List of top English Questions

Fill in the blanks with the correct alternative Caw is to crows as ...............is to cows.

Find the maximum number of times that any one of the given words fits the set of sentences. disabled flimsy crippled lame
1) Don’t make ................... excuses.
2) Liberalization may have ............. smaller manufacturers.
3) Being a defaulter at the stock exchange makes him a ............ duck.
4) A ................ person may limp.

Choose the most appropriate passive construction of the sentence: ‘He is doing his job well.’

There are three underlined words below, followed by their usages. Determine the sentences, in which the use of words is correct or appropriate :
Pray. Prey. Prying
A. If you pray with faith, they say, it will be answered.
B. He has fallen a prey to cheats
C. Prying into the affairs of others is bad.

The following sentence has a missing punctuation mark, choose the right answer. My mother who is from the village is very superstitious

Find the correct match of grammatical function with usage for the word: AFTER

	Grammatical function		Usage
1	adjective	5	you may  go after having your lunch
2	adverb	6	It appear to be the after effect of the disease
3	conjunction	7	Many graduates are hankering after jobs
4	Preposition	8	He came soon after

Choose the sentence in which the given word is used correctly (grammatically and semantically) ALMOST

Read the edited excerpt of an article by NELSON VINOD MOSES and answer the questions in this context. A successful non-resident Indian employed in the United States returns to a backward Indian village and transforms the lives of the villagers. Sounds familiar? At 31, Ashwin Naik is pacing through the path Shah Rukh Khan traced in his off-bear Bollywood movie, Swades. Naik had just quit his cushy job in a genomics firm in the US to join MIT Sloan School of Business. With a month in hand, he headed home a travelled through the remote areas of Bagalkot district in Karnataka. The woeful social conditions he saw moved him. Naik chucked the MBA course and in six months set up Vaatsalya Healthcare, a rural healthcare delivery system. In February 2005, Vaatsalya’s first hospital opened in Hubli. Two more centres were opened in Gadag and Karwar to offer specialist services of surgeons and facilities such as physiotherapy for children suffering from cerebral palsy. “We introduced paediatric surgery for infants below six months,” says Naik. “Else, patients would have to be taken to distant cities of Hubli or Bangalore.” Naik plans 100 more units in five states in the next three years. Mere charity by an affluent, middle-class professional? Far from it. Vaatsalya is one among rapidly spreading ‘for profit’ social enterprises that serve the poor and bring in profit. Mumbai-based Ziqitza, an imbalance services company, is another. It never refuses a patient for money, and charges Rs. 50 to 200. Done fleetingly in India and elsewhere till now, entrepreneurial minds with a social conscience are methodically creating such models at a greater pace. “There has been a boom in the past two years,” says Varun Sahni, country director of Acumen Fund, a US- based social fund that invests in companies that target low income communities. “Currently, there are about 1,000 in India.” The timing seems perfect. There is a wide market acceptance and funding has been coming in easily. These enterprises work across a swathe of areas including healthcare, education, rural energy, agriculture, arts and crafts, banking and more. ‘For profit’ entrepreneurs are obsessed with social and environmental impact in addition to the financial returns. Since they are answerable to the investors, they try expanding the business rapidly. SKS Microfinance, for instance, started in 1998 and has now over 900,000 customers, 440 branches and an outstanding loan disbursement of over Rs. 452 crores as of August 2007

Read the following passage and answer within its context.
TRIPs agreement provides a comprehensive set of global trade rules for the protection of copyright patents, trademarks, industrial designs, trade secrets, semiconductor lay out designs, and geographical indications, that apply to all the number-countries irrespective of their levels of development, natural and human endowments and history. Every member-country has been asked by the WTO to amend its national patent law to confirm to that universal globalized format for legislation relating to pharmaceutical, agrochemical, food, alloys, etc. Under Article 65, the developed countries have been asked to change their laws within another five years, and the less developed countries within an additional five years. The least developed countries have been asked to make those changes by 2005 AD. This attempt at global standardisation and uniformity by way of TRIP’s agreement is in conflict with the main thrust of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 that set out the conditions for sustainable development. These two reveal two contrasting types of international approaches and norms. While the 1992 Earth Summit and the 1993 convention on biodiversity (CBD) focused on ‘diversity’ as being fundamental to sustain life and development, TRIPs and WTO are pushing for ‘conformity’ to international standardized norms on patents, services, labour, investment and what not irrespective of their history, ecology, level of economic development, etc. But despite their diametrically opposed viewpoints, 170 countries signed CBD upholding the need for diversity, and 50 countries signed the TRIPs agreement in 1994 claiming the urgency of uniformity, with a very large element of common names (130) in both. The convention on bio-diversity (CBD) in its Article 16.5 specifically asserts that intellectual property right must not be in conflict with conservation and sustainable use of bio-diversity, a provision that has been totally ignored by those who composed the TRIPs agreement. While in case of agriculture the higher yield of patented products induces the farmers to switch form a more varied production pattern, the resulting narrowing of genetic base makes the economy and society more vulnerable to plant disease and epidemics. It is true that the move towards cultivation of a smaller number of higher yielding varieties and the uniform spread of the same variety over a large space predates the present debate on patent, particularly since the introduction of the green revolution technology in the mid-sixties, but there can be no doubt that the latter has brought about a qualitative change in the scenario and has created possibility of a vast quantitative change too in that direction. So far no attempt has been made to reconcile the two conflicting approaches of CBD and TRIPs. If diversity is so important for sustaining life, how can WTO demand conformity to standardised global formats?

