Read the following passage and answer the questions. Passage:Where is this going?' That is the question at the heart of River of Life, River of Death, as author Victor Mallet travels the length of the Ganges. Beginning at its ice cave source in t ?->(Show Answer!)

1. Read the following passage and answer the questions. Passage:Where is this going?' That is the question at the heart of River of Life, River of Death, as author Victor Mallet travels the length of the Ganges. Beginning at its ice cave source in the Himalayan foothills. he follows the water through the holy confluence at Allahabad. the spindly banks of Varanasi city and onwards to the delta in Bangladesh. where 'in its parting gift to the land. the river spews millions of tons of fertile silt on to the rice fields of Bengal and the mangroves of the Sundarbans.' It is the same question he asks about the treatment of the Ganges. both good and bad. The river leads a double life. being the most worshipped waterway in the world and also one of the most polluted. The Ganges and its tributaries are now subject to sewage pollution that is 'half a million times over the Indian recommended limit for bathing' in places. not to mention the unchecked runoff from heavy metals, fertilizers. carcinogens and the occasional corpse. As Mallet observes. the danger of contamination does not put off the millions of revellers at Kuinbh Mela. It is a Hindu pilgrimage 'thought to be the largest gathering of people anywhere'. described to him as 'a spiritual expo... where you will be talking one moment to a visiting Mumbai businessman and the next to a marijuana-stoned yogi. He suggests the pollution might never deter them. He is told by one bather: 'we do believe that anyone who takes in this water. he becomes pure also. because it is always pure.' There is a collective sense that the spirit of the Ganges is so sacred that she can never be spoiled. He informs the reader in the preface — 'almost everyone knows the problems are real'. His journey down the Ganges is one of investigation rather than discovery. Mallet investigates the potential of the river to become a cradle for antibiotic-resistant infections — or superbugs' — that could be exported to other regions by global travel. He points out that some 450 million people depend on the Ganges water basin for survival, and many more for its religious and cultural importance. The Ganges is a goddess and a mother to everyone from the politician in the north, to the humblest Hindu living in the far south or running a motel in the United States. There is hope. Mallet draws some parallels to clean-ups of the Rhine and the Thames. He points to the design feat of Ktunbh Mela, which as 'a pop-up megacity' for two million pilgrims has better infrastructure and waste treatment than many Indian cities. 'In the minds of both Indians and foreigners. this raises important questions... if the authorities can build infrastructure so efficiently for this short but very large festival why can they not do the same for permanent villages and towns?'Which ONE of the options fills in the blank and completes the statement below correctly? The average believer is of the faith-driven conviction that the river Ganges

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MCQ-> Read the following passage and answer the questions. Passage:Where is this going?' That is the question at the heart of River of Life, River of Death, as author Victor Mallet travels the length of the Ganges. Beginning at its ice cave source in the Himalayan foothills. he follows the water through the holy confluence at Allahabad. the spindly banks of Varanasi city and onwards to the delta in Bangladesh. where 'in its parting gift to the land. the river spews millions of tons of fertile silt on to the rice fields of Bengal and the mangroves of the Sundarbans.' It is the same question he asks about the treatment of the Ganges. both good and bad. The river leads a double life. being the most worshipped waterway in the world and also one of the most polluted. The Ganges and its tributaries are now subject to sewage pollution that is 'half a million times over the Indian recommended limit for bathing' in places. not to mention the unchecked runoff from heavy metals, fertilizers. carcinogens and the occasional corpse. As Mallet observes. the danger of contamination does not put off the millions of revellers at Kuinbh Mela. It is a Hindu pilgrimage 'thought to be the largest gathering of people anywhere'. described to him as 'a spiritual expo... where you will be talking one moment to a visiting Mumbai businessman and the next to a marijuana-stoned yogi. He suggests the pollution might never deter them. He is told by one bather: 'we do believe that anyone who takes in this water. he becomes pure also. because it is always pure.' There is a collective sense that the spirit of the Ganges is so sacred that she can never be spoiled. He informs the reader in the preface — 'almost everyone knows the problems are real'. His journey down the Ganges is one of investigation rather than discovery. Mallet investigates the potential of the river to become a cradle for antibiotic-resistant infections — or superbugs' — that could be exported to other regions by global travel. He points out that some 450 million people depend on the Ganges water basin for survival, and many more for its religious and cultural importance. The Ganges is a goddess and a mother to everyone from the politician in the north, to the humblest Hindu living in the far south or running a motel in the United States. There is hope. Mallet draws some parallels to clean-ups of the Rhine and the Thames. He points to the design feat of Ktunbh Mela, which as 'a pop-up megacity' for two million pilgrims has better infrastructure and waste treatment than many Indian cities. 'In the minds of both Indians and foreigners. this raises important questions... if the authorities can build infrastructure so efficiently for this short but very large festival why can they not do the same for permanent villages and towns?'Which ONE of the options fills in the blank and completes the statement below correctly? The average believer is of the faith-driven conviction that the river Ganges....

