Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of four alternatives and mark your answer.
In ancient times, a king had a boulder placed on a roadway. Then he hid himself and watched to see if anyone would remove the huge rock. Some of the kingdom's wealthiest merchants and courtiers came by and simply walked around it. Many loudly blamed the king for not keeping the roads clear, but none did anything about getting the stone out of the way. Then a peasant came along, carrying a load of vegetables. On approaching the boulder, the peasant laid down his burden and tried to move the stone to the side of the road. After much pushing and straining, he finally succeeded.
As the peasant picked up his load of vegetables, he noticed a purse lying in the road where the boulder had been. The purse contained many gold coins and a note from the king indicating that the gold was for the person who removed the boulder from the roadway.
The peasant learned what many others never understand: Every obstacle presents an opportunity to improve one's condition.
The peasant succeeded to push the huge rock away from the road:
In ancient times, a king had a boulder placed on a roadway. Then he hid himself and watched to see if anyone would remove the huge rock. Some of the kingdom's wealthiest merchants and courtiers came by and simply walked around it. Many loudly blamed the king for not keeping the roads clear, but none did anything about getting the stone out of the way. Then a peasant came along, carrying a load of vegetables. On approaching the boulder, the peasant laid down his burden and tried to move the stone to the side of the road. After much pushing and straining, he finally succeeded.
As the peasant picked up his load of vegetables, he noticed a purse lying in the road where the boulder had been. The purse contained many gold coins and a note from the king indicating that the gold was for the person who removed the boulder from the roadway.
The peasant learned what many others never understand: Every obstacle presents an opportunity to improve one's condition.
Important Questions on Reading Comprehension
This is the thorny side of the prevailing examination system. Most examiners have perfected their skill in making it a veritable nightmare for the majority of the students. Quite unwittingly we have increased the enrolment in schools alarmingly. Most of the students have neither the requisite aptitude nor any clear-cut goal in life. The destiny of students would be decided in the final examination of a written nature to test bookish, rote memory. All laudable objectives of kindling originality and problem-solving ability are trumpeted only in educational seminars and workshops. Ultimately all these are gone with the wind. No wonder examination hangs like a Damocles sword. Compare this with a related discipline such as music and dance. None would venture to seek entry into such centres of excellence unless one has proven aptitude to profit from training. Here the students have an excellent rapport with their teachers who evaluate their performance on a day-to-day basis and provide constant feedback. Students enjoy practicing at home what they are taught in class. As they realise their progress through constant reinforcement they welcome and enjoy examinations in class. Under the watchful guidance of committed teachers, students grow and blossom out as well-trained artists. This is possible and feasible because the teacher-pupil ratio is ideal and the attitude of the learner is based on devotion and dedication.
According to the passage, the objective of education should be-
Our current approach to solving global warming will not work. It is flawed economically because carbon taxes will cost a fortune and do little, and it is flawed politically because negotiations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions will become even more fraught and divisive. And even if you disagree on both counts, the current approach is also flawed technologically.
Many countries are now setting ambitious carbon-cutting goals ahead of global negotiations. Let us imagine that the work ultimately agrees on an ambitious target. Say, we decide to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by three-quarters by the year 2100 while maintaining reasonable growth. Herein lies the technological problem to meet this goal, non-carbon-based sources of energy would have to be astounding 2.5 times greater in 2100 than that was in the year 2000.
These figures were calculated by economists of a foreign university. Their research shows that confronting global warming effectively requires nothing short of a technological revolution. We are not taking this challenge seriously. If we continue on our current path, technological development will be nowhere near significant enough to make non-carbon-based energy sources competitive with fossil fuels on price and effectiveness.
Sadly, during the international negotiations, the focus is on how much carbon to cut, rather than on how to do so. Little or no consideration will be given to whether the means of cutting emissions are sufficient to achieve the goals. Politicians will base their decisions on global warming models that simply assume that technological breakthroughs will happen by themselves. This faith is sadly and dangerously misplaced. Economists examine the state of non-carbon-based energy today — nuclear, wind, solar and geothermal and find that, taken together, alternative energy sources would get us less than halfway towards a path of stable carbon emissions by 2050 and only a tiny fraction of the way towards stabilisation by 2100. We need many times more non-carbon-based energy than is currently produced.
Yet the needed technology will not be ready in terms of scalability or stability. In many cases, there is still a need for the most basic research and development. We are not even close to getting this revolution started.
Current technology is so inefficient that to take just one example, if we were serious about wind power, we would have to blanket most countries with wind turbines to generate enough energy for everybody, and we would still have a massive problem of storage: We don't know what to do when the wind does not blow.
Policymakers should abandon fraught carbon reduction negotiations and instead make agreements to invest in research and development to get this technology to the level where it needs to be.
Which of the following is most nearly the same in meaning as the word given in bold in the passage "Cutting"?
Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it.
Certain words have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answer in some questions.
