Reading Compreh...

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]    "Companies can now keep sensitive information at a distance from the competition. Indian competition can now make it to big deals which are time bound", said MO, Hero Cycle, "Opening up of doing agricultural sector overseas is a major bonanza". Buoyed by the productivity gains, financial reforms, strong rupee, and bulging Forex reserves, Indian companies are thinking global. "This freedom is important for the companies to expand and grow. Often, companies need short windows to complete the deals", said BCG chairman. Aditya Birla group is going global aggressively and has acquired companies in Australia, China, and Indonesia. Dabur has acquired three companies this year. Tata's slogan this year is globalization. Hindalco is buying out Aluminium firms.
    Corporate India can now prowl on global companies priced above $100 million without obtaining permission from the government and bid against competition for the target takeovers. So far, the companies had to walk through bureaucratic mazes and waste crucial time fulfilling 'babudom' requirements, while acquiring foreign companies. Corporate India can make overseas investments up to 100 percent of their net worth.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Scientists have developed a hydrogen-making catalyst that uses cheaper materials and yields much fewer contaminants than do the current processes while extracting the element from common renewable plant sources. Further, the new catalyst lies at the heart of a chemical process the authors say is a significant advance in producing alternate fuels from domestic sources.

In the journal of science, James Dumesic, John Shabaker, and George Huber of the University of Wisconsin at Madison report developing the catalyst from nickel, tin, and aluminum and using it in a process called aqueous-phase reforming (APR), which converts plant by-products into hydrogen. The process performs as well as current methods that use precious metals such as platinum, yet runs at lower temperatures and is much cleaner.

'The APR process can be used on the small scale to produce fuel for portable devices, such as cars, batteries, and military equipment,' said Dumesic. 'But it could also be scaled up as a hydrogen source for industrial applications, such as the production of fertilizers or the removal of sulfur from petroleum products.'

Hydrogen is a 'clean' fuel because when it burns, it combines with oxygen to form water; no toxic by-products or greenhouse gasses are produced in the process. The APR process extracts hydrogen from a variety of biological sources, especially simple carbohydrates, and sugars generated by common plants.

Platinum is known to be an excellent catalyst in a number of chemical reactions. It is one component in a car's catalytic converter, for example, that helps remove toxins from automobile exhaust. Catalytic platinum (Pt) and nickel (Ni) are preferred over other metals because they process reaction molecules much faster. But pure nickel, unlike platinum, recombines the hydrogen product with carbon atoms to make methane, a common greenhouse gas.

Using a specially designed reactor, the team found a match in a modified version of what researchers call a Raney-nickel catalyst. Raney-nickel is a highly porous catalyst made of about 90 percent nickel (Ni) and 10 percent Aluminium (AI).

While Raney-nickel proved somewhat effective at separating hydrogen from biomass-derived molecules, the researchers improved the material's effectiveness by adding more tin (Sn), which stops the production of methane and instead generates more hydrogen. Relative to the other catalysts, the new Raney-NiSn can perform for very long time periods (at least for about 48 hours) and at much lower temperatures (roughly 225 degrees Celsius).

[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]Early in the careers of most novelists, the critics nag and carp; later, the cold eye of reassessment is cast over their life work at the peak of a writing career, which is where Doris Lessing now stands, the years of solid achievement command maximum respect.

A survey of critical responses to Lessing's books might reveal curious strata of social history. It is hard to remember now that she was once considered very daring and very militant (she insisted that relations between the sexes were difficult and unequal). She has been accused of being a feminist and then accused by feminists of not being a feminist enough. She has been a communist but then moved on from a belief in simplistic political solutions to interest in deeper psychological change, touching on themes of madness and of mystical and extrasensory states of consciousness.

Lessing has written clearly into all her work the conviction that we are moving blindly and inevitably toward global catastrophe. Her message seems to be of complete moral and social bankruptcy, particularly in the relations between men and women. Hers is not an angry feminism, though her men are rather poor creatures compared to her bruised but gritty women. Anger may imply a hope that things could be better if only some sense could be knocked into somebody's head, a hope for a time 'after the revolution.' One does not feel that Lessing sees any hope, only perpetual deadlock.

