ENGLISH - Online Test
Q1. Direction: Rearrange the following six sentences A, B, C, D, E and F in the proper sequence to form a meaningful paragraph, then answer the questions given below them.
A. While the reference point for the former is the state, for the latter it’s society.
B. India’s strategic community’ comprises two distinct circles with little overlap.
C. Consequently, mainstream strategists have an external orientation to their discourse, concentrating on high politics; the latter is more internal oriented.
D. Their prescriptions too are understandably poles apart and thus, the state, to which both their commentary is directed, has to play balancer, and ends up being at the receiving end of criticism from both sides.
E. Out of the two, one can be termed the ‘mainstream’ and the other ‘alternate’.
F. To further elaborate on the external and internal concept−while one is enamored of India’s rise and place in the global order, the other is more sensitive to its vulnerabilities and inadequacies.
Which of the following should be the SIXTH sentence after rearrangement ?
Answer : Option D
Explaination / Solution:
No Explaination.
Q2. Directions: Read each sentence to find out whether there is any grammatical error in it. The error, if any, will be in one part of the sentence. The number of that part is the answer. If there is no error, the answer is ‘No error’. (Ignore the errors of punctuation, if any.)
we had extensively discussions / with the participants and / obtained their feedback / regarding our new services.
Answer : Option A
Explaination / Solution:
Replace 'we had extensively discussions' by 'we had extensive (Adjectiev) discussions', as an Adjective qualifies a Noun (discussions).
Q3.
Direction: Each passage is followed by a set of five statements. Answer according to the directions given for each question.
The average American voter does not care about Libya. That may sound harsh, but it’s generally true. The average American does however care a great deal about gas prices. So perhaps it is no surprise that as the regime of Moammar Gadhafi falls, American news outlets are trying to explain the news out of Libya within the frame of prices at the pump. Heck, it was the first idea that came to my mind as I thumbed through the morning news.
Adding insult to injury is the amount of fuel being used to conduct these fuel-based military operations in the Middle East. A CNN.com article pointed out recently that, “One out of eight U.S. Army casualties in Iraq was the result of protecting fuel convoys. A post on Scaling Green contained a video of FTI Consulting’s Adam Siegel recalling a chat with Gen. Richard Zilmer. In that conversation, the former commander of troops in the Anbar province of Iraq told Seigel, “I need renewable energy because getting fuel to my base is putting people's lives at risk.”
Which of the above statements may be used by American authorities to justify the war on Libya and other middle eastern countries?
Answer : Option D
Explaination / Solution:
This is the opportunistic view that the US administration might have taken to boost its oil supplies, if it were true.
Q4. Direction: Rearrange the following six sentences A, B, C, D, E and F in the proper sequence to form a meaningful paragraph, then answer the questions given below them.
A. While the reference point for the former is the state, for the latter it’s society.
B. India’s strategic community’ comprises two distinct circles with little overlap.
C. Consequently, mainstream strategists have an external orientation to their discourse, concentrating on high politics; the latter is more internal oriented.
D. Their prescriptions too are understandably poles apart and thus, the state, to which both their commentary is directed, has to play balancer, and ends up being at the receiving end of criticism from both sides.
E. Out of the two, one can be termed the ‘mainstream’ and the other ‘alternate’.
F. To further elaborate on the external and internal concept−while one is enamored of India’s rise and place in the global order, the other is more sensitive to its vulnerabilities and inadequacies.
Which of the following should be the SECOND sentence after rearrangement?
Answer : Option A
Explaination / Solution:
No Explaination.
Q5. Directions: Read each sentence to find out whether there is any grammatical error in it. The error, if any, will be in one part of the sentence. The number of that part is the answer. If there is no error, the answer is ‘No error’. (Ignore the errors of punctuation, if any.)
The success of the /government sponsor job guarantee Programmer /has resulted in a / drastic drop in poverty.
Answer : Option B
Explaination / Solution:
Here 'government sponsored job guarantee programme' should be used in place of ‘government sponsor job guarantee Programmer’. 'Programmer' means a person who writes computer programs which is irrelevant to the context of the statement.
