English Language Quiz for IBPS 2020 Mains Exams- 31st December

Directions (1-5): In each of the following questions five options are given, of which one word is most nearly the same or opposite in meaning to the given word in the question. Find the correct option having either same or opposite meaning.

Q1. ACQUAINT
(a) Withhold
(b) furnish
(c) Conversant
(d) Promulgate
(e) Parlous

Q2. ASSIDUOUS
(a) rejection
(b) diligent
(c) insolence
(d) artful
(e) brave

Q3. GLUT
(a) Joust
(b) kindness
(c) overflow
(d) bright
(e) restrain

Q4. OBDURATE
(a) indiscreet
(b) rash
(c) amenable
(d) vacuous
(e) advanced

Q5. PERVASIVE
(a)limpid
(b)jarring
(c) exiguous
(d)irregular
(e)proactive

Directions (6-10): In each of the following questions a short passage is given with one of the lines in the passage missing and represented by a blank. Select the best out of the five answer choices given, to make the passage complete and coherent (coherent means logically complete and sound).

Q6. A scientific approach too leads to the conclusion that it is not possible to accumulate such an enormous amount of wealth in a single lifetime. According to research studies, the size of the human brain is about 1,600 cc. Another study suggests that a normal human being is capable of using around 8 per cent of her brain and a genius can use up to 12 per cent. The question is: How did the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population get their brain and from where did they acquire the high-functioning biology which the other 99 per cent does not own? If intelligence is the source behind wealth accumulation, then the wealthiest group ought to have a higher functioning brain.___________________.

(a)With the level of inequality, poverty and hunger prevailing in India, it is hard to believe how that privileged class enjoy their wealth and prosperity.
(b)Clearly, the level of inequality can’t be justified even in scientific terms.
(c)It is only a matter of time till this myth is busted.
(d)A person building a Rs 10,000-crore bungalow and another gifting his son an aeroplane worth Rs 500 crore are a result of such an ethos.
(e)Now a wealthy person is idealised as a smart, intelligent person capable of making money.

Q7. A good example is the role played by the government of Maharashtra in water reforms across its cities and towns. Maharashtrian cities have been way ahead of other Indian cities in addressing the challenge of providing drinking water to their residents. ____________________________. The committee recommended water audits for all cities and offered to fund 75 per cent of the cost of determining the gap between the water supplied and the water billed to consumers for water ostensibly consumed.

(a)As early as the year 2000, the government of Maharashtra had set up the Sukhtankar Committee to review the efficiency of supplying water in its cities and towns.
(b)A significant feature of Maharashtra’s planning for water has been their recognition of the importance of economic pricing of water.
(c)The Maharashtra Water Resource Regulatory Authority, established in 2005, has been conducting exercises to price water, setting water charges based on the volume of water consumed by different user categories.
(d)The canals that brought raw water from Pench, 48 km outside of the city, provided ample opportunities for stealing water along the way.
(e)It is possible that the successive drought conditions diverted the government’s attention to the urgent task at hand, that is, a basic provision of water, and the focus on reforms was lost.

Q8. Comparisons are, of course, silly and dicey, but one can hazard that Arrow’s achievements were in some ways arguably greater than Samuelson’s. Samuelson’s many contributions helped us think through the first principles of many issues in economics — public goods, taxation, savings, trade, consumer preference, pensions, and finance. Arrow’s two stunning contributions (both theoretical) in some ways both built and undermined all of politics and all of (market) economics. Samuelson made mega-contributions, Arrow made meta-contributions. ____________________________.

(a)The Arrow-Samuelson comparison is interesting for another reason: Family connections.
(b)The work of Arrow and many others showed how such self-interested individual behaviour could produce outcomes that had broadly desirable social virtues.
(c)If you start with individual preferences, it is very difficult (or impossible) to come up with a rule (say majority voting) that aggregates these preferences and produces a societal preference that can satisfy some basic conditions.
(d)But this work showed how demanding were the conditions for the market system.
(e)Samuelson’s related to one discipline, Arrow’s transcended two.

Q9. Monetary policy makers concentrate on core inflation because it is a good yardstick for measuring “sustainable inflation”: Which means that core inflation has to be correctly measured. Unfortunately, core inflation is mis-measured in India because the CPI for Fuel and Light includes kerosene and electricity, but excludes petrol. True core would exclude food, fuel and petrol. The reason monetary policy should be concerned with true core is because the excluded items are broadly outside the influence of monetary policy. _______________________.

