A passage is given with 5 Questions following it. Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives and click the button corresponding to it.

The public distribution system, which provides food at low prices, is a subject of vital concern. There is a growing realization that though India has enough food to feed its masses two square meals a day, the monster of starvation and food insecurity continues to haunt the poor in our country. Increasing the purchasing power of the poor through providing productive employment leading to rising income, and thus good standard of living, is the ultimate objective of public policy. However, till then, there is a need to provide assured supply of food through a restructured, more efficient and decentralized public distribution system (PDS). Although the PDS is extensive world – it hasn't reached the rural poor and the remote places. It remains an urban phenomenon, with the majority of the rural poor still out of its reach due to lack of economic and physical access. The poorest in the cities and the migrants are left out, for they generally do not possess ration cards. The allocation of PDS supplies in big cities is larger than in rural areas. In view of such deficiencies in the system, the PDS urgently needs to be streamlined. Also, considering the large it is one of the largest such systems in the food grains production combined with food subsidy on one hand and the continuing slow starvation and dismal poverty of rural population on the other, there is a strong case for making PDS target group oriented. By making PDS target group oriented, not only the poorest and the neediest would be reached without additional cost but we can also reduce the overall costs incurred. 

Which of the following is true of public distribution system? 

Direction: In the following questions, out of the four alternatives, choose the one which best expresses the meaning of the given word as your answer.

See

Directions: 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 of the questions.
Among those suffering from the global recession are millions of workers who are not even included in the official statistics : urban recyclers – the trash pickers, sorters, traders and reprocesses who extricate paper, cardboard and plastics from garbage heaps and prepare them for reuse. Their work is both unrecorded and largely unrecognized, even though in some parts of the World they handle as much as 20% of all waste.
The World’s 15 million informal recyclers clean up cities, prevent some trash from ending in landfills and thus, reduce climate change by saving energy on waste disposal techniques like incineration. In the developed countries they are the preferred ones since they recycle waste much more cheaply and efficiently than governments or private corporations can. In the developing World, on the other hand, they provide the only recycling services except for a few big cities. But as recession hits the markets Worldwide, the price of scrap metal, paper and plastic has also fallen. Recyclers throughout the World are experiencing a sharp drop in income. Trash pickers and scrap dealers saw a decline of as much as 80% in the price of scrap from October 2007 to October 2009. In some countries scrap dealers have shuttered so quickly that researchers at the Solid Waste Management Association didn’t have a chance to record their losses. In Delhi, some 80% of families in the informal recycling business surveyed by an organization said they had cut back on “luxury foods,” which they defined as fruit, milk and meat. About 41% had stopped buying milk for their children. By this summer, most of those children, already malnourished, hadn’t had a glass of milk in nine months. Many of these children have also cut down on hours spent in school to work alongside their parents. Families have liquidated their most valuable assets – primarily copper from electrical wires – and have stopped sending remittances back to their rural villages. Many have also sold their emergency stores of grain. Their misery is not as familiar as that of the laid-off workers of big name but imploding, service sector corporation, but it is often more tragic. Few countries have adopted emergency measures to help trash pickers. Brazil, for one, is  providing recyclers, or “catadores,” with cheaper food, both through arrangements with local farmers and by offering food subsidies. Other countries, with the support of non-governmental organizations  and donor agencies are following Brazil’s example. Unfortunately, most trash pickers operate outside official notice and end up falling through the cracks of programmes like these. In the long run,  though, these invisible workers will remain especially vulnerable to economic slowdowns unless they are integrated into the formal business sector, where they can have insurance and reliable wages. This is not hard to accomplish. Informal junk shops should have to apply for licences, and governments should create or expand doorstep waste collection programmes to employ trash pickers. Instead of sorting through haphazard trash heaps and landfills, the pickers would have access to the cleaner scrap that comes from households.

The need of the hour, however, is a more immediate solution. An efficient but temporary solution would be for governments where they’d have to pay a small subsidy to waste dealers so they could purchase scrap from trash pickers at about 20% above the current price. This increase, if well advertised and broadky utilized, would bring recyclers a higher price and eventually bring them back from the brink. Trash pickers make our cities healthier and more liveable. We all stand to gain by making sure that the work of recycling remains sustainable for years to come.

