CAT 1996

1. 1. It doesn't take a highly esteemed medical expert to conclude that women handle pain better than men.
A. First the men would give birth, and then take six months to recover.
B. As for labour pains, the human species would become extinct if men had to give birth.
C. They do, however, make life hell for everyone else with their non-stop complaining about how bad they feel.
D. The men in my life, including my husband and my father, would not take a Tylenol for pain even if their lives depends on it.
6. And by the time they finish sharing their excruciating experience with their buddies, all reproduction would come to a halt.

2. 1. A few years ago, hostility towards Japanese-Americans was so strong that I thought they were going to reopen the detention camps here in Kolkata.
A. Today Asians are a success story.
B. I cannot help making a comparison to the anti-Jewish sentiment in Nazi Germany when Jewish people were successful in business.
C. But do people applaud President Clinton for improving foreign trade with Asia?
D. Now, talk about the ‘Arkansas-Asia Connection’ is broadening that hatred to include all AsianAmericans.
6. No, blinded by jealousy, they complain that it is the Asian-Americans who are reaping the wealth.

3. 1. Michael Jackson, clearly no admirer of long engagements, got married abruptly for the second time in three years.
A. The latest wedding took place in a secret midnight ceremony in Sydney, Australia.
B. It is also the second marriage for the new missus, about whom little is known.
C. The wedding was attended by the groom's entourage and staff, according to Jackson's publicist.
D. The bride, 37-year-old Debbie Rowe, who is carrying Jackson's baby, wore white.
6. All that is known is that she is a nurse for Jackson's dermatologist.

4. 1. Liz Taylor isn't just unlucky in love.
A. She, and husband Larry Fortensky, will have to pay the tab — $4,32,600 in court costs.
B. The duo claimed that a 1993 story about a property dispute damaged their reputations.
C. Taylor has just filed a defamation suit against the National Enquirer. D. She is unlucky in law too.
6. Alas, all levels of the California court system disagreed.

5. 1. Hiss was serving as Head of the Endowment on August 3, 1948, when Whittaker Chambers reluctantly appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
A. Chambers, a portly rumpled man with a melodramatic style, had been a Communist courier but had broken with the party in 1938.
B. When Nixon arranged a meeting of the two men in New York, Chambers repeated his charges and Hiss his denials.
C. Summoned as a witness, Hiss denied that he had ever been a Communist or had known Chambers.
D. He told the Committee that among the members of a secret Communist cell in Washington during the 1930s was Hiss.
6. Then, bizarrely, Hiss asked Chambers to open his mouth.

6. 1. Since its birth, rock has produced a long string of guitar heroes.
A. It is a list that would begin with Chuck Berry and continue with Hendrix, Page and Clapton.
B. These are musicians celebrated for their sheer instrumental talent, and their flair for expansive, showy and sometimes self-indulgent solos.
C. It would also include players of more recent vintage, like Van-Halen and Living Colour's Vemon Rei.
(d) D. But with the advent of alternative rock and grunge, guitar heroism became uncool.
6. Guitarists like Peter Buck and Kurt Cobain shy away from exhibitionism.

7. 1. For many scientists, oceans are the cradle of life.
A. But all over the world, chemical products and nuclear waste continue to be dumped into them.
B. Coral reefs, which are known to be the most beautiful places of the submarine world, are fast disappearing.
C. The result is that many species of fish die because of this pollution.
D. Of course man is the root cause behind these problems.
6. Man has long since ruined the places he visits — continents and oceans alike.

8. 1. Am I one of the people who are worried that Bill Clinton's second term might be destroyed by the constitutional crisis?
A. On the other hands, ordinary citizens have put the campaign behind them.
B. In other words, what worries me is that Bill Clinton could exhibit a version of what George Bush used to refer to as Big Mo.
C. That is, he might have so much campaign momentum that he may not be able to stop campaigning.
D. Well, it's true that I've been wondering whether a President could be impeached for refusing to stop talking about the bridge we need to build to the 21st century.
6. They now prefer to watch their favourite soaps and ads on TV rather than senators.

9. 1. So how big is the potential market?
A. But they end up spending thousands more each year on hardware overhaul and software upgradation.
B. Analysts say the new machines will appeal primarily to corporate users.
C. An individual buyer can pick up a desktop computer for less than $2,000 in America.
D. For them, the NCs best-drawing card is its promise of much lower maintenance costs.
6. NCs, which automatically load the latest version of whatever software they need could put an end to all that.

10. 1. Historically, stained glass was almost entirely reserved for ecclesiastical spaces.
A. By all counts, he has accomplished that mission with unmistakable style.
B. "It is my mission to bring it kicking and screaming out of that milieu," says Clarke.
C. The first was the jewel-like windows he designed for a Cistercian Church in Switzerland.
D. Two recent projects show his genius in the separate worlds of the sacred and the mundane.
6. The second was a spectacular, huge skylight in a shopping complex in Brazil.

Direction for questions 11 to 15: Find the odd word out from each of the following sets of four word.

12. Find the odd word out from each of the following sets of four word.

13. Find the odd word out from each of the following sets of four word.

14. Find the odd word out from each of the following sets of four word.

15. Find the odd word out from each of the following sets of four word.

Direction for questions 16 to 23: In each of the following questions a pair of capitalised words is followed by four pair of words. You are required to mark as the answer the pair of words which have a relationship between them most similar to the relationship between the capitalised pair.

