Archives: Quizzes & Surveys

ENGLISH SECTION

Directions: In this question, a part of the sentence is made bold. Below are given alternatives to the bold part at (A), (B), (C) and (D) which may improve the sentence.
Choose the correct alternative. In case no replacement is needed, mark (E) as your answer.

(1). BJP is the only political party in the country which has a trained political human resource and this will form the backing bone in the organization’s workforce in the days to come.

(3). Hardly had the thieves seen the polices than they started running towards the black van.

(5). Khurshid said that a heckler’s freedom of speech and expression would have to be consistent for the right to movement and privacy of the recipient.

(6). The police looked for the fraud jeweller all over the country but drew back.

(7). It is difficult to take sides when both the parties present spacious arguments.

(8). One should clear one’s mind instead of beaten one’s brains in trying to solve life’s mysteries during meditation.

(9). Nationalisation of banks in the 1970s was undertaken by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

(10). The assailant made a cleaning breast with his offence and implored the judge for mercy.

Direction: In each of these questions, a sentence with four words printed in bold type is given. These are numbered as A, B, C and D. One of these four words printed in bold may be either wrongly spelled or inappropriate in context of the sentence. Find out the word which is wrongly spelled or inappropriate if any. The number of that word is your answer. If all the words printed in bold are correctly spelled and also appropriate in the context of the sentence, mark (E) “All correct” as your answer.

11. What makes the 2019 election unprecedented is not that inappropriate words were used and misinformation spread, but the fact that India witnesses an increasing tendency to normalise these.

12. On the one hand, inform discussions have become difficult, and on the other, social tensions have risen.

14. Australia, among the world’s largest wheat exporters, has been forced to take recours to bulk imports of the grain, consequent to severe droughts in its eastern states over two years.

15. As with several industrialised democracies, voter disillusionment with the principal parties is yielding a fragmented polity.

16. The greatest achievement of modern medecines has been to save us from premature death and allow us to enjoy the full measure of our years.

17. The panel decided to investigate the fraud charges against the company, which has always been reticent about its internal operations.

18. Educating girls have proven to be one of the world’s best-ever ideas.

19. The researchers had collected all the Ebola data since the start of the epidemic and used it to calculete the expected number of new cases. 

20. Climate change is way too important a global risk to be ignore or denied, and the vast majority of the world knows that.

REASONING SECTION

Directions (1-10): In each of the given questions an inference is given in bold which is then followed by three paragraphs. You have to find the paragraph(s) from where it is inferred. Choose the option with the best possible outcome as your choice.

 1. Jagan Mohan Reddy is showcasing his widened social base with his choice of Ministers

(1) The constitution of Mr. Reddy’s Council of Ministers , include a Dalit woman, as the Home Minister and five Deputy CMs are from the Scheduled Caste (K. Narayana Swamy), Scheduled Tribe (Pamula Pushpa Sreevani), backward caste (Pilli Subhash Chandrabose), Muslim (Amzath Basha) and Kapu (Alla Kali Krishna Srinivas) communities.

(2) While naming five deputy chief ministers, one each from SC, ST, BC, Kapu and Muslim communities, was a surprise, giving home ministry to Mekathoti Sucharitha was another surprise. Jagan’s choice of ministers is being called an excellent example of ‘social engineering’. While choosing Sucharitha gave representation to women and to the SC-s, Jagan also tried to keep the presence of Reddy-s to a minimum. He chose only four Reddy-s in his cabinet.

(3) Several aspirants are lobbying for the cabinet berths through the close confidantes of Jagan. According to party sources, Jagan Mohan Reddy may choose two or three members each from the districts with more number of YSRC MLAs and one member each from the districts with less number of party legislators.

2. India needs to strengthen and implement regulations on antibiotic misuse

(1) “India is in the centre of a perfect storm,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan. Since antibiotics have contributed significantly to a broad rise in life expectancy, and are used for everything from preventing infections during surgeries to protecting cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, the weakening defences will leave a ripple effect on the entire healthcare chain.

(2) In a recent investigation, it was found that the world’s largest veterinary drug-maker, Zoetis, was selling antibiotics as growth promoters to poultry farmers in India, even though it had stopped the practice in the U.S. India is yet to regulate antibiotic-use in poultry, while the U.S. banned the use of antibiotics as growth- promoters in early 2017. As the country takes its time to formulate regulations, the toll from antibiotic-misuse is growing at an alarming rate.

