https://www.facebook.com/events/202501190107150/
omo
1.
a)
Even though recent legal changes have made it easier, even in America,
to claw back some of the money paid to failed bosses, in practice
firms will only try to do that if there is cast-iron evidence of
fault, such as a financial misstatement.
b)
Robert Marcus is set to take over as boss on January 1st and if
rumours are to be believed, that will be just in time for the cable
firm to be bought by one of a host of rivals that are now circling it.
c)
A change-of-control clause in his contract means he could go straight
back out of the door with a "golden goodbye" of over $56m.
d)
Is the new boss of Time Warner Cable about to become one of the
luckiest-ever winners of the great chief-executive pay lottery?
OMO
2.
a)
He has adapted Homer, Virgil and Thucydides for the radio and, as a
labour of love and at a rate of a paragraph a day, he has translated
Herodotus, the man Cicero called "the Father of History" and who Mr.
Holland refers to as "the most entertaining of historians".
b)
Over the course of the past decade Tom Holland, a British popular
historian, has produced a succession of highly readable works of
fiction and non-fiction about the classical world.
c)
The Greek word "history" meant something more like "investigation",
and Herodotus's curiosity led him to explore the structure, customs
and past of all the then known world.
d)
This lively, engaging version of the "Histories" written by Herodotus
around 440 B.C. provides ample support for what might otherwise appear
to be a wild exaggeration.
omo
3.
a)
It is hard to be sure, since the huge fall in worldwide mortality
since 1950 makes comparisons hard.
b)
But according to Delia Grace of the International Livestock Research
Institute in Nairobi, zoonoses cause a fifth of premature deaths in
poor countries.
c)
Zoonoses – diseases transmitted from animals to people – seem to be
becoming more serious.
d)
That cuts the chance of transmission, but means that a disease that
crosses into people is likely to do more harm
4.
a)
You will be more creative, determined, and focused than ever before.
b)
It is absolutely amazing how much you can accomplish if you break your
tasks down into bite-sized pieces, set deadlines, and then do one
piece at a time, every single day – "By the yard it's hard; but inch
by inch, anything's a cinch."
c)
Great men and women are those who make clear, unequivocal commitments
and then refuse to budge from them, no matter what happens.
d)
When you make a firm commitment to achieve a particular goal, and you
put aside all excuses, it is very much like stepping on the
accelerator of your subconscious mind.
5.There is an unwritten social contract between scientists and
society: an unspoken agreement that gives science a creative
separateness from involvement with goals, values and institutions
other than its own. This has made it possible for science to be able
to pursue long-term goals, even in a society such as ours, which
thinks only in the short term. But this same social contract is
responsible for the troubling disparity between the sophistication of
our science and the relatively primitive state of our social and
political relationships.
With respect to scientists, we can conclude that
a)
In today's public domain, scientists contribute to progress in the
scientific arena but they are not nearly as influential as they should
be in public affairs.
b)
Scientists' importance, the significance of their work, and the
promises and dangers it can host for our communal life is underplayed.
c)
Scientists belong to the intellectual elite who need not sign social
contracts with ordinary society.
d)
It is time that scientists eschew long-term goals and focus on short
term, socially relevant goals.
PC
6. In the sum over histories, there is only one completely uniform and
regular history, and it will have the greatest probability, but many
other histories that are very slightly irregular will have
probabilities that are almost as high. That is why inflation (the
exponential expansion of space in the early universe) predicts that
the very early universe is likely to be slightly non-uniform,
corresponding to the small variations in the temperature that were
observed. The irregularities in the early universe are lucky for us.
They are important because if some regions had a slightly higher
density than others, the gravitational attraction of the extra density
would slow the expansion of that region compared with its
surroundings. As the force of gravity slowly draws matter together, it
can eventually cause it to collapse to form galaxies and stars, which
can lead to planets and, on at least one occasion, people. So look
carefully at the map of the microwave sky. It is the blueprint for all
the structure in the universe. ___________________________________
a)
We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.
b)
In order to make predictions in cosmology, we need to calculate the
probabilities of different states of the entire universe at the
present time.
c)
One can use the laws of physics to calculate how this history develops
with time – we create history by our observation, rather than history
creating us.
d)
If one were religious, one could say that God really does play dice.
SC 7
Select all that are correct:
a)
In the sweaty heat of northern Mozambique, Vale, a Brazilian mining
giant, is digging coals at its mine near the village of Moatize.
b)
A 400,000-tonne mound sits ready to burn. The mine can churn off 4,000
tonnes an hour but the railways and ports cannot cope.
c)
Vale is working for improving a line through Malawi to take the coal for export.
d)
OAS Construtora, another Brazilian firm, has signed a deal with the
minor to build part of a new port
e)
at Nacala, 1,000 km (620 miles) to the north-east.
SC 8
Select all that are correct:
a)
Scientists discovered a new species of snail (Zospeum tholussum) in
one of the world's 20 deepest cave systems, Lukina Jama–Trojama in
Croatia.
b)
These are land, air-breathing, minute, fragile snails that have lost
visual orientation and are considered to be true eutroglobionts, or
exclusive cave-dwellers.
c)
The animals were found at the remarkable depth of 980 m, in an unnamed
chamber full of sand and a small stream running through them.
d)
Their preference of a muddy habitat and the fact that they are located
usually near the drainage system of the cave, in a close proximity to
running water,
e)
suggest that these animals are not exactly immobile.
SC 9
Select all that are correct:
a)
"A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means
a life of event," wrote Henry Austen for his spinster sister Jane.
b)
This image of the sequestered author persisted for years. But
contemporary scholars have reprised "dear Aunt Jane" as an independent
and
c)
worldly-wise woman who wielded a sardonic pen. She continues to
fascinate, 200 years after the publication of "Pride and Prejudice".
d)
This is the charm of a new biography from Paula Byrne, a British
author, who yet breathes more life into Austen and her works by
e)
considering the objects that populated her days.
PC
12. The theory of the modular mind is another way of explaining
behaviour – in particular, human behaviour. The idea is that the human
mind is made up of a number of specialized components called modules
that work more or less independently. These modules collect various
kinds of information from the environment and process it in different
ways. They issue different commands – occasionally, conflicting
commands. It's not an elegant theory; on the contrary, it's the sort
of thing that would make Occam whip out his razor. But we shouldn't
judge theories by asking them to compete in a beauty pageant. We
should ask whether they can explain more, or explain better, than
previous theories could. The modular theory can explain, for example,
the curious effects of brain injuries.
_______________________________________
a)
Humans tend to accumulate in memory information of no immediate
practical relevance which they can exploit to imagine possible novel
situations.
b)
Some abilities may be lost while others are spared, with the pattern
differing from one patient to another.
c)
In cognitive science, the modularity of mind refers to the idea that
the mind is composed of independent, closed, domain-specific
processing modules.
d)
The theory of the modular mind is not beautiful or elegant but not
being a poet, I prize truth above beauty.
PC
13. A successful transaction between two people – a sale and purchase
– should benefit both. If it benefits one and not the other, it is
exploitation, and it does nothing to raise the standard of living. The
history of human prosperity lies in the repeated discovery of
non-zero-sum bargains that benefit both sides. That's the trick by
which the world gets rich. Yet it takes only a few sidelong glances at
your fellow human beings to realize that remarkably few people think
this way. Zero-sum (win-lose) thinking dominates the popular
discourse, whether in debates about trade or in complaints about
service providers. You just don't hear people coming out of shops
saying, "I got a great bargain, but don't worry, I paid enough to be
sure that the shopkeeper feeds his family too."
___________________________
a)
Every voluntary transaction between traders in a fair market provides
to each trader more wealth after the transaction than he or she had
before and like Portia's mercy in The Merchant of Venice, exchange is
'twice blest: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.'
b)
That is a shame, because the zero-sum mistake was what made so many
-isms of past centuries so wrong.
c)
When radicals who "occupy" this or that claim that the "1%" should be
divested of their wealth, through higher taxes, because they have more
wealth than others, they start from the false premise that the "1%"
got richer because they made others poorer--a zero-sum fallacy.
d)
This may be because during our evolutionary history, we lived in a
zero-sum world, in which one person's gain meant another person's
loss.
14.Carbon credit activists, while pleading for emission reversal
through clean development mechanism, have been pressing for the
issuance of individual credit bonds, which they can later redeem in
the form of hard cash. Though there is no denying the fact that people
with low carbon footprint should not only be compensated for their low
carbon usage but also for their carbon offsetting initiatives; the
activists have become almost intolerant in pursuance of 'their' line
of emission trading. In order to show their dissent, they have even
fallen heavily on the commodity exchange boards and emissions control
initators. In one of the recent high-level summits on climate change,
carbon credit activists have burnt effigies of top-notch personnel,
thereby polluting the local environment. They have also punctured the
tyres of those huge cars that were supposed to ferry the personnel to
and fro, thereby adding new cars in the loop and causing more fuel
burns. None of the activists bothered, though, to put up a formal
request to the authorities to reflect their concerns and issues. The
12 day summit ultimately ended in a fiasco, to the detriment of the
activists.
Which of the following proverbial statements is reflected in the path
followed by the carbon credit activists for attaining their goals?
a)
To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction.
b)
Where there is a will, there is a way.
c)
Necessity knows no law and in everything one thing is impossible: rationality.
d)
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
15.(a) The committee gave him the nod but then the grandees had second
thoughts.
(b) In an inspired move they replaced Shipton with his psychological
opposite – a methodical and self-effacing military man named John Hunt
– replacing one idea of mountaineering (gentlemanly amateurism) with a
very different one (meticulous organisation).
(c) Eric Shipton was the obvious man for the job: a
gentleman-adventurer who knew the mountain better than anyone.
(d) Shipton took amateurism to absurd lengths; he had even forgotten
to bring a backpack on one expedition and foreign rivals were
threatening to reach the top first.
(e) In 1953 the Himalayan Committee of the Royal Geographical Society
met to choose a leader for the latest attempt to climb Mount Everest.
a)
decba
b)
ecdab
c)
ecadb
d)
edcab
16.(a) It is not clear whether Japan's pacifist constitution prevents
its Self-Defence Forces from striking back until its own citizens are
injured.
(b) Imagine that China decided to land soldiers on the disputed
islands that it calls the Diaoyus.
(c) Nor is it obvious that its main ally, America, would go to war to
rid the Senkakus of the platoon of Chinese troops.
(d) The coastguard may repel private vessels, but not troops arriving
from the air or from a submarine.
(e) Japan, which administers the uninhabited rocks and knows them as
the Senkakus, might, under its own laws, be unable to meet the
incursion with force.
a)
acebd
b)
bedac
c)
bdcae
d)
bacde
#RC
'Market' no longer means a place where you go to buy provisions. The
'market' is a de-territorialised space where faceless corporations do
business, including buying and selling 'futures'. 'Justice' has come
to mean 'human rights'. This theft of language, this technique of
usurping words and deploying them like weapons, to mask intent and to
mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has
been the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new
dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalise their detractors,
deprive them of a language in which to voice their critique and
dismiss them as being 'anti-progress', 'anti-development',
'anti-reform' and of course 'anti-national' – negativists of the worst
sort. Talk about saving a river or a forest and they say, 'Don't you
believe in Progress?' To people whose land is being submerged by dam
reservoirs and whose homes are being bulldozed they say, 'Do you have
an alternative development model?' To those who believe that a
government is duty-bound to provide people with basic education,
healthcare and social security, they say, 'You're against the Market.'
And who except a cretin could be against a Market?
Two decades of 'Progress' in India has created a vast middle class
punch-drunk on sudden wealth and respect – and a much vaster,
desperate underclass. Millions of people have been displaced from
their land by floods, droughts and desertification caused by
indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural
projects, dams, mines and special economic zones. All of them
developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the
rising demands of the new aristocracy.
Already forests, mountains and water systems are being ravaged by
marauding multinational corporations, backed by a State that has lost
its moorings and is committing 'ecocide'. In eastern India, mining is
destroying whole ecosystems, turning fertile land into desert. In the
Himalayas, high dams are being planned, leading to disastrous
consequences. In the plains, embankments built along rivers, to
control floods, have led to rising river beds, causing more flooding,
water logging, salinisation of agricultural land and the destruction
of livelihoods. Most of India's holy rivers have been turned into
unholy drains that carry more sewage and industrial effluent than
water.
The regime of free market economic policies, administered by people
who are blissfully ignorant of the fate of civilisations that grew too
dependent on artificial irrigation, has led to a worrying shift in
cropping patterns. Sustainable food crops, suitable to local soil
conditions and micro-climates, have been replaced by water-guzzling,
hybrid and genetically modified 'cash' crops which are heavily
dependent on chemical fertilisers, pesticides, canal irrigation and
the indiscriminate mining of ground water. As abused farmland,
saturated with chemicals, gradually becomes exhausted and infertile,
agricultural input costs rise, ensnaring small farmers in a debt trap.
Over the last few years, 1,80,000 Indian farmers have committed
suicide. While state granaries are bursting with food that eventually
rots, starvation and malnutrition approaching the same levels as in
sub-Saharan Africa stalk the land.
It's as though an ancient society, decaying under the weight of
feudalism and caste, was churned in a great machine. The churning has
ripped through the mesh of old inequalities, recalibrating some of
them but reinforcing most. Now the old society has curdled and
separated into a thin layer of thick cream – and a lot of water. The
cream is India's 'market' of many million consumers (of cars, cell
phones, computers, Valentine's Day greeting cards), the envy of
international business. The water is of little consequence. It can be
sloshed around, stored in holding ponds, and eventually drained away.
Or so they think, the men in suits. They didn't bargain for the
violent civil war that has broken out in India's heartland:
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal.
17. The author implies in the first paragraph "Market's no longer
....... against a market" that
a)
India is diluting its responsibilities towards the needy in pursuit of
an illusion.
b)
an unabashed display of half-truths has taken the place of convincing arguments.
c)
anyone championing the voice of distressed farmers is being branded
'anti-national'.
d)
India is bending over backwards to favour industrialists.
18. The author alludes to which of the following as the adverse
environmental impact of 'development'?
a)
Freeing up India's national resources for corporate plunder.
b)
India's rivers carrying more sewage and industrial effluent than water.
c)
Wrecking the ecology of the entire subcontinent.
d)
Destroying deltas and estuaries.
19. The author of the passage implies that cash crops are
a)
profitable
b)
soil-degrading
c)
sustainable
d)
viable
20. In the last sentence of the passage "They didn't bargain ........
West Bengal", "They" signifies
a)
The cream of society in India.
b)
The vast underclass of India.
c)
The vast middleclass of India.
d)
The tsars of the new aristocracy in India.
#RC
The term 'glass ceiling' describes "the unseen, unreachable barrier
that keeps women from rising to the upper rungs of the corporate
ladder, regardless of their achievements". Most individuals concerned
with this problem cite it as evidence of discrimination; to be
corrected by affirmative action laws. Yet even if what such advocates
of "equality" claimed about glass ceilings were true, they would not
be justified in using immoral means to achieve a purportedly positive
end.
The idea of "affirmative action" has shape-shifted over the past three
decades. At first, the goal was equality under the law. Slowly,
"affirmative action" melted to a desire for equality of opportunity.
Now the term means equality of results regardless of the objective
reasons for any disparities in the economic conditions of our nation's
citizens.
Some feminists state that the "under-representation" of women at the
most rarified heights of business is a result of conscious decisions
and overt anti-women prejudice on the part of top leadership. Other
critics see the dearth of female business leaders as an inexorable
result of subconscious prejudice: the fallout of years of male
domination in our society.
Occupying an organization's higher echelons means subordinating other
aspects of one's life to one's career. The desirability of such a goal
is not relevant in the current context where more men than women are
willing to commit themselves to the course of action demanded by such
a rigorous goal. Even if there were no prejudice against women in
business, the disparate numbers in the pools of available male and
female candidates actively striving for this end would lead to a
male/female ratio in line with that observed today.
Consider the health field. Nursing is almost exclusively the province
of women and is well-paid. Yet many nurses voluntarily accept only
part-time positions as they prefer more flexibility in work schedules
and free time to engage in personal development and enjoyable
activities. The resulting consequence of low average wage is one of
voluntary choice, not prejudice. Overall, women nurses work fewer
hours than men nurses; have less job experience and work fewer years.
In other sectors, women who fail to understand the importance of
office politics, going through proper channels etc put themselves at a
disadvantage.
Unfortunately, some feminists prefer to focus solely on the issue of
wages as measures of how much society values women. They have no
incentive to impute economic importance to a homemaking career. To do
so would undermine their case for widespread discrimination. But while
material goods are necessary and desirable, they are by no means the
sole standard we should use in judging someone's worth.
Despite barriers of prejudice, there is no need to invoke conscious
(or subconscious) male-led conspiracies designed to deny women
opportunities for achievement. Whatever the objective merits or
shortcomings of the different goals selected by men and women, the
reality of those differences provides a sufficient explanation for
most situations. Businesses which continue to hire only males at top
positions to maintain a "good old boys" environment will find
themselves at a competitive disadvantage with rivals who promote more
competent, "underpaid" females. Also all the (invalid) derivative
permutations of "affirmative action" and "equality" entail violations
of property rights. Even if an employer is overtly racist, there is no
ethical justification for governmental intervention in his business
decisions. If someone wants to serve only blacks or hire only young
women on the basis of their looks, that is his perogative. The
function of government is not to ensure virtue but to ensure that no
one's rights are violated.
No "right" exists to a job or a product or a service except for those
economic goods which one has earned and obtained in a mutually
satisfactory, voluntary interaction. Any other course involving the
coercive powers of the State threatens the freedom of the business
operators and of those who would seek redress of "unfairness" by
calling on the State to commit injustices of its own.
The proper avenue for victims of prejudice is to respect the rights
which protect them: to seek change by education, and argument
(including boycotts); by working harder than those who do discriminate
against them; and by utilizing only nonviolent means to their noble
ends. Better yet, they can create their own businesses where women
seeking executive positions are welcomed, not rejected. They need to
realize that the initiation of force is always wrong. The constructive
power of demonstrating merit will -- in the long run and despite
prejudice -- win out over the destructive actions of discrimination.
Left to itself, evil is powerless to achieve anything beyond its own
demise. It grows stronger only when those well-intentioned souls who
oppose it adopt those same immoral means practiced by their enemy
21. DIRECTIONS for question 87: Select one or more answer choices
according to the directions given in the question.
Which of the following can be understood from the passage?
