मराठी

The Writer Ends the Passage on a Note Of...

Advertisements
Advertisements

प्रश्न

In view of the passage given below. Choose the best option for question.

When talks come to how India has done for itself in 50 years of Independence, the world has nothing but praise for our success in remaining a democracy. On other fronts, the applause is less loud. In absolute terms, India has not done too badly, of course, life expectancy has increased. So has literacy. Industry, which was barely a fledging, has grown tremendously. And as far as agriculture is concerned, India has been transformed from a country perpetually on the edge of starvation into a success story held up for others to emulate. But these are competitive times when change is rapid, and to walk slowly when the rest of the world is running is almost as bad as standing still on walking backwards.

Compared with large chunks of what was then the developing 'world South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia. China and what was till lately a separate Hong Kong-India has fared abysmally. It began with a far better infrastructure than most of these countries had. It suffered hardly or not at all during the Second World War. It had advantages like an English speaking elite, quality scientific manpower (including a Nobel laureate and others who could be ranked among the world's best) and excellent business acumen. Yet, today, when countries are ranked according to their global competitiveness. it is tiny Singapore that figures at the top. Hong Kong is an export powerhouse. So is Taiwan. If a symbol were needed of how far we have fallen back. note that while Korean Cielos are sold in India, no one in South Korea is rushing to buy an Indian car. The reasons list themselves. Topmost is economic isolationism.

The government discouraged imports and encouraged self-sufficiency. Whatever the aim was, the result was the creation of a totally inefficient industry that failed to keep pace with global trends and, therefore. became absolutely uncompetitive. only when the trade gates were opened a little did this become apparent. The years since then have been spent merely trying to catch up. That the government actually sheltered its industrialists from foreign competition is a little strange. For in all other respects, it operated under the conviction that businessmen were little more than crookS how were to be prevented from entering the most important areas of the economy, how we're to be hamstrung in as many ways as possible, how we're to be tolerated in the same way as an inexcusable wan. The high expropriation rates of taxation. the licensing Jaws, the reservation of whole swathes of the industry for the public sector, and the granting of monopolies to the public sector firms were the principal manifestations of this attitude. The government forgot that before wealth could be distributed, it had to be created.

The government forgot that it itself could not create, but only squander wealth. some of the manifestations of the old attitude have changed. Tax rates have fallen. Licensing has been a but abolished. And the gates of global trade have been opened wide. But most of these Changes were first by circumstances partly by the foreign exchange bankruptcy of 1991 ana the recognition that the government could no longer muster the funds of support the public sector, leave alone expand it. Whether the attitude of the government itself. or that of more than handful of ministers has changed, is open to question. In many other ways, however, the government has not changed one with. Business still has to negotiate a welter of negotiations. Transparency is still a long way off. And there is no exit policy. In defending the existing policy, politicians betray an inability to see beyond their noses. A no-exit policy for labour is equivalent to a no-entry policy for new business If one industry is not allowed to retrench labour, other industries will think a hundred times before employing new labour. In other way too, the government hurts industries.

Public sector monopolies like the department of telecommunications and Yidesh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. make it possible for Indian business to operate only at a cost several times that of their counterparts abroad The infrastructure is in a shambles partly because it is unable to formulate a sufficiently remunerative policy for private business, and partly because it does not have the stomach to change market rates for services. After a burst of activity in the early nineties, the government iS dragging itS feet. At the rate, it is going. it will be another fifty years before the government realizes that a pro-business policy is the best pro-people policy By then, of course, the world would have moved even further ahead. 

The writer ends the passage on a note of...

पर्याय

  • cautious optimism

  • pessimism

  • optimism

  • pragmatism

MCQ
Advertisements

उत्तर

pessimism

shaalaa.com
Comprehension Passages (Entrance Exams)
  या प्रश्नात किंवा उत्तरात काही त्रुटी आहे का?
2014-2015 (May) Set 1

संबंधित प्रश्‍न

Direction: The passage given below is followed by a set of question. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.

