The history of human growth and development is at the same time the history of the terrible struggle of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn. In its tenacious hold on tradition, the Old has never hesitated to make use of the foulest and cruelest means to avoid the advent of the New, in whatever form or period the latter may have asserted itself. We need not retrace our steps into the distant past to realize the enormity of opposition, difficulties, and hardships placed in the path of every progressive idea.

The rack, the thumbscrew, and the knout are still with us; so are the convict's garb and the social wrath, all conspiringagainst the spirit that is serenely marching on. Anarchism could not hope to escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims to reconstruct.

The strange phenomenon of the opposition to Anarchism is that it brings to light the relation between socalled intelligence and ignorance. And yet this is not so very strange when we consider the relativity of allthings. The ignorant mass has in its favor that it makes no pretense of knowledge or tolerance. Acting, as it always does, by mere impulse, its reasons are like those of a child.

"Why?" "Because." Yet the opposition of the uneducated to Anarchism deserves the same consideration as that of the intelligent man What, then, are the objections? First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for violence and destruction, hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous. Both the intelligent man and the ignorant mass judge not from a thorough knowledge of the subject, but either from hearsay or false interpretation.

A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life. In the light of this conception,Anarchism is indeed practical. More than any other idea, it is helping to do away with the wrong and foolish;more than any other idea, it is building and sustaining new life.

The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories aboutAnarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child,-a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence.

Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature's forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life's essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit. Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence, so prevalent in society, proves this to be only too true. Rather than to go to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether, or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials










In an essay called 'Why I Write' written in 1947, Orwell says that his desire has been to make political writing into an art. He starts to write a book, he says, from 'a sense of injustice, not from the idea that he is going to produce a great work of art: I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. From the sketch of the political background to Animal farm it will be quite clear that one of the purposes of the book is to expose the lie which (it seemed to Orwell) Stalinist Russia had become.

It was supposed to be a Socialist Union of States, but it had become a dictatorship. Not only that. There were socialists in Britain and in the West generally who were so eager to advance the cause that everything the Soviet Union did had to be accepted. The Soviet Union, in fact, damaged the cause of true socialism. In a preface he wrote to Animal farm he says that for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the 'socialist movement'. Animal farm attempts, through a simplification of Soviet history, to clarify in the minds of readers what Orwell felt Russia had become.

The clarification is to get people to face the facts of injustice, of brutality. And hopefully to get them to think out for themselves some way in which a true and democratic socialism (in Orwell's phrase) will be brought about. But Orwell's purpose goes beyond the particular example of the Russia Revolution. In Animal Farm he criticizes something inherent in an all revolutions and he himself was conscious of this. Russia is the immediate example, but the book, Orwell himself said, is intended as a satire on dictatorship in general. The time will come when the details of Russian history that roused Orwell's anger will be forgotten, and Animal Farm will be read for its bitter, ironic analysis of the stages all revolutions tend to go through. In Animal Farm Orwell is thinking of the French Revolution and of the Spanish Civil War as well as the Bolshevik Rebellion of 1917.

After the initial excitement and enthusiasm, when personal interests are almost forgotten, Orwell seems to say, the hard facts of life begin to make themselves felt again. To survive one must produce food, and to produce food one must organize. To organize one needs administrators, and they will be among the most intelligent and the most ambitious. Administrative authority gradually becomes power and power becomes tyranny. Authority gradually becomes power and power becomes tyranny. Orwell sees this process as something that is almost inevitable in human affairs, Revolution among them.

In Animal Farm this process works itself out with a logic that is simple and effective. Was it Orwell's purpose then to present the reader with a view of man's inability to change himself? Such a view would be directly contrary to Orwell's own, very personal brand of socialism, but there is no doubt that part of him, at least, felt that there was something wrong with human nature and that political systems, because human, had a tendency towards corruption and tyranny. Animal Farm is a powerful parable of that tendency. It would also be possible to take the view that Animal Farm confronts its readers with the tendencies towards tyranny in Revolution so that they may be warned. Such things having happened before, they may very well happen again if care is not taken to avoid them, next time.

The reader will have to make up his own mind as to whether Orwell was a moral pessimist or a moralistic socialist. It may be that they are the same thing. Animal Farm is a work that raises questions not just about political systems, but about human nature itself. Can man change, or is he condemned to a see-saw of systems that all end up the same? Because one of Orwell's deepest purposes was primarily moral, it is not surprising that he chose a form traditionally associated with the moral as a means of achieving his purpose: the animal fable













Fifteen years after communism was officially pronounced dead, its spectre seems once again to be haunting Europe. Last month, the Council of Europes parliamentary assembly voted to condemn the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes, linking them with Nazism and complaining that communist parties are still legal and active in some countries.Now Goran Lindblad, the conservative Swedish MP behind the resolution, wants to go further. Demands that European Ministers launch a continent-wide anti-communist campaign - including school textbook revisions, official memorial days, and museums - only narrowly missed the necessary two-thirds majority. Mr. Lindblad pledged to bring the wider plans back to the Council of Europe in the coming months.

He has chosen a good year for his ideological offensive: this is the 50th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchevs denunciation of Josef Stalin and the subsequent Hungarian uprising, which will doubtless be the cue for further excoriation of the communist record. Paradoxically, given that there is no communist government left in Europe outside Moldova, the attacks have if anything, become more extreme as time has gone on. A clue as to why that might be can be found in the rambling report by Mr. Lindblad that led to the Council of Europe declaration. Blaming class struggle and public ownership, he explained different elements of communist ideology such as equality or social justice still seduce many and a sort of nostalgia for communism is still alive.

Perhaps the real problem for Mr. Lindblad and his right-wing allies in Eastern Europe is that communism is not dead enough - and they will only be content when they have driven a stake through its heart. The fashionable attempt to equate communism and Nazism is in reality a moral and historical nonsense. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka or Sorbibor, no extermination camps built to murder millions. Nor did the Soviet Union launch the most devastating war in history at a cost of more than 50 million lives in fact it played the decisive role in the defeat of the German war machine.

Mr. Lindblad and the Council of Europe adopt as fact the wildest estimates of those killed by communist regimes (mostly in famines) from the fiercely contested Black Book of Communism, which also underplays the number of deaths attributable to Hitler. But, in any case, none of this explains why anyone might be nostalgic in former communist states, now enjoying the delights of capitalist restoration. The dominant account gives no sense of how communist regimes renewed themselves after 1956 or why Western leaders feared they might overtake the capitalist world well into the 1960s.

For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialization, mass education, job security, and huge advances in social and gender equality. Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the West, and provided a powerful counterweight to Western global domination. It would be easier to take the Council of Europes condemnation of communist state crimes seriously if it had also seen fit to denounce the far bloodier record of European colonialism which only finally came to an end in the 1970s.

This was a system of racist despotism, which dominated the globe in Stalins time. And while there is precious little connection between the ideas of fascism and communism, there is an intimate link between colonialism and Nazism. The terms lebensraum and konzentrationslager were both first used by the German colonial regime in south-west Africa (now Namibia), which committed genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples and bequeathed its ideas and personnel directly to the Nazi party. Around 10 million Congolesedied as a result of Belgian forced labour and mass murder in the early twentieth century; tens of millions perished in avoidable or enforced famines in British-ruled India; up to a million Algerians died in their war for independence, while controversy now rages in France about a new law requiring teacher to put a positive spin on colonial history.

Comparable atrocities were carried out by all European colonialists, but not a word of condemnation from the Council of Europe. Presumably, European lives count for more No major twentieth century political tradition is without blood on its hands, but battles over history are more about the future than the past. Part of the current enthusiasm in official Western circles for dancing on the grave of communism is no doubt about relations with todays Russia and China. But it also reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering. With the new imperialism now being resisted in the Muslim world and Latin America, growing international demands for social justice and ever greater doubts about whether the environmental crisis can be solved within the existing economic system, the pressure for alternatives will increase.













Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. For these reasons some cognitive scientists have described language as a psychological faculty, a mental organ, a neural system, and a computational module. But I prefer the admittedly quaint term "instinct." It conveys the idea that people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs.

Web-spinning was not invented by some unsung spider genius and does not depend on having had the right education or on having an aptitude for architecture or the construction trades. Rather, spiders spin spider webs because they have spider brains, which give them the urge to spin and the competence to succeed. Although there are differences between webs and words, I will encourage you to see language in this way, for it helps to make sense of the phenomena we will explore. Thinking of language as an instinct inverts the popular wisdom, especially as it has been passed down in the canon of the humanities and social sciences. Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general capacity to use -symbols: a three year old, we shall see, is a grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious iconography, traffic signs, and the other staples of the semiotics curriculum.

Though language is a magnificent ability unique to Homo sapiens among living species, it does not call for sequestering the study of humans from the domain of biology, for a magnificent ability unique to a particular living species is far from unique in the animal kingdom. Some kinds of bats home in on flying insects using Doppler sonar. Some kinds of migratory birds navigate thousands of miles by calibrating the positions of the constellations against the time of day and year. In nature's talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale Once you begin to look at language not as the ineffable essence of human uniqueness but as a biological adaption to communicate information, it is no longer as tempting to see language as an insidious shaper of thought, and, we shall see, it is not. Moreover, seeing language as one of natures engineering marvels an organ with that perfection of structure and co-adaption which justly excites our admiration, in Darwins words give us a new respect for your ordinary Joe and the much-maligned English language (or any language).

The complexity of language, from the scientists point of view, is part of our biological birthright; it is not something that parents teach their children or something that must be elaborated in school as Oscar Wilde said, Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. A preschoolers tacit knowledge of grammar is more sophisticated than the thickest style manual or the most state-of-the-art computer language system, and the same applies to all healthy human beings, even the notorious syntax-fracturing professional athlete and the, you know, like, inarticulate teenage skateboarder. Finally, since language is the product of a well-engineered biological instinct, we shall see that it is not nutty barrel of monkeys that entertainer-columnists make it out to be.













A British judge has decided that belief in human influence on climate has the status of religious conviction. This is being celebrated as a success by some activists. As a scientist who works on climate change, I find it deeply alarming. Is Jeremy Clarkson similarly entitled to protection if he declares himself a conscientious objector and wants to keep his 4 4?

It is yet another symptom of general confusion over the status of science among the public, politicians, the judiciary and, indeed, just about anyone who is not a practising scientist. I don't ask anyone to believe in human influence on climate because I do, or because thousands of other scientists do. I ask them to look at the evidence. As Einstein is said to have reacted to an article entitled 100 scientists against Einstein: "If I'm wrong, one would be enough." The scientific case for human influence on climate is not a political opinion, made stronger simply by lots of people signing up. Nor is it a religious conviction, made stronger, in Mr Justice Burton's phrase, if it is "genuinely held".

It is based on evidence and understanding that has withstood some of the most intense scrutiny in the history of science. If I could come up with convincing evidence that greenhouse gas emissions do not cause dangerous climate change after all, evidence that similarly withstands the scrutiny of my peers, I would get, and deserve, a Nobel prize (and for physics this time, not peace). If a scientist finds something that appears to conflict with mainstream opinion, she or he publishes it like a shot - this is not the behaviour of an adherent to a "genuinely held philosophical belief".

There is, of course, a moral and ethical dimension: to what extent should we concern ourselves with what happens to the generation-after-next? But very few of those arguing against emission reductions actually claim they don't care at all what happens in the 22nd century. They argue that emission reductions will not make a substantial difference to the risk of dangerous climate change. That is a testable hypothesis, and one which looks, on the overwhelming weight of current evidence, to be wrong.

To be fair, Tim Nicholson, the activist who brought the case, seems to be aware he may have opened a Pandora's box, stressing that climate change is not a new religion because it "is based on scientific evidence". But that means he should have lost his case: one of the key arguments the judge used was that, in his opinion, the case for human influence on climate was not "a view based on the present state of information available". But that is precisely what scientific evidence provides: if countervailing information becomes available, I would revise my view, as would any genuine scientist. There is a very dangerous trend to regard climate scientists as just one of many "stakeholders" in the climate change debate.

Journalists have taken to asking me whether I take steps to reduce my personal carbon footprint, presumably as a test of whether my beliefs are "genuinely held". If anyone thinks this is relevant, they don't understand how science works. I know climate scientists who drive Priuses and climate scientists who drive 4x4s: this is not a factor I consider when reading or reviewing their papers












The ocean bottom ---- a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth ---- is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3,600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense (5) pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth's surface, the deep-ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space.

Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not (10) actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation's Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry. the DSDP's drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean's surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rock from the ocean floor.The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983.

During this time, the vessel logged 600,000 kilometers and took almost 20,000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger's core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably look like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger's voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth. The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world's past climates.

Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change--- information that may be used to predict future climates.















Caffeine, the stimulant in coffee, has been called "the most widely used psychoactive substance on Earth ." Synder, Daly and Bruns have recently proposed that caffeine affects behavior by countering the activity in

the human brain of a naturally occurring chemical called adenosine. Adenosine normally depresses neuron firing in many areas of the brain. It apparently does this by inhibiting the release of neurotransmitters, chemicals that carry nerve impulses from one neuron to the next.

Like many other agents that affect neuron firing, adenosine must first bind to specific receptors on neuronal membranes. There are at least two classes of these receptors, which have been designated A1 and A2. Snyder et al propose that caffeine, which is struc-

turally similar to adenosine, is able to bind to both types of receptors, which prevents adenosine from attaching there and allows the neurons to fire more readily than they otherwise would. For many years, caffeine's effects have been attri-

buted to its inhibition of the production of phosphodiesterase, an enzyme that breaks down the chemical called cyclic AMP.A number of neurotransmitters exert their effects by first increasing cyclic AMP concentrations in target neurons. Therefore, prolonged periods at

the elevated concentrations, as might be brought about by a phosphodiesterase inhibitor, could lead to a greater amount of neuron firing and, consequently, to behavioral stimulation. But Snyder et al point out that the caffeine concentrations needed to inhibit the production

of phosphodiesterase in the brain are much higher than those that produce stimulation. Moreover, other compounds that block phosphodiesterase's activity are not stimulants. To buttress their case that caffeine acts instead by pre-

venting adenosine binding, Snyder et al compared the stimulatory effects of a series of caffeine derivatives with their ability to dislodge adenosine from its receptors in the brains of mice. "In general," they reported, "the ability of the compounds to compete at the receptors

correlates with their ability to stimulate locomotion in the mouse; i.e., the higher their capacity to bind at the receptors, the higher their ability to stimulate locomotion." Theophylline, a close structural relative of caffeine and the major stimulant in tea, was one of the most

effective compounds in both regards. There were some apparent exceptions to the general correlation observed between adenosine-receptor binding and stimulation. One of these was a compound called 3-isobuty1-1-methylxanthine(IBMX), which bound very

well but actually depressed mouse locomotion. Snyder et al suggest that this is not a major stumbling block to their hypothesis. The problem is that the compound has mixed effects in the brain, a not unusual occurrence with psychoactive drugs. Even caffeine, which is generally

known only for its stimulatory effects, displays this property, depressing mouse locomotion at very low concentrations and stimulating it at higher ones















With the 2005 publication of Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, the world has come to see that economists can be spectacularly clever. In the search for "clean identification" - a situation in which it is easy to discern the causal forces in play -Levitt has turned to such offbeat contexts as Japanese sumo-wrestling and the seedy world of Chicago real estate. He has studied racial discrimination on a game show, and reflected on whitecollar bagel filching.

