Education is not only an instrument for enhancing efficiency but also an effective tool of augmenting and widening democratic participation and upgrading the overall quality of individual and society. India has a vast population and to capture the potential demographic dividend to remove the acute regional, social and gender imbalances, the government is committed to make concerted efforts for improving the quality of education as mere quantitative expansion will not deliver the desired results in view of the fast changing domestic and global scenario.
According to the author, education not only enhances the efficiency of the learner, it also
- widens his/her democratic participation
- upgrading overall quality of individual
- improving society
- all of the above
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
To determine the correct answer for the given question, we must carefully analyze the comprehension passage.
The passage states: "Education is not only an instrument for enhancing efficiency but also an effective tool of augmenting and widening democratic participation, upgrading the overall quality of the individual and society."
This information supports the following assertions:
- Enhancing Democratic Participation: The passage explicitly mentions that education aids in "widening democratic participation," making option "widens his/her democratic participation" valid.
- Upgrading Overall Quality of Individual: The text states that education is effective in "upgrading the overall quality of the individual," supporting option "upgrading overall quality of individual".
- Improving Society: The phrase "upgrading the overall quality of ... society" indicates that education improves society, thus making option "improving society" correct as well.
Since all the options provided are corroborated by the text, the correct choice is: "all of the above".
Therefore, the correct answer is option all of the above, as it encompasses all aspects highlighted by the passage.
High quality education can help the individual to balance between
- the mark system and the grading system
- regional, social and gender differences
- the inequalities between the rich and the poor
- the past, present and the future
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
The question asks us to identify what high-quality education helps balance according to the passage provided. To answer this, we need to comprehend the passage and relate it to the options given.
The passage emphasizes the multifaceted role of education. It states that education is not solely about enhancing individual efficiency but also plays a crucial role in boosting democratic participation and improving the quality of society at large. Importantly, it mentions:
...to remove the acute regional, social, and gender imbalances, the government is committed to making concerted efforts for improving the quality of education...
This part of the passage highlights a direct link between high-quality education and the balance or reduction of regional, social, and gender imbalances.
Let's evaluate the options:
- the mark system and the grading system- The passage does not mention anything about the education system's internal assessment methods such as marks and grades. Thus, this is not the correct option.
- regional, social and gender differences- This option directly correlates with the passage's statement about education addressing these specific imbalances. Hence, this is the most appropriate answer.
- the inequalities between the rich and the poor- While education may impact economic inequalities, the passage specifically refers to social categorizations rather than economic status.
- the past, present and the future- The passage does not discuss time dimensions or historical change directly. Thus, this option is not relevant.
In conclusion, the correct answer is the option emphasizing education's role in addressing regional, social, and gender differences, aligning perfectly with the passage's key points.
Mere quantitative expression of education doesn't deliver the desired results, because
- education is the overall growth of a person
- the fast-changing global scenario is challenging
- it is the duty of the government to improve the quality of education
- people are willing to invest more on education
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
To determine which option best describes why a mere quantitative expression of education doesn't deliver the desired results, we must analyze the context and content of the provided comprehension passage.
-
Understanding the passage:
- The passage emphasizes that education is not just about increasing numbers (such as more schools or graduates) but about enhancing efficiency, widening democratic participation, and improving the overall quality of individuals and society.
- The mention of India’s vast population and the need to address regional, social, and gender imbalances suggests that simply adding more educational institutions or graduates isn't enough.
- The passage alludes to the necessity for quality over mere quantity in education, especially in the context of a rapidly changing domestic and global scenario.
-
Analyzing the options:
- Option 1: "education is the overall growth of a person." This statement emphasizes the qualitative aspect of education but doesn't directly address why quantitative expansion alone is insufficient.
- Option 2: "the fast-changing global scenario is challenging." This directly correlates with the passage's context, indicating that global changes require education systems to adapt qualitatively, not just quantitatively, to remain relevant and effective.
- Option 3: "it is the duty of the government to improve the quality of education." While true, this statement identifies responsibility rather than explaining the inadequacy of quantitative measures alone.
- Option 4: "people are willing to invest more in education." This statement is unrelated to the inefficacy of mere quantitative expression, as investment readiness does not explain the shortcomings described.
-
Conclusion:
- The correct answer is Option 2: "the fast-changing global scenario is challenging." This option accurately reflects the primary reason mentioned in the passage for the insufficiency of mere quantitative expansion, highlighting the need for qualitative improvement in the face of evolving global conditions.
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
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