Test Name Marks Answered Unanswered Correct Wrong
Verbal Ability and English

Read Instructions for the test.

  1. Negative marks are -0.33 per wrong answer
  2. Right answer is 1 mark
  3. No time limit but finish in 30 mins
  4. Solution can be found at below chapters:

Test series is based on following chapters.

  1. Aptitude Chapter 21: Reading Comprehensions
  2. Aptitude Chapter 21-A: Reading Comprehensions

Core competencies and focus are now the mantras of corporate strategists in Western economies. But while managers in the West have dismantled many conglomerates assembled in the 1960s and 1970s, the large, diversified business group remains the dominant form of enterprise throughout most emerging markets. Some groups operate as holding companies with full ownership in many enterprises, others are collections of publicly traded companies, but all have some degree of central control.

As emerging markets open up to global competition, consultants and foreign investors are increasingly pressuring these groups to conform to Western practice by scaling back the scope of their business activities. The conglomer-, ate is the dinosaur of organizational design, they argue, too unwieldy and slow to compete in today’s fast-paced markets. Already a number of executives have decided to break up their groups in order to show that they are focusing on only a few core businesses.

There are reasons to worry about this trend. Focus is good advice in New York or London, but something important gets lost in translation when that advice is given to groups in emerging markets. Western companies take for granted a range of institutions that support their business activities, but many of these institutions are absent in other regions of the world. Without effective securities regulation and venture capital firms, for example, focused companies may be unable to raise adequate financing; and without strong educational institutions, they will struggle to hire skilled employees.

Communicating with customers is difficult when the local infrastructure is poor, and unpredictable government behavior can stymie any operation. Although a focused strategy may enable a company to perform a few activities well, companies in emerging markets must take responsibility for a wide range of functions in order to do business effectively. In the case of product markets, buyers and sellers usually suffer from a severe dearth of information for three reasons. First, the communications infrastructure in emerging markets is often underdeveloped. Even as wireless communication spreads throughout the West, vast stretches in countries such as China and India remain without telephones.

Power shortages often render the modes of communication that do exist ineffective. The postal service is typically inefficient, slow, or unreliable; and the private sector rarely provides efficient courier services. High rates of illiteracy make it difficult for marketers to communicate effectively with customers. Second, even when information about products does get around, there are no mechanisms to corroborate the claims made by sellers. Independent consumer-information organizations are rare, and government watchdog agencies are of little use.

The few analysts who rate products are generally less sophisticated than their counterparts in advanced economies. Third, consumers have no redress mechanisms if a product does not deliver on its promise. Law enforcement is often capricious and so slow that few who assign any value to time would resort to it. Unlike in advanced markets, there are few extrajudicial arbitration mechanisms to which one can appeal. As a result of this lack of information, companies in emerging markets face much higher costs in building credible brands than their counterparts in advanced economies.

In turn, established brands wield tremendous power. A conglomerate with a reputation for quality products and services can use its group name to enter new businesses, even if those businesses are completely unrelated to its current lines. Groups also have an advantage when they do try to build up a brand because they can spread the cost of maintaining it across multiple lines of business. Such groups then have a greater incentive not to damage brand quality in any one business because they will pay the price in their other businesses as well.












Passage - II


From a technical and economic perspective, many assessments have highlighted the presence of cost-effective opportunities to reduce energy use in buildings. However several bodies note the significance of multiple barriers that prevent the take-up of energy efficiency measures in buildings. These include lack of awareness and concern, limited access to reliable information from trusted sources, fear about risk, disruption and other ‘transaction costs’ concerns about up-front costs and inadequate access to suitably priced finance, a lack of confidence in suppliers and technologies and the presence of split incentives between landlords and tenants.

The widespread presence of these barriers led experts to predict that without a concerted push from policy, two-thirds of the economically viable potential to improve energy efficiency will remain unexploited by 2035. These barriers are albatross around the neck that represent a classic market failure and a basis for governmental intervention. While these measurements focus on the technical, financial or economic barriers preventing the take-up of energy efficiency options in buildings, others emphasize the significance of the often deeply embedded social practices that shape energy use in buildings.

These analyses focus not on the preferences and rationalities that might shape individual behaviours, but on the ‘entangled’ cultural practices, norms, values and routines that underpin domestic energy use. Focusing on the practice-related aspects of consumption generates very different conceptual framings and policy prescriptions than those that emerge from more traditional or mainstream perspectives. But the underlying case for government intervention to help to promote retrofit and the diffusion of more energy efficient particles is still apparent, even though the forms of intervention advocated are often very different to those that emerge from a more technical or economic perspective. Based on the recognition of the multiple barriers to change and the social, economic and environmental benefits that could be realised if they were overcome, government support for retrofit (renovating existing infrastructure to make it more energy efficient) has been widespread. Retrofit programmes have been supported and adopted in diverse forms in many setting and their ability to recruit householders and then to impact their energy use has been discussed quite extensively.

