Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words are given in bold to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions.
Recent advances in science and technology have made it possible for geneticists to find out abnormalities in the unborn foetus and take remedial action to rectify some defects which would otherwise prove to be fatal to the child. Though genetic engineering is still at its infancy, scientists can now predict with greater accuracy a genetic disorder. It is not yet an exact science since they are not in a position to predict when exactly a genetic disorder will set in. While they have not yet been able to change the genetic order of the gene in germs, they are optimistic and are holding out that in the near future they might be successful in achieving this feat. They have, however, acquired the ability in manipulating tissue cells. However, genetic misinformation can sometimes be damaging for it may adversely affect people psychologically. Genetic information may lead to a tendency to brand some people as inferiors. Genetic information can therefore be abused and its application in deciding the sex of the foetus and its subsequent abortion is now hotly debated on ethical lines. But on this issue geneticists cannot be squarely blamed though this charge has often been levelled at them. It is mainly a societal problem. At present genetic engineering is a costly process of detecting disorders but scientists hope to reduce the costs when technology becomes more advanced. This is why much progress in this area has been possible in scientifically advanced and rich countries like the USA, UK and Japan. It remains to be seen if in the future this science will lead to the development of a race of supermen or will be able to obliterate disease from this world.

According to the author, the present state of knowledge about heredity has made geneticists.

Comprehension: In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. Coca-Cola is to become the new sponsor of the London Eye after (1) ______ a deal to replace France's EDF Energy. The capital's giant Ferris Wheel has been a (2) ______ tourist attraction since it was introduced in 2000, when it was (3) ______ as the Millennium Wheel. It was previously (4) ______ by British Airways before becoming the EDF Energy London Eye in 2011. Coca-Cola will take over in January after (5) ______ a two-year deal with the wheel's owner, Merlin Entertainments, for an undisclosed sum.

Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank number 3. 

You have eight brief passages with 10 questions following each passage. Read the passages carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives 

Time was when people looked heavenward and prayed, “Ye Gods, give us rain, keep drought away.” Today there are those who pray. “Give us rain, keep El Nino away.” 

El Nino and its atmospheric equivalent, called the Southern Oscillation, are together referred to as ENSO, and are household words today. Meteorologists recognize it as often being responsible for natural disaster worldwide. But this wisdom dawned only after countries suffered, first from the lack of knowledge, and then from the lack of coordination between policy making and the advances in scientific knowledge. 

Put simply, El Nino is a weather event restricted to certain tropical shores, especially the Peruvian coast. The event has diametrically opposite impacts on the land and sea. The Peruvian shore is a desert. But every few years, an unusually warm ocean current - El Nino - warms up the normally cold surface-waters off the Peruvian coast, causing very heavy rains in the early half of the year, 

And then, miraculously, the desert is matted green. Crops like cotton, coconuts and banana grow on the otherwise stubbornly barren land. These are the Peruvians’ anos de abundencia or years of abundance. The current had come to be termed El Nino, or the Christ Child because it usually appears as an enhancement if a mildly warm current that normally occurs here around every Christmas. 

But this boon on land is accompanied by oceanic disasters. Normally, the waters off the South American coast are among the most productive in the world because of a constant upwelling of nutrient rich cold waters from the ocean depths. During an El Nino, however waters are stirred up only from near the surface. The nutrient-crunch pushes down primary production, disrupting the food chain. Many marine species, including anchoveta (anchovies) temporarily disappear. 

This is just one damning effect of El Nino. Over the years its full impact has been studied and what the Peruvians once regarded as manna, is now seen as a major threat. 

How can we say that El Nino proves to be a boon for South American Coast ?  

In the following passage there are blanks each of which has been numbered. These numbers are printed below the passage and against each four words have been suggested, one of which fits the blanks appropriately. Find out the appropriate word in each case.

