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

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
Promoting increased plastic recycling is comparable to trying to stop a collapsing skyscraper by hammering a nail. It's a futile effort to find recycling centers and feel a sense of accomplishment when we manage to recycle, yet it fails to tackle the root cause: the rampant production of single-use plastics. These items, like grocery bags used for mere minutes but enduring for hundreds of years in our ecosystems, illustrate a profound misuse of technology. The real solution lies in eliminating the production of single-use plastics altogether, rather than relying on insufficient recycling efforts to address a problem that should never have been created in the first place.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
The era of the internal combustion engine is nearing its end, evidenced by various indicators. Major automakers are increasingly transitioning to hybrid vehicles. Volvo, for instance, has committed to ceasing production of purely petrol-engined cars by 2019. Additionally, Tesla has introduced its first electric car aimed at middle-class consumers—the Tesla 3, priced at $35,000 in the US. Over 400,000 people have already made refundable deposits for this model, with thousands having received their cars. Tesla aims to sell another half a million units next year, a notable achievement considering its limited range and the scarcity of charging stations.

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences:
1. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized various industries, from healthcare to finance, by automating complex tasks and improving efficiency.
2. However, concerns about AI's ethical implications, such as privacy violations and algorithmic biases, have also been raised as its usage becomes more widespread.
3. AI systems rely on vast amounts of data to train algorithms, which can sometimes lead to unintended consequences if the data is biased or incomplete.
4. Despite these challenges, AI continues to be integrated into everyday applications, driving innovation and shaping the future of technology.
Choose the sequence of the four numbers that best forms a coherent paragraph:

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
It's taken me six decades, but recently I had a profound realization: Every aspect of existence requires continuous energy and order to sustain itself. This fundamental truth, encapsulated in the second law of thermodynamics, states that everything tends towards disorder over time. This realization isn't just a reflection of aging; it's a deeper understanding that even seemingly inert objects—stones, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, or a piece of paper—inevitably degrade without ongoing maintenance and the infusion of additional order. It appears that the essence of existence itself is largely about maintenance.

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer:
1.Man has used poisons for assassination purposes ever since the dawn of civilization, against individual enemies but also occasionally against armies.
2. These dangers were soon recognized, and resulted in two international declarations—in 1874 in Brussels and in 1899 in The Hague—that prohibited the use of poisoned weapons.
3. The foundation of microbiology by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch offered new prospects for those interested in biological weapons because it allowed agents to be chosen and designed on a rational basis.
4. Though treaties were all made in good faith, they contained no means of control, and so failed to prevent interested parties from developing and using biological weapons.

The passage below contains four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
The Impressionists openly rejected any philosophical connotations, although their avant-garde approach to painting had important philosophical implications. By drastically diverging from the conventional perspectives of artists on visual reality, they created a logical new mode of artistic expression. Greek painters even made the connection between abstract ideas and concrete shapes, demonstrating their concrete comprehension of the cosmos. This materialistic perspective dominated painting far into the nineteenth century. By contrast, the Impressionists felt that the fundamental element of visual reality was light, not substance. This viewpoint is aptly expressed by the philosopher Taine, who said, "The chief 'person' in a picture is the light in which everything is bathed."
The Impressionists held that all solid objects were connected by light and that any divisions between them were artificial. Solid objects were merely surfaces reflecting light. This alteration altered how color and outline were handled. It was discovered that color resulted from light vibrations on a colorless surface, refuting the earlier belief that color was an intrinsic feature of objects. Originally intended to indicate the edges of an item, outline is currently only used to indicate the boundaries of often overlapping patterns. Impressionist paintings saw the world as a sequence of surfaces reacting to light, rather than as a collection of distinct objects. Filtered light frequently produces the mosaic of colors seen in an Impressionist painting.According to Mauclair, "light becomes the sole subject of the picture," with the objects it illuminates playing a supporting role. This shift means that painting is no longer only a visual art form. This ground-breaking new approach to art appreciation ignored all external ideas, whether they were moral, spiritual, or psychological, as well as any emotions that went beyond the purely aesthetic. The subjects of Impressionist paintings—people, places, and things—did not convey deeper meanings or tell tales. Instead, they merely served as elements of a light pattern that the painter used as inspiration from nature to create on canvas.

