General English Practice Question and Answer

Q:

A vexed problem facing us is the clamour to open more colleges and to reserve more seats for backward classes. But it will be a sheer folly to expand such facilities recklessly without giving any thought to the quality of education imparted. If admissions are made far more selective, it will automatically reduced the number of entrants. This should apply particularly colleges, many of which are little more than degree factories. Only then can the authorities hope to bring down the teacher-student ratio to manageable proportion. What is more, teachers should be given refresher courses, every summer to brush up their knowledge. Besides, if college managements increase their library budget it will help both the staff and the to new students a great deal. 
At the same time, however, it will be unfair to deny college education to thousands of young men and women, unless employers stop insisting on degrees even for clerical jobs. For a start, why can't the Government disqualify graduates from securing certain jobs, say class III and IV posts? Once the link between degrees and jobs is severed at least in some important departments, in will make young people think twice before joining college. 

Many of the new college are – 

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    Centres of advanced learning
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    Research institutions
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    Factories producing degree holders
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    Knowns for their academic excellence
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Answer : 3. "Factories producing degree holders "

Q:

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.

OFFEND

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    assist
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    assuage
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    Wrong
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    aid
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    Wrong
  • 4
    annoy
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    Wrong
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Answer : 4. "annoy"

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Answer : 2. "had"

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Answer : 4. "4"

Q:

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words/phrases are printed in bold to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions.

In the second week of August 1998, just a few days after the incidents of bombing the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, a high-powered, brain-storming session was held near Washington D.C., to discuss various aspects of terrorism. The meeting was attended by ten of America’s leading experts in various fields such as germ and chemical warfare, public health, disease control and also by the doctors and the law-enforcing officers. Being asked to describe the horror of possible bio-attack, one of the experts narrated the following gloomy scenario. A culprit in a crowded business centre or in a busy shopping mall of a town empties a test tube containing some fluid, which in turn creates an unseen cloud of germ of a dreaded disease like anthrax capable of inflicting a horrible death within 5 days on any one who inhales it. At first 500, or so victims feel that they have mild influenza which may recede after a day or two. Then the symptoms return again and their lungs start filling with fluid. They rush to local hospitals for treatment, but the panic-stricken people may find that the Medicare services run quickly out of drugs due to excessive demand. But no one would be able to realise that a terrorist attack has occurred. One cannot deny the possibility that the germ involved would be of contagious variety capable of causing an epidemic. The meeting concluded that such attacks, apart from causing immediate human tragedy,  would have dire long-term effects on the political and social fabric of a country by way of ending people’s trust on the competence of the government. The experts also said that the bombs used in Kenya and Tanzania were of the old-fashion variety and involved quantities of high explosives, but new terrorism will prove to be more deadly and probably more elusive than hijacking an aeroplane or a gelignite of previous decades.
According to Bruce Hoffman, an American specialist on political violence, old terrorism generally had a specific manifesto - to overthrow a colonial power or the capitalist system and so on. These terrorists were not shy about planting a bomb or hijacking an aircraft and they set some limit to their brutality. Killing so many innocent people might turn their natural supporters off. Political terrorists want a lot of people watching but not a lot of people dead. “Old terrorism sought to change the world while the new sort is often practised by those who believe that the world has gone beyond redemption”, he added. Hoffman says, “New terrorism has no long-term agenda but is ruthless in its short-term intentions. It is often just a cacophonous cry of protest or an outburst of religious intolerance or a protest against the West in general and the US in particular. Its perpetrators may be religious fanatics or diehard opponent of a government and see no reason to show restraint. They are simply intent on inflicting the maximum amount of pain on the victim.”

In what way would the new terrorism be different from that of the earlier years ?
A. More dangerous and less baffling
B. More hazardous for victims
C. Less complicated for terrorists

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    A and C only
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    B and C only
    Correct
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    A and B only
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    All the three
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Answer : 2. "B and C only"

Q:

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

In February 2010 the Medical Council of India announced a major change in the regulation governing the establishment of medical colleges. With this change, corporate entities were permitted to open medical colleges. The new regulation also carried the following warning: "permission shall be withdrawn if the colleges resort to commercialization". Since the regulation does not elaborate on what constitutes "resorting to commercialisation", this will presumably be a matter left to the discretion of the Government. 