Select all that apply:
a)
The primary concern of the author in the passage is to affirm that
many of the barriers in the career path of women are related to the
women themselves and to argue against affirmative action because he
feels that women are incapable of being committed towards their work.
b)
The main purpose of the author is to explain that feminists grossly
exaggerate the issue of 'glass ceiling' as women are increasingly
taking up superior positions in the corporate world thereby turning
down all the male bastions.
c)
The author takes the example of the nursing profession (para 5) to
explain that social values and mores and the increased global focus on
women's issues have changed the woman's role impacting the career
progression of women.
d)
The example of the nursing profession is used by the author to state
that women outperform in 'taking care' while men outperform in 'taking
charge' and work policies keep more men in positions of corporate
power.
e)
None of the above
22. The style of the passage is _______________ and the tone of the
author is _____________.
a)
narrative . . . commiserating
b)
descriptive . . . polemical
c)
argumentative . . . emphatic
d)
analytical . . . speculative
23. The author of the passage would be least likely to agree with
which of the following?
(i) Glass ceilings are more precarious than 'glass cliffs' and the
number of women who are desirous of committing themselves to their
careers wholeheartedly, subordinating all other aspects of life, is
very meagre.
(ii) If among the students who get admission to top engineering,
medical and business schools, 80% are males, then there should be 50%
reservation for female students.
(iii) If, in a school in Kentucky, black kids are not allowed, strict
action should be taken against the school.
(iv) Affirmative action has transformed from a recognition of equality
under the law to a desire for equality of opportunity and has now come
to mean equality of results.
a)
(i) and (ii)
b)
(ii) and (iv)
c)
(i) and (v)
d)
Only (iii)
24. DIRECTIONS for question 90: Select one or more answer choices
according to the directions given in the question.
What remedial measures can be taken to overcome the 'glass ceiling'?
Select all that apply:
a)
Employers should make organization culture more friendly and
supportive for women. All other things being equal, no corporate
should deny a job to a woman because of her gender. They can go the
extra mile in ensuring that she is safe and secure at her workplace
and that there is no discrimination of any kind by her male
colleagues, bosses and subordinates.
b)
Women should understand their own strengths and weaknesses and their
motivations and understand one's situation that provides the framework
within which their career is to be developed.
c)
Women should watch men and women role models and contemplate as to
what is effective and what is not for understanding how to behave in
new situations.
d)
Organizations should monitor the flow of promotions to the highest
echelons, especially the flow of those getting opportunities to make
sure that deserving women are included.
e)
None of the above
#RC
Many political analysts had wrongly hoped that the elections of 2009
would be a precursor to economic progress. In its time in office, in
order to mitigate the devastation caused by its economic policies, the
former Congress regime passed three progressive (critics call them
populist and controversial) parliamentary acts. The Forest Rights Act
(which gave forest-dwellers legal right to land and the traditional
use of forest produce), the Right to Information Act and the National
Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The NREGA guarantees every
rural family a hundred days of work (hard, manual labour) a year at
minimum wages. It amounts to an average of Rs 8,000 (about $170) per
family per year. Enough for a good meal in a restaurant, including
wine and dessert. Imagine how hellish times must be for even that tiny
amount of money to come as a relief to millions of people who are
reeling under the impact of the precipitous loss of their lands and
their livelihoods. (Talk about crumbs from the high table. But then,
which one of us has the heart, or the right, to argue that no crumbs
are better than crumbs? Or, indeed, that no elections are better than
meaningless elections?) Implementing the NREGA, seeing that the crumbs
actually reach the people they're meant for, has occupied all the
energy of some of India's committed social activists. They have had to
battle cartels of corrupt government officers, power-brokers and
middlemen. They have faced threats and a fair amount of violence. One
rural activist in Jharkhand immolated himself in anger and frustration
at the injustice of it all.
Ironically, the NREGA only made it through Parliament because of
pressure brought to bear on the UPA government by the Left Front and
by Sonia Gandhi. It was passed despite tremendous resistance from the
mandarins of the free market within the Congress party. The corporate
media was unanimously hostile to the Act. Come election-time and the
NREGA became one of the main planks of the Congress party's election
campaign. There's little doubt that the goodwill it generated amongst
the poor translated into votes for the Congress. But now that the
elections are over, victory is being attributed to the very policies
that the NREGA was passed to mitigate! The Captains of Industry have
lost no time in claiming the 'People's Mandate' as their own. 'It's
fast forward for markets', the business papers crowed the morning
after, 'Vote [was] for reforms, says India Inc'.
There is an even greater irony: the Left Front, acting with the
duplicity that has become second nature to all parliamentary political
parties, took a sharp turn to the right. Even while it criticised the
government's economic policies at the Centre, it tried to enforce
similar ones on its home turf in West Bengal. It announced that it was
going to build a chemical hub in Nandigram, a manufacturing unit for
the Tata Nano in Singur, and a Jindal Steel plant outside the forests
of Lalgarh, home to the Santhal people. It began to acquire land, most
of it fertile farmland, virtually at gunpoint. The militant uprisings
that followed were put down with bullets and lathicharges. Lumpen
'party' militias ran amok among the protesters, raping women and
killing people. But eventually the combination of genuine mass
mobilisation and militancy worked. The people prevailed. They won all
three battles, and forced the government to back off. The Tatas had to
move the Nano project to Gujarat which offered a 'good investment
climate'. The Left Front was decimated in the elections in West
Bengal, something that had not happened in thirty years.
The irony doesn't end there. In a fiendishly clever sleight of hand,
the defeat of the Left is being attributed to its obstructionism and
anti-development policies! 'Corporate captains feel easy without
Left', the papers said. The stockmarket surged, looking forward to 'a
summer of joy'. CEOs on TV channels celebrated the new government's
'liberation' from the Left. Hectoring news anchors have announced that
the UPA no longer has any excuse to prevaricate on implementing
reforms, unless of course it has 'closet socialists' hiding in its
midst. This is the wonderful thing about democracy. It can mean
anything you want it to mean.
25. The author of the passage mentions "a good meal in a five-star
hotel" in para 1
a)
to imply that the $170 per family per year that NREGA brings is a
handsome amount indeed.
b)
to argue that everyone has the right to live the good life.
c)
to accuse the NREGA of being populist and controversial.
d)
to satirize the pittance that the NREGA offers.
26. The second paragraph "Ironically ............... India Inc"
supports all of the following statements EXCEPT?
a)
The UPA government on its own was least inclined to pass the NREGA.
b)
Corporate globalization has vaulted over the stated ideologies of
political parties.
c)
India Inc declared that the markets have won a popular mandate from the people.
d)
The NREGA boosted the electoral fortunes of the UPA government.
27. What does the author describe as "an even greater irony" in the
third paragraph?
a)
The Left's temporary, shotgun solutions to its economic pitfalls
having magnified West Bengal's economic woes.
b)
The absence of a genuinely left-wing party in mainstream politics
creating the space for some truly progressive politics.
c)
The Left implementing pro-industry economic policies in West Bengal.
d)
Gujarat being celebrated by business houses for its faith in the free market.
28. What does the author of the passage describe as a "fiendishly
clever sleight of hand"?
a)
The mandarins of the free market being able to fool all the people all the time.
b)
Soaring stocks vindicating the defeat of the Left in Bengal.
c)
CEOs practically living in TV studios to hasten the demise of
socialism in India.
d)
The Left's dismissal at the hustings being attributed to an
anti-development agenda.
TITA
29. (A) In the 1930s it was an article of faith that aerial bombing
would transform the nature of war.
(B) The bombing campaign in Europe had become a Western Front of the
air: a costly, grinding war of attrition with no clear-cut end and a
yawning gap between ambition and outcome.
(C) Yet when war broke out in 1939 neither was the air force capable
of such devastation nor did the general staffs of the main
protagonists have plans to use what passed for heavy bombers at the
time to carry out such attacks, seeing them as adjuncts to ground
warfare rather than forces intended for independent operation.
(D) There are many paradoxes associated with the European bombing
campaign of the second world war.
(E) Not only would the "bomber always get through", as Stanley
Baldwin, Britain's prime minister, lamented in 1932, but when it did,
the assumption was that it would visit so much destruction on city
populations that any country on the receiving end would quickly be
forced to surrender.
(F) Nearly four years later in 1943, even when allied bombers with the
range and payload to do serious damage had become available in
numbers, only the most blinkered disciples still believed claims that
they could deliver a "knockout blow".
30.(a) But surely true greatness means that the creator of a painting
has brought a certain je ne sais quoi to the work as well.
(b) In 1945, for example, a Dutchman named Han van Meegeren faced
execution for selling a national art treasure, in the form of a
painting by Vermeer, to Hermann Göring, Hitler's deputy.
(c) Instead he turned out a completely new painting, "Jesus Among the
Doctors", in the style of the master, before the eyes of his
incredulous inquisitors.
(d) What makes an artist great? Brilliant composition, no doubt.
Superb draughtsmanship, certainly. Originality of subject or of
concept, sometimes.
(e) There is, however, a type of person who seems to sait perfectly
well what that quoi is, and can turn it out on demand.
(f) His defence was that it was a forgery he had painted himself and
when asked to prove it by copying a Vermeer he scorned the offer.
a)
daebfc
b)
bdaefc
c)
deabfc
d)
bfadec
#RC
An error-statistical philosophy of science involves using
error-statistical methods, to deal with problems of philosophy of
science: to model scientific inference, to scrutinize principles of
inference, and to address philosophical problems (the problem of
induction, under determination, theory testing, etc.).
After I'd bungled teaching it enough times to have an idea of what I
was doing, one of the first things students in my introductory physics
and statistics classes learned was probability and error analysis:
estimating the uncertainty in measurements, propagating errors from
measured quantities into calculated ones, and some significance tests,
tests for whether or not two numbers agree, within their associated
margins of error. I did this for purely pragmatic reasons: it seemed
like one of the most useful things we were supposed to teach, and also
one of the few areas where what I did had any discernible effect on
what they learnt. Now that I've read Deborah G. Mayo's book, I'll be
able to offer another excuse to my students the next time I teach
error analysis, namely, that it's how science really works.
I exaggerate her conclusion slightly, but only slightly. Mayo is a
dues-paying philosopher of science, and like most of the breed these
days is largely concerned with questions of method and justification,
of "ampliative inference" (C. S. Peirce) or "non-demonstrative
inference" (Bertrand Russell). Put concretely: why, since neither can
be deduced rigorously from unquestionable premises, should we put more
trust in David Grinspoon's ideas about Venus than in those of Immanuel
Velikovsky? A nice answer would be something like, "because good
scientific theories are arrived at by employing thus-and-such a
method, which infallibly leads to the truth, for the following
self-evident reasons." A nice answer, but not one which is seriously
entertained by anyone these days, apart from some professors of
sociology and literature moonlighting in the construction of straw
men. In the real world, science is alas fallible, subject to constant
correction, and very messy. Still, mess and all, we somehow or other
come up with reliable, codified knowledge about the world, and it
would be nice to know how the trick is turned: not only would it
satisfy curiosity ("the most agreeable of all vices" --- Nietzsche),
and help silence such people as do, in fact, prefer Velikovsky to
Grinspoon, but it might lead us to better ways of turning the trick.
Asking scientists themselves is nearly useless: you'll almost
certainly just get a recital of whichever school of methodology we
happened to blunder into in college, or impatience at asking silly
questions and keeping us from the lab. If this vice is to be indulged
in, someone other than scientists will have to do it: namely, the
methodologists.
That they have been less than outstandingly successful is not exactly
secret. Peter Medawar once said, "Most scientists receive no tuition
in scientific method, but those who have been instructed perform no
better as scientists than those who have not." Medawar's friend Karl
Popper achieved eminence by tenacious insistence on the importance of
this point. Instead of conferring patents of epistemic nobility,
lawdoms and theoryhoods, on certain hypotheses, Popper hauled them all
before an Anglo-Austrian Tribunal of Revolutionary Empirical Justice
where the accused was blindfolded, and the magistrates then formed a
firing squad, shooting at it with every piece of possibly-refuting
observational evidence or conjectures they could find.
The problem for Popper, I think, is that getting two successes in ten
thousand trials is possible, and the Tribunal is only authorized to
eliminate conjectures in actual contradiction to the facts, as "no
mammals lay eggs" is contradicted by the platypus. Popper realized
this and said that we just have to make "risky decisions" about when
to reject statistical hypotheses. But the challenges facing the
Tribunal in the execution of its duty mounted: another "risky
decision" was required, about what ammunition the firing squad could
legitimately use, i.e., about what evidence would be accepted when we
saw whether or not a hypothesis stands up.
Mayo thinks she knows what the problem is: Popper is entirely too soft
on conjectures.
Although Popper's work is full of exhortations to put hypotheses
through the wringer, to make them "suffer in our stead in the struggle
for the survival of the fittest," the tests Popper sets out are
white-glove affairs of logical analysis. If anomalies are approached
with white gloves, it is little wonder that they seem to tell us only
that there is an error somewhere and that they are silent about its
source.
Fortunately, scientists should not only devote much effort to making
errors talk, they need to even develop a theory of inquisition, in the
form of mathematical statistics, which Mayo feels, should justify a
very large class of scientific inferences, those concerned with
"experimental knowledge," and to suggest that the rest of our business
can be justified on similar grounds. Statistics should become a kind
of applied methodology, as well as the "continuation of experiment by
other means." Mayo's key notion is that of a severe test of a
hypothesis, one with "an overwhelmingly good chance of revealing the
presence of a specific error, if it exists --- but not otherwise". If
a severe test does not turn up the error it looks for, it's good
grounds for thinking that the error is absent.
31. As per Mayo's perspective, which of the following statements best
describes her conclusion?
a)
Error analysis is a study of the inferences of natural phenomena.
b)
A scientific inference that is thoroughly tested by other scientists
cannot be questioned.
c)
The method and justification employed to explain scientific inferences
need to be reevaluated.
d)
Good scientific theories are arrived at after considering all related
implications.
32. The author's use of David Grinspoon and Velikovsky (third para)
can be best described as
a)
premeditated
b)
illustrative
c)
contrived
d)
superfluous
33. All of the following, if true, would resonate with the viewpoint
of Mayo as discussed in the passage, except ............ ?
a)
Mathematical statistics is important as, without it, initial
hypotheses or conjectures can never be made but it should not allow
the possibility of rejecting a theory or hypothesis or conjecture.
b)
Instead of a method for infallibly or even reliably finding truths, we
need to have a host of methods for reliably finding errors.
c)
The severity of the test of a basis or hypothesis must ensure that
errors, if any, in the basis or hypothesis are thrown up; otherwise
the hypothesis is rendered acceptable.
d)
We have to become shrewd inquisitors of errors, interact with them,
simulate them (with models and computers), and amplify them.
34. Which of the following conclusions can be drawn from the passage?
a)
Inferences drawn from the use of method and justification cannot be
challenged on the basis of error analysis.
b)
In a non-ideal world, where the theories of academicians are really
put to the test, science is subject to being infallible.
c)
Error analysis is a sufficient condition to ensure the validity of
inferences and conclusions resulting from scientific experiments.
d)
Error analysis can be used to revisit inferences based on time-tested
scientific experiments and methodology.
Tuesday, 1 March 2016
Sunday, 28 February 2016
01.03.16
https://www.facebook.com/events/997471466982241/
1. C. Rangarajan, chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the
former Prime Minister, had said that the Indian education system was
more focussed on answering examinations than on imparting knowledge.
Questions being asked in examinations did not call for an application
of the mind or critical analyses. Most often, they were a test of
memory. Therefore, he said, there was an urgent need to reform the
examination system. In this regard, several changes to the structure
of exams as well as the syllabus had been recommended, but no
consensus reached yet, and India was falling behind developed nations.
Which of the following can be inferred from this paragraph?
a)
Students should regard learning as an exciting experience and show a
genuine desire to learn and keep other interests out of their minds.
They should demand a rigorous education and a better examination
system.
b)
The developed nations have moved ahead of India with better structured
education systems.
c)
No changes have ever been made to the Indian higher education system.
There is infighting and lack of political will on the issue which
prevents a consensus being reached.
d)
Fifteen years ago India was on par with developed nations and the
changes that have been recommended need to be immediately put into
effect.
2.Biochar is a name for charcoal when it is used for particular
purposes, especially as a soil amendment. Like most charcoal, biochar
is created by pyrolysis of biomass. Burn any kind of organic material
− corn husks, hazelnut shells, bamboo − in an oxygen depleted process
called pyrolysis, and you generate gases and heat that can be used as
energy − biochar. Biochar is under investigation as an approach to
carbon sequestration to produce negative carbon dioxide emissions.
Biochar thus has the potential to help mitigate climate change, via
carbon sequestration. It thus proves helpful in reducing global
warming.
Which of the following, if true, would weaken the claim that biochar
is helpful in reducing global warming?
a)
The process of pyrolysis itself produces carbon dioxide emissions more
than normal energy sources.
b)
By using biochar, the farmers could fertilize existing plots instead
of clearing more land.
c)
Pyrolysis can produce enough energy in an efficient way to power a
tractor and biochar can improve soils.
d)
When added to thin and acidic soils, biochar produces higher
agricultural yields and cuts down fertilizers.
3.Sluggishness or a lack of energy or vigor or interest or enthusiasm
has to be overcome before one can achieve one's goals and targets and
meet expectations. To overcome sluggishness its existence has to be
accepted.
The above statements imply all of the following EXCEPT?
a)
Acceptance of sluggishness is a necessary precondition to meeting
one's goals and targets. Goals and targets can be met only by those
who have successfully dealt with their sluggishness.
b)
A person who does not take sluggishness seriously always fall short of
expectations.
c)
To meet expectations and achieve goals and targets, accepting and
overcoming sluggishness is a must.
d)
People who readily accept their sluggishness and are ready to face it
succeed in meeting expectations.
4.(a) Hitler next positioned his divisions along the Czechoslovakian
border, demanding that Britain and France turn a blind eye to
Germany's impending assault on that helpless country.
(b) Chamberlain even said of the meeting, "I got the impression that
here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word."
(c) Hitler, knowing his army might suffer a crushing defeat if Britain
and France combined forces to resist the attack, called for a meeting
in Germany, where he bullied and cajoled, setting off frightful
emotions in Chamberlain.
(d) Later historians would write that Chamberlain's distorted
perceptions of reality created deadly flaws in his thinking at a time
when Great Britain desperately needed realistic thinking about the
intentions of Hitler.
(e) When Adolf Hitler marched his troops into Austria, British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain hoping for peace dismissed the incident
as only an isolated event.
