English Language Quiz for IBPS 2020 Mains Exams- 14th December

Directions (1-5): Each of the following questions has a paragraph from which one sentence has been deleted. From the given options, choose the one that completes the paragraph in the most appropriate way.

Q1. Unchecked and unfiltered, screen-time can be dangerous for kids. It has clear health implications, in that it can affect sleep, or prevent kids from engaging in physical activity, thereby contributing to India’s rising childhood obesity rates. ________________________________. And studies have shown that young children who are screen users exhibit higher rates of aggression. Online apps and games, which are created with the specific intent to attract and hook their users, are particularly addictive for kids.

(a)It can exacerbate mental health issues, and perpetuate social isolation.
(b)Context is about how they’re engaging with what they’re watching.
(c)Devices, alone, are not going to teach our children empathy.
(d)We are lucky to live in a time when we have these tools, now we just have to learn how to use them.
(e)Technology is vital to kids’ future achievement and a necessary part of their education.

Q2. The Odiyas drew first, but the taste of defeat hangs heavy as lead on Odisha’s palate. In 2014, Jagannath scholar Asit Mohanty had submitted a 100-page report to the state government stating that the rosogolla was cited in the Odiya Ramayana of Balaram Das and had been offered to the state’s gods six centuries ago. __________________________________________________. Had they not proselytised the rosogolla the world over? They have literally weaponised it — along with guns, knives and explosives, notices in Kolkata’s airport explicitly ban rosogollas from baggage.

(a)And anyway, squabbling over rosogollas beats fighting over beef.
(b)Banglar rosogolla belongs in a mixed bag.
(c)The Bengalis, with whom the sweet is associated as closely as Chianti is with the Italians, were outraged at being accused of filching it later.
(d)Led by its chief minister, West Bengal is celebrating its equivalent of the return of the Kohinoor diamond or the Elgin Marbles.
(e)However, it is noteworthy that the GI is in the name of one state’s product.

Q3. Italian football, though, is far from dead. History shows that they recover fast. Ask Pele. By the time he played his last World Cup, in 1970, they had recovered briskly enough to reach the finals, and the Brazilian maestro and his colleagues had to be at their most destructive best to beat them. _______________________________________. As Gianluigi Buffon, who drew the curtains on his glittering 20-year-old career, said, tears rolling down his cheeks, “the next generation of Italian players can turn this catastrophe around.”

(a)It’s a storm that has been brewing for several years.
(b)In another 12 years, they won the World Cup, beating en route what is deemed to be the best Brazilian team to have never won a World Cup.
(c)But the best of Italian teams can gloss over such deficiencies with their sheer will, allied with the tactical brilliance of their coaches.
(d)Thus the utter disbelief of watching the World Cup in Russia without the Azzurri, the famed catenaccio artistes in blue, the blue-eyed alpha males who suddenly turn on their game astride the biggest stage.
(e)Back in Italy, it’s apocalypse.

Q4. To do this successfully, the leadership may have to prepare their personnel and create fertile ground for the cross-department collaboration necessary to embrace and implement the change. Continuous organizational learning and renewal is one of the elements—along with human resources, strategic choices, efficiency of implementation and effective leadership—essential for an organization to become high performing in an overall sense. ____________________________________________

(a)Also, there is incentivization for the employees to take up external certification programmes to improve their skills and knowledge.
(b)As such, HBR aptly termed it the “great training robbery”.
(c)American corporates spent $356 billion in 2015 on training their employees, but only one in four of them observed any salutary impact on the organization performance.
(d)After all, those who sweat more in training, bleed less in combat.
(e)The management must necessarily utilize the feedback to draw up a training strategy which is in line with corporate goals and values.

Q5. The legislature, the army, the judiciary and the media are important structures of the nation. The first sets the rules, the second defends the state, the third determines what is right and what’s wrong, and the fourth blows the whistle when things go wrong. They have their roles and boundaries. _______________________________________________

(a)Institutions are strengthened or weakened depending on how the individuals temporarily in charge of the institutions act.
(b)Political demagogues have often used language that dehumanizes the opponent to undermine them.
(c)In democracies, the army should be visible sparingly—at parades, and only occasionally, to help with emergency disaster relief, and heard from even less.
(d)There is another guardian, the media, which can hold all these institutions accountable.
(e)All it needs is popular will.

Direction (6): There are four sentences given in the following question. Find the sentence(s) which is/are grammatically correct and mark your answer choosing the best possible alternative among the five options given below each question. If all sentences are correct, choose (e) as your answer.

