Reading Comprehension

What is the best summary of the last paragraph of the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:

People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It does not make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps. The success of any organization depends on how the performers are rewarded and how much the non-performers go unnoticed in the system. Several organizations have called for introducing a robust performance based compensation system that basically fixes accountability on the employees and compensates them accordingly. There are calls for introducing variable pay systems, ESOPs etc. However, practical these solutions might seem at present, the possible fallouts of such systems must be kept in mind. Introducing such systems on the lines of private sector banks will essentially hit at the core of the culture of the public sector banks and the relationship that it has with its employees. And, since it is clear that it will be very difficult for the PSBs to actually pay at the levels of the private sector banks, introducing such a system would essentially mean affecting one thing that still attracts people to such jobs that is the emotional connect in terms of pride etc. Also, it will mean incentivizing managers to take decisions that maximize short-term profits and in the process probably affecting long term prospects.
Keeping in mind the responsibility that the PSBs have towards the society as a whole (something the private counterparts cannot be held accountable for), it is very important that managers at the PSBs take decisions that positively affect the long terms prospects of the banks. Introducing such explicit performance oriented systems can negatively affect the pursuit of such goals. It does not, however, mean that the banks need not lay stress on the performance. Obviously, there is a need to revamp the performance evaluation systems, probably introduce modern systems like 360 degrees appraisal etc. Also, the general compensation levels may need to be looked into and possibly increased as may be possible.
There is a requirement of the introduction of scientific manpower planning. We need to scientifically come up with parameters and benchmarks against which the productivity of the employees can be measured. Welfare of the employees needs to be looked into and it is a very important part of the talent management. There needs to be substantial increase in the allocation of welfare fund for the welfare and especially for the welfare of the retired employees. It is equally important to increase the involvement of the employees in general and the new recruits specially. In this context the policy of reward and punishment must be revamped. Any disciplinary proceeding against an employee regarding procedural lapses must be completed within the shortest possible time. It must be kept in mind that employee faces least mental harassment since the employee is nearly non-productive in this period. The above matters are very important in keeping the motivational level of the employee intact because it is now an established fact that only a motivated employee can deliver results. “The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.”
Creation of congenial climate for talent nurturing calls for creation of atmosphere where employees are adequately and correctly compensated for their performance; and their talents and performances are recognized and appreciated. Apart from having right climate, the other important issues that one looks into before giving a medium to long term commitment for a career, is satisfaction arising from job enrichment/rotation, getting recognition for doing a good job, expectation of performance-based payment, flexibility in terms of job hours and other related aspects, both monetary and non-monetary incentives and a fast track promotion process through which one can look for prospects of a good career ahead. This becomes all the more important because today’s employee compares his job with the kind of job his friend/peer might be having at a private sector counterpart. More flexibility at the level of bank in deciding the compensation level reflecting the capacity of the bank to pay will be a welcome step. Today, all negotiations and settlements are reached at the industry level. There needs to be a difference in the amount being paid at a low-performing and a high performing bank. Such steps will motivate the employees of a bank on the whole to work harder and, more importantly, together. (The Indian Banker, Jan 2012)

Which of the following best sums up the essence of the last paragraph of the passage?

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

So many people today are gripped with a sense of fear. They fear for the future. They feel vulnerable in the workplace. They are afraid of losing their jobs and their ability to provide for their families. This vulnerability often fosters a resignation to riskless living and to co-dependency with others at work and at home. Our culture’s common response to this problem is to become more and more independent. Independence is an important, even vital, value and achievement. The problem is, we live in an interdependent reality, and our most important accomplishments require interdependency skills well beyond our present abilities.
People want things and want them now. Though today’s ‘credit card’ society makes it easy to ‘get now and pay later’, economic realities eventually set in, and we are reminded, sometimes painfully, that our purchases cannot outstrip our ongoing ability to produce. The demands of interest are unrelenting and unforgiving. With the dizzying rate of change in technology and increasing competition driven by the globalization of markets and technology, we must develop our minds and continually sharpen and invest in the development of our competencies to avoid becoming obsolete.
Whenever we find a problem, we usually find the finger-pointing of blame. ‘If only this hadn’t been like this…if only that…’ Blaming everyone and everything else for our problems and challenges may be the norm and many provide temporary relief from the pain, but it also chains us to these very problems. If we can find someone humble enough to accept and take responsibility for his or her circumstances and courageous enough to take whatever initiative is necessary to creatively work his or her way through or around these challenges, we can find the supreme power of choice.
The children of blame are cynicism and hopelessness. When we succumb to believing that we are victims of our circumstances and yield to the plight of determinism, we lose hope, we lose drive, and we settle into resignation and stagnation. So many bright, talented people suffer the broad range of discouragement and depression that follows. The survival response of popular culture is cynicism—‘just lower your expectations of life to the point that you aren’t disappointed by anyone or anything.’ The contrasting principle of growth and hope throughout history is the discovery that ‘I am the creative force of my life.’ (Excerpted from Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