Q6. Direction: In given question below, a statement is followed by some assumptions. An assumption is something supposed or taken in for granted. You have to consider the statement and the following assumptions and then decide which of the assumptions is implicit in the statement.
Statement: No reform of income-tax law can be completed without a reasonable and rational personal income-tax rate structure in our country.
Assumptions:
I. Until the present exemption limit for individuals is not raised, tax evasion and black money can’t be checked.
II. Developed countries have reasonable income-tax rate structure.
Assumptions:
I. Until the present exemption limit for individuals is not raised, tax evasion and black money can’t be checked.
II. Developed countries have reasonable income-tax rate structure.
Answer : Option D
Explaination / Solution:
None follows: Assumption I is not exhaustive. Hence it is not implicit. The speaker has nothing to do with other countries. He is talking about his country only. Hence II is not implicit.
Q7. Direction: Rearrange the following six sentences A, B, C, D, E and F in the proper sequence to form a meaningful paragraph, then answer the questions given below them.
A. While the reference point for the former is the state, for the latter it’s society.
B. India’s strategic community’ comprises two distinct circles with little overlap.
C. Consequently, mainstream strategists have an external orientation to their discourse, concentrating on high politics; the latter is more internal oriented.
D. Their prescriptions too are understandably poles apart and thus, the state, to which both their commentary is directed, has to play balancer, and ends up being at the receiving end of criticism from both sides.
E. Out of the two, one can be termed the ‘mainstream’ and the other ‘alternate’.
F. To further elaborate on the external and internal concept−while one is enamored of India’s rise and place in the global order, the other is more sensitive to its vulnerabilities and inadequacies.
Which of the following should be the FIRST sentence after rearrangement?
Answer : Option B
Explaination / Solution:
No Explaination.
Q8. Direction: Read the sentence to find out whether there is any error in it. The error, if any, will be in one part of the sentence. The number of that part is the answer. If the given sentence is correct, the answer is 'No error'. Ignore the errors of punctuation, if any.
One family of three, which stood in the crowd sobbing (1) / and asked not to be named, said simply that they had (2) /lost someone in the Manchester terror attacks and had came (3) / to London to show “solidarity and strength”. (4)
Answer : Option C
Explaination / Solution:
The error lies in part 3 of the sentence where the verb in the past tense ‘came’ is incorrect and needs to be replaced with the verb in the past present tense ‘come’ to make the sentence correct. With ‘had’ the verb should be in the present tense) It should read as:’..and had come to London..’
Q9. Direction: The question below has a statement followed by two assumptions numbered I and II. An assumption is something supposed or taken for granted. You have to consider the statement and the following assumptions and decide which of the assumption is implicit in the statement.
Statement: The government has decided to pay compensation to the tune of Rs. 20 lakh to the family members of soldiers killed in terrorist attack in Uri.
Assumptions:
I. The government has enough funds to meet the expenses due to compensation. II. The youth of India may take part in Indian Army so as to get compensation for their families.
Assumptions:
I. The government has enough funds to meet the expenses due to compensation. II. The youth of India may take part in Indian Army so as to get compensation for their families.
Answer : Option A
Explaination / Solution:
Only I; It is clear that the amount of compensation must have been decided keeping in mind the monetary position of the government. So, I is implicit. However nothing can be said about the II, it is purely illogical to make such assumption. Nobody would want compensation at the expense of their life.
Q10.
Direction: Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.
As bitcoin launched in 2009, most early adopters saw its disruptive potential. While bitcoin has stalled for some time approaching a valid use of the term “stagnation”, cryptocurrency in a larger context is still just as disruptive. In 2011, I stated that bitcoin (cryptocurrency) will do to banks what e-mail did to the postal services. This is not just true, but it will be even more brutal to governments, and by extension, governmental services.
Now, governments love anything that smells like innovation, because it means jobs, this magic word that smells of magic unicorns to anybody in government. Therefore, people who like innovation are nurturing this bitcoin thing, this cryptocurrency thing, this ethereum thing (as if governments made a difference, but still). Lots of startups in tip-of-the-spear financial technology means that their government may get a head start over other governments. They have no idea that cryptocurrency will radically scale back the power of government, not just their own one, but also all those other governments over which it seeks a competitive edge.