Certainly, Lessing has earned the respect accorded to a writer 'of her stature and productivity'. Doggedly, she has been writing into her fiction signposts and warnings that we need desperately to be reminded of and writing in a way that has been more persuasive and imaginative than if she had been a pure polemicist. But the critic has the problem of distinguishing between what an author says and the way she says it. The moralist in Lessing, struggling with the very skilled writer, at times, has made her writing prolix, clogged, slow - though in her latest novels she has successfully introduced a leavening of fantasy. The fact is that there are writers who in an economical page or two can make us feel our dilemmas more piercingly than she does in a leisurely fictional experience. Missing from her work is that sense of time and space gathered up for a moment between the hands, that sudden shift from understanding to seeing directly, that we expect at rare moments from our storytellers.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]    "Companies can now keep sensitive information at a distance from the competition. Indian competition can now make it to big deals which are time bound", said MO, Hero Cycle, "Opening up of doing agricultural sector overseas is a major bonanza". Buoyed by the productivity gains, financial reforms, strong rupee, and bulging Forex reserves, Indian companies are thinking global. "This freedom is important for the companies to expand and grow. Often, companies need short windows to complete the deals", said BCG chairman. Aditya Birla group is going global aggressively and has acquired companies in Australia, China, and Indonesia. Dabur has acquired three companies this year. Tata's slogan this year is globalization. Hindalco is buying out Aluminium firms.
    Corporate India can now prowl on global companies priced above $100 million without obtaining permission from the government and bid against competition for the target takeovers. So far, the companies had to walk through bureaucratic mazes and waste crucial time fulfilling 'babudom' requirements, while acquiring foreign companies. Corporate India can make overseas investments up to 100 percent of their net worth.

Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:
 Economic growth involves both benefits and costs. The desirability of increasing production has frequently been challenged in recent years and some have even mentioned that economic growth is merely a quantitative enlargement that has no human meaning or value. However, economic growth is an increase in the capacity to produce goods and services that people want. Since the product of economic growth can be measured by its value to someone, it is important to ask whose standard of valuation counts.
  In the U.S., the value of a product is what purchasers pay for it. That is determined by the purchaser's preferences combined with the condition of supply which in turn reflects various other factors, such as natural and technological circumstances of those who supply capital and labor. The value by which we measure a product synthesizes all these factors.
  Gross National Product (GNP) is the market value of the nation's total output of goods and services. GNP is not a perfect measure of all the activities involved in economic output. It does not account for the deterioration or improvement in the environment even when they are, incidentally, results of the production process. On the other hand, it does not count as "Product" many benefits provided as side-effects of the economic process. It does not include productive but unpaid work (such as that done by a home-maker) and it does not reckon with such other factors as the burdensomeness of work, the length of the work, week, and so forth. Nonetheless, the GNP concept makes an important contribution to our understanding of how the economy is working while it is not a complete measure of economic productivity and even less so of "welfare". The level and rate of the increase of GNP are clearly and positively associated with what most people throughout the world see as an improvement in the quality of life. In the long run, the same factor results in a growing GNP and in other social benefits: size and competence of population, state of knowledge, amount of capital and the effectiveness with those are combined and utilized.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Did you know that there are at least 14 million blind people in the world? There are many degrees of blindness, so it is hard to define blindness. Some people cannot even see light. Others can only tell light from dark. Still, others have a small amount of vision.

[passage-header]Read the following passage and answer the question that follows. [/passage-header]Biologists in New Zealand are baffled by the sudden death of a large number of the world's rarest species of penguins. At least a third of the 400 yellow-eyed penguins that live on the Otago Peninsula, in New Zealand's South Island, have died since December. The loss represents around 15 per cent of all yellow-eyed penguins and threatens to extinguish the mainland population. The disappearance of this group of penguins is particularly serious for the species because the birds are genetically distinct from those on the Auckland Islands and Campbell Island. Their disappearance would narrow the species' gene pool considerably.
The first penguins died in December and by February the population had crashed. Post-mortem examinations showed no sign of poisoning by heavy metals or pesticides, nor was there any sign of a virus. Whatever killed the birds acted very quickly in the eight hours they were at sea feeding on the day they died and most of the corpses recovered were near their home beaches. "Whatever it is, seems to make them sick, then head for home and collapse on the beach," said one of the scientists.
Suggestions of a cause range from a change in food supply caused by climatic change, to poisoning by a biological toxin-perhaps from an algal bloom. The sea has been particularly warm this summer, but temperature alone would not kill the penguins; nor had the unusual climatic conditions interfered with the birds' feeding. None of the dead birds showed any signs of disease.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]

[passage-header]Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]