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प्रश्न
Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions given after the passage:
1. Often, we passionately pursue matters that in the future appear to be contradictory to our real intention or nature; and triumph is followed by remorse or regret. There are numerous examples of such a trend in the annals of history and contemporary life.
2. Alfred Nobel was the son of Immanuel Nobel, an inventor who experimented extensively with explosives. Alfred too carried out research and experiments with a large range of chemicals; he found new methods to blast rocks for the construction of roads and bridges; he was engaged in the development of technology and different weapons; his life revolved around rockets and cannons and gun powder. The ingenuity of the scientist brought him enough wealth to buy the Bofors armament plant in Sweden.
3. Paradoxically, Nobel's life was a busy one yet he was lonely; and as he grew older, he began suffering from guilt of having invented the dynamite that was being used for destructive purposes. He set aside a huge part of his wealth to institute Nobel Prizes. Besides honouring men and women for their extraordinary achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine and literature, he wished to honour people who worked for the promotion of peace.
4. It's strange that the very man whose name was closely connected with explosives and inventions that helped in waging wars willed a large part of his earnings for the people who work for the promotion of peace and the benefit of mankind. The Nobel Peace Prize is intended for a person who has accomplished the best work for fraternity among nations, for abolition or reduction of war and for promotion of peace.
5. Another example that comes to one's mind is that of Albert Einstein. In 1939, fearing that the Nazis would win the race to build the world's first atomic bomb, Einstein urged President Franklin D Roosevelt to launch an American programme on nuclear research. The matter was considered and a project called the Manhattan Project was initiated. The project involved intense nuclear research the construction of the world's first atomic bomb. All this while, Einstein had the impression that the bomb would be used to protect the world from the Nazis. But in 1945, when Hiroshima was bombed to end World War II, Einstein was deeply grieved and he regretted his endorsement of the need for nuclear research.
6. He also stated that had he known that the Germans would be unsuccessful in making the atomic bomb, he would have probably never recommended making one. In 1947, Einstein began working for the cause of disarmament. But, Einstein's name still continues to be linked with the bomb.
Man's fluctuating thoughts, changing opinions, varying opportunities keep the mind in a state of flux. Hence, the paradox of life: it's certain that nothing is certain in life.
One of the paradoxes in Alfred's life was that he was ___________.
विकल्प
lonely yet rich
occupied yet lonely
intelligent yet lonely
hard-working but a failure
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उत्तर
One of the paradoxes in Alfred's life was that he was intelligent yet lonely.
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संबंधित प्रश्न
In 1954, a Bombay economist named A.D. Shroff began a forum of free Enterprise, whose ideas on economic development were somewhat at odds with those then influentially articulated by the Planning Commission of the Government of India. Shroff complained against the 'indifference, if not discouragement, with which the state treated entrepreneurs.
At the same time as Shroff, but independently of him, a journalist named Philip Spratt was writing a series of essays in favour of free enterprise. Spratt was a Cambridge communist who was sent by the party in the 1920s to the foment revolution in the subcontinent. detected in the act, he spent many years in an Indian jail. The books he read in the prison, and his marriage to an Indian woman afterward, inspired a steady move rightwards. By the 1950s, he was editing a pro-American weekly from Banglore, called mysIndia. there he inveighed against the economic policies of the government of India. These, he said, treated the entrepreneur 'as a criminal who has dared to use his brain independently of the state to create wealth and give employment’. The state’s chief planner, P.C. Mahalanobis had surrounded himself with Western leftists and Soviet academicians, who reinforced his belief in 'rigid control by the government overall activities’. The result, said Spratt, would be `the smothering of free enterprise, a famine of consumer goods, and the tying down of millions of workers to soul-deadening techniques.'
