Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.
There are five basic features of services. These features distinguish them from goods. The first is that services are intangible. They are experiential in nature. One cannot taste a doctor’s treatment, or touch entertainment. One can only experience it. An important implication of this is that quality of the offer can often not be determined before consumption or before purchase. It is, therefore, important for the service providers that they consciously work on creating a desired service so that the customer undergoes a favourable experience. The second important characteristic of services is inconsistency. Since there is no standard tangible product, services have to be performed exclusively each time. Different customers have different demands and expectations. Service providers need to have an opportunity to alter their offer to closely meet the requirements of the customers. Another important characteristic of services is the simultaneous activity of production and consumption being performed. This makes the production and consumption of services inseparable. While we can manufacture a car today and sell it after, say, a month; this is often not possible with services that have to be consumed as and when they are produced. For example, the services of a teacher, doctor or lawyer. Service providers may design a substitute for the person by using appropriate technology but the interaction with the customer remains a key feature of services. Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) may replace the banking clerk for the front office activities like cash withdrawal and cheque deposit. But, at the same time, the presence of the customer, is required and his/her interaction with the process has to be managed. Services have little or no tangible components and, therefore, cannot be stored for a future use. That is, services are perishable and providers can, at best, store some associated goods but not the service itself. This means that the demand and supply needs to be managed as the service has to be performed as and when the customer asks for it. They cannot be performed earlier to be consumed at a later date. For example, a railway ticket can be stored but the railway journey will be experienced by a traveller only when the railways provide it.

What is the key feature of any service?

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 

Time was when people looked heavenward and prayed, “Ye Gods, give us rain, keep drought away.” Today there are those who pray. “Give us rain, keep El Nino away.” 

El Nino and its atmospheric equivalent, called the Southern Oscillation, are together referred to as ENSO, and are household words today. Meteorologists recognize it as often being responsible for natural disaster worldwide. But this wisdom dawned only after countries suffered, first from the lack of knowledge, and then from the lack of coordination between policy making and the advances in scientific knowledge. 

Put simply, El Nino is a weather event restricted to certain tropical shores, especially the Peruvian coast. The event has diametrically opposite impacts on the land and sea. The Peruvian shore is a desert. But every few years, an unusually warm ocean current - El Nino - warms up the normally cold surface-waters off the Peruvian coast, causing very heavy rains in the early half of the year, 

And then, miraculously, the desert is matted green. Crops like cotton, coconuts and banana grow on the otherwise stubbornly barren land. These are the Peruvians’ anos de abundencia or years of abundance. The current had come to be termed El Nino, or the Christ Child because it usually appears as an enhancement if a mildly warm current that normally occurs here around every Christmas. 

But this boon on land is accompanied by oceanic disasters. Normally, the waters off the South American coast are among the most productive in the world because of a constant upwelling of nutrient rich cold waters from the ocean depths. During an El Nino, however waters are stirred up only from near the surface. The nutrient-crunch pushes down primary production, disrupting the food chain. Many marine species, including anchoveta (anchovies) temporarily disappear. 

This is just one damning effect of El Nino. Over the years its full impact has been studied and what the Peruvians once regarded as manna, is now seen as a major threat. 

People today, pray to God to keep 

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions as directed.

Start-ups troubled by the so-called angel tax may soon receive some (A)______from the government. On Monday, the Centre set up a five-member working committee to look into revising the (B)norms of the angel tax imposed on start-ups. The tax, which was first introduced in 2012 to curb money-laundering through the (i) at bloated prices, has caused a lot of anguish among start-up investors in the country. Start-up owners have complained that income tax officials have asked many start-ups to cough up money when they try to attract capital into their entities by issuing new shares. For its part, the IT department fears that start-ups may be used as convenient tools to launder illegally acquired money, so a tax on investments beyond a certain threshold is (ii). (C) But while the (1) unintended of such an angel tax may be (2) benefits, the arbitrary nature of it means the cost of (3) intent consequences could be larger than the supposed (4) justifiable. In trying to curb money-laundering, Section 56(2)(viib) of the Indian Income Tax Act, 1961 gives income tax officials a free hand to harass even genuine start-ups looking to raise investments for their growth. Under the Act, the IT department is free to arbitrarily decide the fair value of a company’s share and tax start-ups if the price at which their new shares are sold to investors is higher than the fair value of these shares. The broad-brush tax on all investments means an unnecessary cost is (iii)community simply because of the lack of better means at the government’s disposal to tackle black money.

The committee set up by the government will, among other things, consider raising the threshold beyond which new investments into start-ups will be taxed. It is expected that start-ups with aggregate paid-up share capital and share premium of less than ₹25 crore, against the previous threshold of only ₹10 crore, will not be taxed while attracting new investment. This would definitely make life easier to a certain extent for angel investors and start-ups. But it will not address the real problem with the angel tax, which has to do with the unbridled power that it vests in the hands of the income tax authorities. Investors, foreign or domestic, may become wary of investing in new ideas when they are taxed while risking money on untested ventures. So the government should look to withdraw the angel tax and focus instead on building the capability to better identify and rein in illegal wealth. Otherwise it risks killing the nascent start-up ecosystem in the country.

Which of the following words should fill in the blank in (A) to make a contextually correct and meaningful sentence? 

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.

Deterioration in the quality of air can mainly be attributed to

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

The public sector banks are witnessing in India a period of transition and are at crossroads, where they without giving up social responsibility, should also remain healthy. They need to undertake risky experiments, yet perform it innovatively in a way it does not fail. They should make forays into new areas which are rarely tread by them and lose no emerging opportunities. It should be understood that absence of any bad advance is no sign of efficient banking system. It only indicates immense conservatism. However this is no guarantee for profit. There should be a balance between liquidity and risk. Past sins should be forgotten. Novel and pragmatic techniques should be adopted without which banks would be in danger.

In addition to being socially responsible, what does the author want the banks to be?

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 has not been an effect of the losses observed in the informal waste recycling?

Comprehension: In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank.
 Nitrogen is essential to life (1)______ Earth. It is a component of all proteins, and it can be (2)______ in all living systems. Nitrogen compounds are (3)______ in organic materials, foods, fertilisers, explosives and poisons. Nitrogen is crucial to life, (4)______ in excess it can also be (5)______ to the environment.

Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank number 4.

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow

Plato is the earliest important educational thinker, and education is an essential element in ‘The Republic’ (his most important work on philosophy and political theory, written around 360 B.C.). In it, he advocates some rather extreme methods: removing children from their mothers' care and raising them as wards of the state, and differentiating children suitable to the various castes, the highest receiving the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the less able. He believed that education should be holistic, including facts, skills, physical discipline, music and art. Plato believed that talent and intelligence is not distributed genetically and thus is be found in children born to all classes, although his proposed system of selective public education for an educated minority of the population does not really follow a democratic model.

Aristotle considered human nature, habit and reason to be equally important forces to be cultivated in education, the ultimate aim of which should be to produce good and virtuous citizens. He proposed that teachers lead their students systematically, and that repetition be used as a key tool to develop good habits, unlike Socrates' emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas. He emphasized the balancing of the theoretical and practical aspects of subjects taught, among which he explicitly mentions reading, writing, mathematics, music, physical education, literature, history, and a wide range of sciences, as well as play, which he also considered important.

Aristotle believed that virtuous citizens could be produced by cultivating: