Word Formation Questions and Answers

Direction for [ Question No: 11 To 11 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct/most appropriate options.

Lata stood outside the hall for a minute. Sunlight poured onto the stone steps. The edge of her middle finger was smeared with dark blue ink, and she looked at it, frowning. She was close to tears.

Other English students stood on the steps and chatted. A post-mortem of the paper was being held, and it was dominated by an optimistic and chubby girl who was ticking off on her fingers the various points she had answered correctly.

'This is one paper I know I have done really well,' she said. 'Especially the 'King Lear' question. I think that the answer was 'Yes'.' Others were looking excited or depressed. Everyone agreed that several of the questions were far harder than they had needed to be. A knot of history students stood not far away, discussing their paper, which had been held simultaneously in the same building. One of them was the young man who had brought himself to Lata's attention in the Imperial Book Depot, and he was looking a little worried. He had spent a great deal of time these last few months in extra-curricular activities - particularly cricket - and this had taken its toll upon his performance.

Lata walked to a bench beneath the gulmohar tree and sat down to collect herself. When she got home for lunch, she would be pestered with a hundred questions about how well she had done. She looked down at the red flowers that lay scattered at her feet. In her head, she could still hear the buzzing of the fly.

The young man, though he had been talking to his classmates, had noticed her walking down the steps. When she sat down on the far bench under the tree, he decided to have a word with her. He told his friends that he had to go home for lunch - that his father would be waiting for him - and hurried along the path past the gulmohar. As he came to the bench, he uttered an exclamation of surprise and stopped.

Direction for [ Question No: 12 To 13 ] :

Directions : Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct / most appropriate options.

If asked, "What matters are related to health i.e. health decisions ?" most of us would answer - hospitals, doctors and pills. Yet we are all making a whole range of decisions about our health which go beyond this limited area of doctors, pills etc. For example, whether or not to smoke, take exercise, wear a seat belt, drive a motor bike, drink alcohol regularly etc. The way we reach decisions and form attitudes about our health is only just beginning to be understood.

The main paradox is why people consistently do things which are known to be very hazardous. Two interesting examples of this are smoking and not wearing seat belts. Addiction makes smokers keep on smoking and whether to wear a seat belt or not is affected by safety considerations. Taken together both these examples show how people reach decisions about their health. Understanding this process is crucial. Only then can we effectively change public attitude towards voluntary activities like smoking.

Smokers run the risk of contracting heart disease, several times more as compared to non-smokers. Even lung cancer. Despite extensive press campaigns which have regularly told smokers and car drivers the grave risks they are running, the number of smokers and non-wearers of seat belts has remained much the same. Although the numbers of deaths from road accidents and smoking are well publicized, they have aroused little public interest.

If we give smokers the real figures of deaths caused by smoking, will it affect their views on the dangers of smoking ? Unfortunately not. Many of the real figures are in the form of probable estimates, and evidence shows that people are very bad at understanding this kind of information.

Direction for [ Question No: 14 To 15 ] :

Directions : Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct/most appropriate options :

As science progresses, superstitions ought to grow less. On the whole, that is true. However, it is surprising how superstitions linger on. If we are tempted to look down on savage tribes for holding such ideas, we should remember that even today, among most civilised nations, a great many equally stupid superstitions exist and are believed in by a great many people. Some people will not sit down thirteen at a table; or will not like to start anything important on a Friday; or refuse to walk under a ladder. Many people buy charms and talismans because they think they will bring them luck. Even in civilised nations today, many laws are made on the basis of principles which are just as much unproved. For instance, it is often held as a principle that white people are by nature superior to people of other colours. The ancient Greeks believed that they were superior to the people of Northern and Western Europe. The only way to see if there is anything in such a principle is to make scientific studies of a number of white and black and brown people under different conditions of life and find out just what they can and cannot achieve.

It is, however, true that the increase of scientifc knowledge does reduce superstition and also baseless guessing and useless arguments and practices. Civilised people do not argue and get angry about what water is composed of. The composition of water is known, and there is no argument about it.

Direction for [ Question No: 16 To 16 ] :

Directions : Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct/most appropriate options :

Learning a language under any circumstances requires hard work and concentration. However, the circumstances can make a difference in both quality and quantity. Most foreign language students learn in a classroom, from a text-book. In a classroom, language learning can be controlled so that all the necessary structures are taught. Highly motivated students can thus learn the language efficiently and quickly. Learning on the streets and in the markets from experience and need can be effective although the student learns only what he happens to need, in a haphazard way.