The empty ‘Chyawanprash’ containers near the makeshift kitchen at the elephant camp say it all – that the elephants have been having a healthy, nutritious diet as (1) by the veterinary doctors.  The camp managers say that the elephants get to have the nutritious (2) twice a day – morning before bath and early evening, walk eight to 1 km on the walking track twice a day and have loads of green fodder. A few of these elephants also undergo special medication, if necessary. ‘Valli’, a female elephant from the Koodal Azhagar Perumal Koil, Madurai, and ‘Vedanayagi’ another female elephant from Bhavani, Erode, are two such elephants. Based on the veterinarians’ prescription, the managers are treating the two for foot rot disease.
 The elephants get to (3) their legs in a decoction of seven chemicals, a traditional formula, to get over the problem. The foot rot sets in when the elephants are obese, or stand on hard surface or bitumen-topped roads for long with very little movement.
 Likewise, two other elephants are also undergoing eye treatment to overcome the ‘watery eye’ problem. This occurs when the elephants’ living (4) is hot. The managers say that the ingredients of the food and the quantity given to the elephants (5) from one to another and are dependent on the age and gender.
 Based on the two, a body-mass-index of sorts is derived and that determines the food and the quantity. Right at the start of the camp, the managers have noted down the weight of each elephant.
 This will be compared to the (6) that they will record when the elephants exit the camp around the second week of January. The managers say that one important factor in the camp is giving green fodder, which the elephants (7) in plenty in the camp. For the weak elephants, the camp managers give twigs of ‘aal’, ‘arasu’ ‘athi’ trees and also ‘koondapanai’. They add that the managers are also (8) the mahouts and those accompanying the elephants on the ways to keep the animal healthy. This is (9) the mahouts are with the elephants 24x7. And also because the animal should continue to live in a (10) environment.

Choose the correct option for (5).

Directions: Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by choosing the correct/most appropriate options.

AU Small Finance Bank Limited is an Indian Small Finance Bank, based in Jaipur, India. It was founded as vehicle finance company AU Financiers (India) Ltd. in 1996 and converted to a small finance bank on April 19, 2017.

AU Small Finance Bank serves low and middle-income individuals and micro and small businesses that have limited or no access to formal banking and finance channels. The Bank offers loans, deposits, and payment products and services. AU Small Finance Bank ranked 355 in the list of Fortune India 500 (2019) companies, with annual revenue of 3410.87 crore (US$427 million) and Total B/S Assets of 31198.68 crore (US$ 3.9 billion).

AU Bank enjoys a long-term credit rating of "AA-/Stable" from CRISIL Ratings, ICRA Ratings, India Ratings and CARE Ratings.

The company was founded by Sanjay Agarwal (Managing Director and CEO of AU Small Finance Bank) as a private limited company, and publicly listed in an IPO on June 29, 2017. A merit holder Chartered Accountant and a first-generation entrepreneur, he holds ~ 28.5% stake in the bank. He is supported by a team of 23486 employees.

AU Small Finance Bank is listed on NSE and BSE with a market capitalisation of ~ 37942 crore. On its first day of trading, the stock rose 51% to be the most expensive bank in India based on price-to-book. In November 2017, the Reserve Bank of India added the bank to its schedule of commercial banks, further improving the bank's growth prospects by reducing the cost of short-term funds and improving the bank's ability to provide services.

Over the years, the Bank has attracted marquee investors like IFC, Warburg Pincus, Temasek Holdings, Nomura, Kotak Mahindra MF, etc. Private equity companies that provided venture capital, including Warburg Pincus and International Finance Corporation, made partial exits for as much as nine times their original investment.

Due to its history as a vehicle finance company, as of March 2018 almost all the loans made by AU Small Finance Bank were secured, unlike most small finance banks that have unsecured loans due to their background in microfinance. This provides lower yields (lower interest rates) than unsecured loans, so the bank has been particularly active in growing its deposits, as bank deposits have a lower cost than other sources of funds. It has also sought to diversify into savings products like deposits, payment/transaction banking, distribution of third-party products, and additional loan products thereby positioning itself as a holistic financial products and services provider.

As on June 30, 2021, AU Small Finance Bank's distribution network............... 758 Banking Touchpoints and 23486 employees spread contiguously across 15 states and two Union Territories with over 2 million customers.

The bank has operations in 15 States and two Union Territories, with Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh being key states. It is one of the largest banks by a number of locations in its home state of Rajasthan.

Who is the founder of AU Small Finance Bank?