(f) At the meeting, when Hitler called Czechoslovakia his "last
territorial demand," Chamberlain deceived himself into believing it,
even though reality belied everything Hitler said.
a)
ceabdf
b)
cefbad
c)
eacfbd
d)
ecabdf
5.OMO
a)
The entire conceptual edifice of modern science is a product of biology.
b)
Even the most basic and profound ideas of science − relativity,
quantum theory, the theory of evolution by natural selection −are
generated and necessarily limited by the particular capacities of our
human biology, the limitations of our human brains.
c)
There was also the discovery of DNA and the genetic code with its
implication (to quote James Watson) that "There are only molecules.
Everything else is sociology" and there was also the Darwinian
revolution; the idea that far from being the climax of "intelligent
design" we are merely neotonous apes that happen to be slightly
cleverer than our cousins.
d)
This implies that the content and scope of scientific knowledge is not
open ended.
6. OMO
a)
So far archaeologists have discovered 40 large burial mounds
containing 600 likenesses of mythical animals, gods and chieftains in
what is South America's largest complex of megalithic statues.
b)
The museum has adopted its own form of protest and opened the
exhibition minus statues; light is projected where the statues would
have been; guides use a virtual-reality program and tablet computers
to show visitors a 3D image of what was meant to be there.
c)
Nestled between the headwaters of the Magdalena river and high Andean
moorland, the ancient stone statues at San Agustín are among the most
mysterious pre-Columbian archaeological artefacts.
d)
Like other sites in the region, San Agustín has suffered plunder, both
organised and freelance; Konrad Preuss, a German anthropologist who
led the first European excavations there, shipped 35 statues that he
found to a museum in Berlin, where they remain.
OMO
7.
a)
Rich prizes beckon companies that grasp digital opportunities;
ignominy awaits those that fail.
b)
The days of derision are long gone: now geeks are gods.
c)
To thousands of bright young people, nothing is cooler than coding the
night away, striving to turn their own startup into the next big
thing.
d)
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter are reinventing the ways
in which mere mortals converse, read, play, shop and live.
SUMMARY
8. Everybody at Harmony Villa loved the birch grove behind the house,
though to none of them did it mean what it meant to Alice. For her it
lived. She not only knew the birches but they knew her: the fern-sweet
solitudes, threatened with shadows, knew her; the wind in the boughs
always made her a glad salutation. From the first beginnings of memory
she had played in it and wandered in it and dreamed in it. She could
not remember the time it had not held her imagination in thrall and
dominated her life. It could never be to Alice just the ordinary grove
of white-skinned trees and ferny hollows it was to other people.
a)
All the residents of Harmony Villa loved the birch grove behind the
house, especially Alice.
b)
For Alice, the birch grove behind Harmony Villa was almost like a living thing.
c)
The birch grove behind the house was special to Alice in ways it was
not to other people.
d)
The grove of birch trees behind her house had always dominated Alice's life.
SUMMARY
9. Our cultural backgrounds influence not only how we marry but how we
make choices in nearly every area of our lives. From early on, members
of individualistic societies are taught the special importance of
personal choice. Even a walk through the grocery store becomes an
opportunity to teach lessons about choosing, particularly in the
United States, where stores routinely offer hundreds of options. A
parent will probably narrow down the number of choices and explain the
differences between this cereal and that one, or that toy and this
one, but the child would be encouraged to express a preference. By
contrast, members of collectivist societies place greater emphasis on
duty. Children are often told, "If you are a good child, you'll do
what your parents tell you," and the parents need not explain
themselves. From what you eat to what you wear, the toys you play with
to what you study, it is what you are supposed to do that is most
important.
a)
Individualist societies have greater dialogue with their children
whereas collectivist societies mostly talk down to their children.
b)
Individualistic societies stress more on the individual and are more
self centered, whereas collectivist societies stress more on social
units such as families and are unselfish.
c)
Children of individualist societies become accustomed to making their
own decisions whereas children in collectivist societies such as India
prefer to let their elders decide for them.
d)
Culture influences choice making. Individualistic societies emphasize
personal choice while collectivist societies emphasize duty.
summary
10. Corruption is an intractable problem. Like Diabetes, it can be
controlled but can't be eliminated. Despite moaning about corruption,
we don't hesitate to vote for the same tainted persons. Choosing
honest and dedicated people, introducing electoral reforms and
controlling electoral expenses can combat corruption to some extent.
Inculcating values in our young children might give us some hope in
future. Corruption has to be rooted out from the roots.
a)
The person who gives bribe is as much responsible for corruption as
the person who takes it.
b)
It is not easy to wipe out corruption from the world.
c)
To tackle the epidemic of corruption which can only be controlled but
not eliminated, measures like electoral reforms, choosing people of
integrity and focussing on moral values in youth can help to an
extent.
d)
Corruption can be rooted out only if every citizen vows to keep himself clean.
11 SC
Select all that are correct:
a)
With Susana Diaz beaming radiant from the conference stage after
winning control of the Spanish Socialists' mighty Andalusian branch
b)
in Granada last month, fans hailed a generational and gender
revolution in the party. Her victory confirmed that the
c)
energetic 39-years-old, who also runs the region's government, is now
Spain's most powerful Socialist.
d)
That is a big role in a country where the ruling Popular Party of
Mariano Rajoy and the Socialists tends to alternate in power.
e)
Ms Diaz's smile hides an iron will. She is at ease with power and is
reputedly ruthless against rivals.
12 SC
Identify Correct
a)
The digital revolution is transforming the process of innovation
itself. Thanks to off-the-shelf code from the internet and platforms
b)
that host services, provide distribution and offer marketing, the
number of digital startups have exploded.
c)
Just as computer-games designers invented a product that humanity
never knew it needed, these firms will dream up new products to employ
millions.
d)
When Instagram, a popular photo-sharing site, was sold to Facebook for
about $1 billion in 2012, it had 30m customers and employed 13 people.
e)
Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy a few months earlier, employed
145,000 people in its heyday.
13SC
Select all that are correct:
a)
The prospect from Sam mountain, rocky outcrop in southern Vietnam's
Mekong delta, is timeless.
b)
Paddy fields shine like emeralds and irrigation canals reflect the
sunlight as mirrors.
c)
Three times a year, farmers in surrounding towns put on their rubber
boots and plant rice seedlings deep in the soil.
d)
Rice cultivation is rooted in the Vietnamese psyche deeply.
e)
Today Vietnam's $ 4 billion in rice exports account for more than a
fifth of the global total.
14 sc
Select all that are correct:
a)
For much of the 27 years that Nelson Mandela was in prison, another
South African led an equally almost solitary life,
b)
in purely political terms, with virtue of her role as the sole liberal
member of parliament. Helen Suzman, a beacon of decency, courage and
common sense,
c)
tormented a succession of justice ministers with her barbed wit. A
string of former political prisoners, including Mandela himself,
d)
testified of her courage and, perhaps even more important, to the
effect she had in publicising and often alleviating the harshness of
their conditions behind bars.
e)
She never shrank from inveighing the tendency of the African National
Congress (ANC) to put party and state above the individual, whether
black or white.
15.Research has shown that meditation can contribute to an
individual's psychological and physiological well-being. This is
accomplished as meditation brings the brainwave pattern into an alpha
state, which is a level of consciousness that promotes the healing
state. There is scientific evidence that meditation can reduce blood
pressure and relieve pain and stress. Research has shown that hormones
and other biochemical compounds in the blood indicative of stress tend
to decrease during meditation. These changes also stabilize over time,
so that a person is actually less stressed biochemically during daily
activity. When used in combination with biofeedback, meditation
enhances the effectiveness of biofeedback. The benefits of an ongoing
meditation practice as it impacts our health can be classified further
into three categories: physiological, psychological and spiritual.
Most people who practise meditation do so to reduce stress, anxiety,
anger and other negative emotions. Increasingly, physicians prescribe
meditation as part of the treatment for a large and growing number of
medical conditions.
Which of the following, if true, significantly strengthens the idea
given in the passage?
a)
People who meditate for long periods of time often cannot distinguish
between their meditative state and reality.
b)
History of medicine shows that meditation is the oldest and most
popular system of relaxation and meditation has been proven to have no
side effects.
c)
Meditation has been recommended by people from many walks of life as a
valuable form of exercise for those living in noisy and fast cities.
d)
In a credible survey conducted to find out the impact of meditation,
70% of respondents said they felt more relaxed and less worried about
daily happenings after meditating.
#RC
One of the most influential philosophers of the post-Renaissance
period was René Descartes, who also contributed to the study of the
anatomy of the brain and the relation between the mind and body. In De
homine (On Man), published posthumously in 1662, Descartes theorized
that filaments within each nerve tube operated tiny "valvules" that
could control the flow of animal spirits into the nerves. He thought
that external stimuli would move the skin, which would pull on these
filaments to open valvules in the ventricles. This allowed animal
spirits to be released from the ventricular reservoirs into the
nerves, which in turn would trigger the muscles to move.
Descartes (1650, 1662) presented this reflexive theory only to account
for involuntary behaviour. He believed that voluntary behaviour
demanded the interaction of the rational soul with the automaton. He
maintained that this occurred through the pineal gland, a small
central body suspended between the anterior ventricles. Small
movements by the pineal gland regulated the flow of spirits through
the intricate system of pipes and valves.
It is often stated that Descartes may have considered the pineal gland
simply because it was unitary rather than double. Although this was an
important factor, Descartes also selected the pineal gland because it
was surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid, which he believed served as a
reservoir for animal spirits.
The solution to the mind-body problem proposed by Descartes was not
widely accepted. Among other things, it was argued that the pineal
gland was even better developed in wild animals than in humans, even
though the brutes were considered soulless automata. Descartes should
have expected this. In 1543, Andreas Vesalius had discussed the gross
anatomy of the pineal gland when dissecting human brains. In fact, in
Book VII of his De HumaniCorporisFabrica (The Fabric of The Human
Body), he decried, "I wish that a sheep's brain be at hand, since it
shows the gland more distinctly than does the human head."
Even Galen had discussed the pineal gland in his anatomy lesson of
A.D. 177, which called for the brain of an ox. But perhaps, even more
interestingly, in the eighth book of his De UsuPartium (On The Use of
Parts of The Body), Galen mentioned the idea of pineal movements
regulating the flow of spirits. He wrote that he evaluated this theory
and found it absurd.
For this and other reasons, opinions varied as to whether the pineal
gland could be regarded as the seat of the soul. In this context, a
few of Descartes' contemporaries suggested that the honour should be
granted to another unique structure, the corpus callosum. In
retrospect, Descartes' ideas about the brain as a reflexive machine
probably had more impact on the development of scientific thought than
his specific solution to the mind-body problem.
16. What is the primary function of the passage?
a)
To present an argument and provide examples supporting the argument.
b)
To present a hypothesis and prove the hypothesis using other studies.
c)
To present a theory and critically discuss it.
d)
To present various solutions to a scholarly dilemma.
17. According to the passage, what should Descartes have expected (in para 4)?
a)
That the pineal gland could not have been the seat of the soul.
b)
That the pineal gland could not have regulated the flow of animal spirits.
c)
That the pineal gland in wild animals was better developed than in humans.
d)
That the nature of the pineal gland in wild animals would be used to
challenge his theory.
18. Which of the following is an assumption made by Descartes while
proposing his solution to the mind-body problem?
a)
The movements of pineal glands regulates the flow of animal spirits.
b)
The pineal gland is unitary.
c)
The pineal gland is not well developed in wild animals.
d)
Cerebrospinal fluid serves as a reservoir for animal spirits.
19. DIRECTIONS for question 85: Select one or more answer choices
according to the directions given in the question.
Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage
about the corpus callosum?
Select all that apply:
a)
The amount of cerebrospinal fluid surrounding it is more than that
surrounding pineal gland.
b)
It is a gland present in the brain
c)
It is also unitary like the pineal gland
d)
None of the above
20.(a) It's the leading edge of the train of knowledge − containing
all the history of the past and all the infinite possibilities of the
future −that keeps the whole train on the track.
(b) You don't have pure reason − you have pure confusion.
(c) Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience.
(d) Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that
leading edge has been.
(e) At the leading edge, there are no subjects, no objects, only the
track of quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of evaluating,
no way of acknowledging this quality, then the entire train has no way
of knowing where to go.
a)
ecdab
b)
decba
c)
cbeda
d)
cadeb
#RC
In the period between 1961 and 1989, the regulated art system of the
German Democratic Republic (GDR) led to a large scale exodus of at
least fifteen hundred artists to the Federal Republic of Germany
(FRG). Several young artists, who were born in the post-World War II
period, did so in order to discontinue working according to the rigid
confines of the art policy that favoured Socialist Realism as an ideal
style for the construction of a socialist utopia. For this generation,
who experienced the devastating impact of World War II only through
the stories of their parents, the GDR was "a dead corpse, dead to an
extent that you could only make fun of it", as the performance artist
Else Gabriel stated shortly after the collapse of the regime. Their
utter disillusionment in the failing socialist society was expressed
in autonomous artistic production that embraced Western modernist
approaches such as performance art, and sought legitimation in its
disturbing impact on a closed society. However, this nonconformist
attitude put artists in the crosshairs of the secret police (Minister
iumfürStaatssicherheit/MfS or Stasi), that in turn criminalized their
actions, and ultimately sought to dismantle or destroy artistic
groups. In order to continue developing their modernist art practice
and being recognized as artists, several artists were left no other
choice than to emigrate, whether through internal migration or fleeing
to 'non-socialist' foreign countries.
This exodus occurred despite the fact that the bureaucracy of an
emigration application (Ausreiseantrag) was unyielding and the process
could take up to six years. In the mid-1980s, when the overall
problems of the socialist system became more apparent, the application
rate increased significantly. For years, applicants literally lived
amidst their packed boxes in anticipation of a definitive answer on
their emigration applications. Once in the West, they faced new
challenges as they transitioned from the state-controlled model of
artistic production of the East towards the market-led approach
favoured in the West, with marked effects on their work. After all of
these efforts and sacrifices, deserting artists ended up only a few
years later in a state where the former East suddenly became West.
Why would an artist who was the visual translator of the socialist
utopia and thus generally enjoyed a high status and a good income have
a desire to fleein the first place? By pointing out the core
limitations artists found themselves confronted with, a better
understanding of their motives for pursuing emigration to the West
will evolve. By focusing on the (self-) controlled and regulate dart
system of the GDR we can define the artistic constraints and thereby
the limitations for the younger generation. The hierarchal structure
of East Germany's ruling party, the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei
Deutschlands/Socialist Unity Party of Germany), was reflected in its
subsidized cultural sector. In order to influence the artistic
landscape and promote the official artistic style, Socialist Realism,
the state government founded the Verband Bildender Künstler
Deutschlands (short: VBKD or VBK), the artists' union, in the early
1950s. Association with this union was mandatory to pursue an artistic
career. The union enforced the right to use special food cards in the
early years of the socialist state, supported artists' efforts to find
a studio or apartment, and most importantly assigned commissions for
art works. Simultaneously, the VBK was used as apolitical instrument
that implemented actual dogmas of the art policy, such as the
promotion of the prototypical function of Soviet art in society.
Meanwhile, the cultural department carried out campaigns against
expressionism, formalism, cosmopolitism, abstract art and heavily
debated performance arts in the 1980s.Non-conformists, i.e. those who
worked in an independent manner, could continue their work only
through private funding or at their own expense. Artists whose art was
not in alignment with the dogma prescribed by the official socialist
style were therefore excluded from art exhibitions and commissions and
could even be banned from exhibition and work.
21. According to the passage, who among the following is most likely
to be a non-conformist artist?
a)
An artist who practised Socialist Realism.
b)
An artist who was born in the post-World War II era.
c)
An artist who was associated with VBKD.
d)
An artist who practised abstract art.
22. In the second para, when the author mentions "…amidst their packed
boxes...", he intends to convey that
a)
the applicants were eager to move to the West.
b)
the applicants were against Socialism.
c)
the applicants were eager to leave the GDR.
d)
the Ausreiseantrag was about to accept their application.
23. The primary function that the quote in the first paragraph, "a
dead corpse, dead to an extent that you could only make fun of it",
serves is to
a)
indicate the tone of the passage.
b)
indicate the importance of art in the GDR.
c)
indicate the lack of activism by the state government in patronising art.
d)
indicate the general sentiment of the young post war populace of GDR.
24. Which of the following situations would be most similar to that of
a non-conformist artist in GDR during the period 1961-1989?
a)
A teenager pursuing his hobby against the wishes of his parents.
b)
A researcher publishing only the optimistic findings of his research.
c)
A book vendor selling books that are against the political sentiments
of the state.
d)
A rebel leader fighting for his principles.
25.(a) Thankfully we do not have to reinvent the wheel time and again,
but occasionally we find ourselves using wheels when, in fact, we need
to invent new forms of transportation.
(b) We may chuckle today at the Church's opposition to Galileo, but we
have our own share of favourite preconceptions embedded in our
consciousness.
(c) Sharp minds like Galileo's resist the temptation, indeed
compulsion, to rely on old mental patterns when only new ones will do
and fully appreciate the often unconscious mental process by which we
perceive events, people and things.
(d) Entrenched patterns, right or wrong, become extremely difficult to
change, as Galileo discovered when he suggested, counter to Church
dogma, that the Earth does not occupy the centre of the Universe.
(e) The ability of humans to think in patterns as they navigate
through life's sophisticated and mundane tasks is at once the greatest
strength and the most pernicious weakness of healthy human brains,
regardless of IQ.
a)
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b)
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c)
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d)
badec
According to Stamps, indicators of habitat quality, as perceived by an
individual of a dispersing species, include the presence of resources,
conspecifics, and hetero specifics. As you might imagine, dispersers
lack the time and energy needed to complete in-depth assessments of
critical resources in the habitats they encounter. Evidence suggests
that some dispersers rely on "quick and dirty" cues to assess the
relative quality of prospective settlement sites. For example, young
lizards (Anolisaeneus) that leave their natal site to search for
feeding territories spend only about six hours evaluating a particular
location. Given their varied diet of arthropods, this time period is
probably too short to permit a detailed assessment of prey
availability. So, rather than assessing arthropod availability at each
site, the lizards seem to assess habitat characteristics such as light
intensity and amount of leaf litter. These characteristics correlate
with prey availability and lend themselves to more rapid evaluation
than the painstaking task of evaluating the local availability of
several different prey species.
What about conspecifics? Should dispersers evaluate their presence or
absence in the vicinity of a prospective home? Absence of conspecifics
from a particular site might be a good thing. After all, if an
individual settles into an unoccupied site, then it would avoid all
that nasty intraspecific (i.e., within the same species) competition
for resources. There are two main ideas concerning how fitness might
change with number of conspecifics in an area. One model, proposed by
Fretwell, called the ideal free distribution, predicts that individual
fitness will decline as the number of conspecifics in a patch
increases. Another idea, proposed by Allee, suggests that individual
fitness increases with the number of conspecifics at low to moderate
densities, and then declines from moderate to high densities.