Braving the scorching sun, they arrived in tractors, buses and hired jeeps. For the people of Bijoliya block, in southwest Rajasthan, attending a meeting with the sub-district magistrate was more important than earning a day's wage ranging from Rs.100 to Rs.300.The meeting was the culmination of a 10-day walk- organised by Rajasthan Adhikar Manch - through 30 villages and settlements in the district of Bhilwara.
The team walked through these villages listening, mobilising and collecting the grievance and receive a time-bound written reply addressing the problem and its solution. On submitting a request, the complainant is given a pink receipt stating the day of the hearing. This receipt is the only proof that can hold the local officials accountable to the fact that the government has registered the complaint and that action will be taken.
Bhils form almost 38 per cent of the adivasi population of Rajasthan and are classified as scheduled tribes under the Constitution. Although the word 'bhilwara' means abode of the Bhils, there is little that the bhils can call their own. Most of them hold no registered land holdings to claim their land, most of which is mined and wened by those with business interests in textiles and stone mines. The Bhils in this area live in settlements or villages in the forests. Traditionally they relied on these forests for wood, shelter and livelihoods, including collecting medicinal hers and subsistence farming. Today to earn a living most of the young Bhils work as labourers at Bhilwara stone mines - the stone most commonly used for roofing pukka houses in this area.
Although the Bhils lack housing and access to bare necessities they have not been classified as Below Poverty Line. This status would help them build proper houses, get rations from the government at a subsidised rate, send their children to schools, gain affordable access to electricity and other social schemes. During the yatra, 372 Bhil families submitted their applications demanding inclusion in the BPL category. Their lives are a constant struggle for survival. Either they have no access to water tanks or the existing water pumps and connections lie defunct. If living in makeshift houses, walking two kilometres to get drinking water, having no access to schools and aanganwaadis, and no medical facilities don't qualify the Bhils to be classified under the BPL category, then what does? For the Bhils gathered at Bijoliya block, their main appeal to the SDM Gopal Singh Shekhawat and the panchayat was inclusion under the BPL category. However, neither the panchayat nor the SDM provided them with the pink receipts. Shekhawat, who accepted the application but made no written commitment, said, "We will try to deal with these issues, although we are not certain if we can hold special camps to redress their problems." The new State government has now announced a Good Governance Act. While policymakers and politicians tweak and replace important legislation like the Right to Hearing, poor governance makes day-to-day survival an endless struggle for the Bhils.
Why are Bhil Families submitting applications for their inclusion in BPL category?
(A) So that they are no more deprived of necessities.
(B) So that they can send their children to schools.
(C) So that they can gain affordable access to various social schemes run by the government.
(D) So that they can migrate from rural areas to urban areas.
Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of, poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers once fretted about girls'. Lack of confidence in science but this is changing. Sweden has commissioned research into its "boy crisis". Australia has devised a reading programme called "Boys, Blokes, Books and Bytes". In just a couple of generations, one gender gap has closed, only for another to open up. The reversal is laid out in a report published on March 5th by the OECD. A Paris-based rich-country think-tank. Boys' dominance just about endures in maths: at age 15 they are, on average, the equivalent of three months' schooling ahead of girls. In science the results are fairly even. But in reading, where girls have been ahead for some time, a gulf has appeared. In all G4 countries and economies in the study, girls outperform boys. The average gap is equivalent to an extra year of schooling. The OECD deems literacy to be the most important skill that it assesses, since further learning depends on it. Sure enough, teenage boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail to achieve basic proficiency in any of maths, reading and science. Youngsters in this group, with nothing to build on or shine at, are prone to drop out of school altogether. To see why boys and girls fare so differently in the classroom, first look at what they do outside it. The average 15-year old girl devotes five-and-a-half hours a week to homework, an hour more than the average boy, who spend more time playing video games and trawling the internet. Three-quarters of girls read for pleasure, compared with little more than half of boys. Reading rates are falling everywhere as screens draw eyes from pages, but boys are giving up faster. The OECD found that, among boys who do as much homework as the average girl, the gender gap in reading fell by nearly a quarter.
Once in the classroom, boys long to be out of it: They are twice as likely as girls to report that school is a "waste of time", and more often turn up late. Just as a teachers-used
to struggle to persuade girls that science is not only for men, the OECD now urges parents and policymakers to steer boys away from a version of masculinity that ignores academic achievement. Boys' disdain for school might have been less irrational when there were plenty of jobs for uneducated men. But those days have long gone. It may be that a bit of swagger helps in maths, where confidence plays a part in boys' lead (though it sometimes extends to delusion : 12% of boys told the OECD that they are familiar with the mathematical concept of "subjunctive sealing", a red herring that fooled only 7% of girls.) But their lack of self-discipline drives teachers crazy. The OECD found that boys did much better in its anonymized tests than in teachers assessments. What is behind this discrimination? One possibility is that teachers mark up students who are polite, eager and stay out of flights, all attributes that are more common among girls. In some countries, academic points can even be docked for bad behaviour.
