SBI Clerk 20 Minutes Marathon | English Language Sectional Test: 27th June 2018

Check Video Solutions for English Quiz

Directions (1-10): Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below them. Certain words/phrases have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.

Many in Pakistan reject her. Her own country remains impervious to her message. Pakistani Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai visited Pakistan for five days in March this year. She is Pakistan’s second Nobel Laureate and has been rejected by most Pakistanis; the first laureate, Dr Abdus Salam, was also rejected. Pakistan supports Aafiya Siddiqi instead, an al Qaeda agent serving 86 years in an American prison, whose release has also been demanded by Pakistan as well as by the terrorist organisation, Islamic State. A girl from the picturesque Swat Valley — once visited by the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang in search of ancient Buddhist scriptures — won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2014. At 15, Malala, who had openly objected to the Taliban’s policy of destroying girls’ schools, was shot in the head at close range by a Taliban terrorist. The Taliban’s psychopath chief, Mullah Fazlullah, had ordered her execution from his hideout in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, a popular TV channel in Islamabad aired a “morning view” on October 13, 2014, saying Malala’s Nobel was a Great Game conspiracy aimed at Pakistan.

Pakistanis abroad also rejected her. They listened to Abu Baraa, a senior member of Shariah4Pakistan, linked to Anjem Choudary, a British-Pakistani currently in jail for abetting terrorism in association with an Arab cleric, Omar Bakri, leader of Al Muhajiroun, now ousted from the UK. Choudary was also linked to the Britain-based al Ghurabaa, whose Pakistani leader was then hiding in Karachi as a part of the plot that killed Daniel Pearl. Abu Baraa said from London: “There will be a fatwa issued regarding Malala Yousafzai, taking into account the full story of her injury, including her public statements in support of the occupying US army in the region and mocking of key symbols of Islam such as hijab and jihad.” Back in Pakistan, the government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa banned Malala’s book from the premises of Peshawar University. Malala was not supposed to go to her native Swat but she did sneak away from Islamabad for a short visit to see her friends. She has spent her Nobel Prize money to build a school in the Shangla district of Swat, the beautiful valley where the armies of Islam created an inferno of sharia in 2008, driving three million inhabitants out of the valley and destroying all schools. In 2009, Pakistan felt that the army of jihad fighters it had gestated were going to fall on Islamabad not far away from Swat, and got the army to oust Fazlullah from there. Three years later, Fazlullah nearly killed Malala while she was going to school, putting a bullet through her head.

But many politicians and clerics were not in favour of challenging Fazlullah. To the frog-chorus of intellectuals recommending “negotiations” with the al Qaeda-led elements, one could only offer a glimpse of what the warlord in Swat wanted. As a topic for discussion, he put forward three demands: One, evacuation of the army from Swat so that he can legitimise his occupation of it; two, enforcement of sharia in the area — which of course means the kind of sharia enforced under Taliban; and three, scrapping of all criminal cases registered against his men. Last time Islamabad had negotiated with the Taliban in Waziristan, it had agreed to remove its checkposts and virtually leave the territory to those patronised by al Qaeda. Swat was destined to be the state al Qaeda wanted to create as an Islamic utopia manned by the likes of Fazlullah who had the money and the manpower to run it. With tax on trade of all sorts and the vehicle “token system”, the warlord had enough revenue to finance his 30,000-strong army and even send it into all parts of the Tribal Areas to help other Taliban elements. He also has a contingent of suicide-bombers whose outreach included the entire length and breadth of Pakistan. Salaries paid to the ranks and officers ranged from Rs 10,000 to Rs 25,000.

In 2018, Malala’s response to Fazlullah has come in the shape of a three-storey tall school for girls complete with a computer lab, a playground and a library. This is also her challenge to what Pakistan tried so hard to become. The people of Shangla don’t want too much publicity about the school because the Taliban, now led by Fazlullah in Afghanistan, can still send in their killers at will. There are 183 girl students in the school today, most between the ages of five and 12, 38 of them orphans. But in the rest of Pakistan, Malalas are still not treated right. If you are not a cleric or “drunk with the wine of faith” you can yet be an isolationist hating anything to do with the West from where the funds come to ease the birth of Pakistan’s civil society. When laws are infructuous, the suffering population leans on interest groups for advocacy and the few Pakistani women who know the real plight of their deprived gender rise in their defence. The state that wins no wars shows masculinity against defenceless NGOs, calling them agents of foreign powers set to destroy Pakistan’s pristine culture. And the woman goes on suffering, exploited by her own family while vulnerable to an indifferent state.

Q1. As per the passage, Malala was Pakistan’s second Nobel laureate. Who was the first Nobel Laureate of Pakistan?

Q2. Which of the following statements is/are incorrect in the context of the passage? 

(I) Malala spent her Nobel prize money to build a school in the shangla district of Swat. 

(II) Malala’s book was banned from the premises of Peshawar University by the government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. 

(III) Al Qaeda wanted Swat to become a perfect place fulfilling the desires of Fazlullah.

Q3. As per the passage, who is called as the ‘warlord in swat’?

Q4. Which of the following demands put forward by Fazlullah in the above passage are correct? 

(I) Evacuation of the army from Swat so that he can validate his rule. 

(II) Enforcement of sharia in the Swat similar to that under Taliban. 

(III) Discarding all criminal cases registered against his men.

Q5. Which of the following is the most appropriate title for the passage above?

Q6. Choose the word which is MOST SIMILAR to the word given in passage.

