Our government has taken/ propose a number of major initiatives during the eleventh Five Year Plan. Some of the new initiative in the school and literacy sector and higher and technical education sector include right of children to free and compulsory education, launching a Saakshar Bharat, ICT in secondary school and in open and distance learning, evolving a national curriculum framework for teacher education, examination reform in accordance with NCF- 2005, introducing a system of replacement of marks by grades at the secondary stage in school affiliated to CBSE, recommendation of Yash Pal Committee and National Knowledge Commission, establishment of 14 innovation Universities aiming at world class standards, setting up 10 new national institutes of technology, launching of new scheme of interest, subsidy on educational loan taken for professional courses by the economically weaker students, scheme for setting up of 374 model degree colleges in districts, 150 women's hostels for women of weaker sections and minorities, academic reforms like semester system, choice based credit system, regular revision of syllabi, impetus to research etc.
The overall Idea behind the passage is
- Importance to higher education
- Importance to people below poverty line
- Women's education
- None of these
The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
The task is to identify the overall idea behind the passage. Let's examine the content of the passage to determine the correct answer.
The passage discusses several initiatives taken by the government during the eleventh Five Year Plan. These initiatives are categorized into various educational sectors, highlighting the government's focus on enhancing education infrastructure and quality. The initiatives include:
- Right to free and compulsory education for children.
- ICT in secondary education and open learning.
- Evolving a curriculum framework and reforms for teacher education.
- Examination and grading reforms in CBSE.
- Recommendations implementation from the Yash Pal Committee and National Knowledge Commission.
- Establishing innovation universities and institutes of technology.
- Interest subsidies on educational loans for economically weaker students.
- Setting up model degree colleges and women's hostels.
- Academic reforms like the semester system, credit systems, and syllabus revisions.
The passage predominantly emphasizes higher education initiatives, such as establishing new universities, technology institutes, and providing financial support for professional courses.
Now, let's evaluate the provided options:
- Importance to higher education: This option is correct because the passage mainly focuses on improving higher education through new universities, technical institutes, and educational reforms.
- Importance to people below poverty line: While the passage does mention interest subsidy for economically weaker students, the overall emphasis is not on poverty alleviation but on education.
- Women's education: The passage mentions women's hostels but does not focus extensively on women's education as the central theme.
- None of these: This option is incorrect since the passage clearly emphasizes the importance of higher education.
Thus, the correct answer is "Importance to higher education."
The free and compulsory education bill of the eleventh Five Year Plan is a major initiative towards
- Technical Education
- Mass education
- Replacing Grade to marks
- Saeva Shiksha Abhiyan
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
The Free and Compulsory Education Bill, introduced during the Eleventh Five Year Plan, involved several educational reforms. Understanding this context helps identify the correct option related to the bill. Here is the step-by-step explanation:
- Understanding the Context: The passage outlines various educational initiatives under the Eleventh Five Year Plan. Among these initiatives, there's an emphasis on reform in the examination system at the secondary level where grades replace traditional marks.
-
Analyzing the Options:
- Technical Education: This option refers to reforms focused on technological or vocational training, which is not specifically highlighted in the passage regarding the Free and Compulsory Education Bill.
- Mass Education: This refers to initiatives aimed at broadening the scope and reach of education. While this is a general aim of many educational reforms, it is not explicitly linked to grading reforms in the passage.
- Replacing Grade to marks: This option is directly related to the passage's mention of converting the marking system at the secondary level to a grading system, which aligns with the described examination reforms.
- Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan: This is a historical program aimed at universalizing elementary education, but it doesn't directly relate to the examination reform of the Eleventh Five Year Plan discussed in the passage.
- Conclusion: Based on the passage, the reform initiative explicitly described involves changing the system from traditional marks to grades, aligning with the option: Replacing Grade to marks. Hence, this is the correct answer.
Technical education is encouraged by our government by the introduction of
- ICT in open distance learning
- Ten new National Institutes of Technology
- Innovation Univertsities
- The National Knowledge Commission
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
To determine how the government is encouraging technical education, we need to carefully analyze the given options and context provided in the passage regarding initiatives during the Eleventh Five Year Plan:
- The passage mentions multiple government initiatives related to both school education and technical/higher education.
- These initiatives include establishing various educational structures, enhancing curriculum frameworks, and implementing financial support systems.
- A key focus in the technical education sector mentioned in the passage is the "setting up of 10 new national institutes of technology."
This statement aligns directly with the option provided:
- Ten new National Institutes of Technology - This option directly matches the passage's statement about establishing new technology institutes, indicating encouragement for technical education.