The passage below contains four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Artificial intelligence has been growing quite fast of late and has altered health, finance, transport, and entertainment. In its scope and definition, AI is an all-round technology involving machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. This has made machines undertake in large, major aspects that were under human intelligence: speech recognition and image interpretation, among many complex decision-makings.
Probably the first huge breakthrough in AI would be the field of deep learning—machine learning dealing with neural networks having many layers. Algorithms from deep learning have proven tremendously successful in tasks like image and speech recognition, where they have greatly surpassed human performance. For instance, AI-powered diagnosis tools can identify diseases such as cancer and diabetic retinopathy at greatly improved accuracy levels, hence greatly helping medical professionals in their work. AI in finance has indeed been a revolution. Algorithms are capable of analyzing huge reams of data at incredible speeds, notating patterns and trends that the human eye could never perceive. In this way, higher accuracy in risk assessment, fraud detection, and personalized financial advice can be reached. Even more, AI-driven trading systems trade at really amazing speed for the optimization of an investment strategy to the very last drop of maximum return. Another domain in which AI has made very big strides is transportation. Several companies across the world are developing and testing autonomous vehicles equipped with advance sensors and AI algorithms. There are several advantages of self-driving cars: they can reduce traffic accidents, improve fuel efficiency, and provide better mobility for the people who couldn't drive themselves. Moreover, AI could make public transport systems more efficient, less congested, by optimizing routes and schedules. It is constantly reshaping the very face of entertainment through content creation and consumption. Recommendation algorithms are running on any streaming service or social media to analyze user preferences to suggest yet more personalized content that allows for more engagement and satisfaction. AI-generated art, music, and literature are on their way up, expanding creativity into new frontiers and challenging conventional ideas of authorship and originality. The fast pace at which AI is developing is associated with ethical and social concerns. With respect to data privacy, bias of algorithms, and work displacement, if handled properly, that would go in line with the equitability of AI benefits. There needs to be increased cooperation from policymakers, researchers, and industry leaders on working out frameworks that support openness, accountability, and inclusiveness as AI goes on to gain more relevance. AI is a very powerful tool that transforms many dimensions of modern life. It opens up possibilities for innovative and vast efficiency improvements but at the same time bears requirements—thoughtful and responsible—to meet the challenges presented by this new technology. Great promise lies ahead of us in the future of AI, and exactly how its potential bearing on society will be shaped depends on how we go about using those capabilities while keeping their

The passage below contains four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
The Industrial Revolution was the period of immense technological, social, and economic changes in the late 18th century; it was basically based on the shift from agrarian economies toward a more industrialized and urban society. In this phase, new manufacturing processes were developed, hence marking the emergence of factories and mass production of goods. Influential inventions—the steam engine, spinning jenny, and power loom—transformed industries and significantly increased productivity during this time period.
One of the most pronounced effects of the Industrial Revolution was in the labor area. All along, people remained in villages and worked in agriculture, but then factories came, demanding lots of labor and seeing to mass migration into towns. This process of urbanization was accompanied by immense growth of the city but also gave rise to serious social problems. The process of industrialization corresponds to enormous growth in cities, entailing problems of overcrowding, bad living conditions, and exploitation of workers where large numbers were women and children often laboring for long hours under hazardous conditions. It changed the economic landscape of the time as well. Extension of trade and growth of markets enhanced the potentialities of production.
It generated enormous wealth for entrepreneurs and industrialists, giving birth to a new class of bourgeoisies. This newfound wealth was not, however, so equally distributed. Where the industrialist or the factory owner was minting money, a number of workers were being paid peanuts to work in most appallingly dreadful conditions. It is this mismatched economic distribution that manned social tensions and laid the path for labor movements coupled with calls for reforms. The environment paid a huge price, such as air and water pollution due to coal becoming the pivot of energy, and forest clearing and depletion of natural resources. Notwithstanding these problems created for laissez-faire by the Industrial Revolution, it laid the foundation for modern industrial society and stimulated innovations that continued to shape the world in the ensuing centuries. In all, the Industrial Revolution was an age of high complexity and great development with serious difficulties. Its inheritance has been novelty and human toughness, pointing to both the potential for progress and the potential for sustainable and equitable development.

