- DI & DS
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Intelligence & CR
- Alphabet & Number Ranking
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- Blood Relations Test
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Mathematical Skills
- Average
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79.
A successful non-resident Indian imployed in the United states returns to a backward Indian village and transforms the lives of the villagers. Sounds familiar? At 31, Ashwin Naik is pacing through the path Shah Rukh Khan traced in his off bear Bollywood movie, Swades. Naik had just quit his cushy job in a genomics firm in the US to join MIT Sloan School of Business. With a month in hand, he headed home a travelled through the remote areas of Bagalkot district in Karnataka. The woeful social conditions he saw moved him. Naik chucked the MBA course and in six months set up Vaatsalya Healthcare, a rural healthcare delivery system.
In February 2005, Vaatsalya’s first hospital opened in Hubli. Two more centres were opened in Gadag and Karwar to offer specialist services of surgeons and facilities such as physiotherapy for children suffering from cerebral palsy. “We introduced paediatric surgery for infants below six months,” says Naik. “Else, patients would have to be taken to distant cities of Hubli or Bangalore.” Naik plans 100 more units in five states in the next three years. Mere charity by an affluent, middle-class professional? Far from it. Vaatsalya is one among rapidly spreading ‘for profit’ social enterprises that serves the poor and brings in profit. Mimbaibased Ziqitza, an imbalance services company, is another. It never refuses a patient for money, and charges Rs. 50 to 200.
Done fleetingly in India and elsewhere till now, entrepreneurial minds with a social conscience are methodically creating such models at a greater pace. “There has been a boom in the past two years,” says Varun Sahni, country director of Acumen Fund, a US-based social fund that invests in companies that target low income communities. “Currently, there are about 1,000 in India.”
The timing seems perfect. There is a wide market acceptance and funding has been coming in easily. These enterprises work across a swathe of areas including healthcare, education, rural energy, agriculture, arts and crafts, banking and more. ‘For profit’ entrepreneurs are obsessed with social and environmental impact in addition to the financial returns. Since they are answerable to the investors, they try expanding the business rapidly. SKS Microfinance, for in stance, started in 1998 and has now over 900,000 customers, 440 branches and an outstanding loan disbursement of over Rs. 452 crore as of August 2007.[1] Identify the appropriate business model of the kind of enterprise described by the author.
(a) Servicing societies at no profit
(b) Profiting from poor people
(c) Setting up enterprises for masses of low-income groups on experimental basis.
(d) Setting up enterprises for social causes for profit and expand rapidly[2] Which of the following companies does not illustrate the idea explained by the author?
(a) SKS Microfinance
(b) Acumen Fund
(c) Ziqitza
(d) Vaatsalya Healthcare[3] According to the author, which of the following options describes ‘for profit’ entrepreneurs most appropriately?
(a) NRI’s paying back to their motherland.
(b) Those affluent, middle-class professionals treating it as charity.
(c) Those who work towards getting financial returns on social business by expanding quickly.
(d) Those who have sympathetic investors for their business ideas for poor.asked in SNAP
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80.
TRIPs agreement provides a comprehensive set of global trade rules for the protection of copyright patents, trademarks, industrial designs, trade secrets, semiconductor lay out designs, and geographical indications, that apply to all the number countries irrespective of their levels of development, natural and human endowments and history. Every member-country has been asked by the WTO to amend its national patent law to confirm to that universal globalized format for legislation relating to pharmaceutical, agrochemical, food, alloys, etc.
Under Article 65, the developed countries have been asked to change their laws within another five years, and the less developed countries within an additional five years. The least developed countries have been asked to make those changes by 2005 AD.
This attempt at global standardisation and uniformity by way of TRIP’s agreement is in conflict with the main thrust of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 that set out the conditions for sustainable development. These two reveal two contrasting types of international approaches and norms.
While the 1992 Earth Summit and the 1993 convention on biodiversity (CBD) focused on ‘diversity’ as being fundamental to sustain life and development, TRIPs and WTO are pushing for ‘conformity’ to international standardized norms on patents, services, labour, investment and what not irrespective of their history, ecology, level of economic development, etc. But despite their diametrically opposed viewpoints, 170 countries signed CBD upholding the need for diversity, and 50 countries signed the TRIPs agreement in 1994 claiming the urgency of uniformity, with a very large element of common names (130) in both.
The convention on bio-diversity (CBD) in its Article 16.5 specifically asserts that intellectual property right must not be in conflict with conservation and sustainable use of bio-diversity, a provision that has been totally ignored by those who composed the TRIPs agreement. While in case of agriculture the higher yield of patented products induces the farmers to switch form a more varied production pattern, the resulting narrowing of genetic base makes the economy and society more vulnerable to plant disease and epidemics. It is true that the move towards cultivation of a smaller number of higher yielding varieties and the uniform spread of the same variety over a large space predates the present debate on patent, particularly since the introduction of the green revolution technology in the mid-sixties, but there can be no doubt that the latter has brought about a qualitative change in the scenario and has created possibility of a vast quantitative change too in that direction. So far no attempt has been made to reconcile the two conflicting approaches of CBD and TRIPs. If diversity is so important for sustaining life, how can WTO demand conformity to standardised global formats?[1] The author points out that intellectual property rights and their administration mechanism
(a) is throttling the interest of global bio-diversity
(b) is working to help sustain global bio-diversity
(c) is being sustained by global bio-diversity
(d) is what the global bio-diversity needs[2] Which of the following has been said by the author in the passage?
