List of top English Questions asked in CUET (UG)

Read the given passage and answer the six questions that follow.

On a chilly winter evening, nothing warms you up better than a cup of hot cocoa. Chocolate was first consumed in liquid form by the Olmec people of northwestern Central America around 1500 BCE. It was even enjoyed by the Aztec Emperor Montezuma, and the Aztec word for it (xocolatl, pronounced shoh-kwah-tl) evolved into the English word Chocolate.
But the Aztecs didn’t serve their cocoa hot. And since sugar had not yet arrived from Europe, back then, the drink was often flavoured with peppers and spices. It may not have been quite as indulgent as today’s version, but it was more palatable if you believed, as the Aztecs did, that chocolate was a gift from the Gods and had healing properties.
After the Spanish arrived in the Americas in the 1500s, liquid chocolate made its way across the pond, where wealthy Europeans added sugar and drank it warm. In Chocolate: History, Culture and Heritage, author Bertram Gordon says hot chocolate became ‘‘the beverage of the aristocracy,’’ as sugar was still a luxury.
Soon enough, though, hot choclate caught on with the masses. Chocolate houses — a cross between cafes and casinos — started popping up around 17th-century Europe. In these lively places, hot chocolate was poured from gilded pots into elegant cups (for a posh experience, one can still find it today at the famed Parisian tearoom Angelina’s, which is also in New York City). But by the end of the 18th century, chocolate houses had mostly died off, partly because the cost of chocolate was much higher than that of coffee or tea.
Taking a tour of international cups of cocoa, Italians serve it like a thick pudding. Colombians serve it with a dollop of soft cheese while Mexicans punch it up with vanilla, chilli powder and cinnamon. And Filipinos serve it with mango chunks.

Read the given passage and answer the six questions that follow.

Coffee’s genetic make-up is no trivial concern; 10 million tonnes of the crop were grown and sold in 2022–23. The coffee that we drink comes from two species: Coffea Canephora, which is also known as Robusta and Coffea Arabica, known as Arabica. In many cases, beans from the two species are blended to make a brew. But the beans of single species are also roasted and sold. Overall, Arabica beans represent around 56% of all coffee sold.
The above is an exacting definition of free will. What we commonly mean by free will is that we have a choice in most situations like, who you choose to marry, what profession you pursue or how you react to someone’s aggression. Sounds reasonable. But here’s the catch. Our ability to make that choice too is significantly restricted, dictated by our predispositions. 
Most genetic variation in living organisms comes from hybridization with other species. However, this is a relatively rare event for Coffea Arabica because it has more than two copies of each chromosome — a phenomenon called polyploidy. Coffea Canephora has two copies of each chromosome, but Coffea Arabica contains multiple copies. This makes it much more difficult for Arabica to interbreed with other species.
As a result, Coffea Arabica’s main source of single nucleotide variation is mutation, which occurs at a steady rate over time. However, the species is also relatively young, having formed as a hybrid of Robusta and Coffea Eugenioides — another coffee species that is not widely cultivated — within the past 50,000 years. From that single plant, which has basically no variation, you create the whole species, and then the variation is only the novel mutations that have occurred since that event.
Despite this, there is substantial variation in the physical characteristics of the Arabica coffee plant, including different flavour profiles in the beans and variations in disease resistance, says emeritus geneticist Juan Medrano at the UC Davis Coffee Center at the University of California, Davis. “We’re always talking about low variability at the DNA level, but there is variability at the structural level, at the chromosomal level, at the level of deletions … and insertions,” Medrano says.

Read the given passage and answer the six questions that follow. 

Free will is the ability to decide and act free from any influence of past events or environment. It implies complete freedom to make any choice absolutely. We clearly don't have free will. Our decisions and actions are never divorced from our past.
We have a conditioned mind. Our memories, past impressions and experiences bias and shape our thoughts and actions in the present. It is our karmic imprint. Not just what we are born with, but also what we accumulate while living. We can consider it as the result of our genetic code, upbringing and environment. It's our backstory.
The only way to experience free will is to get rid of all such conditioning; to neutralise our karmic imprint; to be independent of our psychological coding. That’s possible only if we can purify our mind by letting go of all our ego, attachments and fixed beliefs. Then we can reside in the truth of our being.
The above is an exacting definition of free will. What we commonly mean by free will is that we have a choice in most situations like, who you choose to marry, what profession you pursue or how you react to someone’s aggression. Sounds reasonable. But here’s the catch. Our ability to make that choice too is significantly restricted, dictated by our predispositions. 
This applies even to our ability to bring about change within ourselves. Despite a strong resolve to be calmer, kinder or less anxious, our ability to manifest that change depends, partly on our emotional and mental wiring. That’s why some people succeed in such efforts more than the others. 
If you wish to expand the scope of your agency, explore ways to engage in sustained inner work, deepen your self-awareness, examine and reform your conditioned beliefs. But then, I wonder if your inclination to embark on that journey too depends on your current karmic coding.

Read the given passage and answer the six questions that follow.

When I was in my late teens and still undecided about which language I should write in, he told me that the language one is born into, one’s mother tongue, can be the only possible medium of creative expression. For most of his life, my father, Sripat Rai, had been a Hindi editor and critic. Off and on, he translated writings into English from Hindi. He was fond of saying that a failed writer becomes a critic. The weight of his literary expectation came, eventually, to rest on me. He seemed happy that I was showing an inclination for writing. ‘‘She will go far,’’ he told my mother after reading the first story that I sent him from Melbourne. My father’s pronouncement on the mother tongue stayed with me when I later started writing fiction in Hindi. Another thing that I barely acknowledged even to myself was that I felt something like shame whenever I thought of writing in English. It seemed wrong for a granddaughter of Premchand even to be thinking so. Our family had a certain linguistic pride. I knew that Premchand was famous, but I had not at that time realised the extent of his popularity. The fact that I was the granddaughter of Premchand, followed me everywhere. Everyone had a story to tell about their personal engagement with his fiction — the shopkeeper, the long time cook in my father’s Delhi house, a tea vendor, etc. The list was long, for there was practically no one who had not read something by him that had moved them. However, it was this very ubiquity, the reverence and love that he inspired in people, that made of him something too large for me to comprehend in the early years of my life. It led also to the strange feeling that, without having read him and just by being related to him, I had somehow inhaled his writing. The reading happened much later.

Match the words in List I with their meanings in List II: 

Match the blanks in List I with suitable Articles in List II: