Questions

Read the following passage carefully and choose the most appropriate answer to the question out of the four alternatives.

In short, to write a good letter you must approach the job in the lightest and most casual way. You must be personal, not abstract. You must not say, 'This is too small a thing to put down'. You must say, 'This is just the sort of small thing we talk about at home. If I tell them this they will see me, as it were they'll hear my voice, they'll know what I'm talking about'. That is the purpose of a letter. Carlyle had the trick to perfection. He is writing from Scotsbrig to his brother Alec in Canada and he begins talking about his mother. Good old Mother, he says, 'she is even now sitting at my back, trying at another table to write you a small word with her own hand; the first time she has tried such a thing for a year past. It is Saturday night, after dark; we are in the east room in a hard, dry evening with a bright fire to our two selves; Jenny and her Barns are 'scouring up things' in the other end of the house; and below stairs the winter operations of the farm go on, in a subdued tone; you can conceive the scene! How simple it is and yet how perfect. Can not you see Alec reading it in his far-off home and his eyes moistening at the picture of his old mother sitting and writing her last message to him on earth?

Abstract' in the passage means

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

to bite your tongue

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

By the seat of one's pants

In the following question, the sentence given with blank to be filled in with an appropriate word. Select the correct alternative out of the four and indicate it by selecting the appropriate option.

While mother mixed the cake __________, Dipu stood at the table watching her.

All this does not bode _______________ for even the loosest definitions of cosmopolitanism. A city by definition is a space, as ________________ historians and sociologists have already told us, which ideally privileges and _________________ the unexpected encounter, and calls on its citizens to be able to respond humanely even to those _______________ are not linked to us in familial, ethnic, nationalist or caste ___________________.

ethnic, nationalist or caste ___________________.

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.

Widespread liberalization of the economic ________________ regime was long overdue in 1991, and has played a positive role since, but its impact has ________________ its course and the policy has recognisable ___________________. Liberalization cannot address all aspects of the man­made environment and now climate change ________________ to change everything forever. We do not have another quarter century to deal ___________ these imperatives.

but its impact has ________________ its course

In the following question, out of the four alternatives, select the alternative which will improve the bracketed part of the sentence. In case no improvement is needed, select "no improvement".

I have always (baffle) by the unique melange of languages and dialects that India is home to.

In the following question, out of the four alternatives, select the alternative which will improve the bracketed part of the sentence. In case no improvement is needed, select "no improvement".

They (has rented) the premises for fifteen rupees a month, a princely sum, considering that milk was fifty paisa a litre.