This has inspired a flurry of imitators, including papers on point shaving in college basketball, under-used gym memberships and the parking tickets of UN diplomats. Within the tedious body of economics scholarship, these papers stand out as fantastically entertaining. Judging from the dizzying sales of Freakonomics and the thousands of lecture halls across the U.S. now bursting with econ majors, they've also been wildly successful at ginning up interest in the discipline. But what if all the cleverness has crowded out some of the truly deep questions we rely on economists to answer?

For more than a generation after the Second World War, the economists who dealt with real world data were mostly earnest, stubborn men. They tackled the era's thorniest questions. Zvi Griliches of Harvard devoted decades to the problem of productivity growth, the chief determinant of rising living standards. His colleague Simon Kuznets spent half his career devising the measure of economic growth we still use today.

In the '80s, however, the data-crunchers had a crisis of confidence. In one famous episode, the eminent economist Gregg Lewis reviewed several studies on unions. Some papers reported that unions strongly increased wages; others reported exactly the opposite. The old approach had been sweeping in its ambition. But what good were ambitious goals if the best you could do was "on the one hand/on the other hand"-style equivocation or plain gibberish? Many economists concluded that the path to knowledge lay in solid answers to modest questions. Henceforth, the emphasis would be on "clean identification.

" "I've always been someone who's thought it's better to answer a small question well than to fail to answer a big question," Levitt says. While still a student, he wondered whether money drives election results or if the better candidate raises more money. He ingeniously demonstrated the latter. Another early paper found that a slight increase in the chance of arrest dramatically deterred auto theft. Levitt discerned this by studying cities that had approved the use of Lojack,a transmitter that leads police to stolen cars.

In 2001, Levitt published his most controversial finding: a paper highlighting the connection between the legalization of abortion in the '70s and the falling crime rates of the '90s. Levitt argued that unwanted children are most at risk of becoming criminals. Abortion, he concluded, lowered crime rates by reducing unwanted pregnancies. Some of these papers made important contributions. The Lojack paper helped demonstrate that theft is a rational phenomenon and can therefore be discouraged.

A few years later, Levitt debuted a new kind of paper: an investigation into offbeat phenomena from daily life. One pondered the strategies soccer players employ when taking penalty kicks. Another paper studied corruption in sumo-wrestling tournaments as a window onto the power of incentives. Not long after, Levitt conducted an exhaustive inquiry into Weakest Link, a game show in which contestants voted to remove a player after each round of trivia questions. Tallying the voting data revealed that contestants were discriminating against Latinos and the elderly, but not blacks and women.

But while the game show provided a pure setting for observing discrimination, there was no reason to think we could extrapolate from Weakest Link contestants to hiring and promotion decisions, where discrimination often intersects with economics. Most such decisions don't take place in a Hollywood studio before a national TV audience. Levitt's voice is high, except when it's trailing off at the end of a sentence. He leans heavily on the word "OK." He is lanky and concave-chested and makes little eye contact.

But Levitt has a droll magnetism, an anti-charisma, which, combined with his eclectic interests, made a talk he gave at Harvard in 2002 a hit. "He talked about his kick-ass creative papers," recalls one attendee. "Here are the lessons you can draw to improve your own research, how you can do clever, appealing papers yourself." As he was wrapping up, Levitt reflected on the choices facing grad students: If you think you can do as well in traditional topics as someone like Marty Feldstein - a giant of the profession - you should pursue that, he said. Knowing laughter broke out.

But, he continued, if you don't feel like you're up to that, you might want to think about alternative topics. The message resonated. One student watched classmates spend the next several weeks on high alert for some curiosity of daily life around which they could build a paper. Levitt has become famous for saying that "economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions." What is one to make of a discipline that heaps scorn on its own raison d'etre?

When I raise this with Levitt, he is almost apologetic: "There needs to be a core for work on the periphery to make any sense. I don't think we would want to have a whole profession with dilettantes like me out doing what I do." But he quickly adds: "The simple fact is that it's hard to do good research. To the extent that you can do interesting research that teaches us something about the world, and entertains along the way, that's not so bad."














The antigen-antibody immunological reaction used to be regarded as typical of immunological responses. Antibodies are proteins synthesized by specialized cells called plasma cells, which are formed by lymphocytes (cells from the lymph system) when an antigen, a substance foreign to the organisms body, comes in contact with lymphocytes.

Two important manifestations of antigen-antibody immunity are lysis, the rapid physical rupture of antigenic cells and the liberation of their contents into the surrounding medium, and phagocytosis, a process in which antigenic particles are engulfed by and very often digested by macrophages and polymorphs. The process of lysis is executed by a complex and unstable blood constituent known as complement, which will not work unless it is activated by a specific antibody; the process of phagocytosis is greatly facilitated when the particles to be engulfed are coated by a specific antibody directed against them.

The reluctance toabandon this hypothesis, however well it explains specific processes, impeded new research, and for many years antigens and antibodies dominated the thoughts of immunologists so completely that those immunologists overlooked certain difficulties.

Perhaps the primary difficulty with the antigen-antibody explanation is the informational problem of how an antigen is recognized and how a structure exactly complementary to it is then synthesized. When molecular biologists discovered, moreover, that such information cannot flow from protein to protein, but only from nucleic acid to protein, the theory that an antigen itself provided the mold that directed the synthesis of an antibody had to be seriously qualified.

The attempts at qualification and the information provided by research in molecular biology led scientists to realize that a second immunological reaction is mediated through the lymphocytes that are hostile to and bring about the destruction of the antigen. This type of immunological response is called cell-mediated immunity.

Recent research in cell-mediated immunity has been concerned not only with the development of new and better vaccines, but also with the problem of transplanting tissues and organs from one organism to another, for although circulating antibodies play a part in the rejection of transplanted tissues, the primary role is played by cell-mediated reactions. During cell-mediated responses, receptor sites on specific lymphocytes and surface antigens on the foreign tissue cells form a complex that binds the lymphocytes to the tissue.

Such lymphocytes do not give rise to antibody-producing plasma cells but themselves bring about the death of the foreign-tissue cells, probably by secreting a variety of substances, some of which are toxic to the tissue cells and some of which stimulate increased phagocytic activity by white blood cells of the macrophage type. Cell-mediated immunity also accounts for the destruction of intracellular parasites.
















The best graduates of Saint-Cyr were given the choice of their first appointment. Charles de Gaulle had also won that right, and he now faced the question: where should he begin his service? Traditionally, the most prestigious service was cavalry, and last on this scale, as everywhere, was long-suffering infantry. However strange that may seem at first glance, our junior lieutenant chose precisely the thankless lot of an infantryman. Moreover, he decided to serve in that very 33rd Infantry Regiment at Arras where he had gone through his service in the ranks. Charles de Gaulle would always surprise everyone by his unexpected decisions, but this one was not as rash as it might seem. Picturesque cavalry inevitably lost its former glory in the epoch of mass use of machine-guns while artillery was regarded as a kind of auxiliary service in France; but infantry remained the main striking force called upon to perform those really great deeds of which de Gaulle dreamed. True, there were also the particularly fashionable Navy and aviation, which was then coming in to being. But these services required highly specialized training.

Born at Lille and linked with the north through his mothers and grandmothers origin, he had a longing for the parts where he intended to serve. In character and temperament he was close to the traditions and spirit of the inhabitants of the northern provinces sharply differing from those of the south. Charles de Gaulle was fascinated by the history of France, chiefly by military history, and it was mostly in the north that the great battles had taken place which he knew as if he had fought in them himself. He was convinced that the north would also inevitably be the scene of the battles to come.

Finally, Charles de Gaulle knew, of course, that the newly appointed commander of 33rd Infantry was Philippe Petain, well known in the army not only for his obstreperousness and frictions with his superiors, which adversely affected his career, but also for his critical attitude to the official military doctrine. Petain was extremely conservative. Ignoring the new law segregating the church from the state, he openly encouraged officers to attend Mass regularly. In any case he had the reputation of an intelligent, energetic, and exacting officer who could be a good teacher of the military craft.

The moment came when the raw young officer, his fresh epaulets glittering, reported to his colonel. The 22-year-old junior lieutenant, black eyed, very tall, stood for the first time face to face with the 56-year-old colonel ironically looking at him with his pale blue eyes. De Gaulles destiny would for a long time be linked with Petain

The Young officer who would serve for many years under Colonel (later Marshall) Petain would feel great respect for his patron. It is interesting that even after Petains disgrace at the end, when he became Frances traitor, de Gaulle would retain something of that feeling. He would write in his memoir : My first colonel, Petain, showed me the meaning of the gift and art of command.

Thus De Gaulle began his career. One cannot say, however, that his education was ended. His Service as an officer strengthened and deepened some of his character traits. Professional soldiers were a world in itself not only with regard to the nation but also to the variable elements in the army, the men called up for the service in the ranks and reserve officers. The caste spirit was at that time extremely strong in the French army, which largely retained the structure and traditions of the monarchist army despite the numerous attempts of the Republic to democratize it. While it has proved possible to impose heavy restriction on the church, this other institution of the old regime was unshakable.

Officially, the army functioned according to 1832 law adopted under Louis Philippe. Even after the exposure of the Dreyfus affair nothing had changed; the army remained a state within state. Officers were encouraged in their feelings of disdain towards civilians in general and towards the deputies, parliament, and the government in particular. Strange as it may seem, the fact that the army had no franchise and was formally outside politics only served to foster that contempt and to strengthen the officers opposition to everything civilian. It is easy to see that this tendency coincided with young de Gaulles anti-parliamentarism















When A. Philip Randolph assumed the leadership of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, he began a ten-year battle to win recognition from the Pullman Company, the largest private employer of Black people in the United States and the company that controlled the railroad industry's sleeping car and parlor service. In 1935 the Brotherhood became the first Black union recognized by a major corporation. Randolph's efforts in the battle helped transform the attitude of Black workers toward unions and toward themselves as an identifiable group; eventually, Randolph helped to weaken organized labor's antagonism toward Black workers.

In the Pullman contest Randolph faced formidable obstacles.The first was Black workers' understandable skepticism toward unions, which had historically barred Black workers from membership. An additional obstacle was the union that Pullman itself had formed, which weakened support among Black workers for an independent entity.

The Brotherhood possessed a number of advantages, however, including Randolph's own tactical abilities. In 1928 he took the bold step of threatening a strike against Pullman. Such a threat, on a national scale, under Black leadership, helped replace the stereotype of the Black worker as servant with the image of the Black worker as wage earner. In addition, the porters' very isolation aided the Brotherhood. Porters were scattered throughout the country, sleeping in dormitories in Black communities; their segregated life protected the union's internal communications from interception. That the porters were a homogeneous group working for a single employer with a single labor policy, thus sharing the same grievances from city to city, also strengthened the Brotherhood and encouraged racial identity and solidarity as well.

But it was only in the early 1930's that federal legislation prohibiting a company from maintaining its own unions with company money eventually allowed the Brotherhood to become recognized as the porters' representative.

Not content with this triumph, Randolph brought the Brotherhood into the American Federation of Labor, where it became the equal of the Federation's 105 other unions. He reasoned that as a member union, the Brotherhood would be in a better position to exert pressure on member unions that practiced race restrictions. Such restrictions were eventually found unconstitutional in 1944.

















Reading comprehensions - CAT


I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control. To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things like empires and their wars to more familiar little things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important to women. There was a time when pinmakers would buy the material; shape it; make the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to the market, and sell it and the making required skill in several operations.

They not only knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could do it all by themselves. But they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for the farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman's dress allowance was calling pin money. By the end of the 18th century Adam Smith boasted that it took 18 men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pin-makers, you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilisation when its effect had so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it.

The men, it is said, could turn out nearly 5000 pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be richer because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without intelligence and being fed by the spare food of the capitalist just as an engine is fed with coals and oil. That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well as a poet, complained that 'wealth accumulates, and men decay'. Nowadays Adam Smith's 18 men are as extinct as the diplodocus.

The 18 flesh-and-blood men have been replaced by machines of steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them into pink papers is done by machinery. The result is that with the exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody knows how to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent, skilful and accomplished as the old pinmaker; and the only compensation we have for this deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal, if even it's a pin.

Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and degrade our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the Distribution of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old free for higher work than pin-making or the like. But in the meantime the fact remains that the workers are now not able to make anything themselves even in little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their day's work until it has all been arranged for them by their employer's who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply pay other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker's directions.

The same is true for clothes. Earlier the whole work of making clothes, from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the men and women of the household, especially the women; so that to this day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left of all this but the sheep shearing; and even that, like the milking of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a sheep today and ask her to produce a woollen dress for you; and not only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are likely to find that she is not even aware of any connection between sheep and clothes.

When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at the shop, she knows that there is a difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet and other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or how they came to be in the shop ready for her to buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own clothes. Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and encyclopaedias to find out what it is we are doing all day;

and as the books are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their information from other books, what they tell us is twenty to fifty years out of date knowledge and almost impractical today. And of course most of us are too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about it; what we need is cinema to take our minds off it and feel our imagination. It is a funny place, this word of capitalism, with its astonishing spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is made that they find people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it.

And when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive, but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or less dangerous lunatics in the real world. Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do.

And when I see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realise that I had better stop writing plays for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.


Q.A suitable title to the passage would be


  1. You Can't Hear a Pin-drop Nowadays.
  2. Capitalism and Labour Disintegration: Pinning the Blame.
  3. The Saga of the Non Safety Pins.
  4. Reaching the Pinnacle of Capitalistic Success.

Ans.b


Q.Why do you think that the author gives the example of Adam Smith?


  1. Because he thinks that Adam Smith was a boaster without any facts to back his utterance
  2. Because he wants to give us an example of something undesirable that Adam Smith was proud of
  3. Because he is proud to be a believer in a tenet of production that even a great man like Adam Smith boasted about.
  4. Because he feels that Adam Smith was right when he said that it took 18 men to make a pin.