Give the best summary of the third paragraph.

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

Data of educational psychology are obtained in various methods. These methods range in reliability from extremely low to very high. In addition to the questionable validity of the information obtained by research, there are certain risks of inference involved when the results of laboratory investigations are extrapolated to classroom applications. Every classroom is unique in many ways and there are certain risks in generalising from the laboratory to the classroom as well as from one type of classroom to another.
Educational psychologists and educators in the field would do a service to the profession if they would cross-validate laboratory studies in the classroom and pool the results from such studies in several schools to determine the generality of their findings.
Conventional textbooks are quite unsatisfactory for the student who wishes to critically evaluate the reliability of the methods used in obtaining the information presented. The book, which presents enough of the methodology of the studies from which all of the data presented are derived, would be able to cover a very limited area of subject matter and a small number of studies. It is necessary, therefore, for textbooks to become authoritarian in tenor and subject-matter oriented if they are to be useful to the student who is largely a consumer of research data. Data presented in textbook fashion must be accepted largely on faith—faith in the veracity of the presentations and in the reliability of the research methods used.
The student who is critical will want to go back to the original studies to check on the original methods and data on issues which are crucial for him. There are books of readings available in which selected studies are presented in their complete forms. These constitute useful supplements to the subject-matter oriented textbook. A textbook should be perceived by the student as a presentation of the best available information to date, organised and interpreted within a limited frame of reference.

What is the best summary of the opening paragraph?

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

Data of educational psychology are obtained in various methods. These methods range in reliability from extremely low to very high. In addition to the questionable validity of the information obtained by research, there are certain risks of inference involved when the results of laboratory investigations are extrapolated to classroom applications. Every classroom is unique in many ways and there are certain risks in generalising from the laboratory to the classroom as well as from one type of classroom to another.
Educational psychologists and educators in the field would do a service to the profession if they would cross-validate laboratory studies in the classroom and pool the results from such studies in several schools to determine the generality of their findings.
Conventional textbooks are quite unsatisfactory for the student who wishes to critically evaluate the reliability of the methods used in obtaining the information presented. The book, which presents enough of the methodology of the studies from which all of the data presented are derived, would be able to cover a very limited area of subject matter and a small number of studies. It is necessary, therefore, for textbooks to become authoritarian in tenor and subject-matter oriented if they are to be useful to the student who is largely a consumer of research data. Data presented in textbook fashion must be accepted largely on faith—faith in the veracity of the presentations and in the reliability of the research methods used.
The student who is critical will want to go back to the original studies to check on the original methods and data on issues which are crucial for him. There are books of readings available in which selected studies are presented in their complete forms. These constitute useful supplements to the subject-matter oriented textbook. A textbook should be perceived by the student as a presentation of the best available information to date, organised and interpreted within a limited frame of reference.

Which of the following is the best summary of the fourth paragraph?

