(A) The state government has now decided to increase the stamp duty on house purchases with immediate effect. (B) The real estate prices have decreased considerably during the last few, months. ?->(Show Answer!)

1. (A) The state government has now decided to increase the stamp duty on house purchases with immediate effect. (B) The real estate prices have decreased considerably during the last few, months.

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MCQ->(A) The state government has now decided to increase the stamp duty on house purchases with immediate effect. (B) The real estate prices have decreased considerably during the last few, months.....

MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words/phrases have been printed in bold tohelp you locate them while answering some of the questions. During the last few years, a lot of hype has been heaped on the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). With their large populations and rapid growth, these countries, so the argument goes, will soon become some of the largest economies in the world and, in the case of China, the largest of all by as early as 2020. But the BRICS, as well as many other emerging-market economieshave recently experienced a sharp economic slowdown. So, is the honeymoon over? Brazil’s GDP grew by only 1% last year, and may not grow by more than 2% this year, with its potential growth barely above 3%. Russia’s economy may grow by barely 2% this year, with potential growth also at around 3%, despite oil prices being around $100 a barrel. India had a couple of years of strong growth recently (11.2% in 2010 and 7.7% in 2011) but slowed to 4% in 2012. China’s economy grew by 10% a year for the last three decades, but slowed to 7.8% last year and risks a hard landing. And South Africa grew by only 2.5% last year and may not grow faster than 2% this year. Many other previously fast-growing emerging-market economies – for example, Turkey, Argentina, Poland, Hungary, and many in Central and Eastern Europe are experiencing a similar slowdown. So, what is ailing the BRICS and other emerging markets? First, most emerging-market economies were overheating in 2010-2011, with growth above potential and inflation rising and exceeding targets. Many of them thus tightened monetary policy in 2011, with consequences for growth in 2012 that have carried over into this year. Second, the idea that emerging-market economies could fully decouple from economic weakness in advanced economies was farfetched : recession in the eurozone, near-recession in the United Kingdom and Japan in 2011-2012, and slow economic growth in the United States were always likely to affect emerging market performance negatively – via trade, financial links, and investor confidence. For example, the ongoing euro zone downturn has hurt Turkey and emergingmarket economies in Central and Eastern Europe, owing to trade links. Third, most BRICS and a few other emerging markets have moved toward a variant of state capitalism. This implies a slowdown in reforms that increase the private sector’s productivity and economic share, together with a greater economic role for state-owned enterprises (and for state-owned banks in the allocation of credit and savings), as well as resource nationalism, trade protectionism, import substitution industrialization policies, and imposition of capital controls. This approach may have worked at earlier stages of development and when the global financial crisis caused private spending to fall; but it is now distorting economic activity and depressing potential growth. Indeed, China’s slowdown reflects an economic model that is, as former Premier Wen Jiabao put it, “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable,” and that now is adversely affecting growth in emerging Asia and in commodity-exporting emerging markets from Asia to Latin America and Africa. The risk that China will experience a hard landing in the next two years may further hurt many emerging economies. Fourth, the commodity super-cycle that helped Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and many other commodity-exporting emerging markets may be over. Indeed, a boom would be difficult to sustain, given China’s slowdown, higher investment in energysaving technologies, less emphasis on capital-and resource-oriented growth models around the world, and the delayed increase in supply that high prices induced. The fifth, and most recent, factor is the US Federal Reserve’s signals that it might end its policy of quantitative easing earlier than expected, and its hints of an even tual exit from zero interest rates. both of which have caused turbulence in emerging economies’ financial markets. Even before the Fed’s signals, emergingmarket equities and commodities had underperformed this year, owing to China’s slowdown. Since then, emerging-market currencies and fixed-income securities (government and corporate bonds) have taken a hit. The era of cheap or zerointerest money that led to a wall of liquidity chasing high yields and assets equities, bonds, currencies, and commodities – in emerging markets is drawing to a