(3) India is one of the largest consumers of antibiotics in the world. And its misuse and overuse is rampant. As a result, ‘super bugs’ that are resistant to all known types of antibiotics are starting to thrive. Infection-causing pathogens have been pinging away at humanity’s defences ever since Penicillin was discovered in 1928.
Prolonged exposure to any drug allows certain strains of bacteria to acquire resistance.

3. The RBI makes a valid case against the proposal for a separate payments regulator

(1) There is definite overlapping between the current regulatory powers of the RBI and the proposed regulations for the payments industry. A unified regulator can thus help in lowering the compliance costs and enabling the seamless implementation of rules unlike the separate ones which is why RBI seems ambivalent about the latter.

(2) The RBI’s demand for the centralisation of regulatory powers also brings with it the need for exercising a greater degree of responsibility. At a time when there are increasing risks to the stability of the domestic financial system, both the government and the RBI must look to work together to tackle these risks.

(3) There is the real risk that a brand new separate payment regulator may be unable to match the expertise of the RBI in carrying out necessary regulatory duties which it performs with ease in case of unified regulators. So it makes better sense to have the RBI take charge of the rapidly growing payments industry which can ill- afford regulatory errors at this point.

4. Strong unified actions are an important protection against child labor.

(1) Following the ratification of the Optional Protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict in 2001, Guinea had taken steps to prohibit the recruitment of persons under the age of 18 and their direct involvement in armed conflict. The provisions of the Children’s Code protected and afforded all possible guarantees to refugee children affected by armed conflict. The provisions of the Optional Protocol had been taken into account both in the Constitution and in the Child Code Act.

(2) Since 2015, Pact and Microsoft have been working together to address the issue through the Children out of Mining pilot project in Katanga. The project uses interventions that are deeply embedded in communities and local institutions to address the economic and social root causes that lead to child labor in mining. In mines where the project has been active, Pact has found a reduction in child labor of between 77 to 97 percent, with variation influenced by seasonal factors and the influx of new conflict- displaced families, among others.

(3) In 2001 factory monitors confirmed illegal union-busting and other violations—including employment of 13-15 year-old children—at a Mexican factory sewing clothing with university logos for Nike and other U.S. companies.
Thousands of American students, workers, and consumers wrote letters to corporate CEOs protesting worker treatment. The international solidarity campaign helped factory workers overcome violence, intimidation, and mass firings when they tried to organize, and after months of struggle, workers won an independent union.

(1) It makes sense for the government to procure directly from farmers at MSP and, instead of hoarding and resorting to open market sales at a later date, introduce it under the subsidized public distribution system. This will not only help farmers growing pulses with better prices, but also improve India’s terrible nutritional indicators—about 38% of our under-five children are stunted.

(2) That rural anger can cause noticeable political damage was proved beyond doubt when the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party performed poorly in rural areas in the Gujarat elections. Ground reports from the current phase of state elections suggest that farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan have set the tone of electoral discourse in these states. Simultaneously, they are also setting the stage for the general elections next year to remind governments that there is a political cost to ignoring rural India.

(3) Indian farmer face a pressing problem that they are often at a loss about what to plant without any useful market intelligence. They take the previous year’s prices for a particular crop as a market signal, not where prices will be when they harvest their crop.

6. ISRO’s recent accomplishments pronounce the autarky of Indian space prowess.

(1) Success upon success has visited ISRO in the past several years. It successfully put into orbit its spacecraft around Mars in its first attempt on September 24, 2014. The spacecraft completed 1,000 earth days in its orbit on June 19, 2017, well beyond its designated mission life of six months. Its mission to the moon, Chandrayaan- 1, was the first to discover the presence of water molecules on the lunar surface soil and rocks. Majority of the mission was financed by Isro’s commercial arm antrix which generates a profit of more than 28 million dollar a year by launching various foreign satellites.

(2) The GSLV Mk III, part of the GSLV launchers, carried India’s heaviest satellite, GSAT-19 weighing 3136 kg for 16.20 minutes, will continue to be an operating launch. This was the first such launch from India. Earlier, India used to ask foreign space organizations to launch heavy satellites/orbiters. With this development, India will now be able to save crores. The GSLV Mk-III will continue to be a launch vehicle in the future.