(a)A true core price index can easily be constructed by excluding the effects of petrol consumption from the transport and communication (TC) basket (TC has a weight of 8.59 per cent in the CPI and petrol consumption weight is 2.4 per cent), and adding it to the basket of Fuel.
(b)The correct and incorrect core inflation series, along with petrol price inflation, are reported in the chart.
(c)These facts counter the post-truth core inflation scenario painted by the RBI.
(d)For example, it is a bit difficult to argue that the RBI’s repo rate policy can affect OPEC’s pricing policy for oil!
(e)The RBI is well aware of the problem of wrongly measured core inflation in India.

Q10. The analogy of theatre commands of the US/China is misleading as it would only address the “under command” syndrome of the ground-based forces in India. The truism that “air power is indivisible” and works best under an airman should not be violated. Since India has a status quoist stance on boundary matters, the blocking of air assets by splitting them under theatre commanders would be sub-optimal. _______________________. Both would be unwieldy considering the diverse requirements of equipment and training for troops (desert, plains and hills) — so more (smaller) commands would be required, bifurcating air assets further, reducing their potency.

(a)Joint procurement, commanding future commands like cyber, space and special forces and a role in budgeting could be the starting point.
(b)If one were to follow the US/China model, then there would be just two “theatres” — the Northern and Western.
(c)At the operational level, war is directed by regional command headquarters which, in the case of the army and navy, are terrestrial/surface combatants.
(d)A Su-30 from Pune can address maritime threats down south as well as those across the Thar desert.
(e)Decisive political decision-making is the need of the hour if we want to move forward.

Directions (11-13): Five statements are given below, labelled a, b, c, d and e. Among these, four statements are in logical order and form a coherent paragraph/passage. From the given options, choose the option that does not fit into the theme of the passage/paragraph.

Q11.
(a) It is a Chinese diplomatic tradition to celebrate the anniversaries of important events in its relations with foreign nations.
(b)Instead of high-level visits or grand ceremonies, however, the anniversary is marred by unprecedented confrontation between the two countries.
(c)The dramatic downturn in bilateral relations resulted from President Park Geun-hye’s decision in July 2016 to deploy the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system on South Korean soil.
(d)This year marks the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and South Korea.
(e) Chinese sacrifices and friendliness apparently have been reciprocated by ingratitude and resentment.

Q12.
(a) In the euphoria of the progress of the global economy or few national economies doing well, we conveniently forget the humongous failure rate of individual organizations.
(b) A look at the prevailing organization structures and processes does not give one the confidence that organizations are created with any deep understanding of human behaviour.
(c) Very few of them analyse why companies that were deemed icons of excellence are nowhere to be found just a few decades down the line.
(d) While a few unicorns are created every now and then, we forget that many more companies (some of them world leaders like Nokia) are biting the dust at an alarming rate.
(e) Management experts and analysts are more interested in talking about the few good organizations that have gone on to become great companies.

Q13.
(a) The document opens with a broadside against the World Trade Organization (WTO), arguing that WTO decisions are not binding on American businesses unless Congress chooses to implement them.
(b) The Trade Policy Agenda lays out a general approach to trade that is, in its own words, aggressive and that in many cases appears to be strongly at odds with India’s own position.
(c) The agenda and the accompanying annual report strongly suggest that India will be navigating an increasingly difficult trade terrain in the next few years.
(d) This threatens to relegate the WTO to the long list of international agreements that the US has refused to make part of domestic law, gutting the strength of the organization and possibly triggering a round of punitive tariffs by other nations.
(e) India, by contrast, has made the WTO the primary focus of its trade negotiation efforts and is poised to make a major play towards updating the Trade in Services Agreement.

Directions (14 – 15): Each question consists of a number of sentences which, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Below each question are five options which gives the possible sequence of the coherent paragraph, choose the option which gives the correct sequence of the given coherent paragraph.

Q14.
A. And everywhere—on the palace steps, and the great promenade, around the fountains, among the trees—hundreds and hundreds of people in gay costumes walked or ran or danced, and gave to the fairy picture the life and animation which was all of perfection it could have lacked. Concluding remark; the people complete the picture perfect settings
B. The scene thrills one like military music!
C. Versailles is wonderfully beautiful!
D. You gaze and stare and try to understand that it is real, that it is on the earth, that it is not the Garden of Eden—but your brain grows giddy, stupefied by the world of beauty around you, and you half believe you are the dupe of an exquisite dream.
E. A noble palace, stretching its ornamented front, block upon block away, till it seemed that it would never end; a grand promenade before it, where on the armies of an empire might parade; broad flights of stone steps leading down from the promenade to lower grounds of the park—stairways that whole regiments might stand to arms upon and have room to spar.

