Directions: Read the following passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.

The most logical and intelligent people seem to go berserk when talking about snakes. Recently a reputed scientist said with a wise look in his eyes that sand boas have two heads. The other day someone walked into my office and stated that in his village at least cobras mate with rat snakes. About other places he was not sure, he added modestly, but that was how it was in his village.

These stories about snakes are myths. Sand boas have only one head; vine snakes do not peck your eyes out; no snake will drink milk. But it is interesting to try and trace the origin of these untruths. The one about the sand boas two heads obviously exists because the short, stumpy tail of this snake looks remarkably like the head, an effective device to fool predators. Or take the one about vine snakes pecking at eyes. It was ‘probably started by a vine snake that had a bad aim, as snakes, when provoked, will bite the most prominent projection of the offender, which is usually the nose.

But the most interesting one is about snakes coming to the scene of killing to take revenge. It so happens that when injured or under stress, a snake exudes, a large quantity of musk. Musk is a powerful sex attractant, the snakes’ equivalent of after-shave lotion. So after a snake is killed, the ground around still has this smell and naturally a snake of the same species passing by will lick its lips and come to investigate. The killer of the snake, who is probably worried if the pooja he performed was adequate to liquidate the killing of a snake, sees the second snake and is convinced that it was not.

The Irula tribals have a good answer to the query about whether cobras have jewels in their heads; “If they did, we wouldn’t be snake catchers, we would be rajas!”

The phrase that it is not means

Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow-
Parents all over Iceland’s capital Reykjavik embark on a two-hour evening walk around their neighbourhood every weekend, checking on youth hangouts as a 10 pm curfew approaches.The walk in Reykjavik is one step toward Iceland’s success into turning around a crisis in teenage drinking.Focusing on local participation and promoting more music and sports options for students, the island nation in the North Atlantic has dried up a teenage culture of drinking and smoking. Icelandic teenagers now have one of the lowest rates of substance abuse in Europe.The Icelandic Centre for Social Research and Analysis, the institute pioneering the project for the past two decades, says it currently advises 100 communities in 23 countries, from Finland to Chile, on cutting teenage substance abuse. “The key to success is to create healthy communities and by that get healthy individuals, ” said Inga Dora Sigfusdottir, a sociology professor who founded the Youth of Iceland programme, which now has rebranded as Planet Youth.The secret, she says, is to keep young people busy and parents engaged without talking much about drugs or alcohol. That stands in sharp contrast to other anti-abuse programmes which try to sway teenagers with school lectures and scary, disgusting ads showing smokers’ rotten lungs or eggs in a frying pan to represent an intoxicated brain.
“Telling teenagers not to use drugs can backlash and actually get them curious to try them,” Ms Sigfusdottir said. In 1999, when thousands of teenagers would gather in Reykjavik every weekend, surveys showed 56% of Icelandic 16-year-olds drank alcohol and about as many had tried smoking.
Years later, Iceland has the lowest rates for drinking and smoking among the 35 countries measured in the 2015 European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs. On average, 80% of European 16-year-olds have tasted alcohol at least once, compared with 35% in Iceland, the only country where more than half of those students completely abstains from alcohol.
Denmark, another wealthy Nordic country, has the highest rates of teenage drinking, along with Greece, Hungary and the Czech Republic, where 92% to 96% have consumed alcohol. In the US, teen drinking is a significant health concern, because many US teenagers are driving cars and do not have access to good public transport like teenagers in Europe.
Reykjavik mayor Dagur B. Eggertsson said the Icelandic plan “is all about society giving better options” for teens than substance abuse. He believes the wide variety of opportunities that now keep students busy and inspired has dramatically altered the country’s youth culture. Local municipalities like Reykjavik have invested in sport halls, music schools and youth centres.To make the programmes widely available, parents are offered a 500 US dollar
annual voucher toward sports or music programmes for their children.

Researchers say the Planet Youth prevention model is evolving constantly because it is based on annual surveys to detect trends and measure policy effectiveness. By law, introduced when Icelandic police routinely dealt with alcohol-fuelled street gatherings, children under 12 are not allowed to be outside after 8pm without parents and those 13 to 16 not past 10pm. “We tell the kids if they are out too late, polite and nice, and then they go home,” said Heidar Atlason, a veteran member of the patrol. Over Iceland’s harsh winter, one parent admits, evenings sometimes pass without running into any students.

What is dramatic about the figures of teenage drinking in Iceland?

