English for RRB PO/Clerk 2018: 07 August

English for RRB PO/Clerk 2018: 07 August

English for RRB PO/Clerk 2018: 07 August

Directions (Q. 1-5): 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 choices given to make the passage complete and coherent. (Coherent means logically complete and sound.)
1. “Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers,” Voltaire advised. Google has become one of the most successful firms in history by heeding that advice. ___________ But for years there has been a lingering question about Google: can it create a new, highly profitable unit to rival its search business?
1) In the past five years, Alphabet, formed as a holding company for Google and other disparate projects, has spent $46 bn on research and development.
2) Search advertising in particular makes up around three-quarters of Alphabet’s total ad revenues.
3) Alphabet has also been trying to sell its malfunctioning robotics business, Boston Dynamics.
4) It evaluates the intention of web-surfer’s queries and returns relevant advertising alongside search results.
5) Meanwhile, the way that people navigate their way around the internet is also changing, which could eventually pose a threat to Google’s search-advertising business.
2. Mr Trump wants to offer a one-time tax rebate of 10% to firms that repatriate their cash. To put an end to the barmy incentives, Mr Ryan would stop taxing foreign profits. ________. Meanwhile, firms would no longer be able to knock off the cost of imported goods when adding up their profits. In combination, these two changes are dubbed “border adjustment”.
1) This would make American’s corporate tax very similar to a value-added tax (VAT) – a kind of border – adjusted sales tax.
2) Mr Ryan’s proposal would more or less reverse this.
3) Mr Trump has often complained about the VAT Mexico imposes on American goods, when Mexican exports flowing north incur no such levy.
4) In theory, border adjustments do not affect trade, because export subsidies and import taxes both push up the dollar.
5) In fact, he wants to ignore foreign activity altogether, including profits made by selling American goods abroad.
3. Irony is not dead in the Middle East. In April, Saudi Arabia, a land where women may not drive, or leave the country without the written permission of a male “guardian” or appear in public without an all-enveloping cloak, was elected to the UN’s Committee on Women’s Rights. Now that same monarchy, where the government censors everything from political dissent to risque Rubens paintings, is trying to shut down the only big, feisty broadcaster in the Arab world, Al Jazeera. ________. It is as if China had ordered Britain to abolish the BBC.
1) It harbours dozens of people the Saudis do not like, including some with close links to groups affiliated to al-Qaeda.
2) This is an extraordinary, extra-territorial assault on free speech.
3) When it broadcast Osama bin Laden’s tape-recorded message from his cave in Afghanistan, many concluded that it was not reporting a big news story so much as promoting terrorism.
4) All these banks were wrong.
5) Yet on any fair accounting, Al Jazeera performs a valuable service by adding to the supply of news and views about the Middle East.
4. For more than two decades after the early 1980s, it seemed as if the financial markets were moving in only one direction. _________. Since the 2008 financial crisis this particular aspect of globalisation has stalled, and even partly retreated. The reversal is illustrated by the triennial survey of foreign exchange markets, conducted by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS).
1) More and more money was flowing across borders, capital markets were becoming increasingly integrated.
2) After all, as Asian countries found out in the 1990s, too much “hot money” flowing into an economy can be destabilising.
3) The implication of deglobalisation depends on why showdown is happening.
4) Before the crisis, cross-border banking activity was closely correlated with measures of risk apetite.
5) When the economic outlook was good, banks were happy to lend abroad; in the face of shocks, they retreated back to their home base.
5. Should it be a crime for a husband to hit his wife? ________. But not in Russia, where the Duma (parliament) voted recently to decriminalise domestic violence against family members unless it is a repeat offence or causes serious medical damage. The change is part of a state-sponsored turn to traditionalism during Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term. It has exposed deep fault lines. Many Russians now embrace the liberal notion of individual rights, but others are moving in the opposite direction.
1) Activists warn that decriminalisation will legitimise abuse.
2) That pleased civil-society groups that had been pushing for tougher rules.
3) In many countries this question no longer needs discussing.
4) Anna Zhavnerovich does not agree that tolerating domestic abuse leads to strong families.
5) Domestic violence has deep cultural roots.
Directions (Q. 6-10): Five statements are given below, labelled 1), 2), 3), 4) and 5). 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.
6. 1) An investor who takes over the airline would have to generate profits on a scale that would make the deal worthwhile.
2) The government’s in-principle approval to divest stake in the loss-making national carrier Air India is welcome.
3) But will any sane investor buy a stake in the company that is laden with debt even if 100% equity is handed over for, say `1?
4) A privatised Air India would cease to be a drain on the exchequer and also gain a sustainable capital structure and become more efficient.
5) The best way is to let potential investors bid for Air India, and select the bidder who is willing to take on the largest amount of debt – the government’s payout should be the lowest.
7. 1) Seawater is much darker than ice.
2) It absorbs heat rather than reflecting it back into space.
3) One consequence is erratic behaviour of the northern jet stream, a circumpolar current, the oscillations of which sometimes bring cold air south and warm air north.
4) That melts ice which leaves more seawater exposed, which melts more ice, and so on.
5) This helps explain why the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet.
8. 1) On May 6th 1997 Gordon Brown, freshly installed as Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, announced that he was giving the Bank of England the responsibility for setting interest rates.
2) The bank would be charged with meeting an inflation target set by the government.
3) The case for central-bank independence is as powerful as it was two decades ago.
4) The move was hailed as a political masterstroke.
5) It gave substance to the new Labour government’s claim to economic competence.
9. 1) Arithmetic, writes the historian Eric Hobsbawm, was the fundamental tool of the Industrial Revolution.
2) The value of an enterprise was determined by the operation of addition and subtraction: the difference between buying price and selling price, between revenue and cost, between investment and return.
3) Clearly, “every feeling must last some time, and … while it lasts, it may be more or less accurate and intense.”
4) The arithmetic worked its way into the discourse and analysis of politics and morals.
5) The simple calculations of arithmetic could express the human condition, moreover; the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed that pleasure and pain could be expressed as quantities, and pleasure minus pain was the measure of happiness.
10. 1) Politicians and economists view trade imbalances very differently.
2) Consider the United States’ trade deficit.
3) Economists emphasise that the total US trade deficit with the rest of the world is the result of the policies and actions at home.
4) Imports cause losses to particular industries, occupations and geographic areas.
5) Simply put, if the US invests more than the country as a whole saves, it must import the difference from the rest of the world, creating the existing trade deficit.
Answers:
  1. 4
  2. 5
  3. 2
  4. 1
  5. 3
  6. 1
  7. 3
  8. 3
  9. 3
  10. 4

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