Questions

Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives and click the button corresponding to it.

Awareness means the capacity to see a coffee pot and hear the birds sing in one's own way, and not the way one was taught. It may be assumed on good grounds that seeing and hearing have a different quality for infants than for grownups and that they are more aesthetic and less intellectual in the first years of life. A little boy sees and hears birds with delight. Then the 'good father' comes along and feels he should 'share' the experience and help his son 'develop'. He says, "That's a jay and this is a sparrow." The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. He has to see and hear them the way his father wants him to. Father has good reasons on his side: since few people can afford to go through life listening to the birds sing, sooner the little boy starts his 'education' the better. Maybe he will be an ornithologist when he grows up.

How do children perceive things around them?

Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives and click the button corresponding to it.

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by his arm and shoulder, as though, at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened ­ a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half Pariah. For a moment, it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.

What was the tone of the essay at the beginning?

The sentences given with blanks are to be filled with an appropriate word(s). Four alternatives are suggested for each question. For each question, choose the correct alternative and click the button corresponding to it.

The President will finally have a national memorial _____ his honour.

The question below consists of a set of labelled sentences. Out of the four options given, select the most logical order of the sentences to form a coherent paragraph.

Then there came faint rays of primrose

X-light that changed presently to golden
Y-bars, through which the dawn
Z-glided out across the desert

In the following question, out of the four alternatives, select the alternative which best expresses the meaning of the idiom/Phrase.
To give the devil his due

A passage is given with five questions following it. Read the passage carefully and select the best answer to each question out of the given four alternatives.

The saddest part of life lies not in the act of dying, but in failing to truly live while we are alive. Too many of us play small with our lives, never letting the fullness of our humanity see the light of day. I’ve learned that what really counts in life, in the end, is not how many toys we have collected or how much money we’ve accumulated, but how many of our talents we have liberated and used for a purpose that adds value to this world. What truly matters most are the lives we have touched and the legacy that we have left. Tolstoy put it so well when he wrote: “We live for ourselves only when we live for others.” It took me forty years to discover this simple point of wisdom.

Forty long years to discover that success cannot really be pursued. Success ensues and flows into your life as the unintended yet inevitable byproduct of a life spent enriching the lives of other people. When you shift your daily focus from a compulsion to survive towards a lifelong commitment to serve, your existence cannot help but explode into success. I still can’t believe that I had to wait until the “half-time” of my life to figure out that true fulfillment as a human being comes not from achieving those grand gestures that put us on the front pages of the newspapers and business magazines, but instead from those basic and incremental acts of decency that each one of us has the privilege to practice each and every day if we simply make the choice to do so.

Mother Teresa, a great leader of human hearts if ever there was one, said it best: “There are no great acts, only small acts done with great love.” I learned this the hard way in my life. Until recently, I had been so busy striving, I had missed out on living. I was so busy chasing life’s big pleasures that I had missed out on the little ones, those micro joys that weave themselves in and out of our lives on a daily basis but often go unnoticed. My days were overscheduled, my mind was overworked and my spirit was underfed.

What according to the passage is success?

A sentence has been given in Direct/Indirect Speech. Out of the four given alternatives, select the one which best expresses the same sentence in Indirect/Direct Speech.

Bunty says, “I may not come for the practice today.”

In the following question, a sentence has been given in Active/Passive voice. Out of the four alternatives suggested, select the one which best expresses the same sentence in Passive/Active voice.

The doctor has given me a very painful injection.