Ans.b


Q.Which of the following is true as far as pins are concerned?


  1. The cost of pins is more nowadays to produce.
  2. Earlier, workmen made pins with a lot of love and care
  3. Pinball machines are the standard pin producing gadgets nowadays
  4. It took much longer to make a pin earlier.

Ans.d


Q.The reason that children have to be taught that stealing a pin is wrong is that


  1. they have an amazing proclivity to steal them right from childhood.
  2. pins are so common and cheap that taking one would not even be considered stealing by them
  3. stealing a pin would lead to stealing bigger and bigger things in the future.
  4. stealing an insignificant thing like a pin smacks of kleptomania.

Ans.b


Q.It may be inferred from the passage that the author


  1. is a supporter of the craftsmanship over bulk mechanised production
  2. is a supporter of assembly line production over socialistic systems of the same.
  3. is a defender of the faith in capitalistic production.
  4. None of the above

Ans.a


Q.Which of the following is not against the modern capitalistic system of mass production?


  1. John Ruskin
  2. Goldsmith
  3. Adam Smith
  4. William Morris

Ans.c


Q.Goldsmith's dictum, "wealth accumulates, and men decay," in the context of the passage, probably means


  1. the more wealthy people get, they become more and more corrupt.
  2. the more rich people get, they forget the nuances of individual ability.
  3. people may have a lot of money, but they have to die and decay someday.
  4. the more a company gets wealthy the less they take care of people.

Ans.b


Q.When the author says that a woman now is likely to know about any connection between sheep and clothes, he is probably being


  1. vindictive.
  2. chauvinisti(c)
  3. satirical.
  4. demeaning.

Ans.c


Q.Which of the following can be a suitable first line to introduce the hypothetical next paragraph at the end of the passage?


  1. The distribution of leisure is not a term that can be explained in a few words.
  2. If people wear clothes they hardly seem to think about the method of production.
  3. Machines are the gods of our age and there seems to be no atheists
  4. None of the above.

Ans.d


Reading comprehensions - CAT


Now let us turn back to inquire whether sending our capital abroad, and consenting to be taxed to pay emigration fares to get rid of the women and men who are left without employment in consequence, is all that capitalism can do when our employers, who act for our capitalists in industrial affairs, and are more or less capitalists themselves in the earlier stages of capitalistic development, find that they can sell no more of their goods at a profit, or indeed at all, in their own country. Clearly they cannot send abroad the capital they have already invested, because it has all been eaten up by the workers, leaving in its place factories and railways and mines and the like; and these cannot be packed into a ship's hold and sent to Africa. It is only the freshly saved capital that can be sent out of the country. This, as we have seen, does go abroad in heaps of finished products.

But the British land held by him on long lease, must, when once he has sold all the goods at home that his British customers can afford to buy, either shut up his works until the customers have worn out their stock of what they have bought, which would bankrupt him (for the landlord will not wait), or else sell his superfluous goods somewhere else; that is, he must send them abroad. Now it is not easy to send them to civilized countries, because they practise Protection, which means that they impose heavy taxes (customs duties) on foreign goods. Uncivilized countries, without Protection, and inhabited by natives to whom gaudy calicoes and cheap showy brassware are dazzling and delightful novelties, are the best places to make for at first. But trade requires a settled government to put down the habit of plundering strangers. This is not a habit of simple tribes, who are often friendly and honest.

It is what civilized men do where there is no law to restrain them. Until quite recent times it was extremely dangerous to be wrecked on our own coasts, as wrecking, which meant plundering wrecked ships and refraining from any officious efforts to save the lives of their crews, was a well-established business in many places on our shores. The Chinese still remember some astonishing outbursts of looting perpetrated by English ladies of high position, at moments when law was suspended and priceless works of art were to be had for the grabbing. When trading with aborigines begins with the visit of a single ship, the cannons and cutlasses carried may be quite sufficient to overawe the natives if they are troublesome.

The real difficulty begins when so many ships come that a little trading station of white men grows up and attracts the white ne'er-do-wells and violent roughs who are always being squeezed out of civilization by the pressure of law and order. It is these riff-raff who turn the place into a sort of hell in which sooner or later missionaries are murdered and traders plundered. Their home governments are appealed to put a stop to this. A gunboat is sent out and inquiry made. The report after the inquiry is that there is nothing to be done but set up a civilized government, with a post office, police, troops and the navy in the offing.

In short, the place is added to some civilized Empire. And the civilized taxpayer pays the bill without getting a farthing of the profits. Of course the business does not stop there. The riff-raff who have created the emergency move out just beyond the boundary of the annexed territory, and are as great a nuisance as ever to the traders when they have exhausted the purchasing power of the included natives and push on after fresh customers.

Again they call on their home government to civilize a further area; and so bit by bit the civilized Empire grows at the expense of the home taxpayers, without any intention or approval on their part, until at last although all their real patriotism is centred on their own people and confined to their own country, their own rulers, and their own religious faith; they find that the centre of their beloved realm has shifted to the other hemisphere. That is how we in the British Islands have found our centre moved from London to the Suez Canal, and are now in the position that out of every hundred of our fellow-subjects, in whose defence we are expected to shed the last drop of our blood, only 11 are whites or even Christians.

In our bewilderment some of us declare that the Empire is a burden and a blunder, whilst others glory in it as a triumph. You and I need not argue with them just now, our point for the moment being that, whether blunder or glory, the British Empire was quite unintentional. What should have been undertaken only as a most carefully considered political development has been a series of commercial adventures thrust on us by capitalists forced by their own system to cater to foreign customers before their own country's needs were one-tenth satisfied.


Q.it may be inferred that the passage was written


  1. when Britain was still a colonial power.
  2. when the author was in a bad mood.
  3. when the author was working in the foreign service of Britain.
  4. when the author's country was overrun by the British

Ans.a


Q.According to the author, the habit of plundering the strangers


  1. is usually not found in simple tribes but civilized people.
  2. is usually found in the barbaric tribes of the uncivilized nations.
  3. is a habit limited only to English ladies of high position.
  4. is a usual habit with all white-skinned people.

Ans.a


Q.Which of the following does not come under the aegis of capital already invested?


  1. Construction of factories
  2. Development of a mine
  3. Trade of finished products
  4. All of the above

Ans.c


Q.Which of the following may be called the main complaint of the author?


  1. The race of people he belongs to are looters and plunderers.
  2. The capitalists are taking over the entire world
  3. It is a way of life for English ladies to loot and plunder
  4. The English taxpayer has to pay for the upkeep of territories he did not want.

Ans.d


Q.Why do the capitalistic traders prefer the uncivilized countries to the civilized ones?


  1. Because they find it easier to rule them
  2. Because civilized countries would make them pay protection duties.
  3. Because civilized countries would make their own goods
  4. Because uncivilized countries like the cheap and gaudy goods of bad quality all capitalists produce.

Ans.b


Q.The word 'officious', in the context of the passage, means


  1. self-important.
  2. official
  3. rude.
  4. oafish.

Ans.a


Q.According to the author, the main reason why capitalist go abroad to sell their goods is


  1. that they want to civilize the under developed countries of the world by giving them their goods.
  2. that they have to have new places to sell their surplus goods some where in new markets
  3. that they actually want to rule new lands and selling goods is an excuse.
  4. None of the above

Ans.c


Reading comprehension- CAT


That the doctrines connected with the name of Mr Darwin are altering our principles has become a sort of commonplace thing to say. And moral principles are said to share in this general transformation. Now, to pass by other subjects, I do not see why Darwinism need change our ultimate moral ideas. It was not to modify our conception of the end, either for the community, or the individual, unless we have been holding views, which long before Darwin were out of date. As to the principles of ethics I perceive, in short, no sign of revolution.

Darwinism has indeed helped many to truer conception of the end, but I cannot admit that it has either originated or modified that conception. And yet in ethics Darwinism after all perhaps be revolutionary, it may lead not to another view about the end, but to a different way of regarding the relatively importance of the means. For in the ordinary moral creed those means seem estimated on no rational principle. Our creed appears rather to be an irrational mixture of jarring elements.

We have the moral code of Christianity, accepted in part; rejected practically by all save a few fanatics. But we do not realise how in its very principle the Christian ideals is false. And when we reject this code for another and in part a sounder morality, we are in the same condition of blindness and of practical confusion. It is here that Darwinism, with all the tendencies we may group under that name, seems destined to intervene. It will make itself felt, I believe, more and more effectually. It may force on us in some points a correction of our moral views, and a return to a non-Christian and perhaps a Hellenic ideal.

I propose to illustrate here these general statements by some remarks on Punishment. Darwinism, I have said, has not even modified our ideas of the Chief Good. We may take that as — the welfare of the community realised in its members. There is, of course, a question as to meaning to be given to welfare. We may identify that with mere pleasure, or gain with mere system, or may rather view both as inseparable aspects of perfection and individuality. And the extent and nature of the community would once more be a subject for some discussion.

But we are forced to enter on these controversies here. We may leave welfare undefined, and for present purpose need not distinguish the community from the state. The welfare of this whole exists, of course, nowhere outside the individuals, and the individuals again have rights and duties only as members in the whole. This is the revived Hellenism — or we may call it in the organic view of things — urged by German Idealism early in the present century.


Q.What is most probably the author's opinion of the existing moral principles of the people?


  1. He thinks they have to be revamped in the light of Darwinism.
  2. He thinks that they are okay as they are and do not need any major change.
  3. He thinks that it may be a good idea to have a modicum of the immortal Darwinism in us.
  4. Cannot be determined from the passage.

Ans.b


Q.According to the author, the doctrines of Mr Darwin


  1. have changed our physical and moral principles.
  2. have to be re-evaluated to correct the faults endemic in them.
  3. do not have to change our moral ideas.
  4. are actually new versions of old moral rules.

Ans.c


Q.What, according to the passage, is the Chief Good?


  1. Being good and kind to all fellow human beings.
  2. The greatest good of the greatest number
  3. The welfare of the community realised in its members.
  4. Cannot be determined from the passage.

Ans.c


Q.It is implied in the passage that


  1. a Hellenic ideal is not a proper substitute of the Christian ideal.
  2. what mankind needs is a Hellenic ideal rather than a Christian one
  3. Darwinism is more Christian than Hellenic.
  4. fanatics do not understand what Darwinism really is

Ans.b


Q.According to the author, the moral code of Christianity


  1. is not followed by most people.
  2. is in danger due to opposition of Darwinism.
  3. is followed by a vast majority of people.
  4. is totally ignored by all true Christians.

Ans.a


Reading comprehensions - CAT


Governments looking for easy popularity have frequently been tempted into announcing give-aways of all sorts; free electricity, virtually free water, subsidised food, cloth at half price, and so on. The subsidy culture has gone to extremes. The richest farmers in the country get subsidised fertiliser. University education, typically accessed by the wealtier sections, is charged at a fraction of cost.

Postal services are subsidised, and so are railway services. Bus fares cannot be raised to economical levels because there will be violent protests, so bus travel is subsidised too. In the past, price control on a variety of items, from steel to cement, meant that industrial consumers of these items got them at less than actual cost, while the losses of the public sector companies that produced them were borne by the taxpayer! A study, done a few years ago, came to the conclusion that subsidies in the Indian economy total as much as 14.5 per cent of gross domestic product. At today's level, that would work out to about Rs. 1,50,000 crore. And who pays the bill?

The theory — and the political fiction on the basis of which it is sold to unsuspecting voters — is that subsidies go to the poor, and are paid for by the rich. The fact is that most subsidies go to the 'rich' (defined in the Indian context as those who are above the poverty line), and much of the tab goes indirectly to the poor. Because the hefty subsidy bill results in fiscal deficits, which in turn push up rates of inflation — which, as everyone knows, hits the poor the hardest of all. Indeed, that is why taxmen call inflation the most regressive form of taxation. The entire subsidy system is built on the thesis that people cannot help themselves, therefore governments must do so. That people cannot afford to pay for a variety of goods and services, and therefore the government must step in. This thesis has been applied not just in the poor countries but in the rich ones as well; hence the birth of the welfare state in the West, and an almost Utopian social security system;

free medical care, food aid, old age security, et al. But with the passage of time, most of the wealthy nations have discovered that their economies cannot sustain this social safety net, which infact reduces the desire among people to pay their own way, and takes away some of the incentive to work. In short, the bill was unaffordable, and their societies were simply not willing to pay. To the regret of many, but because of the laws of economics are harsh, most Western societies have been busy pruning the welfare bill. In India, the lessons of this experience — over several decades, and in many countries — do not seem to have been learnt.

Or, they are simply ignored in the pursuit of immediate votes. People who are promised cheap food or clothing do not in most cases look beyond the gift horses — to the question of who picks up the tab. The uproar over higher petrol, diesel and cooking gas prices ignored this basic question: if the user of cooking gas does not want to pay for its cost, who should pay? Diesel in the country is subsidised, and if the trucker or owner of a diesel generator does not want to pay for its full cost, who does he or she think should pay the balance of the cost? It is a simple question, nevertheless it remains unasked. The Deve Gowda government has shown some courage in biting the bullet when it comes to the price of petroleum products.

But it has been bitten by a much bigger subsidy bug. It wants to offer food at half its cost to everyone below the poverty line, supposedly estimated at some 380 million people. What will be the cost? And, of course, who will pick up the tab? The Andhra Pradesh Government has been bankrupted by selling rice at Rs. 2 per kg. Should the Central Government be bankrupted too, before facing up to the question of what is affordable and what is not? Already, India is perenially short of power because the subsidy on electricity has bankrupted most electricity boards, and made private investment wary unless it gets all manner of state guarantees.

Delhi's subsidised bus fares have bankrupted the Delhi Transport Corporation., whose buses have slowly disappeared from the capital's streets. It is easy to be soft and sentimental, by looking at programmes that will be popular. After all, who doesn't like a free lunch? But the evidence is surely mounting that the lunch isn't free at all. Somebody is paying the bill. And if you want to know who, take a look at the country's poor economic performance over the years.


Q.Which of the following should not be subsidised now, according to the passage?


  1. University education
  2. Postal services
  3. Steel
  4. All of the above

Ans.d


Q.The statement that subsidies are paid for by the rich and go to the poor is


  1. fiction.
  2. fact.
  3. fact, according to the author
  4. fiction, according to the author

Ans.d


Q.Why do you think that the author calls the Western social security system Utopian?