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

Data of educational psychology are obtained in various methods. These methods range in reliability from extremely low to very high. In addition to the questionable validity of the information obtained by research, there are certain risks of inference involved when the results of laboratory investigations are extrapolated to classroom applications. Every classroom is unique in many ways and there are certain risks in generalising from the laboratory to the classroom as well as from one type of classroom to another.
Educational psychologists and educators in the field would do a service to the profession if they would cross-validate laboratory studies in the classroom and pool the results from such studies in several schools to determine the generality of their findings.
Conventional textbooks are quite unsatisfactory for the student who wishes to critically evaluate the reliability of the methods used in obtaining the information presented. The book, which presents enough of the methodology of the studies from which all of the data presented are derived, would be able to cover a very limited area of subject matter and a small number of studies. It is necessary, therefore, for textbooks to become authoritarian in tenor and subject-matter oriented if they are to be useful to the student who is largely a consumer of research data. Data presented in textbook fashion must be accepted largely on faith—faith in the veracity of the presentations and in the reliability of the research methods used.
The student who is critical will want to go back to the original studies to check on the original methods and data on issues which are crucial for him. There are books of readings available in which selected studies are presented in their complete forms. These constitute useful supplements to the subject-matter oriented textbook. A textbook should be perceived by the student as a presentation of the best available information to date, organised and interpreted within a limited frame of reference.

What is the underlying idea of the passage?

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

With Charles Darwin’s popularisation of the concept of evolution, man became interested in his biological origins and affiliations. This interest was centred on man’s phylogenetic origins. Starting with the work on heredity of Gregor Mendel in the 1860s and the recognition of its significance in 1900, interest shifted to the problem of man’s ontogenetic origins. Mendel’s simple ‘laws of heredity’ came to be widely known and were uncritically assumed to apply to all human characteristics. Most physical characteristics, intelligence, and many aspects of personality were thought to operate as simple Mendelian unit characters in their transmission from parent to child. This belief stimulated an interest to eugenic movements that proposed to bring about race betterment through sterilization of the unfit and encouragement of marriage among the superior members of society. Many groups of people organised to promote such programmes. Feeble-mindedness, poverty, crime, and immorality were thought to be largely matters of poor heredity. Several studies of family lines were published that seemed to give considerable support to this general concept.
From 1900 to about 1920, there was an overemphasis on the role of heredity in producing these conditions. The fixity and certainty of hereditary determination were grossly overestimated, and the environmental contribution to intelligence, personality, morality, and crime was either ignored or underestimated. The one fundamental fact of logic—that correlation does not prove causation—was forgotten. Because certain traits follow family lines, it does not follow that they are necessarily inherited. There is a ‘social heredity’ involved in the transmission of many things from generation to generation, and it is easy to confuse its effects with those of biology heredity.
Starting in the 1920s and ‘30s there set in a reaction against the uncritical application of the simple Mendelian concepts to all human characteristics and the resulting disregard of the importance of environmental factors. The extreme hereditarians were accused of being mechanistic in their frame of reference, deterministic in their philosophy, and unscientific in their methods.
Behaviour trends, intellectual level, special talents, and temperament are not inherited as such, but heredity is certainly a factor in determining all of them. Genes affect behaviour indirectly through their influence on the structural development of the individual. Genes affect structural conditions which, in turn, influence function. Such complex things as feeble-mindedness, musical talent, mathematical aptitude, and criminality can hardly be inherited. However, the genes can be crucial factors in determining the development of the nervous system, the sensitivity of the ear, the discriminating ability of the eye, the length, diameter, and nature of the vocal cords, and as such things as the size and shape of the hands. (Sawrey and Telford in Education Psychology)

Give the best summary of the first paragraph of the passage.

