Which city is chosen as "Best place to Live in World" by OECD organization? ?->(Show Answer!)

1. Which city is chosen as "Best place to Live in World" by OECD organization?

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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 following passage carefully and answer the questions. Certain words/phrases are given in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions. Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of , poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers once fretted about girls’ . lack of confidence in science but this is changing. Sweden has commissioned research into its “boy crisis”. Australia has devised a reading programme called “Boys, Blokes, Books and Bytes”. In just a couple of generations, one gender gap has closed, only for another to open up. The reversal is laid out in a report published on March 5th by the OECD. a Paris based Rich country thinktank. Boys’ dominance just about endures in maths: at age 15 they are, on average, the equivalent of three months’ schooling ahead of girls. In science the results are fairly even. But in reading, where girls have been ahead for some time, a gulf has appeared. In all G4 countries and economies in the study, girls outperform boys. The average gap is equivalent to an extra year of schooling. The OECD deems literacy to be the most important skill that it assesses, since further learning depends on it. Sure enough, teenage boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail to achieve basic proficiency in any of maths, reading and science. Youngsters in this group, with nothing to build on or shine at, are prone to drop out of school altogether. To see why boys and girls fare so differently in the classroom, first look at what they do outside it. The average 15year old girl devotes five and half hours a week to homework, an hour more than the average boy, who spend more time playing video games and trawling the internet. Three quarters of girls read for pleasure, compared with little more than half of boys. Reading rates are falling everywhere as screens draw eyes from pages, but boys are giving up faster. The OECD found that, among boys who do as much homework as the average girl, the gender gap in reading fell by nearly a quarter. Once in the classroom, boys long to be out of it: They are twice as likely as girls to report that school is a “waste of time”, and more often turn up late. Just as a teacher sused to struggle to persuade girls that science is not only for men, the OECD now urges parents and policymakers to steer boys away from a version of masculinity that ignores academic achievement. Boys’ disdain for school might have been less irrational when there were plenty of jobs for uneducated men. But those days have long gone. It may be that a bit of swagger helps in maths, where confidence plays a part in boys’ lead (though it sometimes extends to delusion:12% of boys told the OECD that they are familiar with the mathematical concept of “subjunctive sealing”, a red herring that fooled only 7% of girls.) But their lack of self Visit discipline drives teachers crazy. The OECD found that boys did much better in its anonymised tests than in teachers assessments. What is behind this discrimination? One possibility is that teachers mark up students who are polite, eager and stay out of flights, all attributes that are more common among girls. In some countries, academic points can even be docked for bad behaviour.Choose the word which is opposite in meaning to the word DOCKED given in bold as used in the passage.
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MCQ-> When people react to their experiences with particular authorities, those authorities and the organizations or institutions that they represent often benefit if the people involved begin with high levels of commitment to the organization or institution represented by the authorities. First, in his studies of people's attitudes toward political and legal institutions, Tyler found that attitudes after an experience with the institution were strongly affected by prior attitudes. Single experiences influence post- experience loyalty but certainly do not overwhelm the relationship between pre-experience and post- experience loyalty. Thus, the best predictor of loyalty after an experience is usually loyalty before that experience. Second, people with prior loyalty to the organization or institution judge their dealings with the organization’s or institution's authorities to be fairer than do those with less prior loyalty, either because they are more fairly treated or because they interpret equivalent treatment as fairer.Although high levels of prior organizational or institutional commitment are generally beneficial to the organization or institution, under certain conditions high levels of prior commitment may actually sow the seeds of reduced commitment. When previously committed individuals feel that they were treated unfavourably or unfairly during some experience with the organization or institution, they may show an especially sharp decline in commitment. Two studies were designed to test this hypothesis, which, if confirmed, would suggest that organizational or institutional commitment has risks, as well as benefits. At least three psychological models offer predictions of how individuals’ reactions may vary as a function of a: their prior level of commitment and b: the favorability of the encounter with the organization or institution. Favorability of the encounter is determined by the outcome of the encounter and the fairness or appropriateness of the procedures used to allocate