English Language and Comprehension Passage For questions 57–61 In the following passage, some of the words have been left out. Read the passage carefully and select the correct answer for the given blank out of the four alternatives. There has never been a better time to get out of our own way and get rid of FEAR. It is possible. We can choose to ______ on where we want to go instead of where we may go. Often fear is tied up in letting our minds consider all the negative ______ that could happen. The key word is could - most of the time our fears never ______. But when we focus on what could happen we get off course. We can choose to make a ______ to change our focus. To focus on where we want to go, where we are ______ to go.
Passage For questions 62–66 In the following passage, some of the words have been left out. Read the passage carefully and select the correct answer for the given blank out of the four alternatives. Everyone is busy in making their life in the world. After working whole day, there are so many things ______ that gives us ______ and irritation. We face many ______ in our life. Those who are heavy set with material ______ will have a lot of trouble when their things are taken away from them or lost. But the ______ is life still is easy. It always will be.
Passage For questions 67–71 In the following passage, some of the words have been left out. Read the passage carefully and select the correct answer for the given blank out of the four alternatives. Everyone needs to find the leadership style that works ______ for them and their subordinates. What works for your ______ may not work for you and your team. However, if you take some time and ______ different leadership styles and how they work for different ______ types, you place a much better ______ of success as a leader.
Passage For questions 114–118 Read the passage carefully and select the best answer to each question out of the given four alternatives. Transactional Analysis has the triangle of PAC. P means parent, A means adult, C means child. These are your three layers, as if you are a three-storeyed building. The first floor is that of the child, the second floor is that of the parent, the third floor is that of the adult. All three exist together. This is your inner triangle and conflict. Your child says one thing, your parent says something else, and your adult, rational mind says something else. The child says ‘enjoy’. For the child, this moment is the only moment; he has no other considerations. The child is spontaneous, but unaware of the consequences — unaware of past, unaware of future. He lives in the moment. He enjoys — but his enjoyment is not creative, cannot be creative. He delights — but life cannot be lived only through delight. You cannot remain a child forever. You will have to learn many things because you are not alone here....The child has to be disciplined — and that’s where the parent comes in. The parental voice in you is the voice of the society, culture, civilization; the voice that makes you capable of living in a world where you are not alone —where there are many individuals with conflicting ambitions, where there is much struggle for survival, where there is much conflict. The parental voice is that of caution. It makes you civilized. The word ‘civil’ is good. It means one who has become capable of living in a city, who has become capable of being a member of a group, of a society. It is needed. And then there is the third voice within you, the third layer, when you have become adult and you are no longer controlled by your parents; your own reason has come of age, you can think on your own. And these three layers are continuously fighting. The child says one thing, the parent says just the opposite, and the reason may say something totally different. There is no necessity that your adult mind agrees with your parents. Many times you find them very dogmatic, superstitious, believing in foolish things, irrational ideologies. Your parent says do it, your adult says it is not worth doing, and your child goes on pulling you somewhere else. This is the triangle within you.
Passage For questions 119–123 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. The Indian Space Research Organisation boosted its reputation further when it successfully launched a record 104 satellites in one mission from Sriharikota on 15th February, 2017 by relying on its workhorse PSLV rocket. An earth observation Cartosat-2 series satellite and two other nano satellites were the only Indian satellites launched; the remaining were from the United States, Israel, the UAE, the Netherlands, Kazakhstan and Switzerland. Of the 101 foreign satellites launched, 96 were from the U.S. and one each from the other five countries. Till now Russia held the record of launching 37 satellites in a single mission, in 2014, while the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the U.S. launched 29 satellites in one go in 2013. Last June, ISRO had come close to NASA’s record by launching 20 satellites in one mission. But ISRO views the launch not as a mission to set a world record but as an opportunity to make full use of the capacity of the launch vehicle. The launch is particularly significant as ISRO now cements its position as a key player in the lucrative commercial space launch market by providing a cheaper yet highly reliable alternative. At an orbital altitude of around 500 km, the vehicle takes about 90 minutes to complete one orbit. Though ISRO had sufficient time to put the satellites into orbit, it accomplished the task in about 12 minutes. With the focus on ensuring that no two satellites collided with each other, the satellites were injected in pairs in opposite directions. Successive pairs of satellites were launched once the vehicle rotated by a few degrees, thereby changing the separation angle and time of separation to prevent any collision. Besides setting the record for the most number of satellites launched in a single mission, the Indian space agency has launched two nano satellites weighing less than 10 kg. It is a technology demonstrator for a new class of satellites called ISRO nano satellites (INS). With many Indian universities already building and launching nano satellites, the availability of a dedicated nano satellites platform is sure to boost space research in India.
