Verbal Ability Test - 3

Arrange the following to form a coherent passage -
1). A difference in the frequency of usage of counter proposing between skilled and average negotiators suggests that counter proposing may not be, as effective one tends to think it would be.
2). I may have suggested that my son buy a pair of trousers at a certain price whereas my son would have made a counterproposal that he would rather buy two pairs at half price each.
3). Research conducted across several negotiators ranging from sales negotiators to purchase and labour negotiators shows that average negotiators tend to counter propose more often than skilled negotiators.
4). This happens in everyday life too.
5). Think back to the last time you were discussing completing an assignment with one of your colleagues : you may have suggested that you both come in on Saturday to finish the work and your colleague may have counter proposed that you could stay back on Friday evening and finish it instead.

Arrange the following to form a coherent passage -
1). Thrills, ranging from video games to burgers cover the rest.
2). This is because the returns from browsing cover only a percentage of your costs.
3). The bigger your cafe, the more is the need for additional mean of income.
4). Some cafes can get away with being plain vanilla.
5). These fruits will make your clients spend more time with you and also add to your profits.
6). But others cannot.

Arrange the following to form a coherent passage -
P). Exchange control does not altogether prohibit Indian banks keeping open positions during the course of a day.
1). Indeed, unless they are willing to take open positions, they will cease to be market-makers.
2). For market-makers offering two-way quotes in the international markets, open positions are far more common.
3). Thus, depending on the policy of a bank, dealers may be allowed to take intra-day positions in order to make profit.
4). For instance, a dealer expecting the dollar to weaken during the day might deliberately create, through customer transactions and transaction in the inter-bank market, an oversold position in the hope of squaring it later during a day at a profit, should his expectation about the dollar weakening materialise.
Q). Large overbought or oversold positions are often deliberately built up in the hope of profiting from price movements.

Arrange the following to form a coherent passage -

The one major cause for the current weakened state of Indian banks is the level and volume of non-performing assets.
1). Yet, the fact remains that the banks allowed themselves to be pressurized into lowering their guard in the one area of business that is and should be their bread and butter of existence- risk assessment.
2). Description such as 'deceased portfolio' and figures running into thousands of crores have all led to treating the problem as a major one-time aberration requiring emergency treatment.
3). The causal explanations - political interference, wilful defaults, targeted lending and even fraudulent behaviours by banks - have some grain of truth in them.
4). The problem has not been looked at in its proper perspective.
Q). The response from the banks is to concentrate on somehow reducing the amount and number of accounts in this category.

Since Independence the policy of the government of India towards private foreign investment and collaboration has moved from cautious encouragement through a brief spell of near 'open door' in the fifties, a long phase of rigorous selectivity from 1968 to 1991 onto current post-1991 policy of open encouragement of direct investment specially in priority areas even with 51 percent participation in equity.
1). Independent India started with a legacy of well-established foreign capital and all the fear and prejudice associated with it.
2). Based on the exposure of a series of misdeeds perpetrated on some third countries by some of the multinational like International Telephone and Telegraph corp. (ITT), United Fruit, Union Miniere and Lockheed, criticism welled up against the MNCs in the Indian parliament and outside.
3). During the seventies and eighties, official view has been inevitably influenced by the controversy the world over on the role of multinational corporations in relation to third world countries.
4). While the overwhelming thrust has all along been towards the goal of a self-sufficient economy and of freeing national economic and industrial policy from the dictates and manipulates of foreign capital, the compulsions of an economy of scarcity and chronic foreign exchange deficiency also had an effect in shaping official policy towards foreign investment and foreign collaboration.
On the other hand, there was also a realisation that all foreign enterprises operating in India should not be tarred with the same brush and that there were some amongst them who were performing a useful role in the economy by their import-substitution or export-oriented operation, or by making valuable contribution to the technological skill and capability of our country.

Read the passage/argument and answer the question that follows it.

Very few inputs influence the US economic system as much as oil prices. Oil runs the cars, trucks and planes that transport people and products. As oil prices rise, costs rise for transportation companies such as airlines and freight delivery companies, squeezing their profit margins. Downstream of these companies, customers who rely on them to get products to markets are similarly impacted by higher prices.
Contrarily, most energy companies benefit from higher oil prices, either from higher oil revenues, or due to more demand for alternatives like ethanol and clean energy. Car companies with fuel conservation technology such as hybrid engines can expect more sales as consumers feel the pinch of higher oil prices, while those who rely on sales of Sports Utility Vehicles may feel challenged business-wise.

The author conveys his point primarily by

Read the passage/argument and answer the question that follows it.

It is extremely difficult to confront someone with facts in a plain, honest manner. It's also not so easy to evaluate and apply a carrot-and stick policy. I can easily recall when we attended a very much grounded-in-reality self-assessment camp with our senior staff about our consumers, competition, and our performance. Clearly, one cannot do one's own interpretation of what is wrong and castigate people, to motivate them for change; you need to hold a mirror to them. So, I wrote down the things these managers had themselves said two years earlier about the company. Also included were the things customers had said about us, both gung-ho and nasty. When confronted with the inescapable facts of what they had said about themselves and what customers had told us, managers accepted the truth.

According to the paragraph above,

Read the passage/argument and answer the question that follows it.

In the esoteric world of finance, no new idea is complete without its Greek symbol. In the distant past, picking the best stocks was just seen as being clever; now that skill is known as 'alpha'. The letter 'beta is for the boring, old style of simply tracking the market. But what if you can find exciting, new markets to track markets that do not move in step with shares or government bonds? That could be extremely valuable. ___________________

Which of the following would complete the above paragraph?

Read the passage/argument and answer the question that follows it.

The most irksome contributors to the Wikipedia, globally the most global blog, do get censored eventually, though they can always log in under a new identity. Other drawbacks are the subject of earnest internal debate too, such as the Wikipedia's inherent bias towards trivial recent events rather than important historical ones. That is already undergoing a subtle change, slowly, though subjects of interest to northern white computer-literate males are over-covered, while those of interest to others are under-covered in terms of space devoted and the prominence given.

Which of the following options is best supported by the above selection? Mark it as your answer.

Read the passage/argument and answer the question that follows it.

In a closely watched decision, the US Supreme Court overturned damages of $79.5m against Philip Morris that were awarded by a jury in 2007. The case was about an Oregon man who had smoked for 42 years and died of lung cancer. The Supreme Court decreed that the jury award to his widow had overstepped the mark by punishing the cigarette-maker for harm done to others, but it failed to set any ceiling on future punitive-damage awards and sent the case back to state of Oregon Supreme Court for a new hearing.

Which of the following is the most serious objection to the ruling of the US Supreme Court?