English Reading Comprehension

What did the crow do to get water?

Directions: Read the passage given below carefully and answer the following question.

One hot sunny day, a thirsty crow was flying all over the fields in search for water. For a long time, he could not find any. He felt very weak, almost giving up hope. Suddenly, he saw an earthen pot below him. He flew down to see if there was any water inside. He saw some water inside the pot! The crow tried to insert his head into the jug. Sadly, he found that the neck of the pot was too narrow. Then he tried to push the pot down for the water to flow out. He found that the pot was too heavy. The crow kept thinking for a while. Then he saw some pebbles. Suddenly an idea struck his mind. He started picking up the pebbles one by one, dropping each into the pot. As more and more pebbles filled the jug, the water level kept rising. Soon it was high enough for the crow to drink. His plan had worked! So one should never give up, instead one should keep trying to get what one wants.

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

What on earth is an engaging ruffian. He must be a creature of literary imagination, I thought, for the two words do not match in my personal experience. It has happened to me to meet a few ruffians here and there, but I never found one of them engaging. I consoled myself, however, by reflecting that the friendly reviewer must have been talking like a parrot, which so often seems to understand what it says.

What message does the passage convey?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

There is no instance in history of a more marvellous and sudden up-surging of strength in a nation than modern Japan. There were several theories to account for the uprising, but the intellectual Japanese told us as to what were the fountains of that mighty awakening, the sources of that inexhaustible strength. They were drawn from religion. It was the Vedantic teachings of Oyomei and the recovery of Shintoism with its worship of the national Shakti of Japan in the image and person of the Mikado that enabled the little island empire to wield the stupendous weapons of Western knowledge and science with the same ease with which Arjun wielded the Gandiv.

What is the central idea of the passage?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

Though the prose writing of the period is not great in bulk, it shows a profound change in style. Previous writers had done remarkable and beautiful work in prose, but clear style had not yet found itself. It was wayward and erratic, often cumbrous and often obscure, and weighted with a Latinized construction and vocabulary. In Dryden's time prose begins definitely to find its feet. It acquires a general utility and permanence; it is smoothed and straightened, simplified and harmonized. This is the age of average prose, and prepares the way for the works of those that then stood on the threshold of the modern prose style.

What is the author's purpose in writing the passage?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

The space between the waves and the foot of the cliffs was very broad; one might walk for half an hour before reaching the latter. Our boots crushed innumerable shells of all shapes and sizes, the remains of prehistoric creatures. We saw enormous carapaces, sometimes fifteen feet across, which had belonged to beasts of which the modern tortoise is but a greatly reduced reproduction. Besides this, the stones covering the ground were rounded, and disposed in rows and layers; from all of which we concluded that at one time the sea had covered this part, now beyond its reach.

What is the author`s purpose in writing the passage?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

The voters today are so far removed from contact with their elected representatives; the issues dealt with are so technical, that even well-educated middle-class citizens feel hopelessly excluded from the goal-setting process. Because of the generalized acceleration of life, so much happens so fast between elections that the politician grows increasingly less accountable to the 'folks back home'. What's more, these folks back home keep changing. In theory, the voter unhappy with the performance of his representative can vote against him the next time around. In practice, millions find even this impossible as mass mobility removes them from the district, sometimes disenfranchising them altogether.

What message does the passage convey?

City streets during rain have been compared with

Directions: Read the passage given carefully and answer the question that follows.

Rain in the countryside attracts the lovers of nature. It is pleasant and helpful. But rain in the city creates a different kind of sight. For some people, the heavy downpour may have a cooling effect, and it has its charm with the roar of thunder and the flash of lightening. On a rainy day, the lanes and the streets look like rivers and the entire city becomes magically converted into Venice. The street bears a deserted look. Occasionally, people try to plod their way. Their clothes are tucked up and they hold the umbrella in one hand and their bag in the other. A sudden gush of wind tilts their umbrella and they get drenched. If a vehicle passes speedily, it splashes muddy water on them. Sometimes, the streets become water-logged and traffic comes to a halt.