  1. The countries' belief in the efficacy of the system was bound to turn out to be false.
  2. The system followed by these countries is the best available in the present context.
  3. Every thing under this system was supposed to be free but people were charging money for them
  4. The theory of system followed by these countries was devised by Dr Utopia.

Ans.a


Q.It can be inferred from the passage that the author


  1. believes that people can help themselves and do not need the government.
  2. believes that the theory of helping with subsidy is destructive
  3. believes in democracy and free speech
  4. is not a successful politician

Ans.b


Q.Which of the following is not a victim of extreme subsidies?


  1. The poor
  2. The Delhi Tranport Corporation
  3. The Andhra Pradesh Government
  4. None of these

Ans.d


Q.What, according to the author, is a saving grace of the Deve Gowda government?


  1. It has realised that it has to raise the price of petroleum products.
  2. It has avoided been bitten by a bigger subsidy bug
  3. Both (a) and (b).
  4. Neither (a) and (b).

Ans.a


Q.A suitable title to the passage would be


  1. There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.
  2. The Economic Overview.
  3. Deve Gowda's Government and its Follies.
  4. It Takes Two to Tango

Ans.a


Q.Which of the following is not true, in the context of the passage?


  1. Where subsidies are concerned, the poor ultimately pay the tab.
  2. Inflation is caused by too much subsidies
  3. Experts call subsidies the most regressive form of taxation.
  4. Fiscal deficits are caused due to heavy subsidy bills.

Ans.c


Reading comprehension


The membrane-bound nucleus is the most prominent feature of the eukaryotic cell. Schleiden and Schwann, when setting forth the cell doctrine in the 1830s, considered that it had a central role in growth and development. Their belief has been fully supported even though they had only vague notions as to what that role might be, and how the role was to be expressed in some cellular action. The membraneless nuclear area of the prokaryotic cell, with its tangle of fine threads, is now known to play a similar role. Some cells, like the sieve tubes of vascular plants and the red blood cells of mammals, do not possess nuclei during the greater part of their existence, although they had nuclei when in a less differentiated state. Such cells can no longer divide and their life span is limited. Other cells are regularly multinucleate. Some, like the cells of striated muscles or the latex vessels of higher plants, become so through cell fusion.

Some, like the unicellular protozoan paramecium, are normally binucleate, one of the nuclei serving as a source of hereditary information for the next generation, the other governing the day-to-day metabolic activities of the cell. Still other organisms, such as some fungi, are multinucleate because cross walls, dividing the mycelium into specific cells, are absent or irregularly present. The uninucleate situation, however, is typical for the vast minority of cells, and it would appear that this is the most efficient and most economical manner of partitioning living substance into manageable units. This point of view is given credence not only by the prevalence of uninucleate cells, but because for each kind of cell there is a ratio maintained between the volume of the nucleus and that of the cytoplasm. If we think of the nucleus as the control centre of the cell, this would suggest that for a given kind of cell performing a given kind of work, one nucleus can 'take care of' a specific volume of cytoplasm and keep it in functioning order.

In terms of material and energy, this must mean providing the kind of information needed to keep flow of materials and energy moving at the correct rate and in the proper channels. With the multitude of enzymes in the cell, materials and energy can of course be channelled in a multitude of ways; it is the function of some information molecules to make channels of use more preferred than others at any given time. How this regulatory control is exercised is not entirely clear. The nucleus is generally a rounded body. In plant cells, however, where the centre of the cell is often occupied by a large vacuole, the nucleus may be pushed against the cell wall, causing it to assume a lens shape.

In some white blood cells, such as polymorphonucleated leukocytes, and in cells of the spinning gland of some insects and spiders, the nucleus is very much lobed. The reason for this is not clear, but it may relate to the fact that for a given volume of nucleus, a lobate form provides a much greater surface area for nuclear-cytoplasmic exchanges, possibly affecting both the rate and the amount of metabolic reactions. The nucleus, whatever its shape, is segregated from the cytoplasm by a double membrane, the nuclear envelope, with the two membranes separated from each other by a perinuclear space of varying width. The envelope is absent only during the time of cell division, and then just for a brief period.

The outer membrane is often continuous with the membranes of the endoplasmic reticulum, a possible retention of an earlier relationship, since the envelope, at least in part, is formed at the end cell division by coalescing fragments of the endoplasmic reticulum. The cytoplasmic side of the nucleus is frequently coated with ribosomes, another fact that stresses the similarity and relation of the nuclear envelope to the endoplasmic reticulum. The inner membrane seems to posses a crystalline layer where it abuts the nucleoplasm, but its function remains to be determined. Everything that passes between the cytoplasm and the nucleus in the eukaryotic cell must transverse the nuclear envelope.

This includes some fairly large molecules as well as bodies such as ribosomes, which measure about 25 mm in diameter. Some passageway is, therefore, obviously necessary since there is no indication of dissolution of the nuclear envelope in order to make such movement possible. The nuclear pores appear to be reasonable candidates for such passageways. In plant cells these are irregularly, rather sparsely distributed over the surface of the nucleus, but in the amphibian oocyte, for example, the pores are numerous, regularly arranged, and octagonal and are formed by the fusion of the outer and inner membrane.


Q.Which of the following kinds of cells never have a nuclei?


  1. Sieve Tubes

  2. Red blood cells of mammals

  3. Prokaryotic cells

  4. None of these


Ans.d


Q.According to the first paragraph, the contention of Schleiden and Schwann that the nucleus is the most important part of the cell has


  1. been proved to be true

  2. has been true so far but false in the case of the prokaryotic cell.

  3. is only partially true.

  4. has been proved to be completely false.


Ans.a


Q.It may be inferred from the passage that the vast majority of cells are


  1. multinucleate.

  2. binucleate.

  3. uninucleate.

  4. anunucleate.


Ans.c


Q.What is definitely a function of the nuclei of the normally binucleate cell?


  1. To arrange for the growth and nourishment of the cell.

  2. To hold hereditary information for the next generation.

  3. To make up the basic physical structure of the organism.

  4. To fight the various foreign diseases attacking the body.


Ans.b


Q.The function of the crystalline layer of the inner membrane of the nucleus is


  1. generation of nourishment of the cell.

  2. holding together the disparate structures of the endoplasmic reticulum.

  3. helping in transversal of the nuclear envelope.

  4. Cannot be determined from the passage


Ans.d


Q.Why, according to the passage, is the polymorphonucleated leukocyte probably lobed?


  1. Because it is quite convoluted in its functions.

  2. Because it is the red blood cell which is the most important cell in the body.

  3. Because it provides a greater area for metabolism reactions.

  4. Because it provides greater strength to the spider web due to greater area.


Ans.c


Q.Why, according to the passage, are fungi multinucleate?


  1. Because they need more food to survive.

  2. Because they frequently lack walls dividing the mycelium.

  3. Because the mycelium is areawise much bigger than other cells.

  4. Cannot be determined from the passage


Ans.b


Reading comprehensions


The second plan to have to examine is that of giving to each person what she deserves. Many people, especially those who are comfortably off, think this is what happens at present: that the industrious and sober and thrifty are never in want, and that poverty is due to idleness, improvidence, drinking, betting, dishonesty, and bad character generally. They can point to the fact that a labour whose character is bad finds it more difficult to get employment than one whose character is good; that a farmer or country gentleman who gambles and bets heavily, and mortgages his land to live wastefully and extravagantly, is soon reduced to poverty;

and that a man of business who is lazy and does not attend to it becomes bankrupt. But this proves nothing that you cannot eat your cake and have it too; it does not prove that your share of the cake was a fair one. It shows that certain vices make us rich. People who are hard, grasping, selfish, cruel, and always ready to take advantage of their neighbours, become very rich if they are clever enough not to overreach themselves. On the other hand, people who are generous, public spirited, friendly, and not always thinking of the main chance, stay poor when they are born poor unless they have extraordinary talents. Also as things are today, some are born poor and others are born with silver spoons in their mouths: that is to say, they are divided into rich and poor before they are old enough to have any character at all.

The notion that our present system distributes wealth according to merit, even roughly, may be dismissed at once as ridiculous. Everyone can see that it generally has the contrary effect; it makes a few idle people very rich, and a great many hardworking people very poor. On this, intelligent Lady, your first thought may be that if wealth is not distributed according to merit, it ought to be; and that we should at once set to work to alter our laws so that in future the good people shall be rich in proportion to their goodness and the bad people poor in proportion to their badness. There are several objections to this; but the very first one settles the question for good and all. It is, that the proposal is impossible and impractical. How are you going to measure anyone's merit in money? Choose any pair of human beings you like, male or female, and see whether you can decide how much each of them should have on her or his merits.

If you live in the country, take the village blacksmith and the village clergyman, or the village washerwoman and the village schoolmistress, to begin with. At present, the clergyman often gets less pay than the blacksmith; it is only in some villages he gets more. But never mind what they get at present: you are trying whether you can set up a new order of things in which each will get what he deserves. You need not fix a sum of money for them: all you have to do is to settle the proportion between them. Is the blacksmith to have as much as the clergyman? Or twice as much as the clergyman? Or half as much as the clergyman? Or how much more or less? It is no use saying that one ought to have more the other less; you must be prepared to say exactly how much more or less in calculable proportion. Well, think it out.

The clergyman has had a college education; but that is not any merit on his part: he owns it to his father; so you cannot allow him anything for that. But through it he is able to read the New Testament in Greek; so that he can do something the blacksmith cannot do. On the other hand, the blacksmith can make a horse-shoe, which the parson cannot. How many verses of the Greek Testament are worth one horse-shoe? You have only to ask the silly question to see that nobody can answer it. Since measuring their merits is no use, why not try to measure their faults? Suppose the blacksmith swears a good deal, and gets drunk occasionally! Everybody in the village knows this; but the parson has to keep his faults to himself. His wife knows them; but she will not tell you what they are if she knows that you intend to cut off some of his pay for them.

You know that as he is only a mortal human being, he must have some faults; but you cannot find them out. However, suppose he has some faults he is a snob; that he cares more for sport and fashionable society than for religion! Does that make him as bad as the blacksmith, or twice as bad, or twice and quarter as bad, or only half as bad? In other words, if the blacksmith is to have a shilling, is the parson to have six pence, or five pence and one-third, or two shillings? Clearly these are fools' questions: the moment they bring us down from moral generalities to business particulars it becomes plain to every sensible person that no relation can be established between human qualities, good or bad, and sums of money, large or small.

It may seem scandalous that a prize-fighter, for hitting another prize-fighter so hard at Wembley that he fell down and could not rise within ten seconds, received the same sum that was paid to the Archbishop of Canterbury for acting as Primate of the Church of England for nine months; but none of those who cry out against the scandal can express any better in money the difference between the two. Not one of the persons who think that the prize-fighter should get less than the Archbishop can say how much less. What the prizefighter got for his six or seven months' boxing would pay a judge's salary for two years; and we all agree that nothing could be more ridiculous, and that any system of distributing wealth which leads to such absurdities must be wrong. But to suppose that it could be changed by any possible calculation that an ounce of archbishop of three ounces of judge is worth a pound of prize-fighter would be sillier still.

You can find out how many candles are worth a pound of butter in the market on any particular day; but when you try to estimate the worth of human souls the utmost you can say is that they are all of equal value before the throne of God. And that will not help you in the least to settle how much money they should have. You must simply give it up, and admit that distributing money according to merit is beyond mortal measurement and judgement.


Q.Which of the following is not a vice attributed to the poor by the rich?


  1. Idleness

  2. Drug addition

  3. Gambling

  4. Alcoholism


Ans.b


Q.What, according to the author, do the generous and public spirited people need to become rich?


  1. A criminal mind

  2. To be born with silver spoons

  3. Extraordinary talents

  4. Strength of character


Ans.c


Q.In the passage, which kind of people are not mentioned as likely to get rich quickly?


  1. Selfish people

  2. Grasping people

  3. Hard people

  4. Ambitious people


Ans.d


Q.What, according to the author, is the main problem in distributing wealth according to the goodness or badness of human beings?


  1. Because the bad people will as always, cheat the good people of their fair share of the money

  2. Because there are too many people in the world and it will take a long time to categorise them into good or bad

  3. Because there are no standards by which to judge good or bad in relation to money

  4. None of the above


Ans.c


Q.Which of the following about the author's thinking may be inferred from the passage?


  1. The poor should work hard to become rich.

  2. The present system of distribution of wealth is biased in favour of the rich.

  3. The honest men should resort to trickery if they want to become rich.

  4. The present system of government should give way to a more progressive one.


Ans.b


Q.This passage most probably is a part of


  1. a newspaper article.

  2. an anthropological document.

  3. a letter to someone.

  4. an ecclesiastical liturgy.


Ans.c


Q.The word 'improvidence' in the context of the passage, means


  1. extravagance.

  2. lasciviousness.

  3. corruption.

  4. indelicacy


Ans.a


Q.The author gives the example of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the prize-fighter to


  1. prove that there cannot be any division of wealth based on moral standards.

  2. prove that in this day and age might always scores over religion and love.

  3. prove the existence of a non-discriminating god

  4. prove that a pound of butter is worth more than any amount of candles any day.


Ans.b


Reading comprehensions


The conventional wisdom says that this is an issue-less election. There is no central personality of whom voters have to express approval or dislike; no central matter of concern that makes this a one-issue referendum like so many elections in the past; no central party around which everything else revolves — the Congress has been displaced from its customary pole position, and no one else has been able to take its place. Indeed, given that all-seeing video cameras of the Election Commission, and the detailed pictures they are putting together on campaign expenditure, there isn't even much electioning:

no slogans on the walls, no loudspeakers blaring forth at all hours of the day and night, no cavalcades of cars heralding the arrival of a candidate at the local bazaar. Forget it being an issue-less election, is this an election at all? Perhaps the 'fun' of an election lies in its featuring someone whom you can love or hate. But Narasimha Rao has managed to reduce even a general election, involving nearly 600 million voters, to the boring non-event that is the trademark of his election rallies, and indeed of everything else that he does. After all, the Nehru-Gandhi clan has disappeared from the political map, and the majority of voters will not even be able to name P.V.Narasimha Rao as India's Prime Minister.

There could be as many as a dozen prime ministerial candidates ranging from Jyoti Basu to Ramakrishna Hegde, and from Chandra Shekar to (believe it or not) K.R.Narayanan. The sole personality who stands out, therefore, is none of the players, but the umpire: T.N.Seshan. As for the parties, they are like the blind men of Hindustan, trying in vain to gauge the contours of the animal they have to confront. But it doesn't look as if it will be the mandir-masjid, nor will it be Hindutva or economic nationalism. The Congress will like it to be stability, but what does that mean for the majority?