Q6. (I)The GST Council, at its 23rd meeting in Guwahati last week announced major GST rate cuts by shifting 177 items—ranging from shaving creams to wristwatches—from the highest slab of 28% to the 18% slab.
(II)The government has procured 2 million tonnes of pulses by ensuring minimum support price or market rates, whichever is higher, directly from the farmers and this has been the highest ever procurement of pulses.
(III)Globally, firms across industries are cutting their spending on legacy work such as application maintenance, and ploughing the savings on newer projects into areas such as data analytics and cyber security solutions.
(IV)TCS, India’s largest software services firm, maintains that it is the company’s DNA to build technologies and groom leaders to take against senior roles, even if implementing this strategy means the company has to sacrifice some growth in the short term.

(a)Only (I) is correct
(b)Only (IV) is correct
(c)Both (I) and (II) are correct
(d)Only (I), (II) and (III) are correct
(e)All are correct

Direction (7): The following question consists of a sentence which is divided into three parts which contain grammatical errors in one or more than one part of the sentence, as specified in bold in each part. If there is an error in any part of the sentence, find the correct alternatives to replace those parts from the three options given below each question to make the sentence grammatically correct. If the given sentence is grammatically correct or does not require any correction, choose (e), i.e., “No correction required” as your answer.

Q7. In the biggest revamp of the GST tax structure, the GST Council last week removed 178 items (I)/from the highest 28 per cent category while cutting the tax on all restaurants outside starred-hotels (II)/to 5 per cent but withdrawing input credit facility for them. (III)

(I)To revamp the biggest GST tax structure
(II)by cutting the tax from all restaurants
(III)facilities to them

(a)Only (I)
(b)Only (III)
(c)Both (I) and (III)
(d)All (I), (II) and (III)
(e)No correction required

Direction (8): In the question given below, there are four sentences. Choose the sentence which is grammatically incorrect as your answer. If all the given sentences are grammatically correct and do not require any correction, choose (e) i.e. “All are correct” as your answer.

Q8.
(a)Owing to the rampant change in the lifestyle of the majority of Indian populace, it is vital to understand lifestyle diseases, including and especially diabetes.
(b)The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved setting up of the anti-profiteering authority under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime to be composed of a chairman and four technical members.
(c)Less than half of Indian households has access to a proper toilet and as a consequence many people defecate in public spaces.
(d)Once a regional breadbasket, Zimbabwe saw its economy collapse after the seizure of white-owned farms in the early 2000s, followed by runaway money-printing that catapulted inflation to 500 billion percent in 2008.
(e)All are correct.

Direction (9): There are three sentences given in the following question. Find the sentence(s) which is/are grammatically correct and mark your answer choosing the best possible alternative among the five options given below each question. If all the sentences are correct, choose (e) as your answer.

Q9. (I)In recent months, Mr Modi’s Clean India programme to provide access to sanitation has received international attention and even praise from people like Bill Gates who has commended the fact that the Modi government has said that the problem will not exist by the year 2019.
(II)As researchers Diane Coffey and Dean Spear point out in their recently released book Where India Goes, the issue of why most Indians do not use toilets was less than a problem of the unavailability of proper toilets and more to with having social behaviour and religious beliefs.
(III)If Pakistanis want a better future for their children, if they want to ensure that so many of them do not perish because of entirely preventable illnesses, this attitude of stubborn denial will have to change.

(a)Only (II) is correct
(b)Both (I) and (III) are correct
(c)Both (I) and (II) are correct
(d)Both (II) and (III) are correct
(e)All are correct

Direction (10): Rearrange the following sentences to form a meaningful paragraph and then answer the questions that follow.

Q10. If the sentence (C), “The multiple terror attacks that killed at least 200 people in Afghanistan last week has set alarm bells ringing in Kabul.” is the first sentence of the paragraph, then what is the sequence of other sentences after rearrangement?

(A)That the attacks occurred at a time when the United States was putting to work its new strategy to stabilise Afghanistan underscores the resolve of the militants to stay the course of insurgency.
(B)On Friday, bombings in two Shia mosques killed more than 80 people, mostly Shias, for which the Islamic State has claimed responsibility.
(C)The multiple terror attacks that killed at least 200 people in Afghanistan last week has set alarm bells ringing in Kabul.
(D)If the government faced only one major armed insurgency till a couple of years ago, now it has to fight on many fronts.
(E)Most of these attacks were carried out by the Taliban.
(F)The security situation in Afghanistan is increasingly worsening.