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.
Design has manifold applications and usages ranging from the most obvious or surface-level usages to the subtler and indirect usages that have far-reaching and deeper impact. The significance of design lies in its ability to fulfil these demands, whether aesthetic, teleological or semiotic. By aesthetics, it is broadly understood as its sensory and beauty values, i.e. Concerned with the judgment of visual taste, here it is meant as the sensory appreciation of graphic design. While by functionality is meant the practical aspects of a given graphic design such as usability, communicability, readability and making an impact. Its efficiency lies in its ability to do so. Design has function as well as some purpose. In theoretical terms the ability of design to fulfil the function or purpose is called ‘teleology’ of design. Apart from the above two, there is one more aspect of design called ‘content’ or meaning of design that can be broadly called as semiotic value of design. A simple discussion might elaborate this case. Food has taste that caters to our taste buds which is a sensory quality of food. Sometimes the colour of food is attractive therefore we like it and probably other times we get attracted towards it because it is presented in an appealing manner. Aroma, taste and decoration or garnishing cater to our sensory expectations. Food also has nutritional value that is concerned with supplying energy to the body that helps in its overall physical growth and maintenance of general health and work efficiency and at times such food may not be visually attractive. This is the teleological significance. Now if the food is cooked by a mother, sister or wife, then it has a special meaning and a highly personal significance attached to it. It may not be very nutritious or properly garnished, still the food will have its own unique significance which is the semiotic value of the food. 

Which of the following aspects of a dish does NOT have a sensory appeal?

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 intended in the given passage?

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.
   
Indeed the western recession is really the beginning of good news for India! But to understand that we will have to move away for a while from the topic of western recession . . . . . . . to the Japanese recession! For years the Japanese style of management has been admired. However, over the last decade or so, one key question has sprung up ‘if Japanese management style is as wonderful as described then why has Japan been in a recession for more than a decade?'
The answer to this question is very simple. Culture plays a very important part in shaping up economies. What succeeds in one culture fails in another. Japanese are basically nonmaterialistic. And however rich they become, unlike others, they cannot just keep throwing and buying endlessly. And once they have everything they need; there is a saturation point. It was only when companies like Toyota realized that they cannot keep selling cars endlessly to their home market that they went really aggressive in the western markets-and the rest is history. Japanese companies grew bigger by catering to the world markets when their home markets shrunk.

served equally well. They were lured through advertising and marketing techniques of ‘dustbinisation' of the customer; and then finally, once they became ready customers, they were given loans and credits to help them buy more and more. When all the creditworthy people were given loans to a logical limit, they ceased to be a part of the market. Even this would have been understandable if it could work as an eye-opener. Instead of taking the 'Right Step' as Toyota did, they preferred to take a 'shortcut'. Now banks went to the noncredit worthy people and gave them loans. The people expectedly defaulted and the entire system collapsed.

Now like Toyota western companies will learn to find new markets. They will now lean towards India because of its common man! The billion-plus population in the next 25 years will become, a consuming middle-class. Finally, there will be a real surge in income of these people and in the next fifty odd years, one can really hope to see an equal world in terms of material plenty, with poverty being almost nonexistent! And this will happen not by selling more cars to Americans and Europeans. It will happen by creating markets in India, China, Latin America and Africa, by giving their people purchasing power and by making products for them.
The recession has made us realize that it is not because of worse management techniques, but because of limits to growth. And they will realize that it is great for planet earth. After all, how many cars and houses must the rich own before calling it enough? It's time for them to look at others as well. Many years back, to increase his own profits, Henry Ford had started paying his workers more, so that they could buy his cars. In similar fashion, now the developed world will pay the developing world people so that they can buy their cars and washing machines.
The recession will kick - start the process of making the entire world more prosperous, and lay the foundation of limits to growth in the west and the foundation of real globalization in the world - of the globalization of prosperity. And one of its first beneficiaries will be India. 

How does the author foresee the future globalization as an analogy to Henry Ford's example?
(A) Car companies would start selling cars in developing countries as well.
(B) By paying the developing world the developed world would increase its own profit, in turn bring in affluence to developing world as well.
(C) To earn profit, the companies in developing countries would move to foreign land. 

Direction : Read the following passage carefully and answer the question given below it. Certain words/phrases have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the question.
 Governments have traditionally equated economic progress with steel mills and cement factories. While urban centers thrive and city dwellers get rich, hundreds of millions of farmers remain mired in poverty. However fears of food shortages, a rethinking of anti-poverty priorities and the crushing recession in 2008 are causing a dramatic shift in world economic policy in favour of greater support for agriculture.
 The last time when the world’s farmer felt such love was in the 1970s. 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. Government across the developing world and international aid organisations plowed investment into agriculture in the early 1970s, while technological breakthroughs, like high-yield strains of important food crops, boosted production. The result was the Green Revolution and food production exploded. But the Green Revolution became a victim of its own success. Food prices plunged by some 60% by the late 1980s from their peak in the mid-1970s. 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 aid directed at agriculture sank to 3.5 % and Agriculture lost its glitter. Also as consumer 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 upto heights not seen for three decades. Making matters worse land and resources got reallocated to produce cash crops such as biofuels 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 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 centers. But that strategy 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 2009 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 have a tough time meeting its economic growth targets. In a report Goldman Sachs, predicted that if this year, too receives weak rains it could cause agriculture to contract by 2 % this fiscal year making the government 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.

