-time solo percussionist. Her achievement was not a matter of luck or accident but of a sustained refusal to be defeated, which is why it is called a triumph of will.
Q4. In 'The Little Girl', how does Kezia's view of her father change, and what causes the change? (4 marks) (4 marks)
Answer: At the beginning Kezia is frightened of her father. He seems huge and severe, his voice is loud, and her stammering in his presence irritates him; when she accidentally tears up his important speech to stuff a pincushion for his birthday, he beats her hands with a ruler and she concludes that he is simply a cruel giant. The change comes when her grandmother is away and her mother is taken ill to hospital, and Kezia, alone in the house, has a nightmare. Her father comes to her, carries her to his own bed, tells her to rub her feet against his legs to get warm, and falls asleep beside her. Lying there she notices how tired he is, and she understands for the first time that he works hard all day and has no one to look after him, and that his shortness is exhaustion rather than cruelty. Her fear turns into a protective tenderness — she realises he has a 'big heart'.
Q5. What lesson does the narrator learn in 'Iswaran the Storyteller' or 'The Beggar', and how is it conveyed? (4 marks) (4 marks)
Answer: In 'The Beggar' the lesson is that a person is changed not by charity but by being given work and being treated as capable of it. Lushkoff begs by telling a false story of being a dismissed schoolteacher, and Sergei, who catches the lie, offers him not money but the job of chopping wood. Lushkoff is barely able to do it, and the reader later learns that the cook Olga in fact did the chopping for him while scolding and pitying him. Two years afterwards Lushkoff, now a notary earning a salary, tells Sergei that it was Olga who saved him — her words and her example changed him, and the work gave him back his self-respect. The lesson is conveyed through this reversal: the man who thought he was reforming the beggar had less effect than the servant who quietly did the work beside him.
Q6. In 'A Truly Beautiful Mind', what qualities of Einstein does the chapter emphasise besides his scientific genius? (4 marks) (4 marks)
Answer: The chapter is careful to present Einstein as more than a physicist. It stresses that he was a slow developer who did not speak fluently until he was well past two, was called Bruder Langweil — brother boring — by the family maid, and disliked the regimented schooling of Munich so much that he left the school and the country at fifteen. It emphasises his independence of mind: he questioned what he was told rather than memorising it, and this same habit produced both his trouble at school and his physics. Above all it dwells on his moral seriousness. He wrote to President Roosevelt warning that Germany might build an atomic bomb, was appalled when the weapon was used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and afterwards campaigned publicly for nuclear disarmament and world peace, so that by his death he was regarded as a world citizen as much as a scientist. The title refers to that combination of intellect and conscience.
Q7. Discuss the theme of courage in any one prose lesson you have studied, in about 100–120 words. (8 marks) (8 marks)
Answer: A full-credit answer states a thesis, supports it with two or more specific incidents, and closes with an evaluation. Taking 'The Snake and the Mirror': courage in the story is comically absent and that is the point. The homeopathic doctor, who has just been admiring his own handsome face in the mirror and planning to marry a rich woman with a fat purse, is reduced to complete helplessness when a snake coils itself round his arm and holds its hood inches from the mirror. He sits absolutely still, not out of bravery but out of terror, and makes silent resolutions to be humble if he survives. When the snake finally slides away he escapes at once, and a thief later strips his room of everything he owned. The story suggests that self-importance is fragile — one genuine danger dissolves it entirely — and that the vanity a man believes to be confidence is not courage at all.
Q8. 'A poem can teach without preaching.' Discuss with reference to any one poem from Beehive, in about 100–120 words. (8 marks) (8 marks)
Answer: A full-credit answer argues the claim rather than summarising. Taking 'The Road Not Taken': Frost never tells the reader what to do. He describes a traveller in a yellow wood facing two paths, choosing one, and keeping the other for another day while knowing he will probably never return. The poem's moral force comes from a detail the careless reader misses — the two roads were 'really about the same', worn 'about the same', and equally covered in untrodden leaves. The famous closing lines, spoken 'with a sigh' and set 'ages and ages hence', are the traveller's future account of himself, not the poet's verdict; he will claim a difference that the poem has already denied. In refusing to preach, Frost teaches something sharper than any instruction: that we make our choices with far less knowledge than we later pretend, and that we edit them into significance afterwards.
FAQs
What is the total marks for Class 9 English?
Class 9 English is out of 80 marks; 20 marks are for internal assessment.
Which texts are prescribed for Class 9 English?
Beehive and Moments are the main textbooks; questions are based on poems and stories from these.
How can I improve my comprehension skills?
Read diverse materials regularly, practice skimming and scanning, and answer comprehension questions daily.
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