Reading Compreh...

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Telecom infrastructure is the key to the growth of the IT software and services marketplace and a segment that has attracted the attention of Nasscom and the software sector for the past few years. Nasscom has in fact been lobbying with the Government to create a world-class, international level telecom network to facilitate the process of software exports from the country. With the software development delivery model increasingly moving towards outsourcing and offshore services, a robust and reliable telecom infrastructure has become a priority. Issues such as teledensity are important for enhancing internet penetration in the country, which in turn will spur the growth of the domestic software and services market as well as industry segments such as e-commerce. The Government has already taken substantial steps to deregulate the telecom environment since 1993. Initiatives such as liberalizing the Internet environment through the introduction of the ISP policy have been moves in this direction. Yet, our telecom infrastructure lags behind other Asia-Pacific nations such as China, Singapore, among others that boast higher telephone/PC/Internet penetration and world-class telecom infrastructure in terms of bandwidth availability, etc., which are very important for domestic IT market proliferation and software exports.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Telecom infrastructure is the key to the growth of the IT software and services marketplace and a segment that has attracted the attention of Nasscom and the software sector for the past few years. Nasscom has in fact been lobbying with the Government to create a world-class, international level telecom network to facilitate the process of software exports from the country. With the software development delivery model increasingly moving towards outsourcing and offshore services, a robust and reliable telecom infrastructure has become a priority. Issues such as teledensity are important for enhancing internet penetration in the country, which in turn will spur the growth of the domestic software and services market as well as industry segments such as e-commerce. The Government has already taken substantial steps to deregulate the telecom environment since 1993. Initiatives such as liberalizing the Internet environment through the introduction of the ISP policy have been moves in this direction. Yet, our telecom infrastructure lags behind other Asia-Pacific nations such as China, Singapore, among others that boast higher telephone/PC/Internet penetration and world-class telecom infrastructure in terms of bandwidth availability, etc., which are very important for domestic IT market proliferation and software exports.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Telecom infrastructure is the key to the growth of the IT software and services marketplace and a segment that has attracted the attention of Nasscom and the software sector for the past few years. Nasscom has in fact been lobbying with the Government to create a world-class, international level telecom network to facilitate the process of software exports from the country. With the software development delivery model increasingly moving towards outsourcing and offshore services, a robust and reliable telecom infrastructure has become a priority. Issues such as teledensity are important for enhancing internet penetration in the country, which in turn will spur the growth of the domestic software and services market as well as industry segments such as e-commerce. The Government has already taken substantial steps to deregulate the telecom environment since 1993. Initiatives such as liberalizing the Internet environment through the introduction of the ISP policy have been moves in this direction. Yet, our telecom infrastructure lags behind other Asia-Pacific nations such as China, Singapore, among others that boast higher telephone/PC/Internet penetration and world-class telecom infrastructure in terms of bandwidth availability, etc., which are very important for domestic IT market proliferation and software exports.

[passage-header]Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]New research findings on the ability of a fetus to recognize its mother's voice and even distinguish it from other female voices confirm what the scientists have speculated about for more than twenty years, that experiences in the womb help shape newborn preferences and behavior.

Dr. Barbara Kisilevsky, a Queen's University professor of nursing, along with a team of psychologists at Queen's and obstetricians in Hangzhou, China, found that fetuses are capable of learning in the womb and can remember and recognize their mother's voice before they are even born. Their research findings are published in the international journal Psychological Science. 

While previous research on infant development has demonstrated that newborns prefer to listen to their own mother's voice than to that of a female stranger and will even change their behavior to elicit their mother's voice, Dr. Kisilevsky's research proves that this 'preference/recognition' begins before birth. 

"This is an extremely exciting finding that provides evidence of sustained attention, memory, and learning by the fetus," says Dr. Kisilevsky. "The fetuses learn about their mother's voice in the womb and then prefer it, after birth. Our findings provide evidence that in-utero experience has an impact on newborn infant behavior and development and that voice recognition may play a role in mother-infant attachment."

The findings also suggest that the foundation for speech perception and language acquisition is laid before birth, says Dr. Kisilevsky. Therefore, the precocious language processing abilities observed in newborns and young infants may not be due to a hardwired speech processing module in the brain as has been assumed, but may instead stem from the interaction of the fetus with its environment.

Along with researchers at Zhejiang University, China, Dr. Kisilevsky tested 60 fetuses. Thirty fetuses were played a two-minute audiotape of their own mother reading a poem and 30 fetuses were played the voice of a female stranger reading the poem. The researchers found that the fetuses responded to their own mother's voice with heart-rate acceleration and to the stranger's voice with a heart-rate deceleration. The responses lasted during the two-minute tape as well as for at least two minutes after the offset of the voices.

"These results tell us that the fetuses heard and responded to both voices and that there was sustained attention to both voices," notes Dr. Kisilevsky. "But, because they responded differently to the two voices, we know they had to recognize their own mother's voice. We believe they are probably already learning about language in general and their own language specifically."

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
[/passage-header]
This degree of self-correction is laudatory in the specific but applied across the board would render daily newspapers unreadable, given the half-truths and falsities, festering in the compost of back issues. Most readers prefer that journalists collect today's news instead of annotating to the nth degree every ancient mistake or miscue.

