List of top Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Questions

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The outline of our theory can be expressed as follows. When employment increases, aggregate real income is increased. The psychology of the community is such that when aggregate real income is increased aggregate consumption is increased, but not by so much as income. Hence employers would make a loss if the whole of the increased employment were to be devoted to satisfying the increased demand for immediate consumption. Thus, to justify any given amount of employment there must be an amount of current investment sufficient to absorb the excess of total output over what the community chooses to consume when employment is at the given level. For unless there is this amount of investment, the receipts of the entrepreneurs will be less than is required to induce them to offer the given amount of employment. It follows, therefore, that, given what we shall call the community's propensity to consume, the equilibrium level of employment, i.e. the level at which there is no inducement to employers as a whole either to expand or to contract employment, will depend on the amount of current investment. The amount of current investment will depend, in turn, on what we shall call the inducement to invest; and the inducement to invest will be found to depend on the relation between the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital and the complex of rates of interest on loans of various maturities and risks. Thus, given the propensity to consume and the rate of new investment, there will be only one level of employment consistent with equilibrium; since any other level will lead to inequality between the aggregate supply price of output as a whole and its aggregate demand price. This level cannot be greater than full employment, i.e. the real wage cannot be less than the marginal disutility of labour. But there is no reason in general for expecting it to be equal to full employment. The effective demand associated with full employment is a special case, only realised when the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest stand in a particular relationship to one another. This particular relationship, which corresponds to the assumptions of the classical theory, is in a sense an optimum relationship. But it can only exist when, by accident or design, current investment provides an amount of demand just equal to the excess of the aggregate supply price of the output resulting from full employment over what the community will choose to spend on consumption when it is fully employed.
The equilibrium level of employment is the function of
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The object of study in game theory is the game, which is a formal model of an interactive situation. It typically involves several players; a game with only one player is usually called a decision problem. The formal definition lays out the players, their preferences, their information, the strategic actions available to them, and how these influence the outcome. Games can be described formally at various levels of detail. A coalitional (or cooperative) game is a high-level description, specifying only what payoffs each potential group, or coalition, can obtain by the cooperation of its members. What is not made explicit is the process by which the coalition forms. As an example, the players may be several parties in parliament. Each party has a different strength, based upon the number of seats occupied by party members. The game describes which coalitions of parties can form a majority, but does not delineate, for example, the negotiation process through which an agreement to vote en bloc is achieved. Cooperative game theory investigates such coalitional games with respect to the relative amounts of power held by various players, or how a successful coalition should divide its proceeds. This is most naturally applied to situations arising in political science or international relations, where concepts like power are most important. For example, Nash proposed a solution for the division of gains from agreement in a bargaining problem which depends solely on the relative strengths of the two parties' bargaining position. The amount of power a side has is determined by the usually inefficient outcome that results when negotiations break down. Nash's model fits within the cooperative framework in that it does not delineate a specific timeline of offers and counteroffers, but rather focuses solely on the outcome of the bargaining process. In contrast, noncooperative game theory is concerned with the analysis of strategic choices. The paradigm of noncooperative game theory is that the details of the ordering and timing of players' choices are crucial to determining the outcome of a game. In contrast to Nash's cooperative model, a noncooperative model of bargaining would posit a specific process in which it is prespecified who gets to make an offer at a given time. The term "noncooperative" means this branch of game theory explicitly models the process of players making choices out of their own interest. Cooperation can, and often does, arise in noncooperative models of games, when players find it in their own best interests.
Nash's model........................
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The Securities Exchange Board of India's (SEBI's) move, under its new Chairperson Madhabi Puri Buch, to undertake a thorough review of securities market regulations should be welcomed as it is a necessary initiative to keep up with the times. The review can perhaps focus on three aspects. One, as India's financial market evolves with rising retail participation, market regulations need to keep up with new products and asset classes that are springing up. While comprehensive frameworks are in place to govern traditional investment vehicles such as stocks, bonds and mutual funds currently, newer options such as curated stock portfolios and digital gold which are quite popular with retail investors, are in the grey zone. Two, existing laws on insider trading, front-running and other market crimes rely mainly on call logs, preservation of transcripts and sharing of information on official databases to prevent leakage of unpublished price sensitive information (UPSI). But the widespread use of social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Twitter and YouTube apart from apps that encrypt and instantly purge messages, are helping rogue players bypass such checks, with the result that mass dissemination of false information about dodgy companies has become rampant. SEBI's regulations must be rewritten to plug this gap. Three, regulations that haven't been updated in a while can stand in the way of innovation and deter the launch of new products or services that better serve the interests of investors. The proposed review must do away with redundant regulations wherever warranted, to facilitate market development. Updating laws apart, if financial market regulators such as SEBI are to keep up with new-age fraudsters, they need to be armed with the skillsets and regulatory powers to keep up close surveillance of communications through the digital media, call for information and carry out decryption to decipher such data. Recently, for instance, the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) refused to uphold a SEBI ruling against market players for insider trading, after they were discovered to be sharing unpublished company results on WhatsApp groups, on the grounds that these messages couldn't be traced back to company insiders. SEBI is therefore quite right to seek powers from the Government under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguard for Monitoring and Collecting Traffic Data or Information) Rules, to be allowed to access digital communication channels and carry out interception and decryption of such information. The Centre should waste no time in arming SEBI with such powers, with adequate safeguards to protect personal data privacy. To keep up with scamsters, the regulator will also have to build internal capacity and skillsets in efficiently mining surveillance data, connecting the dots and building a convincing evidence trail. The Kotak Committee on Corporate Governance had noted that SEBI was severely under-staffed, overseeing 5,000-odd listed companies with just 800-odd staff while the US SEC had over 4,500 employees to oversee an equal number of companies. Apart from adding numerically to its workforce, SEBI must look at lateral hiring of data science and tech talent at competitive pay scales, to buttress its regulatory capacity to keep up with the times.
