Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Correct answer: It has its associations with good upbringing and a conservative lifestyle

The passage says it is corduroy's link with good breeding and country living that made it essential in the gentleman's wardrobe. The Wellington boots and the woolly are the other items in that wardrobe, not the reason for corduroy's place in it.

Answer: B

Correct answer: It is useful because it is durable

Utilitarian means serving a practical purpose and tenacity means the ability to hold together and last. Taken together the phrase says the cloth is useful because it wears well; it says nothing about cost, fashion or laundering.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Emergence of sectional interests in organizations

The passage traces one movement throughout: members compete, groups form, sectional interests emerge, and the goals of the organisation are displaced in favour of sectional interests and individual ambition. Groupism and individual ambition are stages in that account, and the senior managers' frustration is one illustration of its effects.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Growth with input from science and technology

The passage introduces organic systems immediately alongside the new research and development departments and the highly qualified and well paid scientists and technicians, and closes by describing close cooperation with the experts in an organic system. The term is therefore tied to bringing scientific expertise into the working of the firm.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Keeping in view the larger objectives of the organizations

The passage's complaint is that policy decisions may serve the ends of political and career systems rather than those of the concern. If that is the fault, then a proper policy decision is one that keeps the concern's own ends in view. Attracting qualified personnel is something the firms had already done, and it is described as the source of the trouble rather than as the remedy.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Organic system

The passage says sectional preoccupations sometimes prevent the emergence of organic systems and then shows what is lost when senior managers avoid cooperating with the experts. The organic system is the thing being obstructed, and so the thing the author is arguing for; research and development departments already exist in the firms described.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Ignorant and incompetent

The passage says many senior managers had little knowledge of technicalities and that some feared cooperation would reveal their ignorance and show their experience was now redundant. Both halves of that sentence are in the passage's own words, and together they give the harsher of the two readings offered.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Pursuit of a commercialised material culture

The glittering prizes are what Gandhi wanted villagers to eschew, and they are set against growing one's own food and weaving one's own cloth. What is being refused is therefore the material abundance of an industrial century, not the removal of poverty, which is the problem the passage says he was trying to solve.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Self sufficiency in food clothes and simplicity of the lifestyle

The passage defines the paradise by what Gandhi wanted villagers taught: to be self-sufficient in food, to weave their own cloth from cotton, and to turn away from the century's temptations. Industrialisation and the glittering prizes are exactly what the vision excludes.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Unless you do (i), you cannot have (ii)

Eschewing the glittering prizes is the condition; the rural paradise is what follows from meeting it. The passage puts them in that order - villagers are to be self-sufficient and to eschew the prizes, and the result is called the idyllic paradise. They are therefore neither identical nor opposite: one is the means and the other the end.