Economic reform is a non-issue for most people with inflation down to barely 4 per cent, prices are not top of the mind either. In a strange twist, after the hawala scandal, corruption has been pushed off the map too. But ponder for a moment, isn't this state of affairs astonishing, given the context? Consider that so many ministers have had to resign over the hawala issue; that a governor who was a cabinet minister has also had to quit, in the wake of judicial displeasure; that the prime minister himself is under investigation for his involvement in not one scandal but two;

that the main prime ministerial candidate from the opposition has had to bow out because he too has been changed in the hawala case; and that the head of the 'third force' has his own little (or not so little) fodder scandal to face. Why then is corruption not an issue — not as a matter of competitive politics, but as an issue on which the contenders for power feel that they have to offer the prospect of genuine change? If all this does not make the parties (almost all of whom have broken the law, in not submitting their audited accounts every year to the income tax authorities) realise that the country both needs — and is ready for-change in the Supreme Court; the assertiveness of the Election Commission, giving new life to a model code of conduct that has been ignored for a quarter country; the independence that has been thrust upon the Central Bureau of Investigation;

and the fresh zeal on the part of tax collectors out to nab corporate no-gooders. Think also that at no other point since the Emergency of 1975-77 have so many people in power been hounded by the system for their misdeeds. Is this just a case of a few individuals outside the political system doing the job, or is the country heading for a new era? The seventies saw the collapse of the national consensus that marked the Nehruvian era, and ideology took over in the Indira Gandhi years. That too was buried by Rajiv Gandhi and his technocratic friends. And now, we have these issue-less elections.

One possibility is that the country is heading for a period of constitutionalism as the other arms of the state reclaim some of the powers they lost, or yielded, to the political establishment. Economic reform free one part of Indian society from the clutches of the political class. Now, this could spread to other parts of the system. Against such a dramatic backdrop, it should be obvious that people (voters) are looking for accountability, for ways in which to make a corrupted system work again. And the astonishing thing is that no party has sought to ride this particular wave; instead all are on the defensive, desperately evading the real issues. No wonder this is an 'issue-less' election.


Q.Why does the author probably say that the sole personality who stands out in the elections is T.N.Seshan?


  1. Because all the other candidates are very boring

  2. Because all the other candidates do not have his charisma

  3. Because the shadow of his strictures are looming large over the elections.

  4. None of the above


Ans.c


Q.A suitable title to the passage would be


  1. Elections: A Oreview.

  2. The Country's Issue-less Elections.

  3. T.N.Seshan — the Real Hero.

  4. Love or Hate Them, But Vote For Them.


Ans.b


Q.Which of the following are not under scrutiny for alleged corruption, according to the passage?


  1. The opposition prime ministerial candidate

  2. P.V. Narasimha Rao

  3. The leader of the 'third force'

  4. Ramakrishna Hegde


Ans.d


Q.Why does the author say that almost all parties have broken the law?


  1. Because they all indulge in corrupt electoral process.

  2. Because they all have more income than recorded sources.

  3. Because they are all indicted on various charges.

  4. Because they have failed to submit audited accounts to tax authorities.


Ans.d


Q.According to the passage, which of the following has not been responsible for the winds of change blowing throughout the country?


  1. Greater awareness on the part of the general public.

  2. Enforcement of a model code of conduct by the Election Commission.

  3. Greater independence to the Central Bureau of Investigation.

  4. Fresh zeal on the part of tax collectors.


Ans.a


Q.According to the passage, which of the following is not mentioned as even having the potential to be an issue in the current elections?


  1. The mandir-masjid issue

  2. The empowerment of women

  3. Economic nationalism

  4. Hindutva


Ans.b


READ AND ANSWER


The Union Government's present position vis-a-vis the upcoming United Nations conference on racial and related discrimination world-wide seems to be the following: discuss race please, not caste; caste is our very own and not at all as bad as you think. The gross hypocrisy of that position has been lucidly underscored by Kancha Ilaiah. Explicitly, the world community is to be cheated out of considering the matter on the technicality that caste is not, as a concept, tantamount to a racial category. Internally, however, allowing the issue to be put on agenda at the said conference would, we are patriotically admonished, damage the country's image.

Somehow, India's virtual beliefs elbow out concrete actualities. Inverted representations, as we know, have often been deployed in human histories as balm for the forsaken — religion being the most persistent of such inversions. Yet, we would humbly submit that if globalising our markets is thought as good for the 'national' pocket, globalising our social inequities might not be so bad for the mass of our people. After all, racism was as uniquely institutionalised in South Africa as caste discrimination has been within our society; why then can't we permit the world community to express itself on the latter with a fraction of the zeal with which, through the years, we pronounced on the former?

As to the technicality about whether or not caste is admissible into an agenda about race (that the conference is also about 'related discriminations' tends to be forgotten), a reputed sociologist has recently argued that where race is a 'biological' category caste is a 'social' one. Having earlier fiercely opposed implementation of the Mandal Commission Report, the said sociologist is at least to be complemented now for admitting, however tangentially, that caste discrimination is a reality, although, in his view, incompatible with racial discrimination. One would like quickly to offer the hypothesis that biology, in important ways that affect the lives of many millions, is in itself perhaps a social construction. But let us look at the matter in another way.

If it is agreed — as per the position today at which anthropological and allied scientific determinations rest — that the entire race of homo sapiens derived from an originary black African female (called 'Eve'), then one is hard put to understand how, one some subsequent ground, ontological distinctions are to be drawn either between races or castes. Let us also underline the distinction between the supposition that we are all god's children and the rather more substantiated argument about our descent from 'Eve', lest both positions are thought to be equally diversionary.

It then stands to reason that all subsequent distinctions are, in modern parlance, 'constructed' ones, and like all ideological constructions, attributable to changing equations between knowledge and power among human communities through contested histories here, there, and elsewhere. This line of thought receives, thankfully, extremely consequential buttress from the findings of the Human Genome project. Contrary to earlier (chiefly 19th-century colonial) persuasions on the subject of race, as well as, one might add, the somewhat infamous Jensen offerings in the 20th century from America, those finding deny genetic difference between 'races'.

If anything, they suggest that environmental factors impinge on gene-function, as a dialectic seems to unfold between nature and culture. It would thus seem that 'biology' as the constitution of pigmentation enters the picture first only as a part of that dialectic. Taken together, the originary mother stipulation and the Genome findings ought indeed to furnish ground for human equality across the board, as well as yield policy initiatives towards equitable material dispensations aimed at building a global order where, in Hegel's stirring formulation, only the rational constitutes the right. Such, sadly, is not the case as everyday fresh arbitrary grounds for discrimination are constructed in the interests of sectional dominance.


Q. When the author writes 'globalising our social inequities', the reference is to


  1. going beyond an internal deliberation on social inequity

  2. dealing with internal poverty through the economic benefits of globalisation.

  3. going beyond an internal delimitation of social inequity.

  4. achieving disadvantaged people's empowerment, globally.


Ans . A


Q. According to the author, 'inverted representations as balm for the forsaken'


  1. is good for the forsaken and often deployed in human histories.

  2. is good for the forsaken, but not often deployed historically for the oppressed.

  3. occurs often as a means of keeping people oppressed.

  4. occurs often to invert the status quo.


Ans . C


Q. Based on the passage, which broad areas unambiguously fall under the purview of the UN conference being discussed?
A. Racial prejudice
B. Racial pride
C. Discrimination, racial or otherwise
D. Caste-related discrimination
E. Race-related discrimination


  1. A and E

  2. C and E

  3. A, C and E

  4. B, C and D


Ans . A


Q. According to the author, the sociologist who argued that race is a 'biological' category and caste is a 'social' one


  1. generally shares the same orientation as the author's on many of the central issues discussed

  2. tangentially admits to the existence of 'caste' as a category.

  3. admits the incompatibility between the people of different race and caste.

  4. admits indirectly that both caste-based prejudice and racial discrimination exist.


Ans . B


Q. An important message in the passage, if one accepts a dialectic between nature and culture, is that


  1. the results of the Human Genome Project reinforces racial differences.

  2. race is at least partially a social construct

  3. discrimination is at least partially a social construct.

  4. caste is at least partially a social construct.


Ans . B


Read and Answer

Studies of the factors governing reading development in young children have achieved a remarkable degree of consensus over the past two decades. The consensus concerns the causal role of 'phonological skills in young children's reading progress. Children who have good phonological skills, or good 'phonological awareness' become good readers and good spellers. Children with poor phonological skills progress more poorly. In particular, those who have a specific phonological deficit are likely to be classified as dyslexic by the time that they are 9 or 10 years old.

Phonological skills in young children can be measured at a number of different levels. The term phonological awareness is a global one, and refers to a deficit in recognising smaller units of sound within spoken words. Development work has shown that this deficit can be at the level of syllables, of onsets and rimes, or phonemes. For example, a 4-year old child might have difficulty in recognising that a word like valentine has three syllables, suggesting a lack of syllabic awareness. A five-year-old might have difficulty in recognising that the odd work out in the set of words fan, cat, hat, mat is fan. This task requires an awareness of the sub-syllabic units of the onset and the rime.

The onset corresponds to any initial consonants in a syllable words, and the rime corresponds to the vowel and to any following consonants. Rimes correspond to rhyme in single-syllable words, and so the rime in fan differs from the rime in cat, hat and mat. In longer words, rime and rhyme may differ. The onsets in val:en:tine are /v/ and /t/, and the rimes correspond to the selling patterns 'al', 'en' and' ine'. A six-year-old might have difficulty in recognising that plea and pray begin with the same initial sound. This is a phonemic judgement.

Although the initial phoneme /p/ is shared between the two words, in plea it is part of the onset 'pl' and in pray it is part if the onset 'pr'. Until children can segment the onset (or the rime), such phonemic judgements are difficult for them to make. In fact, a recent survey of different developmental studies has shown that the different levels of phonological awareness appear to emerge sequentially. The awareness of syllables, onsets, and rimes appears to merge at around the ages of 3 and 4, long before most children go to school.

The awareness of phonemes, on the other hand, usually emerges at around the age of 5 or 6, when children have been taught to read for about a year. An awareness of onsets and rimes thus appears to be a precursor of reading, whereas an awareness of phonemes at every serial position in a word only appears to develop as reading is taught. The onset-rime and phonemic levels of phonological structure, however, are not distinct. Many onsets in English are single phonemes, and so are some rimes (e.g. sea, go, zoo).

The early availability of onsets and rimes is supported by studies that have compared the development of phonological awareness of onsets, rimes, and phonemes in the same subjects using the same phonological awareness tasks. For example, a study by Treiman and Zudowski used a same/different judgement task based on the beginning or the end sounds of words. In the beginning sound task, the words either began with the same onset, as in plea and plank, or shared only the initial phoneme, as in plea and pray.

In the end-sound task, the words either shared the entire rime, as in spit and wit, or shared only the final phoneme, as in rat and wit. Treiman and Zudowski showed that four- and five-year-old children found the onset-rime version of the same/different task significantly easier than the version based on phonemes. Only the sixyear-olds, who had been learning to read for about a year, were able to perform both versions of the tasks with an equal level of success


Q. From the following statements, pick out the true statement according to the passage.


  1. A mono-syllabic word can have only one onset.

  2. A mono-syllabic word can have only one rhyme but more than one rime.

  3. A mono-syllabic word can have only one phoneme

  4. All of these


Ans . A


Q. Which one of the following is likely to emerge last in the cognitive development of a child?


  1. Rhyme

  2. Rime

  3. Onset

  4. Phoneme


Ans . D


Q. A phonological deficit in which of the following is likely to be classified as dyslexia?


  1. Phonemic judgement

  2. Onset judgement

  3. Rime judgement

  4. Any one or more of the above


Ans . D


Q. The Treiman and Zudowski experiment found evidence to support which of the following conclusions?


  1. At age six, reading instruction helps children perform both, the same-different judgement task

  2. The development of onset-rime awareness precedes the development of an awareness of phonemes.

  3. At age four to five children find the onset-rime version of the same/different task significantly easier.

  4. The development of onset-rime awareness is a necessary and sufficient condition for the development of an awareness of phonemes


Ans . B


Q. The single-syllable words Rhyme and Rime are constituted by the exact same set of
A. rime(s)
B. onset(s)
C. rhyme(s)
D. phonemes(s)


  1. A and B

  2. A and C

  3. A, B and C

  4. B, C and D


Ans . B


Read and Answer


Billie Holiday died a few weeks ago. I have been unable until now to write about her, but since she will survive many who receive longer obituaries, a short delay in one small appreciation will not harm her or us. When she died we — the musicians, critics, all who were ever transfixed by the most heart-rending voice of the past generation — grieved bitterly. There was no reason to. Few people pursed self-destruction more whole-heartedly than she, and when the pursuit was at an end, at the age of 44, she had turned herself into a physical and artistic wreck. Some of us tried gallantly to pretend otherwise, taking comfort in the occasional moments when she still sounded like a ravaged echo of her greatness. Others had not even the heart to see and listen any more.

We preferred to stay home and, if old and lucky enough to own the incomparable records of her heyday from 1937 to 1946, many of which are not even available on British LP, to recreate those coarse-textured, sinuous, sensual and unbearable sad noises which gave her a sure corner of immortality. Her physical death called, if anything, for relief rather than sorrow. What sort of middle age would she have faced without the voice to earn money for her drinks and fixes, without the looks — and in her day she was hauntingly beautiful — to attract the men she needed, without business sense, without anything but the disinterested worship of ageing men who had heard and seen her in her glory? And yet, irrational though it is, our grief expressed Billie Holiday's art, that of a woman for whom one must be sorry. The great blues singers, to whom she may be justly compared, played their game from strength.

Lionesses, though often wounded or at bay (did not Bessie Smith call herself 'a tiger, ready to jump'?), their tragic equivalents were Cleopatra and Phaedra; Holiday's was an embittered Ophelia. She was the Puccini heroine among blues singers, or rather among jazz singers, for though she sang a cabaret version of the blues incomparably, her natural idiom was the pop song. Her unique achievement was to have twisted this into a genuine expression of the major passions by means of a total disregard of its sugary tunes, or indeed of any tune other than her own few delicately crying elongated notes, phrased like Bessie Smith or Louis Armstrong in sackcloth, sung in a thin, gritty, haunting voice whose natural mood was an unresigned and voluptuous welcome for the pains of love.

Nobody has sung, or will sing, Bess's songs from Porgy as she did. It was this combination of bitterness and physical submission, as of someone lying still while watching his legs being amputated, which gives such a blood-curdling quality to her Strange Fruit, the anti-lynching poem which she turned into an unforgettable art song. Suffering was her profession; but she did not accept it. Little need be said about her horrifying life, which she described with emotional, though hardly with factual, truth in her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues.