The voices of men like Spratt and Shroff were drowned in the chorus of popular support for a model of heavy industrialization funded and directed by the governments. The 1950s were certainly not propitious times for free marketers in India. But from time to time their ideas were revived. After the rupee was devalued in 1966, there were some moves towards freeing the trade regime and hopes that the licensing system would also be liberalized. However, after Indira Gandhi split the Congress Party in 1969, her government took its `left turn’, nationalizing a fresh range of industries and returning to economic autarky.
Which of the following statements can most reasonably be inferred from the information available in the passage:
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
Civilization is basically a vital kind of grouping. Without civilizations, the world as we know it would not be. Civilizations have different qualities than regular groups of people such as nomads. For example, a civilization develops surpluses of things which helps the people be a stable community. These surpluses also create the construction and growth of cities and help develop secure, formal states. The government is also present in civilizations. One very important part of a civilization is an advanced writing method. A civilization can only be complete with all of these factors, or it will just fall apart. Nomads are nowhere close to being a civilization even though sometimes groups of nomads have good technology. The words 'culture' and 'civilization' have been often used synonymously, though they have clearly defined meanings differentiating them. 'Civilization' means the betterment of ways of living, making Nature bend to fulfill the needs of humankind. It includes also organizing societies into politically well-defined groups working collectively for improved conditions of life in matters of food, dress, communication, and so on. Thus a group considers itself as civilized, while others were looked down upon as barbarians. This has led to wars and holocausts, resulting in the mass destruction of human beings. What are the good parts of our civilization? First and foremost there are order and safety. If today I have a quarrel with another man, I do not get beaten merely because I am physically weaker and he can kick me down. I go to law, and the law will decide as fairly as it can between the two of us. Thus in disputes between man and man right has taken the place of might. Moreover, the law protects me from robbery and violence. Nobody may come and break into my house, steal my goods or run off with my children. Of course, there are burglars, but they are very rare, and the law punishes them whenever it catches them. It is difficult for us to realize how much this safety means. Without safety, these higher activities of mankind which make up civilization could not go on. The inventor could not invent, the scientist find out or the artist make beautiful things. Hence, order and safety, although they are not themselves civilization are things without which civilization would be impossible. They are as necessary to our civilization as the air we breathe is to us, and we have grown so used to them that we do not notice them any more than we notice the air. Another great achievement of our civilization is that today civilized men are largely free from the fear of pain. They still fall ill, but illness is no longer the terrible thing it used to be... Not only do men and women enjoy better health; they live longer than they ever did before, and they have a much better chance of growing up... Thirdly, our civilization is more secure than any that have gone before it. This is because it is much more widely spread... Previous civilizations were specialized and limited, they were like oases in a desert.
The essential condition for the promotion of higher activities of life is:
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
The world dismisses curiosity by calling it idle, or mere idle curiosity – even though curious persons are seldom idle. Parents do their best to extinguish curiosity in their children because it makes life difficult to be faced every day with a string of unanswerable questions about what makes fire hot or why grass grows. Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline are invited to join our university. Within the university, they go on asking their questions and trying to find the answers. In the eyes of a scholar, that is mainly what a university is for. Some of the questions that scholars ask seem to the world to be scarcely worth asking, let alone answering. They ask questions too minute and specialized for you and me to understand without years of explanation. If the world inquires one of them why he wants to know the answer to a particular question, he may say, especially if he is a scientist, that the answer will, in some obscure way, make possible a new machine or weapon or gadget. He talks that way because he knows that the world understands and respects utility. But to you who are now part of the university, he will say that he wants to know the answer, simply because he does not know it. The way a mountain climber wants to climb a mountain simply because it is there. Similarly, a historian when asked by outsiders why he studies history may come out with the argument that he has learned to repeat on such occasions, something about the knowledge of the past, making it possible to understand the present and mold the future. But if you really want to know why a historian studies the past, the answer is much simpler: something happened, and he would like to know what. All this does not mean that the answers which scholars find to their questions have no consequences. They may have enormous consequences, but these seldom form the reason for asking the question or pursuing the answers. It is true that scholars can be put to work answering questions for the sake of the consequences, as thousands are working now, for example, in search of a cure for cancer. But this is not the primary function of the scholar, for the consequences are usually subordinate to the satisfaction of curiosity.