Individual people in government can also love bitcoin because it gives them something to do. More specifically, it gives them something to regulate. Fortunately, other people in government see that this gives them something to do, which is to hold those government regulators with an overdeveloped sense of order somewhat in check. You’ll hear no shortage of wannabe regulators saying that “bitcoin is bad because it’s being used in crime and contraband trade!”, to which I usually respond, “well, bitcoin is a currency, so I mean you put it in relation to the US Dollar, which then… is not used in crime and contraband trade, is this the argument you’re using to support your position?”, at which point the discussion generally changes topic.
This completely disregards the observation that bitcoin and cryptocurrency were designed to not submit to regulation in the first place. Well, at least not governmental regulation. It is heavily regulated – but by its source code, and by its source code alone.
The reason this will cripple today’s governments — today’s idea of what a government is and does — is because today’s economy is built on one layer doing actual work and three layers of abstraction on top.
At the first and bottom layer of our economy are the individual people doing all the actual work.
The second layer on top of the first is the abstraction we call corporations, which is a way to organize our economy and optimize transaction costs.
The third layer on top of the second would be banks, which handle money for corporations and individual people in a middleman gatekeeper position.
Finally, the fourth layer is the government, which takes advantage of the banks’ gatekeeper position to siphon off taxes from money flows in order to fund itself and governmental services. In other words, layer four completely depends on layer three for its operations – or at least for the relative simplicity of funding its operations.
Now, what bitcoin and cryptocurrency do is make away with the banks – cutting them out of the loop entirely, making them redundant, obsolete, dinosaurified. This resulting absence of anything where banks used to be creates an air gap between the functional part of the economy – people and corporations – and governments who want funding.
The way governments want to tap all money flows in order to fund itself is not entirely unlike how the surveillance agencies want to tap all information flows in order to have an information advantage. In this way, the deployment of cryptocurrency is to tax collection what deployment of end-to-end encryption is to mass surveillance. The government can no longer reach into money flows and grab what it wants, but will be dependent on people actively sending it money. The government can’t point a gun at a computer and have it give up its money; you can only make a computer operator feel very sorry for not voluntarily producing the keys to that money. So the government is no longer able to collect taxes without the consent – even if coerced and forced consent – of the people being thus collected.
The deployment of cryptocurrency is to tax collection what deployment of end-to-end encryption is to mass surveillance.
Governments, and individual people in government, have no idea about this bigger picture. They’re far too wrapped up in things-as-usual to notice. They won’t see it coming until it’s already happened.
When this happens, there will be no shortage of people in government who suddenly want to regulate cryptocurrency – only to find out it will be as effective as regulating gravity. When this happens, it will be redefined from a coercive Colossus able to take what it wants and do what it wants into a construct that actually depends on people wanting to fund it. This will be a very interesting time to live in. While today’s governments will see themselves as getting crippled, I suspect most citizens will regard it as unquestionably healthy that governments will actually begin to depend on the approval of the people at large.
We’re just beginning to see the changes to society that the Internet brings. This is one of them.
Cryptocurrency can cripple the present governments because-
(i) they are ignorant of the potential risk of cryptocurrency and will be unable to control it eventually
(ii) it cannot be regulated by government regulation but can only be regulated by its source code alone
(iii) today’s economy is built on one layer doing actual work and rest three layers of abstraction on top
(i) they are ignorant of the potential risk of cryptocurrency and will be unable to control it eventually
(ii) it cannot be regulated by government regulation but can only be regulated by its source code alone
(iii) today’s economy is built on one layer doing actual work and rest three layers of abstraction on top
Answer : Option D
Explaination / Solution:
The answer can be interpreted from these lines, “The reason this will cripple today’s governments — today’s idea of what a government is and does — is because today’s economy is built on one layer doing actual work and three layers of abstraction on top.” and "This completely disregards the observation that bitcoin and cryptocurrency were designed to not submit to regulation in the first place. Well, at least not governmental regulation. It is heavily regulated – but by its source code, and by its source code alone."