close. Finally, while many emerging-market economies tend to run current-account surpluses, a growing number of them – including Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, and India – are running deficits. And these deficits are now being financed in riskier ways: more debt than equity; more short-term debt than longterm debt; more foreign-currency debt than local-currency debt; and more financing from fickle cross-border interbank flows. These countries share other weaknesses as well: excessive fiscal deficits, abovetarget inflation, and stability risk (reflected not only in the recent political turmoil in Brazil and Turkey, but also in South Africa’s labour strife and India’s political and electoral uncertainties). The need to finance the external deficit and to avoid excessive depreciation (and even higher inflation) calls for raising policy rates or keeping them on hold at high levels. But monetary tightening would weaken already-slow growth. Thus, emerging economies with large twin deficits and other macroeconomic fragilities may experience further downward pressure on their financial markets and growth rates. These factors explain why growth in most BRICS and many other emerging markets has slowed sharply. Some factors are cyclical, but others – state capitalism, the risk of a hard landing in China, the end of the commodity supercycle -are more structural. Thus, many emerging markets’ growth rates in the next decade may be lower than in the last – as may the outsize returns that investors realised from these economies’ financial assets (currencies, equities. bonds, and commodities). Of course, some of the better-managed emerging-market economies will continue to experitnce rapid growth and asset outperformance. But many of the BRICS, along with some other emerging economies, may hit a thick wall, with growth and financial markets taking a serious beating.Which of the following statement(s) is/are true as per the given information in the passage ? A. Brazil’s GDP grew by only 1% last year, and is expected to grow by approximately 2% this year. B. China’s economy grew by 10% a year for the last three decades but slowed to 7.8% last year. C. BRICS is a group of nations — Barzil, Russia, India China and South Africa.....

MCQ-> A difficult readjustment in the scientist's conception of duty is imperatively necessary. As Lord Adrain said in his address to the British Association, unless we are ready to give up some of our old loyalties, we may be forced into a fight which might end the human race. This matter of loyalty is the crux. Hitherto, in the East and in the West alike, most scientists, like most other people, have felt that loyalty to their own state is paramount. They have no longer a right to feel this. Loyalty to the human race must take its place. Everyone in the West will at once admit this as regards Soviet scientists. We are shocked that Kapitza who was Rutherford's favourite pupil, was willing when the Soviet government refused him permission to return to Cambridge, to place his scientific skill at the disposal of those who wished to spread communism by means of H-bombs. We do not so readily apprehend a similar failure of duty on our own side. I do not wish to be thought to suggest treachery, since that is only a transference of loyalty to another national state. I am suggesting a very different thing; that scientists the world over should join in enlightening mankind as to the perils of a great war and in devising methods for its prevention. I urge with all the emphasis at my disposal that this is the duty of scientists in East and West alike. It is a difficult duty, and one likely to entail penalties for those who perform it. But, after all, it is the labours of scientists which have caused the danger and on this account, if on no other, scientists must do everything in their power to save mankind from the madness which they have made possible. Science from the dawn of History, and probably longer, has been intimately associated with war. I imagine that when our ancestors descended from the trees they were victorious over the arboreal conservatives because flints were sharper than coconuts. To come to more recent times, Archimedes was respected for his scientific defense of Syracuse against the Romans; Leonardo obtained employment under the Duke of Milan because of his skill in fortification, though he did mention in a postscript that he could also paint a bit. Galileo similarly derived an income from the Grant Duke of Tuscany because of his skill in calculating the trajectories of projectiles. In the French Revolution, those scientists who were not guillotined devoted themselves to making new explosives. There is therefore no departure from tradition in the present day scientists manufacture of A-bombs and H-bomb. All that is new is the extent of their destructive skill.I do not think that men of science can cease to regard the disinterested pursuit of knowledge as their primary duty. It is true that new knowledge and new skills are sometimes harmful in their effects, but scientists cannot profitably take account of this fact since the effects are impossible