List of practice Questions

The reformer must know that what moves people is the authentic life, not mere writing. The newspaper and journals that Tilak and other reformers ran, the books they wrote, sold little, but had enormous effect. Their writing was known to reflect and be just an extension of, their exemplary lives. It was the authenticity of their lives which lent weight to their message, to their example. All knew that their lives were an integral whole - they were not moral in public life and lack in private, not vice versa. They were not full of pious thoughts and sacred resolutions within the walls of a temple.
A writer who is merely entertaining his readers, even one who is merely informing them, can do what he wants with the rest of his life. But the writer, who sets out to use his pen to reform public life, cannot afford such dualities. Here is the testimony of one great man - about the influence of another, Lokmanya Tilak.
"I believe that an editor who has anything worth saying and who commands a clientiele cannot easily be hushed. He delivered his finished message as soon as he is put underduress. Tilak spoke more eloquently from the Mandalay fortress than through columns of the printed Kesari.
His influence was multiplied thousand fold by his imprisonment and his speech and his pen had acquired much greater power after he was discharged than before his imprisonment. By his death we have been editing his paper without pen and speech through the sacred resolution of the people to realize his life's dream.
He could possibly have done more if he were today in flesh preaching his view. Critics like me would perhaps be still finding fault in the expression of this or that. Today, his message rules millions of hearts which are determined to raise permanent living memorial by the fulfilment of his ambition in their lives".
Direction for Reading Comprehension: The passages given here are followed by some questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option whose answer best aligns with the passage
The word ‘anarchy’ comes from the Greek anarkhia, meaning contrary to authority or without a ruler, and was used in a derogatory sense until 1840, when it was adopted by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to describe his political and social ideology. Proudhon argued that organization without government was both possible and desirable. In the evolution of political ideas, anarchism can be seen as an ultimate projection of both liberalism and socialism, and the differing strands of anarchist thought can be related to their emphasis on one or the other of these.
Historically, anarchism arose not only as an explanation of the gulf between the rich and the poor in any community, and of the reason why the poor have been obliged to fight for their share of a common inheritance, but as a radical answer to the question ‘What went wrong?’ that followed the ultimate outcome of the French Revolution. It had ended not only with a reign of terror and the emergence of a newly rich ruling caste, but with a new adored emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, strutting through his conquered territories.
The anarchists and their precursors were unique on the political Left in affirming that workers and peasants, grasping the chance that arose to bring an end to centuries of exploitation and tyranny, were inevitably betrayed by the new class of politicians, whose first priority was to re-establish a centralized state power. After every revolutionary uprising, usually won at a heavy cost for ordinary populations, the new rulers had no hesitation in applying violence and terror, a secret police, and a professional army to maintain their control.
For anarchists the state itself is the enemy, and they have applied the same interpretation to the outcome of every revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries. This is not merely because every state keeps a watchful and sometimes punitive eye on its dissidents, but because every state protects the privileges of the powerful.
The mainstream of anarchist propaganda for more than a century has been anarchistcommunism, which argues that property in land, natural resources, and the means of production should be held in mutual control by local communities, federating for innumerable joint purposes with other communes. It differs from state socialism in opposing the concept of any central authority. Some anarchists prefer to distinguish between anarchist-communism and collectivist anarchism in order to stress the obviously desirable freedom of an individual or family to possess the resources needed for living, while not implying the right to own the resources needed by others. . . .
There are, unsurprisingly, several traditions of individualist anarchism, one of them deriving from the ‘conscious egoism’ of the German writer Max Stirner (1806–56), and another from a remarkable series of 19th-century American figures who argued that in protecting our own autonomy and associating with others for common advantages, we are promoting the good of all. These thinkers differed from free-market liberals in their absolute mistrust of American capitalism, and in their emphasis on mutualism.
Direction for Reading Comprehension: The passages given here are followed by some questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option whose answer best aligns with the passage
Mode of transportation affects the travel experience and thus can produce new types of travel writing and perhaps even new “identities.” Modes of transportation determine the types and duration of social encounters; affect the organization and passage of space and time; . . . and also affect perception and knowledge—how and what the traveler comes to know and write about. The completion of the first U.S. transcontinental highway during the 1920s . . . for example, inaugurated a new genre of travel literature about the United States—the automotive or road narrative. Such narratives highlight the experiences of mostly male protagonists “discovering themselves” on their journeys, emphasizing the independence of road travel and the value of rural folk traditions.