The passage below contains four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Sustainable development is the platform that links people, the planetary system, and the future. This has been done to explain what has been everything in a nutshell concerning sustainable development: it represents meeting today's needs without meddling with the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This has three pillars: economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental care.
Growth in an economy has been taken to mean an improvement in the standard of living and the creation of wealth simultaneously. On the other hand, it is disproportionate because its insatiable demands on natural resources will deplete them unless kept within limits. On a brighter note, environmental degradation has a scope to be checked. The end should thus be to strike a balance that supports economic development yet conserves the available natural resources for future generations. It means making people participate in society by giving opportunities and sharing resources equally. This also involves the reduction of inequalities and ensures that economic gains are well shared among these strata of people within the population structure. Economic growth, which does not lead to social inclusiveness, can increase disparities and trigger related social unrest or instability.
Environment protection is the process of preserving natural resources and natural ecosystems. Full detailing may differ from anti-pollution measures, sustainable management, and conservation of natural resources; the meaning remains the same—preservation of biodiversity at that particular time. The environment is basic to both aspects: it stands for the reason that a sound environment is a precondition for economic growth and social inclusion. The serious pursuit of sustainable development is required at each level of governance, business, and individual. It requires internal coherence at the policy and practice levels that provides transformative capacity toward sustainability. Other key levers for advancing sustainable development goals are innovation, education, and international cooperation.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Just outside London's Paddington Station, affixed to a corporate building at 50 Eastbourne Terrace, stands a remarkable clock. A cursory glance may deceive one into seeing a miniature man in a three-piece suit inside, painting and removing the clock's hands meticulously, marking the passage of time minute by minute. Initially bewildering, the realization dawns that this is not reality but a meticulously crafted film, capturing a continuous 12-hour performance—a stroke of creative genius inserted into an otherwise mundane piece of urban architecture. The public clock, now largely obsolete in the age of smartphones, has been transformed into a philosophical poem where function intertwines with artistic expression. It invites viewers to contemplate time in its existential purity, as a medium shaped by human action.
Designed by Dutch artist Maarten Baas, the clock debuted as part of his Real Time project at Milan's Salone del Mobile in 2009. Originally a trade fair for product design showcasing new furnishings and decor, Salone del Mobile has increasingly embraced more avant-garde installations at its fringe festival, known as 'Fuorisalone'. Here, the emphasis is less on comfort, brightness, or traditional beauty of objects like chairs or lamps, but rather on their ability to captivate like conceptual art. Each piece's underlying idea, concept, or narrative must match or exceed the value of its materials or the ingenuity of its construction, which sometimes becomes an integral part of its narrative.
Among the standout examples is Jeroen Verhoeven's Cinderella Table (2006), a conceptual fusion of an 18th-century chest of drawers and table, created using computer-generated outlines and meticulously constructed from plywood by boat-building specialists. The name itself invokes whimsical associations with Disney's reinterpretations of classical furniture in films like Beauty and the Beast. Similarly, Nacho Carbonell's expansive Light Mesh Collection transforms simple chairs into sprawling, cocoon-like structures reminiscent of his childhood home in Spain, while Thomas Lemut's Gigognes. Olympia. 43 + 38 (2020) nesting tables pay homage to Édouard Manet's painting Olympia, mapping its cracked varnish onto glazed earthenware tabletops, blending precision engineering with an allusion to human frailty. Furniture design, with its proximity to the human body and its integral role in domestic, social, and political spheres, offers a fertile ground for exploring embodied experiences. As John A. Fleming notes in 'The Semiotics of Furniture Form' (1999), all objects we create are reflections of the human body and mind within the constraints of time and space. This intimate relationship with movable objects like chairs and tables is underscored by our anthropomorphic references—leg, arm, back, seat—highlighting their symbolic resonance and functional significance throughout history.
The evolution of furniture from purely functional items to expressive, culturally resonant pieces parallels broader shifts in art and design. While traditional distinctions between art and design have been upheld through linguistic and educational frameworks, there have been movements, like the Bauhaus and Wiener Werkstätte, that sought to bridge these divides. The Surrealists, in particular, viewed furniture not merely as utilitarian but as conduits for subconscious projections and myths, exemplified by Salvador Dalí's Mae West lips sofa and lobster telephones, Méret Oppenheim's Object (1936), and Dorothea Tanning's Primitive Seating (1982).
Contemporary designers continue to challenge these boundaries. Artists like Franz West and Ron Arad blur distinctions between art and functional design, while groups like Droog and institutions like Design Academy Eindhoven foster experimental, thought-provoking approaches to design. Objects like Tejo Remy's Rag Chair (1991) or Lubna Chowdhary's non-functional sculptural ceramics defy conventional expectations, prompting viewers to reconsider the role of design as a medium for political expression and cultural critique.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
In the late 1980s, my father and his friend took a wrong turn off the international road from West Germany to West Berlin and were stopped by an East German police officer. Fortunately, they simply turned around after their harrowing interchange with the cop. Mistakes can have far worse consequences when they are made by leaders of countries. In 1962, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's move to furnish Cuba's Fidel Castro with nuclear-capable long-range missiles almost produced an all-out war. Such an action was a violation of the post-World War II spheres-of-influence logic, where the Soviet Union and the United States were each supposed to dominate their own ideological, military, and economic spheres.
The Cold War influenced all aspects of life and became a motive for academics and different pundits to scrutinize the status of the international system it had generated. IR theory turned into an independent academic discipline to some extent due to nuclear threats and thereby the need for predictability. In 1964, theorist Kenneth Waltz argued that bipolarity as cast by the Cold War was the reason for a more secure world, where two poles balanced power and diminished opportunities for war.
These theorists based their predictions of behavior in specific international systems on ancient history and thinkers. The civil war between Sparta and Athens, the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), was taken to be the first bipolar system. Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche were all influences on this viewpoint, though its exact origins are unclear. In the 1960s, when bipolarity was supposedly at its height during the Cold War, dissenters such as journalist Walter Lippmann began to argue that an independent role for China could already be counted on, citing the example of Charles de Gaulle's withdrawal of French troops from NATO in 1966 to illustrate weakening superpower dominance.
During the 1970s, new indicators of power, such as economic growth in Japan, hinted at a shift toward a multipolar world order. As recently as 2015, political scientist John Mearsheimer forecasted Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine on the basis of geographical and size differences—a very traditionalist power dynamics thinking.
This board game-like approach forgets the human element of international affairs. Differential worldviews resulted from the post-1945 decolonization and reconstruction process, thus upsetting the bipolarity of the Cold War. Anticolonial modernity was pursued by leaders like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who used to insist on the necessity of psychological deliverance from colonial inferiority complexes.
