Hello, Greetings of the day!!
Dear Students, As we’ve all seen the drastic change in the pattern of Questions asked in English Section, Gone are the days when we used to predict types and no. of questions asked in the clerk and PO exam..but now every single day Questions are changing. IBPS is surprising all of us by asking CAT Exam pattern Questions.
So now we’ve decided to help and guide all of you to Sail through these unpredictable Bank Exams.
Every day, we’ll provide Quizzes based on the new pattern and some other new type of Questions that also might be asked in the upcoming exams. The best thing you can do is to be well prepared and familiar with all possible type of questions. We’ll also post the tricks and approach to nail unexpected pattern questions.
Directions (1-15): Each of the following questions has a paragraph from which the last sentence has been deleted. From the given options, choose the one that completes the paragraph in the most appropriate way.
Q1. Yes, nobody wants to be Japan, the fallen angel that went from one of the fastest growing economies in the world for more than three decades to one that has slowed to a crawl for the past 18 years. No one wants to live with the trauma of the deflation (falling prices) that Japan has repeatedly experienced. No one wants to navigate the precarious government-debt dynamic that Japan faces, with debt levels far above 100% of GDP – even if one factors in the Japanese government’s vast holdings of foreign – exchange reserves.
(a) No one wants to go from being a world-beater to a poster child for economic stagnation.
(b) And yet, visitors to Tokyo today see prosperity everywhere.
(c) Although hardly in crisis yet, Japan’s fiscal situation grows more alarming by the day.
(d) Until now, the government has been able to finance its vast debts locally, despite paying paltry interest rates even on longer-term borrowings.
(e) Remarkably, Japanese savers soak up some 95% of their government’s debt.
Q2. On March 1st Philip Morris, a tobacco giant, sued eight American retailers for selling counterfeit versions of its Marlboro cigarettes. Governments are also boosting their efforts to crack down on counterfeiting which deprives them of tax revenue in addition to harming legitimate businesses. Thanks to the rise of the internet and of extended international supply chains, and more recently, to the global economic downturn, counterfeit goods are everywhere. Fake Porsches and Ferraris zoom along the streets of Bangkok. A German bank has discovered an ersatz gold ingot made of tungsten in its reserves, according to a German television channel investigating persistent reports that many of the world’s financial institutions have been similarly hoodwinked.
(a) Counterfeiting used to be a luxury goods problem, but now people are trying to traffic counterfeit items that have a wider effect on the economy.
(b) NASA, America’s space agency, has even bought suspect materials.
(c) Several factors have contributed to the growth of counterfeiting in recent years.
(d) Fake goods are proliferating, to the dismay of companies and governments.
(e) The recession in the rich world may also have given a boost to counterfeit goods.
Q3. The rate of conviction in SC and ST atrocity cases in the State has reached 22% from 10% last year due to the proper investigations done by the departments concerned and the increased awareness that enabled the aggrieved persons to get justice. The Government has been appointing special public prosecutors in “most sensational” and long-pending cases and has issued guidelines to increase people’s understanding of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
(a) The people’s representatives should now acquaint people with the legal remedies available for them.
(b) The Act has been implemented in letter and spirit.
(c) The Police Department act swiftly on complaints of atrocities.
(d) These measures facilitated speedy disposal of SC and ST atrocity cases.
(e) Investigations have paved the way for speedy delivery of justice.
Q4. Make no mistake: the setting matters. There are many ways to listen to classical Indian music – in the private, somewhat sterile perfection of the CDs and DVDs we play at home; in the concert sabhas of Mylapore and T. Nagar; on the music channels on TV or on YouTube, which now carries a little or a lot of almost everything, often in choppy, byte-size pieces. But I happen to think that this music sounds best outside, on a hot spring or summer night, with the taste of pollen and dust on your tongue and mosquitoes circling around your feet.
(a) We tend to forget that much of the classical music of India, both Hindustani and Carnatic, was meant for intimate settings like the royal court,
(b) Taking classical music out of “sabhas” into vibrant cultural spaces brings out its ethereal dimensions.
(c) Music is a tangible thing, to be felt in the pores of your skin no less than in the ear; you just can’t do that very well in the concert halls.
(d) In the course of its transition to the modern concert stage, Carnatic music in particular has sacrificed something of its delicacy.
(e) One of the important things about the settings is the re-creation of a context for listening in which subtlety and intimacy can assume their natural role.