MCQ-> The second plan to have to examine is that of giving to each person what she deserves. Many people, especially those who are comfortably off, think this is what happens at present: that the industrious and sober and thrifty are never in want, and that poverty is due to idleness, improvidence, drinking, betting, dishonesty, and bad character generally. They can point to the fact that a labour whose character is bad finds it more difficult to get employment than one whose character is good; that a farmer or country gentleman who gambles and bets heavily, and mortgages his land to live wastefully and extravagantly, is soon reduced to poverty; and that a man of business who is lazy and does not attend to it becomes bankrupt. But this proves nothing that you cannot eat your cake and have it too; it does not prove that your share of the cake was a fair one. It shows that certain vices make us rich. People who are hard, grasping, selfish, cruel, and always ready to take advantage of their neighbours, become very rich if they are clever enough not to overreach themselves. On the other hand, people who are generous, public spirited, friendly, and not always thinking of the main chance, stay poor when they are born poor unless they have extraordinary talents. Also as things are today, some are born poor and others are born with silver spoons in their mouths: that is to say, they are divided into rich and poor before they are old enough to have any character at all. The notion that our present system distributes wealth according to merit, even roughly, may be dismissed at once as ridiculous. Everyone can see that it generally has the contrary effect; it makes a few idle people very rich, and a great many hardworking people very poor.On this, intelligent Lady, your first thought may be that if wealth is not distributed according to merit, it ought to be; and that we should at once set to work to alter our laws so that in future the good people shall be rich in proportion to their goodness and the bad people poor in proportion to their badness. There are several objections to this; but the very first one settles the question for good and all. It is, that the proposal is impossible and impractical. How are you going to measure anyone's merit in money? Choose any pair of human beings you like, male or female, and see whether you can decide how much each of them should have on her or his merits. If you live in the country, take the village blacksmith and the village clergyman, or the village washerwoman and the village schoolmistress, to begin with. At present, the clergyman often gets less pay than the blacksmith; it is only in some villages he gets more. But never mind what they get at present: you are trying whether you can set up a new order of things in which each will get what he deserves. You need not fix a sum of money for them: all you have to do is to settle the proportion between them. Is the blacksmith to have as much as the clergyman? Or twice as much as the clergyman? Or half as much as the clergyman? Or how much more or less? It is no use saying that one ought to have more the other less; you must be prepared to say exactly how much more or less in calculable proportion.Well, think it out. The clergyman has had a college education; but that is not any merit on his part: he owns it to his father; so you cannot allow him anything for that. But through it he is able to read the New Testament in Greek; so that he can do something the blacksmith cannot do. On the other hand, the blacksmith can make a horse-shoe, which the parson cannot. How many verses of the Greek Testament are worth one horse-shoe? You have only to ask the silly question to see that nobody can answer it.Since measuring their merits is no use, why not try to measure their faults? Suppose the blacksmith swears a good deal, and gets drunk occasionally! Everybody in the village knows this; but the parson has to keep his faults to himself. His wife knows them; but she will not tell you what they are if she knows that you intend to cut off some of his pay for them. You know that as he is only a mortal human being, he must have some faults; but you cannot find them out. However, suppose he has some faults he is a snob; that he cares more for sport and fashionable society than for religion! Does that make him as bad as the blacksmith, or twice as bad, or twice and quarter as bad, or only half as bad? In other words, if the blacksmith is to have a shilling, is the parson to have six pence, or five pence and one-third, or two shillings? Clearly these are fools' questions: the moment they bring us down from moral generalities to business particulars it becomes plain to every sensible person that no relation can be established between human qualities, good or bad, and sums of money, large or small.It may seem scandalous that a prize-fighter, for hitting another prize-fighter so hard at Wembley that he fell down and could not rise within ten seconds, received the same sum that was paid to the Archbishop of Canterbury for acting as Primate of the Church of England for nine months; but none of those who cry out against the scandal can express any better in money the difference between the two. Not one of the persons who think that the prize-fighter should get less than the Archbishop can say how much less. What the prize- fighter got for his six or seven months' boxing