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 true regarding waste recycling in the developing countries?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions as directed.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days. A recent article noted that ‘robots’ — shorthand for AI in the tabloids — will be able to write a fiction bestseller within 50 years. I suppose that would be shocking to me as a novelist if most fiction bestsellers were not already being written by ‘robots’. Or so one feels, keeping publishing and other vogues in mind: a bit of this, a bit of that, a dash of something else, and voila you have a bestseller! In that sense, perhaps the rise of AI will make us reconsider what we mean by human intelligence. This discussion has been neglected for far too long. Take my field: literature. The Chinese company, Cheers Publishing, lately offered a collection of poems written by a computer program. So, are poets, generally considered to be suicidal in any case, jumping off the cliffs in droves as a consequence?
 Well, this is a selection from one of the AI poems I found online: “The rain is blowing through the sea / A

bird in the sky / A night of light and calm / Sunlight / Now in the sky / Cool heart / The savage north wind

/ When I found a new world.”
 Yes, there are aspiring poets — and sometimes established ones — who write like this, connecting words centripetally or centrifugally to create an effect. I think they should have been pushed off literary cliffs a long time ago. Because this is not poetry; this is just the technique of assembling words like poetry. There is a difference between the intelligence required to write poetry and the skills required to write it. That poetic intelligence is lost without the required poetic skills, but the skills on their own do not (A)suffice either. The fact that lines like this, written by AI, can be considered poetry does not reflect on the intelligence of AI. It reflects on the intelligence of those readers, writers, critics, editors, publishers and academics who have not yet distinguished between gimmickry and mimicry on the one side and the actual freshness of a chiselled line on the other. But this is a small example. Surely, AI might also make (B)_____________, including that of considering something like IQ to be a sufficient index of human mental capacity! Because if we think that AI can replace human intelligence, then we are simply not thinking hard enough. (C) One of the major (1) activity here is that of considering (2) intelligence to be something (3) different from and raised above the (4) failures of living. This leads to the misconception that intelligence can be (D)___ to something else — say, a robot — without becoming something else. Human intelligence cannot be passed on to something else: What is “passed on” is always a different kind of ‘intelligence’. Even the arguments that AI — or, as in the past, robots — can enable human beings to lead a gloriously workless existence is based on a similar misconception. Because human intelligence is embedded in human existence, ‘work’ as human activity in the world is not something human beings can do without.

The sentence given in (C) has four words given in bold. Amongst given bolded words, which of the followings must replace each other to make the sentence contextually correct and meaningful.

In the following passage there are blanks each of which has been numbered. These numbers are printed below the passage and against each four words have been suggested, one of which fits the blanks appropriately. Find out the appropriate word in each case.

The empty ‘Chyawanprash’ containers near the makeshift kitchen at the elephant camp say it all – that the elephants have been having a healthy, nutritious diet as (1) by the veterinary doctors.  The camp managers say that the elephants get to have the nutritious (2) twice a day – morning before bath and early evening, walk eight to 1 km on the walking track twice a day and have loads of green fodder. A few of these elephants also undergo special medication, if necessary. ‘Valli’, a female elephant from the Koodal Azhagar Perumal Koil, Madurai, and ‘Vedanayagi’ another female elephant from Bhavani, Erode, are two such elephants. Based on the veterinarians’ prescription, the managers are treating the two for foot rot disease.
 The elephants get to (3) their legs in a decoction of seven chemicals, a traditional formula, to get over the problem. The foot rot sets in when the elephants are obese, or stand on hard surface or bitumen-topped roads for long with very little movement.
 Likewise, two other elephants are also undergoing eye treatment to overcome the ‘watery eye’ problem. This occurs when the elephants’ living (4) is hot. The managers say that the ingredients of the food and the quantity given to the elephants (5) from one to another and are dependent on the age and gender.
 Based on the two, a body-mass-index of sorts is derived and that determines the food and the quantity. Right at the start of the camp, the managers have noted down the weight of each elephant.
 This will be compared to the (6) that they will record when the elephants exit the camp around the second week of January. The managers say that one important factor in the camp is giving green fodder, which the elephants (7) in plenty in the camp. For the weak elephants, the camp managers give twigs of ‘aal’, ‘arasu’ ‘athi’ trees and also ‘koondapanai’. They add that the managers are also (8) the mahouts and those accompanying the elephants on the ways to keep the animal healthy. This is (9) the mahouts are with the elephants 24x7. And also because the animal should continue to live in a (10) environment.

Choose the correct option for (1).