Q5. In 2009 China overtook Germany to become the world’s largest exporter. Exactly half the trade disputes that were filed at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) last year involved China. These facts are not unrelated. As Pascal Lamy, the WTO’s chief, pointed out in January, the scope for trade friction increases as countries trade more.
(a) Hence, China will test the WTOs dispute-settlement system.
(b) Hence, disputes between China and other countries are only to be expected.
(c) Hence, China’s increasing propensity to bring disputes to the WTO is part of a broader shift.
(d) Hence, China has moved from learning-by-watching, to being an active participant in formal dispute settlement.
(e) Hence, more disputes may be inevitable; resolving them successfully is not.
Q6. Hundreds of farmers in long, faded cotton sarongs swarmed outside an auditorium at Bangalore University last February. They were waiting for India’s Environment Minister. This was the last of his public consultations on the commercial release of Bt Brinjal, a genetically modified (GM) aubergine, created by Mahyco, an Indian hybrid-seed company, and Monsanto, an American biotech giant. Waving placards and appetizing images of aubergines, known in India as brinjal, they shouted themselves hoarse praising the transgenic vegetable. But most of these men, registered at the consultation as farmers, were in fact landless labourers with no aubergine experience. The Minister was the first to call their bluff. The companies, he said, without naming any, had bussed farmers from rural districts, to play the pro-GM crowd at the hearing that day.
(a) The tactic failed miserably.
(b) The minister’s road show to canvass public views was unusual.
(c) Many were surprised at the Minister’s decision to snub the seed companies and powerful domestic and American biotech lobbies.
(d) The Minister felt obliged to be responsible to science and responsive to society.
(e) It was a setback for GM in India.
Q7. India’s industry is going from strength to strength. Manufacturing grew by 14.3% in the fourth quarter, compared with the same period last year. Politicians celebrate the achievements of “India Inc,” applauding its acquisitions abroad and welcoming the foreign investment it attracts. They do not show anything like the same confidence in “Bharat Inc,” which is how India’s rural economy is sometimes described. Bharat, which means India in Hindi, is a different country. The rural heartland is courted for votes, smothered with regulations, and shielded from the global economy that corporate India is busy conquering.
(a) Indian agriculture has performed poorly because governments have treated it as a source of votes rather than as an engine of growth.
(b) But its policymakers should treat farms as a potential source of growth, not just of votes.
(c) Yet the government cannot achieve the growth it aspires to without robust progress in agriculture, which still employs about half of India’s workforce.
(d) This year, for the first time in the country’s history, India’s factories may contribute more to GDP than its farms, forests and fisheries.
(e) Indian agriculture can comfortably feed the country, but that remains the sum of its achievement.
Q8. Thirty years ago the bosses of America’s car industry were shocked to learn that Japan had overtaken America to become the world’s leading car producer. They were even more shocked when they visited Japan to find out what was going on. They found that the secret of Japan’s success did not lie in cheap labour or government subsidies – their preferred explanations – but in what was rapidly dubbed “lean manufacturing”. While Detroit slept, Japan had transformed itself from a low-wage economy into a hotbed of business innovation.
(a) Soon every factory around the world was lean – or a ruin.
(b) Management gurus are always glibly proclaiming revolutions.
(c) Now something comparable is taking place in the developing world.
(d) The rich world is losing its leadership in the sort of breakthrough ideas that transform industries.
(e) Western carmakers learned the techniques of lean production from their Japanese rivals.
Q9. When Parliament decided, in 1709, to create a law that would protect books from piracy, the London-based publishers and booksellers who had been pushing for such protection were overjoyed. When Queen Anne gave her assent on April 10th the following year – 300 years ago – to “An act for the encouragement of learning” they were less enthused. Parliament had given them rights, but it had set a time limit on them: 21 years for books already in print and 14 years if the author was still alive when the first term ran out. After that, the material would enter the public domain so that anyone could reproduce it.
(a) The lawmakers helped channel the spate of inventiveness that writers had in the past.
(b) The lawmakers knew that authors do not generally consult the statute books before deciding whether or not to pick up pen.
(c) The lawmakers did not bother about how such a deal can be made equitably.
(d) The lawmakers intended to balance the incentive to create with the interest that people have in free access to knowledge.
(e) However, none of this should get in the way of the enforcement of copyright, which remains a vital tool in the encouragement of learning.