Common people consider some of the questions asked by scholars as unimportant
Read the following passage carefully and answer the question:
Antigone was one of the daughters of Oedipus, that tragic figure of male power who had been cursed by Gods for mistakenly his father and subsequently marrying his mother and assuming the throne of Thebes. After the death of Oedipus, civil war broke out and a battle was waged in front of the seventh gate of Thebes his two sons led opposing factions and at the height of the battle fought and killed each other. Oedipus brother Creon, uncle of Antigone, was now undisputed master of the city. Creon resolved to make an example of the brother who had fought against him, Polynices, by refusing the right of honourable burial. The penalty of death was promulgated against any who would defy this order.
Antigone was distraught. Polynices had been left unburied, unwept, a feast of flesh for keen eyed carrion birds. Antigone asks her sister Ismene, for it was a challenge to her royal blood. Now it is time to show whether or not you are worthy of your royal blood is be 'not my brother and yours? Whether you like it or not? I shall never desert him-never. But Simone responds, “How could you dare-when Creon has expressly forbidden it? Antigone, we are women, it is not for us to fight against men". With a touch of bitterness, Antigone releases her sister from the obligation to help her. but argues she cannot shrug off the burden. "if I die for it what happiness! Live,..if you will live, and defy the holiest of laws of heaven".
Why did Creon deny decent burial to Polynices? He did so because
Read the given passage carefully and attempt the question that follow.
The work which Gandhiji had taken up was not only regarding the achievement of political freedom but also the establishment of a new social order based on truth and nonviolence, unity and peace, equality and universal brotherhood and maximum freedom for all. This unfinished part of his experiment was perhaps even more difficult to achieve than the achievement of political freedom. In the political struggle, the fight was against a foreign power and all one could do was either join it or wish it success and give it his/her moral support. In establishing a social order on this pattern, there was a strong possibility of a conflict arising between diverse groups and classes of our own people. Experience shows that man values his possessions even more than his life because in the former he sees the means for perpetuation and survival of his descendants even after his body is reduced to ashes. A new order cannot be established without radically changing the mind and attitude of men towards property and, at some stage or the other, the ‘haves’ have to yield place to the ‘have-nots’. We have seen, in our time, attempts to achieve a kind of egalitarian society and the picture of it after it was achieved. But this was done, by and large, through the use of physical force.
In the ultimate analysis it is difficult, if not impossible, to say that the instinct to possess has been rooted out or that it will not reappear in an even worse form under a different guise. It may even be that like a gas kept confined within containers under great pressure, or water held back by a big dam, once the barrier breaks, the reaction will one day sweep back with a violence equal in extent and intensity to what was used to establish and maintain the outward egalitarian form. This enforced egalitarianism contains, in its bosom, the seed of its own destruction.
The root cause of class conflict is possessiveness or the acquisitive instinct. So long as the ideal that is to be achieved is one of securing the maximum material satisfaction, possessiveness is neither suppressed nor eliminated but grows on what it feeds. Nor does it cease to be possessiveness, whether it is confined to only a few or is shared by many.
If egalitarianism is to endure, it has to be based not on the possession of the maximum material goods by a few or by all but on voluntary, enlightened renunciation of those goods which cannot be shared by others or can be enjoyed only at the expense of others. This calls for substitution of material values by purely spiritual ones. The paradise of material satisfaction, which is sometimes equated with progress these days, neither spells peace nor progress. Mahatma Gandhi has shown us how the acquisitive instinct inherent in man can be transmuted by the adoption of the ideal of trusteeship by those who ‘have’ for the benefit of all those who ‘have not’ so that, instead of leading to exploitation and conflict, it would become a means and incentive for the amelioration and progress of society respectively.