(a)FBEDA
(b)AEBDF
(c)DABEF
(d)ADFEB
(e)AEBFD

Directions (11-15): Below in each questions some sentences are given, find the sentence which is not really contributing to the main theme and OUT of the passage or find the odd sentence and rearrange the remaining sentences to make a coherent paragraph.
Q11.
A. This has proven a boon for the aerospace industry. Globally, in the next two decades, more than 41,000 aircraft are expected to be produced, with a value of over $6.1 trillion.
B. Across the globe, rising wealth and the advent of discount airlines have made air travel more of a mass proposition than ever before.
C. This bounty will flow not only to plane manufacturers but also to a range of supporting parts and service suppliers.
D.A monthly cap of Rs10,000 for each means users may only use them for such use cases as utilities, telephone bills and so forth.
E. At the same time, the boom in electronic and mobile commerce has increased air-freight volumes as consumers order goods across borders, demanding speedy delivery.
(a) BCEA
(b) DBCA
(c) BEAC
(d) EADC
(e) EABC

Q12.
A. These are the electrodes that record the impulses of individual cells, ideally simultaneously with lots of others, in order to try to work out how networks of cells process information.
B. Until the invention of the microscope, microbiology did not exist. Neuroscience, too, has advanced recently on the back of some powerful tools, particularly techniques for scanning whole brains.
C. But the devices that look at the nitty-gritty of how nerve cells themselves work are still Heath-Robinson affairs.
D. For example, since the 2016 edition, the indicator on ease of getting electricity began to include indicators on reliability of supply, price of electricity, and transparency of tariffs.
E. Science is a mixture of the intellectual and the practical. And the practical requires tools. Until the invention of the telescope, astronomy had been stuck in a rut for millennia.
(a) BCDA
(b) CAED
(c) DBCA
(d) BACD
(e) EBCA

Q13.
A. He speculated that both types of sounds were important for sending signals to others, but was unsure If this was true. In the years that have passed since his death, ornithologists have proved time and again that birds’ songs, squawks and shrieks are used for sending signals to their kin, their rivals and sometimes even their predators.
B. Such quick fixes may even be effective, but will only remain under the glare of the media.
C. In “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex” he devoted equal space to both the sorts of sounds that emerge from birds’ beaks and the more percussive noises that they make with other parts of their bodies, such as their feet and feathers.
D. In contrast, their more percussive sounds have received almost no attention at all . A study published in Current Biology by Trevor Murray at the Australian National University, in Canberra, however, suggests that is a mistake. At least one bird creates a specific, audible warning with the flapping of its wings.
E. CHARLES DARWIN was fascinated by bird communication.
(a) DCAB
(b) CABD
(c) ECAD
(d) ECAB
(e) CAED

Q14.
A. They have also taken to flirting with deep science to achieve a part of this vision.
B. The common refrain is that IT services firms are not original enough, and seek to profit only on the deep technology advancements made by other firms, usually based in Silicon Valley.
C. However, to be fair, Infosys Ltd and some of the other firms in this category such as Wipro Ltd and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) have actually been hard at work to retool their operations to allow for the creation of new technology “products” such that these become an increasingly important part of their eventual go-to-market propositions.
D. Information technology (IT) services providers are often faulted for not having any “original” product ideas.
E. Meanwhile, private industry can’t justify investment in expensive research that doesn’t yet have clear commercial potential.
(a) DBAC
(b) DBCA
(c) EDCB
(d) BCEA
(e) BDEC

Q15.
A. Another part of the flawed start can be explained by poor incentive design.
B. The overdue transition to the new goods and services tax (GST) has started off on the wrong foot.
C. One part of the flawed start can be explained by political realities. The complicated federal bargaining in the GST council led to a system of five tax rates, along with a special rate for gold, as well as cesses that go against the very basic principles of value-added taxation.
D. The three main problems have been the complicated tax structure that can create distortions, onerous compliance procedures that have created working capital stress in many smaller companies, and technical glitches in the GST network.
E. This widened the trade deficit to $14.01 billion, the highest level since $14.08 billion in May 2017.
(a) BCAD
(b) ECBA
(c) DABC
(d) BDCA
(e) EABD

Practice More Questions of English for Competitive Exams:

Solutions

S1. Ans. (a)
Sol. The given paragraph is about the impact of excess use of screen or technology on kids these days. Read the paragraph carefully, it can be easily viewed that among the given options, only the sentence (a) forms the correct substitution to the provided blank space. Other options do not go with the theme of the paragraph. They alter the meaning of the paragraph. Hence (a) is the correct choice.

S2. Ans. (c)
Sol. Read the paragraph carefully, it is about the most famous sweet of West Bengal “rosogolla” and the conflicting scene related to it. Among the given options, only sentence (c) fits perfectly into the blank space as it follows the sentence prior to the space as well as the one following it. It brings the continuity into the meaning of the paragraph. Other options are not relevant enough to bring about a similar meaning to the paragraph. Hence (c) is the correct choice.