(3) A key focus area of ISRO is building reusable launch vehicles (RLVs). In fact, the RLV program crossed a milestone on May 23, 2016, with the launch and return of a winged RLV-TD in a scaled configuration that flew at hypersonic speed. On August 28, 2016, ISRO took the next steps towards reducing the cost of access to space when a modified two-stage vehicle developed by the VSSC (Kerala, India) used air- breathing propulsion in its scramjet engine.

7. Most NGOs in India lack leaders to succeed Current Management.

(1) NGOs lack a foundational, leadership development culture and often do not have a shared understanding of what this should look like. Pushed in part by donors to focus almost exclusively on delivering programs, NGOs do not emphasize talent development and often shortchange themselves by under-investing in people.

(2) For the not-for-profit sector to play a far larger role in narrowing the social development deficit in India, prioritizing and investing in developing leaders needs to be a concerted effort from all sector stakeholders—NGO leaders, funders, and intermediaries.

(3) If India’s NGOs are to make real strides toward ambitious goals such as providing equitable healthcare, ensuring high-quality education for children, or providing access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, they will have to confront the unassailable fact that exceptional organizations rely on exceptional leaders—and they need to grow more of them.

9. Strong unified actions are an important protection against child labor.

(1) Following the ratification of the Optional Protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict in 2001, Guinea had taken steps to prohibit the recruitment of persons under the age of 18 and their direct involvement in armed conflict. The provisions of the Children’s Code protected and afforded all possible guarantees to refugee children affected by armed conflict. The provisions of the Optional Protocol had been taken into account both in the Constitution and in the Child Code Act.

(2) Since 2015, Pact and Microsoft have been working together to address the issue through the Children out of Mining pilot project in Katanga. The project uses interventions that are deeply embedded in communities and local institutions to address the economic and social root causes that lead to child labor in mining. In mines where the project has been active, Pact has found a reduction in child labor of between 77 to 97 percent, with variation influenced by seasonal factors and the influx of new conflict- displaced families, among others.

(3) In 2001 factory monitors confirmed illegal union-busting and other violations—including employment of 13-15 year-old children—at a Mexican factory sewing clothing with university logos for Nike and other U.S. companies.
Thousands of American students, workers, and consumers wrote letters to corporate CEOs protesting worker treatment. The international solidarity campaign helped factory workers overcome violence, intimidation, and mass firings when they tried to organize, and after months of struggle, workers won an independent union.

10. Electrification, in contemporary times, is a basic human necessity.

(1) The Saubhagya scheme will help India, the world’s third-largest energy consumer after the US and China, to help meet its global climate change commitments as electricity will substitute kerosene for lighting purposes. Lighting in turn will also help in improving education, health, connectivity with the multiplier effect of increased economic activities and job creation.

(2) After launching the Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana for universalizing electricity access, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is readying a raft of power sector structural reforms including legal provisions to drive electricity demand, promoting retail competition and tariff slab rationalization to drive manufacturing.

(3) Despite the government’s aggressive village electrification programme, the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana launched in July 2015, under which 78% of 18,000 villages have been electrified, it was realised that the problem of electricity ‘access’ wasn’t resolved. A village is declared to be electrified if 10% of the households are given electricity along with public places such as schools, panchayat office, health centers, dispensaries and community centers.

Directions (11-20): In each of the given questions an inference is given in bold which is then followed by three paragraph. You have to find the paragraph(s) from where it is inferred. Choose the option with the best possible outcome as your choice.

11. A Popular Leader

I. Despite allegations of a rigged election in Pakistan in which the army is said to have enabled Mr. Khan’s victory, it is widely recognised that there was a major groundswell of support for him.

II. The interlude between the general elections in Pakistan and India is a period of extreme caution and careful domestic calculations, and hence not conducive for bold foreign policy initiatives, especially on something as fraught as India-Pakistan relations.

III. The fact that his PTI left the rival Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) far behind in terms of seat share, and that the PTI, until recently a provincial party, made stunning inroads in all of Pakistan’s provinces shows that the big story is also the rise of a charismatic Pakistani political leader seen as incorruptible and visionary by young voters.