outcomes during the encounter. First, the instrumental prediction is that because people are mainly concerned with receiving desired outcomes from their encounters with organizations, changes in their level of commitment will depend primarily on the favorability of the encounter. Second, the assimilation prediction is that individuals' prior attitudes predispose them to react in a way that is consistent with their prior attitudes.The third prediction, derived from the group-value model of justice, pertains to how people with high prior commitment will react when they feel that they have been treated unfavorably or unfairly during some encounter with the organization or institution. Fair treatment by the other party symbolizes to people that they are being dealt with in a dignified and respectful way, thereby bolstering their sense of self-identity and self-worth. However, people will become quite distressed and react quite negatively if they feel that they have been treated unfairly by the other party to the relationship. The group-value model suggests that people value the information they receive that helps them to define themselves and to view themselves favorably. According to the instrumental viewpoint, people are primarily concerned with the more material or tangible resources received from the relationship. Empirical support for the group-value model has implications for a variety of important issues, including the determinants of commitment, satisfaction, organizational citizenship, and rule following. Determinants of procedural fairness include structural or interpersonal factors. For example, structural determinants refer to such things as whether decisions were made by neutral, fact-finding authorities who used legitimate decision-making criteria. The primary purpose of the study was to examine the interactive effect of individuals a: commitment to an organization or institution prior to some encounter and b: perceptions of how fairly they were treated during the encounter, on the change in their level of commitment. A basic assumption of the group-value model is that people generally value their relationships with people, groups, organizations, and institutions and therefore value fair treatment from the other party to the relationship. Specifically, highly committed members should have especially negative reactions to feeling that they were treated unfairly, more so than a: less- committed group members or b: highly committed members who felt that they were fairly treated.The prediction that people will react especially negatively when they previously felt highly committed but felt that they were treated unfairly also is consistent with the literature on psychological contracts. Rousseau suggested that, over time, the members of work organizations develop feelings of entitlement, i.e., perceived obligations that their employers have toward them. Those who are highly committed to the organization believe that they are fulfilling their contract obligations. However, if the organization acted unfairly, then highly committed individuals are likely to believe that the organization did not live up to its end of the bargain.The hypothesis mentioned in the passage tests at least one of the following ideas.
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MCQ-> Study the following information and answer the questions given below: Nine friends – P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W and X — live on nine different floors of a building but not necessarily in the same order. The lower most floor of the building is numbered one, the one above that is numbered two and so on till the topmost floor is numbered nine. Only two persons live below the floor on which V lives. Only one person lives between V and P. W lives on an odd numbered floor but not on floor number 7. Only two persons live between W and Q. X does not live on the topmost floor. P does not live on the lowermost floor. S lives immediately below R but R does not live on top most floor. Neither R nor T live on floor number 6. U lives immediately above P.How many persons live between the floors on which P and S live?
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MCQ-> Study the following information carefully and answer the questions given below : Seven persons – M, N, O, P, Q, R and S – live on separate floors of a sevenstoreyed building, but not necessarily in the same order. The ground floor of the building is numbered 1, the floor above it 2 and so on until the topmost floor is numbered 7. Each person likes diffemt cartoon characters, viz, Chipmnuk, Flinstone, Jetson, Popeye, Scooby Doo, Simpson and Tweety, but not necessarily in the same order. The person who likes Popeye lives on floor numbered 4. Only two persons live between P and the one who likes Popeye. M does not live on the lowermost floor. M lives on any odd numbered floor below the one who likes Popeye. S lives on an even numbered floor but neither immediately above nor immediately below the floor of M. Only two persons live between M and the person who likes Tweety. Only one person lives between N and R. R lives on an even numbered floor and does not like Popeye. Only three persons live between the persons who like Chipmnuk and Jetson respectively. The person who likes Chipmnuk live on any floor above the N’s floor. The person who likes Chipmanuk does not live on the topmost floor. O does not like Chipmnuk or Jet-son. The person who likes Scooby Doo lives on the floor immediately above the floor of the perosn who likes Simpson.How many persons live between the floors on which S and P live ?
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