Where is rain more beneficial and attractive?

Directions: Read the passage given carefully and answer the question that follows.

Rain in the countryside attracts the lovers of nature. It is pleasant and helpful. But rain in the city creates a different kind of sight. For some people, the heavy downpour may have a cooling effect, and it has its charm with the roar of thunder and the flash of lightening. On a rainy day, the lanes and the streets look like rivers and the entire city becomes magically converted into Venice. The street bears a deserted look. Occasionally, people try to plod their way. Their clothes are tucked up and they hold the umbrella in one hand and their bag in the other. A sudden gush of wind tilts their umbrella and they get drenched. If a vehicle passes speedily, it splashes muddy water on them. Sometimes, the streets become water-logged and traffic comes to a halt.

Find the word which means 'a place where there are no people'.

Directions: Read the passage given carefully and answer the question that follows.

Rain in the countryside attracts the lovers of nature. It is pleasant and helpful. But rain in the city creates a different kind of sight. For some people, the heavy downpour may have a cooling effect, and it has its charm with the roar of thunder and the flash of lightening. On a rainy day, the lanes and the streets look like rivers and the entire city becomes magically converted into Venice. The street bears a deserted look. Occasionally, people try to plod their way. Their clothes are tucked up and they hold the umbrella in one hand and their bag in the other. A sudden gush of wind tilts their umbrella and they get drenched. If a vehicle passes speedily, it splashes muddy water on them. Sometimes, the streets become water-logged and traffic comes to a halt.

According to the passage, the rain allures

Directions: Read the passage given carefully and answer the question that follows.

Rain in the countryside attracts the lovers of nature. It is pleasant and helpful. But rain in the city creates a different kind of sight. For some people, the heavy downpour may have a cooling effect, and it has its charm with the roar of thunder and the flash of lightening. On a rainy day, the lanes and the streets look like rivers and the entire city becomes magically converted into Venice. The street bears a deserted look. Occasionally, people try to plod their way. Their clothes are tucked up and they hold the umbrella in one hand and their bag in the other. A sudden gush of wind tilts their umbrella and they get drenched. If a vehicle passes speedily, it splashes muddy water on them. Sometimes, the streets become water-logged and traffic comes to a halt.

Why do people in cities face inconvenience on a rainy day?

Directions: Read the passage given carefully and answer the question that follows.

Rain in the countryside attracts the lovers of nature. It is pleasant and helpful. But rain in the city creates a different kind of sight. For some people, the heavy downpour may have a cooling effect, and it has its charm with the roar of thunder and the flash of lightening. On a rainy day, the lanes and the streets look like rivers and the entire city becomes magically converted into Venice. The street bears a deserted look. Occasionally, people try to plod their way. Their clothes are tucked up and they hold the umbrella in one hand and their bag in the other. A sudden gush of wind tilts their umbrella and they get drenched. If a vehicle passes speedily, it splashes muddy water on them. Sometimes, the streets become water-logged and traffic comes to a halt.

Which word in the passage is opposite in meaning to 'addition'?

Directions: Read the passage given below carefully and answer the question that follows.

The major problem related to environmental pollution and decrease in the amount of natural resources vary from local, regional and global levels. A lot of harm has been caused to the environment due to pollution at various levels. Air pollution results from burning of coal and other fossil fuels. They must be removed from air to keep our air clean. Sewage from homes and waste from industries are major causes of pollution of water bodies which kill fish and other animals living in the water bodies causing water pollution. Land pollution is another type of pollution in which solid waste products create problem when dumped in the landfills. Other major environmental issues relate to increasing greenhouse effect which is warming the earth and depletion of ozone in the atmosphere. The main reasons of greenhouse effect are increase in the level of carbon dioxide and other harmful gases besides cutting of trees in the forests. The depletion of ozone in the atmosphere poses various risks like skin cancer and other problems.