Johnson was deeply but not necessarily conventionally religious: he struggled within himself most of his life to sustain his belief in God in the face of enormous pressures, disappointments, and psychological calamities. On the surface, and in much of his work, he appeared to be an orthodox, conventional, conservative adherent of revealed religion, of the Church of England, but the conventional Anglican explanations for the existence of evil in the world failed to satisfy him, and in any case, his characteristic reluctance to believe without evidence, his fear of credulity, his dislike of mysteries, continually undermined his attempts to accept conventional beliefs. He was remarkable, privately, for his tolerance; maintaining that the differences between Christian sects (Protestants and Roman Catholics, for example) were trivial, and due primarily to political rather than religious differences.
His religious difficulties began at a very early age. His mother, when he was only three, told him of "a fine place filled with happiness called Heaven" and "a sad place, called Hell." Many years later he recalled that (as one might expect) this account did not impress him very deeply: it is significant, however, that he remembered it at all. After the age of nine, and through his adolescence, he stopped going to church. One part of him remained a skeptic for the rest of his life, and, as his private journals show, even after he had regained his faith he struggled continually (and privately) with fears, guilt, and disbelief: in "The Vanity of Human Wishes," written when he was forty, he returns to a traditional religious theme as well as a personal preoccupation and insists that we cannot find genuine or permanent happiness in this world and that we must therefore turn to religious belief and faith in the existence of a better world after death if we are to endure our existence here. It was a belief; however, which he himself had difficulty maintaining. The happiness derived from such belief was in any case a limited one, but the only alternative
to religious faith, as Johnson saw it, was a dull apathy, a stoical disengagement from life. He was troubled, too — a better word would be tormented — by a fear of death and by a deeper fear that he might in spite of his best efforts be so guilty, so sinful, that he merited damnation. And beneath that fear was another, even deeper — the fear that God might not exist at all, that death might bring annihilation, mere nothingness, the loss of personal identity. He struggled all his life — in the end, successfully — not so much to overcome these fears as to coexist with them. In public, he was much more conventional, much more characteristically paternalistic. He maintained in print, for example, that religion was a valuable asset to society and to mankind and that Anglicanism, as the English state religion, ought therefore to be carefully protected: "Permitting men to preach any opinion contrary to the doctrine of the established church," he wrote, "tends, in a certain degree, to lessen the authority of
the church, and, consequently, to lessen the influence of religion."

What were Johnson’s views about the Christian religion?


Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
Management education gained new academic stature within US Universities and greater respect from outside during the 1960 and 1970s. Some observers attribute the competitive superiority of US corporations to the quality of business education. In1978, a management professor, Herbert A. Simon of Carnegie Mellon University, won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in decision theory. And the popularity of business education continued to grow, since 1960, the number of master’s degrees awarded annually has grown from under 5000 to over 50,000 in the mid-1980’s as the MBA has become known as ‘the passport to the good life’.
By the 1980s, however, US business schools faced critics who charged that learning had little relevance to real business problems. Some went so far as to blame business schools for the decline in US competitiveness.

Amidst the criticisms, four distinct arguments may be discerned. The first is that business schools must be either unnecessary or deleterious because Japan does so well without them. Underlying this argument is the idea that management ability cannot be taught, one is either born with it or must acquire it over years of practical experience. A second argument is that business schools are overly academic and theoretical. They teach quantitative models that have little application to real-world problems. Third, they give inadequate attention to shop floor issues, production processes and to management resources. Finally, it is argued that they encourage undesirable attitudes in students, such as placing value on the short term and ‘bottom line’ targets, while neglecting longer-term development criteria. In summary, some business executives complain that MBA’s are incapable of handling day to day operational decisions, unable to communicate and to motivate people, and unwilling to accept responsibility for following through on implementation plans. We shall analyze these criticisms after having reviewed experiences in other countries.

