Many companies use general rules of thumb or centralized corporate mandates to run their network operations. Lacking quick and easy ways to generate tailored solutions, these companies base decisions about staffing levels, growth targets and the like on broad, company wide guidelines, including ‘one-size-fits-all’ expense parameters or financial targets. Thus, for example, a clothing retailer might keep labour outlays at 25% of its sales across the board or set uniform sales growth targets of 55 a year for all of its stores.
Which of the following facts, if true, would strengthen the trend mentioned in the passage?
A :
The best company uses standard application packages for routine business tasks and minimizes customization.
B :
To accommodate different growth rates in different locations and regions, a company needs the flexibility that’s to be found in a distributed service network.
C :
The effect of seemingly minor mistakes in the centralized way of allocating resources can quickly be amplified across several thousand locations and perhaps threaten the whole company.
D :
Analytical tools to help optimize a distributed service network are too inaccessible and abstract to be useful.
Answer: D The trend is that many companies use centralized corporate mandate to run their network operations. B and C are in favour of decentralization of network operations. A is eliminated as the passage talks of network operations and not routine business tasks. D reveals the hassles of a distributed service network and thus strengthens the argument put across in the passage.
Q. No. 2:
The loose, decentralized, uncensored structure of the Net is what makes it resilient and gives it longevity without falling prey to technological obsolescence. Its anarchic nature will help it reinvent itself as it has already done once. The first infant network which was known as ARPANET, (after its Pentagon sponsor), died rather quietly in the late eighties. The world had by then already moved on to TCP/IP software without any glitches or the system crashing. This smooth transition should give us the confidence that the Net is unlikely to suddenly keel over and die one day. And if the need does arise to upgrade it, either in parts or whole, it will happen without it completely falling to pieces.
Which of the following, if true, poses a threat to the anarchic nature of the Net?
A :
It’s being headless and million-limbed.
B :
The fact that it can afford to and does not dance to the tune of governments, countries or ideologies.
C :
People are abandoning the open standards processes in favour of proprietary systems, breaking it into ultimately incompatible islands.
D :
The network which is built on the TCP/IP software, is in the public domain.
Answer: C A and D define the anarchic nature of the Net and are discarded. As it can afford to stand independent, B is also not a threat to the Net. If C is true it will surely hamper the anarchic nature of the Net. Unless people are debared from accessing and using the Net, its anarchic nature would remain.
Q. No. 3:
The society which, by fixing itself in place locally, gives space a content by arranging individualised places, thus finds itself enclosed inside this localisation.
This is equivalent to:
A :
Racing, with its preoccupation on speed is a sport that survives in spite of close encounters with death.
B :
Women’s magazines, with emphasis on beauty, sexuality and independence are actually fixated on capitalism since they are by-products of consumerism
C :
Psychiatrists maintain that reading habits when begun early create a whole world of imagination in a child’s mind that is of great developmental importance.
D :
The paraphernalia of the armed forces are merely a semiotic of aggression and antagonistic war dances.
Answer: B The relation drawn here is that society turns a space into something more, but is also held within the limits of what it has conceived, i.e. imprisoned within its content. Acontent does not inhibit the sport, C content adds to the child’s mind. In D there is no suggestion that the armed forces are limited by its boundaries. But B is suitable, where the genre created by women’s magazines, is also enclosed within capitalism, which is the superstructure.
Q. No. 4:
To understand the origins of the word ‘classic’, we need to return to the ancient Greeks, who by peculiar good fortune and natural enlightenment of mind, had no classics but themselves. They were at first the only classical authors for the Romans, coming just after, who strove and contrived to imitate them.
Which of the following if true would strengthen the argument of this passage?
A :
At first the only true classics were the ancient Greeks.
B :
The Greeks were in a class by themselves.
C :
The Greeks were revered by the Romans who had a love of Greek art.
D :
The Greeks and Romans together laid foundations for classical art.
Answer: A B and C are suggested by the passage, but do not serve to increase/strengthen the argument of this passage, which is that the origins of the classic temperament will lead us to understand its present. D is incorrect since there is no mention of contemporaneous work. A qualifies the passage by adding to it that to understand the origins of classicism, we must study the first and only true classics – the Greeks
Q. No. 5:
Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it ‘is’ only by being acknowledged or “recognised.”
This statement is equivalent to:
A :
Tobacco companies spend increasingly on point-of-purchase merchandise since the consumer is most vulnerable at the moment of choice.
B :
Offices increasingly have reflective glass in their lobbies since anti-social behaviour is reduced when people are continually aware of how they appear.
C :
Video cameras are installed in most shopping malls in order for the store to monitor the goings-on not just among customers but also among staff.
D :
To become a hit playback singer it is necessary to be recognised as the number one in a particular genre of music.
Answer: B The emphasis in the passage is on how a certain factor, that is in itself self conscious, only gains existence through recognition. A relates to a business acumen using psychological insights, C is a simple act of monitoring. With Drecognition may make one something, i.e., a playback singer. But with B selfconsciousness and self-awareness are also brought in as factors to bring out more social behaviour in a lobby which would not have gained existence if it weren’t for the reflective mirrors. This statement achieves equivalence with the passage.
Q. No. 6:
In the historical society divided into classes, culture is the general sphere of knowledge and of representations of the lived; which is to say that culture is the power of generalisation existing apart, as division of intellectual labour and as intellectual labour of division.
Answer: A B is not implied, rather culture stemming from representation is unlikely to be ‘natural’, nor can C be correct on the basis of this, since culture is a sphere of knowledge and representation. In D, culture’s role in historicising society is not elaborated upon enough to draw this conclusion. But since culture by the definition in [A is largely a fabricated means of control based on representations, with the end result that it would be an “intellectual labour of division”.