Stamps concluded that presence of conspecifics in an area could also
serve as a source of information about habitat quality. Juvenile
lizards (A. aeneus), for example, seem to use conspecific presence as
an indirect cue to habitat quality. Juveniles were allowed to view two
sites of equivalent quality; a territory owner was present in one site
but not on the other. After ten days, the territory owner was removed
and the juveniles were allowed to select between the two sites. The
young lizards preferred the previously occupied site to the equivalent
unoccupied site.
The presence of hetero specifics in a particular habitat can have
costs and benefits for an animal considering whether to settle there.
Interactions between species that share mutual resources could be
negative due to interspecific (i.e., between different species)
competition. Interactions between hetero specific individuals can also
be beneficial, however, such as when birds from mixed species flock
and experience the benefits of enhanced food acquisition and
antipredator behaviour. Thus, moving in where there are neighbours of
other species may be beneficial under certain circumstances. This idea
has been formalized by Mönkkönen as the heterospecific attraction
hypothesis which states that individuals choose habitat patches based
on the presence of established residents of other species. This model
predicts that individuals searching for a new home will display the
strongest attraction to heterospecifics when the benefits of social
aggregation outweigh the costs of competition and when the costs of
independent sampling of habitats are high.
26. Which of the following statements regarding dispersers and
conspecifics is accurate according to the passage?
a)
Dispersers tend to consider the presence of conspecifics to be a
negative indicator of the quality of a prospective habitat.
b)
If the population of conspecifics is high, it will increase the
individual fitness of the dispersers.
c)
Dispersers assess the characteristics of a habitat and correlate them
with the presence of conspecifics.
d)
The presence of conspecifics in a habitat is considered to be a
positive indicator of the quality of a prospective habitat by some
dispersers.
27. "After all, if an individual settles into an unoccupied site, then
it would avoid all that nasty intraspecific competition for
resources." The model proposed by which of the following authors
mentioned in the passage would support the above statement?
a)
Allee
b)
Fretwell
c)
Mönkkönen
d)
Stamps
28. Which of the following statements can definitely be inferred about
the territory owner of a habitat, in the context of the selection of a
site by a juvenile lizard?
a)
Territory owner is a conspecific whose presence indicates a high
quality habitat.
b)
The territory owner is a prey of the disperser indicating higher
resource availability and a better quality of settlement site.
c)
The territory owner is a conspecific whose presence will result in
lower individual fitness for the disperser.
d)
Both A and C
29. It can be inferred from the passage that, heterospecifics and
conspecifics in a habitat often
a)
share a predator and prey relation.
b)
serve diametrically opposite purposes during habitat selection by dispersers.
c)
coexist in a symbiotic relationship, sharing mutual benefits.
d)
do not prefer to co-exist in the same territory.
30.(a) Those in the comfort zone dislike and fear change. They avoid
risk − and, given their presence, even dominance, in some
organizations, they let conformity trump creativity whenever new
thinking threatens the status quo.
(b) However, creative minds must march courageously to the beat of a
different drum, one not always pleasing to those with trained years.
(c) Critics need not take personal responsibility for ideas, since
they only invest themselves in finding fault in the ideas of others.
(d) Those who muster the courage to rock boats quite often invite the
suspicion, resistance and even sabotage of shipmates who prefer a
comfortable ride.
(e) It's all quite natural because we all find it easier to criticize
than create.
(f) Breaking ranks always requires courage, in the navy and elsewhere.
a)
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b)
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c)
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d)
facdeb
Digitization is upending many core tenets of competition among
industries by lowering the cost of entering markets and providing
high-speed passing lanes to scale up enterprises. At the extreme are
hyperscale businesses that are pushing the new rules of digitization
so radically that they are challenging conventional management
intuition about scale and complexity. These businesses have users,
customers, devices, or interactions numbered in the hundreds of
millions, billions, or more. Billions of interactions and data points,
in turn, mean that events with only a one-in-a-million probability are
happening many times a day.
Taken individually, each of these businesses seems like a special
case. After all, how many companies can be like Google, which
processes around four billion searches a day; Twitter, handling 500
million tweets a day; or Alibaba, the world's largest e-commerce
market, which facilitated 254 million orders in one day?
Yet the existence of even a small but growing number of such
businesses represents a new and potent competitive force. Digital
powerhouses already are flexing their hyperscale muscles to move from
search and social networking into new sectors, like banking and
retailing. Furthermore, hyperscaling will probably touch more areas as
cheaper computer power, sensors, and communications accelerate the
pace at which businesses adopt digital technologies. Already, the
number of subscribers to China Mobile's digital and voice services has
grown to over 760 million; payments networks such as Visa process
billions of transactions; and new hyperscale segments are emerging in
manufacturing industries thanks to the Internet of Things, which
creates massive data flows from machine-to-machine interactions. For
example, the GE twin-jet engines on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner generate a
terabyte of information a day.
In the face of these developments, senior leaders and boards will need
not only to focus on their current digitization strategies but also to
consider which hyperscale businesses could threaten their existing or
emerging digital models. Alternatively, as established businesses
become more fully digitized, they may find they have opportunities to
compete at hyperscale in some segments. Large retail businesses can
exploit immense data troves that enable hyperscaling. New business
models may emerge from exploiting machine-to-machine data, making it
possible for companies that draw revenues from sales of physical
assets, such as vehicles or factory machines, to evolve into service
businesses based on usage charges. Clearly, the game is still in its
early innings and therefore, the business leaders need to have a
closer view of the new terrain at the frontiers of digital
competition.
31.The author used the phrase "high-speed passing lanes", most likely
in order to indicate that digitization is
a)
providing a path for easier entry into the market due to lower costs.
b)
creating an avenue for increased competition between large and small companies.
c)
providing an opportunity to scale up rapidly by challenging
conventional management principles.
d)
is a likely means of threat to existing businesses as new companies
manage to scale up rapidly.
32.What does the author imply when he states the fact, "twin-jet
engines on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner generate a terabyte of information
a day", in the passage?
a)
Communication between machines is significant in manufacturing industries
b)
The data generated because of machine-to-machine interactions is huge in scale.
c)
Internet of Things, involving machine-to-machine interactions has
helped manufacturing industries.
d)
Hyperscaling can be relevant even to manufacturing industries.
33.According to the passage, which of the following is necessary for
hyperscaling to affect an industry?
a)
The industry should be a nascent one.
b)
The industry should involve generating and managing massive data.
c)
The industry should follow conventional business practices.
d)
The industry should primarily be based on digital technology.
34.At the end of the passage, the author said "the game is still in
its early innings" most likely because he believes that
a)
the impact that hyper scaling can have on businesses has not been
fully realized.
b)
the business leaders of digital businesses are all very young.
c)
hyper scaling has changed the business practices of conventional businesses.
d)
many business leaders are not aware of hyper scaling.
1. C. Rangarajan, chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the
former Prime Minister, had said that the Indian education system was
more focussed on answering examinations than on imparting knowledge.
Questions being asked in examinations did not call for an application
of the mind or critical analyses. Most often, they were a test of
memory. Therefore, he said, there was an urgent need to reform the
examination system. In this regard, several changes to the structure
of exams as well as the syllabus had been recommended, but no
consensus reached yet, and India was falling behind developed nations.
Which of the following can be inferred from this paragraph?
a)
Students should regard learning as an exciting experience and show a
genuine desire to learn and keep other interests out of their minds.
They should demand a rigorous education and a better examination
system.
b)
The developed nations have moved ahead of India with better structured
education systems.
c)
No changes have ever been made to the Indian higher education system.
There is infighting and lack of political will on the issue which
prevents a consensus being reached.
d)
Fifteen years ago India was on par with developed nations and the
changes that have been recommended need to be immediately put into
effect.
2.Biochar is a name for charcoal when it is used for particular
purposes, especially as a soil amendment. Like most charcoal, biochar
is created by pyrolysis of biomass. Burn any kind of organic material
− corn husks, hazelnut shells, bamboo − in an oxygen depleted process
called pyrolysis, and you generate gases and heat that can be used as
energy − biochar. Biochar is under investigation as an approach to
carbon sequestration to produce negative carbon dioxide emissions.
Biochar thus has the potential to help mitigate climate change, via
carbon sequestration. It thus proves helpful in reducing global
warming.
Which of the following, if true, would weaken the claim that biochar
is helpful in reducing global warming?
a)
The process of pyrolysis itself produces carbon dioxide emissions more
than normal energy sources.
b)
By using biochar, the farmers could fertilize existing plots instead
of clearing more land.
c)
Pyrolysis can produce enough energy in an efficient way to power a
tractor and biochar can improve soils.
d)
When added to thin and acidic soils, biochar produces higher
agricultural yields and cuts down fertilizers.
3.Sluggishness or a lack of energy or vigor or interest or enthusiasm
has to be overcome before one can achieve one's goals and targets and
meet expectations. To overcome sluggishness its existence has to be
accepted.
The above statements imply all of the following EXCEPT?
a)
Acceptance of sluggishness is a necessary precondition to meeting
one's goals and targets. Goals and targets can be met only by those
who have successfully dealt with their sluggishness.
b)
A person who does not take sluggishness seriously always fall short of
expectations.
c)
To meet expectations and achieve goals and targets, accepting and
overcoming sluggishness is a must.
d)
People who readily accept their sluggishness and are ready to face it
succeed in meeting expectations.
4.(a) Hitler next positioned his divisions along the Czechoslovakian
border, demanding that Britain and France turn a blind eye to
Germany's impending assault on that helpless country.
(b) Chamberlain even said of the meeting, "I got the impression that
here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word."
(c) Hitler, knowing his army might suffer a crushing defeat if Britain
and France combined forces to resist the attack, called for a meeting
in Germany, where he bullied and cajoled, setting off frightful
emotions in Chamberlain.
(d) Later historians would write that Chamberlain's distorted
perceptions of reality created deadly flaws in his thinking at a time
when Great Britain desperately needed realistic thinking about the
intentions of Hitler.
(e) When Adolf Hitler marched his troops into Austria, British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain hoping for peace dismissed the incident
as only an isolated event.
(f) At the meeting, when Hitler called Czechoslovakia his "last
territorial demand," Chamberlain deceived himself into believing it,
even though reality belied everything Hitler said.
a)
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b)
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c)
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d)
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5.OMO
a)
The entire conceptual edifice of modern science is a product of biology.
b)
Even the most basic and profound ideas of science − relativity,
quantum theory, the theory of evolution by natural selection −are
generated and necessarily limited by the particular capacities of our
human biology, the limitations of our human brains.
c)
There was also the discovery of DNA and the genetic code with its
implication (to quote James Watson) that "There are only molecules.
Everything else is sociology" and there was also the Darwinian
revolution; the idea that far from being the climax of "intelligent
design" we are merely neotonous apes that happen to be slightly
cleverer than our cousins.
d)
This implies that the content and scope of scientific knowledge is not
open ended.
6. OMO
a)
So far archaeologists have discovered 40 large burial mounds
containing 600 likenesses of mythical animals, gods and chieftains in
what is South America's largest complex of megalithic statues.
b)
The museum has adopted its own form of protest and opened the
exhibition minus statues; light is projected where the statues would
have been; guides use a virtual-reality program and tablet computers
to show visitors a 3D image of what was meant to be there.
c)
Nestled between the headwaters of the Magdalena river and high Andean
moorland, the ancient stone statues at San Agustín are among the most
mysterious pre-Columbian archaeological artefacts.
d)
Like other sites in the region, San Agustín has suffered plunder, both
organised and freelance; Konrad Preuss, a German anthropologist who
led the first European excavations there, shipped 35 statues that he
found to a museum in Berlin, where they remain.
OMO
7.
a)
Rich prizes beckon companies that grasp digital opportunities;
ignominy awaits those that fail.
b)
The days of derision are long gone: now geeks are gods.
c)
To thousands of bright young people, nothing is cooler than coding the
night away, striving to turn their own startup into the next big
thing.
d)
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter are reinventing the ways
in which mere mortals converse, read, play, shop and live.
SUMMARY
8. Everybody at Harmony Villa loved the birch grove behind the house,
though to none of them did it mean what it meant to Alice. For her it
lived. She not only knew the birches but they knew her: the fern-sweet
solitudes, threatened with shadows, knew her; the wind in the boughs
always made her a glad salutation. From the first beginnings of memory
she had played in it and wandered in it and dreamed in it. She could
not remember the time it had not held her imagination in thrall and
dominated her life. It could never be to Alice just the ordinary grove
of white-skinned trees and ferny hollows it was to other people.
a)
All the residents of Harmony Villa loved the birch grove behind the
house, especially Alice.
b)
For Alice, the birch grove behind Harmony Villa was almost like a living thing.
c)
The birch grove behind the house was special to Alice in ways it was
not to other people.
d)
The grove of birch trees behind her house had always dominated Alice's life.
SUMMARY
9. Our cultural backgrounds influence not only how we marry but how we
make choices in nearly every area of our lives. From early on, members
of individualistic societies are taught the special importance of
personal choice. Even a walk through the grocery store becomes an
opportunity to teach lessons about choosing, particularly in the
United States, where stores routinely offer hundreds of options. A
parent will probably narrow down the number of choices and explain the
differences between this cereal and that one, or that toy and this
one, but the child would be encouraged to express a preference. By
contrast, members of collectivist societies place greater emphasis on
duty. Children are often told, "If you are a good child, you'll do
what your parents tell you," and the parents need not explain
themselves. From what you eat to what you wear, the toys you play with
to what you study, it is what you are supposed to do that is most
important.
a)
Individualist societies have greater dialogue with their children
whereas collectivist societies mostly talk down to their children.
b)
Individualistic societies stress more on the individual and are more
self centered, whereas collectivist societies stress more on social
units such as families and are unselfish.
c)
Children of individualist societies become accustomed to making their
own decisions whereas children in collectivist societies such as India
prefer to let their elders decide for them.
d)
Culture influences choice making. Individualistic societies emphasize
personal choice while collectivist societies emphasize duty.
summary
10. Corruption is an intractable problem. Like Diabetes, it can be
controlled but can't be eliminated. Despite moaning about corruption,
we don't hesitate to vote for the same tainted persons. Choosing
honest and dedicated people, introducing electoral reforms and
controlling electoral expenses can combat corruption to some extent.
Inculcating values in our young children might give us some hope in
future. Corruption has to be rooted out from the roots.
a)
The person who gives bribe is as much responsible for corruption as
the person who takes it.
b)
It is not easy to wipe out corruption from the world.
c)
To tackle the epidemic of corruption which can only be controlled but
not eliminated, measures like electoral reforms, choosing people of
integrity and focussing on moral values in youth can help to an
extent.
d)
Corruption can be rooted out only if every citizen vows to keep himself clean.
11 SC
Select all that are correct:
a)
With Susana Diaz beaming radiant from the conference stage after
winning control of the Spanish Socialists' mighty Andalusian branch
b)
in Granada last month, fans hailed a generational and gender
revolution in the party. Her victory confirmed that the
c)
energetic 39-years-old, who also runs the region's government, is now
Spain's most powerful Socialist.
d)
That is a big role in a country where the ruling Popular Party of
Mariano Rajoy and the Socialists tends to alternate in power.
e)
Ms Diaz's smile hides an iron will. She is at ease with power and is
reputedly ruthless against rivals.
12 SC
Identify Correct
a)
The digital revolution is transforming the process of innovation
itself. Thanks to off-the-shelf code from the internet and platforms
b)
that host services, provide distribution and offer marketing, the
number of digital startups have exploded.
c)
Just as computer-games designers invented a product that humanity
never knew it needed, these firms will dream up new products to employ
millions.
d)
When Instagram, a popular photo-sharing site, was sold to Facebook for
about $1 billion in 2012, it had 30m customers and employed 13 people.
e)
Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy a few months earlier, employed
145,000 people in its heyday.
13SC
Select all that are correct:
a)
The prospect from Sam mountain, rocky outcrop in southern Vietnam's
Mekong delta, is timeless.
b)
Paddy fields shine like emeralds and irrigation canals reflect the
sunlight as mirrors.
c)
Three times a year, farmers in surrounding towns put on their rubber
boots and plant rice seedlings deep in the soil.
d)
Rice cultivation is rooted in the Vietnamese psyche deeply.
e)
Today Vietnam's $ 4 billion in rice exports account for more than a
fifth of the global total.
14 sc
Select all that are correct:
a)
For much of the 27 years that Nelson Mandela was in prison, another
South African led an equally almost solitary life,
b)
in purely political terms, with virtue of her role as the sole liberal
member of parliament. Helen Suzman, a beacon of decency, courage and
common sense,
c)
tormented a succession of justice ministers with her barbed wit. A
string of former political prisoners, including Mandela himself,
d)
testified of her courage and, perhaps even more important, to the
effect she had in publicising and often alleviating the harshness of
their conditions behind bars.
e)
She never shrank from inveighing the tendency of the African National
Congress (ANC) to put party and state above the individual, whether
black or white.
15.Research has shown that meditation can contribute to an
individual's psychological and physiological well-being. This is
accomplished as meditation brings the brainwave pattern into an alpha
state, which is a level of consciousness that promotes the healing
state. There is scientific evidence that meditation can reduce blood
pressure and relieve pain and stress. Research has shown that hormones
and other biochemical compounds in the blood indicative of stress tend
to decrease during meditation. These changes also stabilize over time,
so that a person is actually less stressed biochemically during daily
activity. When used in combination with biofeedback, meditation
enhances the effectiveness of biofeedback. The benefits of an ongoing
meditation practice as it impacts our health can be classified further
into three categories: physiological, psychological and spiritual.
Most people who practise meditation do so to reduce stress, anxiety,
anger and other negative emotions. Increasingly, physicians prescribe
meditation as part of the treatment for a large and growing number of
medical conditions.
Which of the following, if true, significantly strengthens the idea
given in the passage?
a)
People who meditate for long periods of time often cannot distinguish
between their meditative state and reality.
b)
History of medicine shows that meditation is the oldest and most
popular system of relaxation and meditation has been proven to have no
side effects.
c)
Meditation has been recommended by people from many walks of life as a
valuable form of exercise for those living in noisy and fast cities.
d)
In a credible survey conducted to find out the impact of meditation,
70% of respondents said they felt more relaxed and less worried about
daily happenings after meditating.