17. Fission : Fusion

18. Doubt : Faith

19. Brick : Building

20. Dulcet : Raucous

21. Action : Reaction

22. Malapropism : Words

23. Anterior : Posterior

Direction for questions 24 to 29: In each of the following questions, a part of a sentence is left blank. Choose from among the four options given below each question, the one which would best fill the blanks.

25. I am an entertainer ___, I have to keep smiling because in my heart laughter and sorrow have an affinity.

26. The stock markets ___. The state they are in right now speaks volumes about this fact.

27. Political power is just as permanent as today's newspaper. Ten years down the line, ___ the most powerful man in any state today.

28. ___, the more they remain the same.

29. Although, it has been more than 50 years since Satyajit Ray made Pather Panchali, ___ refuse to go away from the mind.

Direction for questions 30 to 35: In each of the following questions, a part of the paragraph or sentences has been underlined. From the choices given to you, you are required to choose the one which would best replace the underlined part.

31. In a penetrating study, CBS-TV focuses on these people without hope, whose bodies are cared for by welfare aid, but whose spirit is often neglected by a disinterested society.

32. Contemplating whether to exist with an insatiable romantic temperament, he was the author and largely the subject of a number of memorable novels.

33. How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start to make sense? There is a monster out there, and it is rushing towards me over the uneven ground of consciousness.

34. In Martin Amis' new novel, the narrator is trapped — and hurtling towards a terrible secret, its resolution and the dreadful revelations it brings, ally to give an excruciating vision of guilt.

35. Victory is everything in the Indian universe and Tendulkar will be expected to translate his genius to that effect. To contemplate any other option is to contemplate the risk of failure.

Direction for questions 36 to 44: Given below are six statements followed by sets of three. You are to mark the option in which the statements are most logically related.

37. 1. An ostrich lays eggs
2. All birds lay eggs
3. Some birds can fly
4. An ostrich cannot fly
5. An ostrich is a bird
6. An ostrich cannot swim

38. 1. Some paper is wood
2. All wood is good
3. All that is good is wood
4. All wood is paper
5. All paper is good
6. Some paper is good

39. 1. All bricks are tricks
2. Some tricks are shrieks
3. Some that are shrieks are bricks
4. Some tricks are not bricks
5. All tricks are shrieks
6. No tricks are shrieks

40. 1. Some sand is band
2. All sandal is band
3. All band is sandal
4. No sand is sandal
5. No band is sand
6. Some band is sandal

41. 1. No wife is a life
2. All life is strife
3. Some wife is strife
4. All that is wife is life
5. All wife is strife 6. No wife is strife

42. 1. Some crows are flies
2. Some flies are mosquitoes
3. All mosquitoes are flies
4. Some owls are flies
5. All owls are mosquitoes
6. Some mosquitoes are not owls

43. 1. Six is five
2. Five is not four
3. Some five is ten
4. Some six is twelve
5. Some twelve is five
6. Some ten is four

44. 1. Poor girls want to marry rich boys
2. Rich girls want to marry rich boys
3. Poor girls want to marry rich girls
4. Rich boys want to marry rich girls
5. Poor girls want to marry rich girls
6. Rich boys want to marry poor girls

Direction for questions 45 to 50: Arrange the four sentences in their proper order so that they make a logically coherent paragraph.

46. A.However, the severed head could not grow back if fire could be applied instantly to the amputated part.
B.To get rid of this monstrosity was truly a Herculean task, for as soon as one head was cut off, two new ones replaced it.
C.Hercules accomplished this labour with the aid of an assistant who cauterized the necks as fast as Hercules cut off the heads!
D.One of the twelve labours of Hercules was the killing of hydra, a water monster with nine heads.

47. A.That Hollywood is a man's world is certainly true, but it is not the whole truth.
B.Even Renaissance film actress, Jodie Foster, who hosts this compendium of movie history, confesses surprise at this.
C.She says that she had no idea that women were so active in the industry even in those days.
D.During the silent era, for example, female scriptwriters outnumbered males 10 to 1.

48. A.Its business decisions are made on the timely and accurate flow of information.
B.It has 1,700 employees in 13 branch and representative offices across the Asia-Pacific region.
C.For employees to maintain a competitive edge in a fast-moving field, they must have quick access to JP Morgan's proprietary trade related data.
D.JP Morgan's is one of the largest banking institutions in the US and a premier international trading firm.

49. A.The Saheli Programme, run by the US Cross-Cultural Solutions, is offering a three week tour of India that involves a lot more than frenzied sightseeing.
B.Participants interested in women's issues will learn about arranged marriages, dowry and infanticide.
C.Holiday packages include all sorts of topics, but female infanticide must be the first for tourism.
D.Interspersed with these talks and meetings are visits to cities like New Delhi and Agra, home to the Taj Mahal.

50. A. Something magical is happening to our planet.
B. Some are calling it a paradigm shift.
C. Its getting smaller.
D. Others call it business transformation.

Directions for questions 51 to 100: Read each of the following passages carefully and answer the questions that follow.

Passage – 1

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passage – 2
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. Page 13CAT 1996 Actual Paper 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passage – 3
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.

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

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

70. It is implied in the passage that

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

Passage – 4

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. Page 16 CAT 1996 Actual Paper 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.

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

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

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

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

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

78. A suitable title to the passage would be

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

Passage – 5

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 Page 18 CAT 1996 Actual Paper 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passage – 6

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.

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

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

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

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

92. This passage most probably is a part of

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

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

Passage – 7

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.

96. A suitable title to the passage would be

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

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

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

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