would pay a judge's salary for two years; and we all agree that nothing could be more ridiculous, and that any system of distributing wealth which leads to such absurdities must be wrong. But to suppose that it could be changed by any possible calculation that an ounce of archbishop of three ounces of judge is worth a pound of prize-fighter would be sillier still. You can find out how many candles are worth a pound of butter in the market on any particular day; but when you try to estimate the worth of human souls the utmost you can say is that they are all of equal value before the throne of God:And that will not help you in the least to settle how much money they should have. You must simply give it up, and admit that distributing money according to merit is beyond mortal measurement and judgement.Which of the following is not a vice attributed to the poor by the rich?
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MCQ-> I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control. To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things like empires and their wars to more familiar little things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important to women.There was a time when pinmakers would buy the material; shape it; make the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to the market, and sell it and the making required skill in several operations. They not only knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could do it all by themselves. But they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for the farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman's dress allowance was calling pin money.By the end of the 18th century Adam Smith boasted that it took 18 men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pin-makers, you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilisation when its effect had so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it. The men, it is said, could turn out nearly 5000 pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be richer because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without intelligence and being fed by the spare food of the capitalist just as an engine is fed with coals and oil. That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well as a poet, complained that 'wealth accumulates, and men decay'.Nowadays Adam Smith's 18 men are as extinct as the diplodocus. The 18 flesh-and-blood men have been replaced by machines of steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them into pink papers is done by machinery. The result is that with the exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody knows how to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent, skilful and accomplished as the old pinmaker; and the only compensation we have for this deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal, if even it’s a pin.Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and degrade our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the Distribution of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old free for higher work than pin-making or the like. But in the meantime the fact remains that the workers are now not able to make anything themselves even in little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their day's work until it has all been arranged for them by their employer's who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply pay other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker's directions.The same is true for clothes. Earlier the whole work of making clothes, from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the men and women of the household, especially the women; so that to this day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left of all this but the sheep shearing; and even that, like the milking of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a sheep today and ask her to produce a woollen dress for you; and not only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are likely to find that she is not even aware of any connection between sheep and clothes. When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at the shop, she knows that there is a difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet and other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or how they came to be in the shop ready for her to buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own clothes.Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and encyclopaedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the books are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their information from other books, what they tell us is twenty to fifty years out of date knowledge and almost impractical today. And of course most of us are too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about it; what we need is cinema to take our minds off it and feel our imagination.It is a funny place, this word of capitalism, with its astonishing spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is made that they find people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive, but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or less dangerous lunatics in the real world.Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realise that I had better stop writing plays for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.A suitable title to the passage would be