S3. Ans. (b)
Sol. The given paragraph is about Italy’s poor show in the game of football and its failure to qualify for Football World Cup. There is an indication in the sentence prior to the blank space that talks about the history of Brazilian football team of 1970s. It clearly states that among the given options, only sentence (b) fits perfectly into the space provided as it follows the other sentences in a proper order to bring out an appropriate meaning to the paragraph. Other options are irrelevant to this particular paragraph. Hence (b) is the correct choice.

S4. Ans. (d)
Sol. The paragraph is about the organizational learning and training motives along with the importance of work culture associated with it. Read the paragraph carefully, among the given options, there is only sentence (d) which finds some connection with the paragraph and at the same time it concludes the paragraph in the best manner, adding meaning to it. Other options are not feasible enough to make the paragraph complete and conclusive. Hence (d) is the correct choice.

S5. Ans. (a)
Sol. The paragraph is all about strengthening India’s institutions which has been nicely explained here. Read the paragraph carefully, it can be easily drawn that the only sentence that follows the pattern of the theme of the paragraph is (a). It adds meaning to the paragraph and at the same time it concludes the paragraph in the most evident way. Other options, though related to the same subject, are not relevant enough to be the part of this particular paragraph. Hence (a) is the correct choice.

S6. Ans. (d)
Sol. All the sentences, except (IV), are grammatically correct. In the case of sentence (IV), the phrasal verb “take against” should be replaced by “take up” to bring out a meaningful sentence. The phrasal verb “take against” means begin to dislike (someone), often for no strong or obvious reason, which is irrelevant in the context of the meaning of the sentence. The phrasal verb “take up” means accept an offer or challenge, which adds meaning to the sentence. Thus except (IV), all other sentences are grammatically correct. Hence option (d) is the correct choice.

S7. Ans. (e)
Sol. The sentence is grammatically correct which means that all the three bold parts in the sentence do not require any replacement or correction. Hence option (e) is the correct choice.

S8. Ans. (c)
Sol. There is a grammatical error in the sentence (c), the singular verb “has” should be replaced by its plural “have” as the subject it signifies is in plural form [Less than half of Indian households]. The other sentences are grammatically correct. Hence option (c) is the correct choice.

S9. Ans. (b)
Sol. There is an error in the sentence structure of sentence (II), the later part of the sentence “was less than a problem of the unavailability of proper toilets and more to with having social behaviour and religious beliefs” should be replaced by “is less a problem of the unavailability of proper toilets and more to do with social behaviour and religious beliefs” to make the sentence both logically and contextually correct. Moreover, it is to be noted that the sentence is in Present Tense, so the use of the verb “was” is incorrect. The correct structure of the sentence should be – “As researchers Diane Coffey and Dean Spear point out in their recently released book Where India Goes, the issue of why most Indians do not use toilets is less a problem of the unavailability of proper toilets and more to do with social behaviour and religious beliefs.”, which is both grammatically and meaningfully correct. The other two sentences are grammatically correct and do not require any correction. Hence option (b) is the correct choice.

S10. Ans. (e)
Sol. If (C) is the first sentence, the correct sequence of other sentences after rearrangement should be AEBFD. The first two sentences (C) and (A) make a clear connection with each other [“multiple terror attacks” in the first case can be connected with “that the attacks occurred at” in the second case]. Similarly, the sentence (E) follows the sentence (A). The sentence (D) clearly suggests that it should be the concluding sentence. Thus sentences in the sequence of CAEBFD form a coherent paragraph which is about the multiple terror attacks in Afghanistan that happened recently. Hence option (e) is the correct choice.

S11. Ans.(c)
Sol. Correct Choice is option (c). Statement B is most likely the starting sentence. Now that we know statement B is the starting statement A and C gets eliminated as second sentence. Statement E follows B, which is then followed by A and C.
Now we can see Sentence D has no correlation with aerospace industry, and its business, We can rule out Sentence D.

S12. Ans.(e)
Sol. Correct Choice is option (e). Statement B logically initiate the discussion, followed by B, which further elaborates Idea introduced in E. Subsequently A explains C. Hence EBCA is the apt choice.
Hence we can rule out Option D as it is not contributing to provide coherent meaning.

S13. Ans.(c)
Sol. Correct Choice is option (c). Statement E starts the discussion, followed by C , ‘He’ is the hint . Here ‘He’ refers to CHARLES DARWIN. Then comes statement A, which elaborates “types of sounds”, which is referred in statement C. Statement D is the concluding statement. B is ruled out as it is out of context.

S14. Ans.(b)
Sol. Correct Choice is option (b).
Statement D initiates the discussion, followed by B and C . Statement A concludes the statement.
Statement E is out of context.

S15. Ans.(d)
Sol. Correct Choice is option (d) .Statement E is out of context.
Correct choice is BDCA.

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