Q10. Organ transplantation is one of the most impressive achievements of modern medicine. It has brought hope to millions of patients suffering from previously fatal organ failure. For many, it has made life longer and better. It has benefited many professionals and industries, too, by becoming a new source of pride, funding, and profit. Struggling to contain costs, health-care payers are also among its beneficiaries.
(a) Kidney transplantation, for example, has proved to be less costly than dialysis.
(b) Transplant medicine has been grappling with a rapidly increasing gap between the supply of organs and demand for them.
(c) If we are short of organs, then let us get more of them.
(d) Indeed, transplant ethics has been on a slippery slope almost since transplants began.
(e) Organ transplantation, like mosquito repellent, should be used sparingly, and only when there is no other choice.
Q11. How do you do it? Your colleagues, neighbours, family and friends, how do they all do it? “I follow my nose,” says Dan Rhodes, author of Gold, “I am always on the hunt for the next book that’s going to rock my world … my favourite thing is still going into a shop and coming out with something I’d never heard of.” But if you stand in any bookstore, you’re unlikely to see many people using their noses, they just head straight for the “new” Salman Rushdie or the “latest” Chetan Bhagat or the “most recent” Shobhaa De or the “new bestseller” from Paulo Coelho:
(a) because they believe that books can change life.
(b) maybe that is the Catcher effect – most of us had read Catcher in the Rye and Salinger’s other books in our late teens.
(c) It doesn’t seem to work that way now.
(d) It’s a matter of judging every book by its author.
(e) If it’s always been around you, you develop an instinct about it, else you are never sure.
Q12. Marie Antoinette told her people to eat cake when they needed bread. Our government encourages people to buy cars-from Rolls Royce to the Nano-when they need affordable public transport. And when people, especially women, want simple, basic health care-and clean water and sanitation – they are being urged to inject their daughters with a Rs. 9,000 vaccine against cervical cancer.
(a) If some of us do these things, we should not be blamed.
(b) It has brought into focus several ethical and gender-related issues in the arena of public health.
(c) The priorities of our decision makers are more than slightly skewed.
(d) What women need is basic healthcare, not costly medical experiments.
(e) The vaccine is supposed to protect them from cervical cancer.
Q13. A ride to Alappuzha, visiting the coir industries and boating in the backwaters was next on the agenda. As the boats sliced the green water of the Vembanad Kayal, we watched life on the backwaters of Kerala: women selling foodstuff wrapped in banana leaves from the canoes, the transport service, the boat stops as schools kids hopped from one boat to another to get home, the different National waterways that the signs indicated and the homes that had their families bathing, washing utensils and clothes.
(a) We were awestruck by the vast expanse of the lake.
(b) The backwaters were indeed the artery of this area.
(c) It was then we realized that this was India’s longest and largest lake.
(d) Life moves at a serene pace in the backwaters of Alappuzha.
(e) The Vembanad Kayal Wetlands is in the list of wetlands of international importance.
Q14. The tragedy about data collection in India is that by the time primary data is converted into useable information, it may be too late to aid policy intervention. This is true of data collected by not just government agencies such as the National Sample Survey Organization but also think tanks such as National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER). One of the criticisms of Human Development in India: Challenges for a Society in Transition of Maryland, US – is that it is based on data collected at least six years back.
(a) It brings out various dimensions of human development to understand social inequalities, based on survey of 41,554 households.
(b) Many of its findings are an eye-opener, while some others a reaffirmation of conclusion of other independent studies.
(c) Indicators used to measure development were household incomes and poverty rates, land ownership and agriculture incomes, health and education.
(d) It does not capture the impact of the changes of the following years when the economy grew at more than 8% on an average every year.
(e) Policymakers could draw inference from the findings to improve targeting of programs aimed at inclusive growth.
Q15. Almost a decade after the launch of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the achievement on universalizing elementary education is best described as maxed. Massive spending by the Centre and states on setting up new schools and hiring an army of teachers across the country has ensured enrolment of children in schools has risen across rural India. Just about 4% of children in the age group 6-14 are now estimated not to be attending school.
(a) However, on any given day, the average attendance rate seems to be around 74% at the all-India level.
(b) However, that is the only happier part of the story.
(c) However, nearly 50% of children in class V cannot read the text for class II without making a mistake.
(d) However, the poor quality of learning has ensured that the crores spent with the objective of creating an educated, employable workforce are fruitless.
(e) These children would possibly grow up to be the educated employable workforce in India.