After an adolescence in which self-respect was measured by a girl's insistence on picking up the coins thrown to her by clients with her hands, she was plainly beyond help. She did not lack it, for she had the flair and scrupulous honesty of John Hammond to launch her, the best musicians of the 1930s to accompany her — notably Teddy Wilson, Frankie Newton and Lester Young — the boundless devotion of all serious connoisseurs, and much public success.

It was too late to arrest a career of systematic embittered self-immolation. To be born with both beauty and selfrespect in the Negro ghetto of Baltimore in 1915 was too much of a handicap, even without rape at the age of 10 and drug-addiction in her teens. But, while she destroyed herself, she sang, unmelodious, profound and heartbreaking. It is impossible not to weep for her, or not to hate the world which made her what she was.


Q. Why will Billie Holiday survive many who receive longer obituaries?


  1. Because of her blues creations.

  2. Because she was not as self-destructive as some other blues exponents.

  3. Because of her smooth and mellow voice

  4. Because of the expression of anger in her songs.


Ans . A


Q. According to the author, if Billie Holiday had not died in her middle age


  1. she would have gone on to make a further mark.

  2. she would have become even richer than what she was when she died.

  3. she would have led a rather ravaged existence

  4. she would have led a rather comfortable existence


Ans . C


Q. Which of the following statements is not representative of the author's opinion?


  1. Billie Holiday had her unique brand of melody

  2. Billie Holiday's voice can be compared to other singers in certain ways.

  3. Billie Holiday's voice had a ring of profound sorrow

  4. Billie Holiday welcomed suffering in her profession and in her life.


Ans . D


Q. According to the passage, Billie Holiday was fortunate in all but one of which of the following ways?


  1. She was fortunate to have been picked up young by an honest producer.

  2. She was fortunate to have the likes of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith accompany her.

  3. She was fortunate to possess the looks.

  4. She enjoyed success among the public and connoisseurs.


Ans . B


Read and Answer

The narrative of Dersu Uzala is divided into two major sections, set in 1902, and 1907, that deal with separate expeditions which Arseniev conducts into the Ussuri region. In addition, a third time frame forms a prologue to the film. Each of the temporal frames has a different focus, and by shifting them Kurosawa is able to describe the encroachment of settlements upon the wilderness and the consequent erosion of Dersu's way of life.

As the film opens, that erosion has already begun. The first image is a long shot of a huge forest, the trees piled upon one another by the effects of the telephoto lens so that the landscape becomes an abstraction and appears like a huge curtain of green. A title informs us that the year is 1910. This is as late into the century as Kurosawa will go. After this prologue, the events of the film will transpire even farther back in time and will be presented as Arseniev's recollections. The character of Dersu Uzala is the heart of the film, his life the example that Kurosawa wishes to affirm. Yet the formal organization of the film works to contain, to close, to circumscribe that life by erecting a series of obstacles around it.

The film itself is circular, opening and closing by Dersu's grave, thus sealing off the character from the modern world to which Kurosawa once so desperately wanted to speak. The multiple time frames also work to maintain a separation between Dersu and the contemporary world. We must go back father even than 1910 to discover who he was. But this narrative structure has yet another implication. It safeguards Dersu's example, inoculates it from contamination with history, and protects it from contact with the industrialised, urban world. Time is organised by the narrative into a series of barriers, which enclose Dersu in a kind of vacuum chamber, protecting him from the social and historical dialectics that destroyed the other Kurosawa heroes.

Within the film, Dersu does die, but the narrative structure attempts to immortalise him and his example, as Dersu passes from history into myth. We see all this at work in the enormously evocative prologue. The camera tilts down to reveal felled trees littering the landscape and an abundance of construction. Roads and houses outline the settlement that is being built. Kurosawa cuts to a medium shot of Arseniev standing in the midst of the clearing, looking uncomfortable and disoriented. A man passing in a wagon asks him what he is doing, and the explorer says he is looking for a grave.

The driver replies that no one has died here, the settlement is too recent. These words enunciate the temporal rupture that the film studies. It is the beginning of things (industrial society) and the end of things (the forest), the commencement of one world so young that no one has had time yet to die and the eclipse of another, in which Dersu had died. It is his grave for which the explorer searches. His passing symbolises the new order, the development that now surrounds Arseniev. The explorer says he buried his friend three years ago next to huge cedar and fir trees, but now they are all gone. The man on the wagon replies they were probably chopped down when the settlement was built, and he drives off. Arseniev walks to a barren, treeless spot next to a pile of bricks.

As he moves, the camera tracks and pans to follow, revealing a line of freshly built houses and a woman hanging her laundry to dry. A distant train whistle is heard, and the sounds of construction in the clearing vie with the cries of birds and the rustle of wind in the trees. Arseniev pauses, looks around for the grave that once was, and murmurs desolately, 'Dersu'. The image now cuts farther into the past, to 1902, and the first section of the film commences, which describes Arseniev's meeting with Dersu and their friendship. Kurosawa defines the world of the film initially upon a void, a missing presence. The grave is gone, brushed aside by a world rushing into modernism, and now the hunter exists only in Arseniev's memories.

The hallucinatory dreams and visions of Dodeskaden are succeeded by nostalgic, melancholy ruminations. Yet by exploring these ruminations, the film celebrates the timelessness of Dersu's wisdom. The first section of the film has two purposes: to describe the magnificence and in human vastness of nature and to delineate the code of ethics by which Dersu lives and which permits him to survive in these conditions. When Dersu first appears, the other soldiers treat him with condescension and laughter, but Arseniev watches him closely and does not share their derisive response. Unlike them, he is capable of immediately grasping Dersu's extraordinary qualities.

In camp, Kurosawa frames Arseniev by himself, sitting on the other side of the fire from his soldiers. While they sleep or joke among themselves, he writes in his diary and Kurosawa cuts in several point-of-view shots from his perspective of trees that appear animated and sinister as the fire light dances across their gnarled, leafless outlines. This reflective dimension, this sensitivity to the spirituality of nature, distinguishes him from the others and forms the basis of his receptivity to Dersu and their friendship. It makes him a fit pupil for the hunter.


Q. How is Kurosawa able to show the erosion of Dersu's way of life?


  1. By documenting the ebb and flow of modernisation.

  2. By going back farther and farther in time.

  3. By using three different time frames and shifting them.

  4. Through his death in a distant time.


Ans . C


Q. Arseniev's search for Dersu's grave


  1. is part of the beginning of the film.

  2. symbolises the end of the industrial society.

  3. is misguided since the settlement is too new.

  4. symbolises the rediscovery of modernity


Ans . A


Q. The film celebrates Dersu's wisdom


  1. by exhibiting the moral vacuum of the pre-modern world.

  2. by turning him into a mythical figure.

  3. through hallucinatory dreams and visions.

  4. through Arseniev's nostalgic, melancholy ruminations.


Ans . D


Q. According to the author, the section of the film following the prologue


  1. serves to highlight the difficulties that Dersu faces that eventually kills him.

  2. shows the difference in thinking between Arseniev and Dersu

  3. shows the code by which Dersu lives that allows him to survive his surroundings.

  4. serves to criticize the lack of understanding of nature in the pre-modern era.


Ans . C


Q. In the film, Kurosawa hints at Arseniev's reflective and sensitive nature


  1. by showing him as not being derisive towards Dersu, unlike other soldiers.

  2. by showing him as being aloof from other soldiers.

  3. through shots of Arseniev writing his diary, framed by trees.

  4. All of these


Ans . D


Q. According to the author, which of these statements about the film is correct?


  1. The film makes its arguments circuitously

  2. The film highlights the insularity of Arseniev.

  3. The film begins with the absence of its main protagonist.

  4. None of these


Ans . C


Read and Answer


Democracy rests on a tension between two different principles. There is, on the one hand, the principle of equality before the law, or, more generally, of equality, and, on the other, what may be described as the leadership principle. The first gives priority to rules and the second to persons. No matter how skilfully we contrive out schemes, there is a point beyond which the one principle cannot be promoted without some sacrifice of the other. Alexis do Tocqueville, the great 19th-century writer on democracy, maintained that the age of democracy, whose birth he was witnessing, would also be the age of mediocrity, in saying this he was thinking primarily of a regime of equality governed by impersonal rules. Despite his strong attachment to democracy, he took great pains to point out what he believed to be its negative side: a dead level plane of achievement in practically every sphere of life.

The age of democracy would, in his view, be an unheroic age; there would not be room in it for either heroes or hero-worshippers. But modern democracies have not been able to do without heroes: this too was foreseen, with much misgiving, by Tocqueville. Tocqueville viewed this with misgiving because he believed, rightly or wrongly, that unlike in aristocratic societies there was no proper place in a democracy for heroes and, hence, when they arose they would sooner or later turn into despots.

Whether they require heroes or not, democracies certainly require leaders, and, in the contemporary age, breed them in great profusion; the problem is to know what to do with them. In a world preoccupied with scientific rationality the advantages of a system based on an impersonal rule of law should be a recommendation with everybody. There is something orderly and predictable about such a system. When life is lived mainly in small, self-contained communities, men are able to take finer personal distinctions into account in dealing with their fellow men. They are unable to do this in a large and amorphous society, and organised living would be impossible here without a system of impersonal rules.

Above all, such a system guarantees a kind of equality to the extent that everybody, no matter in what station of life, is bound by the same explicit, often written, rules and nobody is above them. But a system governed solely by impersonal rules can at best ensure order and stability; it cannot create any shining vision of a future in which mere formal equality will be replaced by real equality and fellowship. A world governed by impersonal rules cannot easily change itself, or when it does, the change is so gradual as to make the basic and fundamental feature of society appear unchanges. For any kind of basic or fundamental change, a push is needed from within, a kind of individual initiative which will create new rules, new terms and conditions of life.

The issue of leadership thus acquires crucial significance in the context of change. If the modern age is preoccupied with scientific rationality, it is no less preoccupied with change. To accept what exists on its own terms is traditional, not modern, and it may be all very well to appreciate tradition in music, dance and drama, but for society as a whole the choice has already been made in favour of modernisation and development. Moreover, in some countries the gap between ideal and reality has become so great that the argument for development and change is now irresistible. In these countries no argument for development has greater appeal or urgency than the one which shows development to be the condition for the mitigation, if not the elimination, of inequality. There is something contradictory about the very presence of large inequalities in a society which profess to be democratic. It does not take people too long to realise that democracy by itself can guarantee only formal equality;

beyond this, it can only whet people's appetite for real or substantive equality. From this arises their continued preoccupation with plans and schemes that will help to bridge the gap between the ideal of equality and the reality which is so contrary to it. When pre-existing rules give no clear directions of change, leadership comes into its own. Every democracy invests its leadership with a measure of charisma, and expects from it a corresponding measure of energy and vitality. Now, the greater the urge for change in a society the stronger the appeal of a dynamic leadership in it. A dynamic leadership seeks to free itself from the constraints of existing rules: in a sense that is the test of its dynamism. In this process it may take a turn at which it ceases to regard itself as being bound by these rules, placing itself above them.

There is always a tension between 'charisma' and 'discipline' in the case of a democratic leadership, and when this leadership puts forward revolutionary claims, the tension tends to be resolved at the expense of discipline. Characteristically, the legitimacy of such a leadership rests on its claim to be able to abolish or at least substantially reduce the existing inequalities in society. From the argument that formal equality or equality before the law is but a limited good, it is often one short step to the argument that it is a hindrance or an obstacle to the establishment of real or substantive equality. The conflict between a 'progressive' executive and a 'conservative' judiciary is but one aspect of this larger problem. This conflict naturally acquires added piquancy when the executive is elected and the judiciary appointed.


Q. Dynamic leaders are needed in democracies because


  1. they have adopted the principles of 'formal' equality rather than 'substantive' equality.

  2. 'formal' equality whets people's appetite for 'substantive' equality.

  3. systems that rely on the impersonal rules of 'formal' equality lose their ability to make large changes.

  4. of the conflict between a 'progressive' executive and a 'conservative' judiciary.


Ans . C


Q. What possible factor would a dynamic leader consider a 'hindrance' in achieving the development goals of a nation?


  1. Principle of equality before the law

  2. Judicial activism

  3. A conservative judiciary

  4. Need for discipline


Ans . A


Q. Which of the following four statements can be inferred from the above passage?
A. Scientific rationality is an essential feature of modernity.
B. Scientific rationality results in the development of impersonal rules.
C. Modernisation and development have been chosen over traditional music, dance and drama.
D. Democracies aspire to achieve substantive equality.


  1. A, B, D but not C

  2. A, B but not C, D

  3. A, D but not B, C

  4. A, B, C but not D


Ans . A


Q. Tocqueville believed that the age of democracy would be an un-heroic age because


  1. democractic principles do not encourage heroes.

  2. there is no urgency for development in democratic countries.

  3. heroes that emerged in democracies would become despots.

  4. aristocratic society had a greater ability to produce heroes.


Ans . A


Q. A key argument the author is making is that


  1. in the context of extreme inequality, the issue of leadership has limited significance.

  2. democracy is incapable of eradicating inequality.

  3. formal equality facilitates development and change.

  4. impersonal rules are good for avoiding instability but fall short of achieving real equality.


Ans . D


Q. Which of the following four statements can be inferred from the above passage?
A. There is conflict between the pursuit of equality and individuality.
B. The disadvantages of impersonal rules can be overcome in small communities.
C. Despite limitations, impersonal rules are essential in large systems.
D. Inspired leadership, rather than plans and schemes, is more effective in bridging inequality


  1. B, D but not A, C

  2. A, B but not C, D

  3. A, D but not B, C

  4. A, C but not B, D


Ans . C


Read and Answer

In the modern scientific story, light was created not once but twice. The first time was in the Big Bang, when the universe began its existence as a glowing, expanding, fireball, which cooled off into darkness after a few million years.

The second time was hundreds of millions of years later, when the cold material condensed into dense suggests under the influence of gravity, and ignited to become the first stars. Sir Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal, named the long interval between these two enlightements the cosmic 'Dark Age'. The name describes not only the poorly lit conditions, but also the ignorance of astronomers about that period. Nobody knows exactly when the first stars formed, or how they organised themselves into galaxies — or even whether stars were the first luminous objects.

They may have been preceded by quasars, which are mysterious, bright spots found at the centres of some galaxies. Now two independent groups of astronomers, one led by Robert Becker of the University of California, Davis, and the other by George Djorgovski of the Caltech, claim to have peered far enough into space with their telescopes (and therefore backwards enough in time) to observe the closing days of the Dark age. The main problem that plagued previous efforts to study the Dark Age was not the lack of suitable telescopes, but rather the lack of suitable things at which to point them. Because these events took place over 13 billion years ago, if astronomers are to have any hope of unravelling them they must study objects that are at least 13 billion light years away.