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MCQ-> I think that it would be wrong to ask whether 50 years of India's Independence are an achievement or a failure. It would be better to see things as evolving. It's not an either-or question. My idea of the history of India is slightly contrary to the Indian idea.India is a country that, in the north, outside Rajasthan, was ravaged and intellectually destroyed to a large extent by the invasions that began in about AD 1000 by forces and religions that India had no means of understanding.The invasions are in all the schoolbooks. But I don't think that people understand that every invasion, every war, every campaign, was accompanied by slaughter, a slaughter always of the most talented people in the country. So these wars, apart from everything else led to a tremendous intellectual depletion of the country.I think that in the British period, and in the 50 years after the British period, there has been a kind of regrouping or recovery, a very slow revival of energy and intellect. This isn't an idea that goes with the vision of the grandeur of old India and all that sort of rubbish. That idea is a great simplification and it occurs because it is intellectually, philosophically easier for Indians to manage.What they cannot manage, and what they have not yet come to terms with, is that ravaging of all the north of India by various conquerors. That was ruined not by the act of nature, but by the hand of man. It is so painful that few Indians have begun to deal with it. It is much easier to deal with British imperialism. That is a familiar topic, in India and Britain. What is much less familiar is the ravaging of India before the British.What happened from AD 1000 onwards, really, is such a wound that it is almost impossible to face. Certain wounds are so bad that they can't be written about. You deal with that kind of pain by hiding from it. You retreat from reality. I do not think, for example, that the Incas of Peru or the native people of Mexico have ever got over their defeat by the Spaniards. In both places the head was cut off. I think the pre-British ravaging of India was as bad as that.In the place of knowledge of history, you have various fantasies about the village republic and the Old Glory. There is one big fantasy that Indians have always found solace in: about India having the capacity for absorbing its conquerors. This is not so. India was laid low by its conquerors.I feel the past 150 years have been years of every kind of growth. I see the British period and what has continued after that as one period. In that time, there has been a very slow intellectual recruitment. I think every Indian should make the pilgrimage to the site of the capital of the Vijayanagar empire, just to see what the invasion of India led to. They will see a totally destroyed town. Religious wars are like that. People who see that might understand what the centuries of slaughter and plunder meant. War isn't a game. When you lost that kind of war, your town was destroyed, the people who built the towns were destroyed. You are left with a headless population.That's where modern India starts from. The Vijayanagar capital was destroyed in 1565. It is only now that the surrounding region has begun to revive. A great chance has been given to India to start up again, and I feel it has started up again. The questions about whether 50 years of India since Independence have been a failure or an achievement are not the questions to ask. In fact, I think India is developing quite marvelously, people thought — even Mr Nehru thought — that development and new institutions in a place like Bihar, for instance, would immediately lead to beauty. But it doesn't happen like that. When a country as ravaged as India, with all its layers of cruelty, begins to extend justice to people lower down, it's a very messy business. It's not beautiful, it's extremely messy. And that's what you have now, all these small politicians with small reputations and small parties. But this is part of growth, this is part of development. You must remember that these people, and the people they represent, have never had rights before.When the oppressed have the power to assert themselves, they will behave badly. It will need a couple of generations of security, and knowledge of institutions, and the knowledge that you can trust institutions — it will take at least a couple of generations before people in that situation begin to behave well. People in India have known only tyranny. The very idea of liberty is a new idea. The rulers were tyrants. The tyrants were foreigners. And they were proud of being foreign. There's a story that anybody could run and pull a bell and the emperor would appear at his window and give justice. This is a child's idea of history — the slave's idea of the ruler's mercy. When the people at the bottom discover that they hold justice in their own hands, the earth moves a little. You have to expect these earth movements in India. It will be like this for a hundred years. But it is the only way. It's painful and messy and primitive and petty, but it’s better that it should begin. It has to begin. If we were to rule people according to what we think fit, that takes us back to the past when people had no voices. With self-awareness all else