This anticolonial modernity was projected across Africa by Nkrumah's Ghana, with its message combining cultural pride and psychological liberation. The 1958 All-African Peoples' Conference argued that the African people had to cast off the imitation of foreign ways of life and turn seriously to their traditions.
Anti-colonial modernity aimed at a different international system from the bipolarity of the Cold War. Pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and other pan-isms sought to unite regions against protection and progress. For Nkrumah, independence was therefore connected with a united Africa.
This multipolarity was recognized by theorists such as Hans J Morgenthau and Joseph Nye, who saw beyond Cold War rigidity. Indeed, as early as the 1960s, even a US policymaker like Henry Kissinger recognized that a multipolar world had emerged.
Postcolonial archives are quite revealing for the period, even though record-keeping challenges and overrepresentation of Global North archives complicate that exercise. All the same, an opportunity exists for African sources to test how far Cold War superpower rivalry alone dictated the international system.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
I remember going years ago to a BBC boardroom, in front of a panel of senior editors, to be interviewed for a promotion. Getting this job was something I really wanted, and I was keen to make a good impression. As I started to answer one question about teamwork, something weird happened inside my head. Over and over again, playing in my mind, was "The Wheels on the Bus" children's song. Although I was attempting to concentrate on my story about the tardy attendee and the less-than-patient presenter, I could feel myself losing control. I was chanting the song in my head, gnashing my teeth, and blinking my eyes like crazy. After a while, one of the panel members caught me acting strangely, and I felt as if I were on a pedestal for everyone to see.
For several years now, this has comprised—the painful habits that most obviously manifest are scraping my tongue over my teeth, doing complex eye movements, and peeling the skin off my lips until they bled. These behaviors worsen when anything is high-stakes or I am trying to enjoy the moment. Realistically, my OCD acts quite insidiously all the time; it seems to constantly avoid some part of conscious control and will of its own, though extrinsic to me. Apart from OCD, I have another problem with procrastination. Very often, I ruin my attention by scrolling through social media or emailing someone when I ought to be spending quality time with my kids. I am also an addict to screens and booze to get me through the evenings—but, of course, one of the normalized ones. I'm addicted to productivity: forever ticking lists, filling up every second, and all the while wishing for time and space to think.
Self-sabotage is a sort of intriguing process that really fits well with things like procrastination, distraction, addiction, and OCD. We know the damages these are causing to our own lives, yet we still hang onto them. For instance, when things really count, we tend to foul them up—beating ourselves up incessantly over wasting hours on activities that are not relevant, which basically halts any kind of progress. What's really happening with this self-defeating circle in which we just keep undermining our finest laid plans?.
Plato's image of a charioteer driving two winged horses, one light and one dark, is taken as a metaphor for the human divided psyche. One horse symbolizes the light of moral intention; another, that of dark irrationality and undermining. It is such a model of split self that echoes down to this day in the likes of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and psychiatrist R.D. Laing. It is now that neuroscience looks into the details of brain involvement in these behaviors and identifies imbalances of neurotransmitters that prevent the brain from regulating intrusive thoughts in OCD.
According to Piers Steel, an expert on procrastination, impulsive pleasure-seeking behaviors and the delay of procrastination are what drive our irrational actions. Our motivations mostly fade away when needed the most, earlier on knowing that we will be worse off. Again, addiction is a kind of self-sabotage where instant-gratification craving gets better of our rational intentions.
Ultimately, while mechanical explanations like neural pathways and dopamine responses offer a degree of insight, psychoanalysis suggests a much deeper understanding of our split selves and contradictions. Much of what ends up being self-sabotage, against our best interests, has been coping mechanisms or ways to handle stress and emotion. By recognizing these and making sense of them, people can find self-compassion and lead more balanced lives.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
By the beginning of the Common Era, three-quarters of humanity resided within the confines of four imperial orders: the Romans, the Han, the Parthians and the Kushans. This raises suggestion that most people in history are born, live, and die in an imperial world. To some among modern scholars, this indicates that empires are natural and even desirable political structures that humans have repeatedly created throughout history. They argue that subjects of empires might have preferred life under imperial rule to the uncertainties of life outside. Edward Gibbon in the 18th century, for one, portrayed the Roman Empire as the height of civilization in the center of swarming barbarism. It was he who proposed that the poverty and primitiveness of those barbarian societies gave birth to freedom within them. Such attitudes have contributed to conclusions made upon empires as bringers of civilization and non-imperial life being chaotic and unproductive. This view largely remains unchecked and thereby reconfirms in society the knowledge that civilization requires both control and violence.
It's said that the ancient rulers for instance, of Egypt and Syria referred to disorganizing groups with the term 'Apiru.' This was a concept considered referential to Hebrews but it's only aeons down the line that it received elucidation as a referent for an individual dissent and/or refugee. The Han Empire also used to describe groups that rebel against its rule as being savage and barbaric. These tendencies used to make claims about the imperial violence and as a consequence, showed up empires as imperative to order and civilization. This is because Walter Scheidel bases his argument from an already shaky beginning when he assumes that painfully created empires with their powerful elites were the key competitive advantage in success. However, basing statistics from the 1978 Atlas of World Population History casts a shade on the statistics' validity and reliability, and because such claims have been based on such bare sources, one has to question the veracity of his assertive statement that empires were a good thing.
New archaeological discoveries challenge the premise that outside the empires, nothing was sophisticated or developed. That was shown to be just the case in the Amazon, Africa, and Southeast Asia: Urban civilizations existed with neither central rulers nor empires, found, thus placing their argument on the contrary side to what had been purported—where many societies like those thrived with imperial structures.
Archaeology has recovered rich histories of all sorts of non-imperial societies that flourished and developed their own ways and lifeways. These findings raise the stakes: ways in which human societies were diverse are at the same time raising entirely contemporary moral queries about all this in determining that empires were the main vehicles of civilization. Encouragingly: these facts suggest, also, that the 'winners' in history were not always those that lived under such imperial conditions.
The present modern world is being shaped by empires, which have brought it to the point of environmental collapse, erosion of democracy, and wars of a new kind. But to study all human history, of non-imperial societies as well, might provide insights into alternative ways of living and organizing into societies. A broader angle of vision could be fruitful in rereading civilization and prospects for different futures.
Such a exploration of the past is not about utopia but about recognizing the richness of human experience and its different possibilities for social realities. Such varied paths of human history will help us in understanding new ways of thinking to come out of future challenges regarding freedom, governance, and sustainability.

