Vocabulary Test 37

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
Matsupaa - The Magic Remains[/passage-header]    Dawn has not yet broken over the horizon, but Rosita is crossing the border. Rosita is a matsu woman. Her land, Matsupaa, lies partly in Ghana, and partly in Congo. Matsupaa has its own flag, language, traditions and festivals, but it is divided by an international border. Rosita crosses the border frequently to get from one part of her country to another, but she needs a special visa every time and it sometimes takes her forever to reach another part of her own country.
    Today Rosita is making the crossing from her village Onista to the capital city Maru to attend the annual Matsupaa Kingdom Day. There will be a carnival, and the atmosphere is likely to be raucous and mad as most carnivals are. People in their ancestral costume of large billowing gowns, silver plated shirts and clanging, chunky bracelets move around noisily. Youngsters usually borrow their grandparents' clothes!
    One of Matsupaa's celebrity citizens is Mopar Magutsu. He is active in the movement to save Matsu cultural identity. More and more young people are leaving Matsupaa for the west and Mopar wants to prevent his culture from dying out. He holds a lot of cultural programmes to initiate the young into the rich and colourful Matsu past. The future is bright only when we know the past with pride - is Mopar's firm belief.
    Meanwhile, Rosita has reached the capital with her basket of knick-knacks and handcrafted pots and pans. She hopes to make a killing with the ever-present tourists.

The very first time she sang professionally, playback singer Kavita Krishnamurty learnt a lesson she's never forgotten. It was 1970, and at 16, she'd been selected by composer Vijay S. Padukone to sing a 60-second Tamil jingle advertising a popular brand of baby food. Already on edge when she arrived at the recording studio, Kavita was further unnerved to find the legendary Geeta Dutt there, preparing to sing the same jingle in Hindi.
"I'd almost certainly have muffed my lines," Kavita says, "Had not Geeta Dutt done something wonderful. Sensing my nervousness, she smiled and holding my hand said, 'I've heard that you sing well. So don't be afraid. Do your best.'"
"Her words immediately put me at ease and my recording went without a hitch."
Subsequently, during Kavita's struggle to make it as a playback singer, many other - including Hemant Kumar and Manna Dey - provided encouragement and advice. "They all taught me that you shouldn't reach for success by trampling on other people."

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]There was __(1)__ ancient temple in a village. As with all temples, here too there was __(2)__ huge statue of God which was covered with precious jewels and gold. __(3)__ dark night, a burglar scaled the temple walls and ran off with all the jewels. The police are still on the __(4)__ for the culprits who have escaped with the __(5)__.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]To most people, landfill sites are holes in the ground where waste____(1)____ is buried. To garbologists, however, they provide a valuable ____(2)____ of information about a population's activities in areas such as food consumption and waste disposal. Garbology is a branch of ethnography, a science which abandons traditional methods of ___(3)___ market research information, such as questionnaires and focus groups, in favour of  ____(4)____ observation of people and their habits. The world's ___(5)___ garbologist, Professor William Rathje, is also an archaeologist. Archaeologists study past cultures by examining the ___(6)___ of objects and buildings, but the basic principles of archaeology can also be applied to the discarded rubbish of present day civilizations in order to ___(7)___ a better understanding of how people behave now. As founder and director of the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona, Professor Rathje has ___(8)___ over 30 years of his life to the archaeological study of modern refuse. His work is of ____(9)____ interest to commerce; companies need to understand the lives of their consumers in order to create brands which will be of most ___(10)___ to them. Rathje's ____(11)____ can help them achieve this. In addition, his analysis of the composition of landfill sites reveals a greater need not only to recycle more rubbish but also to  ___(12)___ down on the amount of rubbish we produce in the first place.

[passage-header]Read the text given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]You have spent the last 20 minutes talking to an automated call center. A passionless, computerized voice drones out assurances and urges you to press yet another key. Your temper soars. Finally, you give up, shouting rude remarks. Or your friend becomes immersed, with increasing agitation, in a computer game. As his temper worsens, his performance declines until he ends up trashing the console in a fit of adolescent rage. Computer angst - now a universal feature of modern life - is an increasing phenomenon today. Fortunately, the days of the unfeeling machine will soon be over. Thanks to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, psychology, electronics and other research fields, scientists are now creating computers and robots that can detect, and respond to, users' feelings. The discoveries are being channeled by Humanine, a 6 million programme that has just been launched by the European Union to give Europe a lead in emotional computing. As a result, computers will soon detect our growing irritation at their behavior and in turn generate more sympathetic, human-like messages or slow down the tempo of the games that they are running. Robots will be able to react in lifelike ways, though we may end up generating some unwelcome responses too. Computers that can detect and imitate human emotion may sound like science fiction, but they are already with us, said Dr. Dylan Evans, a key Humanine project collaborator.