Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

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.

Answer: B

Correct answer: It would undermine self-sufficiency and destroy the beauty of life of the villager

The passage says Gandhi believed industrialisation was no answer to the problems that plague the mass of India's poor, and sets against it self-sufficiency in food and cloth and a life free of the century's temptations. What industrialisation threatens is therefore that self-sufficiency and that simplicity.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Those who inherited political powers after independence

The passage says the vision did not appear to those who inherited the reins of political power. The option about those who disbelieved in industrialisation names people who would have shared the dream, not rejected it.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Ambiguity in speech

The passage lists what turns a would-be friend into an enemy: a slip of the tongue, the use of an unusual word, or of an ambiguous word. Ambiguity is named there, and the paragraph goes on to explain the danger - that a word may bear a different meaning to our listener than to us. Pomposity is mentioned, but as how the educated sound, not as what loses a friend.

Answer: B

Correct answer: His vocabulary

The passage says different classes of people use different vocabularies and that educated speech may strike an uneducated listener as pompous. The remedy that follows from this is to meet the listener in the vocabulary he uses. Simple words is close, but the passage's point is about matching the listener rather than about simplicity as such.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Foolish

The passage ends with the judgement itself: only a fool will express himself alike to all kinds and conditions of men. The other three options describe how such speech might sound; the passage says what it makes the speaker.