to foresee. We cannot blame Columbus because the discovery of the Western Hemisphere spread throughout the Eastern Hemisphere an appallingly devastating plague. Nor can we blame James Watt for the Dust Bowl although if there had been no steam engines and no railways the West would not have been so carelessly or so quickly cultivated To see that knowledge is wisely used in primarily the duty of statesmen, not of science; but it is part of the duty of men of science to see that important knowledge is widely disseminated and is not falsified in the interests of this or that propaganda.Scientific knowledge has its dangers; but so has every great thing. And over and beyond the dangers with which it threatens the present, it opens up, as nothing else can, the vision of a possible happy world, a world without poverty, without war, with little illness. And what is perhaps more than all, when science has mastered the forces which mould human character, it will be able to produce populations in which few suffer from destructive fierceness and in which the great majority regard other people, not as competitors, to be feared, but as helpers in a common task. Science has only recently begun to apply itself to human beings except in their purely physical aspect. Such science as exists in psychology and anthropology has hardly begun to affect political behaviour or private ethics. The minds of men remain attuned to a world that is fast disappearing. The changes in our physical environment require, if they are to bring well being, correlative changes in our beliefs and habits. If we cannot effect these changes, we shall suffer the fate of the dinosaurs, who could not live on dry land.I think it is the duty of science. I do not say of every individual man of science, to study the means by which we can adapt ourselves to the new world. There are certain things that the world quite obviously needs; tentativeness, as opposed to dogmatism in our beliefs: an expectation of co-operation, rather than competition, in social relations, a lessening of envy and collective hatred These are things which education could produce without much difficulty. They are not things adequately sought in the education of the present day.It is progress in the human sciences that we must look to undo the evils which have resulted from a knowledge of the physical world hastily and superficially acquired by populations unconscious of the changes in themselves that the new knowledge has made imperative. The road to a happier world than any known in the past lies open before us if atavistic destructive passion can be kept in leash while the necessary adaptations are made. Fears are inevitable in our time, but hopes are equally rational and far more likely to bear good fruit. We must learn to think rather less of the dangers to be avoided than of the good that will be within our grasp if we believe in it and let it dominate our thoughts. Science, whatever unpleasant consequences it may have by the way, is in its very nature a liberator, a liberator of bondage to physical nature and, in time to come a liberator from the weight of destructive passion. We are on the threshold of utter disaster or unprecedented glorious achievement. No previous age has been fraught with problems so momentous and it is to science that we must look for happy issue.The duty of science, according to the author is :-
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MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words/phrases have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions. The past quarter of a century has seen several bursts of selling by the world’s governments, mostly but not always in benign market conditions. Those in the OECD, a rich-country club, divested plenty of stuff in the 20 years before the global financial crisis. The first privatisation wave, which built up from the mid-1980s and peaked in 2000, was largely European. The drive to cut state intervention under Margaret Thatcher in Britain soon spread to the continent. The movement gathered pace after 1991, when eastern Europe put thousands of rusting state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on the block. A second wave came in the mid-2000s, as European economies sought to cash in on buoyant markets. But activity in OECD countries slowed sharply as the financial crisis began. In fact, it reversed. Bailouts of failing banks and companies have contributed to a dramatic increase in government purchases of corporate equity during the past five years. A more lasting fea ture is the expansion of the state capitalism practised by China and other emerging economic powers. Governments have actually bought more equity than they have sold in most years since 2007, though sales far exceeded purchases in 2013. Today privatisation is once again “alive and well”, says William Megginson of the Michael Price College of Business at the University of Oklahoma. According to a global tally he recently completed, 2012 was the third-best year ever, and preliminary evidence suggests that 2013 may have been better. However, the geography of sell-offs has changed, with emerging