Select the most appropriate word to fill in the blank.
______ the train was late by six hours, it made up three hours before reaching its destination.

Directions: In the passage given below there are blanks, each followed by a word given in the brackets. Every blank has five alternative words given in options. Find the word which best suits the respective blank. If the given word suits the blank, mark 'no correction required' as the answer.

The widespread consternation over the rupee hitting a 27-month low against the dollar is unwarranted, for the Indian currency has been among the better (Q11) [hiking] currencies over the last couple of years. While other (Q12) [trickling] market currencies.  such as the Russian rouble and the Brazilian real are down more than 20 per cent this year, the rupee is lower by just 6 per cent. This follows a strong performance in 2014, when the Indian currency lost just 1.2 per cent against the greenback. It is obvious that the rupee is in a sweet spot (Q13) [peculiar] to its emerging market peers, which have been hit hard by the (Q14) [ascent] in commodity prices. India, on the other hand, has benefited from this fall. The crash in crude prices combined with the checks on gold imports have helped (Q15) [recede] the current account deficit to just 1.27 per cent of GDP. Strong foreign inflows — from both portfolio and direct investments — have pushed India’s forex reserves to $351 billion; we are among the few countries that have (Q16) [considered] to increase forex reserves since the middle of last year. These reserves provide the Indian central bank with (Q17) [ammunition] to protect the rupee from short-term volatility that may arise once the Federal Reserve goes through with its long-anticipated rate hike. Since the Fed has given financial markets sufficient time to (Q18) [discern] the move, a 25 basis points move is not likely to cause too much turbulence. True, some short-term money will flow out of the equity markets; foreign portfolio investors have (Q19) [turned] net sellers since November. But long-term investors are likely to stay put due to the better growth (Q20) [contrariety] of Indian companies. The superior real yield, falling inflation and a stable rupee also make a strong case for staying invested in Indian debt instruments.

Choose the correct answer from the given options to fill the blanks18 which are numbered.

Directions: In the passage given below there are blanks, each followed by a word given in the brackets. Every blank has five alternative words given in options. Find the word which best suits the respective blank. If the given word suits the blank, mark 'no correction required' as the answer.

The widespread consternation over the rupee hitting a 27-month low against the dollar is unwarranted, for the Indian currency has been among the better (Q11) [hiking] currencies over the last couple of years. While other (Q12) [trickling] market currencies.  such as the Russian rouble and the Brazilian real are down more than 20 per cent this year, the rupee is lower by just 6 per cent. This follows a strong performance in 2014, when the Indian currency lost just 1.2 per cent against the greenback. It is obvious that the rupee is in a sweet spot (Q13) [peculiar] to its emerging market peers, which have been hit hard by the (Q14) [ascent] in commodity prices. India, on the other hand, has benefited from this fall. The crash in crude prices combined with the checks on gold imports have helped (Q15) [recede] the current account deficit to just 1.27 per cent of GDP. Strong foreign inflows — from both portfolio and direct investments — have pushed India’s forex reserves to $351 billion; we are among the few countries that have (Q16) [considered] to increase forex reserves since the middle of last year. These reserves provide the Indian central bank with (Q17) [ammunition] to protect the rupee from short-term volatility that may arise once the Federal Reserve goes through with its long-anticipated rate hike. Since the Fed has given financial markets sufficient time to (Q18) [discern] the move, a 25 basis points move is not likely to cause too much turbulence. True, some short-term money will flow out of the equity markets; foreign portfolio investors have (Q19) [turned] net sellers since November. But long-term investors are likely to stay put due to the better growth (Q20) [contrariety] of Indian companies. The superior real yield, falling inflation and a stable rupee also make a strong case for staying invested in Indian debt instruments.

Choose the correct answer from the given options to fill the blanks which are numbered.

Select the most appropriate synonym of the given word.
SANCTION

She invited everyone ______Tom.

In the given question, four words are printed in bold and are numbered A, B, C, and D. Of these, the positions of two of these words may be incorrect and need to be exchanged to make the sentence correct. Find the two words which need to be exchanged. In case the given sentence is correct, your answer is (E), i.e. No improvement.

Union minister M.J. Akbar newspapers (A) to take legal action against several women journalists (B) who had accused (C) him of sexual harassment at two threatened (D) where he had been an editor.

Choose the word which is most nearly the same in meaning as the word given in capital letters:

CONSUMMATION

Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
The problem of water pollution by pesticides can be understood only in context, as part of the world to which it belongs- the pollution of the total environment of making. 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 added a new kind 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 group of chemicals themselves there are sinister and little- understood interactions, transformations, and summations of effect.
Even since the chemists began to manufacture substances that nature never invented, the problems of water purification have become complex and the danger to user of water has increased. As we have seen, the production of these synthetic chemicals in large volume begin 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”.

Water pollution can only be understood