IMPERVIOUS

Q7. Choose the word which is MOST SIMILAR to the word given in passage.

OUSTED

Q8. Choose the word which is most opposite to the following word given in bold in the passage

SNEAK

Q9. Choose the word which is most opposite to the following word given in bold in the passage

VULNERABLE

Q10. Choose the word which is most opposite to the following word given in bold in the passage

ABET

Directions (11-15): In the passage given below there are blanks which are to be filled with the options given below. Find out the appropriate word in each case which can most suitably complete the sentence without altering the meaning of the statement. 

 Inequality occurs in many (11) ……………………., only some of which are economic. And when we speak of economic inequality, again the reference is to a very large canvas, which must be (12) ……………………. very severely in the interests of tractability. Accordingly, by “economic inequality”, we shall mainly mean interpersonal inequality in the distribution of incomes. This is as good a place as any to observe that the enterprise of measurement—including that of socio-economic (13) …………………. such as poverty and inequality—has tended to trigger two types of reaction among practitioners. On the one hand, we have the “measurement fetishists”—those who seldom see poverty or inequality as felt, experienced, human conditions beyond the boundaries of equations and formulas. At the other extreme, we have the “measurement nihilists”—those who regard measurement as a cold, calculating, soulless exercise (14) ………………….. by “experts” who trade in (15) ……………………. symbols and unreliable data to construct misleading pictures of reality.

 Q11.

Q12.

Q13.

Q14.

Q15.

Directions (16-20): Rearrange the following five sentences (A), (B), (C), (D) and (E) in the proper sequence to form a meaningful paragraph and then answer the questions given below. 

Q16. (A) It is not uncommon for batsmen 

 (B) of the supporting cast. 

 (C) to finish as part 

 (D) who began their careers as leading stroke-makers 

 (E) Age converts the carefree into the careworn.

Q17.(A) and journalists are increasingly the targets of online smear campaigns 

 (B) by the most radical nationalists, who vilify them 

(C) and even threaten physical reprisals. 

(D) With Hindu nationalists trying to purge all manifestations of ‘anti-national’ thought 

(E) from the national debate, self-censorship is growing in the mainstream media

Q18. (A) The business model of platform companies, 

(B) It demands a more transparent, trustworthy and accountable online ecosystem 

(C) is central to the crisis. 

(D) which collect data for monetisation, 

(E) Hence, the EC recommendation focusses more on the role of platform companies.

Q19. (A) It has potentially sabotaged elections. Even as governments and social media companies grapple with methods 

(B) of countering the publishing of fake news, 

(C) a particularly alarming strain has come into existence recently, in the Rana Ayyub case. 

(D) It has whipped up communal frenzy. 

(E) Fake news has wreaked damage several times over the last few years.

Q20. (A) This is a potential threat to anybody who has an online presence. 

 (B) It has been proven that false news spreads faster and farther than real news. 

 (C) there is absolutely no stopping them as they leap from group to group within seconds. 

 (D) Any attempts at correcting statements that are wrongly attributed to users will find a much more limited audience and once the screenshots reach WhatsApp, 

(E) The damage to one’s reputation is immediate and impossible to completely reverse.

Directions (21-25): In each of the following sentence, there are two blank spaces. Below the sentences, there are five options and the blanks are to be filled with the pair of words given below to make the sentences correct. Fill up the sentences with the correct word. 

 Q21. India is the first ............. in Asia for the airline and the flights from the Indian capital would be ............ five times a week.

Q22. We ........... a world where we pay you to travel. When you come to Iceland, we should be the .......... partners for booking hotels, rental cars. As you select more services, you will see the fare drop.

Q23. Pointing out that collectivizing the small and marginal tea growers into producers organizations has ........... as one of the most effective ways to improve their access to investments and technology inputs the new scheme ........... formation of farmers producer organizations with creation of common facilities and a system of rewarding best performance.

Q24. We can’t have teams that do only programming. We need more all-rounders. People should have .......... knowledge, the ability to correlate and understand the experience being ............ to the client.

Q25. If you have solid analytical reasoning ............ and understand a good amount of maths, then we can .......... you.

Directions (26-30): In each of the questions given below a sentence is given which is divided into 5 parts out of which one part may or may not have error in it. It is then followed by 5 options out of which one is your answer. Choose the option which gives the grammatically incorrect part as answer. If all the parts are grammatically correct, choose option (e) as the correct choice. 

Q26. That apart, he would focused on creating(A)/ awareness among school students. The idea(B)/ is to approach schools and teach(C)/ students subjects such as(D)/ physics, health and civics through cycling(E).

Q27. While it was Kousalya Devi who ushered in the trend(A)/ of film adaptations of Telugu novels with Doctor Chakravarthy, it was(B)/ Sulochana's writings that captured the fascinating of an average(C)/ reader since the '60s reflecting contemporary(D)/ trends, relationships with her signature nostalgic style(E).

Q28. The novels created such an impact that(A)/ I wondered how would Yaddanapudi interprets(B)/ certain situations I witnessed(C)/ in life. She talked about very relatable(D)/ issues in contrast to feminist literature(E).

Q29. Her moralistic views in relationships from her(A)/ novels reflected in her real(B)/ life- she dedicated the last(C)/ few years of her life to her husband(D)/, halted her writing career(E).

Q30. Some months ago, a global leader of the(A)/ IT industry set sections of(B)/ India’s corporate-sector elite(C)/ aflutter of the comment(D)/ that Indians are not creative(E).