What is the author’s main objective in writing the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the question accordingly.

The saddest part of life lies not in the act of dying, but in failing to truly live while we are alive. Too many of us play small with our lives, never letting the fullness of our humanity see the light of day. I’ve learned that what really counts in life, in the end, is not how many toys we have collected or how much money we’ve accumulated, but how many of our talents we have liberated and used for a purpose that adds value to this world. What truly matters most are the lives we have touched and the legacy that we have left. Tolstoy put it so well when he wrote: “We live for ourselves only when we live for others.” It took me forty years to discover this simple point of wisdom.

Forty long years to discover that success cannot really be pursued. Success ensues and flows into your life as the unintended yet inevitable byproduct of a life spent enriching the lives of other people. When you shift your daily focus from a compulsion to survive towards a lifelong commitment to serve, your existence cannot help but explode into success. I still can’t believe that I had to wait until the “half-time” of my life to figure out that true fulfillment as a human being comes not from achieving those grand gestures that put us on the front pages of the newspapers and business magazines, but instead from those basic and incremental acts of decency that each one of us has the privilege to practice each and every day if we simply make the choice to do so. Mother Teresa, a great leader of human hearts if ever there was one, said it best: “There are no great acts, only small acts done with great love.” I learned this the hard way in my life. Until recently, I had been so busy striving, I had missed out on living. I was so busy chasing life’s big pleasures that I had missed out on the little ones, those micro joys that weave themselves in and out of our lives on a daily basis but often go unnoticed. My days were overscheduled, my mind was overworked and my spirit was underfed.

According to the passage, what does ''failing to truly live while we are alive means.''?

Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow-
Parents all over Iceland’s capital Reykjavik embark on a two-hour evening walk around their neighbourhood every weekend, checking on youth hangouts as a 10 pm curfew approaches.The walk in Reykjavik is one step toward Iceland’s success into turning around a crisis in teenage drinking.Focusing on local participation and promoting more music and sports options for students, the island nation in the North Atlantic has dried up a teenage culture of drinking and smoking. Icelandic teenagers now have one of the lowest rates of substance abuse in Europe.The Icelandic Centre for Social Research and Analysis, the institute pioneering the project for the past two decades, says it currently advises 100 communities in 23 countries, from Finland to Chile, on cutting teenage substance abuse. “The key to success is to create healthy communities and by that get healthy individuals, ” said Inga Dora Sigfusdottir, a sociology professor who founded the Youth of Iceland programme, which now has rebranded as Planet Youth.The secret, she says, is to keep young people busy and parents engaged without talking much about drugs or alcohol. That stands in sharp contrast to other anti-abuse programmes which try to sway teenagers with school lectures and scary, disgusting ads showing smokers’ rotten lungs or eggs in a frying pan to represent an intoxicated brain.
“Telling teenagers not to use drugs can backlash and actually get them curious to try them,” Ms Sigfusdottir said. In 1999, when thousands of teenagers would gather in Reykjavik every weekend, surveys showed 56% of Icelandic 16-year-olds drank alcohol and about as many had tried smoking.
Years later, Iceland has the lowest rates for drinking and smoking among the 35 countries measured in the 2015 European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs. On average, 80% of European 16-year-olds have tasted alcohol at least once, compared with 35% in Iceland, the only country where more than half of those students completely abstains from alcohol.
Denmark, another wealthy Nordic country, has the highest rates of teenage drinking, along with Greece, Hungary and the Czech Republic, where 92% to 96% have consumed alcohol. In the US, teen drinking is a significant health concern, because many US teenagers are driving cars and do not have access to good public transport like teenagers in Europe.
Reykjavik mayor Dagur B. Eggertsson said the Icelandic plan “is all about society giving better options” for teens than substance abuse. He believes the wide variety of opportunities that now keep students busy and inspired has dramatically altered the country’s youth culture. Local municipalities like Reykjavik have invested in sport halls, music schools and youth centres.To make the programmes widely available, parents are offered a 500 US dollar
annual voucher toward sports or music programmes for their children.

Researchers say the Planet Youth prevention model is evolving constantly because it is based on annual surveys to detect trends and measure policy effectiveness. By law, introduced when Icelandic police routinely dealt with alcohol-fuelled street gatherings, children under 12 are not allowed to be outside after 8pm without parents and those 13 to 16 not past 10pm. “We tell the kids if they are out too late, polite and nice, and then they go home,” said Heidar Atlason, a veteran member of the patrol. Over Iceland’s harsh winter, one parent admits, evenings sometimes pass without running into any students.

The word from the passage that means ‘change the image of an organisation or program’ is-