Frequently, these discussions have criticised the extent to which retrofit schemes rely on incentives and the provision of new technologies to change behaviour whilst ignoring the many other factors that might limit either participation in the schemes or their impact on the behaviours and prac-tices that shape domestic energy use.

These factors are obviously central to the success of retrofit schemes, but evaluations of different schemes have found that despite these they can still have significant impacts. Few experts that the best estimate of the gap between the technical potential and the actual in-situ performance of energy efficiency measures is 50%, with 35% coming from performance gaps and 15% coming from ‘comfort taking’ or direct rebound effects.

They further suggest that the direct rebound effect of energy efficiency measures related to household heating is Ilkley to be less than 30% while rebound effects for various domestic energy efficiency measures vary from 5 to 15% and arise mostly from indirect effects (i.e., where savings from energy efficiency lead to increased demand for goods and services).

Other analyses also note that the gap between technical potential and actual performance is likely to vary by measure, with the range extending from 0% for measures such as solar water heating to 50% for measures such as improved heating controls. And others note that levels of comfort taking are likely to vary according to the levels of consumption and fuel poverty in the sample of homes where insulation is installed, with the range extending from 30% when considering homes across all income groups to around 60% when considering only lower income homes.

The scale of these gaps is significant because it materially affects the impacts of retrofit schemes and expectations and perceptions of these impacts go on to influence levels of political, financial and public support for these schemes.

The literature on retrofit highlights the presence of multiple barriers to change and the need for government support, if these are to be overcome.

Although much has been written on the extent to which different forms of support enable the wider take-up of domestic energy efficiency measures, behaviours and practices, various areas of contestation remain and there is still an absence of robust ex-post evidence on the extent to which these schemes actually do lead to the social, economic and environmental benefits that are widely claimed.









Passage - III


Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of , poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers once fretted about girls’ . lack of confidence in science but this is changing.

Sweden has commissioned research into its “boy crisis”. Australia has devised a reading programme called “Boys, Blokes, Books and Bytes”. In just a couple of generations, one gender gap has closed, only for another to open up. The reversal is laid out in a report published on March 5th by the OECD. a Paris­based richcountry think­tank. Boys’ dominance just about endures in maths: at age 15 they are, on average, the equivalent of three months’ schooling ahead of girls. In science the results are fairly even. But in reading, where girls have been ahead for some time, a gulf has appeared.

In all G4 countries and economies in the study, girls outperform boys. The average gap is equivalent to an extra year of schooling. The OECD deems literacy to be the most important skill that it assesses, since further learning depends on it. Sure enough, teenage boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail to achieve basic proficiency in any of maths, reading and science. Youngsters in this group, with nothing to build on or shine at, are prone to drop out of school altogether. To see why boys and girls fare so differently in the classroom, first look at what they do outside it.

The average 15­year old girl devotes five­and­a­half hours a week to homework, an hour more than the average boy, who spend more time playing video games and trawling the internet.

Three­quarters of girls read for pleasure, compared with little more than half of boys. Reading rates are falling everywhere as screens draw eyes from pages, but boys are giving up faster. The OECD found that, among boys who do as much homework as the average girl, the gender gap in reading fell by nearly a quarter. Once in the classroom, boys long to be out of it: They are twice as likely as girls to report that school is a “waste of time”, and more often turn up late.

Just as a teachers­ used to struggle to persuade girls that science is not only for men, the OECD now urges parents and policymakers to steer boys away from a version of masculinity that ignores academic achievement. Boys’ disdain for school might have been less irrational when there were plenty of jobs for uneducated men. But those days have long gone. It may be that a bit of swagger helps in maths, where confidence plays a part in boys’ lead (though it sometimes extends to delusion :12% of boys told the OECD that they are familiar with the mathematical concept of “subjunctive sealing”, a red herring that fooled only 7% of girls.) But their lack of selfdiscipline drives teachers crazy. The OECD found that boys did much better in its anonymised tests than in teachers assessments.

What is behind this discrimination? One possibility is that teachers mark up students who are polite, eager and stay out of flights, all attributes that are more common among girls. In some countries, academic points can even be docked for bad behaviour