Travel writing’s relationship to empire building— as a type of “colonialist discourse”—has drawn the most attention from academicians. Close connections have been observed between European (and American) political, economic, and administrative goals for the colonies and their manifestations in the cultural practice of writing travel books. Travel writers’ descriptions of foreign places have been analysed as attempts to validate, promote, or challenge the ideologies and practices of colonial or imperial domination and expansion. Mary Louise Pratt’s study of the genres and conventions of 18th- and 19th-century exploration narratives about South America and Africa (e.g., the “monarch of all I survey” trope) offered ways of thinking about travel writing as embedded within relations of power between metropole and periphery, as did Edward Said’s theories of representation and cultural imperialism. Particularly Said’s book, Orientalism, helped scholars understand ways in which representations of people in travel texts were intimately bound up with notions of self, in this case, that the Occident defined itself through essentialist, ethnocentric, and racist representations of the Orient. Said’s work became a model for demonstrating cultural forms of imperialism in travel texts, showing how the political, economic, or administrative fact of dominance relies on legitimating discourses such as those articulated through travel writing. . . .
Feminist geographers’ studies of travel writing challenge the masculinist history of geography by questioning who and what are relevant subjects of geographic study and, indeed, what counts as geographic knowledge itself. Such questions are worked through ideological constructs that posit men as explorers and women as travelers—or, conversely, men as travelers and women as tied to the home. Studies of Victorian women who were professional travel writers, tourists, wives of colonial administrators, and other (mostly) elite women who wrote narratives about their experiences abroad during the 19th century have been particularly revealing. From a “liberal” feminist perspective, travel presented one means toward female liberation for middle- and upper-class Victorian women. Many studies from the 1970s onward demonstrated the ways in which women’s gendered identities were negotiated differently “at home” than they were “away,” thereby showing women’s selfdevelopment through travel. The more recent poststructural turn in studies of Victorian travel writing has focused attention on women’s diverse and fragmented identities as they narrated their travel experiences, emphasizing women’s sense of themselves as women in new locations, but only as they worked through their ties to nation, class, whiteness, and colonial and imperial power structures.
Direction for Reading Comprehension: The passages given here are followed by some questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option whose answer best aligns with the passage
I’ve been following the economic crisis for more than two years now. I began working on the subject as part of the background to a novel, and soon realized that I had stumbled across the most interesting story I’ve ever found. While I was beginning to work on it, the British bank Northern Rock blew up, and it became clear that, as I wrote at the time, “If our laws are not extended to control the new kinds of super-powerful, super-complex, and potentially superrisky investment vehicles, they will one day cause a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions.” . . . I was both right and too late, because all the groundwork for the crisis had already been done—though the sluggishness of the world’s governments, in not preparing for the great unraveling of autumn 2008, was then and still is stupefying. But this is the first reason why I wrote this book: because what’s happened is extraordinarily interesting. It is an absolutely amazing story, full of human interest and drama, one whose byways of mathematics, economics, and psychology are both central to the story of the last decades and mysteriously unknown to the general public. We have heard a lot about “the two cultures” of science and the arts—we heard a particularly large amount about it in 2009, because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the speech during which C. P. Snow first used the phrase. But I’m not sure the idea of a huge gap between science and the arts is as true as it was half a century ago—it’s certainly true, for instance, that a general reader who wants to pick up an education in the fundamentals of science will find it easier than ever before. It seems to me that there is a much bigger gap between the world of finance and that of the general public and that there is a need to narrow that gap, if the financial industry is not to be a kind of priesthood, administering to its own mysteries and feared and resented by the rest of us. Many bright, literate people have no idea about all sorts of economic basics, of a type that financial insiders take as elementary facts of how the world works. I am an outsider to finance and economics, and my hope is that I can talk across that gulf.
My need to understand is the same as yours, whoever you are. That’s one of the strangest ironies of this story: after decades in which the ideology of the Western world was personally and economically individualistic, we’ve suddenly been hit by a crisis which shows in the starkest terms that whether we like it or not—and there are large parts of it that you would have to be crazy to like—we’re all in this together. The aftermath of the crisis is going to dominate the economics and politics of our societies for at least a decade to come and perhaps longer.