A basic requirement for a new medical college is a preexisting hospital that will serve as a teaching hospital. Corporate entities have hospitals in the major metros and that is where they will have to locate medical colleges.The earlier mandated land requirement for a medical college campus, minimum of 25 acres of contiguous land, cannot be fulfilled in the metros. Not surprisingly, yet another tweak has been made in the regulation, prescribing 10 acres as the new minimum campus size for 9 cities including the main metros. With this, the stage is set for corporate entities to enter the medical education market. 

Until now, medical education in India has been projected as a not-for- profit activity to be organised for the public good. While private bodies can run medical colleges, these can only be societies or trusts, legally non-profit organizations. In opening the door to corporate colleges, thus, a major policy change has been effected without changing the law or even a discussion in Parliament, but by simply getting a compliant MCI to change the regulation on establishment of medical colleges. This and other changes have been justified in the name of addressing the shortage of doctors. At the same time, over 50, existing medical colleges, including 15 run by the government, have been prohibited from ad- mitting students in 2010 for having failed to meet the basic standards prescribed. Ninety per cent of these colleges have come up in the last 5 years. Particularly shocking is the phenomenon of government colleges falling short of standards approved by the Government. Why are state government institutions not able to meet the requirements that have been approved by the central government? A severe problem faced by government-run in- situations is attracting and retaining teaching faculty, and this is likely to be among the major reasons for these colleges failing to satisfy the MCI norms. The crisis building up on the faculty front has been flagged by various commissions looking into problems of medical education over the years.

An indicator of the crisis is the attempt to conjure up faculty when MCI carries out inspections of new colleges, one of its regulatory functions. Judging by news reports, the practice of presenting fake faculty-students or private medical practitioners hired for the day -during MCI inspections in private colleges is common. What is interesting is that even government colleges are adopting unscrupulous methods. Another indicator is the extraordinary scheme, verging on the ridiculous that is being put in place by the MCI to make inspections 'foolproof. Faculty in all medical colleges are to be issued an RFID based smart card by the MCI with a unique Faculty Number. The Card, it is argued, will eliminate the possibility of a teacher being shown on the faculty of more than one college and establish if the qualifications of a teacher are genuine. In the future it is projected that biometric RFID readers will be installed in the colleges that will enable a Faculty from within the college and even remotely from MCI headquarters.

The picture above does not even start to reveal the true and pathetic situation of medical care especially in rural India. Only a fraction of the doctors and nursing professionals serve rural areas where 70 per cent of our population lives. The Health Ministry, with the help of the MCI, has been active in proposing yet another 'innovative' solution to the problem of lack of doctors in the rural areas. The proposal is for a three-and-a-half year course to obtain the degree of Bachelor of Rural Medicine and Surgery (BRMS). Only rural candidates would be able to join this course. The study and training would happen at two different levels -Community Health Centers for 18 months, and sub-divisional hospitals for a further period of 2 years and be conducted by retired professors. After completion of training, they would only be able to serve in their own state in district hospitals, community health centers, and primary health centers.

The BRMS proposal has invited sharp criticism from some doctors' organisations on the grounds that it is discriminatory to have two different standards of health care -one for urban and the other for rural areas, and that the health care provided by such graduates will be compromised. At the other end is the opinion expressed by some that "something is better than nothing", that since doctors do not want to serve in rural areas, the government may as well create a new cadre of medics who will be obliged to serve there. The debate will surely pick up after the government formally lays out its plans. What is apparent is that neither this proposal nor the various stopgap measures adopted so far address the root of the problem of health care. The far larger issue is government policy, the low priority attached by the government to the social sector in particular, evidenced in the paltry allocations for maintaining and upgrading medical infrastructure and medical education and for looking after precious human resoureces. 

Choose the word opposite in meaning in the given passage bold in passage.

COMPLIANT



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    fixed
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    unyielding
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    stagnant
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    obedient
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    negative
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Answer : 2. "unyielding"

Q:

In the question a sentence has been given in Direct/Indirect. Out of the four alternatives suggested, select the one which best expresses the same sentence in Indirect/Direct and mark your answer in the Answer Sheet.

He told me that I was very happy.

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    He said to me, "How happy you are !"
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    He said to me, "How you are happy !"
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    He said to me, "I am very happy !"
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    He said to me, "How I am happy !"
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Answer : 1. "He said to me, "How happy you are !""

Q:

In the following question, out of the given four alternatives, select the one which best expresses the meaning of the given word.

Hybrid

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    Homogeneous
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    Composite
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    Pure
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    Love
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Answer : 2. "Composite"

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