The best prospects are quasars, because they are so bright and compact that they can be seen across vast stretches of space. The energy source that powers a quasar is unknown, although it is suspected to be the intense gravity of a giant black hole. However, at the distances required for the study of Dark Age, even quasars are extremely rare and faint. Recently some members of Dr Becker's team announced their discovery of the four most distant quasars known. All the new quasars are terribly faint, a challenge that both teams overcame by peering at them through one of the twin Keck telescopes in Hawaii. These are the world's largest, and can therefore collect the most light. The new work by Dr Becker's team analysed the light from all four quasars.

Three of them appeared to be similar to ordinary, less distant quasars. However, the fourth and most distant, unlike any other quasar ever seen, showed unmistakable signs of being shrouded in a fog because new-born stars and quasars emit mainly ultraviolet light, and hydrogen gas is opaque to ultraviolet. Seeing this fog had been the goal of would-be Dark Age astronomers since 1965, when James Gunn and Bruce Peterson spelled out the technique for using quasars as backlighting beacons to observe the fog's ultraviolet shadow.

The fog prolonged the period of darkness until the heat from the first stars and quasars had the chance to ionise the hydrogen (breaking it into its constituent parts, protons and electrons). Ionised hydrogen is transparent to ultraviolet radiation, so at that moment the fog lifted and the universe became the well-lit place it is today. For this reason, the end of the Dark Age is called the 'Epoch of Re-ionisation'. Because the ultraviolet shadow is visible only in the most distant of the four quasars, Dr Becker's team concluded that the fog had dissipated completely by the time the universe was about 900 million years old, and oneseventh of its current size.


Q. In the passage, the Dark Age refers to


  1. the period when the universe became cold after the Big Bang

  2. a period about which astronomers know very little

  3. the medieval period when cultural activity seemed to have come to an end

  4. the time that the universe took to heat up after the Big Bang


Ans . B


Q. Astronomers find it difficult to study the Dark Age because


  1. suitable telescopes are few.

  2. the associated events took place aeons ago.

  3. the energy source that powers a quasars is unknown

  4. their best chance is to study quasars, which are faint objects to begin with.


Ans . B


Q. The four most distant quasars discovered recently


  1. could only be seen with the help of large telescopes.

  2. appear to be similar to other ordinary, quasars.

  3. appear to be shrouded in a fog of hydrogen gas

  4. have been sought to be discovered by Dark Age astronomers since 1965.


Ans . A


Q. The fog of hydrogen gas seen through the telescopes


  1. is transparent to hydrogen radiation from stars and quasars in all states.

  2. was lifted after heat from starts and quasars ionised it.

  3. is material which eventually became stars and quasars.

  4. is broken into constituent elements when stars and quasars are formed.


Ans . B


Read and Answer

At the heart of the enormous boom in wine consumption that has taken place in the English speaking world over the last two decades or so is a fascinating, happy paradox. In the days when wine was exclusively the preserve of a narrow cultural elite, bought either at auctions or from gentleman wine merchants in wing collars and bow-ties, to be stored in rambling cellars and decanted to order by one’s butler, the ordinary drinker didn’t get a look-in. Wine was considered a highly technical subject, in which anybody without the necessary ability could only fall flat on his or her face in embarrassment. It wasn’t just that you needed a refined aesthetic sensibility for the stuff if it wasn’t to be hopelessly wasted on you.

It required an intimate knowledge of what came from where, and what it was supposed to taste like. Those were times, however, when wine appreciation essentially meant a familiarity with the great French classics, with perhaps a smattering of other wines — like sherry and port. That was what the wine trade dealt in. These days, wine is bought daily in supermarkets and high-street chains to be consumed that evening, hardly anybody has a cellar to store it in and most don’t even possess a decanter. Above all, the wines of literally dozens of countries are available in our market. When a supermarket offers its customers a couple of fruity little numbers from Brazil, we scarcely raise an eyebrow.

It seems, in other words, that the commercial jungle that wine has now become has not in the slightest deterred people from plunging adventurously into the thickets in order to taste and see. Consumers are no longer intimidated by the thought of needing to know their Pouilly-Fume from their Pouilly-Fuisse, just at the very moment when there is more to know than ever before. The reason for this new mood of confidence is not hard to find. It is on every wine label from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States: the name of the grape from which the wine is made.

At one time that might have sounded like a fairly technical approach in itself. Why should native English-speakers know what Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay were? The answer lies in the popularity that wines made from those grape varieties now enjoy. Consumer effectively recognize them as brand names, and have acquired a basic lexicon of wine that can serve them even when confronted with those Brazilian upstarts. In the wine heartlands of France, they are scared to death of that trend—not because they think their wine isn’t as good as the best from California or South Australia (what French winemaker will ever admit that?) but because they don’t traditionally call their wines Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay.

They call them Chateau Ducru Beaucaillou or Corton-Charlemagne, and they aren’t about the change. Some areas, in the middle of southern France, have now produced a generation of growers using the varietal names on their labels and are tempting consumers back to French wine. It will be an uphill struggle, but there is probably no other way if France is to avoid simply becoming a specialty source of old-fashioned wines for oldfashioned connoisseurs.

Wine consumption was also given a significant boost in the early 1990s by the work of Dr. Serge Renaud, who has spent many years investigating the reasons for the uncannily low incidence of coronary heart disease in the south of France. One of his major findings is that the fat-derived cholesterol that builds up in the arteries and can eventually lead to heart trouble, can be dispersed by the tannins in wine. Tannin is derived from the skins of grapes, and is therefore present in higher levels in red wines, because they have to be infused with their skins to attain the red colour. That news caused a huge upsurge in red wine consumption in the United States.

It has not been accorded the prominence it deserves in the UK, largely because the medical profession still sees all alcohol as a menace to health, and is constantly calling for it to be made prohibitively expensive. Certainly, the manufacturers of anticoagulant drugs might have something to lose if we all got the message that we would do just as well by our hearts by taking half a bottle of red wine every day!


Q. The tone that the author uses while asking “what French winemaker will ever admit that?” is best described as


  1. caustic

  2. satirical

  3. critical

  4. hypocritical


Ans . B


Q. What according to the author should the French do to avoid becoming a producer of merely oldfashioned wines?


  1. Follow the labeling strategy of the English-speaking countries

  2. Give their wines English names

  3. Introduce fruity wines as Brazil has done

  4. Produce the wines that have become popular in the English-speaking world


Ans . A


Q. The development which has created fear among winemakers in the wine heartland of France is the


  1. tendency not to name wines after the grape varieties that are used in the wines.

  2. 'education' that consumers have derived from wine labels from English speaking countries.

  3. new generation of local winegrowers who use labels that show names of grape varieties.

  4. ability of consumers to understand a wine’s qualities when confronted with “Brazilian upstarts”.


Ans . B


Q. Which one of the following, if true, would provide most support for Dr. Renaud’s findings about the effect of tannins?


  1. A survey showed that film celebrities based in France have a low incidence of coronary heart disease.

  2. Measurements carried out in southern France showed red wine drinkers had significantly higher levels of coronary heart incidence than white wine drinkers did.

  3. Data showed a positive association between sales of red wine and incidence of coronary heart disease.

  4. Long-term surveys in southern France showed that the incidence of coronary heart disease was significantly lower in red wine drinkers than in those who did not drink red wine.


Ans . D


Q. Which one of the following CANNOT be reasonably attributed to the labeling strategy followed by wine producers in English speaking countries?


  1. Consumers buy wines on the basis of their familiarity with a grape variety’s name

  2. Even ordinary customers now have more access to technical knowledge about wine.

  3. Consumers are able to appreciate better quality wines.

  4. Some non-English speaking countries like Brazil indicate grape variety names on their labels


Ans . C


READING COMPREHENSIONS

Right through history, imperial powers have clung to their possessions to death. Why, then, did Britain in 1947 give up the jewel in its crown, India? For many reasons. The independence struggle exposed the hollowness of the white man’s burden. Provincial self-rule since 1935 paved the way for full self-rule. Churchill resisted independence, but the Labour government of Atlee was anti-imperialist by ideology. Finally, the Royal Indian Navy mutiny in 1946 raised fears of a second Sepoy mutiny, and convinced British waverers that it was safer to withdraw gracefully. But politico-military explanations are not enough.

The basis of empire was always money. The end of empire had much to do with the fact that British imperialism had ceased to be profitable. World War II left Britain victorious but deeply indebted, needing Marshall Aid and loans from the World Bank. This constituted a strong financial case for ending the no-longer profitable empire. Empire building is expensive. The US is spending one billion dollars a day in operations in Iraq that fall well short of full scale imperialism. Through the centuries, empire building was costly, yet constantly undertaken because it promised high returns.

The investment was in armies and conquest. The returns came through plunder and taxes from the conquered. No immorality was attached to imperial loot and plunder. The biggest conquerors were typically revered (hence titles like Alexander the Great, Akbar the Great, and Peter the Great). The bigger and richer the empire, the more the plunderer was admired. This mindset gradually changed with the rise of new ideas about equality and governing for the public good, ideas that culminated in the French and American revolutions. Robert Clive was impeached for making a little money on the side, and so was Warren Hastings.

The white man’s burden came up as a new moral rationale for conquest. It was supposedly for the good of the conquered. This led to much muddled hypocrisy. On the one hand, the empire needed to be profitable. On the other hand, the white man’s burden made brazen loot impossible. An additional factor deterring loot was the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. Though crushed, it reminded the British vividly that they were a tiny ethnic group who could not rule a gigantic subcontinent without the support of important locals. After 1857, the British stopped annexing one princely state after another, and instead treated the princes as allies.

Land revenue was fixed in absolute terms, partly to prevent local unrest and partly to promote the notion of the white man’s burden. The empire proclaimed itself to be a protector of the Indian peasant against exploitation by Indian elites. This was denounced as hypocrisy by nationalists like Dadabhoy Naoroji in the 19 th century, who complained that land taxes led to an enormous drain from Indiato Britain. Objective calculations by historians like Angus Maddison suggest a drain of perhaps 1.6 percent of Indian Gross National Product in the 19 century. But land revenue was more or less fixed by the Raj in absolute terms, and so its real value diminished rapidly with inflation in the 20 th century.

By World War II, India had ceased to be a profit center for the British Empire. th Historically, conquered nations paid taxes to finance fresh wars of the conqueror. India itself was asked to pay a large sum at the end of World War I to help repair Britain’s finances. But, as shown by historian Indivar Kamtekar, the independence movement led by Gandhiji changed the political landscape, and made mass taxation of India increasingly difficult. By World War II, this had become politically impossible. Far from taxing India to pay for World War II, Britain actually began paying India for its contribution of men and goods.

Troops from white dominions like Australia, Canada and New Zealand were paid for entirely by these countries, but Indian costs were shared by the British government. Britain paid in the form of nonconvertible sterling balances, which mounted swiftly. The conqueror was paying the conquered, undercutting the profitability on which all empire is founded. Churchill opposed this, and wanted to tax India rather than owe it money. But he was overruled by Indian hands who said India would resist payment, and paralyze the war effort.

Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, said that when you are driving in a taxi to the station to catch a life-or-death train, you do not loudly announce that you have doubts whether to pay the fare. Thus, World War II converted India from a debtor to a creditor with over one billion pounds in sterling balances. Britain, meanwhile, became the biggest debtor in the world. It’s not worth ruling over people you are afraid to tax.


Q. Why didn’t Britain tax India to finance its World War II efforts?


  1. Australia, Canada and New Zealand had offered to pay for Indian troops

  2. India has already paid a sufficiently large sum during World War I.

  3. It was afraid that if India refused to pay, Britain’s war efforts would be jeopardized

  4. The British empire was built on the premise that the conqueror pays the conquered.


Ans . C


Q. What was the main lesson the British learned from the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857?


  1. That the local princes were allies, not foes.

  2. That the land revenue from India would decline dramatically.

  3. That the British were a small ethnic group

  4. That India would be increasingly difficult to rule


Ans . C


Q. Which of the following was NOT a reason for the emergence of the ‘white man’s burden’ as a new rationale for empire-building in India?


  1. The emergence of the idea of the public good as an element of governance.

  2. The decreasing returns from imperial loot and increasing costs of conquest

  3. The weakening of the immorality attached to an emperor’s looting behaviour.

  4. A growing awareness of the idea of equality among peoples.


Ans . B


Q. Which of the following best captures the meaning of the ‘white man’s burden’, as it is used by the author?


  1. The British claim to a civilizing mission directed at ensuring the good of the natives.

  2. The inspiration for the French and American revolutions

  3. The resource drain that had to be borne by the home country’s white population.

  4. An imperative that made open looting of resources impossible.


Ans . A


Q. Which one of the following best expresses the main purpose of the author?


  1. To present the various reasons that can lead to the collapse of an empire and the granting of independence of the subjects of an empire.

  2. To point out the critical role played by the ‘white man’s burden’ in making a colonizing power give up its claims to native possessions.

  3. To highlight the contradictory impulse underpinning empire building which is a costly business but very attractive at the same time

  4. To illustrate how erosion of the financial basis of an empire supports the granting of independence to an empire’s constituents.


Ans . D


Reading comprehensions

The controversy over genetically modified food continues unabated in the West. Genetic modification (GM) is the science by which the genetic material of a plant is altered, perhaps to make it more resistant to pests or killer weeds, or to enhance its nutritional value. Many food biotechnologists claim that GM will be a major contribution of science to mankind in the 21 century. On the other hand, large numbers of opponents, mainly in Europe, claim that the benefits of GM are a myth propagated by multinational corporations to increase their profits, that they pose a health hazard, and have therefore called for government to ban the sale of genetically-modified food.

st The anti-GM campaign has been quite effective in Europe, with several European Union member countries imposing a virtual ban for five years over genetically-modified food imports. Since the genetically-modified food industry is particularly strong in the United States of America, the controversy also constitutes another chapter in the US-Europe skirmishes which have become particularly acerbic after the US invasion of Iraq.

To a large extent, the GM controversy has been ignored in the Indian media, although Indian biotechnologists have been quite active in GM research. Several groups of Indian biotechnologists have been working on various issues connected with crops grown in India. One concrete achievement which has recently figured in the news is that of a team led by the former vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru university, Asis Datta — it has successfully added an extra gene to potatoes to enhance the protein content of the tuber by at least 30 percent.