Direction for Reading Comprehension: The passages given here are followed by some questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option whose answer best aligns with the passage
[There is] a curious new reality: Human contact is becoming a luxury good. As more screens appear in the lives of the poor, screens are disappearing from the lives of the rich. The richer you are, the more you spend to be off-screen. . . .
The joy — at least at first — of the internet revolution was its democratic nature. Facebook is the same Facebook whether you are rich or poor. Gmail is the same Gmail. And it’s all free. There is something mass market and unappealing about that. And as studies show that time on these advertisement-support platforms is unhealthy, it all starts to seem déclassé, like drinking soda or smoking cigarettes, which wealthy people do less than poor people. The wealthy can afford to opt out of having their data and their attention sold as a product. The poor and middle class don’t have the same kind of resources to make that happen.
Screen exposure starts young. And children who spent more than two hours a day looking at a screen got lower scores on thinking and language tests, according to early results of a landmark study on brain development of more than 11,000 children that the National Institutes of Health is supporting. Most disturbingly, the study is finding that the brains of children who spend a lot of time on screens are different. For some kids, there is premature thinning of their cerebral cortex. In adults, one study found an association between screen time and depression. . . .
Tech companies worked hard to get public schools to buy into programs that required schools to have one laptop per student, arguing that it would better prepare children for their screenbased future. But this idea isn’t how the people who actually build the screenbased future raise their own children. In Silicon Valley, time on screens is increasingly seen as unhealthy. Here, the popular elementary school is the local Waldorf School, which promises a back-to nature, nearly screen-free education. So as wealthy kids are growing up with less screen time, poor kids are growing up with more. How comfortable someone is with human engagement could become a new class marker.
Human contact is, of course, not exactly like organic food . . . . But with screen time, there has been a concerted effort on the part of Silicon Valley behemoths to confuse the public. The poor and the middle class are told that screens are good and important for them and their children. There are fleets of psychologists and neuroscientists on staff at big tech companies working to hook eyes and minds to the screen as fast as possible and for as long as possible. And so human contact is rare. . . .
There is a small movement to pass a “right to disconnect” bill, which would allow workers to turn their phones off, but for now a worker can be punished for going offline and not being available. There is also the reality that in our culture of increasing isolation, in which so many of the traditional gathering places and social structures have disappeared, screens are filling a crucial void.
In an election several candidates contested for a constituency. In any constituency, the winning candidate was the one who polled the highest number of votes, the first runner up was the one who polled the second highest number of votes, the second runner up was the one who polled the third highest number of votes, and so on. There were no ties (in terms of number of votes polled by the candidates) in any of the constituencies in this election. 
In an electoral system, a security deposit is the sum of money that a candidate is required to pay to the election commission before he or she is permitted to contest. Only the defeated candidates (i.e., one who is not the winning candidate) who fail to secure more than one sixth of the valid votes polled in the constituency, lose their security deposits. 
The following table provides some incomplete information about votes polled in four constituencies: A, B, C and D, in this election.
 Constituency
 ABCD
No. of candidates contesting101258
Total No. of valid votes polled5,00,0003,25,0006,00,030 
No. of votes polled by the winning candidate2,75,00048,750  
No. of votes polled by the first runner up95,000  37,500
No. of votes polled by the second runner up   30,000
% of valid votes polled by the third runner up   10%
The following additional facts are known: 
1. The first runner up polled 10,000 more votes than the second runner up in constituency A.
2. None of the candidates who contested in constituency C lost their security deposit. The difference in votes polled by any pair of candidates in this constituency was at least 10,000.
3. The winning candidate in constituency D polled 5% of valid votes more than that of the first runner up. All the candidates who lost their security deposits while contesting for this constituency, put together, polled 35% of the valid votes.
The Humanities department of a college is planning to organize eight seminars, one for each of the eight doctoral students - A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H. Four of them are from Economics, three from Sociology and one from Anthropology department. Each student is guided by one among P, Q, R, S and T. Two students are guided by each of P, R and T, while one student is guided by each of Q and S. Each student is guided by a guide belonging to their department.
Each seminar is to be scheduled in one of four consecutive 30-minute slots starting at 9:00 am, 9:30 am, 10:00 am and 10:30 am on the same day. More than one seminars can be scheduled in a slot, provided the guide is free. Only three rooms are available and hence at the most three seminars can be scheduled in a slot. Students who are guided by the same guide must be scheduled in consecutive slots.