Passage For questions 124–128 Read the passage carefully and select the best answer to each question out of the given four alternatives. Let’s move to the crackling topic of the SC’s firecracker ban in Delhi. Like me and millions of other children raised in India, Masaba must have celebrated Diwali with new clothes, sweets and the quintessential rockets, anars and phuljharis. But when she supports the ban on firecrackers because of the pollution it creates, the earthworms once again flail desperately, not by quoting statistics or making logical arguments to refute her point but by muck-raking. ‘Don’t mess with our ancient traditions,’ they say. I would like to tell them that if we stuck to all our traditions just because they’re ancient then we should still be pushing widows into funeral pyres to commit sati and get our children married off at the age of eight. As much as I would like to see the delight on my daughter’s face — the same glee I had as a child — while bursting atom bombs and laris, it is the present scenario and not nostalgia that must dictate my actions. If even doctors welcome the ban as they feel fumes from firecrackers take pollution levels beyond safe limits, then perhaps we need to change our traditional values and create new ones. If saying that makes me a bad Indian, then so be it. One of the greatest privileges I have — in fact because of the very background that they are trying to smear — stems from the fact that I was lucky enough to have a mother who has raised me to believe that equality isn’t one of my privileges but it is my right. One that was hard won by some brave and fearless women, women who set the right precedent for other women by standing against inequality. The flailing trollers do not realize that you cannot shame us by pulling down our mothers, those fiercely independent women who have lived life on their own terms, who have not just talked the talk but walked the walk. Yes, you can reason with us by presenting a logical argument but this seems to be beyond the resources of these anonymous creatures hiding their faces in the mud. And yes one last thing, for all those claiming to be the flag-bearers of ancient traditions, it would be lovely if you adhered to your so-called traditional ways completely. Why do you write open letters, tweet and troll in the language of the Brits? Why not go traditional there as well, use only our ancient languages and spare us your venom-filled and grammatically incorrect English?
Passage For questions 129–133 Read the passage carefully and select the best answer to each question out of the given four alternatives. The first thing is that the rich people of the world should start living in communes. Let those communes be of the rich! So they will not be dragged down from their standard of life, their comforts, and their luxuries. Let there be, around the world, hundreds of communes of rich people – that is, rich communes. And to me, wealth is a certain kind of creativity. If five thousand rich people who have all created wealth individually are together, they can create wealth a millionfold. Their standard will not go lower; their standard could go even higher. Or they can start sharing. They can start inviting people who are not rich but who are creative in some other way, who will enhance the life of their commune although they may be poor. Five thousand rich people, together with their genius for creating wealth, are capable of creating so much wealth that they can invite thousands of other people who may not be rich in the sense of being wealthy, but who may be rich as painters, poets, dancers, singers. What are you going to do only with wealth? You cannot play music on money; you cannot dance just because you have so much cash in the bank. And these rich communes can start becoming bigger, absorbing more and more creative people. They can make beautiful places all around the world, and slowly, new people can be absorbed. For example, you will need plumbers, however rich you may be; you will need mechanics; technicians; you will need shoemakers. Invite them – and they come to you not as servants, but as members of the commune. Slowly, we can transform the whole world – without any bloodshed and without any dictatorship. A communism that comes out of love, out of intelligence, out of generosity, will be real. A communism that comes through force is going to be unreal. There is not a single man in the world, howsoever poor, who has nothing to contribute. Around the world all the rich communes will need people; and slowly, slowly your commune will become bigger and bigger. The rich will not become poor, but the poor will become rich, and respectable, and equal – in no way inferior to anybody else – because they are also functioning in the same way as anybody else. And whatever they are doing is needed as much as anybody else’s expertise is needed.
Passage For questions 134–138 In the following passage, some of the words have been left out. Read the passage carefully and select the correct answer for the given blank out of the four alternatives. Over the years Blyton ________________ for a lot of things, especially for being ___________ and creating two-dimensional characters. But for many of us, the name brings up the nostalgia of rainy afternoons ___________ snuggled up with our noses in her books and being transported to a world where good means good and bad means bad, with nothing _______ between. I remember reading in a preface that many girls had written asking Blyton how __________ could enrol at Malory Towers or St. Clare’s!
Passage For questions 139–143 In the following passage, some of the words have been left out. Read the passage carefully and select the correct answer for the given blank out of the four alternatives. The climate question _____________ a leapfrog era for India’s development paradigm. Already, the country has chalked out an _____________ policy on renewable energy, hoping to generate a massive 175 gigawatts of power ____________ green sources by 2022. This has to be _____________ pursued, breaking down the barriers to wider ___________ of rooftop solar energy at every level and implementing net metering systems for all categories of consumers.
Passage For questions 149–153 Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives. There may be some merit in this, but clearly, we need to look at the hawkers issue more broadly. For quite some time now, many middle-class citizens groups have urged strict action against hawkers, asking residents not to favour their business. The terms routinely used to refer to hawkers and vendors is “menace”, with their everyday businesses described as “encroachments” on public space. This, despite the fact that an existing 2014 central law, the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, protects their presence as a part of the right to livelihood. The law specifies the number of licensed hawkers permitted and outlines the process to implement a fair street vending policy. Mumbai and other cities have failed to implement the law to date, with the Mumbai municipality having frozen hawker licenses since 1978. As a result, only a fraction of Mumbai’s hawkers are licensed. Hawkers desire legal status — their illegality makes them vulnerable to extortion and harassment by a whole range of State and non-State actors. Unfortunately, by looking upon the hawkers question as only a clearing of pavements issue, we have neglected to see their contribution in several other ways. Firstly, hawkers are not the only ones sullying our pavements. But they are far easier to target as villains than the middle-class who use pavements for car parking and shops/restaurants who unabashedly extend their shopfronts onto footpaths. Secondly, hawking is also an employment issue. It provides the urban poor a means to earn a legitimate livelihood, and in fact, many sell goods produced in small-scale or home-based industries.