In contrast to the expansion and development of business education in the United States and more recently in Europe, Japanese business schools graduate no more than two hundred MBA’s each year. The Keio Business School (KBS) was the only graduate school of management in the entire country until the mid-1970s and it still boasts the only two-year master's programme. The absence of business schools in Japan would appear in contradiction with the high priority placed upon learning by its Confucian culture. Confucian colleges taught administrative skills as early as 1630 and Japan wholeheartedly accepted Western learning following the Meiji restoration of 1868 when hundreds of students were dispatched to universities in US, Germany, England, and France to learn the secrets of Western technology and modernization. Moreover, the Japanese educational system is highly developed and intensely competitive and can be credited for raising the literary and mathematical abilities of the Japanese to the highest level in the world.

Until recently, Japan corporations have not been interested in using either local or foreign business schools for the development of their future executives. Their in-company training programs have sought the socialization of newcomers, the younger the better. The training is highly specific and those who receive it have neither the capacity nor the incentive to quit. The prevailing belief, says Imai, ‘is management should be born out of the experience and many years of effort and not learnt from educational institutions.’ A 1960 survey of Japanese senior executives confirmed that a majority (54%) believed that managerial capabilities can be attained only on the job and not in universities.

However, this view seems to be changing: the same survey revealed that even as early as 1960, 37% of senior executives felt that the universities should teach integrated professional management. In the 1980’s a combination of increased competitive pressures and greater multi-nationalization of Japanese business are making it difficult for many companies to rely solely on uponinternally trained managers. This has led to rapid growth of local business programmes and greater use of American MBA programmes. In 1982-83, the Japanese comprised the largest single group of foreign students at Wharton, where they not only learnt the latest techniques of financial analysis but also developed worldwide contacts through their classmates and became Americanized, something highly useful in future negotiations. The Japanese, then do not ‘do without’ business schools, as is sometimes contended. But the process of selecting and orienting new graduates, even MBA’s, into corporations is radically different than in the US. Rather than being placed in highly paying staff positions, new Japanese recruits are assigned responsibility for operational and even menial tasks. Success is based upon Japan’s system of highly competitive recruitment and intensive in-company management development, which in turn are grounded in its tradition of universal and rigorous academic education, life-long employment and strong group identification.

The harmony among these traditional elements has made the Japanese industry highly productive and given corporate leadership a long term view. It is true that this has been achieved without much attention to university business education, but extraordinary attention has been devoted to the development of managerial skills, both within the company and through participation in programmes sponsored by the Productivity Center and other similar organizations. 

The following reasons were responsible for the growth of popularity of business schools among students except


Read the passage given below. Choose the best options for the Question.

IOT has had an impact across all fields, be it industries, government, small or large businesses and even for Personal Consumption.

What is IOT (Internet of things) you might ask? It’s been a growing topic of conversation for some time now. Put in the simplest term it means anything that has an on and off button and is connected to the internet for receiving, analyzing, storing or sending data. This could mean anything, from the watch that you wear to airplanes that can be controlled from a remote location. According to the analyst firm Gartner, by the year 2020, we’ll have over 26 billion connected devices. That could mean people to people, people connected to things and things connected to things.The new rule of the future is going to be “Anything that can be connected will be connected”. Take for example that when you set an alarm to wake up and that alarm goes off it not only wakes you up but also brews your coffee, sets the right temperature of water for your bath, puts on the television to bring you the latest updates from around the globe and all this before you even put a foot out of your bed. This is all done by simply getting the network of interconnected things/devices that have embedded sensors, network connectivity, software and necessary electronics that collect and exchange data. To show how far we have come with technology and connectivity, we have smartwatches such as Fitbit, Garmin to name a few that have changed the way we look at time. We have one device that not only tells us the time but also tracks the number of steps, calories and heart rate. This watch is actually connected to our phone so with just one turn of the wrist, one can tell who is calling or what messages have been received without having to dig through pockets or handbags.

IOT is making its presence felt in health care as well. Doctors can now remotely monitor and communicate with their patients and health care providers can benefit from this. Whether data comes from foetal monitors, electrocardiograms, temperature monitors or blood glucose levels, tracking this information is vital for some patients. Many of this requires to follow up interaction with healthcare professionals. With smarter devices that deliver more valuable data, it can reduce the need for direct patient-physician interaction.

Take for instance in the sporting field, minute chips are being attached to balls and bats which will transmit information of how fast the ball is travelling and a batsman’s moves, the time, the angles, the pressure on the bat at different positions, data of the muscle stretch if he’s hit a six so on and so forth. Formula one cars are also being fitted with these sensors which relay information on the minute moves being made by the driver. Chips are also being put into wearable devices of sportsmen to detect suboptimal action of any body parts to show signs of stress or strain which will help in the early detection of injuries and take preventive measures. IOT has had an impact across all fields, be it industries, government, small or large business and even for personal consumption. IBM, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco are some of the top players in the IOT spectrum. With billions of devices connected security becomes a big issue. How can people make sure that their data is safe and secure? This is one of the major concerns in the IOT that becomes a hot topic. Another issue is with all these billions of devices sharing data companies will be faced with the problem of how to store, track, analyse and make vast sense of the information being generated. Companies are monitoring the network segment to identify anomalous traffic and to take action if necessary. Now that we have a fair understanding of IOT let’s see what impact it’s had on the education sector. The only constant in our lives is change and learning. From the get-go, we learn, be it to the walk, talk or run. We adapt to the changing times and constantly learn from them. Education or learning as we know it in the broader sense is the most important of all and the one that decides which way we handle those changes to impact us and the world. Today’s world is fast-paced and to keep up with this we need an infusion of speed with learning. From the classroom assignments, lectures, blackboards, and chalk we have come a long way to what is now known as e-learning (electronic learning) or m-learning (mobile learning). With the GenNext it is imperative to provide the right kind of education. The rise of technology and IOT allows schools to improve the safety of their campuses, keep track of resources and enhance access to information. It ensures data quality being the top priority but also facilitates the development of content allowing teachers to use this technology to create smart lesson plans and ensuring the reach of this content to any corner of the world.

How is IOT a concept of connecting?


Paragraph: A fundamental principle of pharmacology is that all drugs have multiple actions. Actions that are desirable in the treatment of disease are considered therapeutic, while those that are undesirable or pose risks to the patient are called "effects." Adverse drug effects range from the trivial, e.g., nausea or dry mouth, to the serious, e.g., massive gastrointestinal bleeding or thromboembolism; and some drugs can be lethal. Therefore, an effective system for the detection of adverse drug effects is an important component of the health care system of any advanced nation. Much of the research conducted on new drugs aim at identifying the conditions of use that maximize beneficial effects and minimize the risk of adverse effects.

The intent of drug labeling is to reflect this body of knowledge accurately so that physicians can properly prescribe the drug; or, if it is to be sold without prescription, so that consumers can properly use the drug.

The current system of drug investigation in the United States has proved very useful and accurate in identifying the common side effects associated with new prescription drugs. By the time a new drug is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, its side effects are usually well described in the package insert for physicians. The investigational process, however, cannot be counted on to detect all adverse effects because of the relatively small number of patients involved in premarketing studies and the relatively short duration of the studies.

Animal toxicology studies are, of course, done prior to marketing in an attempt to identify any potential for toxicity, but negative results do not guarantee the safety of a drug in humans, as evidenced by such well-known examples as the birth deformities due to thalidomide.