#RC
One of the most influential philosophers of the post-Renaissance
period was René Descartes, who also contributed to the study of the
anatomy of the brain and the relation between the mind and body. In De
homine (On Man), published posthumously in 1662, Descartes theorized
that filaments within each nerve tube operated tiny "valvules" that
could control the flow of animal spirits into the nerves. He thought
that external stimuli would move the skin, which would pull on these
filaments to open valvules in the ventricles. This allowed animal
spirits to be released from the ventricular reservoirs into the
nerves, which in turn would trigger the muscles to move.
Descartes (1650, 1662) presented this reflexive theory only to account
for involuntary behaviour. He believed that voluntary behaviour
demanded the interaction of the rational soul with the automaton. He
maintained that this occurred through the pineal gland, a small
central body suspended between the anterior ventricles. Small
movements by the pineal gland regulated the flow of spirits through
the intricate system of pipes and valves.
It is often stated that Descartes may have considered the pineal gland
simply because it was unitary rather than double. Although this was an
important factor, Descartes also selected the pineal gland because it
was surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid, which he believed served as a
reservoir for animal spirits.
The solution to the mind-body problem proposed by Descartes was not
widely accepted. Among other things, it was argued that the pineal
gland was even better developed in wild animals than in humans, even
though the brutes were considered soulless automata. Descartes should
have expected this. In 1543, Andreas Vesalius had discussed the gross
anatomy of the pineal gland when dissecting human brains. In fact, in
Book VII of his De HumaniCorporisFabrica (The Fabric of The Human
Body), he decried, "I wish that a sheep's brain be at hand, since it
shows the gland more distinctly than does the human head."
Even Galen had discussed the pineal gland in his anatomy lesson of
A.D. 177, which called for the brain of an ox. But perhaps, even more
interestingly, in the eighth book of his De UsuPartium (On The Use of
Parts of The Body), Galen mentioned the idea of pineal movements
regulating the flow of spirits. He wrote that he evaluated this theory
and found it absurd.
For this and other reasons, opinions varied as to whether the pineal
gland could be regarded as the seat of the soul. In this context, a
few of Descartes' contemporaries suggested that the honour should be
granted to another unique structure, the corpus callosum. In
retrospect, Descartes' ideas about the brain as a reflexive machine
probably had more impact on the development of scientific thought than
his specific solution to the mind-body problem.
16. What is the primary function of the passage?
a)
To present an argument and provide examples supporting the argument.
b)
To present a hypothesis and prove the hypothesis using other studies.
c)
To present a theory and critically discuss it.
d)
To present various solutions to a scholarly dilemma.
17. According to the passage, what should Descartes have expected (in para 4)?
a)
That the pineal gland could not have been the seat of the soul.
b)
That the pineal gland could not have regulated the flow of animal spirits.
c)
That the pineal gland in wild animals was better developed than in humans.
d)
That the nature of the pineal gland in wild animals would be used to
challenge his theory.
18. Which of the following is an assumption made by Descartes while
proposing his solution to the mind-body problem?
a)
The movements of pineal glands regulates the flow of animal spirits.
b)
The pineal gland is unitary.
c)
The pineal gland is not well developed in wild animals.
d)
Cerebrospinal fluid serves as a reservoir for animal spirits.
19. DIRECTIONS for question 85: Select one or more answer choices
according to the directions given in the question.
Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage
about the corpus callosum?
Select all that apply:
a)
The amount of cerebrospinal fluid surrounding it is more than that
surrounding pineal gland.
b)
It is a gland present in the brain
c)
It is also unitary like the pineal gland
d)
None of the above
20.(a) It's the leading edge of the train of knowledge − containing
all the history of the past and all the infinite possibilities of the
future −that keeps the whole train on the track.
(b) You don't have pure reason − you have pure confusion.
(c) Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience.
(d) Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that
leading edge has been.
(e) At the leading edge, there are no subjects, no objects, only the
track of quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of evaluating,
no way of acknowledging this quality, then the entire train has no way
of knowing where to go.
a)
ecdab
b)
decba
c)
cbeda
d)
cadeb
#RC
In the period between 1961 and 1989, the regulated art system of the
German Democratic Republic (GDR) led to a large scale exodus of at
least fifteen hundred artists to the Federal Republic of Germany
(FRG). Several young artists, who were born in the post-World War II
period, did so in order to discontinue working according to the rigid
confines of the art policy that favoured Socialist Realism as an ideal
style for the construction of a socialist utopia. For this generation,
who experienced the devastating impact of World War II only through
the stories of their parents, the GDR was "a dead corpse, dead to an
extent that you could only make fun of it", as the performance artist
Else Gabriel stated shortly after the collapse of the regime. Their
utter disillusionment in the failing socialist society was expressed
in autonomous artistic production that embraced Western modernist
approaches such as performance art, and sought legitimation in its
disturbing impact on a closed society. However, this nonconformist
attitude put artists in the crosshairs of the secret police (Minister
iumfürStaatssicherheit/MfS or Stasi), that in turn criminalized their
actions, and ultimately sought to dismantle or destroy artistic
groups. In order to continue developing their modernist art practice
and being recognized as artists, several artists were left no other
choice than to emigrate, whether through internal migration or fleeing
to 'non-socialist' foreign countries.
This exodus occurred despite the fact that the bureaucracy of an
emigration application (Ausreiseantrag) was unyielding and the process
could take up to six years. In the mid-1980s, when the overall
problems of the socialist system became more apparent, the application
rate increased significantly. For years, applicants literally lived
amidst their packed boxes in anticipation of a definitive answer on
their emigration applications. Once in the West, they faced new
challenges as they transitioned from the state-controlled model of
artistic production of the East towards the market-led approach
favoured in the West, with marked effects on their work. After all of
these efforts and sacrifices, deserting artists ended up only a few
years later in a state where the former East suddenly became West.
Why would an artist who was the visual translator of the socialist
utopia and thus generally enjoyed a high status and a good income have
a desire to fleein the first place? By pointing out the core
limitations artists found themselves confronted with, a better
understanding of their motives for pursuing emigration to the West
will evolve. By focusing on the (self-) controlled and regulate dart
system of the GDR we can define the artistic constraints and thereby
the limitations for the younger generation. The hierarchal structure
of East Germany's ruling party, the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei
Deutschlands/Socialist Unity Party of Germany), was reflected in its
subsidized cultural sector. In order to influence the artistic
landscape and promote the official artistic style, Socialist Realism,
the state government founded the Verband Bildender Künstler
Deutschlands (short: VBKD or VBK), the artists' union, in the early
1950s. Association with this union was mandatory to pursue an artistic
career. The union enforced the right to use special food cards in the
early years of the socialist state, supported artists' efforts to find
a studio or apartment, and most importantly assigned commissions for
art works. Simultaneously, the VBK was used as apolitical instrument
that implemented actual dogmas of the art policy, such as the
promotion of the prototypical function of Soviet art in society.
Meanwhile, the cultural department carried out campaigns against
expressionism, formalism, cosmopolitism, abstract art and heavily
debated performance arts in the 1980s.Non-conformists, i.e. those who
worked in an independent manner, could continue their work only
through private funding or at their own expense. Artists whose art was
not in alignment with the dogma prescribed by the official socialist
style were therefore excluded from art exhibitions and commissions and
could even be banned from exhibition and work.
21. According to the passage, who among the following is most likely
to be a non-conformist artist?
a)
An artist who practised Socialist Realism.
b)
An artist who was born in the post-World War II era.
c)
An artist who was associated with VBKD.
d)
An artist who practised abstract art.
22. In the second para, when the author mentions "…amidst their packed
boxes...", he intends to convey that
a)
the applicants were eager to move to the West.
b)
the applicants were against Socialism.
c)
the applicants were eager to leave the GDR.
d)
the Ausreiseantrag was about to accept their application.
23. The primary function that the quote in the first paragraph, "a
dead corpse, dead to an extent that you could only make fun of it",
serves is to
a)
indicate the tone of the passage.
b)
indicate the importance of art in the GDR.
c)
indicate the lack of activism by the state government in patronising art.
d)
indicate the general sentiment of the young post war populace of GDR.
24. Which of the following situations would be most similar to that of
a non-conformist artist in GDR during the period 1961-1989?
a)
A teenager pursuing his hobby against the wishes of his parents.
b)
A researcher publishing only the optimistic findings of his research.
c)
A book vendor selling books that are against the political sentiments
of the state.
d)
A rebel leader fighting for his principles.
25.(a) Thankfully we do not have to reinvent the wheel time and again,
but occasionally we find ourselves using wheels when, in fact, we need
to invent new forms of transportation.
(b) We may chuckle today at the Church's opposition to Galileo, but we
have our own share of favourite preconceptions embedded in our
consciousness.
(c) Sharp minds like Galileo's resist the temptation, indeed
compulsion, to rely on old mental patterns when only new ones will do
and fully appreciate the often unconscious mental process by which we
perceive events, people and things.
(d) Entrenched patterns, right or wrong, become extremely difficult to
change, as Galileo discovered when he suggested, counter to Church
dogma, that the Earth does not occupy the centre of the Universe.
(e) The ability of humans to think in patterns as they navigate
through life's sophisticated and mundane tasks is at once the greatest
strength and the most pernicious weakness of healthy human brains,
regardless of IQ.
a)
cebad
b)
eadbc
c)
cedab
d)
badec
According to Stamps, indicators of habitat quality, as perceived by an
individual of a dispersing species, include the presence of resources,
conspecifics, and hetero specifics. As you might imagine, dispersers
lack the time and energy needed to complete in-depth assessments of
critical resources in the habitats they encounter. Evidence suggests
that some dispersers rely on "quick and dirty" cues to assess the
relative quality of prospective settlement sites. For example, young
lizards (Anolisaeneus) that leave their natal site to search for
feeding territories spend only about six hours evaluating a particular
location. Given their varied diet of arthropods, this time period is
probably too short to permit a detailed assessment of prey
availability. So, rather than assessing arthropod availability at each
site, the lizards seem to assess habitat characteristics such as light
intensity and amount of leaf litter. These characteristics correlate
with prey availability and lend themselves to more rapid evaluation
than the painstaking task of evaluating the local availability of
several different prey species.
What about conspecifics? Should dispersers evaluate their presence or
absence in the vicinity of a prospective home? Absence of conspecifics
from a particular site might be a good thing. After all, if an
individual settles into an unoccupied site, then it would avoid all
that nasty intraspecific (i.e., within the same species) competition
for resources. There are two main ideas concerning how fitness might
change with number of conspecifics in an area. One model, proposed by
Fretwell, called the ideal free distribution, predicts that individual
fitness will decline as the number of conspecifics in a patch
increases. Another idea, proposed by Allee, suggests that individual
fitness increases with the number of conspecifics at low to moderate
densities, and then declines from moderate to high densities.
Stamps concluded that presence of conspecifics in an area could also
serve as a source of information about habitat quality. Juvenile
lizards (A. aeneus), for example, seem to use conspecific presence as
an indirect cue to habitat quality. Juveniles were allowed to view two
sites of equivalent quality; a territory owner was present in one site
but not on the other. After ten days, the territory owner was removed
and the juveniles were allowed to select between the two sites. The
young lizards preferred the previously occupied site to the equivalent
unoccupied site.
The presence of hetero specifics in a particular habitat can have
costs and benefits for an animal considering whether to settle there.
Interactions between species that share mutual resources could be
negative due to interspecific (i.e., between different species)
competition. Interactions between hetero specific individuals can also
be beneficial, however, such as when birds from mixed species flock
and experience the benefits of enhanced food acquisition and
antipredator behaviour. Thus, moving in where there are neighbours of
other species may be beneficial under certain circumstances. This idea
has been formalized by Mönkkönen as the heterospecific attraction
hypothesis which states that individuals choose habitat patches based
on the presence of established residents of other species. This model
predicts that individuals searching for a new home will display the
strongest attraction to heterospecifics when the benefits of social
aggregation outweigh the costs of competition and when the costs of
independent sampling of habitats are high.
26. Which of the following statements regarding dispersers and
conspecifics is accurate according to the passage?
a)
Dispersers tend to consider the presence of conspecifics to be a
negative indicator of the quality of a prospective habitat.
b)
If the population of conspecifics is high, it will increase the
individual fitness of the dispersers.
c)
Dispersers assess the characteristics of a habitat and correlate them
with the presence of conspecifics.
d)
The presence of conspecifics in a habitat is considered to be a
positive indicator of the quality of a prospective habitat by some
dispersers.
27. "After all, if an individual settles into an unoccupied site, then
it would avoid all that nasty intraspecific competition for
resources." The model proposed by which of the following authors
mentioned in the passage would support the above statement?
a)
Allee
b)
Fretwell
c)
Mönkkönen
d)
Stamps
28. Which of the following statements can definitely be inferred about
the territory owner of a habitat, in the context of the selection of a
site by a juvenile lizard?
a)
Territory owner is a conspecific whose presence indicates a high
quality habitat.
b)
The territory owner is a prey of the disperser indicating higher
resource availability and a better quality of settlement site.
c)
The territory owner is a conspecific whose presence will result in
lower individual fitness for the disperser.
d)
Both A and C
29. It can be inferred from the passage that, heterospecifics and
conspecifics in a habitat often
a)
share a predator and prey relation.
b)
serve diametrically opposite purposes during habitat selection by dispersers.
c)
coexist in a symbiotic relationship, sharing mutual benefits.
d)
do not prefer to co-exist in the same territory.
30.(a) Those in the comfort zone dislike and fear change. They avoid
risk − and, given their presence, even dominance, in some
organizations, they let conformity trump creativity whenever new
thinking threatens the status quo.
(b) However, creative minds must march courageously to the beat of a
different drum, one not always pleasing to those with trained years.
(c) Critics need not take personal responsibility for ideas, since
they only invest themselves in finding fault in the ideas of others.
(d) Those who muster the courage to rock boats quite often invite the
suspicion, resistance and even sabotage of shipmates who prefer a
comfortable ride.
(e) It's all quite natural because we all find it easier to criticize
than create.
(f) Breaking ranks always requires courage, in the navy and elsewhere.
a)
caedbf
b)
ecfdab
c)
fdaecb
d)
facdeb
Digitization is upending many core tenets of competition among
industries by lowering the cost of entering markets and providing
high-speed passing lanes to scale up enterprises. At the extreme are
hyperscale businesses that are pushing the new rules of digitization
so radically that they are challenging conventional management
intuition about scale and complexity. These businesses have users,
customers, devices, or interactions numbered in the hundreds of
millions, billions, or more. Billions of interactions and data points,
in turn, mean that events with only a one-in-a-million probability are
happening many times a day.
Taken individually, each of these businesses seems like a special
case. After all, how many companies can be like Google, which
processes around four billion searches a day; Twitter, handling 500
million tweets a day; or Alibaba, the world's largest e-commerce
market, which facilitated 254 million orders in one day?
Yet the existence of even a small but growing number of such
businesses represents a new and potent competitive force. Digital
powerhouses already are flexing their hyperscale muscles to move from
search and social networking into new sectors, like banking and
retailing. Furthermore, hyperscaling will probably touch more areas as
cheaper computer power, sensors, and communications accelerate the
pace at which businesses adopt digital technologies. Already, the
number of subscribers to China Mobile's digital and voice services has
grown to over 760 million; payments networks such as Visa process
billions of transactions; and new hyperscale segments are emerging in
manufacturing industries thanks to the Internet of Things, which
creates massive data flows from machine-to-machine interactions. For
example, the GE twin-jet engines on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner generate a
terabyte of information a day.
In the face of these developments, senior leaders and boards will need
not only to focus on their current digitization strategies but also to
consider which hyperscale businesses could threaten their existing or
emerging digital models. Alternatively, as established businesses
become more fully digitized, they may find they have opportunities to
compete at hyperscale in some segments. Large retail businesses can
exploit immense data troves that enable hyperscaling. New business
models may emerge from exploiting machine-to-machine data, making it
possible for companies that draw revenues from sales of physical
assets, such as vehicles or factory machines, to evolve into service
businesses based on usage charges. Clearly, the game is still in its
early innings and therefore, the business leaders need to have a
closer view of the new terrain at the frontiers of digital
competition.
31.The author used the phrase "high-speed passing lanes", most likely
in order to indicate that digitization is
a)
providing a path for easier entry into the market due to lower costs.
b)
creating an avenue for increased competition between large and small companies.
c)
providing an opportunity to scale up rapidly by challenging
conventional management principles.
d)
is a likely means of threat to existing businesses as new companies
manage to scale up rapidly.
32.What does the author imply when he states the fact, "twin-jet
engines on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner generate a terabyte of information
a day", in the passage?
a)
Communication between machines is significant in manufacturing industries
b)
The data generated because of machine-to-machine interactions is huge in scale.
c)
Internet of Things, involving machine-to-machine interactions has
helped manufacturing industries.
d)
Hyperscaling can be relevant even to manufacturing industries.
33.According to the passage, which of the following is necessary for
hyperscaling to affect an industry?
a)
The industry should be a nascent one.
b)
The industry should involve generating and managing massive data.
c)
The industry should follow conventional business practices.
d)
The industry should primarily be based on digital technology.
34.At the end of the passage, the author said "the game is still in
its early innings" most likely because he believes that
a)
the impact that hyper scaling can have on businesses has not been
fully realized.
b)
the business leaders of digital businesses are all very young.
c)
hyper scaling has changed the business practices of conventional businesses.
d)
many business leaders are not aware of hyper scaling.
29.02.16
https://www.facebook.com/events/1051680678223018/
1.(a) World Bank reports, among others, have come to the conclusion
that the growth of the biofuel industry has a serious impact on food
scarcity and food inflation the world over.
(b) Biofuel evangelism started in the 1970s and was at its peak in the
following decades.
(c) US markets have seen major distortions in the food market because
of ethanol subsidies while there has been food scarcity in Mexico
because of the diversion of corn for ethanol production.
(d) But over the past few years, there has been a mounting pile of
evidence that going the biofuel route can cause more harm than good.
(e) The more arable land is diverted to growing biofuel crops, the
less there is for cultivating food crops.
a)
bdaec
b)
abdec
c)
baecd
d)
ecabd
2.(a) The principal assumption of the anti-smoking movement has been
that tobacco companies persuade teens to smoke by lying to them, by
making smoking sound a lot more desirable and a lot less harmful than
it really is.
(b) And we've run extensive public health campaigns on television and
radio and in magazines to try to educate teens about the dangers of
smoking.
(c) We've raised the price of cigarettes and enforced the law against
selling tobacco to minors, to try to make it much harder for teens to
buy cigarettes.
(d) To address that problem, then, we've restricted and policed
cigarette advertising, so it's a lot harder for tobacco companies to
lie.