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

With Charles Darwin’s popularisation of the concept of evolution, man became interested in his biological origins and affiliations. This interest was centred on man’s phylogenetic origins. Starting with the work on heredity of Gregor Mendel in the 1860s and the recognition of its significance in 1900, interest shifted to the problem of man’s ontogenetic origins. Mendel’s simple ‘laws of heredity’ came to be widely known and were uncritically assumed to apply to all human characteristics. Most physical characteristics, intelligence, and many aspects of personality were thought to operate as simple Mendelian unit characters in their transmission from parent to child. This belief stimulated an interest to eugenic movements that proposed to bring about race betterment through sterilization of the unfit and encouragement of marriage among the superior members of society. Many groups of people organised to promote such programmes. Feeble-mindedness, poverty, crime, and immorality were thought to be largely matters of poor heredity. Several studies of family lines were published that seemed to give considerable support to this general concept.
From 1900 to about 1920, there was an overemphasis on the role of heredity in producing these conditions. The fixity and certainty of hereditary determination were grossly overestimated, and the environmental contribution to intelligence, personality, morality, and crime was either ignored or underestimated. The one fundamental fact of logic—that correlation does not prove causation—was forgotten. Because certain traits follow family lines, it does not follow that they are necessarily inherited. There is a ‘social heredity’ involved in the transmission of many things from generation to generation, and it is easy to confuse its effects with those of biology heredity.
Starting in the 1920s and ‘30s there set in a reaction against the uncritical application of the simple Mendelian concepts to all human characteristics and the resulting disregard of the importance of environmental factors. The extreme hereditarians were accused of being mechanistic in their frame of reference, deterministic in their philosophy, and unscientific in their methods.
Behaviour trends, intellectual level, special talents, and temperament are not inherited as such, but heredity is certainly a factor in determining all of them. Genes affect behaviour indirectly through their influence on the structural development of the individual. Genes affect structural conditions which, in turn, influence function. Such complex things as feeble-mindedness, musical talent, mathematical aptitude, and criminality can hardly be inherited. However, the genes can be crucial factors in determining the development of the nervous system, the sensitivity of the ear, the discriminating ability of the eye, the length, diameter, and nature of the vocal cords, and as such things as the size and shape of the hands. (Sawrey and Telford in Education Psychology)

What is the central idea of the passage?

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

Data of educational psychology are obtained in various methods. These methods range in reliability from extremely low to very high. In addition to the questionable validity of the information obtained by research, there are certain risks of inference involved when the results of laboratory investigations are extrapolated to classroom applications. Every classroom is unique in many ways and there are certain risks in generalising from the laboratory to the classroom as well as from one type of classroom to another.
Educational psychologists and educators in the field would do a service to the profession if they would cross-validate laboratory studies in the classroom and pool the results from such studies in several schools to determine the generality of their findings.
Conventional textbooks are quite unsatisfactory for the student who wishes to critically evaluate the reliability of the methods used in obtaining the information presented. The book, which presents enough of the methodology of the studies from which all of the data presented are derived, would be able to cover a very limited area of subject matter and a small number of studies. It is necessary, therefore, for textbooks to become authoritarian in tenor and subject-matter oriented if they are to be useful to the student who is largely a consumer of research data. Data presented in textbook fashion must be accepted largely on faith—faith in the veracity of the presentations and in the reliability of the research methods used.
The student who is critical will want to go back to the original studies to check on the original methods and data on issues which are crucial for him. There are books of readings available in which selected studies are presented in their complete forms. These constitute useful supplements to the subject-matter oriented textbook. A textbook should be perceived by the student as a presentation of the best available information to date, organised and interpreted within a limited frame of reference.

Which of the following best summarizes the third paragraph of the passage?

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

The wilderness is returning to Europe, but not without a little human help. Conservationists have spent years guarding eggs, counting stocks and reintroducing young animals into their natural habitat. But European wildlife also depends on a strong political framework, such as the hunting bans, protected sites and resettlement projects introduced by individual nations, which inspired the European Union to pass bold laws. This began with the Birds Directive, passed in 1979 which, in a single stroke, banned the hunting of virtually all European birds. In addition, EU member states were required to designate Special Protection Areas for 160 particularly vulnerable species—a measure that is largely responsible for the increase in populations of the White-tailed eagle, Marsh Harrier and Black stork, as studies carried out by Birdlife International have shown.
Thanks to EU laws, the air became cleaner, lakes and rivers recovered, and the use of chemicals in agriculture and industry declined during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, stocks of fish have increased and birds of prey have been breeding more successfully. The greatest legislative coup took place in 1992 with the Habitats Directive. This requires member states to set up Special Areas of Conservation for endangered flora and fauna, including animals and such as the beaver, European otter, Eurasian lynx and Grey wolf. If existing reserves met the required criteria, they could be re-designated, but most countries have had to place additional areas under protection.
The Directive has placed 234 vulnerable species of plants and animals under protection, including all big carnivores, as well as bison, Alpine ibex and beaver. It has also compelled governments to relook at industrial parks and highways—as was the case in Poland in 2008, when a proposed new road was relocated so that it did not cut across the protected Rospuda Valley—and prompted them to introduce bans on hunting. Any new EU member is required to implement far more stringent laws on nature conservation: laws that are often fought out in court. One in four cases before the European Court of Justice involving one of its member states involves a breach of EU environmental law.
In some countries this breach is due to a lack of ability. ‘In Eastern Europe, governments at times have too little money or too few resources to meet their EU obligations’, says Professor Christoph Knill, environmental policy researcher at Konstanz University, Germany. In other cases, it is the lack of political will: Germany, for instance, designated its last Special Area of Conservation only in 2008, after a delay of 10 years and after the EU Commission threatened to drag it to court. By now, however, all states have set up their Special Protection Areas and Special Areas of Conservation: 26,000 sanctuaries in all, that together make up the Natura 2000 network and cover 18 per cent of the EU landmass. It is the world’s largest group of biotopes and a showpiece of the EU environmental policy, no matter what the critics say. (The Laws of the Wild West by Torsten Schafer)

