Questions

A passage is given with five questions following it. Read the passage carefully and select the best answer to each question out of the given four alternatives.

The saddest part of life lies not in the act of dying, but in failing to truly live while we are alive. Too many of us play small with our lives, never letting the fullness of our humanity see the light of day. I’ve learned that what really counts in life, in the end, is not how many toys we have collected or how much money we’ve accumulated, but how many of our talents we have liberated and used for a purpose that adds value to this world. What truly matters most are the lives we have touched and the legacy that we have left. Tolstoy put it so well when he wrote: “We live for ourselves only when we live for others.” It took me forty years to discover this simple point of wisdom.

Forty long years to discover that success cannot really be pursued. Success ensues and flows into your life as the unintended yet inevitable byproduct of a life spent enriching the lives of other people. When you shift your daily focus from a compulsion to survive towards a lifelong commitment to serve, your existence cannot help but explode into success. I still can’t believe that I had to wait until the “half-time” of my life to figure out that true fulfillment as a human being comes not from achieving those grand gestures that put us on the front pages of the newspapers and business magazines, but instead from those basic and incremental acts of decency that each one of us has the privilege to practice each and every day if we simply make the choice to do so.

Mother Teresa, a great leader of human hearts if ever there was one, said it best: “There are no great acts, only small acts done with great love.” I learned this the hard way in my life. Until recently, I had been so busy striving, I had missed out on living. I was so busy chasing life’s big pleasures that I had missed out on the little ones, those micro joys that weave themselves in and out of our lives on a daily basis but often go unnoticed. My days were overscheduled, my mind was overworked and my spirit was underfed.

According to the passage, what did Mother Teresa learned the hard way in her life?

In the following passage, some of the words have been left out. Read the passage carefully and select the correct answer for the given blank out of the four alternatives.

That is why publicly invoking these symbols has to be an act of responsible citizenship and not self­____________ demagoguery, but the difference can be hard to _______________. The problem with emotive symbols is that _________________ they can multiply the force of arguments, they cannot replace the arguments__________________. All persuasion harnesses symbols but principled persuasion must also provide arguments that can be _____________ debated.

but the difference can be hard to _______________.

In the following question, out of the four alternatives, select the alternative which best expresses the meaning of the idiom/phrase.

an axe to grind

A sentence with one blank is given, indicating that something has been omitted. Choose the word that best fits the blank appropriately.

The judge used his ___ in settling the matter.

Binomial Nomenclature was founded by

The World Heritage Site Bhimbetka in MP is famous for

Which  one  of  the  following  is  the  correct sequence  of  occurrences  of  rivers  from Chennai to Kolkata when travelled by road (shortest distance)?

The Chola kingdom mostly ruled which region of India?