Reading Compreh...

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[passage-header]Read the following passage carefully and answer the question that follows:
[/passage-header]A recent report in news week says that in American Colleges students of Asian origin outperform not only the minority group students but the majority whites as well. Many of these students must be of Indian origin, and their achievement is something we can be proud of. It is unlikely that these talented youngsters will come back to India, and that is the familiar brain drain problem.
However, recent statements by the nation's policy makers indicate that the perception of this issue is changing. 'Brain bank' and not 'brain drain' is the more appropriate idea, they suggest, since the expertise of Indians abroad is only deposited in other places and not lost.
This may be so but this brain bank, like most other banks, is one that primarily serves customers in its neighborhood. The skills of the Asians now excelling in America's colleges will mainly help the U.S.A. No matter how significant, what non-resident Indians do for India and what their counterparts do for other Asian lands is only a by-product.
But it is also necessary to ask, or be reminded, why Indians study fruitfully when abroad. Newsweek records would have probably had a very different tale if they had studied in India. In America, they found elbow room, books, and other facilities not available and not likely to be available here. The need to prove themselves in their new country and the competition of an international standard they faced there must have cured mental & physical laziness. But other things helping them in America can be obtained here if we achieve a change in social attitudes, especially towards the youth.
We need to learn to value individuals & their unique qualities more than conformity and respectability. We need to learn the language of encouragement to add to our skill in flattery. We might also learn to be less liberal with blame & less tight-fisted with appreciation.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Censorship is the control of forms of human expression. It is sometimes implemented by the government. The visible motive of censorship is often to stabilize or improve the society that the government has control over. It is most commonly applied to acts that occur in public circumstances, and most formally involves the suppression of ideas. The content of school textbooks is often the issue of debate, since the target audience of school textbooks is young people, and the term 'whitewashing' is the one commonly used to refer to selective removal of critical or damaging evidence or comment. The representation of every society's flaws or misconduct is typically downplayed in favour of a more nationalist or patriotic view.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and accordingly, fill in the blank:
[/passage-header]When we perceive an object, we automatically tend to label it (like nice, bad, wet, dry, light, dark, etc). And our mind reacts on the basis of our own mental labeling of an object. No wonder we tend to react to situations in a subjective manner. All perceived objects are conditioned by our senses and our own mind. This leads to the dramatic conclusion that we are not and, by definition, can never be objective. Our labeling leads not only to problems like anger and attachment but also to the most basic problem: that we think we are somehow separate from the outside world. But are we separate from the outside world? When we see something, for example, a table, it appears to be separate from the rest of the world, just standing there by itself. But is that correct? How could the table stand there without the ground supporting it? How could the table exist without a carpenter making it from pieces of wood? The pieces of wood come from a tree, which comes from a seed, water, soil, air, the sun and its nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms, etc. Every object needs causes and conditions to exist, just like we need our parents, food, air, clothes and many more things to exist. In this way, it becomes impossible to maintain that 'I' am separate from the outside world, however much it feels that way.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and accordingly, fill in the blank:
[/passage-header]When we perceive an object, we automatically tend to label it (like nice, bad, wet, dry, light, dark, etc). And our mind reacts on the basis of our own mental labeling of an object. No wonder we tend to react to situations in a subjective manner. All perceived objects are conditioned by our senses and our own mind. This leads to the dramatic conclusion that we are not and, by definition, can never be objective. Our labeling leads not only to problems like anger and attachment but also to the most basic problem: that we think we are somehow separate from the outside world. But are we separate from the outside world? When we see something, for example, a table, it appears to be separate from the rest of the world, just standing there by itself. But is that correct? How could the table stand there without the ground supporting it? How could the table exist without a carpenter making it from pieces of wood? The pieces of wood come from a tree, which comes from a seed, water, soil, air, the sun and its nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms, etc. Every object needs causes and conditions to exist, just like we need our parents, food, air, clothes and many more things to exist. In this way, it becomes impossible to maintain that 'I' am separate from the outside world, however much it feels that way.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Rahul Dravid is not merely India's most dependable, most consistent or most valuable batsman. He is all of these. But the time has come to recognize that on the basis of his performances in the last three years he is, quite simply, India's best batsman. He is not merely the fortress providing India's dazzling batsmen with a cushion, he has become the pivot around which the Indian batting revolves. Sachin Tendulkar was India's batsman of the 90s. Rahul Dravid has made this decade his very own. To see a good ball hit for four is a spectacle; surviving a great ball requires no less skill, but it rarely elicits a sense of wonderment. It is easy to be agog over a batsman responding to a sharp short ball with an explosive hook, but we often miss the artfulness and skill involved in leaving a bouncer.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Rahul Dravid is not merely India's most dependable, most consistent or most valuable batsman. He is all of these. But the time has come to recognize that on the basis of his performances in the last three years he is, quite simply, India's best batsman. He is not merely the fortress providing India's dazzling batsmen with a cushion, he has become the pivot around which the Indian batting revolves. Sachin Tendulkar was India's batsman of the 90s. Rahul Dravid has made this decade his very own. To see a good ball hit for four is a spectacle; surviving a great ball requires no less skill, but it rarely elicits a sense of wonderment. It is easy to be agog over a batsman responding to a sharp short ball with an explosive hook, but we often miss the artfulness and skill involved in leaving a bouncer.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]More than 125,000 study participants who were free of diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease at the start of a study were selected from the on-going Health Professionals Follow-up Study and the Brigham and Women's Hospital-based Nurses Health Study. Some 41,934 men were tracked from 1986 to 1998 and 84,276 women from 1980 to 1998 via food frequency questionnaires every two to four years to assess their intake of both regular and decaffeinated coffee. During the span of the study, 1,333 new cases of type-2 diabetes were diagnosed in men and 4,085 among the women participants. The researchers also found that for men, those who drank more than six cups of regular coffee per day reduced their risk for type-2 diabetes by more than 50 percent compared to men in the study who didn't drink coffee. Among the women, those who drank six or more cups per day reduced the risk of type-2 diabetes by nearly 30 percent. Decaffeinated coffee was also beneficial, but its effects were weaker than regular coffee.

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