Instructions Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given it. Certain word/phrases have been printed in ‘’bold’’ to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions.

India is rushing headlong towards economic success and modernisation, counting on high-tech industries such as information technology and biotechnology to propel the nation to prosperity. India’s recent announcement that it would no longer produce unlicensed inexpensive generic pharmaceuticals bowed to the realities of the World Trade Organisation while at the same time challenging the domestic drug industry to compete with the multinational firms. Unfortunately, its weak higher education sector constitutes the Achilles’ heel.

of this strategy. Its systematic disinvestment in higher education in recent years has yield neither world-class research nor very many highly trained scholars, scientists or managers to sustain high-tech development. India’s main competitor especially China buts also Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea are investing in large and ‘’differentiated’’ higher education systems. They are providing access to large number of students at the bottom of the academic system while at the same time building some research-based universities that are able to compete with the world’s best institutions. The recent London Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of the world’s top 200 universities included three in China, three in Hong Kong three in South Korea. one in Taiwan, and one in India. These countries are positioning themselves for leadership in the knowledge based economies for coming era. There was a time when countries could achieve economic success with cheap labour and low-tech manufacturing. Low wages still help, but contemporary large-scale development requires a sophisticated and at least partly knowledge based economy. India has chosen that path, but will find a major stumbling block in its universities system. India has significant advantages in the 21st century knowledge race. It has a large higher education sector --- the third largest in the world in student numbers, after China and the United States. It uses English as a primary language of higher education and research. It has a long academic tradition. Academic freedom is respected. There are a small number of highly quality institutions, departments, and centres that can form the basis of quality sector in higher education. The fact that the States, rather than the Central Government, exercise major responsibility for higher education creates a rather cumbersome structure, but the system allows for a variety of policies and approaches. Yet the weakness far outweigh the strengths. India educates approximately 10 per cent of its young people in higher education compared with more than half in the major industrialised countries and 15 per cent in China. Almost all of the world’s academic systems resemble a pyramid, with a small high quality tier at the top and a massive sector at the bottom. India has a tiny top tier. None of its universities occupies a solid position at the top. A few of the best universities have some excellent departments and centres and there are a small number of outstanding undergraduate colleges. The university Grants Commission’s recent major support of five universities to build on their recognised strength is a step toward recognising a differentiated academic system and fostering excellence. These universities, combined, enroll well under 1 percent of the student population. 

Which of the following are Asian countries other than India, doing to head towards a knowledge based economy?
A. Building competitive research based universities
B. Investing in diverse higher education systems
C. Providing access to higher education to a select few students.

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.

Choose the word/group of words which is most similar in meaning to the word printed in bold as used in the passage.

Shuttered

Read the Following Passage carefully and give the answer.

 To write well you have to be able to write clearly and logically, and you cannot do this unless you can think clearly and logically. If you cannot do this, yet you should train yourself to do it by taking particular problem and following them thought, point by point to a solution, without leaving anything out and without avoiding and difficulties that you meet.

At first you may find clear, step-by-step through very difficult. You may find that your mind is not able to concentrate. Several unconnected ideas may occur together. But Practice will improve your ability to concentrate on a single idea and think about it clearly and logically. In order to increase your vocabulary and to improve your style, you should read widely. Use a good dictionary to help you find the exact meaning and correct usage of words.

Always remember that regular and frequent practice is necessary if you want to learn to write well. It is no good waiting until you have an inspiration before you write. Even with the most famous writers, inspiration is rare. Some one said that writing is ninety-nine percent hard work and one percent inspiration, so the sooner you get into the habit of disciplining your self to write, the better.

All the following words mean ‘exact’ except

Read the passage carefully and give answer the following question.

We should preserve Nature to preserve life and beauty. A beautiful landscape, full of green vegetation, will not just attract our attention but will fill us with infinite satisfaction. Unfortunately, because of modernization, much of nature is now yielding to towns, roads and industrial areas. In a few places some natural reserves are now being carved out to avert the danger of destroying nature completely. Man will perish without nature, so modern man should continue this struggle to save plants, which give us oxygen. Moreover, Nature is essential to man’s health.

What does ‘Nature’ in the passage mean?