Which of the following statements is ’not true’ in the context of the passage?
The question in this section is based on the passage. The question is to be answered on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.
Although the legal systems of England and the United States are superficially similar, they differ profoundly in their approaches to and uses of legal reasons: substantive reasons are more common than formal reasons in the United States, whereas in England the reverse is true. This distinction reflects a difference in the visions of law that prevails in the two countries. In England, the law has traditionally been viewed as a system of rules; the United States favours a vision of law as an outward expression of community’s sense of right and justice.
Substantive reasons, as applied to law, are based on moral, economic, political and other considerations. These reasons are found both “in the law” and “outside the law” so to speak. Substantive reasons inform the content of a large part of the law: constitutions, statutes, contracts, verdicts, and the like. Consider, for example, a statute providing or purposes were explicitly written into the statute was to ensure quiet and safety in the park. Now suppose that a veterans’ group mounts a World War II jeep (in running order but without a battery) as a war memorial on a concrete slab in the park, and charges are brought against its members. Most judges in the United States would find the defendants not guilty because what they did had no adverse effect on park’s quiet and safety.
Formal reasons are different in that they frequently prevent substantive reasons from coming into play, even when substantive reasons are explicitly incorporated into the law at hand. For example, when a document fails to comply with stipulated requirements, the court may render the document legally ineffective. A Will requiring written witness may be declared null and void and, therefore, unenforceable for the formal reason that the requirement was not observed. Once the legal rule–that a Will is invalid for lack of proper witnessing –has been clearly established, and the legality of the rule is not in question, application of that rule precludes from consideration substantive arguments in favour of Will’s validity or enforcement.
Legal scholars in England and the United States have long bemused themselves with extreme examples of formal and substantive reasoning. On the one hand, formal reasoning in England has led to wooden interpretations of statutes and an unwillingness to develop the common law through judicial activism. On the other hand, freewheeling substantive reasoning in the United States has resulted in statutory interpretations so liberal that the texts of some statutes have been ignored.
It can be inferred from the passage that English judges would like to find the veterans’ group discussed in the second paragraph guilty of violating the statute because
The question in this section is based on the passage. The question is to be answered on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.
Although the legal systems of England and the United States are superficially similar, they differ profoundly in their approaches to and uses of legal reasons: substantive reasons are more common than formal reasons in the United States, whereas in England the reverse is true. This distinction reflects a difference in the visions of law that prevails in the two countries. In England, the law has traditionally been viewed as a system of rules; the United States favours a vision of law as an outward expression of community’s sense of right and justice.
Substantive reasons, as applied to law, are based on moral, economic, political and other considerations. These reasons are found both “in the law” and “outside the law” so to speak. Substantive reasons inform the content of a large part of the law: constitutions, statutes, contracts, verdicts, and the like. Consider, for example, a statute providing or purposes were explicitly written into the statute was to ensure quiet and safety in the park. Now suppose that a veterans’ group mounts a World War II jeep (in running order but without a battery) as a war memorial on a concrete slab in the park, and charges are brought against its members. Most judges in the United States would find the defendants not guilty because what they did had no adverse effect on park’s quiet and safety.
Formal reasons are different in that they frequently prevent substantive reasons from coming into play, even when substantive reasons are explicitly incorporated into the law at hand. For example, when a document fails to comply with stipulated requirements, the court may render the document legally ineffective. A Will requiring written witness may be declared null and void and, therefore, unenforceable for the formal reason that the requirement was not observed. Once the legal rule–that a Will is invalid for lack of proper witnessing –has been clearly established, and the legality of the rule is not in question, application of that rule precludes from consideration substantive arguments in favour of Will’s validity or enforcement.
