Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.
We have witnessed several disasters in recent times, some natural others man made. The frequency of such calamities has injured us and deadened our collective sensitivity, but that does not reduce the enormity of the - personal tragedy of each victim's family and community. The economic loss is only secondary to the human suffering, but is also substantial. The Government whether State or Central has standardised its response. This consists of reacting late, blaming others, visits by VIPs announcing a relief package including compensation for those affected and then forgetting all about it. There seems to be little attempt at drawing lessons from each disaster, storing the knowledge for future use , long term planning for possible pre - emptive action. Prepared ness for disasters thus falls short of what is possible using today ' s technologies.

Floods in many parts of India like the states of Bihar and Assam area yearly phenomenon. Yet the government seems to be caught by surprise year after year. It is obvious that tarpaulins, vaccines, medicines, clothes, satellite phones, large numbers of doctors and paramedical staff etc. will be needed as will boats and buses for evacuation. This is known to all those who have combated emergencies yet the non - availability of these essential services and commodities occurs. Worse the organizational structure and mechanisms for dealing with disasters are lethargic and ill defined. The National Disaster Management Agency, set up a short time ago being a central government agency has limitations relating to infringing the jurisdiction of states. It could have aggregated and disseminated experiences and knowledge, stocked many of the essential items required in an emergency or worked with agencies to ensure sufficient stocks, but hasn’t.

While the reaction to major disasters is dismal, the response to emergencies like accident is equally sad. Victim lie unattended since passersby are wary of getting caught in a labyrinthine of police and legal systems. The resulting delay in treatment con verts injuries into deaths. Of late, unique and free service to provide assistance in emergency cases is operational. Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI) is a professionally managed operation - initiated by the vision and grant from Ramalinga Raju. The service , which is a successful example of public private partnership likely to become operational in a few states in the near future . Given the sad failure of conventional government organisations in handling disaster, it is time we looked at the PPP model as an alternative without the government seeking in any way to abdicate its responsibility. While the state provides the funding, private organizations will provide the drive, professionalism, competent management and output linked efficiency of a good corporate organization. Combining the sensitivity and purpose of an NGO with private entrepreneurial drive to handle disasters together is thus a worthwhile challenge for both corporates and the government .

What does the author consider "a worthwhile challenge for both corporates and the government " ?

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. 

The full form of PDS is 

What, one wonders, is the lowest common denominator of Indian culture today? The attractive Hema Malini ? The songs of Vinidh Barati? The attractive Hema Malini? The sons of Vinidh Barati?
 Or the mouth-watering Masala Dosa? Delectable as these may be, each yield pride of place to that false (?) symbol of a new era-the synthetic fibre. In less than twenty years the nylon sari and the terylene shirt have swept the countryside, penetrated to the farthest corners of the land and persuaded every common man, woman and child that the key to success in the present day world lie in artificial fibers: glass nylon, crepe nylon, tery mixes, polyesters and what have you. More than the bicycles, the wristwatch or the transistor radio, synthetic clothes have come to represent the first step away form the village square. The village lass treasures the flashy nylon sari in her trousseau most delay; the village youth gets a great kick out of his cheap terrycot shirt and trousers, the nearest he can approximate to the expensive synthetic sported by his wealthy citybred contemporaries. And the Neo-rich craze for ‘phoren’ is nowhere more apparent than in the price that people will pay for smuggled, stolen, begged borrowed second hand or thrown away synthetics. Alas, even the uniformity of nylon. 

‘The lowest common denominator’ of the Indian culture today is – 

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language-so the argument runs-must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. 
Now it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits, one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. 

The author believes that -

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. 

Read the following passage carefully and give the answer of following questions.

The problem of water pollution by pesticides can be understood only in context, as part of the whole to which it belongs – the pollution of the total environment of mankind. The pollution entering our waterways comes from many sources, radioactive wastes from reactors, laboratories and hospitals; fallout from nuclear explosions; domestic wastes from cities and towns; chemical wastes from factories. To these is a added a new kid of fallout - the chemical sprays applied to crop lands and gardens, forests and fields. Many of the chemical agents in this alarming melange initiate and augment the harmful effects of radiation, and within the groups of chemicals themselves there are sinister and little - understood interactions, transformations and summations of effect.

Ever since the chemists began to manufacture substances that nature never invented, the problem of water purification have become complex and the danger to users of water has increased. As we have seen, the production of these synthetic chemicals in large volume began in the 1940’s. It has now reached such proportion that an appalling deluge of chemical pollution is daily poured into the nation’s waterways. When inextricably mixed with domestic and other wastes discharged into the same water, these chemicals sometimes defy detection by the methods in ordinary use by purification plants. Most of them are so complex that they cannot be identified. In rivers, a really incredible variety of pollutants combine to produce deposits that sanitary engineers can only despairingly refer to as “gunk”.

The main argument of paragraph 1 is:

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

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