The author is likely to agree with all of the following, except

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
The qualities and defects of French painting are explained less by its historic origin than by the character of the French genius itself. French painting really began in connoisseurship, one may say. It arose in appreciation, that faculty in which the French have always been, and still are, unrivalled. Its syntheses were based on elements already in combination. It originated nothing. It was eclectic at the outset. Compared with the slow and suave evolution of Italian art, in whose earliest dawn its borrowed Byzantine painting served as a stimulus and suggestion to original views of natural material rather than as a model for imitation and modification, the painting that sprang into existence, Minerva-like, in full armor, at Fontainebleau under Francis I, was of the essence of artificiality. It was very much in the position in which American appreciation finds itself to-day. Like our own painters, the French artists of the Renaissance found themselves familiar with masterpieces wholly beyond their power to create, and produced by a foreign people who had enjoyed the incomparable advantage of arriving at their artistic apogee through natural stages of growth, beginning with impulse and culminating in expertness.

Which of the following is/are true as per the passage? I. The allure of an objective acts as a prod for its achievement. II. A difference in opinion can impact the productivity of an enterprise. III. Distribution of wealth and its production are closely interlinked.

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
Now, whatever may be the value of such teaching as a contribution to economic science, it illustrates by its success one cardinal truth, and by implication it bears witness to another. The first truth is that, no matter how desirable any object may be which is obtruded on the imagination of anybody, nobody will bestir himself in a practical way to demand it until he can be persuaded to believe that its attainment is practically possible. The other is this: that the possibilities of redistributing wealth depend on the causes by which wealth is produced. All wealth, says Marx, can practically be appropriated by the laborers. But why? Because the laborers themselves comprise in their own labor all the forces that produce it. If its production necessitated the activity of any persons other than themselves, these other persons would inevitably have some control over its distribution; since if it were distributed in a manner of which these other persons disapproved, it would be open to them to refuse to take part in its production any longer; and there would, in consequence, be no wealth, or less wealth, to distribute.
Let us, then, examine the precise sense and manner in which this theory of labor as the sole producer of wealth is elaborated and defended by Marx in his Bible of Scientific Socialism. His argument, though the expression of it is very often pedantic and encumbered with superfluous mathematical formulae, is ingenious and interesting, and is associated with historical criticism which, in spite of its defects, is valuable. Marx was, indeed, foremost among those thinkers already referred to who first insisted on the fact that the economic conditions of today are mainly a novel development of others which went before them, and that, having their roots in history, they must be studied by the historical method.

The essential peculiarities of Numidia, in turn, are reflected in

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
To the east and west, there are wide stretches of woodland, rounded hill-summits, streams and torrents which pour through the valleys and glens. But towards the south the verdure grows sparse; arid mountain-tops appear, crushed down as blunted cones; the sterility of the desert becomes perceptible amid the wealth of vegetation. This full-foliaged land has its harsh and stern localities. The African light, however, softens all that. The deep green of the oaks and pines runs into waves of warm and ever-altering tints which are a caress and a delight for the eye. A man has it thoroughly brought home to him that he is in a land of the sun.
To say the least, it is a country of strongly marked features which affords the strangest contrast with the surrounding districts. This wooded Numidia, with its flowing brooks, its fields where the cattle graze, differs in the highest degree from the Numidia towards Setif – a wide, desolate plain, where the stubble of the wheat-fields, the sandy steppes, roll away in monotonous undulations to the cloudy barrier of Mount Atlas which closes the horizon. And this rough and melancholy plain in its turn offers a striking contrast with the coast region of Boujeiah and Hippo, which is not unlike the Italian Campania in its mellowness and gaiety. Such clear-cut differences between the various parts of the same province doubtlessly explain the essential peculiarities of the Numidian character. The bishop Augustine, who carried his pastoral cross from one end to the other of this country, and was its acting and thinking soul, may perhaps have owed to it the contrasts and many-sidedness of his own rich nature.