Men have preserved their foods from ancient times in order to keep the results of harvesting for winter months, for resale, for storage, and for transporting from sea to inland, overseas, or cross-country. To do so, they generally used nature's methods, which are drying, parching and fermenting. Parching is the most natural method, but for many thousands of years, others have also been used. Direct fermentation of liquids, usually by the introduction of yeast, has not only preserved liquids but also enhanced their quality, the same of course applying to salting. Smoking has preserved, and sometimes improved both fish and meat. Hickory wood is generally used for the fires, and natural juices are contained by a slight coating of wood creosote.
It was not until recently that the causes of rottenness were understood, these being the reactions of bacteria, moulds, yeasts and micro-organisms. Some fermentation and moulds are, of course, necessary in the production of food and drink; moulds, for example, being used in cheese-making. But the real 'breakthrough' in preservation against the causes of rottenness came, when it was learnt how to deal with the micro-organisms present in all foods and drinks, and which react chemically over a period to produce unpalatable or poisonous food or drink.

There are two types of diabetes, insulin-dependent and non-insulin-dependent. Between 90–95% of the estimated 13–14 million people in the United States with diabetes have non-insulin-dependent, or Type II, diabetes. Because this form of diabetes usually begins in adults over the age of 40 and is most common after the age of 55, it used to be called adult-onset diabetes. Its symptoms often develop gradually and are hard to identify at first; therefore, nearly half of all people with diabetes do not know they have it. For instance, someone who has developed Type II diabetes may feel tired or ill without knowing why. This can be particularly dangerous because untreated diabetes can cause damage to the heart, blood vessels, eyes, kidneys, and nerves. While the causes, short-term effects, and treatments of the two types of diabetes differ, both types can cause the same long-term health problems.
Most importantly, both types affect the body's ability to use digested food for energy. Diabetes does not interfere with digestion, but it does prevent the body from using an important product of digestion, glucose (commonly known as sugar), for energy. After a meal, the normal digestive system breaks some food down into glucose. The blood carries the glucose or sugar throughout the body, causing blood glucose levels to rise. In response to this rise, the hormone insulin is released into the bloodstream and signals the body tissues to metabolize or burn the glucose for fuel, which causes blood glucose levels to return to normal. The glucose that the body does not use right away is stored in the liver, muscle, or fat.
In both types of diabetes, however, this normal process malfunctions. A gland called the pancreas, found just behind the stomach, makes insulin. In people with insulin-dependent diabetes, the pancreas does not produce insulin at all. This condition usually begins in childhood and is known as Type I (formerly called juvenile-onset) diabetes. These patients must have daily insulin injections to survive. People with non-insulin-dependent diabetes usually produce some insulin in their pancreas, but their body tissues do not respond well to the insulin signal and, therefore, do not metabolize the glucose properly, a condition known as insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance is an important factor in non-insulin-dependent diabetes, and scientists are searching for the causes of insulin resistance. They have identified two possibilities. The first is that there could be a defect in the insulin receptors on cells. Like an appliance that needs to be plugged into an electrical outlet, insulin has to bind to a receptor in order to function. Several things can go wrong with receptors. For example, there may not be enough receptors to which insulin may bind, or a defect in the receptors may prevent insulin from binding. The second possible cause of insulin resistance is that, although insulin may bind to the receptors, the cells do not read the signal to metabolize the glucose. Scientists continue to study these cells to see why this might happen.
There's no cure for diabetes yet. However, there are ways to alleviate its symptoms. The National Institute of Health panel of experts recommended that the best treatment for non-insulin-dependent diabetes is a diet that helps one maintain a normal weight and pays particular attention to a proper balance of the different food groups. Many experts, including those in the American Diabetes Association, recommend that 50–60% of daily calories come from carbohydrates, 12–20% from protein, and no more than 30% from fat. Foods that are rich in carbohydrates, like breads, cereals, fruits, and vegetables, break down into glucose during digestion, causing blood glucose to rise. Additionally, studies have shown that cooked foods raise blood glucose higher than raw, unpeeled foods. A doctor or nutritionist should always be consulted for more of this kind of information and for help in planning a diet to offset the effects of this form of diabetes.