It is quite likely that the GM controversy will soon hit the headlines in India since a spokesperson of the Indian Central government has recently announced that the government may use the protato in its midday meal programme for schools as early as next year. Why should “scientific progress”, with huge potential benefits to the poor and malnourished, be so controversial? The anti-GM lobby contends that pernicious propaganda has vastly exaggerated the benefits of GM and completely evaded the costs which will have to be incurred if the genetically-modified food industry is allowed to grow unchecked.

In particular, they allude to different types of costs. This group contends that the most important potential cost is that the widespread distribution and growth of genetically-modified food will enable the corporate world (alias the multinational corporations – MNCs) to completely capture the food chain. A “small” group of biotech companies will patent the transferred genes as well as the technology associated with them. They will then buy up the competing seed merchants and seed-breeding centers, thereby controlling the production of food at every possible level.

Independent farmers, big and small, will be completely wiped out of the food industry. At best, they will be reduced to the status of being subcontractors. This line of argument goes on to claim that the control of the food chain will be disastrous for the poor since the MNCs, guided by the profit motive, will only focus on the high-value food items demanded by the affluent.

Thus, in the long run, the production of basic staples which constitute the food basket of the poor will taper off. However, this vastly overestimates the power of the MNCs. Even if the research promoted by them does focus on the high-value food items, much of biotechnology research is also funded by governments in both developing and developed countries. Indeed, the protato is a by-product of this type of research. If the protato passes the field trials, there is no reason to believe that it cannot be marketed in the global potato market.

And this type of success story can be repeated with other basic food items. The second type of cost associated with the genetically modified food industry is environmental damage. The most common type of “genetic engineering” involved gene modification in plants designed to make them resistant to applications of weed-killers. This then enables farmers to use massive dosages of weedkillers so as to destroy or wipe out all competing varieties of plants in their field.

However, some weeds through genetically-modified pollen contamination may acquire resistance to a variety of weed-killers. The only way to destroy these weeds is through the use of ever-stronger herbicides which are poisonous and linger on in the environment.


Q. The author doubts the anti-GM lobby’s contention that MNC control of the food chain will be disastrous for the poor because


  1. MNCs will focus on high-value food items.

  2. MNCs are driven by the motive of profit maximization.

  3. MNCs are not the only group of actors in genetically-modified food research.

  4. Economic development will help the poor buy MNC-produced food


Ans . C


Q. Using the clues in the passage, which of the following countries would you expect to be in the forefront of the anti-GM campaign?


  1. USA and Spain.

  2. India and Iraq.

  3. Germany and France.

  4. Australia and New Zealand.


Ans . C


Q. Genetic modification makes plants more resistant to killer weeds. However, this can lead to environmental damage by


  1. wiping out competing varieties of plants which now fall prey to killer weeds.

  2. forcing application of stronger herbicides to kill weeds which have become resistant to weak herbicides.

  3. forcing application of stronger herbicides to keep the competing plants weed-free.

  4. not allowing growth of any weeds, thus reducing soil fertility


Ans . B


Q. According to the passage, biotechnology research


  1. is of utility only for high value food items

  2. is funded only by multinational corporations.

  3. allows multinational corporations to control the food basket of the poor

  4. addresses the concerns of rich and poor countries.


Ans . D


Q. Which of the following about the Indian media’s coverage of scientific research does the passage seem to suggest?


  1. Indian media generally covers a subject of scientific importance when its mass application is likely.

  2. Indian media’s coverage of scientific research is generally dependent on MNCs interests

  3. Indian media, in partnership with the government, is actively involved in publicizing the results of scientific research

  4. Indian media only highlights scientific research which is funded by the government


Ans . A


Reading Comprehensions


Social life is an outflow and meeting of personality, which means that its end is the meeting of character, temperament, and sensibility, in which our thoughts and feelings, and sense perceptions are brought into play at their lightest and yet keenest.

This aspect, to my thinking, is realized as much in large parties composed of casual acquaintances or even strangers, as in intimate meetings of old friends. I am not one of those superior persons who hold cocktail parties in contempt, looking upon them as barren or at best as very tryingly kaleidoscopic places for gathering, because of the strangers one has to meet in them; which is no argument, for even our most intimate friends must at one time have been strangers to us.

These large gatherings will be only what we make of them if not anything better, they can be as good places to collect new friends from as the slavemarkets of Istanbul were for beautiful slaves or New Market for race horses. But they do offer more immediate enjoyment. For one thing, in them one can see the external expression of social life in appearance and behaviour at its widest and most varied, where one can admire beauty of body or air, hear voices remarkable either for sweetness of refinement, look on elegance of clothes or deportment. What is more, these parties are schools for training in sociability, for in them we have to treat strangers as friends.

So, in them we see social sympathy in widest commonality spread, or at least should. We show an atrophy of the natural human instinct of getting pleasure and happiness out of other human beings if we cannot treat strangers as friends for the moment. And I would go further and paraphrase Pater to say that not to be able to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, even when we meet them casually, is on this short day of frost and sun which out life is, to sleep before evening.

So, it will be seen that my conception of social life is modest, for it makes no demands on what we have, though it does make some on what we are. Interest, wonder, sympathy, and love, the first two leading to the last two, are the psychological prerequisites for social life; and the need for the first two must not be underrated. We cannot make the most even of our intimate social life unless we are able to make strangers of our oldest friends everyday by discovering unknown areas in their personality, and transform them into new friends.

In sum, social life is a function of vitality. It is tragic, however, to observe that it is these very natural springs of social life which are drying up among us. It is becoming more and more difficult to come across fellow-feeling for human beings as such in our society and in all its strata. In the poor middle class, in the course of all my life. I have hardly seen any social life properly so-called. Not only has the grinding routine of making a living killed all desire for it in them, it has also generated a standing mood of peevish hostility to other human beings.

Increasing economic distress in recent years has infinitely worsened this state of affairs, and has also brought a sinister addition class hatred. This has become the greatest collective emotional enjoyment of the poor middle class, and indeed they feel most social when they form a pack, and snarl or howl at people who are better off than they. Their most innocent exhibition of sociability is seen when they spill out from their intolerable homes into the streets and bazaars.

I was astonished to see the milling crowds in the poor suburbs of Calcutta. But even there a group of flippant young loafers would put on a conspiratorial look if they saw a man in good clothes passing by them either on foot or in a car. I had borrowed a car from a relative to visit a friend in one of these suburbs, and he became very anxious when I had not returned before dusk. Acid and bombs, he said, were thrown at cars almost every evening in that area.

I was amazed. But I also know as a fact that my brother was blackmailed to pay five rupees on a trumped up charge when passing in a car through one such locality. The situation is differently inhuman, but not a whit more human, among the well-to-do. Kindliness for fellow human beings has been smothered in them, taken as a class, by the arrogance of worldly position, which among the Bengalis who show this snobbery is often only a third-class position.


Q. The word 'they' in the first sentence of the third paragraph refers to


  1. Large parties consisting of casual acquaintances and strangers.

  2. Intimate meetings of old friends.

  3. New friends.

  4. Both (1) and (2).


Ans . A


Q. In this passage the author is essentially


  1. showing how shallow our social life is.

  2. poking fun at the lower middle class people who howl at better off people.

  3. lamenting the drying up of our real social life.

  4. criticizing the upper class for lavish showy parties.


Ans . C


Q. The author’s conception of ‘social life’ requires that


  1. people attend large gatherings.

  2. people possess qualities like wonder and interest.

  3. people do not spend too much time in the company of intimate friends.

  4. large parties consist of casual acquaintances and intimate friends.


Ans . B


Q. The word ‘discriminate’ in the last sentence of the third paragraph means


  1. recognize

  2. count

  3. distinguish

  4. analyse


Ans . A


Q. What is the author trying to show through the two incidents in the paragraph beginning, “Their most innocent exhibition of sociability…”?


  1. The crowds in poor Calcutta suburbs can turn violent without any provocation

  2. Although poor, the people of poor Calcutta suburbs have a rich social life.

  3. It is risky for rich people to move around in poor suburbs.

  4. Achieving a high degree of sociability does not stop the poor from hating the rich.


Ans . D


Reading Comprehensions

Modern science, exclusive of geometry, is a comparatively recent creation and can be said to have originated with Galileo and Newton. Galileo was the first scientist to recognize clearly that the only way to further our understanding of the physical world was to resort to experiment.

However obvious Galileo’s contention may appear in the light of our present knowledge, it remains a fact that the Greeks, in spite of their proficiency in geometry, never seem to have realized the importance of experiment. To a certain extent, this may be attributed to the crudeness of their instruments of measurement. Still an excuse of this sort can scarcely be put forward when the elementary nature of Galileo’s experiments and observations is recalled.

Watching a lamp oscillate in the cathedral of Pisa, dropping bodies from the leaning tower of Pisa, rolling balls down inclined planes, noticing the magnifying effect of water in a spherical glass vase, such was the nature of Galileo’s experiments and observations. As can be seen, they might just as well have been performed by the Greeks. At any rate, it was thanks to such experiments that Galileo discovered the fundamental law of dynamics, according to which the acceleration imparted to a body is proportional to the force acting upon it.

The next advance was due to Newton, the greatest scientist of all time if account be taken of his joint contributions to mathematics and physics. As a physicist, he was of course an ardent adherent of the empirical method, but his greatest title to fame lies in another direction. Prior to Newton, mathematics, chiefly in the form of geometry, had been studied as a fine art without any view to its physical applications other than in very trivial cases. But with Newton all the resources of mathematics were turned to advantage in the solution of physical problems.

Thenceforth, mathematics appeared as an instrument of discovery, the most powerful one known to man, multiplying the power of thought just as in the mechanical domain the lever multiplied our physical action. It is this application of mathematics to the solution of physical problems, this combination of two separate fields of investigation, which constitutes the essential characteristic of the Newtonian method. Thus, problems of physics were metamorphosed into problems of mathematics. But in Newton’s day the mathematical instrument was still in a very backward state of development. In this field again Newton showed the mark of genius by inventing the integral calculus.

As a result of this remarkable discovery, problems, which would have baffled Archimedes, were solved with ease. We know that in Newton’s hands this new departure in scientific method led to the discovery of the law of gravitation. But here again the real significance of Newton’s achievement lay not so much in the exact quantitative formulation of the law of attraction, as in his having established the presence of law and order at least in one important realm of nature, namely, in the motions of heavenly bodies. Nature thus exhibited rationality and was not mere blind chaos and uncertainty.

To be sure, Newton’s investigations had been concerned with but a small group of natural phenomena, but it appeared unlikely that this mathematical law and order should turn out to be restricted to certain special phenomena; and the feeling was general that all the physical processes of nature would prove to be unfolding themselves according to rigorous mathematical laws.

When Einstein, in 1905, published his celebrated paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, he remarked that the difficulties, which surrounded the equations of electrodynamics, together with the negative experiments of Michelson and others, would be obviated if we extended the validity of the Newtonian principle of the relativity of Galilean motion, which applies solely to mechanical phenomena, so as to include all manner of phenomena: electrodynamics, optical etc. When extended in this way the Newtonian principle of relativity became Einstein’s special principle of relativity. Its significance lay in its assertion that absolute Galilean motion or absolute velocity must ever escape all experimental detection. Henceforth absolute velocity should be conceived of as physically meaningless, not only in the particular realm of mechanics, as in Newton’s day, but in the entire realm of physical phenomena.

Einstein’s special principle, by adding increased emphasis to this relativity of velocity, making absolute velocity metaphysically meaningless, created a still more profound distinction between velocity and accelerated or rotational motion. This latter type of motion remained absolute and real as before. It is most important to understand this point and to realize that Einstein’s special principle is merely an extension of the validity of the classical Newtonian principle to all classes of phenomena.


Q. According to the author, why did the Greeks NOT conduct experiments to understand the physical world?


  1. Apparently they did not think it necessary to experiment.

  2. They focused exclusively on geometry.

  3. Their instruments of measurement were very crude.

  4. The Greeks considered the application of geometry to the physical world more important.


Ans . A


Q. The statement “Nature thus exhibited rationality and was not mere blind chaos and uncertainty” suggests that


  1. problems that had baffled scientists like Archimedes were not really problems.

  2. only a small group of natural phenomena was chaotic.

  3. physical phenomena conformed to mathematical laws

  4. natural phenomena were evolving towards a less chaotic future.


Ans . C


Q. Newton may be considered one of the greatest scientists of all time because he


  1. discovered the law of gravitation.

  2. married physics with mathematics.

  3. invented integral calculus

  4. started the use of the empirical method in science.


Ans . B


Q. Which of the following statements about modern science best captures the theme of the passage?


  1. Modern science rests firmly on the platform built by the Greeks.

  2. We need to go back to the method of enquiry used by the Greeks to better understand the laws of dynamics.

  3. Disciplines like Mathematics and Physics function best when integrated into one

  4. New knowledge about natural phenomena builds on existing knowledge.


Ans . D


Q. The significant implication of Einstein’s special principle of relativity is that


  1. absolute velocity was meaningless in the realm of mechanics

  2. Newton’s principle of relativity needs to be modified

  3. there are limits to which experimentation can be used to understand some physical phenomena.

  4. it is meaningless to try to understand the distinction between velocity and accelerated or rotational motion.


Ans . C


Reading Comprehensions

As you set out for Ithaka hope the journey is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidon – don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, wild Poseidon – you won’t encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one, may there be many a summer morning when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbours seen for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind – as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars. Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey, without her you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.


Q. Which of the following best reflects the central theme of this poem?


  1. If you don’t have high expectations, you will not be disappointed.

  2. Don’t rush to your goal; the journey is what enriches you

  3. The longer the journey the greater the experiences you gather.

  4. You cannot reach Ithaka without visiting Egyptian ports.


Ans . B


Q. The poet recommends a long journey. Which of the following is the most comprehensive reason for it?


  1. You can gain knowledge as well as sensual experience.

  2. You can visit new cities and harbours.

  3. You can experience the full range of sensuality.

  4. You can buy a variety of fine things.


Ans . A


Q. In the poem, Ithaka is a symbol of


  1. the divine mother.

  2. your inner self.

  3. the path to wisdom

  4. life’s distant goal.


Ans . D


Q. What does the poet mean by ‘Laistrygonians’ and ‘Cyclops’?


  1. Creatures which, along with Poseidon, one finds during a journey.

  2. Mythological characters that one should not be afraid of.

  3. Intra-personal obstacles that hinder one’s journey

  4. Problems that one has to face to derive the most from one’s journey.


Ans . C


Q. Which of the following best reflects the tone of the poem?


  1. Prescribing

  2. Exhorting

  3. Pleading

  4. Consoling


Ans . B