The following additional facts are also known.
1. Seminars by students from Economics are scheduled in each of the four slots.
2. A’s is the only seminar that is scheduled at 10:00 am. A is guided by R.
3. F is an Anthropology student whose seminar is scheduled at 10:30 am.
4. The seminar of a Sociology student is scheduled at 9:00 am.
5. B and G are both Sociology students, whose seminars are scheduled in the same slot. The seminar of an Economics student, who is guided by T, is also scheduled in the same slot.
6. P, who is guiding both B and C, has students scheduled in the first two slots.
7. A and G are scheduled in two consecutive slots.
A chain of departmental stores has outlets in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata. The sales are categorized by its three departments–‘Apparel’, 'Electronics’, and 'HomeDecor’. An Accountant has been asked to prepare a summary of the 2018 and 2019 sales amounts for an internal report. He has collated partial information and prepared the following table. The following additional information is known. 
Sales Amounts (Crore Rupees)
 DelhiMumbaiBengaluruKolkata
20182019201820192018201920182019
Apparels       54
Electronics789882102907080100
Home Decor 100 72 80 54
1. The sales amounts in the Apparel departments were the same for Delhi and Kolkata in 2018.
2. The sales amounts in the Apparel departments were the same for Mumbai and Bengaluru in 2018. This sales amount matched the sales amount in the Apparel department for Delhi in 2019.
3. The sales amounts in the HomeDecor departments were the same for Mumbai and Kolkata in 2018.
4. The sum of the sales amounts of four Electronics departments increased by the same amount as the sum of the sales amounts of four Apparel departments from 2018 to 2019.
5. The total sales amounts of the four HomeDecor departments increased by Rs 70 Crores from 2018 to 2019.
6. The sales amounts in the HomeDecor departments of Delhi and Bengaluru each increased by Rs 20 Crores from 2018 to 2019. 
7. The sales amounts in the Apparel departments of Delhi and Bengaluru each increased by the same amount in 2019 from 2018. The sales amounts in the Apparel departments of Mumbai and Kolkata also each increased by the same amount in 2019 from 2018.
8. The sales amounts in the Apparel departments of Delhi, Kolkata and Bengaluru in 2019 followed an Arithmetic Progression.
Direction for Reading Comprehension: The passages given here are followed by some questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option whose answer best aligns with the passage
The claims advanced here may be condensed into two assertions: [first, that visual] culture is what images, acts of seeing, and attendant intellectual, emotional, and perceptual sensibilities do to build, maintain, or transform the worlds in which people live. [And second, that the] study of visual culture is the analysis and interpretation of images and the ways of seeing (or gazes) that configure the agents, practices, conceptualities, and institutions that put images to work. . . .
Accordingly, the study of visual culture should be characterized by several concerns. First, scholars of visual culture need to examine any and all imagery – high and low, art and non art.. . . They must not restrict themselves to objects of a particular beauty or aesthetic value. Indeed, any kind of imagery may be found to offer up evidence of the visual construction of reality. . . .
Second, the study of visual culture must scrutinize visual practice as much as images themselves, asking what images do when they are put to use. If scholars engaged in this enterprise inquire what makes an image beautiful or why this image or that constitutes a masterpiece or a work of genius, they should do so with the purpose of investigating an artist’s or a work’s contribution to the experience of beauty, taste, value, or genius. No amount of social analysis can account fully for the existence of Michelangelo or Leonardo. They were unique creators of images that changed the way their contemporaries thought and felt and have continued to shape the history of art, artists, museums, feeling, and aesthetic value. But study of the critical, artistic, and popular reception of works by such artists as Michelangelo and Leonardo can shed important light on the meaning of these artists and their works for many different people. And the history of meaning-making has a great deal to do with how scholars as well as lay audiences today understand these artists and their achievements.
Third, scholars studying visual culture might properly focus their interpretative work on lifeworlds by examining images, practices, visual technologies, taste, and artistic style as constitutive of social relations. The task is to understand how artifacts contribute to the construction of a world. . . . Important methodological implications follow: ethnography and reception studies become productive forms of gathering information, since these move beyond the image as a closed and fixed meaning-event. . . .