markets now to the fore. China, for instance, has been selling minority stakes in banking, energy, engineering and broadcasting; Brazil is selling airports to help finance a $20 billion investment programme. Eleven of the 20 largest IPOs between 2005 and 2013 were sales of minority stakes by SOEs, mostly in developing countries. By contrast, state-owned assets are now “the forgotten side of the balance-sheet” in many advanced economies, says Dag Detter, managing partner of Whetstone Solutions, an adviser to governments on asset restructuring. They shouldn’t be. Governments of OECD countries still oversee vast piles of assets, from banks and utilities to buildings, land and the riches beneath (see table). Selling some of these holdings could work wonders: reduce debt, finance infrastructure, boost economic efficiency. But governments often barely grasp the value locked up in them. The picture is clearest for companies or company-like entities held by central governments. According to data compiled by the OECD and published on its website, its 34 member countries had 2,111 fully or majority-owned SOEs, with 5.9m employees, at the end of 2012. Their combined value (allowing for some but not all pension-fund liabilities) is estimated at $2.2 trillion, roughly the same size as the global hedge-fund industry. Most are in network industries such as telecoms, electricity and transport. In addition, many countries have large minority stakes in listed firms. Those in which they hold a stake of between 10% and 50% have a combined market value of $890 billion and employ 2.9m people. The data are far from perfect. The quality of reporting varies widely, as do definitions of what counts as a state-owned company: most include only centralgovernment holdings. If all assets held at sub-national level, such as local water companies, were included, the total value could be more than $4 trillion. Reckons Hans Christiansen, an OECD economist. Moreover, his team has had to extrapolate because some QECD members, including America and Japan, provide patchy data. America is apparently so queasy about discussions of public ownership of -commercial assets that the Treasury takes no part in the OECD’s working group on the issue, even though it has vast holdings, from Amtrak and the 520,000-employee Postal Service to power generators and airports. The club’s efforts to calculate the value that SOEs add to, or subtract from, economies were abandoned after several countries, including America, refused to co-operate. Privatisation has begun picking up again recently in the OECD for a variety of reasons. Britain’s Conservative-led coalition is fbcused on (some would say obsessed with) reducing the public debt-to-GDP ratio. Having recently sold the Royal Mail through a public offering, it is hoping to offload other assets, including its stake in URENCO, a uranium enricher, and its student-loan portfolio. From January 8th, under a new Treasury scheme, members of the public and businesses will be allowed to buy government land and buildings on the open market. A website will shortly be set up to help potential buyers see which bits of the government’s /..337 billion-worth of holdings ($527 billion at today’s rate, accounting for 40% of developable sites round Britain) might be surplus. The government, said the chief treasury secretary, Danny Alexander, “should not act as some kind of compulsive hoarder”. Japan has different reasons to revive sell-offs, such as to finance reconstruction after its devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Eyes are once again turning to Japan Post, a giant postal-to-financial-services conglomerate whose oftpostponed partial sale could at last happen in 2015 and raise (Yen) 4 trillion ($40 billion) or more. Australia wants to sell financial, postal and aviation assets to offset the fall in revenues caused by the commodities slowdown. In almost all the countries of Europe, privatisation is likely “to surprise on the upside” as long as markets continue to mend, reckons Mr Megginson. Mr Christiansen expects to see three main areas of activity in coming years. First will be the resumption of partial sell-offs in industries such as telecoms, transport and utilities. Many residual stakes in partly privatised firms could be sold down further. France, for instance, still has hefty stakes in GDF SUEZ, Renault, Thales and Orange. The government of Francois Hollande may be ideologically opposed to privatisation, but it is hoping to reduce industrial stakes to raise funds for livelier sectors, such as broadband and health. The second area of growth should be in eastern Europe, where hundreds of large firms, including manufacturers, remain in state hands. Poland will sell down its stakes in listed firms to make up for an expected reduction in EU structural funds. And the third area is the reprivatisation of financial institutions rescued during the crisis. This process is under way: the largest privatisation in 2012 was the $18 billion offering of America’s residual stake in AIG, an insurance company.Which of the following statements is not true in the context of the given passage ?