Directions:- Read the following passage and answer the following questions based on the given passage. Some of the words are highlighted which would help you to answer some of the questions given.
For years, world-wide organisations have become increasingly excited about the prospect of a cloud-based future. As the dream becomes an ever closer reality for many kinds of business and, Forrester predicted that enterprise spending on cloud services is set to surge. IDC also predicted that global spending on public cloud services and infrastructure would reach $210bn in 2019, an increase of 24% from 2018. But one obstacle stands create friction and introduce risk: the process of migration.
 As all indications point to a massive shift in data deployments to the cloud, it is more important than ever that the transition from on-premises to Cloud is as risk free as possible. In today's climate any loss or disruption to data can have a huge business impact. It’s a complex process, is frequently underestimated and many organisations have found there’s lots that can go wrong that can impact the business. Organisations across the globe have found the cloud to be an ideal place to run modern data applications due to big data’s elastic resource requirements. Furthermore, with the lack of data talent an ever-looming issue for most companies today they have been determined to adopt a cloud-first strategy to ensure business operations are accessible for a range of employees.
 The cloud offers great promise for developers especially, as it can increase the speed at which they develop software features and increase the resilience of applications once they are deployed - along with enhanced security through the use of multiple server locations. With all this considered, it is no surprise that 42% of UK businesses leverage some kind of cloud service, according to Eurostat.
 However, all the perceived benefits of leveraging the cloud are redundant if organisations come up against barriers to accessing cloud services. Cloud-based data pipelines still suffer from complexity challenges at the moment, along with the lack of visibility into cost and resource usage at the application and user level. The answer to this is automation fueled by robust Machine learning training models and artificial intelligence. These concepts and the tools that enable them can determine the prerequisites of cloud infrastructure, application dependencies,the appropriate target cloud instance profiles, and provide troubleshooting in real-time
 To summarise, the promise of the cloud has created a sense of excitement amongst enterprises, however, they have proceeded to go full steam ahead into adopting a cloud service, without sufficient data to ensure performance service level agreements (SLAs).

Which of the following words is most OPPOSITE to the word “MASSIVE” as given in the passage?

Choose the correct answer from the passage:
Most children start watching television long before they enter school. Many doctors have come to the conclusion that children up to the age of two years should not watch TV. The doctors are of the view that the first two years of life are very important for the development of a child’s brain. Spending time with parent and others encourages learning and healthy physical and social development. As children get older, TV can be watched toa limited extent. Children preparing to enter school can learn the alphabets and numbers from educational programme. They can also learn about wildlife on nature shows. Television can be excellent educator as well as entertainer for children.

The verb in the clause ‘they enter school ‘ is in

Direction :  passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words/phrases are given in bold in the passage to help you locale them while answering some of the questions. 

Governments have traditionally equated economic progress with steel mills and cement factories. While urban centres thrive and city dwellers get rich, hundreds of millions of famers remain mired in poverty. However fears of food shortages, a rethinking of anti-poverty priorities and crushing recession in 2008 are causing a dramatic shift in world economic policy in favour of greater support for agriculture.  last time when the world's farmers felt such love was in the 1970's. 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. Governments across the developing world and international aid organisations plowed investment agriculture in technological breakthroughs, like high-yield strains of important food crops, boosted production. The result was the Green Revolution and food production exploded. into the early 1970s, while But the Green Revolution became a victim of its own success. Food prices plunged by some 60% by the late 1980's from their peak in the mid- 1970's. 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's aid directed at agriculture sank to 3.5% and "agriculture lost its glitter", “Also, as consumers 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 up to heights not seen for three decades. Making matters worse, land and resources got reallocated to product cash crop such as bio fuels and the result was that voluminous reserves of grain evaporated. Protests broke out across the emerging world and fierce food riots toppled governments.

Which of the following factors was/were responsible for neglect of the farming sector after the Green Revolution?
(i) Steel and cement sectors generated more revenue the government as com- pared to agriculture.
(ii) Large scale protests against favouring agriculture the cost of other important sectors such as education and health care.
(iii)Attention of policy-makers and aid organisations was diverted from agriculture to other sectors. 

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.           

Which of the following factors was/were responsible for the neglect of the farming sector after the Green Revolution?
 
 A. Steel and cement sectors generated more revenue for the government as compared to agriculture
 
 B. Large-scale protests against favouring agriculture at the cost of other important sectors such as education and health care
 
 C. Attention of policy makers and aid organisations was diverted from agriculture to other sectors