Abraham Lincoln served as the 16th President of the United States, yet he never went to college. In fact, Lincoln had nearly no formal education whatsoever, attending schools for less than a year throughout his childhood. Yet this should not be construed to mean that Lincoln was ignorant or unlearned; on the contrary, he was one of the most well-read leaders of the time. The fact is that Abraham Lincoln educated himself by studying books of religion, philosophy, and literature, and he continued his voracious reading throughout his life. A lack of public school education did not prevent Lincoln from becoming a great leader. He led the United States through four years of civil war, which threatened to divide the nation into two separate countries. He was a powerful opponent of slavery, and it was largely through his leadership that slavery was abolished in the country. Lincoln's determination to educate himself through diligent reading also led to his reputation as a great orator—and even today his speeches are quoted and studied worldwide. He serves as an example of a great leader—and a great reader. His love of books and good literature enabled Abraham Lincoln to rise to world renown.

In a recent New York Times Sunday magazine article on school textbooks, writer Robert Reinhold described California’s new history series as “. . . filled with colorful charts, graphs, time lines, maps, photographs in a format suggestive of the newspaper USA Today.” There it is again.
Since when did USA Today become the national design ideal? Everywhere you look you find USA Today used as an analogy to describe a noteworthy design format. Making ideas “accessible” is the operative term for the information age. But too often information is drained of its significance in the name of accessibility.
Some things are designed for reading: scholarly journals, literary reviews, financial pages, and their ilk are fairly impenetrable to the casual page flipper. Other objects like USA Today, annual reports, fashion magazines, and so on are for looking. (Haven’t you heard in the course of a design project someone say, only half in jest, “No one actually reads the copy, just make it look good.”) Then there are the gray areas. These include newsmagazines and textbooks, which imply reading but are increasingly about looking. If you compare Time or Newsweek or a fifth grade schoolbook of twenty years ago to their present incarnations, the change is remarkable. The headlines are bigger, the captions are bigger, and the photographs, charts and call-outs are all bigger. Something had to go, someone must have decided, and what went was the text.

Although cynics may like to see the government’s policy for women in terms of the party’s internal power struggles, it will nevertheless be churlish to deny that it represents a pioneering effort aimed at bringing about sweeping social reforms. In its language, scope and strategies, the policy document displays a degree of understanding of women’s needs that is uncommon in government pronouncements. This is due in large part to the participatory process that marked its formulation, seeking the active involvement right from the start of women’s groups, academic institutions and non-government organizations with grass roots experience.
The result is not just a lofty declaration of principles but a blueprint for a practical programme of action. The policy delineates a series of concrete measures to accord women a decision-making role in the political domain and greater control over their economic status. Of especially far-reaching impact are the devolution of control of economic infrastructure to women, notably at the gram panchayat level, and the amendments proposed in the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 to give women coparcenary rights.
 An enlightened aspect of the policy is its recognition that actual change in the status of women cannot be brought about by the mere enactment of socially progressive legislation. Accordingly, it focuses on reorienting development programmes and sensitizing administrations to address specific situations as, for instance, the growing number of households headed by women, which is a consequence of rural-urban migration. The proposal to create an equal-opportunity police force and give women greater control of police stations is an acknowledgement of the biases and callousness displayed by the generally all-male lawenforcement authorities in cases of dowry and domestic violence. While the mere enunciation of such a policy has the salutary effect of sensitizing the administration as a whole, it does not make the task of its implementation any easier. 
This is because the changes it envisages in the political and economic status of women strike at the root of power structures in society and the basis of man woman relationships. There is also the danger that reservation for women in public life, while necessary for their greater visibility, could lapse into tokenism or become a tool in the hands of vote seeking politicians. Much will depend on the dissemination of the policy and the ability of elected representatives and government agencies to reorder their priorities.