(e) Teenage smoking is one of the great, baffling phenomena of modern
life – no one really knows how to fight it, or even, for that matter,
what it is.
a)
edcba
b)
eadcb
c)
aedcb
d)
ecbda
3.(a) Although they may sound as if they don't have very much in
common, they share a basic, underlying pattern.
(b) They simply wore the shoes when they went to clubs or cafes or
walked the streets of downtown New York, and in so doing exposed other
people to their fashion sense.
(c) The rise of Hush Puppies and the fall of New York's crime rate are
textbook examples of epidemics in action.
(d) No one took out an advertisement and told people that the
traditional Hush Puppies were cool and they should start wearing them.
(e) They infected them with the Hush Puppies "virus".
(f) First of all, they are clear examples of contagious behavior.
a)
cfdabe
b)
cfadeb
c)
cafdbe
d)
dbecaf
OMO
4.
a)
However, Golden Rice is not produced by a corporate behemoth but by
the public sector whose aim is to double food production; and reduce
the number of deaths and cases of blindness caused by vitamin A
deficiency.
b)
If the green revolution had never happened, and yields had stayed at
1960 levels, the world could not produce its current food output even
if it ploughed up every last acre of cultivable land.
c)
In August 2014, environmentalists in the Philippines vandalised a
field of Golden Rice − an experimental grain whose genes had been
modified to carry beta-carotene, a chemical precursor of vitamin A −
claiming that genetically modified (GM) crops pose health risks.
d)
Hence, vandalising Golden Rice (GM) field trials is a bit like the
campaign of some religious leaders to prevent smallpox inoculations:
it causes misery, even death, in the name of obscurantism and
unscientific belief.
OMO
5.
a)
A few though, keep getting better when they're dead, such as the
Chilean novelist and short story writer, Roberto Bolaño.
b)
The successful contemporary writer is an extremely laudable, and
lauded, person, but can also be a pompous and precious one.
c)
Some great authors have published their worst works from beyond the grave.
d)
His seminal five-part novel, 2666, came out posthumously, won the
National Book Critics Circle Award and convinced the world he was not
just a master of the short form but could put out his life's best work
at nearly 900 pages, even after death.
OMO
6.
a)
For Europe's surviving piano-makers, it's a case of changing their
tune or facing the music.
b)
Pleyel, in business for over two centuries, was Chopin's favourite and
counted Stravinsky, Liszt and Debussy among its customers.
c)
The endorsement of august musicians has not saved it after decades of
struggling to compete with less pricey pianos from the Far East.
d)
But the French piano-maker recently said that its last workshop will
close this month.
OMO
7.
a)
Worthless currency is not necessarily useless; it can be a pointed way
of shaming someone who asks for a bribe.
b)
They look roughly like 50-rupee notes; people are encouraging to hand
them to corrupt officials, signalling resistance to sleaze.
c)
That is the thinking behind zero-rupee notes, an Indian
anti-corruption gimmick now attracting world-wide interest.
d)
But in places where public opinion is already shifting, they could be
a useful way of making bureaucrats behave better.
8.Diwali, the festival of lights, signifies that good will always be
better than evil. In the present day many people have developed a lot
of negativity in their minds and hearts, which has led to high
corruption and higher crime rates. Value based education is the need
of the day to eliminate the darkness of cruelty, selfishness and greed
and bring the light of wisdom, peace, kindness, truthfulness, right
attitude, hard work and co-operation. Mahatma Gandhi said that we
should eradicate not the sinner but the sins from our hearts; if a
society has people with good hearts, it will definitely flourish.
What conclusion can be drawn from the above argument?
a)
Nowadays nobody is good even though good is always better than evil.
b)
Nowadays everybody is a corrupt person or a criminal.
c)
Value based education can save a society from crime and corruption.
d)
It is not possible to fight against corruption as everybody is corrupt.
9.There is a direct correlation between the return rate of customers
and the type of service provided by a customer-service employee. The
theory is simple. If employees are happy and motivated, they will
treat customers well. If customers are treated well, they will return.
What inference can be drawn from the above argument?
a)
If customers are treated badly, they will be inclined to switch to
another service provider.
b)
If customer-service employees are paid badly they will become
unmotivated and reluctant to provide quality service to their
customers.
c)
If customers are treated badly by the customer-service employees, the
return rate of customers will increase.
d)
Both (A) and (C)
10.Generally the male catbirds construct decorated nests. Based on the
fact that different local populations of catbirds belonging to the
same species build nests that exhibit different building and
decorative styles, researchers have concluded that catbirds' building
styles are a culturally acquired rather than a genetically transmitted
trait.
Which of the following strengthens the argument?
a)
There are more common characteristics than differences in styles of
local catbird population.
b)
Nests of one species of catbird have fewer flowers and ornamental
characteristics than nests of another species.
c)
Young male catbirds are inept at nest building and spend years
watching elders before becoming accomplished.
d)
Catbirds are found only in New Guinea and Australia apparently when
local populations of birds seldom have contact with one another.
#SC
Select all that are correct:
11
a)
Costa Rica's Turrialba volcano belched up a column of gas and ash up
to 3,280 feet (1 km) into the air on Thursday
b)
in its powerful eruption in two decades. Four explosions emanated from
the volcano in central Costa Rica
c)
and ash reached parts of San Jose, the capital, some 30 miles (50 km)
away, where the airport was closed.
d)
It was the volcano's strongest eruption from 1996. Costa Rica's
emergency services ordered the close of access roads
e)
near the volcano, which is major tourist draw, and were evacuating
residents from a radius of just over a mile around the volcano.
#SC
12
Select all that are correct:
a)
Scientists always wish to learn more about watery worlds which may
exist in the universe because life depends on water to thrive.
b)
They have suspected long that there was an ocean of liquid water on
Ganymede – Jupiter's largest moon and the largest moon in the solar
system.
c)
NASA scientists have located an ocean on Ganymede that may actually
hold more water than all of Earth's surface water combined.
d)
Scientists think the ocean is about 100 kilometers thick, 10 times as
the depth of Earth's oceans, NASA added.
e)
Parts of Ganymede may have been formed by water bubbling up from the
moon's interior through faults or cryo-volcanos.
#SC
13
Select all that are correct:
a)
Within two months, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle
accelerator that had been shut up
b)
will be back in with a vengeance, colliding protons at mind-numbing
energies that have never been achieved in a man-made machine.
c)
Physicists hope that these energies will be enough to produce new
particles or phenomena that exposes secrets the universe has thus far
been unwilling to give up.
d)
In particular, the upcoming run at the LHC could yield evidence for an
idea called supersymmetry, which would be upheld
e)
if extra particles and dimensions of matter showed up, and which would
explain many puzzling facets of the cosmos.
#SC
14
Select all that are correct:
a)
Amid rumours that precision gene-editing technique have been used to
modify the DNA of human embryos,
b)
researchers have called for a moratorium in the use of the technology
in reproductive cells.
c)
Gene-editing tools, are currently used to develop therapies that
correct genetic defects in people, could be exploited for
non-therapeutic modifications.
d)
Known as germline modification, edits to embryos, eggs or sperm are of
particular concern because persons created using such cells
e)
would have had their genetic make-up changed without consent, and
would permanently hand that change down to future generations.
15.(a) And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit
some of the detractions of his primitive life – the pain, the disease,
famine, the hard labour needed just to stay alive.
(b) But this argument, though romantically appealing, doesn't hold up.
(c) From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly
described only as upward progress and the sole agent for this progress
is quite clearly reason itself.
(d) It's sometimes argued that there's no real progress; that a
civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the
land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, can hardly be
called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and
agricultural existence of prehistoric times.
(e) The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than
does modern society, ancient wars were committed with far less moral
justification than modern ones, and a technology that produces debris
can find ways of disposing of it without ecological upset.
a)
eadcb
b)
deacb
c)
daceb
d)
dbeac
16.Researchers studying the Ngamambo tribes, which inhabited parts of
South Africa as early as 1200 BC, have unearthed certain relics that
have led anthropologists to conclude that the tribals could read and
write in an undeciphered non-Semitic language. This proves that
contrary to popular belief, the Ngamambo tribes were actually a
cultured people.
Which of the following, if true, offers the most support for the
conclusion drawn in the paragraph above?
a)
The relics unearthed by the researchers also include refined pottery
and sophisticated architecture.
b)
There are many non-Semitic languages prevalent in various parts of
South Africa in periods as early as 800 B.C. A lot of interest has
been generated by anthropologists around the world about the language
spoken by the Ngamambo tribes as it may help them to understand the
lifestyles of tribals.
c)
All through history it has been demonstrated that communities that
have only speech do not move beyond very low levels of cultural
development.
d)
The Ovimbundu tribes, known to be very cultured and sophisticated,
inhabited some periods of South Africa during the same period as the
Ngamambo tribes.
17."Constant and consistent communication, while at times sounding
like a broken record, is the single most reassuring thing I can do for
all stakeholders: employees, investors, customers, media, and senior
management... And it's always the same basic message, which is our
vision for the company."
If the author is a CEO of the company, he is most likely to agree with
which of the following?
a)
The vision of the company, and the basic message that the CEO would
like to give all stakeholders, is that they will always remain in
touch with all of them and will deliver consistent content in their
communication.
b)
Appreciation of employees' efforts by the CEO is missing in today's
world. Employees in organizations where the CEO does not communicate
to them on a frequent basis are likely to be demotivated.
c)
Senior management has the responsibility to communicate frequently to
all shareholders.
d)
It is not just communication of our views that is important, one needs
to reiterate the same on multiple forums for it to be digested by all
stakeholders.
18.Most companies that use satisfaction surveys to learn how happy
their customers are with their products and services often mislead
themselves. What matters is not what customers say about the level of
satisfaction, but whether they feel thevalue they received will keep
them loyal. Loyalty or repurchase behaviour is the only true measure
of customer satisfaction. As tools for measuring the value a company
delivers to its customers, satisfaction surveys are not very useful
because, amongst other reasons, they focus primarily on transactional
issues, such as product quality, deliveries, technical knowledge,
hygiene factors, product specs etc. These items are simply the minimum
requirements for entry into the market. As tools for predicting
whether customers will purchase more of the company's products and
services, they have proved to be all but useless. Many executives feel
that "good" scores (e.g. an average of 4 out of 5) are an indication
that the company/customer relationship is strong. In other words, a
level of satisfaction below complete (5) is acceptable. After all,
this is the real world, where products and services are rarely perfect
and customers are hard to please. However, research has shown that
there is no direct (straight line) correlation between customer
satisfaction and customer loyalty and only customers showing "top box"
scores close to 100% are likely to remain loyal.
Which of the following strengthens the argument?
a)
Perception is a far better indicator of a brand's future than current reality.
b)
A company XYZ used customer satisfaction surveys but its sales were
lower than the last year.
c)
ABC Corporation, a company outsourcing customer satisfaction surveys
has shown a drastic cut in business.
d)
There are many companies that have fallen on troubled times, not
because they no longer paid attention to customer requirements,
product quality/ specifications, technical knowledge etc., but because
previous customers renounced their faith in the company's product.
22.Which of the following is a viable conclusion to the debate on
whether scientists should look for connections between genes and
violent behavioural patterns?
a)
The government will be able to screen people to see if they have genes
that incline them to violence.
b)
There is a definite connection between genes and violent behavioural
patterns amongst adolescents as all aggressive people have low
serotonin levels and the way out of criminality is to find out how
genes contribute to violence.
c)
Scientists are naive about the implications of their research and the
political agendas it might further even as demonising or stereotyping
certain minorities becomes a norm.
d)
Scientists will be able to better understand human behaviour and will
be able to consider genetic research on violence in the context of a
society desperately seeking solutions to violent crime.
#RC
Football refers to a number of sports that involve, to varying
degrees,kicking aball with the foot to score agoal. The different
variations of football are called football codes. Some examples of
these codes include soccer (UK), gridiron football (United States and
Canada); rules football orrugby league (Australia);Gaelic football
(Ireland); andrugby football (New Zealand).
Imagine a football game. The players wish to gain the advantage for
their own side, and their behaviour is ordered, with shared rules,
governing the unpredictable immediacy of the run of play. The
spectators are absorbed in watching.
But on the sideline, player number twelve wants to get on the pitch to
take part. How is the substitution to be done? If he leaps about, his
frantic antics might be noticed as a distraction, but they won't get
him on. To succeed he needs, first, to be known and recognized as a
bona fide player. Second, he must go through an established routine to
catch the referee's eye. Finally, some other player has to be
displaced from the field to make room for him. Only then will he make
his mark and, if he's lucky, gain the attention of the spectators.
Events don't get into the news simply by happening, no matter how
frantically. They too must fit in with what is already there. Events
need to be known and recognized, coming from a known, trusted and
representative source. To win inclusion in any particular news, they
must fulfill a certain number of criteria and must be seen as
newsworthy. Finally, newsworthy events themselves must jostle for
inclusion in the limited number of slots available.
In order to pick out newsworthy events from the jostling crowd of
clowns on the sidelines of their game, journalists use an informal
paradigm of news values. Galtang and Ruge isolated a series of
conditions which have to be fulfilled before an event is selected for
attention. Some of these are general conditions, applicable not just
to news, but to the perception of events at large. The others are more
'culture-bound': these are the news values underlying selection in
news media in the 'north-western corner of the world'. Here is their
list of general news values:
(1) Frequency: Murders take very little time and their meaning is
quickly arrived at. Hence their frequency fits that of daily
newspapers and programmes. On the other hand, economic, social or
cultural trends take longer to unfold and to be made meaningful and
they have to be 'marked' by means of devices like the release of
reports or statistics on a particular day.
(2) Threshold: There is a threshold below which an event will not be
reported at all (varying in intensity between, for instance, local and
national news). And once reported, there is a further threshold of
drama: the bigger the story, the more added drama is needed to keep it
going. War reporting is an example of this.
(3) Unambiguity: The clarity of an event. Events don't have to be
simple, necessarily, but the range of possible meanings must be
limited. In this way news-discourse differs radically from literary
discourse. In news, the intrinsic polysemic nature of both events and
accounts of them is reduced as much as possible; in literature it is
celebrated and exploited.
(4) Meaningfulness:
(a) Cultural proximity: Events that accord with the cultural
background of the news-gatherers will be seen as more meaningful than
others and so more liable to be selected. Also, within 'our' culture,
events connected with underprivileged or ethnic groups, with regions
remote from the centralized bases of news organizations, or with
specifically working-class culture, will be seen as less intrinsically
meaningful than those associated with central, official, literate
culture.
(b) Relevance: Events in far-off cultures will nevertheless become
newsworthy if they impinge on the news-gatherer's 'home' culture −
usually in the form of a threat; as with OPEC and the (mostly Arab)
countries with oil − their lifestyles are suddenly fascinating for
Western journalists.
(5) Consonance: The predictability of, or desire for, an event. If the
media expect something to happen, then it will.
(6) Unexpectedness: The unpredictability, or rarity, of an event.
(7) Continuity: The 'running' story. If an event is covered, it will
continue to be covered for some time.
(8) Composition: The mixture of different kinds of event. If a
newspaper or TV bulletin is packed with major foreign stories, a
relatively insignificant domestic story will be included to balance
the mixture.
These basic news values give a good idea of the kind of event that
will survive the selection process.
23. DIRECTIONS for question 89: Select one or more answer choices
according to the directions given in the question.
Which of the following statements can be understood from the passage?
Select all that apply:
a)
Events get into the news by being a part of the event.
b)
Galtang and Ruge studied the 'culture bound' nature of news.
c)
Player 12 gets into the game by getting the referee's eye, by being a
bonafide player and by being known and recognized.
d)
The word 'polysemic' means 'explicitness'.
e)
According to the passage, frequency is one thing for murders and the
like, and another for events that unfold slowly – frequency is marked
by periodic release of analysis or data.
24. 'Culture bound' in the context of the passage would be
a)
contextual news in a culture or news related to culture.
b)
defined, shaped and limited by culture.
c)
within the cultural bounds.
d)
All of the above.
25. Which of the following could be an appropriate title to the passage?
a)
Galtang and Ruge analysis
b)
News and Newsworthiness
c)
Understanding News
d)
Newsworthy News
#RC
Darn those pesky Japanese. Sometime over the last few years, when I
wasn't looking, the Japanese muda-mura-muri meme slipped into the
lexicon of people concerned with lean process management. The
elimination of waste has been the goal of Lean, a production practice
that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than
the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful and thus a
target for elimination. Muda, muri and mura are the three types of
waste defined by Toyota Production System (TPS).
Muda is unproductive waste: any activity or excess resource
consumption that does not add value to whatever you're creating. Mura
is any imbalance, unevenness or inconsistency in your process, whether
brought on by you, or imposed on you from the outside. Mura drives
Muda! By failing to smooth our demand you put unfair demands on your
processes and people and cause the creation of inventory and other
wastes. Muri means unreasonableness, to cause overburden or give
unnecessary stress to your employees or processes. This is caused by
failures in our system such as lack of training, unclear or no defined
ways of working, wrong tools, and ill thought out measures of
performance. To reiterate, Muri is all the unreasonable work that
management imposes on workers and machines because of poor
organization, such as carrying heavy weights, dangerous tasks, even
working significantly faster than usual. It is pushing a person or a
machine beyond its natural limits. This may simply be asking a greater
level of performance from a process than it can handle without taking
shortcuts and informally modifying decision criteria. Unreasonable
work is almost always a cause of multiple variations. There are
distinctions between value-adding activity, waste and non-value adding
work. Non-value adding work is waste that must be done under the
present work conditions.
To link these three types of wastes is simple. Firstly, muri focuses
on the preparation and planning of the process, or what work can be
avoided proactively by design. Next, mura then focuses on how the work
design is implemented and the elimination of fluctuation at the
scheduling or operation level, such as quality and volume. Muda is
then discovered after the process is in place and is dealt with
reactively. It is seen through variation in output. It is the role of
management to examine the muda, in the processes and eliminate the
deeper causes by considering the connections to the muri and the mura
of the system. ___________________________________
A typical example of the interplay of these wastes is the corporate
behavior of "making the numbers" as the end of a reporting period
approaches. Demand is raised to 'make plan', increasing (mura), when
the numbers are low, which causes production to try to squeeze extra
capacity from the process, which causes routines and standards to be
modified or stretched. This stretch and improvisation leads to
muri-style waste, which leads to downtime, mistakes and backflows, and
waiting, thus the muda of waiting, correction and movement.