This recognition prompted the establishment in many countries of programs to which physicians report adverse drug effects. The United States and other countries also send reports to an international program operated by the World Health Organization. These programs, however, are voluntary reporting programs and are intended to serve a limited goal: alerting a government or private agency to adverse drug effects detected by physicians in the course of practice. Other approaches must be used to confirm suspected drug reactions and to estimate incidence rates. These other approaches include conducting retrospective control studies; for example, the studies associating endometrial cancer with estrogen use, and systematic monitoring of hospitalized patients to determine the incidence of acute common side effects, as typified by the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program.

Thus, the overall drug surveillance system of the United States is composed of a set of information bases, special studies, and monitoring programs, each contributing in its own way to our knowledge about marketed drugs. The system is decentralized among a number of governmental units and is not administered as a coordinated function. Still, it would be inappropriate at this time to attempt to unite all of the disparate elements into a comprehensive surveillance program. Instead, the challenge is to improve each segment of the system and to take advantage of new computer strategies to improve coordination and communication.

The author relies on which of the following in developing the passage?


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 given passage carefully and attempt the questions that follow.

It is an old saying that knowledge is power. Education is an instrument that imparts knowledge and therefore, indirectly controls power. Therefore, ever since the dawn of our civilisation, persons in power have always tried to supervise or control education. It has been the handmaid of the ruling class. During the Christian era, the ecclesiastics controlled the institution of education and diffused among the people the gospel of the Bible and religious teachings. These gospels and teachings were no other than a philosophy for the maintenance of the existing society. It taught the poor man to be meek and to earn his bread with the sweat of his brow, while the priests and the landlords lived in luxury and fought duels for the slightest offence. During the Renaissance, education passed more from the clutches of the priest into the hands of the prince. In other words, it became more secular. Under the control of the monarch, education began to devise and preach the infallibility of its masters, the monarch or king. It also invented and supported fantastic theories like “The Divine right Theory” and that the king can do no wrong, etc. With the advent of the industrial revolution, education took a different turn and had to please the new masters. It now no longer remained the privilege of the baron class, but was thrown open to the new rich merchant class of the society. The philosophy which was in vogue during this period was that of “Laissez Faire” restricting the function of the state to a mere keeping of laws and order while on the other hand, in practice the law of the jungle prevailed in the form of free competition and the survival of the fittest.

Who controlled education during the Renaissance? 


Choose the word that is opposite in the meaning of the given word.

Pre-requisite


Read the given passages and answer the question with the help of the information provided in the passage.

Under very early common law, all felonies were punishable by death. The perpetrators of the felony were hanged whether or not a homicide had been committed during the felony. Later, however, some felonies were declared to be non-capital offences. The common law courts, in need of a deterrent to the use of deadly force in the course of these non-capital felonies, developed the "felony-murder" rule. The first formal statement of the rule stated: '1\ny killing by one in the commission of a felony is guilty of murder." The killing was a murder whether intentional or unintentional, accidental or mistaken. The usual requirement of malice was eliminated and the only criminal intent necessary was the intent to commit the particular underlying felony. all participants in the felony were guilty of murder actual killer and non-killer confederates. Proponents of the rule argued that it was justified because the felony demon treated a lack of concern for human life by the commission of a violent and dangerous felony and that the crin1e was murder either because of a conclusive presumption of malice or simply by force of statutory definition. Opponents of the rule describe it as a highly artificial concept and "an enigma wrapped in a riddle." They are quick to point out that the rule has been abandoned in England where it originated, abolished in India, severely restricted in Canada and a number of other commonwealth countries are unknown in continental Europe and abandoned in Michigan. In reality, the real strength of the opponents' criticism stems from the bizarre and of times unfair results achieved when the felony-murder rule is applied mechanically. Defendants have been convicted under the rule where the killing was purely accidental, or the killing took place after the Felony during the later flight from the scene, or a third party killed another (police officer killed a citizen or vice versa, or a victim died of a heart attack 15-20 minutes after the robbery was over, or the person killed was an accomplice in the felony). Attacks on the rule have come from all directions with basically the same demand - re-evaluate and abandon the archaic legal fiction; restrict and F it vicarious criminal liability; prosecute killers for murder, not non-killers; increase punishment for the underlying felony as a real deterrent and initiate legislative modifications. With the unstable history of the felony - murder rule, including its abandonment by many jurisdictions in this country, the felony-murder rule is dying a slow but certain death. 