Which one of the following is the underlying idea of the passage?

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

Empowerment is about providing opportunities to individuals to achieve their aspirations while ensuring that community objectives are met. An empowered India is a country that provides opportunities for every child to achieve its potential through education, health care, nutrition, shelter and employment. At the same time, we must ensure that these children advance the interests of the country. To achieve this dream of empowerment, it is necessary to take tough, unpopular and unpleasant decisions.
To push these decisions through, India needs strong political leaders: the leaders who have the courage of conviction, the courage to dream big, to take difficult decisions, and to make sacrifices. The leaders have to be people who can straddle several worlds—the urban and the rural, the modern and the traditional, the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate. They have to appreciate the aspirations of all these worlds. They should not believe that development is a zero-sum game where gains to one world mean losses to another.
Politicians often complain that IT sector has created a great divide between the haves and the have-nots, and that it should be checked. Sadly, they believe that the solution is to restrict the growth of the IT industry instead of encouraging the creation of a larger number of such jobs. The leaders have to believe that the only way of our solving the problem of poverty is to create more jobs and shift a large number of people from agriculture to manufacturing and services. They must be open-minded, and willing to learn from the experiences of the leaders across the world. They must aspire to bench-mark India globally. They must be action oriented. We have become too much of a rhetoric satisfied society. Success is about execution.
It is for the top leaders of every political party to demonstrate leadership by example. They must come together and resolve to promote these values for the good of the future generations. This is tough and seems virtually impossible. But ‘a plausible impossibility is better than a convincing possibility’. There is no other way to do this. In the beginning, we may see a few good leaders being cast away quickly. But, once we see this behaviour from a generation of successive leaders, it will become the norm. For example, at one time, it appeared impossible to stem the mass defection of Aayarams and Gayarams from one party to another. The practice came to an end because all our political leaders came together and stopped it. (Excerpted from A Better India A Better World)

Give the essence of the second paragraph.

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

Data of educational psychology are obtained in various methods. These methods range in reliability from extremely low to very high. In addition to the questionable validity of the information obtained by research, there are certain risks of inference involved when the results of laboratory investigations are extrapolated to classroom applications. Every classroom is unique in many ways and there are certain risks in generalising from the laboratory to the classroom as well as from one type of classroom to another.
Educational psychologists and educators in the field would do a service to the profession if they would cross-validate laboratory studies in the classroom and pool the results from such studies in several schools to determine the generality of their findings.
Conventional textbooks are quite unsatisfactory for the student who wishes to critically evaluate the reliability of the methods used in obtaining the information presented. The book, which presents enough of the methodology of the studies from which all of the data presented are derived, would be able to cover a very limited area of subject matter and a small number of studies. It is necessary, therefore, for textbooks to become authoritarian in tenor and subject-matter oriented if they are to be useful to the student who is largely a consumer of research data. Data presented in textbook fashion must be accepted largely on faith—faith in the veracity of the presentations and in the reliability of the research methods used.
The student who is critical will want to go back to the original studies to check on the original methods and data on issues which are crucial for him. There are books of readings available in which selected studies are presented in their complete forms. These constitute useful supplements to the subject-matter oriented textbook. A textbook should be perceived by the student as a presentation of the best available information to date, organised and interpreted within a limited frame of reference.