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MCQ-> Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow:-Brazil is a top exporter of every commodity that has seen dizzying price surges - iron ore, soybeans, sugar - producing a golden age for economic growth Foreign money-flows into Brazilian stocks and bonds climbed heavenward, up more than tenfold, from $5 billion a year in early 2007 to more than $50 billion in the twelve months through March 2011.The flood of foreign money buying up Brazilian assets has made the currency one of the most expensive in the world, and Brazil one of the most costly, overhyped economies. Almost every major emerging- market currency has strengthened against the dollar over the last decade, but the Brazilian Real is on a path alone, way above the pack, having doubled in value against the dollar.Economists have all kinds of fancy ways to measure the real value of a currency, but when a country is pricing itself this far out of the competition, you can feel it on the ground. In early 2011 the major Rio paper, 0 Globo, ran a story on prices showing that croissants are more expensive than they are in Paris, haircuts cost more than they do in London, bike rentals are more expensive than in Amsterdam, and movie tickets sell for higher prices than in Madrid. A rule of the road: if the local prices in an emerging market country feel expensive even to a visitor from a rich nation, that country is probably not a breakout nation.There is no better example of how absurd it is to lump all the big emerging markets together than the frequent pairing of Brazil and China. Those who make this comparison are referring only to the fact that they are the biggest players in their home regions, not to the way the economies actually run. Brazil is the world‘s leading exporter of many raw materials, and China is the leading importer; that makes them major trade partners - China surpassed the United States as Brazil's leading trade partner in 2009 f but it also makes them opposites in almost every important economic respect: Brazil is the un-China, with interest rates that are too high, and a currency that is too expensive. It spends too little on roads and too much on welfare, and as a result has a very un-China-like growth record.It may not be entirely fair to compare economic growth in Brazil with that of its Asian counterparts, because Brazil has a per capita income of $12,000, more than two times China's and nearly ten times India's. But even taking into account the fact that it is harder for rich nations to grow quickly, Brazil's growth has been disappointing. Since the early 19805 the Brazilian growth rate has oscillated around an average of 2.5 percent, spiking only in concert with increased prices for Brazil's key commodity exports. While China has been criticized for pursuing "growth at any cost," Brazil has sought to secure "stability at any cost." Brazil's caution stems from its history of financial crises, in which overspending produced debt, humiliating defaults, and embarrassing devaluations, culminating in a disaster that is still recent enough to be fresh in every Brazilian adult's memory: the hyperinflation that started in the early 19805 and peaked in 1994, at the vertiginous annual rate of 2,100 percent.Wages were pegged to inflation but were increased at varying intervals in different industries, 50 workers never really knew whether they were making good money or not. As soon as they were paid, they literally ran to the store with cash to buy food, and they could afford little else, causing non-essential industries to start to die. Hyperinflation finally came under control in l995, but it left a problem of regular behind. Brazil has battled inflation ever since by maintaining one of the highest interest rates in the emerging world. Those high rates have attracted a surge of foreign money, which is partly why the Brazilian Real is so expensive relative to comparable currencies.There is a growing recognition that China faces serious "imbalances" that could derail its long economic boom. Obsessed until recently with high growth, China has been pushing too hard to keep its currency too cheap (to help its export industries compete), encouraging excessively high savings and keeping interest rates rock bottom to fund heavy spending on roads and ports. China is only now beginning to consider a shift in spending priorities to create social programs that protect its people from the vicissitudes of old age and unemployment.Brazil’s economy is just as badly out of balance, though in opposite ways. While China has introduced reforms relentlessly for three decades, opening itself up to the world even at the risk of domestic instability, Brazil has pushed reforms only in the most dire circumstances, for example, privatizing state companies when the government budget is near collapse. Fearful of foreign shocks, Brazil is still one of the most closed economies in the emerging world - total imports and exports account for only 15 percent of GDP - despite its status as the world's leading exporter of sugar, orange juice, coffee, poultry, and beef.To pay for its big government, Brazil has jacked up taxes and now has a tax burden that equals 38 percent of GDP, the highest in the emerging world, and very similar to the tax burden in developed European welfare states, such as Norway and France. This heavy load of personal and corporate tax on a relatively poor country means that businesses don’t have the money to invest in new technology or training, which in turn means that industry is not getting more efficient. Between 1986 and 2008 Brazil’s productivity grew at an annual rate of :about 0.2 percent, compared to 4 percent in China. Over the same period, productivity grew in India at close to 3 percent and in South Korea and Thailand at close to 2 percent. According to the passage, the major concern facing the Brazil economy is:
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