Which of the following is intended in the given passage?

Select the most appropriate meaning of the given idiom.
 Grease someone’s palm

Identify the appropriate choice in changing thr voice of the following sentences. She was knitting a sweater at that time.

Direction : Read the following passage carefully and answer the question given below it. Certain words/phrases have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the question.
 Governments have traditionally equated economic progress with steel mills and cement factories. While urban centers thrive and city dwellers get rich, hundreds of millions of farmers remain mired in poverty. However fears of food shortages, a rethinking of anti-poverty priorities and the crushing recession in 2008 are causing a dramatic shift in world economic policy in favour of greater support for agriculture.
 The last time when the world’s farmer felt such love was in the 1970s. At that time, as food prices spiked, there was real concern that the world was facing a crisis in which the planet was simply unable to produce enough grain and meat for an expanding population. Government across the developing world and international aid organisations plowed investment into agriculture in the early 1970s, while technological breakthroughs, like high-yield strains of important food crops, boosted production. The result was the Green Revolution and food production exploded. But the Green Revolution became a victim of its own success. Food prices plunged by some 60% by the late 1980s from their peak in the mid-1970s. Policy makers and aid workers turned their attention to the poor’s other pressing needs such as health care and education. Farming got starved of resources and investment. By 2004 aid directed at agriculture sank to 3.5 % and Agriculture lost its glitter. Also as consumer in high-growth giants such as China and India became wealthier they began eating more meat so grain once used for human consumption got diverted to beef up livestock. By early 2008 panicked buying by importing countries and restrictions slapped on grain exports by some big producers helped drive prices upto heights not seen for three decades. Making matters worse land and resources got reallocated to produce cash crops such as biofuels and the result was that voluminous reserves of grain evaporated. Protests broke out across the emerging world and fierce food riots toppled governments. This spurred global leaders into action. This made them aware that food security is one of the fundamental issues in the world that has to be dealt with in order to maintain administrative and political stability. This also spurred the US which traditionally provisioned food aid from American grain surpluses to help needy nations to move towards investing in farm sectors around the globe to boost productive for themselves and be in a better position to feed their own people.
 Africa, which missed out on the first Green Revolution due to poor policy and limited resources, also witnessed a 'change'. Swayed by the success of East Asia the primary poverty-fighting method favoured by many policy-makers in Africa was to get farmers off their farms and into modern jobs in factories and urban centers. But that strategy proved to be highly insufficient. Income levels in the countryside badly trailed those in cities while the FAO estimated that the number of poor going hungry in 2009 reached an all time high at more than one billion. In India on the other hand with only 40% of its farmland irrigated, entire economic boom currently underway is held hostage by the unpredictable monsoon. With much of India’s farming areas suffering from drought this year, the government will have a tough time meeting its economic growth targets. In a report Goldman Sachs, predicted that if this year, too receives weak rains it could cause agriculture to contract by 2 % this fiscal year making the government 7%GDP growth target look "a bit rich". Another green revolution is the need of the hour and to make it a reality, the global community still has much backbreaking farm work to do.           

What is the author trying to convey through the phrase making the government 7 % GDP growth target look a bit rich ?

Direction (A - E): In the following passage, there are blanks each of which has been numbered. These numbers correspond to the question numbers. Against each question, five words have been suggested, one of which would fill the blank appropriately.

Mark the suitable word as the answer. Use of plastic has become part of a (A) in which those who consume and litter are not supposed to be responsible for (B) cleaning after themselves or to bother about what will happen to the waste they are producing. The (C) of this kind of lifestyle are reflected in the festering garbage in the over spilling landfill sites, with the height of the Ghazipur landfill in Delhi touching 65 metres. Such (D) dumps are emerging as a serious threat to life with leachates in the mixed and untreated waste contaminating water and the carcinogenic pollution (E) when it is set to fire.

Find out the appropriate word in each case. (C)

A phoneme is a-