Fourth, scholars may learn a great deal when they scrutinize the constituents of vision, that is, the structures of perception as a physiological process as well as the epistemological frameworks informing a system of visual representation. Vision is a socially and a biologically constructed operation, depending on the design of the human body and how it engages the interpretive devices developed by a culture in order to see intelligibly. . . . Seeing . . . operates on the foundation of covenants with images that establish the conditions for meaningful visual experience.
Finally, the scholar of visual culture seeks to regard images as evidence for explanation, not as epiphenomena.
In a certain board examination, students were to appear for examination in five subjects: English, Hindi, Mathematics, Science and Social Science. Due to a certain emergency situation, a few of the examinations could not be conducted for some students. Hence, some students missed one examination and some others missed two examinations. Nobody missed more than two examinations.
The board adopted the following policy for awarding marks to students. If a student appeared in all five examinations, then the marks awarded in each of the examinations were on the basis of the scores obtained by them in those examinations. 
If a student missed only one examination, then the marks awarded in that examination was the average of the best three among the four scores in the examinations they appeared for.
If a student missed two examinations, then the marks awarded in each of these examinations was the average of the best two among the three scores in the examinations they appeared for.
The marks obtained by six students in the examination are given in the table below. Each of them missed either one or two examinations.
 EnglishHindiMathematicsScienceSocial Science
Alva8075707560
Bithi9080558585
Carl75809010090
Deep70901009080
Esha8085956055
Foni8372788883

The following facts are also known.
I. Four of these students appeared in each of the English, Hindi, Science, and Social Science examinations. II. The student who missed the Mathematics examination did not miss any other examination.
III. One of the students who missed the Hindi examination did not miss any other examination. The other student who missed the Hindi examination also missed the Science examination.
Direction for Reading Comprehension: The passages given here are followed by some questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option whose answer best aligns with the passage
174 incidents of piracy were reported to the International Maritime Bureau last year, with Somali pirates responsible for only three. The rest ranged from the discreet theft of coils of rope in the Yellow Sea to the notoriously ferocious Nigerian gunmen attacking and hijacking oil tankers in the Gulf of Guinea, as well as armed robbery off Singapore and the Venezuelan coast and kidnapping in the Sundarbans in the Bay of Bengal. For [Dr. Peter] Lehr, an expert on modern-day piracy, the phenomenon’s history should be a source of instruction rather than entertainment, piracy past offering lessons for piracy present. . . .
But . . . where does piracy begin or end? According to St Augustine, a corsair captain once told Alexander the Great that in the forceful acquisition of power and wealth at sea, the difference between an emperor and a pirate was simply one of scale. By this logic, European empire-builders were the most successful pirates of all time. A more eclectic history might have included the conquistadors, Vasco da Gama and the East India Company. But Lehr sticks to the disorganised small fry, making comparisons with the renegades of today possible.
The main motive for piracy has always been a combination of need and greed. Why toil always a starving peasant in the 16th century when a successful pirate made up to £4,000 on each raid? Anyone could turn to freebooting if the rewards were worth the risk . . . .
Increased globalisation has done more to encourage piracy than suppress it. European colonialism weakened delicate balances of power, leading to an influx of opportunists on the high seas. A rise in global shipping has meant rich pickings for freebooters. Lehr writes: “It quickly becomes clear that in those parts of the world that have not profited from globalisation and modernisation, and where abject poverty and the daily struggle for survival are still a reality, the root causes of piracy are still the same as they were a couple of hundred years ago.” . . .
Modern pirate prevention has failed. After the French yacht Le Gonant was ransomed for $2million in 2008, opportunists from all over Somalia flocked to the coast for a piece of the action. . . . A consistent rule, even today, is there are never enough warships to patrol pirate-infested waters. Such ships are costly and only solve the problem temporarily; Somali piracy is bound to return as soon as the warships are withdrawn. Robot shipping, eliminating hostages, has been proposed as a possible solution; but as Lehr points out, this will only make pirates switch their targets to smaller carriers unable to afford the technology.
His advice isn’t new. Proposals to end illegal fishing are often advanced but they are difficult to enforce. Investment in local welfare put a halt to Malaysian piracy in the 1970s, but was dependent on money somehow filtering through a corrupt bureaucracy to the poor on the periphery. Diplomatic initiatives against piracy are plagued by mutual distrust: The Russians execute pirates, while the EU and US are reluctant to capture them for fear they’ll claim asylum.