Which of the following is TRUE in the context of the passage?
Once upon a time, there lived a washerman in a village. He had a donkey by the name of Udhata. He used to carry loads of clothes to the river bank and back home every day. The donkey was not satisfied with the food, that was given to him by his master to eat. So he wandered into the nearby fields stealthily and ate the crops growing there. Once, the donkey, while wandering around, happened to meet a fox. Soon, both of them became friends and began to wander together in search of delicious food. One night, the donkey and the fox were eating watermelons in a field. The watermelons were so tasty, that the donkey ate in a large quantity. Having eaten to his appetite, the donkey became so happy that he was compelled by an intense desire to sing. He told the fox that he was in such a good mood that he had to express his happiness in a melodious tone. 'Don't be a fool. If you sing, the people sleeping in and around this field will wake up and beat us black and blue with sticks,' said the fox worriedly.
`You are a dull fellow', the donkey said hearing the words of the fox. 'Singing makes one happy and healthy. No matter what comes. I'll definitely sing a song." The fox became worried to see the donkey adamant to sing a song in the midst of the field, while the owner was still sleeping only a little distance away. Seeing his adamant, he said to the donkey, 'Friend, wait a minute before you start first, let me jump over to the other side of the fence for my safety.' Saying so the fox jumped over to the other side of the fence without losing a moment. The donkey began in his so-called melodious tone. Hearing, suddenly, a donkey braying in the field, the owner woke up from his sleep. He picked up his stick lying by his side and ran towards the donkey who was still braying happily. The owner of the field looked around and saw the loss caused by the donkey. He became very angry and beat him so ruthlessly that the donkey was physically incapacitated temporarily. He, somehow, managed to drag himself out of the field with great difficulty. The fox looked at the donkey and said in a sympathetic tone, I'm sorry to see you in this pitiable condition. I had already warned you, but you didn't listen to my advice.' The donkey too realised his folly and hung his head in shame.
What happened when the donkey sang a song?
COMPELLED
PITIABLE
Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some questions.
Agriculture has always been celebrated as the primary sector in India: Thanks to the Green Revolution, India is now self-sufficient in food production. Indian agriculture has been making technological advancements as well. Does that mean everything is looking bright for Indian agriculture? A superficial analysis of the above points would tempt one to say yes, but the truth is far from it. The reality is that Indian farmers have to face extreme poverty and financial crisis, which is driving them to suicide. What are the grave adversities that drive the farmers to commit suicide at a time when the Indian economy is supposed, to be gearing up to take on the world?
Indian agriculture is predominantly dependent on nature. Irrigation facilities that are currently available do not cover the entire cultivable land. If the farmers are at the mercy of monsoons for timely water for their crops, they are at the mercy of the government for alternative irrigation facilities. Any failure of nature directly affects the fortunes of the farmers. Secondly, Indian agriculture is largely an unorganized sector, there is no systematic planning in cultivation, farmers work on lands of uneconomical sizes, institutional finances are not available and minimum purchase prices of the government do not, in reality, reach the poorest farmer. Added to this, the cost of agricultural inputs have been steadily rising over the years, farmers margins of profits have been narrowing because the price rise in inputs is not complemented by an increase in the purchase price of the agricultural produce. Even today, in several parts of the country agriculture, is a seasonal occupation. In many districts, farmers get only one crop per year and for the remaining part of the year, they find it difficult to make both ends meet.
The farmers normally resort to borrowing from moneylenders, in the absence of institutionalised finance. Where institutional finance is available, the ordinary farmer does not have a chance of availing it because of the procedures involved in disbursing the finance. This calls for removing the elaborate formalities for obtaining the loans. Institutional finance, where available is mostly availed by the medium or large landowners, the small tamers do not even have the awareness of the existence of such facilities. The moneylender is the only source of finance to the farmers. Should the crops fail, the farmers fall into a debt trap and crop failures piled up over the years give them no other option than to end their lives.
Another disturbing trend has been observed where farmers commit suicide or deliberately kill a family member in order to avail relief and benefits announced by the government to support the families of those who have committed suicide so that their families could at least benefit from the Government's relief programmes. What then needs to be done to prevent this sad state of affairs? There cannot be one single solution to end the woes of farmers.
Temporary measures through monetary relief would not be the solution. The governmental efforts should be targeted at improving the entire structure of the small farmers wherein the relief is not given on a drought to drought basis, rather they are taught to overcome their difficulties through their own skills and capabilities. Social responsibility also goes a long way to help the farmers. General public, NGOs, Corporate and other organisations too can play a part in helping farmers by adopting drought-affected villages and families and helping them to rehabilitate.
The nation has to realise that farmers suicides are not minor issues happening in remote parts of a few states, it is a reflection of the true state of the basis of our economy.
What does the author mean by procedures when he says that farmers do not get a chance of availing institutional finance because of procedures involved in it?
