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.

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 Icelandic Centre for Social Research and Analysis does the work of-

Direction : Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below. Certain words In the passage have been printed In bold to help you locate them when answering some of the questions. 

Can the last fifteen years be called the most successful decade and a half in Indian history and will the next fifteen be equally successful? Consider a culture where independent thinking is not encouraged. Or take the example of traditional family run business with vast resistance to change or a whole nation who believes that breakthrough ideas can be generated abroad but never at home. Partly responsible is socialization from early years we are taught not to question our elders but at workplaces this creates a hurdle for new thinking. Being unable to change radically gives rise to a culture where even the smallest change is heralded as a break through. Indian corporate leaders have done well standing up to global giants as their companies have grown in size and market share. To be successful in international markets they need to be distinct distinct products, processes, technologies, business models and organisations. The bottom line will be Innovation. Creativity workshops are organized to channel people to think differently. There are fantastic ideas being generated all the time but no Industry. breakthrough. Simply because of gravity regressive force exerted by a mindset. Thinking has therefore to happen at three, levels idea, frame and paradigm. From a narrow focus on either product or process innovation organizations need to look at innovating the whole ecosystem of the organization. Many a time waiting for a hundred percent solution before going to the market the organization forgets that it could end up waiting forever. Moreover, sometimes organizations are too focused on today to see tomorrow. Since management mandates are short-term, sowing the seed for a revenue stream today and leaving Its benefits to be reaped by a successor doesn’t appeal to today’s business leader. This is a serious hurdle to into Ovation. Establishing a function called innovation management or training employees through creativity workshops will have few benefits unless each frontline employee is empowered to Share his innovative ideas with the management. What happens to this system when the person driving the change leaves the organization? The approach to innovation hence needs to be system driven rather than people driven. In thirty years, India can be the largest world economy save China and the US. However, as companies grow there exists a resemblance in their products, services, promotions, processes and pricing and so on. There remains only one escape from this trap. 

How does socialization hinder innovation?
(A)It facilitates independent thinking.
(B)It heads us not to challenge established practices.
(C)Creates a strong belief in family values. 

Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
The peacock, which happens to be our national bird, is regarded a good omen. It is also considered to be vain because of its habit to draw attention to itself. Different religions see the peacock as a symbol in varied ways. In Christianity, it represents all -seeing God and is often used as a symbol of immortality. The Chinese believed that a glance from the bird could impregnate a woman. According to Hinduism, Saraswati – the Goddess of knowledge and wisdom – rides a peacock and when God Indra transformed himself into an animal, he chose to be a peacock. In Buddhism, the peacock symbolizes purity, and their feathers are used for purification ceremonies.

The Hindu Goddess used the peacock as

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

Instructions Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given it. Certain word/phrases have been printed in ‘’bold’’ to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions.

India is rushing headlong towards economic success and modernisation, counting on high-tech industries such as information technology and biotechnology to propel the nation to prosperity. India’s recent announcement that it would no longer produce unlicensed inexpensive generic pharmaceuticals bowed to the realities of the World Trade Organisation while at the same time challenging the domestic drug industry to compete with the multinational firms. Unfortunately, its weak higher education sector constitutes the Achilles’ heel.

of this strategy. Its systematic disinvestment in higher education in recent years has yield neither world-class research nor very many highly trained scholars, scientists or managers to sustain high-tech development. India’s main competitor especially China buts also Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea are investing in large and ‘’differentiated’’ higher education systems. They are providing access to large number of students at the bottom of the academic system while at the same time building some research-based universities that are able to compete with the world’s best institutions. The recent London Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of the world’s top 200 universities included three in China, three in Hong Kong three in South Korea. one in Taiwan, and one in India. These countries are positioning themselves for leadership in the knowledge based economies for coming era. There was a time when countries could achieve economic success with cheap labour and low-tech manufacturing. Low wages still help, but contemporary large-scale development requires a sophisticated and at least partly knowledge based economy. India has chosen that path, but will find a major stumbling block in its universities system. India has significant advantages in the 21st century knowledge race. It has a large higher education sector --- the third largest in the world in student numbers, after China and the United States. It uses English as a primary language of higher education and research. It has a long academic tradition. Academic freedom is respected. There are a small number of highly quality institutions, departments, and centres that can form the basis of quality sector in higher education. The fact that the States, rather than the Central Government, exercise major responsibility for higher education creates a rather cumbersome structure, but the system allows for a variety of policies and approaches. Yet the weakness far outweigh the strengths. India educates approximately 10 per cent of its young people in higher education compared with more than half in the major industrialised countries and 15 per cent in China. Almost all of the world’s academic systems resemble a pyramid, with a small high quality tier at the top and a massive sector at the bottom. India has a tiny top tier. None of its universities occupies a solid position at the top. A few of the best universities have some excellent departments and centres and there are a small number of outstanding undergraduate colleges. The university Grants Commission’s recent major support of five universities to build on their recognised strength is a step toward recognising a differentiated academic system and fostering excellence. These universities, combined, enroll well under 1 percent of the student population. 

Which of the following is/are India’s strength/s in terms of higher education?
A: Its system of higher education allows variations
B: Medium of instruction for most higher learning is English
C: It has the paraphernalia, albeit small in number, to build a high quality higher educational sector.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language-so the argument runs-must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. 
Now it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits, one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. 

What causes bad language in the end?

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. 

According to the passage, which of the following was NOT an effect of providing loans and cred its to the customers?
(A) The non-creditworthy people defaulted.
(B) People bought new products which were not needed.
(C) Poverty became non - existent.