Change being the only constant, need to continuously upgrade individual skills and fine-tune them to understand and master nuances is imperative. The emphasis seems to be on

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

With the whole world having converged into one market—the barriers, of whatever kind they may be, cannot persist for long. They must make way for the natural market forces.  It is these forces that will determine what will sell and what will not. It is these forces that will produce what consumers would want to consume. Only those who can read these forces will survive in the market. This market will not be local, but global. A successful entrepreneur has to dabble in this global market, in the international milieu, location notwithstanding. An individual’s traits and tenacity will, accordingly, be put to severe test. An institution can justify its existence only if it is able to hone and sharpen the skill of an individual to a level from where he or she can successfully dabble in international milieu. Several management schools are actually doing that while there are several others that are claiming to be doing that. We have set out on course to sift good from not-so-good.
Certain agencies examine these to provide necessary inputs on the mushrooming business schools so that one could take an informed decision on whether or not to choose them to hone entrepreneurial skill to enable them to dabble in any market. India is young. As part of that Young India and of the emerging economy, an academic stint with a quality institution, national or international, will expectedly give necessary tools to explore potential and develop market for India and Indian produce/services in the international arena and vice versa. This, in the process, will become an enabling conduit. 
Interactive sessions with international clientele—which these B-schools should enable —will give an insight into the basic needs of market and people who buy services and products. While smiles of the satisfied customers are rewards in themselves, they will constantly goad market people to keep upgrading their level of services. Frowns of dissatisfied/querulous customers will be lessons on how to deal with fastidious customers. Taking this as a challenge, ways and means of how to bring smile on the faces of the most fastidious of them all could and should be devised. Success or failure of an enterprise will largely depend on this. While life is changing fast, customer needs are changing faster still. This calls for constantly upgrading marketing skills to meet the requirements of ever changing facets of present day clientele. Change being the only constant, need to continuously upgrade individual skills and fine-tune them to understand and master nuances is imperative.

'They are more or less reconciled to it for lack of better alternatives’. Reconciled to what?

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

Since the governments have failed to provide good schools for the ever growing population, there is a mad rush for admission to public schools or what are popularly known as English medium schools. English is supposed to be the medium of instruction in these schools and these institutions are doing great business. Even if some guardians grumble about the ever mounting charges of these academics, they are more or less reconciled to it for lack of better alternatives. Indeed, some of these are making sincere efforts to improve the quality of their product. And yet, there is much that is distasteful. 
I must hasten to add that I do not entertain great hopes from schools as I know a great number of teachers are there in these schools not because they have any love for the profession, but because they could not find a better outlet for their talent or let us say their free time.
For instance, the modern grammarians divide noun into three parts: proper noun, countable noun and uncountable noun. But it was a revelation to me when I saw the notebook of my ward where he had noted only four types of noun and it was duly endorsed by the teacher. It had proper noun, common noun, collective noun and abstract noun with requisite illustrations. I was frantically looking for a material noun, but it was not to be found anywhere. Thereafter, I became a little more inquisitive and circumspect and decided to scan through all the pages. I was horrified, to say the least, at the discoveries I made. I shall refrain from illustrating all of them, but this one should serve as an eye opener. It is amusing too. There was a sign of delta ‘s’ and the sentence written was: It is a Greek ‘world’. And it was marked right. When I visited the school, I drew the attention of the vice-principal and then of the principal to this. They looked concerned that their teachers should commit these silly mistakes, but they said that so far as the noun was concerned, they abided by the CBSE syllabus and that they could not help the matter. The book had only four types of noun listed, and so they taught only four types. Then I showed them the delta thing.  The vice-principal saw it and said it should have been ‘word’ which has been erroneously spelt as ‘world’. The principal went a step further and corrected it with his own pen and made it ‘word’. When I suggested that ‘delta’ was the fourth ‘letter’ of Greek and not a ‘word’ at all, the principal hurriedly rewrote it as ‘letter’ and said sheepishly that he did not know Greek. Nor did I. But was it necessary to know Greek to know delta was a letter, not a word?
Most of the guardians take it for granted that their wards are receiving the best schooling and do not care to see what actually is happening to their wards. Nor for that matter it is expected of all guardians to know the correct answers. So what happens to their wards? When teachers commit mistakes, you go to the principal. But where would you go if the principal himself is ill-informed?