- \(\text{ICT in open distance learning}\) - While ICT in distance learning is supportive of education, it primarily fosters general education, not specifically technical education.
- \(\text{Innovation Universities}\) - These are mentioned regarding world-class standards but not directly linked to "technical education" in the context of the passage.
- \(\text{The National Knowledge Commission}\) - Although involved in educational reform, it does not specify a focus on technical education.
Thus, according to the passage, the government's introduction of Ten new National Institutes of Technology (answer option) is the explicit measure encouraging technical education.
In order to ensure all round development in the field of education our government should take steps towards
- Educating all women and people below poverty line
- The enhancement of the learning achievements
- The implementation of the eleventh Five Year Plan and the eradication of caste, creed and gender bias
- all of the above
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
The question pertains to initiatives for comprehensive development in the field of education by the government. Based on the given options and the passage, let's review the relevant aspects:
-
Educating all women and people below the poverty line:
- The passage mentions initiatives such as setting up women's hostels for women from weaker sections and minorities, which aligns with this point.
- Focus on the economically weaker sections with schemes for interest subsidies on educational loans indicates efforts to uplift these sections through education.
-
The enhancement of learning achievements:
- The passage details several efforts aimed at improving learning outcomes, such as examination reforms, establishment of innovation Universities, evolving a national curriculum framework, and academic reforms.
- Such initiatives are directly tied to enhancing learning achievements and quality of education delivered.
-
The implementation of the Eleventh Five Year Plan and the eradication of caste, creed, and gender bias:
- The entire passage is centered around initiatives taken during the Eleventh Five Year Plan, which aligns with the implementation aspect mentioned.
- Programs targeting women and minorities signify efforts to overcome biases of caste, creed, and gender, fostering inclusivity and equality in the education sector.
Considering all these aspects, it is evident that the government's educational development initiatives during the Eleventh Five Year Plan encompass all the points mentioned in the options. Therefore, the correct answer is "all of the above." This option covers comprehensive educational reforms, making it the most inclusive choice.
Top Questions on Reading Comprehension
- Acrucial moderating factor in how people experience comparisons is self-esteem. Individuals with high self-esteem are more likely to interpret upward comparison as informative rather than threatening. They are more resilient in the face of others’ success and more likely to believe they can reach their own goals. In contrast, people with low self-esteem are more prone to interpret comparison as judgment, reinforcing negative self-views and triggering feelings of inadequacy.
This dynamic creates a self-reinforcing loop. People with high self-esteem are less vulnerable to upward comparison, which intensifies those doubts. Those with a secure sense of self are more likely to use comparison as a learning tool. The same external stimulus—a colleague’s achievements, a friend’s popularity—can have radically different effects depending on internal stability.
Self-esteem also influences how people choose their comparison targets. Research has found that individuals often engage in “selective comparison,” seeking out those who confirm their existing beliefs about themselves. This can become a subtle form of self-sabotage. Someone who feels unworthy may subconsciously seek out targets that reinforce that sense, perpetuating a narrative of inferiority. One of the most promising antidotes to social comparison is temporal comparison—evaluating oneself not against others, but against one’s own past. This method has been shown to increase motivation and satisfaction, especially when individuals can see concrete progress. Temporal comparison activates the same reward circuits as social comparison but avoids the threat systems associated with social ranking. It also reinforces agency: individuals focus on what they can control and improve rather than what others control. In therapeutic and coaching settings, temporal comparison is used to help clients build self-efficacy and track growth over time.
Moreover, people who focus on self-improvement rather than social dominance are less likely to fall into cycles of envy or self-pity. They can still use others as inspiration, but they do so without attaching their self-worth to the outcome. This is not to say they never compare—but that they focus on learning, rather than judgment. The most skilful approach to comparison may lie in eliminating it, but in reframing it as feedback. When we interpret comparison as information rather than a verdict, we can ask, “What can I learn from this?” This shift turns comparison into a growth tool. Teachers mentor their students, not as rivals. Psychologists emphasize that the key variable here is mindset.
A fixed mindset sees comparison as a threat. If someone else is better, it means we are worse. A growth mindset sees comparison as a map. If someone else has reached a certain level, it means the path exists. This reframing is not just a cognitive trick. It changes the emotional tone of comparison, making it more likely to inspire than to wound. Reframing also requires emotional regulation—the ability to notice an initial pang of envy or shame without reacting impulsively. With practice, individuals can learn to pause, reflect, and reinterpret their emotional responses. Over time, this builds resilience and self-trust, allowing comparison to become a learning tool rather than a cage.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
When people who are talking don’t share the same culture, knowledge, values, and assumptions, mutual understanding can be especially difficult. Such understanding is possible through the negotiation of meaning. To negotiate meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. You also need the flexibility in world view, and a generous tolerance for mistakes, as well as a talent for finding the right metaphor to communicate the relevant parts of unshared experiences or to highlight the shared experiences while demphasizing the others. Metaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in large measure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorize your experiences. Problems of mutual understanding are not exotic; they arise in all extended conversations where understanding is important.