(a)EBCDA
(b)CDEBA
(c) CDBEA
(d) DCBEA
(e) EBDAC

Q15.
A. Her husband was employed outside Rajasthan and she had chosen Barmer to provide a good education to her children.
B. In a rare case of migration from a city to a village, Teeja Jakhar shifted to Chokhla from Barmer city along with her two daughters last year.
C. The British exploration company Cairn Energy PLC promised to pay her Rs 3 lakh per year for three years for rights to her land.
D. She earns Rs 6,000 per month by selling water drawn by her tubewell to Cairn.
E. She bought a diesel-run tubewell with the first installment and plans to grow at least one crop on her 40-acre plot.
F. But Mangla near Barmer, since January last year the site of India’s biggest oil discovery in 22 years, changed all that.

(a) CAEBFD
(b) BAFECD
(c) CABFED
(d) BAFCED
(e) BACFDE

Practice More Questions of English for Competitive Exams:

Solutions

S1. Ans. (c)
Sol. acquaint means make someone aware of or familiar with. Conversant means familiar with or knowledgeable about something. Hence ‘acquaint’ and ‘conversant’ are similar in meanings.

S2. Ans. (b)
Sol. assiduous means showing great care and perseverance. Hence ‘assiduous’ and ‘diligent’ are similar in meanings.

S3. Ans. (c)
Sol. Glut means an excessively abundant supply of something. Hence ‘glut’ and ‘overflow’ are similar in meanings.

S4. Ans. (c)
Sol. Obdurate means stubbornly refusing to change one’s opinion or course of action. amenable means open and responsive to suggestion; easily persuaded or controlled. Hence ‘obdurate’ and ‘amenable’ are opposite in meanings.

S5. Ans. (c)
Sol. Pervasive means spreading widely throughout an area or a group of people. Hence ‘pervasive’ and ‘exiguous’ are opposite in meanings.

S6. Ans. (b)
Sol. The paragraph talks about the results of certain studies and researches that try to assess the reasons behind the brain of earning enormously. Now read the last few sentences of the paragraph, they try to compare the brains of wealthiest 1 percent and the rest 99 percent and hence directing to the level of inequality. Hence the concluding sentence should tally its meaning with the paragraph’s theme. Among the given options, only option (b) makes a relevant conclusion to this paragraph. Other options define some different issues related to the subject.

S7. Ans. (a)
Sol. Read the paragraph carefully, it talks about the role played by the government of Maharashtra in water reforms. Refer the concluding sentence of the paragraph, from here it can be inferred that the preceding sentence should connect to the committee that it is talking about. Hence only option (a) makes the perfect filling to the given space as it refers to the Sukhtankar Committee.

S8. Ans. (e)
Sol. The paragraph compares the contributions of Arrow and Samuelson in the field of economics. Read the last sentence of the paragraph, there is a clear comparison between the two. Hence the conclusive sentence should also be in the same form. Among the given options, only option (e) makes the perfect conclusion and thus adding meaning to the paragraph.

S9. Ans. (d)
Sol. Read the paragraph carefully, it talks about the core inflation and its mis-measurement in India. The last sentence of the paragraph should match its theme. Hence the correct option is (d) as it cites an appropriate example in reference to its preceding sentence. Other options don’t make a valid conclusion in the context of the paragraph.

S10. Ans. (b)
Sol. Refer the sentence just after the blank space. The word “Both” clearly indicates that among the given options, option (b) fits the blank most appropriately thus adding meaning to the paragraph which talks about the defence mechanisms of the US/China model. Other options are irrelevant in the context of the passage.

S11. Ans.(e)
Sol. The options other than (e) are forming a coherent paragraph with their sequence being adbc. Option (e) is out of context as the theme of the passage is how there has been a sourness in the relationship between China and South Korea lately and what caused it. While other options are in perfect sequence, the idea in option (e) is not resonating with the central theme of the paragraph/ passage.

S12. Ans.(b)
Sol. Option (b) is not a part of the coherent paragraph as it explains the unexpectedly high failure rates of organizations while other options with their sequence being adec are part of one coherent paragraph as they are talking about the issue.

S13. Ans.(c)
Sol. Option (c) is correct and is not a part of the coherent paragraph as it puts more emphasis on the suggestions made by report. Other option talks about the comparison of the stances of India and USA toward WTO.

S14. Ans.(c)
Sol. As the paragraph describes an incredibly beautiful place, the 3rd sentence is the opener. The 4th sentence compares it with the Garden of Eden. The second sentence describes the ‘thrill’ and compares it with a military band. The 5th sentence takes the metaphor further to compare the promenade and stone steps with the armies parading. The 1st sentence concludes that people in the area complete the ‘perfection it could have lacked.’ Therefore, CDBEA is the answer.

S15 Ans.(d)
Sol. BAFCED is the correct sequence.

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