Some language students find this real-life situation more meaningful because the students' success in fulfilling their needs depends on their language ability. However, shop-keepers are more likely to be tolerant of incorrect grammar than classroom teachers, so mispronunciations and errors will not matter much. Nevertheless, the rewards are different for the type of language learning situations. They are immediate (goods, bought in a store) in the real-life but delayed until a quiz or oral recital for the classroom learner.

The kind of language learnt in each setting differs too. In the classroom, the student is more likely to learn the grammatical language of educated people. The language learnt out of necessity often lacks the fine details of the classroom variety and might include informal expressions such as slang. The people learning on the street must be easily understood. Therefore, they might actually sound more like native speakers - although not necessarily educated people. So a combination of classroom instruction and the experience of using language in the street will result in the best language learning of all.

Direction for [ Question No: 17 To 17 ] :

Directions : Read the passage given below carefully and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct/most appropriate options.

Water is the core of life; hence water must be central to our spiritual thinking. Water is not only most of earth, but also most of life. Therefore water conservation must be our deepest concern.

The Himalayan mountain range is among the highest, youngest and most fragile ecosystem of the planet. The Himalayas have given us some of the great river systems of the earth including the Indus, Ganga, Brahmaputra, Nu Salween, Yangtze and the Mekong. The Himalayas are also called the 'Third Pole', for they contain the largest mass of ice and snow outside the earth's polar region, the north and south poles. There is a permanent snowline above 5,000 metres. Some of the glaciers in the region are the longest outside the two poles. The Himalayas serve as water towers, providing water on a sustained basis to more than 1,000 million people and millions of hectares of land in South Asia. The greenery, benevolent climate, highly productive ecosystems, food production and overall happiness in South Asia are in fact, attributable to the bounty of the Himalayas. They are not only beautiful; they are life-givers. Little wonder that they are venerated as the abode of gods.

To keep the Third Pole preserved through assured conservation is one of the greatest challenges for the contemporary world. Himalayan mountains are a common but fragile natural resource. As mountain ecosystems have enormous bearing on the earth's systems, their special care, regeneration and conservation of their pristine resources would only bring more happiness, peace and prosperity to large parts of the world. In Agenda 21, Chapter 13 of the United Nations, the importance of mountains is underlined : "mountain environments are essential to the survival of global ecosystems."

The Himalayas in the state of Uttarakhand are especially rich in water resources. This area is home to dozens of perennial streams and numerous other rain-fed rivers along with innumerable rivulets, waterfalls and ponds, etc.

Direction for [ Question No: 18 To 18 ] :

Directions : Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow, by selecting the correct/most appropriate options :

1. Kangri Karchok, the Kailash Purana of the Tibetans describes the sacred elephant-mouthed river or Langchen Khambab as a long and extensive river that rises from the 'lake unconquerable', the Tso Maphan or Manasarovar that flows from the mountainous regions of Tibet. According to this holy book, this cold river with its sands of gold, circles the holy Manasarovar seven times before taking its course to the west.

2. The Langchen Khambab flows down from the red coloured mountains of the Kanglung Kangri Glacier in the Trans-Himalayan region of Tibet, channelling its way through the earth forests of Tholing and Tsparang of the Gugi Kingdom. These earth forests are full of pillars formed by rocks that collectively appear like a forest from afar - an 'out of the world' landscape that was formed by geological movements of the earth and erosion by wind and water. The Khyunglung ruins also lies on the northern bank of the Sutlej river in this valley which was once known as the 'Garuda Valley".

3. This mighty river then flows north-west for about 260 km before entering Himachal Pradesh through Shipki La cutting across the formidable Himalayan ranges of Zanskar, the Greater Himalaya and the Dhauladhar. Subsequently, the waters meander through the gigantic Kinnaur Kailash-Jorkanden Range at Reckong Peo creating the terrifying Sutlej gorge. Then it streams into Shimla, Kullu, Mandi and Bilaspur and is responsible for the rich cultivation of grapes, apples and apricots all along its banks. After its confluence with the River Spiti at Khab it is known as Sutlej.

4. It is 1,448 km in length, making it the longest among the five rivers of Punjab. Extensively used for irrigation, it is topographically divided into the Upper Sutlej Basin and Lower Sutlej Basin. It leaves the Himachal boundary to enter the plains of the Punjab at the Bhakra Dam, the second highest gravity dam and a major point of water supply and electricity generation for the North of India.

Direction for [ Question No: 19 To 20 ] :

Select the combination of numbers so that letters/words arranged accordingly will form meaningful word