Synonyms Questions and Answers

Direction for [ Question No: 1 To 1 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow :

1. Chocoholics no longer need to feel guilty about their desire for chocolate. They are simply the victim of the genes, scientists have found. The so called "sweet-tooth gene" has been identified by separate teams of researchers and helps explain why some find it harder to resist chocolate bars and cream cakes. It also raises the possibility of designing a drug which could "switch off" the gene and help people resist sugary foods. Children, in particular, risk their health by eating too many sweets and chocolates.

2. To identify the gene, research teams conducted almost identical experiments using mice which have differences in their ability to taste sweet foods. One of the team members said "A sweet taste receptor recognises the sweet content of food and initiates a cascade of events which signals to the brain that a sweet food has been eaten." He further added, "The same gene exists in humans, so it means that if your parents have a sweet tooth then you probably will as well".

3. He said, "We have always known that some people have a sweeter tooth than others. But it has also been proved that if you are gradually exposed to less sugar, then the body becomes accustomed to less. They will be satisfied with a lower level of sweetness. Doctors warn against any form of gene therapy which seeks to deactivate the sweet gene. "We have produced this gene through evolution because sweet foods in nature are not poisonous, they give us energy. We all need to have some sugar in our diet," claim scientists. US researchers are using this discovery to develop artificial sweeteners without any after-taste.

Direction for [ Question No: 2 To 2 ] :

Read the poem given below and answer the questions that follow :

Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful world,
With the wonderful water round you curled.
And the wonderful grass upon your breast
World, you are beautifully drest.

The wonderful air is over me,
And the wonderful wind is shaking the tree,
It walks on the water, and whirls the mills,
And talks to itself on the tops of the hills.

You friendly Earth! How far do you go,
With the wheat-fields that nod and the rivers that flow.
With cities and gardens, and cliffs, and isles,
And people upon you for thousands of miles ?

Ah, you are so great, and I am so small,
I tremble to think of you, World, at all;
And yet, when I said my prayers today,
A whisper inside me seemed to say,
'You are more than the Earth, though you are such a dot,
You can love and think, and the Earth cannot!'

Direction for [ Question No: 3 To 5 ] :

Complete the given word analogy :

Direction for [ Question No: 6 To 6 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow :

My home town in the mid-1970s was a laid-back place, resembling a remote rural area, except in having some amenities. Our house was almost at one end of the town. About 15 km away, there was a small village where a fair was held for a week every year during the harvest season. The village deity was worshipped by many from the places in the vicinity.

Devotees thronged the fair not only for divine blessings but also for watching street-shows and other entertainment events. Only a mud track led to the village and everyone reached there by walking or on bullock carts.

My father, an advocate by profession, was popular among the villagers. His clients from the place used to arrange bullock carts for us and a few family friends and relatives to attend the fair.

The journey would start early in the morning. We children will be in a separate cart. I used to eagerly look forward to this occasion every year as though it was a journey of a life-time and worth enjoying every minute of it. Money saved for this fair would be tucked firmly in my pockets during the journey. Whenever the cart jerked or sped away, I would hold my pockets tightly so that coins would not spill out.

The crowd at the temple in the foothill used to be highly unorganised, especially the food counter where prasadam was served. Hot and spicy puffed rice and tea made of jaggery were the delectable combination of food and beverage every devotee craved for.

Going to the temple used to be the last priority of us children. Fearing elders' wrath, we would hurriedly finish the formality of darshan.

Direction for [ Question No: 7 To 7 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow :

Perhaps the worst of the ordeals was to be shut in a darkened room for long, uncertain periods, in solitary confinement and complete silence. Gagarin himself described the experience.

"There was no sound, not even the slightest rustle. No movement of the air-nothing. It was uncanny, unnerving."

He would shut his eyes and imagine himself in a space-cabin in orbit, looking at the world passing beneath him; or sometimes he would recite half-remembered poetry to himself.

Then, came parachute training. Gagarin made forty parachute jumps of gradually increasing difficulty.