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On Monday, the Indian rupee fell to an all-time low of 77.6 against the dollar during intraday. While it has pulled back marginally since then, the rupee has, of late, been exhibiting signs of weakness. However, the Indian currency is not an outlier. Currencies of most other emerging economies have also exhibited weakness against the dollar. In fact, of late, the Turkish lira, Malaysian ringgit and Thai bhat have declined more sharply than the rupee according to analysts at Bank of Baroda. Notwithstanding these day-to-day fluctuations, the outlook for the Indian rupee continues to be weighed down by tighter global monetary policy, a strengthening of the US dollar and risk aversion, and higher current account deficits. With the US Federal Reserve hiking rates by 50 basis points, there has been a sell-off in global markets as investors have rushed to the dollar. In India, foreign portfolio investors have pulled out around $5.8 billion since the beginning of this financial year as per data from Kotak, exerting downward pressure on the currency. The DXY index - which measures the US dollar against six major currencies, namely the euro, pound, Canadian dollar, yen, Swedish kroner and Swiss franc has been rising. This strengthening of the dollar is unlikely to be reversed in the near term. As the US Fed embarks on an aggressive tightening of rates - some analysts are factoring in a terminal rate of more than 3 per cent asset classes across the world will witness further adjustments. There is also the pressure owing to the rising trade deficit — in April the deficit stood at $20 billion, up from $18.7 billion in March. In fact, according to analysts, the current account deficit is likely to be at its highest level since the crisis of 2013. During this period, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has been intervening to soften the currency's slide the fall in its foreign exchange reserves suggests that is the case. However, considering that the rupee is overvalued, the central bank should allow the currency to slide, allowing it to find its own level, intervening only to smoothen excess volatility. Currency depreciation will act as an automatic stabiliser. It will help ease current account pressures by curbing imports, but more importantly, it will help boost exports—a critical driver of the country's economy at the current juncture.
Currencies globally in depreciation mode due to......
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After wheat, there is pressure building up for banning exports of raw cotton. The Narendra Modi government must resist any such demand emanating from domestic textile mills and the garment industry. There are at least three reasons why this is so. To start with, the output of one industry is often the input of another. In this case, cotton is spun by mills into yarn, which is further woven or knitted into fabric used for making garments. During the year ended March 31, 2022, India exported $2.8 billion worth of raw cotton, $5.5 billion of cotton yarn, $8.2 billion of cotton fabrics and made-ups, and $9 billion of cotton ready-made garments. Will spinning mills seeking a ban on cotton shipments agree to the same in respect of yarn? When exports are happening at every stage of the value chain, how can there be pick and choose on which one to disallow or promote? Secondly, while it is true that cotton prices have risen by around 50 per cent since the start of 2022, this cannot be blamed just on exports - which are actually expected to halve in the current marketing season (October-September) compared to 2020-21. Domestic prices increasing to international parity levels should, by itself, slow down exports in the natural course. The Modi government did the right thing last month by scrapping the import duty on cotton. It should, in fact, remove the 10 per cent duty on yarn imports as well. The correct approach to tackling inflation, whether in wheat, cotton or yarn, is by allowing duty-free imports without putting fetters on exports. The third reason has to do with timing. Sowing of cotton has already started in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Plantings in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Telangana and other states will also take off with the arrival of the southwest monsoon rains. High prices would definitely incentivise farmers to expand acreage this time; banning exports will send the opposite signals to the ultimate detriment of the textile industry. The real problem in cotton that needs addressing is yields. The introduction of Bt cotton in the early 2000s led to India's production going up about 2.5 times to 398 lakh bales by 2013-14. Since then, it has been on a falling trajectory, with the latest output estimate for 2021-22 at below 325 lakh bales. The plants incorporating Bt genes have over time developed susceptibility to pink bollworm and whitefly insect pests, reducing yields and also farmer enthusiasm for growing cotton. The Modi government's succumbing to uninformed lobby pressures against genetic engineering technologies has not helped matters. A clearheaded approach is required for this crop, which is a source of not just fibre (lint), but also food (cotton-seed oil) and feed (oil-cake).
The main suggestion in the above passage is...