Comprehension Test Questions and Answers Practice Question and Answer

Q:

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”.

The word ‘gunk’ in the last line refers:

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    to the waste products deposited by sanitary engineers
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    to the debris found in rivers
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    to unidentifiable chemicals found in water
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    to the domestic water supplies
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Answer : 2. "to the debris found in rivers"

Q:

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.

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 productivity. This move helped countries become more 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 centres. But that started 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 2000 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 haw a tough time meeting its economic growth targets. In report, Goldman Sachs predicted that if this year too receives weak rains. It could cause agriculture to contract by 2% this Fiscal years, making the government's 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. 

Choose the words/ group of the words which is MOST SIMILAR in meaning to the word printed in bold as used in the passage. 
PLOWED 

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    cultivation
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    bulldozed
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    recovered
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    instilled
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    withdrew
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Answer : 4. "instilled "

Q:

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

Core competencies and focus are now the mantras of corporate strategists in Western economies. But while managers in the West have dismantled many conglomerates assembled in the 1960s and 1970s, the large, diversified business group remains the dominant form of enterprise throughout most emerging markets. Some groups operate as holding companies with full ownership in many enterprises, others are collections of publicly traded companies, but all have some degree of central control.

As emerging markets open up to global competition, consultants and foreign investors are increasingly pressuring these groups to conform to Western practice by scaling back the scope of their business activities. The conglomerate is the dinosaur of organizational design, they argue, too unwieldy and slow to compete in today's fast-paced markets. Already a number of executives have decided to break up their groups in order to show that they are focusing on only a few core businesses. 

There are reasons to worry about this trend. Focus is good advice in New York or London, but something important gets lost in translation when that advice is given to groups in emerging markets. Western companies take for granted a range of institutions that support their business activities, but many of these institutions are absent in other regions of the world. Without effective securities regulation and venture capital firms, for example, focused companies may be unable to raise adequate financing; and without strong educational institutions, they will struggle to hire skilled employees.

Communicating with customers is difficult when the local infrastructure is poor, and unpredictable government behavior can stymie any operation, although a focused strategy may enable a company to perform a few activities well, companies in emerging markets must take responsibility for a wide range of functions in order to do business effectively. 

In the case of product markets, buyers and sellers usually suffer from a severe dearth of information for three reasons. First, the communications infrastructure in emerging markets is often under-developed. Even as wireless communication spreads throughout the West, vast stretches in countries such as China and India remain without telephones. Power shortages often render the modes of communication that do exist ineffective. The postal service is typically inefficient, slow, or unreliable; and the private sector rarely provides efficient courier services. High rates of illiteracy make it difficult for marketers to communicate effectively with customers. 

Second, even when information about products does get around, there are no mechanisms to corroborate the claims made by sellers. Independent consumer - information organizations are rare, and government watchdog agencies are of little use. The few analysts who rate products are generally less sophisticated than their counterparts in advanced economies. 

Third, consumers have no redress mechanisms if a product does not deliver on its promise. Law enforcement is often capricious and so slow that few who assign any value to time would resort to it. Unlike in advanced markets, there are few extrajudicial arbitration mechanisms to which one can appeal. 

As a result of this lack of information, companies in emerging markets face much higher costs in building credible brands than their counterparts in advanced economies. In turn, established brands wield tremendous power. A conglomerate with a reputation for quality products and services can use its group name to enter new businesses, even if those businesses are completely unrelated to its current lines. Groups also have an advantage when they do try to build up a brand because they can spread the cost of maintaining it across multiple lines of business. Such groups then have a greater incentive not to damage brand quality in anyone business because they will pay the price in their other businesses as well.

What suggestions have been cited by the writer in regard to raising adequate financing and hiring skilled employees ?

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    Effective securities regulation
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    Effective securities regulation and venture capital firms
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    Effective securities regulation and venture capital firms and strong educational institutions
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    Both ( 1 ) and ( 3 )
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    None of these
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Answer : 3. "Effective securities regulation and venture capital firms and strong educational institutions "

Q:

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words/phrases are printed in bold to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions.

In the second week of August 1998, just a few days after the incidents of bombing the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, a high-powered, brain-storming session was held near Washington D.C., to discuss various aspects of terrorism. The meeting was attended by ten of America’s leading experts in various fields such as germ and chemical warfare, public health, disease control and also by the doctors and the law-enforcing officers. Being asked to describe the horror of possible bio-attack, one of the experts narrated the following gloomy scenario. A culprit in a crowded business centre or in a busy shopping mall of a town empties a test tube containing some fluid, which in turn creates an unseen cloud of germ of a dreaded disease like anthrax capable of inflicting a horrible death within 5 days on any one who inhales it. At first 500, or so victims feel that they have mild influenza which may recede after a day or two. Then the symptoms return again and their lungs start filling with fluid. They rush to local hospitals for treatment, but the panic-stricken people may find that the Medicare services run quickly out of drugs due to excessive demand. But no one would be able to realise that a terrorist attack has occurred. One cannot deny the possibility that the germ involved would be of contagious variety capable of causing an epidemic. The meeting concluded that such attacks, apart from causing immediate human tragedy, would have dire long-term effects on the political and social fabric of a country by way of ending people’s trust on the competence of the government. The experts also said that the bombs used in Kenya and Tanzania were of the old-fashion variety and involved quantities of high explosives, but new terrorism will prove to be more deadly and probably more elusive than hijacking an aeroplane or a gelignite of previous decades.
According to Bruce Hoffman, an American specialist on political violence, old terrorism generally had a specific manifesto - to overthrow a colonial power or the capitalist system and so on. These terrorists were not shy about planting a bomb or hijacking an aircraft and they set some limit to their brutality. Killing so many innocent people might turn their natural supporters off. Political terrorists want a lot of people watching but not a lot of people dead. “Old terrorism sought to change the world while the new sort is often practised by those who believe that the world has gone beyond redemption”, he added. Hoffman says, “New terrorism has no long-term agenda but is ruthless in its short-term intentions. It is often just a cacophonous cry of protest or an outburst of religious intolerance or a protest against the West in general and the US in particular. Its perpetrators may be religious fanatics or diehard opponent of a government and see no reason to show restraint. They are simply intent on inflicting the maximum amount of pain on the victim.”

Choose the word which is most nearly the SAME in meaning of the word printed in bold as used in the passage.
elusive

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    harmful
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    fatal
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    destructive
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    baffling
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    obstructing
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Answer : 4. "baffling"

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Answer : 4. "to have a direct conversation with the interviewees."

Q:

Directions: Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow based on the information given in the passage.

IN GORILLA society, power belongs to silverback males. These splendid creatures have numerous status markers besides their back hair: they are bigger than the rest of their band, strike space-filling postures, produce deeper sounds, thump their chests lustily and, in general, exude an air of physical fitness. Things are not that different in the corporate world. The typical chief executive is more than six feet tall, has a deep voice, a good posture, a touch of grey in his thick, lustrous hair and, for his age, a fit body. Bosses spread themselves out behind their large desks. They stand tall when talking to subordinates. Their conversation is laden with prestige pauses and declarative statements. The big difference between gorillas and humans is, of course, that human society changes rapidly. The past few decades have seen a striking change in the distribution of power—between men and women, the West and the emerging world and geeks and non-geeks.

Women run some of America’s largest firms, such as General Motors (Mary Barra) and IBM (Virginia Rometty). More than half of the world’s biggest 2,500 public companies have their headquarters outside the West. Geeks barely out of short trousers run some of the world’s most dynamic businesses. Peter The, one of Silicon Valley’s leading investors, has introduced a blanket rule: never invest in a CEO who wears a suit. Yet it is remarkable, in this supposed age of diversity, how many bosses still conform to the stereotype. First, they are tall: in research for his 2005 book, “Blink”, Malcolm Gladwell found that 30% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are 6 feet 2 inches or taller, compared with 3.9% of the American population. People who “sound right” also have a marked advantage in the race for the top. Quantified Communications, a Texas-based company, asked people to evaluate speeches delivered by 120 executives. They found that voice quality accounted for 23% of listeners’ evaluations and the content of the speech only accounted for 11%.
 Academics from the business schools of the University of California, San Diego and Duke University listened to 792 male CEOs giving presentations to investors and found that those with the deepest voices earned $187,000 a year more than the average.
 Physical fitness seems to matter too: a study published this month, by Peter Limbach of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Florian Sonnenburg of the University of Cologne, found that companies in America’s S&P 1500 index whose CEOs had finished a marathon were worth 5% more on average than those whose bosses had not.

Good posture makes people act like leaders as well as look like them: Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School notes that the very act of standing tall, with your feet planted solidly and somewhat apart, your chest out and your shoulders back, boosts the supply of testosterone to the blood and lowers the supply of cortisol, a steroid associated with stress. (Unfortunately, this also increases the chance that you will make a risky bet.) Besides relying on all these supposedly positive indicators of fitness to lead, those who choose bosses also rely on some negative stereotypes. Overweight people—women especially—are judged incapable of controlling themselves, let alone others. Those who “uptalk”—habitually ending their statements on a high note as if asking a question—rule themselves out on the grounds that they sound tentative and juvenile.

What can be the suitable title of the passage?

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    The look of a leader
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    Age of diversity
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    Gorilla and humans
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    Physical fitness matters
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    CEOs Vs Gorilla
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Answer : 1. "The look of a leader"

Q:

Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain parts are given in bold to answer some of the questions based on the passage.
 Sometimes to upend entrenched power structures, a revolution is required. Naming and shaming powerful men in the #Metoo campaign is in many ways a revolutionary act. The truth about most was known, spoken in whispers, but not to their face. But now that omerta has been broken by some intrepid women , there’s a palpable sense of power and possibility. 

Revolutions are by definition anarchic, as they are aimed against those who make and enforce the rules. So it has been with #MeToo. Men are named, sometimes anonymously, and the naming itself requires punitive action to be taken against them. There isn’t really any room for discussion on context or degree of culpability. Some have raised questions about due process, and the response has been, somewhat reasonably, that due process has failed. And it is true, arguing for due process when due process has failed feels a bit like batting for status quo. So let it be said, #MeToo despite its limitations is unreservedly a good development. However, the question is, what next? The #MeToo movement is more than just outing powerful men, it is about shifting the balance of power between men and women, transferring the punitive aspects — shame, denial of work opportunities — from the victim to the perpetrator. It is about ending impunity embedded in our social construct by shaping new social mores. This is and has to be a collective effort, and it is important for the #MeToo movement to have these discussions.

Let the burden of shame now be shifted to where it is supposed to- the perpetrators and not the women; the victims. It’s the woman who has to hide from the world. And by and large, due to this very fact prevailing in Indian society that many women ultimately choose to leave their jobs, or seek employment elsewhere, when they confront inappropriate behaviour from their colleagues.

Another very important aspect which should be taken care of is that of equality, where there’s no inhibitions, no sense of caution. Women need healthy camaraderie in place of needless caution. Respect, not condescension. They would like colleagues to engage with them, not be patronising. And the fact that they are still having to demand these is telling.

Against whom the writer suggests are revolutions usually aimed at ?

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    the guilty men
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    perpetrators
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    against the government agencies
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    those who make and enforce laws
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    Both 1 and 2
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Answer : 4. "those who make and enforce laws"

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