Q1: Read the following passage carefully to answer the following question.
Urban India is no less traumatised by floods, but city governments have not learnt too many lessons from devastation and losses. The scenes of gridlock and frustration in Gurgaon, Bengaluru and Delhi last week travelled around the world, just months after the disaster in Chennai. Can there be a surgical solution to sclerotic urban planning? Bengaluru is the epitome of governmental indifference to wetlands, most of which have been severely encroached upon or polluted. Being able to live with floods in today’s dense cities requires that these lakes be desilted and restored on a war footing. New artificial wetlands may have to be created to compensate for those that have already been built over. The spectacle of flooding and destruction should convince the Environment Ministry that it is retrograde to sanction large real estate projects without an environmental impact assessment. Some real estate companies have been slapped with penalties by the National Green Tribunal for encroaching upon lakes, but urban planning agencies are equally responsible and must also be called to account for tacitly sanctioning the violations. Provision of relief to those affected by the latest floods has to go beyond patronage politics, and meet the actual needs of the people, particularly those who have suffered extreme losses.
Ques1: Which of the following is/are the companies have been slapped with penalties by the National Green Tribunal for encroaching upon lakes?
2) urban planning agencies
3) some real states
4) both A and C
5) All of the above
Ans: Option (3)
Explanation: Some real estate companies have been slapped with penalties by the National Green Tribunal for encroaching upon lakes.
Q2: Read the following passage carefully to answer the following question.
The SEC’s three missions—of investor protection; fair, orderly and efficient markets; and the facilitation of capital formation—are often seen to be at odds with one another or insufficiently understood. Mr Clayton’s speech expanded on a theme first voiced in his confirmation hearing, that a sharp decline in publicly listed companies in America over the past two decades reflects deep problems in the structure of financial markets. In turn, this causes average Americans harm by denying them the opportunity to invest in dynamic companies.
Among the causes of the decline, he said, was the cumulative impact of disclosure requirements that had gone far beyond the core concept of what is material to an investor. Some of these requirements were aimed at providing indirect benefits to “specific shareholders or other constituencies”, he said, a passage seen by many as an attack on activists who use disclosure standards to push companies on social rather than business issues. Additional compliance mandates had piled on costs for listed companies that they could avoid by staying private. The first change of the Clayton era is telling. On July 10th a new rule went into effect that raised the size threshold for companies that are allowed to file private registration statements to raise capital with the SEC, thereby delaying the exposure of sensitive information that might be of use to competitors. Companies, says one lawyer, consider the disclosure process akin to undressing in public, and thus a reason to stay private. The SEC’s rule change is a small one but may be indicative of a broader change in regulatory philosophy. If the market does not work for companies, it will not work for the public.
Ques2: What are the main aims of disclosure requirements?
A) To attack the activists who disclose the standards of companies.B) To be profitable to a few shareholders
C) To increase the cost of the shares of listed companies.
D) Both 1 & 2
E) None of these.
Ans: Option (B)
See the second line of second paragraph
Explanation: Some of these requirements were aimed at providing indirect benefits to “specific shareholders or other constituencies”
B) embarrassed by their emotional incoherence.
C) interested by their expressions of feeling.
D) unimpressed by their social function.
E) disgusted by their mushiness
Q3: Read the following passage carefully to answer the following question.
American culture changed forever in the latter part of the twentieth century with the advent of pop music. Before the 1950s music defined its own circles, but, at best, only shaded the frame of popular American culture. The birth of Rock and Roll forever changed that as larger and larger numbers of youth came, not only to identify with the music they were listening to, but to identify themselves by that music.
We use pop songs to create for ourselves a particular sort of self- definition, a particular place in society. The pleasure that a pop song produces is a pleasure of identification: in responding to a song, we are drawn into affective and emotional alliances with the performers and with the performers’ other fans. Thus music, like sport, is clearly a setting in which people directly experience community, feel an immediate bond with other people, and articulate a collective pride.
At the same time, because of its qualities of abstractness, pop music is an individualizing form. Songs have a looseness of reference that makes them immediately accessible. They are open to appropriation for personal use in a way that other popular cultural forms (television soap operas, for example) are not—the latter are tied into meanings which we may reject.
This interplay between personal absorption into music and the sense that it is, nevertheless, something public, is what makes music so important in the cultural placing of the individual. Music also gives us a way of managing the relationship between our public and private emotional lives. Popular love songs are important because they give shape and voice to emotions that otherwise cannot be expressed without embarrassment or incoherence. Our most revealing declarations of feeling are often expressed in banal or boring language and so our culture has a supply of pop songs that say these things for us in interesting and involving ways.