According to the passage, opponents of the felony-murder rule have raised all of the following objections to the statute except


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 instill such beliefs and prejudices as are thought useful by his employers. 

The modern teacher is not able to follow the ideals of his predecessors because


Read the given passages and answer the question with the help of the information provided in the passage.

Once upon a time, there was a royal elephant that used to reside in the premises of the king's palace. The elephant was very dear to the king, so he was well-fed and well treated. There was also a Dog who lived near the Elephant's shed. He was very weak and skinny. He was always fascinated by the smell of rich sweet rice being fed to the royal elephant. One day, the Dog could no longer resist the aroma of the rice and somehow managed to sneak into the Elephant's shed. He ate the grains of sweet rice that fell from the Elephant's mouth. He liked the rice so much, that he started going there daily to eat the rice. For days, the huge Elephant didn't notice the small dog as he was busy enjoying the delicious food. Gradually, the Dog grew bigger and stronger eating such rich food. Finally, the Elephant noticed him and allowed him access to the food. The Elephant enjoyed the company of the Dog and started sharing his food with him. They also started spending time with each other and soon became good friends. They ate together, slept together and played together. While playing, the Elephant would hold the Dog in his trunk and swing him back and forth. Soon neither of them was happy without the other. They became great friends and didn't want to be separated from each other.

Then one day, a man saw the Dog and asked the Elephant-keeper, "I want to buy this Dog. What price do you want for it?" The Elephant keeper didn't own the Dog but sold it and extracted a sum of money from this deal. The man took the Dog to his home village, which was quite far away. The King's Elephant became very sad after this incident. He missed his friend a lot and started neglecting everything. He didn't want to do anything without his dear friend, so he stopped eating, drinking and even bathing. Finally, the Elephant-keeper reported this to the King; however, he didn't mention anything about the Dog. The King had a wise minister, who was known for his keen understanding of animals. The King ordered the minister, "Go to the Elephant shed and find out the reason for the Elephant's condition". The intelligent minister went to the Elephant's shed and found the Elephant very sad. He examined the Elephant and asked the Elephant keeper, "There is nothing wrong with this Elephant's body, then why does he look so sad?" I think this Elephant is grief-stricken, possibly due to the loss of a dear friend.

Do you know if this Elephant shared a close friendship with anyone? The Elephant-keeper said, "There was a Dog who used to eat, sleep and play with the Elephant. He was taken by a stranger three days ago''. The minister went back to the King and said, "Your majesty, in my opinion, the royal Elephant is not sick, but he is lonesome without his dear friend, the Dog". The King said, "You're right, friendship is one of the most wonderful things of life. Do you know where that ·Dog is?" The Minister replied, "Elephant keeper has informed me that a stranger took him away and he doesn't know his whereabouts". The King asked, "how can we bring back my Elephant's friend and make him happy again?" The Minister suggested, "Your Majesty, make a declaration that whoever has the dog that used to live at the royal Elephant's shed will be penalised". The King did the same and the man who had taken the dog, instantly turned him loose when he heard the proclamation. As soon as he was freed, the Dog ran back as fast as he could to the Elephant's shed. The Elephant was so delighted to see the Dog that he picked his friend up with his trunk and swung him back and forth. The Dog wagged his tail, while the Elephant's eyes sparkled with happiness. The King was content to see the Elephant happy once again and rewarded the Minister for his wise judgment. 

What did the Dog do once he was set free?


Share
Notifications

Englishहिंदीमराठी


      Forgot password?
Use app×