12. A material basis for unity

I. Mere anti-BJP-ism or anti-Modi-ism is just not good enough either to hold the Opposition together, or to defeat the BJP in 2019. To stand a fighting chance of achieving either, the alliance must address a genuine political need gap, and in the current juncture, the most obvious one is the absence of a platform at the national level for constituencies whose interests cannot be seriously represented by the BJP, given the constraints of the politics it espouses.

II. These constituencies are the social and geographical inverse of the BJP’s core electoral base, which consists of the savarnas (forward castes) and the urban middle and upper classes, primarily from the Hindi-speaking belt.

III. The idea seems to be to hammer away at his failures and hope that anti-incumbency does the rest.

13. The strategy of containment

I. When a constitutional challenge pits individuals against the state, the court’s task is clear: if it finds that there has been a breach by the state, it must strike down the offending law (or rules), and vindicate the rights at issue.

II. When, however, the court is called upon to settle a battle in the culture wars, the task is fraught with greater complexity. This is because these conflicts often represent deep, long-standing and irreconcilable divisions in society, touching issues of personal belief and conviction.

III. Constitutional documents often consciously refrain from directly addressing them: for example, the framers of the Constitution deliberately placed the provision for a uniform civil code in the unenforceable “Directive Principles” chapter, thinking that it was too divisive to be made a fundamental right.

14. Reframing the Right

I. It is not often that nine judges of the Supreme Court assemble and pronounce a unanimous judgment without dissent. The promise of such a holding becomes more critical when it concerns the liberty of individuals and an attempt to correct an imbalance of power which exists against them. This is why the right to privacy judgment was celebrated last year. It signified hope that things could get better, that values of freedom, autonomy and dignity would be realised.

II. It is the report’s approach to rights that is perhaps of most concern for the health of our democracy. Its statement that rights are not “deontological categories” is both unnecessarily complicated in its wording and patently untrue in its content.

III. Our fundamental rights, whether to speech, equality or practice our religion or profession, are all essential facets that make life worth living and are held up by the right to privacy with regard to information about us. In stating that rights are not things which are essential in themselves is an unacceptable position to take under our Constitution.

15. Roots of the Process

I. The recent history of the NRC can be traced to the public interest litigation filed in the Supreme Court by Assam Public Works seeking the removal of “illegal voters” from the electoral rolls of Assam and the preparation of the NRC as required under the Citizenship Act, 1955 and its rules.

II. The NRC was supposed to be prepared as a consequence of the Assam Accord signed between the Union government and the All-Assam Students’ Union to end the agitation against “outsiders”, promising to identify and remove any foreigners from Assam who had entered the State after 1971.

III. Although political leaders and the Supreme Court itself have assured everyone that this is only a draft and everyone will be given an opportunity to prove his or her citizenship in accordance with the law before any “action” is taken, this is unlikely to inspire much confidence given what has transpired thus far.

16. Lost interpretation

I. Widespread condemnation of his refusal to endorse the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies has compelled him to walk back his statements at Helsinki. Yet, critics of the President conveniently forget that it was only 15 years ago that these same intelligence agencies fraudulently claimed that Iraq’s Saddam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction.

II. Of course, whether Mr. Trump should have gone to Helsinki to meet Mr. Putin at all amidst these allegations is another issue. Perhaps the closest parallel was the 1960 Paris summit between the leaders of France, the U.K., the U.S. and the USSR after the U.S. had lied that its spy plane that had been shot down over the USSR had been a weather plane. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s outburst there against U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower led to a collapse of the summit.

III. Two further points are lost in the firestorm of protests over the press conference. First, there is no instance that I can recall when journalists have accused one president – especially a President of a state as large and powerful as Russia of interfering in the elections of another country in a joint press conference between the two Presidents. In joint press conferences, one head of government is not typically called on to label the other head of government a liar. Rather than discussing global issues, ranging from nuclear disarmament to conflicts in Syria and the Ukraine, journalists were focused on a domestic issue in the U.S.

17. The China Question

I. Yet another angle that needs to be factored in while engaging Naya Pakistan is the rising regional influence of China and the further strengthening of China-Pakistan ties.

II. Both the Pakistan army and the political class in Pakistan are upbeat about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and Chinese investments in Pakistan, notwithstanding Mr. Khan’s initial reservations about China.

III. Can this new-found civil-military equation in Pakistan withstand the force of Mr. Khan’s personality traits and Pakistan’s political dynamics in the days ahead?