Generally, people experience stress in their day-to-day lives, but more than thirty million Americans suffer from something more intense than that. Anxiety disorders are the second-most-common mental health problem in the country, and they can be paralyzing. Sometimes, day-to-day stress and anxiety are hard to tell apart, but the easiest way to distinguish them is that stress is brought on by actual events, and then dissipates, whereas anxiety is a more pervasive worry, that often attaches itself to specific areas of your life, like your relationship, job or health, says psychologist Terry Mooney.
This anxiety does not dissipate, and in fact, it can increase to the level where it begins to change your behavior. That’s when it’s characterized as an anxiety disorder. Anxiety can keep you safe, helping you recognize danger, and cope with it, says Mooney. But if you begin to see danger lurking around every corner, or worry over and over again about the same events, then you might be dealing with something more substantial, like an anxiety disorder. 
People with anxiety disorders often begin to avoid activities or circumstances that make them anxious, said John Forsyth, associate professor of Psychology at the State University of New York at Albany and director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Programme at the university. People may stop driving, or stop going to parties. They may stop travelling or even avoid leaving the house. It’s this curtailing of activities that causes the suffering, Forsyth said, making you feel that ‘life is shrinking around you.’
 Anxiety disorders come in a variety of forms and manifest themselves in different ways. Generalized anxiety disorder is characterized by ongoing worry about everyday tasks, even when there is no clear reason to worry. People with social anxiety disorder experience intense worry over social interactions, and often feel judged by people or worry that they will embarrass themselves. Post-traumatic stress disorder, which is characterized by people re-living a frightening event over and over again, is also considered an anxiety disorder. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is when people take on obsessive rituals that help them maintain the illusion of control. Often repetitive in nature, obsessive compulsive rituals can include cleaning, checking and rechecking something, counting or endlessly reviewing conversations in their mind. Treatment is available for anxiety disorders. People can use a variety of approaches, including therapy, medication and exercise.

I am the family face; flesh perishes. I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.
So wrote Thomas Hardy in his poem, Heredity, describing direct descent of life from one generation to the next. Indeed, the poem reflects the DNA in our genome. Dr.Drew Endy of MIT quoted this when he described how people at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) bypass nature’s constraint of direct descent. Scientists there have used chemistry and biochemistry to produce the first synthetic genome in the laboratory. They chemically synthesized many fragments of the DNA, encoding the 582,970-units-long genome of a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium. Next, they assembled these fragments in perfect order to generate the genome of the bacterium.
The DNA sequence of the synthetic one was confirmed to be identical to the natural one. While the DNA pieces were synthesized chemically, the stitching together was done using the biochemical machinery of a host cell. About 100 pieces of the genome, each 5000-7000 units long in DNA sequence, were first joined to produce 25 sub-assemblies, each about 24000 base pairs long. These were then introduced into the bacterium E. coli to produce sufficient DNA for the next steps. Next, they repeated the procedure to generate large fragments comprising l/4th of the whole genome of M.genitalium.
Now, they used the clever trick of exploiting the process called homologous recombination. This is a basic essential process in every cell, which physically rearranges the two strands of DN The JCVI researchers inserted the synthesized DNA fragments into yeast and utilized its homologous recombination ability to generate the whole 580,000 long genome of M.genitalium in one step. 
This is clearly a landmark work that leads into the brave new world of synthesizing life itself in the laboratory. It was hardly 200 years ago when Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea, an organic molecule, in the chemical laboratory, thus throwing out the notion of ‘vital forces’ involved in the components of living organisms. What is the next step, making life itself in the lab, bypassing nature? With single cell organisms like M.genitalium, it might not be far away. It is now possible in the lab to do so, by inserting the genome into a ‘host’ cell and asking the latter to make the bacterium of your choice. If only we find a way to insert the bacterial genome into this proto-cell, and somehow trigger it to make the bacterium itself! We would have chemically created life in the la This is not a pipedream; JCVI scientists are already on the job, and my bet is they will do it within a few years. 
This surely raises ethical questions, a matter that JCVI is keenly aware of and is already engaged in with ethicists. Even their present work on M.genitalium was done with prior approval of ethical experts. But then, today it is M.genitalium, tomorrow it could be a more advanced, multi-cellular organism, and that could flummox even the ethicist. Assisted reproduction, which is the other side of the coin and truly a recently initiated technology, has become ethically and morally acceptable. Cloning of Dolly, the sheep, has not raised any outrage, but cloning a human certainly does.