Ques3: It can be inferred from the passage that the author’s attitude towards love songs in popular music is that of being:
A) bored by the banality of their language. B) embarrassed by their emotional incoherence.
C) interested by their expressions of feeling.
D) unimpressed by their social function.
E) disgusted by their mushiness
Ans: Option C
See the last paragraph
Explanation: the author says that the love songs “give shape and voice to emotions that otherwise cannot be expressed without embarrassment or incoherence. The author also notes that the songs express feeling ―for us in interesting and involving ways. The author is positive, and therefore (C) is correct.
Q4: Read the following passage carefully to answer the following question:
Because we have so deeply interiorized writing, we find it difficult to consider writing to be an alien technology, as we commonly assume printing and the computer to be. Most people are surprised to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus, against writing.
Writing, Plato has Socrates say, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. Secondly, Plato‘s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Thirdly, a written text is basically unresponsive, whereas real speech and thought always exist essentially in a context of give-and-take between real persons.
Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. Thus, for most literates, to think of words as totally disassociated from writing is psychologically threatening, for literates‘ sense of control over language is closely tied to the visual transformations of language. Writing makes ―words‖ appear similar to things because we think of words as the visible marks signalling words to decoders, and we have an inability to represent to our minds a heritage of verbally organized materials except as some variant of writing. A literate person, asked to think of the word ―nevertheless‖ will normally have some image of the spelled-out word and be quite unable to think of the word without adverting to the lettering. Thus the thought processes of functionally literate human beings do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured by the technology of writing.
Without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. Literacy is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science, but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself. Literate users of a grapholect such as standard English have access to vocabularies hundreds of times larger than any oral
Ques4: The author refers to Plato in the first and second paragraphs. He brings the philosopher up primarily in order to:
A) provide an example of literate Greek philosophy.B) suggest the possible disadvantages of writing.
C) illustrate common misconceptions about writing.
D) define the differences between writing and computer technology.
E) suggest possible benefits of writing
Ans: Option B
Explanation: The author says that ―essentially the same objections…were urged by Plato…against writing. The prediction is easy: Plato is used to introduce ancient objections to writing. (B) paraphrases this closely.
Q5: Read the following passage carefully to answer the following question:
The painter is now free to paint anything he chooses. There are scarcely any forbidden subjects, and today everybody is prepared to admit that a painting of some fruit can be as important as a painting of a hero dying. The Impressionists did as much as anybody to win this previously unheard-of freedom for the artist. Yet, by the next generation, painters began to abandon the subject altogether, and began to paint abstract pictures. Today the majority of pictures painted are abstract.
Is there a connection between these two developments? Has art gone abstract because the artist is embarrassed by his freedom? Is it that, because he is free to paint anything, he doesn’t know what to paint? Apologists for abstract art often talk of it as the art of maximum freedom. But could this be the freedom of the desert island? It would take too long to answer these questions properly. I believe there is a connection. Many things have encouraged the development of abstract art. Among them has been the artists’ wish to avoid the difficulties of finding subjects when all subjects are equally possible.
I raise the matter now because I want to draw attention to the fact that the painter’s choice of a subject is a far more complicated question than it would at first seem. A subject does not start with what is put in front of the easel or with something which the painter happens to remember. A subject starts with the painter deciding he would like to paint such-and-such because for some reason or other he finds it meaningful. A subject begins when the artist selects something for special mention. (What makes it special or meaningful may seem to the artist to be purely visual – its colours or its form.) When the subject has been selected, the function of the painting itself is to communicate and justify the significance of that selection.
Ques5: In the sentence, “I believe there is a connection” (second paragraph), what two developments is the author referring to?
A) Painters using a dying hero and using a fruit as a subject of painting.B) Growing success of painters and an increase in abstract forms.
C) Artists gaining freedom to choose subjects and abandoning subjects altogether.
D) Rise of impressionists and an increase in abstract forms.
E) None of these.
Ans: Option C
Explanation: The answer to this question can be easily inferred from paragraph 1 and 2. Option C is the right answer. Refer to the lines: Yet, by the next generation, painters began to abandon the subject altogether, and began to paint abstract pictures. Today the majority of pictures painted are abstract.….Is there a connection between these two developments?
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