The popular seven muda are:
(1) Transport (moving products that are not actually required to
perform the processing, the waste is in terms of loads and distance
travelled)
(2) Inventory (all components, work in progress and stocks of finished
products and raw material that a company holds)
(3) Motion (people or equipment moving or walking more than is
required to perform the processing)
(4) Waiting (waiting for the next production step, for the machine to
finish or for the product to arrive)
(5) Overproduction (production ahead of demand or beyond what the
customer ordered)
(6) Overprocessing (conducting operations beyond those that the
customer requires, resulting from poor tool or product design creating
activity)
(7) Defects (product rejects and the effort involved in inspecting for
and fixing defects).
It is important to measure or estimate the size of these wastes, to
demonstrate the effect of the changes achieved and the movement
towards the goal. The "flow" (or smoothness) based approach aims to
achieve Just-in-Time (JIT), by removing the variation caused by work
scheduling and thereby provide a driver, rationale or target and
priorities for implementation, using a variety of techniques. The
effort to achieve JIT exposes many quality problems that are hidden by
buffer stocks; by forcing smooth flow of only value-adding steps,
these problems become visible and must be dealt with explicitly.
27. Which of the following statements is/ are true as per the passage?
(i) It is not possible for Mura and Muda to precede Muri.
(ii) Muda is result, Mura is action and Muri is thought.
(iii) Muda is independent of Muri and Mura.
(iv) Achieving Mura, Muri and Muda are the goals of Lean and Toyota.
a)
(ii) and (iii)
b)
(ii), (iii) and (iv)
c)
Only (ii)
d)
(i) and (iv)
28. Which of the following recommendations/ situations correspond to
the interrelation or interplay among muda, mura and muri?
a)
One should design the system with sufficient capacity to fulfill
customer requirements without overburdening people, equipment, or
methods (muri), strive to reduce variation/fluctuation (mura) to a
bare minimum and then strive to eliminate sources of waste (muda).
b)
If you're running a delivery business and you overload a truck (muri)
to the point where it breaks down, that truck's load will now have to
be redistributed to other trucks, which will disrupt the normal routes
of those trucks (mura) and doubtless cause them to burn more gas and
wear out brake pads faster due to the added weight and extra time
spent on the road (muda).
c)
You need to write a 10,000-word document in 20 working days and you
plan to do all of this in one night. The unrealistic burden of one
night's stress is muri. The unevenness of the process (19 days of no
writing, then one day of frantic writing) is mura. The sheer
wastefulness of spending a disproportionate amount of time on research
(allowing only a tiny amount of time for actual writing) is muda.
d)
All of the above.
29. Which of the following statements can be understood from the passage?
a)
A feature of 'Just in Time (JIT)' is that production of goods is not
delayed but defects and flaws of the product are not detected.
b)
The blank in the third paragraph can be completed by − The muda and
mura inconsistencies must be fed back to the muri, or planning stage
for the next project.
c)
A key distinction between non-value adding work and waste is that the
former is unavoidable and can be classified as Mura whereas the latter
is avoidable and can be classified as Muda.
d)
A key distinction between non-value adding work and waste is that the
former is a result of poor planning whereas the latter is a result of
poor implementation.
30. Given below are sets of examples (some of which may be
inappropriate) for each of the three types of wastes as discussed in
the passage.
Muda − (a) Using an excess of laundry detergent while doing a load of
laundry; (b) Inventory of final stock goes up and it needs additional
storage space; (c) Inventory piling up long before it is needed for
the next process.
Mura − (a) Henry Ford standardised on one colour of paint (black, the
fastest to dry) to eliminate waste on the assembly line caused by
uneven drying times of paints; (b) In a production process where a
department's performance is measured by monthly output, the department
rushes like mad in the final week of the month to meet targets, and
operates considerably slowly in the first week or two.
Muri − (a) Putting two tons of cargo in a truck designed to carry one
ton; (b) Improvising production methods and stretching processes with
a view to achieve the set targets; (c) Planning production targets in
excess of actual demand.
Choose the option corresponding to the wastes for which ALL examples
are correctly mentioned.
a)
muri, mura and muda
b)
mura and muri
c)
muda and mura
d)
muri and muda
Organic evolution is a process entirely materialistic in its origin
and operation, although no explicit conclusion was made or considered
possible as to the origin of the laws and properties of matter in
general under which organic evolution operates. Man arose as a result
of the operation of organic evolution and his being and activities are
also materialistic, but the human species has properties unique to
itself among all forms of life, superadded to the properties unique to
life among all forms of matter and of action. Man's intellectual,
social, and spiritual natures are altogether exceptional among animals
in degree, but they arose by organic evolution. They usher in a new
phase of evolution, and not a new phase merely but also a new kind,
which is thus also a product of organic evolution and can be no less
materialistic in its essence even though its organization and
activities are essentially different from those in the process that
brought it into being. The objective phenomena of the history of life
can be explained by purely materialistic factors − on the basis of
differential reproduction in populations (main factor in the modern
conception of natural selection) and of the mainly random interplay of
the known process of hereditary.
Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did
not have him in mind. Man was not planned. He is a state of matter, a
form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates,
akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is
material. It is, however, a gross misrepresentation to say that he is
just an accident or nothing but an animal. Among all the myriad forms
of matter and of life on earth or as far as we know in the universe,
man is unique. He happens to represent the highest form of
organization of matter and energy that has ever appeared. Among the
many different lines that show progress, the line leading to man
reaches much the highest level yet developed. Recognition of this
kinship with the rest of the universe is necessary for understanding
him, but his essential nature is defined by qualities found nowhere
else, not by those he has in common with apes, fishes, trees, fires or
anything other than himself.
It is part of this unique status that in man a new form of evolution
begins, overlying and largely dominating the old, organic evolution
which nevertheless also continues in him. This new form of evolution
works in the social structure, as the old evolution does in the
breeding population structure, and it depends on learning, the
inheritance of knowledge, as the old does on physical inheritance. Its
possibility arises from man's intelligence and associated flexibility
of response. His reactions depend far less than other organisms' on
physically inherited factors, far more on learning and on perception
of immediate and of new situations.
This flexibility brings with it the power and need for constant choice
between different courses of action. Man plans and has purposes. Plan,
purpose, goal, all absent in evolution to this point, enter with the
coming of man and are inherent in the new evolution, which is confined
to him. With these comes the need for criteria of choice. Good and
evil, right and wrong, concepts largely irrelevant in nature except
from the human viewpoint, become real and pressing features of the
whole cosmos as viewed by man − the only possible way in which the
cosmos can be viewed morally because morals arise only in man.
The discovery that the universe, apart from man or before his coming,
lacked any purpose or plan, has the inevitable corollary that the
workings of the Universe cannot provide any automatic universal,
eternal, or absolute ethical criteria of right and wrong. This
discovery has completely undermined all older attempts to find an
intuitive ethic or to accept such an ethic as revelation. It equally
undermines attempts to find a naturalistic ethic which will flow with
absolute validity from the workings of nature or of evolution as a new
revelation. Such attempts, arising from discovery of the baselessness
of intuitive ethics, have commonly fallen into the same mistake of
seeking an absolute ethic or one outside of man's own nature and have
then been doomed to failure by their own premises.
31. Among all the myriad forms of matter and life, man is unique. How?
a)
Man was not planned, he is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort
of animal and a species of the order of Primates. Man also shares a
kinship with the rest of the universe.
b)
Man happens to represent the most highly endowed organization of
matter that has yet appeared on earth and there is no good reason to
believe there is any higher in the universe. Also morals arise only in
man.
c)
Man is not necessarily among the higher animals.
d)
Man did originate after a tremendously long sequence of events in
which both chance and orientation played a role.
32. How according to the passage can the history of life be explained
by purely materialistic factors?
a)
Man was certainly not the goal of evolution which evidently had no goals.
b)
Discovery of genetic facts integrated with knowledge of life from
other fields of study has produced a materialistic theory that no
longer gives motive for vitalistic or finalistic theories.
c)
On the basis of differential reproduction in populations and the
mainly random interplay of the known process of hereditary.
d)
Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did
not have him in mind.
33. Which of the following is definitely incorrect about the older
phase or organic form of evolution?
a)
This form of evolution depends on learning, the inheritance of
knowledge. Plans, purposes and goals are inherent in it.
b)
It determines genetic differences, mutations and inheritance and helps
in perception of immediate and of new situations.
c)
It depends on physical inheritance and works in breeding population structure.
d)
The old organic form of evolution also continues in man.
34. Which phenomenon has undermined all older attempts to find an
intuitive ethic or revelation?
a)
A naturalistic ethic, drawing validity from the workings of Nature of evolution.
b)
The discovery that the Universe without or prior to the advent of man
lacked any purpose or plan and attempts at seeking an absolute ethic,
outside man's own nature.
c)
The discovery of the groundlessness of intuitive ethic.
d)
Purpose and plan are characteristic in social evolution because man
has purposes and he makes plans.
1.(a) World Bank reports, among others, have come to the conclusion
that the growth of the biofuel industry has a serious impact on food
scarcity and food inflation the world over.
(b) Biofuel evangelism started in the 1970s and was at its peak in the
following decades.
(c) US markets have seen major distortions in the food market because
of ethanol subsidies while there has been food scarcity in Mexico
because of the diversion of corn for ethanol production.
(d) But over the past few years, there has been a mounting pile of
evidence that going the biofuel route can cause more harm than good.
(e) The more arable land is diverted to growing biofuel crops, the
less there is for cultivating food crops.
a)
bdaec
b)
abdec
c)
baecd
d)
ecabd
2.(a) The principal assumption of the anti-smoking movement has been
that tobacco companies persuade teens to smoke by lying to them, by
making smoking sound a lot more desirable and a lot less harmful than
it really is.
(b) And we've run extensive public health campaigns on television and
radio and in magazines to try to educate teens about the dangers of
smoking.
(c) We've raised the price of cigarettes and enforced the law against
selling tobacco to minors, to try to make it much harder for teens to
buy cigarettes.
(d) To address that problem, then, we've restricted and policed
cigarette advertising, so it's a lot harder for tobacco companies to
lie.
(e) Teenage smoking is one of the great, baffling phenomena of modern
life – no one really knows how to fight it, or even, for that matter,
what it is.
a)
edcba
b)
eadcb
c)
aedcb
d)
ecbda
3.(a) Although they may sound as if they don't have very much in
common, they share a basic, underlying pattern.
(b) They simply wore the shoes when they went to clubs or cafes or
walked the streets of downtown New York, and in so doing exposed other
people to their fashion sense.
(c) The rise of Hush Puppies and the fall of New York's crime rate are
textbook examples of epidemics in action.
(d) No one took out an advertisement and told people that the
traditional Hush Puppies were cool and they should start wearing them.
(e) They infected them with the Hush Puppies "virus".
(f) First of all, they are clear examples of contagious behavior.
a)
cfdabe
b)
cfadeb
c)
cafdbe
d)
dbecaf
OMO
4.
a)
However, Golden Rice is not produced by a corporate behemoth but by
the public sector whose aim is to double food production; and reduce
the number of deaths and cases of blindness caused by vitamin A
deficiency.
b)
If the green revolution had never happened, and yields had stayed at
1960 levels, the world could not produce its current food output even
if it ploughed up every last acre of cultivable land.
c)
In August 2014, environmentalists in the Philippines vandalised a
field of Golden Rice − an experimental grain whose genes had been
modified to carry beta-carotene, a chemical precursor of vitamin A −
claiming that genetically modified (GM) crops pose health risks.
d)
Hence, vandalising Golden Rice (GM) field trials is a bit like the
campaign of some religious leaders to prevent smallpox inoculations:
it causes misery, even death, in the name of obscurantism and
unscientific belief.
OMO
5.
a)
A few though, keep getting better when they're dead, such as the
Chilean novelist and short story writer, Roberto Bolaño.
b)
The successful contemporary writer is an extremely laudable, and
lauded, person, but can also be a pompous and precious one.
c)
Some great authors have published their worst works from beyond the grave.
d)
His seminal five-part novel, 2666, came out posthumously, won the
National Book Critics Circle Award and convinced the world he was not
just a master of the short form but could put out his life's best work
at nearly 900 pages, even after death.
OMO
6.
a)
For Europe's surviving piano-makers, it's a case of changing their
tune or facing the music.
b)
Pleyel, in business for over two centuries, was Chopin's favourite and
counted Stravinsky, Liszt and Debussy among its customers.
c)
The endorsement of august musicians has not saved it after decades of
struggling to compete with less pricey pianos from the Far East.
d)
But the French piano-maker recently said that its last workshop will
close this month.
OMO
7.
a)
Worthless currency is not necessarily useless; it can be a pointed way
of shaming someone who asks for a bribe.
b)
They look roughly like 50-rupee notes; people are encouraging to hand
them to corrupt officials, signalling resistance to sleaze.
c)
That is the thinking behind zero-rupee notes, an Indian
anti-corruption gimmick now attracting world-wide interest.
d)
But in places where public opinion is already shifting, they could be
a useful way of making bureaucrats behave better.
8.Diwali, the festival of lights, signifies that good will always be
better than evil. In the present day many people have developed a lot
of negativity in their minds and hearts, which has led to high
corruption and higher crime rates. Value based education is the need
of the day to eliminate the darkness of cruelty, selfishness and greed
and bring the light of wisdom, peace, kindness, truthfulness, right
attitude, hard work and co-operation. Mahatma Gandhi said that we
should eradicate not the sinner but the sins from our hearts; if a
society has people with good hearts, it will definitely flourish.
What conclusion can be drawn from the above argument?
a)
Nowadays nobody is good even though good is always better than evil.
b)
Nowadays everybody is a corrupt person or a criminal.
c)
Value based education can save a society from crime and corruption.
d)
It is not possible to fight against corruption as everybody is corrupt.
9.There is a direct correlation between the return rate of customers
and the type of service provided by a customer-service employee. The
theory is simple. If employees are happy and motivated, they will
treat customers well. If customers are treated well, they will return.
What inference can be drawn from the above argument?
a)
If customers are treated badly, they will be inclined to switch to
another service provider.
b)
If customer-service employees are paid badly they will become
unmotivated and reluctant to provide quality service to their
customers.
c)
If customers are treated badly by the customer-service employees, the
return rate of customers will increase.
d)
Both (A) and (C)
10.Generally the male catbirds construct decorated nests. Based on the
fact that different local populations of catbirds belonging to the
same species build nests that exhibit different building and
decorative styles, researchers have concluded that catbirds' building
styles are a culturally acquired rather than a genetically transmitted
trait.
Which of the following strengthens the argument?
a)
There are more common characteristics than differences in styles of
local catbird population.
b)
Nests of one species of catbird have fewer flowers and ornamental
characteristics than nests of another species.
c)
Young male catbirds are inept at nest building and spend years
watching elders before becoming accomplished.
d)
Catbirds are found only in New Guinea and Australia apparently when
local populations of birds seldom have contact with one another.
#SC
Select all that are correct:
11
a)
Costa Rica's Turrialba volcano belched up a column of gas and ash up
to 3,280 feet (1 km) into the air on Thursday
b)
in its powerful eruption in two decades. Four explosions emanated from
the volcano in central Costa Rica
c)
and ash reached parts of San Jose, the capital, some 30 miles (50 km)
away, where the airport was closed.
d)
It was the volcano's strongest eruption from 1996. Costa Rica's
emergency services ordered the close of access roads
e)
near the volcano, which is major tourist draw, and were evacuating
residents from a radius of just over a mile around the volcano.
#SC
12
Select all that are correct:
a)
Scientists always wish to learn more about watery worlds which may
exist in the universe because life depends on water to thrive.
b)
They have suspected long that there was an ocean of liquid water on
Ganymede – Jupiter's largest moon and the largest moon in the solar
system.
c)
NASA scientists have located an ocean on Ganymede that may actually
hold more water than all of Earth's surface water combined.
d)
Scientists think the ocean is about 100 kilometers thick, 10 times as
the depth of Earth's oceans, NASA added.
e)
Parts of Ganymede may have been formed by water bubbling up from the
moon's interior through faults or cryo-volcanos.
#SC
13
Select all that are correct:
a)
Within two months, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle
accelerator that had been shut up
b)
will be back in with a vengeance, colliding protons at mind-numbing
energies that have never been achieved in a man-made machine.
c)
Physicists hope that these energies will be enough to produce new
particles or phenomena that exposes secrets the universe has thus far
been unwilling to give up.
d)
In particular, the upcoming run at the LHC could yield evidence for an
idea called supersymmetry, which would be upheld
e)
if extra particles and dimensions of matter showed up, and which would
explain many puzzling facets of the cosmos.
#SC
14
Select all that are correct:
a)
Amid rumours that precision gene-editing technique have been used to
modify the DNA of human embryos,
b)
researchers have called for a moratorium in the use of the technology
in reproductive cells.
c)
Gene-editing tools, are currently used to develop therapies that
correct genetic defects in people, could be exploited for
non-therapeutic modifications.
d)
Known as germline modification, edits to embryos, eggs or sperm are of
particular concern because persons created using such cells
e)
would have had their genetic make-up changed without consent, and
would permanently hand that change down to future generations.
15.(a) And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit
some of the detractions of his primitive life – the pain, the disease,
famine, the hard labour needed just to stay alive.
(b) But this argument, though romantically appealing, doesn't hold up.
(c) From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly
described only as upward progress and the sole agent for this progress
is quite clearly reason itself.
(d) It's sometimes argued that there's no real progress; that a
civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the
land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, can hardly be
called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and
agricultural existence of prehistoric times.
(e) The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than
does modern society, ancient wars were committed with far less moral
justification than modern ones, and a technology that produces debris
can find ways of disposing of it without ecological upset.
a)
eadcb
b)
deacb
c)
daceb
d)
dbeac
16.Researchers studying the Ngamambo tribes, which inhabited parts of
South Africa as early as 1200 BC, have unearthed certain relics that
have led anthropologists to conclude that the tribals could read and
write in an undeciphered non-Semitic language. This proves that
contrary to popular belief, the Ngamambo tribes were actually a
cultured people.
Which of the following, if true, offers the most support for the
conclusion drawn in the paragraph above?
a)
The relics unearthed by the researchers also include refined pottery
and sophisticated architecture.
b)
There are many non-Semitic languages prevalent in various parts of
South Africa in periods as early as 800 B.C. A lot of interest has
been generated by anthropologists around the world about the language
spoken by the Ngamambo tribes as it may help them to understand the
lifestyles of tribals.
c)
All through history it has been demonstrated that communities that
have only speech do not move beyond very low levels of cultural
development.
d)
The Ovimbundu tribes, known to be very cultured and sophisticated,
inhabited some periods of South Africa during the same period as the
Ngamambo tribes.