The following is an excerpt from a recent article by David Ewing Duncan. Read the passage and answer the questions within its context.
Eye surgeon Virendar Sangwan has perfected a procedure so cutting-edge that most who have tried it have failed. In an operating theatre in the central Indian city of Hyderabad, he surgically implants corneas grown in a petri dish from stem cells by his colleague Geeta Vemuganti in patients with damaged eyes. Together they perform about 80 corneal regeneration procedures a year, making the L.V. Prasad Eye Institute, where they work, one of the most prolific facilities in the world using stem cells to regenerate tissues of any kind. The Sangwan-Vemuganti team uses stem cells found in the tissues of living adults, not ones derived from embryos. Teams all over the world are working with adult stem cells, trying to coax them to regrow cells in hearts, brains, livers and other organs, but progress is slow. Besides corneas, scientists have had some success regrowing skin cells and bone tissues, but those procedures remain experimental. “A number of programs around the world have tried to perfect this treatment, but they have had bad outcomes,” says University of Cincinnati eye surgeon and stem cell specialist Edward Holland. “It is impressive what they are doing at Prasad.” In addition to the Hyderabad project, only Holland’s program and a half-dozen others in the world conduct operations using corneas grown from stem cells.The treatment uses stem cells harvested from the limbus, located where the cornea touches the white of the eye. For those with damaged corneas, these cells - called “limbic” and “conjunctiva” - are harvested from a patients good eye, if he has one, or from a close relative. They are placed in a petri dish and chemically tweaked to grow into the lower layer of a cornea, called epithelium. It is then transplanted into the eye of the patient where in most cases it takes hold and grows. In 56% of the cases at the Prasad Institute, patient could still see clearly after 40 months later.
Indians are well known for reverse engineering, meaning they can deduce how drugs are made in order to produce generic versions. But in this case, Sangwan and Vemuganti, a pathologist, developed the technique on their own from reading papers and running experiments in the lab. Sangwan says he had a number of patients with burned eyes who could not helped with standard corneal transplants from cadavers, so he persuaded Vemuganti to try growing corneas in her lab. “You know how to grow cells, and I know how to do the transplant surgery.” Vemuganti recalls him saying. “Why don’t we work together?” She smiles and shakes her head. “I had no clue if this was going to work.” Vemuganti’s major innovation was developing a platform on which to grow corneas. First she designed a circular glass tube about the size of a stack of coins. Then she overlaid the glass with tissue from a human placenta which is “a good surface to grow corneas on.” She says. After that she placed stem cells in four places around a circle, added a growth medium, and watched the corneas begin to grow. Commercial interests among stem cell companies for the procedure has been scant because of the perceived small volume of patients, says venture capitalist Antoun Nabhan of ay Capital, who sits on the board of Cellerant, a leading stem cell company in San Carlos. Calif. But corneal stem cell treatment may have wider applications, say ophthalmologist Ivan Schwab of University of California at Davis. “These stem cells are similar to others in the body that make mucous membrane,” he say. “These techniques of growing stem cells might one day be used to treat mucous-membrane tissue in the sinuses, bladder, and other organs.”

Read the following passage and answer within its context.
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 answerable 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 of 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 argument that he has learnt to repeat on such occasions. Something about knowledge of the past making it possible to understand the present and mould 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.

In the following sentence choose the erroneous segment.
A                   B                       C
\(\text{\underline{We took a taxi so we would be on time for the meeting}}\)

A contextual usage is provided for the word below. Pick the word that is most inappropriate. MALINGER: The young man made it a point to malinger inspite of the assigned work load.

The following is a scrambled sentence with the segments marked 1,2,3 and 4. Choose the alternative with the order of segments that best reconstruct the sentence.
1. For all the padre’s rhetoric about the English as God’s Chosen People, the padre had a whole tribe of Anglo-Indian first cousins.
2. Padre Rotton was an even more striking case.
3. by various Indian wives, all of whom were at that moment engaged in fighting on the rebel side in Avadh, where they took an active part in besieging the British Residency in Lucknow.
4. These included James Rotton who could not speak English and the twenty two Muslim sons of his convert cousin, Felix Rotton.

Which of the following does not make a sensible word/ phrase when added to the given word?
FIRE

Arrange the sentence 1,2,3,4 to form a logical sequence between sentences I and II. Choose the alternative where the four combinations make a meaningful sentence.
I. We all value having the freedom
1) which many of us fail to honour
2) to make the choices we want in our careers
3) but with great freedom comes great responsibility
4) so most companies fall prey to the policies which become rigid
II. and that’s probably one reason we find most companies not following what they preach

A single word equivalent for the statement ‘Speak falsely with deliberate intent’ is

Which two sentences in the following convey the same idea? Choose from the combinations listed below:
1.Wasn’t there any checking at the airport?
2.I want to know if there was any checking at the airport.
3.I wonder if there should have been any checking at the airport?
4.There should have been checking at the airport.

Identify the option with the correct spelling.

For the pair of sentences below choose the right option.
1. Those are them.
2. Those are they.

Choose the erroneous underlined segment or option 'd' if no error.
(a) \(\text{\underline{had been dead}}\) (b) \(\text{\underline{for five days}}\)(c) \(\text{\underline{The corpse}}\) 

Choose the correct alternative that best explains the following idiom. Writing on the wall.

Askance means:

The _____ managed to deceive the entire village.

She ordered the taxi driver, Driver faster, _____ ?"