Read the following passage carefully and give answer the question.
Great books do not spring from something accidental in the great men who write them. They are the affluence of their very core, the expression of the life itself of the authors. And literature cannot be said to have served its true purpose until it has been translated into the actual life of him who reads. It is the vast reservoir of true ideas and emotions. In a world deprived of literature, the broad, the noble, the generous would tend to disappear and life would be correspondingly degraded because the wrong idea and the petty emotion would never feel the upward pull of the ideas and emotions of genius. Only by conceiving a society without literature can it be clearly realized that the function of literature is to raise the plain towards the top level of the peaks. Literature exists so that where a man has lived finely, ten thousand may afterward live finely. it is a means of life, it concerns the living essence.

If a world is deprived of literature, what would happen to the broad, the noble and the generous?

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 

A farmer accompanied by his young son was driving his ass to the market in the hope of selling the ass for a good price. On the road, they met a bevy of girls who laughed and exclaimed, “See this pair of fools ? They are trudging along the dusty road, when they can be riding !” The man thought that there was sense in what they were saying. So he mounted his son on the ass and he walked at the side. Presently, they met some of his old friends, who greeted him and said, “You’ll spoil your son, by letting him ride while you toil along on foot! Make him walk. It’ll be good for him.” The farmer followed their advice and took his son’s place on the back of the ass while the boy trudged along behind. They would not have gone far, they were seen by women and children. The farmer heard them say, “What a selfish old man ! He rides in comfort, but lets his poor little fellow walk the distance.” So he asked his son to get up behind him. Further along the road, they met some travellers. They asked the farmer whether the ass was his property or was it hired for the purpose. The farmer told them that he was taking his ass to the market to sell it. The travellers said, “Good Heavens ! With the load like this, the poor beast will look exhausted and no one would like to purchase him. Why don’t you carry him.” Immediately, the farmer got off the ass, tied its legs with the rope and slung him on a pole and carried him in between them. This was such an absurd sight that people laughed at it. They called the farmer and his son lunatics. They had then reached a bridge over a river. Frightened by the noise around, the ass struggled, kicked, broke the pole, fell into the river and died. The farmer returned home vexed and ashamed. In trying to please all, he in fact, had pleased none and he had lost the ass in the transaction. 

The word trudged means  

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

Pollution befouls the air and poisons water. Pollution induces the release of toxicants into the biosphere which makes the air unsuitable for breathing, harms the quality of water and soil, and causes the emission of substances that may cause damage to humans, plants and animals.
To cater to the needs of an increasing population, agriculture has been intensified through the use of a wide spectrum of fertilizers and pesticides. Diverse industries have been set up to produce chemicals including those that pose a danger to all life forms.

Rapid industrialisation has led to deterioration in the quality of air. Widespread use of coal and fossil fuels in industries and petroleum fuel in motor vehicles has aggravated the air pollution problem. Our atmosphere seems to have become a waste basket into which dust, noxious fumes, toxic gases and other pollutants are callously thrown.

The intensity of air pollution in Indian cities is increasing primarily due to our vintage vehicles and their poor performance. Water pollution, too has increased with the growth of our population and also that of our industries. Water pollution has acquired dangerous dimensions ever since sewage and industrial effluents have started being disposed of into the rivers.

Once considered sacred, the rivers are now turning murky and stink. It is sad that almost three-fourths of our fellow citizens have no choice but to drink filthy water. The severely polluted rivers due to mindless dumping of sewage and industrial wastes are a cause for concern not only to us humans but also to myriads of life forms that exist in water.

On the French and Italian rivier as we can no longer see the sparkling blue waters. The Mediterranean Sea is reported to be turning grey. Rivers and canals pour sewage, detergents and industrial waste into the sea; tankers flush their contents near the river or sea; bottles, rotting garbage and oil slicks are washed into the beaches. The phosphates and nitrates applied to farmlands as inorganic fertilizers, concentrate in lakes and estuaries causing algal blooms due to which wide expanses of water get choked, plants rot, oxygen is used up and fish die.

As per the passage, which of these statements is NOT true about air pollution?

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

In the following passage some words have been deleted. Fill in the blanks with the help of the alternatives given. Select the most appropriate option for each blank.

China is the largest producer of pork, but it (1) ______ a big problem at the moment. There is an epidemic (2) _____ is killing its pigs. The virus was first (3) _____ in August last year, but one million pigs have died by now. It is a (4) ______ virus and when a pig catches it, it dies. China thinks that one third of (5) ______ pigs are going to die by the end of this year.

Select the most appropriate option for blank No. 4.

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.

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

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

The interview may be conducted by letter and by telephone, as well as in person. Letter and telephone interviews are less satisfactory. Direct contact with an individual and a face-to-face relationship often provide a stimulating situation for both interviewer and interviewee. Personal reaction and interaction aid not only in rapport but also in obtaining nuances and additional information by the reactions which are more fully observed in a face-to-face relationship.

Adequate preparation for the interview is a “must”. Careful planning saves not only time but also energy of both parties concerned. The interview is used to obtain facts or subjective data such as individual opinions, attitudes, and preferences. Interviews are used to check on questionnaires which may have been used to obtain data, or when a problem being investigated is complex, or when the information needed to solve it cannot be secured easily in any other way. People will often give information orally but will not put it in writing.

According to the author the best way to conduct interviews is

A passage is given with five questions following it. Read the passage carefully and select the best answer to each question out of the given four alternatives.

Teaching about compassion and empathy in schools can help deal with problems of climate change and environmental degradation,” says Barbara Maas, secretary, Standing Committee for Environment and Conservation, International Buddhist Confederation (IBC). She was in New Delhi to participate in the IBC’s governing council meeting, December 10-11, 2017. “We started an awareness campaign in the year 2005-2006 with H H The Dalai Lama when we learnt that tiger skins were being traded in China and Tibet. At that time, I was not a Buddhist; I wrote to the Dalai Lama asking him to say that ‘this is harmful’ and he wrote back to say, “We will stop this.” He used very strong words during the Kalachakra in 2006, when he said, ‘If he sees people wearing fur and skins, he doesn’t feel like living. ‘This sent huge shock waves in the Himalayan community. Within six months, in Lhasa, people ripped the fur trim of their tubba, the traditional Tibetan dress.
 The messenger was ideal and the audience was receptive,” says Maas who is a conservationist. She has studied the battered fox’s behavioral ecology in Serengeti, Africa. She heads the endangered species conservation at the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) International Foundation for Nature, Berlin. “I met Samdhong Rinpoche, The Karmapa, HH the Dalai Lama and Geshe Lhakdor and I thought, if by being a Buddhist, you become like this, I am going for it, “says Maas, who led the IBC initiative for including the Buddhist perspective to the global discourse on climate change by presenting the statement, ‘The Time to Act is Now: a Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change,’ at COP21 in Paris.
 “It was for the first time in the history of Buddhism that leaders of different sanghas came together to take a stand on anything! The statement lists a couple of important things: the first is that we amass things that we don’t need; there is overpopulation; we need to live with contentment and deal with each other and the environment with love and compassion,” elaborates Maas. She is an ardent advocate of a vegan diet because “consuming meat and milk globally contributes more to climate change than all "transport in the world.”
 Turning vegetarian or vegan usually requires complete change of perspective before one gives up eating their favorite food. What are the Buddhist ways to bring about this kind of change at the individual level? “To change our behavior, Buddhism is an ideal vehicle; it made me a more contented person,” says Maas, who grew up in Germany, as a sausage chomping, meat-loving individual. She says, “If I can change, so can anybody.

According to the passage, what do you infer from ''The messenger was ideal and the audience was receptive''?