When it really counts, meaning is almost never communicated according to the CONDUIT metaphor, that is, where one person transmits a fixed, clear proposition to another by means of expressions in a common language, where both parties have all the relevant common knowledge, assumptions, values, etc. When the chips are down, meaning is negotiated: you slowly figure out what you have in common, what it is safe to talk about, how you can communicate unshared experience or create a shared vision. With enough flexibility in bending your world view and with luck and charity, you may achieve some mutual understanding.
Communication theories based on the CONDUIT metaphor turn from the pathetic to the evil when they are applied indiscriminately on a large scale, say, in government surveillance or computerized files. There, what is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included, and it is assumed that the words in the file have meaning in themselves—disembodied, objective, understandable meaning. When a society lives by the CONDUITmetaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are the likely products.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humanity such a burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons. Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might hide from the problems and the generals. To the contrary, there was a high insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coart forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, but always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
...Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
As the post–World War II generation of liberal democratic leaders forged new, highly successful domestic and international institutions and policies throughout the West, the weaknesses of liberal democracy that dominated the two decades after World War II faded from view. But they did not go away.
First, because liberal democracy restrains majorities, it slows the achievement of goals that majorities support. This generates frustration with institutional restraints, and an unacknowledged envy of authoritarian systems that can act quickly and decisively. China can build huge cities in the time it takes the United States to review the environmental impact of small highway projects. Liberal democracy requires more patience than many possess. Second, liberal democracy requires tolerance for minority views and ways of life to which many citizens are deeply opposed. It is natural to feel that if we consider certain views or ways of life to be odious, we should use public power to suppress them. In many such cases, liberal democracy restrains this impulse, a psychological burden that some will find unbearable.
This leads directly to the third inherent problem of liberal democracy—the distinction it requires us to make between civic identity and personal or group identity. For example, although we may consider certain religious views false and even dangerous, we must, for civic purposes, accept those who hold these views as our equals. They may freely express these views; they may organize to promote them; they may vote, and their votes are given the same weight as ours. The same goes for race, ethnicity, gender, and all the particularities that distinguish us from one another.
This requirement often goes against the grain of natural sentiments. We want the public sphere to reflect what we find most valuable about our private commitments. Liberal democracy prevents us from fully translating our personal identities into our public lives as citizens. This too is not always easy to bear. The quest for wholeness—for a political community, or even a world, that reflects our most important commitments—is a deep yearning to which liberal leaders can always appeal.
Nor is the fourth inherent difficulty of liberal democracy—the necessity of compromise—easy to bear. If what I want is good and true, why should I agree that public decisions must incorporate competing views? James Madison gives us the answer: in circumstances of liberty, diversity of views is inevitable, and unless those who agree with us form a majority so large as to be irresistible, the alternative to compromise is inaction, which is often more damaging, or oppression, which always is.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
Beware of the old newspapers
stacked
on that little three legged stool over there.
Don’t disturb them.
I know it for a fact
that snakes have spawned in between these sheets.
Don’t even look in that direction.
It’s not because of breeze
that their corners are fluttering.
It’s alive, that nest of newspapers.
new born snakes, coiling and uncurling,
are turning their heads to look at you.
That white corner has spread its hood.
A forked tongue
shoots out of its mouth.
Keep your eyes closed.
Get rid of the whole goddamn pile if you
want to
in the morning.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
Questions Asked in CMAT exam
- A "Febian Entrepreneur" is a term used to describe a type of entrepreneur who focuses on gradual and steady growth rather than rapid scaling. Which of the following best describes the approach of a Febian Entrepreneur?
- CMAT - 2025
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- CMAT - 2025
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- Dudhwa National Park, known for its rich biodiversity and tiger conservation efforts, is located in which Indian state?
- CMAT - 2025
- Current Affairs
- The first CDS (Chief of Defence Staff) of India was appointed to enhance coordination and integration among the three branches of the Indian Armed Forces. Who was the first CDS of India?
- CMAT - 2025
- Current Affairs
- A clock is set at 8 am. It loses 10 minutes every 24 hours. What will be the true time when the clock shows 11 am?
- CMAT - 2025
- Logical and Analytical Reasoning Skills