We have set out on course to sift the good from the not-so-good. On which of these does the author laid his emphasis?

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

With the whole world having converged into one market—the barriers, of whatever kind they may be, cannot persist for long. They must make way for the natural market forces.  It is these forces that will determine what will sell and what will not. It is these forces that will produce what consumers would want to consume. Only those who can read these forces will survive in the market. This market will not be local, but global. A successful entrepreneur has to dabble in this global market, in the international milieu, location notwithstanding. An individual’s traits and tenacity will, accordingly, be put to severe test. An institution can justify its existence only if it is able to hone and sharpen the skill of an individual to a level from where he or she can successfully dabble in international milieu. Several management schools are actually doing that while there are several others that are claiming to be doing that. We have set out on course to sift good from not-so-good.
Certain agencies examine these to provide necessary inputs on the mushrooming business schools so that one could take an informed decision on whether or not to choose them to hone entrepreneurial skill to enable them to dabble in any market. India is young. As part of that Young India and of the emerging economy, an academic stint with a quality institution, national or international, will expectedly give necessary tools to explore potential and develop market for India and Indian produce/services in the international arena and vice versa. This, in the process, will become an enabling conduit. 
Interactive sessions with international clientele—which these B-schools should enable —will give an insight into the basic needs of market and people who buy services and products. While smiles of the satisfied customers are rewards in themselves, they will constantly goad market people to keep upgrading their level of services. Frowns of dissatisfied/querulous customers will be lessons on how to deal with fastidious customers. Taking this as a challenge, ways and means of how to bring smile on the faces of the most fastidious of them all could and should be devised. Success or failure of an enterprise will largely depend on this. While life is changing fast, customer needs are changing faster still. This calls for constantly upgrading marketing skills to meet the requirements of ever changing facets of present day clientele. Change being the only constant, need to continuously upgrade individual skills and fine-tune them to understand and master nuances is imperative.

The writer of this article shows his

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

Since the governments have failed to provide good schools for the ever growing population, there is a mad rush for admission to public schools or what are popularly known as English medium schools. English is supposed to be the medium of instruction in these schools and these institutions are doing great business. Even if some guardians grumble about the ever mounting charges of these academics, they are more or less reconciled to it for lack of better alternatives. Indeed, some of these are making sincere efforts to improve the quality of their product. And yet, there is much that is distasteful. 
I must hasten to add that I do not entertain great hopes from schools as I know a great number of teachers are there in these schools not because they have any love for the profession, but because they could not find a better outlet for their talent or let us say their free time.
For instance, the modern grammarians divide noun into three parts: proper noun, countable noun and uncountable noun. But it was a revelation to me when I saw the notebook of my ward where he had noted only four types of noun and it was duly endorsed by the teacher. It had proper noun, common noun, collective noun and abstract noun with requisite illustrations. I was frantically looking for a material noun, but it was not to be found anywhere. Thereafter, I became a little more inquisitive and circumspect and decided to scan through all the pages. I was horrified, to say the least, at the discoveries I made. I shall refrain from illustrating all of them, but this one should serve as an eye opener. It is amusing too. There was a sign of delta ‘s’ and the sentence written was: It is a Greek ‘world’. And it was marked right. When I visited the school, I drew the attention of the vice-principal and then of the principal to this. They looked concerned that their teachers should commit these silly mistakes, but they said that so far as the noun was concerned, they abided by the CBSE syllabus and that they could not help the matter. The book had only four types of noun listed, and so they taught only four types. Then I showed them the delta thing.  The vice-principal saw it and said it should have been ‘word’ which has been erroneously spelt as ‘world’. The principal went a step further and corrected it with his own pen and made it ‘word’. When I suggested that ‘delta’ was the fourth ‘letter’ of Greek and not a ‘word’ at all, the principal hurriedly rewrote it as ‘letter’ and said sheepishly that he did not know Greek. Nor did I. But was it necessary to know Greek to know delta was a letter, not a word?
Most of the guardians take it for granted that their wards are receiving the best schooling and do not care to see what actually is happening to their wards. Nor for that matter it is expected of all guardians to know the correct answers. So what happens to their wards? When teachers commit mistakes, you go to the principal. But where would you go if the principal himself is ill-informed?