Yet some defective news stories moan like tormented spirits and wish for nothing more than to atone for their own errancy. Barton Gellman's is one such story. 

Gellman, whose coverage of the post-invasion search for WMD in Iraq deserves high marks in general, was careful not to overplay his scoop. He didn't state that Al-Qaida received VX or any other nerve Hagent from the Iraqis and smuggled it through Turkey. His only claim was that the 'Bush administration had received a credible report' that such a scheme was in progress. 

Gellman used multiple sources and characterized them as 'speaking without White House permission' for his story, which meant that it was not an official leak designed to bolster the Bush administration's position. But 18 months after the Gellman story ran, we can safely assume that the 'credible report' was false. No Iraqi VX or nerve agent appears to have been transferred to Al- Qaida, and nobody smuggled it through Turkey.

[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 and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]A jolly musicologist by the entirely unobjectionable name of Henry Pleasants has written a book called "The Agony of Modern Music". That word 'agony' is right. Much of it is just not written down but improvised. Much of what passes for the music of these times is raucous noise and the excuse for persisting with it is that every common youngster understands and likes it. The pleasant fellow concedes that "serious" music is virtually dead. This may be dismissed as yet another pleasantry which the undirected young indulge in. Paul Hinde Smith, possibly one of the last of the classical giants, once said that some composers tended to develop an over sublimated technique which produces images of emotions that are far removed from any emotional experience a relatively normal human being ever has. That is just the point. High art can never be totally democratized. There is a barrier between the egghead and the hoi poll oi and it would be lazy idealism to ignore this. When Bach played and Beethoven roared, who was then the gentleman? The pity of it is that while talking music to the masses, all known rules are broken and improvisation becomes king. That, roughly speaking, is how jazz was born: by dropping discipline, inspiration, deep personal emotions and every element of creative art, and adopting improvisation as its main rationale. Why they even tried to smuggle bits of jazz into serious music so that the composers could somehow survive. Now they are going one step further: learn it by ear, don't write down the stuff, make it up as you go along and hope, by these shoddy techniques, that everyone present will applaud and, thus, provide the composer and the performers with their daily bread.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]A jolly musicologist by the entirely unobjectionable name of Henry Pleasants has written a book called "The Agony of Modern Music". That word 'agony' is right. Much of it is just not written down but improvised. Much of what passes for the music of these times is raucous noise and the excuse for persisting with it is that every common youngster understands and likes it. The pleasant fellow concedes that "serious" music is virtually dead. This may be dismissed as yet another pleasantry which the undirected young indulge in. Paul Hinde Smith, possibly one of the last of the classical giants, once said that some composers tended to develop an over sublimated technique which produces images of emotions that are far removed from any emotional experience a relatively normal human being ever has. That is just the point. High art can never be totally democratized. There is a barrier between the egghead and the hoi poll oi and it would be lazy idealism to ignore this. When Bach played and Beethoven roared, who was then the gentleman? The pity of it is that while talking music to the masses, all known rules are broken and improvisation becomes king. That, roughly speaking, is how jazz was born: by dropping discipline, inspiration, deep personal emotions and every element of creative art, and adopting improvisation as its main rationale. Why they even tried to smuggle bits of jazz into serious music so that the composers could somehow survive. Now they are going one step further: learn it by ear, don't write down the stuff, make it up as you go along and hope, by these shoddy techniques, that everyone present will applaud and, thus, provide the composer and the performers with their daily bread.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]If life exists on Mars, it is most likely to be in the form of bacteria buried deep in the planet's permafrost or lichens growing within rocks, say scientists from NASA. There might even be fossilised Martian algae locked up in ancient lake beds, waiting to be found. Christopher McKay of NASA's Ames Research Centre in California told the AAAS that exobiologists, who look for life on other planets, should look for clues among the life forms of the Earth's ultra-cold regions, where conditions are similar to those on Mars. Lichens, for example, are found within some Antarctic rocks, just beneath the surface where sunlight can still reach them. The rock protects the lichen from cold and absorbs water, providing enough for the lichen's needs, said McKay. Bacteria have also been found in 3-million-year old permafrost dug up from Siberia. If there are any bacteria alive on Mars today, they would have survived from the time before the planet cooled more than 3 billion years ago. Nevertheless, McKay is optimistic: "It may be possible that bacteria frozen into the permafrost at the Martian South Pole may be viable." McKay said, "Algae are found in Antarctic lakes with permanently frozen surfaces. Although no lakes are thought to exist on Mars today, they might have existed long ago. If so, the dried-out Martian lake beds may contain the fossilised remains of algae." "On Earth, masses of microscopic algae form large, layered structures known as stromatolites, which survive as fossils on lake beds, and the putative Martian algae might have done the same thing," said Jack Farmer, one of McKay's colleagues. "The researchers are compiling a list of promising Martian lake beds to be photographed from spacecrafts," said Farmer. Those photographs could help to select sites for landers that would search for signs of life, past or present. "If we find algae on Mars, I would say the Universe is lousy with algae," McKay said. "Intelligence would be another question".