One of the most interesting of the training experiments was the method of providing experience of weightlessness. In the early stages the express lift of the great Moscow University building was used. From the twenty-eighth floor to the bottom allowed a drop of 500 feet. At a certain high speed the passenger would find himself suspended between the floor and ceiling of the lift without support. This was a convenient and inexpensive way of reproducing 'zero gravity'.

Special air brakes prevented the lift from crashing as it reached the bottom.

On the morning of April 12, Gagarin rose at 5.30. He was zipped into his complicated space-suit, on top of which went a pale blue fibre suit, and finally an orange one. Then an Air Force bus drove him to the launching site in company with various helpers. The gantry lift took him up 100 feet, to the nose of the rocket, and he entered the cabin (named Vostok) with a wave to those below.

Direction for [ Question No: 8 To 8 ] :

Read the extract given below and answer the questions that follow :

'What dost thou do here ?' the Bishop he said,
'I prithee now tell to me',
'I am a bold harper', quoth Robin Hood,
'And the best in the north countree'.

'O welcome, O welcome!' the Bishop he said,
'That music best pleaseth me.'
'You shall have no music', quoth Robin Hood,
'Till the bride and the bridegroom I see'.

With that came in a wealthy knight,
Which was both grave and old,
And after him a finikin lass,
Did shine like glistening gold.

'This is no fit match', quoth bold Robin Hood,
'That you do seem to make here;
'For since we are come into the church,
The bride she shall choose her own dear'.

Direction for [ Question No: 9 To 9 ] :

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow :

He must have seen us coming from some distance. By the time he loomed up in front of my headlights, the arms in the snow-caked overcoat were flailing desperately like windmills.

Pat gave a little gasp and I braked at once, though gently, or I might have followed his car into the ditch. But immediately I had second thoughts; there had been one or two nasty cases of hold-up in the papers recently. I wasn't going to take any chance with Pat, my sister, there. I changed down the gear and made to drive round him.

Pat was horrified. 'Aren't you stopping, Bill ?' I shook my head. 'Too risky'.

It was then that I saw the car. It had skidded right across the road and was hanging nose down in the deep ditch. I braked again and brought the Mini-Moris gradually to a stop.

I slid back my window as he looked in and then I saw that he was bleeding from a cut in his cheek.

'Anybody else in the car ?'

'No, on my own. If you could give me a lift'.

I nodded and he got into the back and slammed the door.

'Sorry about this, folks. I was beginning to think I was stuck there for the night. Not that you would call it a busy road, is it ?'

'Not at twelve o'clock at night', Pat said, turning round to smile at him. 'We have been to a dance in Boling ford. Bill didn't want to go, but I was keen. He isn't a bad brother, really'.

Direction for [ Question No: 10 To 10 ] :

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

With more then 3,000 languages currently spoken, English undoubtedly is amongst the richest of all languages. The Oxford English Dictionary lists about half a million words of which only 2,00,000 are frequently used. This is because, the balance 3,00,000 words are technical and not found in ordinary dictionaries. The only language that can come near English is Chinese.

Apart from being the richest language, English also boasts of being one of the most widely spoken, second only to Mandarin Chinese. This remarkable achievement is only because of the one thing that we all love to do - copy ! 'Siesta' for example is of Spanish origin. 'Sputnik' as you must be aware of, has a Russian origin. 'Restaurant' is from France and 'Super' from Germany. Even before the birth of the 'genius' of 'drama', William Shakespeare, the words 'genius' and 'drama' were adapted from Greek. Now, you must be wondering if English has anything original about it. Well, find it out ! Did you ever try to find out how many different words of English we use in our daily life ? Try to guess and then read on. A modern novelist has a vocabulary of anywhere between ten to fifteen thousand words.

William Shakespeare used thirty thousand words and the only writer to come close to him was James Joyce in 'Ulysses'. We normally have a vocabulary of about ten thousand words of which only five thousand are used in everyday conversation. This leads to a limited variety of words. This is because we repeat a lot of words. In conversation and in writing, it is 'the'. (Try counting it in this article and you will have proof of it.)