Legal scholars in England and the United States have long bemused themselves with extreme examples of formal and substantive reasoning. On the one hand, formal reasoning in England has led to wooden interpretations of statutes and an unwillingness to develop the common law through judicial activism. On the other hand, freewheeling substantive reasoning in the United States has resulted in statutory interpretations so liberal that the texts of some statutes have been ignored.
The author of the passage suggests that in English law a substantive interpretation of a legal rule might be warranted under which one of the following circumstances.
Read the given passages and answer the question with the help of the information provided in the passage.
Today, with a Noble Prize to its credit, Grameen is one of the largest microfinance organisations in the world. It started out lending small sums to poor entrepreneurs in Bangladesh to help them grow from a subsistence living to a livelihood. The great discovery its founders made was that even with few assets, these entrepreneurs repaid on time. Grameen and micro-finance have since become financial staples of the developing world. Grarneen's approach, unlike other micro-financers, uses the group-lending model. Costs are kept down by having borrowers vet one another, tying together their financial fates and eliminating expensive loan offices entirely. The ultimate promise of Grameen is to use business lending as a way for people to lift themselves out of poverty. Recently, Grameen has taken on a different challenge by setting up operations in the US Money may be tight in the waning recession but it is still a nation of 100000 bank branches. Globally, the working micro-finance equation consists of, borrowing funds cheaply and keeping loan defaults and overhead expenses sufficiently low. Microlenders, including Grarneen, do this by charging colossal interest rates-as high as 60% or 70% which is necessary to compensate for the risk and attract bank funding.
But, loans at rates much above the standard 15% would most likely be attacked as usurious in America. So, the question is whether there is a role for a third world leader in the world's largest economy? Grameen America believes that in a few years it will be successful and turn a profit thanks to 9 million US households untouched by mainstream banks and 21 million using the likes of payday loans and pawn shops for financing. But enticing the unbanked won't be easy. Alter all, profit has long eluded micro-financiers and if it is not lucrative, it is not microlending, but charity. When Grameen first went to the US, in the late 1980s. it tripped up. Under Grameen's fuselage, banks started microloans to entrepreneurs with a shocking 30% loss. But, Grameen America says that this time results will be different because Grameen employees themselves will be making the loans, not training an American bank to do it. More often than not, the borrowers, Grameen finds, in the US already have jobs (as factory workers e.g.) or side businesses-selling toys. cleaning houses, etc. The loans from Grameen, by and large, provide a steadier source of funding, but they don't create businesses out of nothing. But, money isn't everything. More importantly, for many entrepreneurs, group members are tremendous sources of support to one another. So, even if studies are yet to determine if Grameen is a clear-cut pathway out of poverty it still achieves something useful.
What has adversely affected the success of microfinance institutions in the US?
Read the given passages and answer the question with the help of the information provided in the passage.
King Solomon was celebrated for his wisdom. The Queen of the Sheba once paid a visit to his court. She was very much impressed by his wealth and grandeur. She had also heard of his uncanny ability to solve the most difficult puzzles which she meant to test. She showed Solomon two garlands of flowers, one in the right-hand and the other in the left and asked which one was real. The courtiers were puzzled. Both the garlands looked the same. Solomon could not say a word. The Queen felt triumphant. Solomon soon ordered that the windows be opened. A number of bees flew into the hall from the garden and settled on the garland in the right-hand. "The flowers in the right-hand are real", said Solomon. The Queen was greatly impressed with his wisdom.
The Queen intended to test Solomon's
Read the given passages and answer the question with the help of the information provided in the passage.
Teaching, more even than most other professions, has been transformed during the last hundred years from a small, highly skilled profession concerned with a minority of the population, to a large and important branch of public service. The profession has a great and honourable tradition, extending from the dawn of history until recent times, but any teacher in the modern world who allows himself to be inspired by the ideals of his predecessors is likely to be made sharply aware that it is not his function to teach what he thinks, but to instil such beliefs and prejudices as are thought useful by his employers.
In ancient times, the teaching profession was