follows. People begin to make new demands on their leaders, their fellows, on themselves.They ask for more in everything. They have a higher idea of human possibilities. They are not content with what they did before or what their fathers did before. They want to move. That is marvellous. That is as it should be. I think that within every kind of disorder now in India there is a larger positive movement. But the future will be fairly chaotic. Politics will have to be at the level of the people now. People like Nehru were colonial — style politicians. They were to a large extent created and protected by the colonial order. They did not begin with the people. Politicians now have to begin with the people. They cannot be too far above the level of the people. They are very much part of the people. It is important that self-criticism does not stop. The mind has to work, the mind has to be active, there has to be an exercise of the mind. I think it's almost a definition of a living country that it looks at itself, analyses itself at all times. Only countries that have ceased to live can say it's all wonderful.The central thrust of the passage is that
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MCQ-> Read Ito’ following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering sonic of the questions. Once upon a time. there was a shrewd shopkeeper called Makitrand. He had a friend called Mihir, who had saved a lot of money. Mihir was keen on going on a pilgrimage. But he did not know where to leave his precious savings. So he came to Makarand’s shop and said, ‘my friend, I trust you more than anyone. Could you please look after my life’s savings till i return from my pilgrimage Makarand pretended to be deep in thought, and then said, ‘1 would rather not. Money spoils relationships. What if something hap • pens to your money while you are away ? You will no longer be my friend.’ As Mihir stood there by his shop thinking about what his friend had just said, an old woman entered the shup and bought some things. One of the boys helping Makarand, gave her less change than he should have. Makaranc saw this and pretended to scold the boy, he then ordered him to return the remaining money to the woman. Mihir not knowing that this was an act put up by Makarand to make him believe that he was honest, was convinced about his decision and said to Makarand, ‘I have decided. I will leave the money only with you.’ Makarand smiled. Then let us do something. Let’s take the bag of coins and bury it in a place that only you and I will know of. That way, even if something happens to me while you are away, you will know where your money is: Mihir, simple that he was. thought this was a good idea and the two went and hid the bag in a secret place. Mihir left the next day on his pilgrimage. happy his savings Were in safe hands. Six months later, Mihir returned. He dumped his luggage at home and went to dig out his bag of savings. But even though he searched and searched for his valuables, there was no sign of the bag anywhere. In panic, he ran in Makarand, who was busy in his shop. When Mihir asked him about the bitg, Makarand pretended to be surprised. ‘But I did not go that way in all these months. Why don’t you search for it again ?’ he said, putting on his most innocent look. Mihir had no choice but to believe him. Sadly, he went home. On the way, as luck would have it, he met the old woman he had seen in Makarand’s shop. Seeing him sad. she asked him what the matter was. Mihir told her the whole story, Then she smiled and whispered a plan to him. Not long after, the woman came to Makarand’s shop, carrying a big box. ‘Brother, I heard you are a good and honest man. My son went on a pilgrimage many months ago and has still not returned. 1 am worried and have decided to go and loo for him. Will you look after my box of two hundred gold coins while I am away ?Makarand could not believe his luck. He was about to launch into his idea about- hiding the box, when an angry Mihir entered the shop, ‘Where is but before he could complete his sentence, Makarand, afraid of being accused in front of the old woman, said quickly, ‘I forgot. I had seen some pigs digging around there and had removed the bag just to keep it safe. Here it is.’ And he handed Mihir the bag he had stolen many months ago. Now the old woman pretended she was seeing Mihir for the first time, Son, did you also go on a pilgrimage? Could you tell me if you met my son anywhere? His name is Jahangir.’ Mihir, clutching onto his precious bag, said, ‘Yes, Auntie, I met him on the road a few villages away. He was on his way home. He should be here in a week.’ The old woman leaned over and took her box away from Makarand. Thank you. Brother, you have saved me an unnecessary trip. Now, I will need some money to prepare for my son’s welcome,’ she added and the two left the shop. Makarand could only stare at them Open-mouthed,What incident in the passage convinced Mihir that Makarand was indeed an honest man? (A) The incident where he scolded his helper boy for returning less change to the old woman who was a customer in his shop. (B) The fact that Makarand refused to keep Mihir’s money, in the event that it might destroy their friendship. (C) The incident where Makarand told Mihir that he had kept his hag with him as he saw pigs digging at the very spot where the treasure was buried.....