18. Attitude to Time

I. An Indian Edmund Burke is unthinkable. Beyond its corrosive communalism, the BJP has no idea of the right as a systematic ideology. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s idea of capitalism is adequate.

II. Oddly, for all its fetishisation of 2019, the BJP is one party that has no systemic idea of the future. It might borrow a few glib ideas such as smart cities, yet it has no sense of the future as a set of strategies. The fetishisation of 2019 has to be understood in this context 2019 is its end of history thesis.

III. It has no sense of the future except of the NRI who combines modern consumerism with ancient history. The future is 2019 repeated. The attitude to time is best caught in the complete absence of ecological thinking. It is content with linear time and progress. It dissolves the Planning Commission not because it was a Congress idea but because it was a futurist notion.

19. The Trump Road Map

I. The cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s West Asia policy, as it appears, is Israel’s security, and the containment of Iran is a subplot of this approach. America’s traditional allies, Israel and the Sunni Arab world (read Saudi Arabia), were upset with Mr. Obama’s outreach to Iran.

II. His approach was focussed on restoring some balance in the region, which was shaken up by revolts in the Arab world and civil wars. The Obama administration could persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions in return for the lifting of international sanctions.

III. The 2015 nuclear deal with Iran had at least opened new avenues for both Washington and Tehran to reimagine their relations. Those avenues have been closed, at least for now.

20. Strong Leaders

I. Strong leadership and summit diplomacy do not necessarily translate into appropriate responses. Mr. Trump, hardly constrained by diplomatic etiquette, firmly believes in the aphorism, ‘what starts with him changes the world’. He hardly ever debates the question, ‘what will the world look like after you change it?’

II. Summit styles are personal to each leader. One common feature, however, is that Foreign Office mandarins and ministers in charge of foreign affairs are being pushed into the background. Nuanced negotiating stances are no longer the flavour of diplomatic intercourse.

III. Mr. Putin is less mercurial than Mr. Trump. He is, nevertheless, unflinching in his belief that he has the answers to Russia’s problems, and how to take Russia from the low point of the Yelstin years to future glory. Having established an entente with China, he is now intent on raising Russia’s stakes in Europe by confronting the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and also hopes to establish itself as a key player in Eurasia.

QA SECTION

1. If circumference of the base of a right circular cone is 220 cm and volume of the cone is 15400 cm³, then slant height of the cone is:

2: The difference between the length and breadth of a rectangular field is 27 m. If the cost of fencing the field at the rate of Rs. 2/metre is Rs. 492, then find the ratio of the length to breadth of the field.

3: A cube having each edge equals to 20 cm is cut into several smaller cubes having each edge equals to 4 cm. Find the number of smaller cubes which are the part of the faces of the larger cube but not the part of edges of the larger cube.

4: Each side of square ‘A’ is 6 cm less than that of square ‘B’. The perimeter of a rectangle is 3 times the difference of the perimeters of the two squares. If the length of the rectangle is 20 cm, then find its breadth.

5: Ratio of radius to height of right circular cylinder is 4:9 respectively. Find the area of a rectangle whose breadth is 37.5% more than radius of the cylinder while ratio of length of rectangle to height of cylinder is 3:4 respectively. Given that curved surface area of the cylinder is 3456 cm². (Take π = 3)

6: The diagonal of a square is 24√2 cm. The perimeter of the square is 24 cm less than a rectangle whose length to breadth ratio is 7:5. Find the area of the rectangle.

7: The ratio of length to breadth of a rectangle is 8:5. When the length and breadth of the rectangle is increased by 25% and decreased by 40% respectively, then its perimeter becomes 390 cm. Find the original area of the rectangle.

8: The perimeter of a square is 36 metres more than that of a rectangle. The ratio of the length to breadth of the rectangle is 9:4. If the area of the square is 3721 m², then find the cost of painting one surface of the rectangle at the rate of Rs. 2.5/m².

9: Volume of a cylinder is 4928 m³ while cost of painting its outer surface (except base and top) at a rate of Rs. 8 per m² is Rs. 5632. Find the ratio of radius of base to height of the cylinder.

10: Area of the base of a cone is 616 cm² and curved surface area of a cylinder is 3168 cm². Find the height of the cylinder if radius of base of cylinder is 4 cm more than that of the cone.