17."Constant and consistent communication, while at times sounding
like a broken record, is the single most reassuring thing I can do for
all stakeholders: employees, investors, customers, media, and senior
management... And it's always the same basic message, which is our
vision for the company."
If the author is a CEO of the company, he is most likely to agree with
which of the following?
a)
The vision of the company, and the basic message that the CEO would
like to give all stakeholders, is that they will always remain in
touch with all of them and will deliver consistent content in their
communication.
b)
Appreciation of employees' efforts by the CEO is missing in today's
world. Employees in organizations where the CEO does not communicate
to them on a frequent basis are likely to be demotivated.
c)
Senior management has the responsibility to communicate frequently to
all shareholders.
d)
It is not just communication of our views that is important, one needs
to reiterate the same on multiple forums for it to be digested by all
stakeholders.
18.Most companies that use satisfaction surveys to learn how happy
their customers are with their products and services often mislead
themselves. What matters is not what customers say about the level of
satisfaction, but whether they feel thevalue they received will keep
them loyal. Loyalty or repurchase behaviour is the only true measure
of customer satisfaction. As tools for measuring the value a company
delivers to its customers, satisfaction surveys are not very useful
because, amongst other reasons, they focus primarily on transactional
issues, such as product quality, deliveries, technical knowledge,
hygiene factors, product specs etc. These items are simply the minimum
requirements for entry into the market. As tools for predicting
whether customers will purchase more of the company's products and
services, they have proved to be all but useless. Many executives feel
that "good" scores (e.g. an average of 4 out of 5) are an indication
that the company/customer relationship is strong. In other words, a
level of satisfaction below complete (5) is acceptable. After all,
this is the real world, where products and services are rarely perfect
and customers are hard to please. However, research has shown that
there is no direct (straight line) correlation between customer
satisfaction and customer loyalty and only customers showing "top box"
scores close to 100% are likely to remain loyal.
Which of the following strengthens the argument?
a)
Perception is a far better indicator of a brand's future than current reality.
b)
A company XYZ used customer satisfaction surveys but its sales were
lower than the last year.
c)
ABC Corporation, a company outsourcing customer satisfaction surveys
has shown a drastic cut in business.
d)
There are many companies that have fallen on troubled times, not
because they no longer paid attention to customer requirements,
product quality/ specifications, technical knowledge etc., but because
previous customers renounced their faith in the company's product.
22.Which of the following is a viable conclusion to the debate on
whether scientists should look for connections between genes and
violent behavioural patterns?
a)
The government will be able to screen people to see if they have genes
that incline them to violence.
b)
There is a definite connection between genes and violent behavioural
patterns amongst adolescents as all aggressive people have low
serotonin levels and the way out of criminality is to find out how
genes contribute to violence.
c)
Scientists are naive about the implications of their research and the
political agendas it might further even as demonising or stereotyping
certain minorities becomes a norm.
d)
Scientists will be able to better understand human behaviour and will
be able to consider genetic research on violence in the context of a
society desperately seeking solutions to violent crime.
#RC
Football refers to a number of sports that involve, to varying
degrees,kicking aball with the foot to score agoal. The different
variations of football are called football codes. Some examples of
these codes include soccer (UK), gridiron football (United States and
Canada); rules football orrugby league (Australia);Gaelic football
(Ireland); andrugby football (New Zealand).
Imagine a football game. The players wish to gain the advantage for
their own side, and their behaviour is ordered, with shared rules,
governing the unpredictable immediacy of the run of play. The
spectators are absorbed in watching.
But on the sideline, player number twelve wants to get on the pitch to
take part. How is the substitution to be done? If he leaps about, his
frantic antics might be noticed as a distraction, but they won't get
him on. To succeed he needs, first, to be known and recognized as a
bona fide player. Second, he must go through an established routine to
catch the referee's eye. Finally, some other player has to be
displaced from the field to make room for him. Only then will he make
his mark and, if he's lucky, gain the attention of the spectators.
Events don't get into the news simply by happening, no matter how
frantically. They too must fit in with what is already there. Events
need to be known and recognized, coming from a known, trusted and
representative source. To win inclusion in any particular news, they
must fulfill a certain number of criteria and must be seen as
newsworthy. Finally, newsworthy events themselves must jostle for
inclusion in the limited number of slots available.
In order to pick out newsworthy events from the jostling crowd of
clowns on the sidelines of their game, journalists use an informal
paradigm of news values. Galtang and Ruge isolated a series of
conditions which have to be fulfilled before an event is selected for
attention. Some of these are general conditions, applicable not just
to news, but to the perception of events at large. The others are more
'culture-bound': these are the news values underlying selection in
news media in the 'north-western corner of the world'. Here is their
list of general news values:
(1) Frequency: Murders take very little time and their meaning is
quickly arrived at. Hence their frequency fits that of daily
newspapers and programmes. On the other hand, economic, social or
cultural trends take longer to unfold and to be made meaningful and
they have to be 'marked' by means of devices like the release of
reports or statistics on a particular day.
(2) Threshold: There is a threshold below which an event will not be
reported at all (varying in intensity between, for instance, local and
national news). And once reported, there is a further threshold of
drama: the bigger the story, the more added drama is needed to keep it
going. War reporting is an example of this.
(3) Unambiguity: The clarity of an event. Events don't have to be
simple, necessarily, but the range of possible meanings must be
limited. In this way news-discourse differs radically from literary
discourse. In news, the intrinsic polysemic nature of both events and
accounts of them is reduced as much as possible; in literature it is
celebrated and exploited.
(4) Meaningfulness:
(a) Cultural proximity: Events that accord with the cultural
background of the news-gatherers will be seen as more meaningful than
others and so more liable to be selected. Also, within 'our' culture,
events connected with underprivileged or ethnic groups, with regions
remote from the centralized bases of news organizations, or with
specifically working-class culture, will be seen as less intrinsically
meaningful than those associated with central, official, literate
culture.
(b) Relevance: Events in far-off cultures will nevertheless become
newsworthy if they impinge on the news-gatherer's 'home' culture −
usually in the form of a threat; as with OPEC and the (mostly Arab)
countries with oil − their lifestyles are suddenly fascinating for
Western journalists.
(5) Consonance: The predictability of, or desire for, an event. If the
media expect something to happen, then it will.
(6) Unexpectedness: The unpredictability, or rarity, of an event.
(7) Continuity: The 'running' story. If an event is covered, it will
continue to be covered for some time.
(8) Composition: The mixture of different kinds of event. If a
newspaper or TV bulletin is packed with major foreign stories, a
relatively insignificant domestic story will be included to balance
the mixture.
These basic news values give a good idea of the kind of event that
will survive the selection process.
23. DIRECTIONS for question 89: Select one or more answer choices
according to the directions given in the question.
Which of the following statements can be understood from the passage?
Select all that apply:
a)
Events get into the news by being a part of the event.
b)
Galtang and Ruge studied the 'culture bound' nature of news.
c)
Player 12 gets into the game by getting the referee's eye, by being a
bonafide player and by being known and recognized.
d)
The word 'polysemic' means 'explicitness'.
e)
According to the passage, frequency is one thing for murders and the
like, and another for events that unfold slowly – frequency is marked
by periodic release of analysis or data.
24. 'Culture bound' in the context of the passage would be
a)
contextual news in a culture or news related to culture.
b)
defined, shaped and limited by culture.
c)
within the cultural bounds.
d)
All of the above.
25. Which of the following could be an appropriate title to the passage?
a)
Galtang and Ruge analysis
b)
News and Newsworthiness
c)
Understanding News
d)
Newsworthy News
#RC
Darn those pesky Japanese. Sometime over the last few years, when I
wasn't looking, the Japanese muda-mura-muri meme slipped into the
lexicon of people concerned with lean process management. The
elimination of waste has been the goal of Lean, a production practice
that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than
the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful and thus a
target for elimination. Muda, muri and mura are the three types of
waste defined by Toyota Production System (TPS).
Muda is unproductive waste: any activity or excess resource
consumption that does not add value to whatever you're creating. Mura
is any imbalance, unevenness or inconsistency in your process, whether
brought on by you, or imposed on you from the outside. Mura drives
Muda! By failing to smooth our demand you put unfair demands on your
processes and people and cause the creation of inventory and other
wastes. Muri means unreasonableness, to cause overburden or give
unnecessary stress to your employees or processes. This is caused by
failures in our system such as lack of training, unclear or no defined
ways of working, wrong tools, and ill thought out measures of
performance. To reiterate, Muri is all the unreasonable work that
management imposes on workers and machines because of poor
organization, such as carrying heavy weights, dangerous tasks, even
working significantly faster than usual. It is pushing a person or a
machine beyond its natural limits. This may simply be asking a greater
level of performance from a process than it can handle without taking
shortcuts and informally modifying decision criteria. Unreasonable
work is almost always a cause of multiple variations. There are
distinctions between value-adding activity, waste and non-value adding
work. Non-value adding work is waste that must be done under the
present work conditions.
To link these three types of wastes is simple. Firstly, muri focuses
on the preparation and planning of the process, or what work can be
avoided proactively by design. Next, mura then focuses on how the work
design is implemented and the elimination of fluctuation at the
scheduling or operation level, such as quality and volume. Muda is
then discovered after the process is in place and is dealt with
reactively. It is seen through variation in output. It is the role of
management to examine the muda, in the processes and eliminate the
deeper causes by considering the connections to the muri and the mura
of the system. ___________________________________
A typical example of the interplay of these wastes is the corporate
behavior of "making the numbers" as the end of a reporting period
approaches. Demand is raised to 'make plan', increasing (mura), when
the numbers are low, which causes production to try to squeeze extra
capacity from the process, which causes routines and standards to be
modified or stretched. This stretch and improvisation leads to
muri-style waste, which leads to downtime, mistakes and backflows, and
waiting, thus the muda of waiting, correction and movement.
The popular seven muda are:
(1) Transport (moving products that are not actually required to
perform the processing, the waste is in terms of loads and distance
travelled)
(2) Inventory (all components, work in progress and stocks of finished
products and raw material that a company holds)
(3) Motion (people or equipment moving or walking more than is
required to perform the processing)
(4) Waiting (waiting for the next production step, for the machine to
finish or for the product to arrive)
(5) Overproduction (production ahead of demand or beyond what the
customer ordered)
(6) Overprocessing (conducting operations beyond those that the
customer requires, resulting from poor tool or product design creating
activity)
(7) Defects (product rejects and the effort involved in inspecting for
and fixing defects).
It is important to measure or estimate the size of these wastes, to
demonstrate the effect of the changes achieved and the movement
towards the goal. The "flow" (or smoothness) based approach aims to
achieve Just-in-Time (JIT), by removing the variation caused by work
scheduling and thereby provide a driver, rationale or target and
priorities for implementation, using a variety of techniques. The
effort to achieve JIT exposes many quality problems that are hidden by
buffer stocks; by forcing smooth flow of only value-adding steps,
these problems become visible and must be dealt with explicitly.
27. Which of the following statements is/ are true as per the passage?
(i) It is not possible for Mura and Muda to precede Muri.
(ii) Muda is result, Mura is action and Muri is thought.
(iii) Muda is independent of Muri and Mura.
(iv) Achieving Mura, Muri and Muda are the goals of Lean and Toyota.
a)
(ii) and (iii)
b)
(ii), (iii) and (iv)
c)
Only (ii)
d)
(i) and (iv)
28. Which of the following recommendations/ situations correspond to
the interrelation or interplay among muda, mura and muri?
a)
One should design the system with sufficient capacity to fulfill
customer requirements without overburdening people, equipment, or
methods (muri), strive to reduce variation/fluctuation (mura) to a
bare minimum and then strive to eliminate sources of waste (muda).
b)
If you're running a delivery business and you overload a truck (muri)
to the point where it breaks down, that truck's load will now have to
be redistributed to other trucks, which will disrupt the normal routes
of those trucks (mura) and doubtless cause them to burn more gas and
wear out brake pads faster due to the added weight and extra time
spent on the road (muda).
c)
You need to write a 10,000-word document in 20 working days and you
plan to do all of this in one night. The unrealistic burden of one
night's stress is muri. The unevenness of the process (19 days of no
writing, then one day of frantic writing) is mura. The sheer
wastefulness of spending a disproportionate amount of time on research
(allowing only a tiny amount of time for actual writing) is muda.
d)
All of the above.
29. Which of the following statements can be understood from the passage?
a)
A feature of 'Just in Time (JIT)' is that production of goods is not
delayed but defects and flaws of the product are not detected.
b)
The blank in the third paragraph can be completed by − The muda and
mura inconsistencies must be fed back to the muri, or planning stage
for the next project.
c)
A key distinction between non-value adding work and waste is that the
former is unavoidable and can be classified as Mura whereas the latter
is avoidable and can be classified as Muda.
d)
A key distinction between non-value adding work and waste is that the
former is a result of poor planning whereas the latter is a result of
poor implementation.
30. Given below are sets of examples (some of which may be
inappropriate) for each of the three types of wastes as discussed in
the passage.
Muda − (a) Using an excess of laundry detergent while doing a load of
laundry; (b) Inventory of final stock goes up and it needs additional
storage space; (c) Inventory piling up long before it is needed for
the next process.
Mura − (a) Henry Ford standardised on one colour of paint (black, the
fastest to dry) to eliminate waste on the assembly line caused by
uneven drying times of paints; (b) In a production process where a
department's performance is measured by monthly output, the department
rushes like mad in the final week of the month to meet targets, and
operates considerably slowly in the first week or two.
Muri − (a) Putting two tons of cargo in a truck designed to carry one
ton; (b) Improvising production methods and stretching processes with
a view to achieve the set targets; (c) Planning production targets in
excess of actual demand.
Choose the option corresponding to the wastes for which ALL examples
are correctly mentioned.
a)
muri, mura and muda
b)
mura and muri
c)
muda and mura
d)
muri and muda
Organic evolution is a process entirely materialistic in its origin
and operation, although no explicit conclusion was made or considered
possible as to the origin of the laws and properties of matter in
general under which organic evolution operates. Man arose as a result
of the operation of organic evolution and his being and activities are
also materialistic, but the human species has properties unique to
itself among all forms of life, superadded to the properties unique to
life among all forms of matter and of action. Man's intellectual,
social, and spiritual natures are altogether exceptional among animals
in degree, but they arose by organic evolution. They usher in a new
phase of evolution, and not a new phase merely but also a new kind,
which is thus also a product of organic evolution and can be no less
materialistic in its essence even though its organization and
activities are essentially different from those in the process that
brought it into being. The objective phenomena of the history of life
can be explained by purely materialistic factors − on the basis of
differential reproduction in populations (main factor in the modern
conception of natural selection) and of the mainly random interplay of
the known process of hereditary.
Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did
not have him in mind. Man was not planned. He is a state of matter, a
form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates,
akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is
material. It is, however, a gross misrepresentation to say that he is
just an accident or nothing but an animal. Among all the myriad forms
of matter and of life on earth or as far as we know in the universe,
man is unique. He happens to represent the highest form of
organization of matter and energy that has ever appeared. Among the
many different lines that show progress, the line leading to man
reaches much the highest level yet developed. Recognition of this
kinship with the rest of the universe is necessary for understanding
him, but his essential nature is defined by qualities found nowhere
else, not by those he has in common with apes, fishes, trees, fires or
anything other than himself.
It is part of this unique status that in man a new form of evolution
begins, overlying and largely dominating the old, organic evolution
which nevertheless also continues in him. This new form of evolution
works in the social structure, as the old evolution does in the
breeding population structure, and it depends on learning, the
inheritance of knowledge, as the old does on physical inheritance. Its
possibility arises from man's intelligence and associated flexibility
of response. His reactions depend far less than other organisms' on
physically inherited factors, far more on learning and on perception
of immediate and of new situations.
This flexibility brings with it the power and need for constant choice
between different courses of action. Man plans and has purposes. Plan,
purpose, goal, all absent in evolution to this point, enter with the
coming of man and are inherent in the new evolution, which is confined
to him. With these comes the need for criteria of choice. Good and
evil, right and wrong, concepts largely irrelevant in nature except
from the human viewpoint, become real and pressing features of the
whole cosmos as viewed by man − the only possible way in which the
cosmos can be viewed morally because morals arise only in man.
The discovery that the universe, apart from man or before his coming,
lacked any purpose or plan, has the inevitable corollary that the
workings of the Universe cannot provide any automatic universal,
eternal, or absolute ethical criteria of right and wrong. This
discovery has completely undermined all older attempts to find an
intuitive ethic or to accept such an ethic as revelation. It equally
undermines attempts to find a naturalistic ethic which will flow with
absolute validity from the workings of nature or of evolution as a new
revelation. Such attempts, arising from discovery of the baselessness
of intuitive ethics, have commonly fallen into the same mistake of
seeking an absolute ethic or one outside of man's own nature and have
then been doomed to failure by their own premises.
31. Among all the myriad forms of matter and life, man is unique. How?
a)
Man was not planned, he is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort
of animal and a species of the order of Primates. Man also shares a
kinship with the rest of the universe.
b)
Man happens to represent the most highly endowed organization of
matter that has yet appeared on earth and there is no good reason to
believe there is any higher in the universe. Also morals arise only in
man.
c)
Man is not necessarily among the higher animals.
d)
Man did originate after a tremendously long sequence of events in
which both chance and orientation played a role.
32. How according to the passage can the history of life be explained
by purely materialistic factors?
a)
Man was certainly not the goal of evolution which evidently had no goals.
b)
Discovery of genetic facts integrated with knowledge of life from
other fields of study has produced a materialistic theory that no
longer gives motive for vitalistic or finalistic theories.
c)
On the basis of differential reproduction in populations and the
mainly random interplay of the known process of hereditary.
d)
Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did
not have him in mind.
33. Which of the following is definitely incorrect about the older
phase or organic form of evolution?
a)
This form of evolution depends on learning, the inheritance of
knowledge. Plans, purposes and goals are inherent in it.
b)
It determines genetic differences, mutations and inheritance and helps
in perception of immediate and of new situations.
c)
It depends on physical inheritance and works in breeding population structure.
d)
The old organic form of evolution also continues in man.
34. Which phenomenon has undermined all older attempts to find an
intuitive ethic or revelation?
a)
A naturalistic ethic, drawing validity from the workings of Nature of evolution.
b)
The discovery that the Universe without or prior to the advent of man
lacked any purpose or plan and attempts at seeking an absolute ethic,
outside man's own nature.
c)
The discovery of the groundlessness of intuitive ethic.
d)
Purpose and plan are characteristic in social evolution because man
has purposes and he makes plans.
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