The technological trajectory traversed in communications and transport from pigeon mail and pony expressto e-mail and videoconferencing is almost as great as the intellectual space between Noah's Ark and the biotechnological revolution in the preservation and improvement of the species. Dreams are multi-hued today and soar beyond the hitherto accepted bounds of human endeavor.
The first bimolecular motors with tiny metal propellers to reach inside our cells and probe their secrets have been built and pilot-tested and scalpels fitted with probes that can instantly reveal whether cells are cancerous may soon help surgeons operating on tumours to detect cancer at the earliest stages, perhaps even replacing biopsies. That Einstein ousted Gandhi as Time's Man of the Century clearly reflects the Zeitgeist. As Stephen Hawking writes, The world has changed far more in the last 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic, but technological - technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science.
The reflection of the Zeitgeist, even as it stands witness to the enormity of man's reach, is also a warning: that when man's reach exceeds his grasp, it is time to pause and ponder over priorities. From time to time, a natural disaster might push us back to oil lamps and cooking by wood fire but a baby born a whole hundred hours after the mother was trapped under heavy rubble will also establish the sovereignty of other forces. Baby buying on the Internet illustrates the lowest human motivations at work, but harnessing its reach to attract global aid for earthquake victims reflects higher human impulsions.

Harold Pinter, the British playwright, whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation. In more than 30 plays written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming and Betrayal, Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence. Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective 'Pinteresque' has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace.
An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet, director and dramatist, Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce Amer- ican foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq, but that it had also 'supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship' in the last 50 years. His political views were implicit in much of his work. Though his plays deal with the slipperiness of memory and human character, they are also almost always about the struggle for power.
In Pinter's work 'words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other' said Peter Hall, who has staged more of Pinter's plays than any other director. But while Pinter's linguistic agility turned simple, sometimes obscene, words into dark, glittering and often mordantly funny poetry, it is what comes between the words that he is most famous for. And the stage direction 'pause' would haunt him throughout his career.
Intended as an instructive note to actors, the Pinter pause was a space for emphasis and breathing room. But it could also be as threatening as a raised fist. Pinter said that writing the word 'pause' into his first play was 'a fatal error'. It is certainly the aspect of his writing that has been most parodied. But no other playwright has consistently used pauses with such rhythmic assurance and to such fine-tuned manipulative effect. Early in his career, Pinter said his work was about 'the weasel under the cocktail cabinet'. Though he later regretted the image, it holds up as a metaphor for the undertow of danger that pervades his work.
Pinter was born in Hackney on October 10, 1930. With the outbreak of World War II, Harold was evacuated from London to a provincial town in Cornwall. His feelings of loneliness and isolation from that time were to surface later in his plays. Few writers have been so consistent over so many years in the tone and exe- cution of their work. Just before rehearsals began for the West End production of The Birthday Party half a century ago, Pinter sent a letter to his director, Peter Wood. In it he said, "The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work.'

It was a milestone ride to empowerment. A young girl, probably a decade ago, driving a scooter, a little un- steadily, with mom on the pillion. It was the gift of mobility; more significantly, it was a trip to liberation. Now, the girl swings her Scorpio round a dangerous kerb even as mom and a brood of aunt, grandma and nieces squeal in pride. The girl now has a handy tool: her cell phone. Mobility and communication!
Sure, gender cleansing is now a frightening reality. Girls are killed before or at birth, plunging the all-India sex ratio to 927 girls for 1,000 boys. If she survives, the girl cannot assume she'll get a fair share of the family's education budget. Chances are she will drop out; to look after her siblings, to cook at home, to work in the fields, to be married off for money. She might be 'gifted' to a temple. 'Dowry death', a term we gave the English lexicon, is not in danger of fading out. 'The only women likely to keep their daughters are the truly independent-minded, not just the financially independent,' said author Gita Aravamudan. We know of her resilience, ability to raise a family, find happiness somewhere and keep her sanity somehow. All of which is excellent fodder for exploitation.
Out of this tangled mess has emerged the New Woman; a woman 'pushing against the limits society imposed on her'. With an identity no longer defined by domesticity or relationships, she now comes across as a person with a strong sense of self and self worth. A woman taking a tough stand for her rights is no shrew but a woman of substance while a female globetrotter is no adventuress but a woman of spirit. In short, women are going where men fear to tread.
But there are nay-sayers too. "I'm wondering if it is even theoretically possible to define the 'New Woman' in terms of a single set of characteristics. Indian women are so different from each other in terms of their class, caste, regional, linguistic and religious identities that what is 'old' for one is 'new' for the other, and not even on the map for yet another. That said, I think the one thing that has changed is that women are no longer hesitant or apologetic about claiming a share of space and visibility within the family, at work, in public spaces, in the public discourse." said Kalyani Menon Sen of JAGORI. Small concessions to big achievements, she tastes freedom. Her aspirations are taken seriously; count the hailstorm of women-centric TV shows, commercials and food items aimed her way. "It comes with monetary independence," said Usha Srinivasan, HR Consultant.
How is it easier now? Sustained campaigns run by women groups since the national movement. Laws passed to make justice equitable, for corrective surgery of mindsets. Travel, definitely. Her willingness to take up non-traditional workplaces; job opportunities, with IT hiring in bulk. Women began to write and read what other women wrote. And cyberspace, she now blogs and networks, using it for the freedom denied so far to voice her angst, express outrage and disapproval, fulfill the need for acceptance and approval. To speak out.