English Test - ...

Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer for the question out of the four alternatives.

A British survey found that 44 percent of firms, which started using robots; met with initial failure and 22 percent abandoned them altogether, mainly because of inadequate technological know-how and skills at all plant levels. Robotization is by and large a viable proposition. These machines can work round the clock, raise output, protect the quality and enhance industrial competitiveness. One robot can replace between two and five production workers while providing cheaper labour. In the US car industry, a man-hour costs around 23 but a robot-hour costs only 6. Certain jobs, mostly simple or hazardous ones, are irretrievably lost to robotics. Thus spot welders, press operators, spray painters, cleaners, machine leaders, and operators of grinding and polishing machines are endangered species.

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Jazz had its beginnings in song. Its roots lie deep in the tradition of Afro-American folk singing that once flourished throughout the rural Southland of the United States before the Civil War. The Afro-American, in those days, owned only a few crude musical instruments which he made for himself from boxes, barrels, and brooms. His voice was his principal means of musical expression. Songs of work and play, trouble and hope, rose on rich and rhythmic voices everywhere in the South — from peddlers crying their wares to the countryside, from work gangs on the railroads, farm families gathered at the day's end to sing away their weariness in their unpainted cottages overlooking the cotton fields, from the wayside churches singing with the sounds of Sabbath praise. These were the voices that the early Afro-American musicians imitated and transferred to their horns when they taught themselves to play the discarded band instruments that come into their hands at the close of the Civil War in the eighteen-sixties. As played by their proud Afro-American owners, the instruments became extensions of the human voice— singing horns that opened the way to jazz. For this reason, there has always been a strong, singing quality to jazz.

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Pablo Picasso showed his truly exceptional talent from a very young age. His first word was lapis (Spanish for pencil) and he learned to draw before he could talk. He was the only son in the family and very good-looking, so he was thoroughly spoilt. He hated school and often refused to go unless his doting parents allowed him to take one of his father's pet pigeons with him. Apart from pigeons, his great love was art and when in 1891 his father, who was an amateur artist, got a job as a drawing teacher in college, Pablo went with him to the college. He often watched his father paint and sometimes was allowed to help. One evening his father was painting a picture of their pigeons when he had to leave the room. He returned to find that Pablo had completed the picture and it was so amazingly beautiful and lifelike that he gave his son his own palette and brushes and never painted again. Pablo was just thirteen.

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Blame it on broken hearts and bereavement to mere shyness and busy routines, millions of us suffer from some form of loneliness. Like a disease, it cuts across class, age groups and gender, leaving very few of us immune. And it's not Robinson Crusoe's loneliness, where a person is cut-off from society, but it's loneliness despite living amid dear ones and neighbours, despite the Internet and social networking, crowded towns and shopping malls. "People can be alone without being lonely, or lonely in a crowd", says one research paper on the subject. Those affected by loneliness are generally not keen to talk about it. They feel ashamed or embarrassed or simply do not have anyone to discuss the problem with. Globally, modern urban living has become throe and more individualistic and loneliness is a by-product of it, says a psychologist. Relationships in present times have become transient, the concept of extended family has weakened and our circle of friends has narrowed.

Read the passage and complete the sentence given below:

Pablo Picasso showed his truly exceptional talent from a very young age. His first word was lápiz (Spanish for pencil) and he learnt to draw before he could talk. He was the only son in the family and very good-looking, so he was thoroughly spoilt. He hated school and often refused to go unless his doting parents allowed him to take one of the father’s pet pigeons with him. Apart from pigeons, his great love was art, and when in 1891 his father, who was an amateur artist, got a job as a drawing teacher at a college, Pablo went with him to the college. He often watched his father paint and was sometimes allowed to help. One evening his father was painting a picture of their pigeons when he had to leave the room. He returned to find that Pablo had completed the picture, and it was so amazingly beautiful and lifelike that he gave his son his own palette and brushes and never painted again. Pablo was just thirteen.