(a) A high number of countries have signed both CBD and TRIPs, two conflicting treaties.
(b) A narrow genetic base, if stuck to for ling, is fraught with danger.
(c) Although a nondiscriminatory approach has been followed in the applicability of TRIPs, there has been a confessional attitude in prescribing a timeframe for Transition, as per needs of the respective countries.
(d) The author is supportive of international conventions and treaties such as TRIPs, CBD etc.[3] Out of the countries that signed CBD, the percentage of those that signed the TRIPs also, is
(a) 76.5
(b) 74.5
(c) 78.5
(d) 80.2[4] According to the author, a higher-yield seed variety is not always welcome as it also ultimately leads to
(a) diseases among the consumers.
(b) diseases among the plants.
(c) monopoly of developed countries.
(d) monopoly of developing countries.[5] As per the TRIPs agreement not much differentiation is made between a developed country such as the USA and an undeveloped country such as Sudan. This is
(a) definitely true
(b) probably true
(c) probably false
(d) definitely falseasked in SNAP
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81.
Eye surgeon Virendar Sangwan has perfected a procedure so cutting-edge that most who have tried it have failed. In an operating theatre in the central Indian city of Hyderabad, he surgically implants corneas grown in a petri dish from stem cells by his colleague Geeta Vemuganti in patients with damaged eyes. Together they perform about 80 corneal regeneration procedures a year, making the L.V. Prasad Eye Institute, where they work, one of the most prolific facilities in the world using stem cells to regenerate tissues of any kind.
The Sangwan-Vemuganti team uses stem cells found in the tissues of living adults, not ones derived from embryos. Teams all over the world are working with adult stem cells, trying to coax them to regrow cells in hearts, brains, livers and other organs, but progress is slow. Besides corneas, scientists have had some success regrowing skin cells and bone tissues, but those procedures remain experimental. “A number of programs around the world have tried to perfect this treatment, but they have had bad outcomes,” says University of Cincinnati eye surgeon and stem cell specialist Edward Holland. “It is impressive what they are doing at Prasad.”
In addition to the Hyderabad project, only Holland’s program and a half-dozen others in the world conduct operations using corneas grown from stem cells.
The treatment uses stem cells harvested from the limbus, located where the cornea touches the white of the eye. For those with damaged corneas, these cells – called “limbic” and “conjunctiva” - are harvested from a patients good eye, if he has one, or from a close relative. They are placed in a petri dish and chemically tweaked to grow into the lower layer of a cornea, called epithelium. It is then transplanted into the eye of the patient where in most cases it takes hold and grows. In 56% of the cases at the Prasad Institute, patient could still see clearly after 40 months later.
Indians are well known for reverse engineering, meaning they can deduce how drugs are made in order to produce generic versions. But in this case, Sangwan and Vemuganti, a pathologist, developed the technique on their own from reading papers and running experiments in the lab. Sangwan says he had a number of patients with burned eyes who could not helped with standard corneal transplants from cadavers, so he persuaded Vemuganti to try growing corneas in her lab. “You know how to grow cells, and I know how to do the transplant surgery.” Vemuganti recalls him saying. “Why don’t we work together?” She smiles and shakes her head. “I had no clue if this was going to work.”
Vemuganti’s major innovation was developing a platform on which to grow corneas. First she designed a circular glass tube about the size of a stack of coins. Then she overlaid the glass with tissue from a human placenta which is “a good surface to grow corneas on.” She says. After that she placed stem cells in four places around a circle, added a growth medium, and watched the corneas begin to grow.
Commercial interests among stem cell companies for the procedure has been scant because of the perceived small volume of patients, says venture capitalist Antoun Nabhan of Bay Capital, who sits on the board of Cellerant, a leading stem cell company in San Carlos. Calif. But corneal stem cell treatment may have wider applications, say ophthalmologist Ivan Schwab of Unversity of California at Davis. “These stem cells are similar to others in the body that make mucous membrane,” he say. “These techniques of growing stem cells might one day be used to treat mucousmembrane tissue in the sinuses, bladder, and other organs.”[1] According to the article Sangwan-Vemuganti team’s cuttingedge procedure of implanting cornea grown from stem cells is considered a major advancement by the experts because
(a) They derive stems cells from embryos.
(b) Their labs are customised to grow stem cells.
(c) They regrow cells in hearts, brains, livers with stems cells from tissues of living adults.
(d) They derive stem cells from tissues of living adults and grow cells in labs.[2] Sangwan-Vemuganti procedure is carried out on
(a) Patients requiring any corneal transplant
(b) Patients with damaged corneas
(c) Patients with damaged eyes of any kind
(d) None of the above[3] The world recognises this Indian innovation because Indian scientists are normally known
(a) To be good at analysing and finding out a method of how an existing drug is made.
(b) As they are good researchers of drugs.
(c) As they are good at carrying out experiments to create generic drugs.
(d) As they are able to carry out drug trials on large samples.[4] The pathologist, Vemuganti, started growing cornea in a petri dish
(a) By following procedures published in research papers
(b) By inventing a totally new procedure
(c) By experimenting with procedures published in journals
(d) By following the instruction of the transplant surgeon.[5] In the context of the passage choose the correct set of meanings for the words: PLATFORM and GENERIC
(a) Lab table; related to genes
(b) Method; related to genes
(c) Lab experiments; without a brand name
(d) Methodology; without a brand nameasked in SNAP
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82.
The world dismisses curiosity by calling it idle, or mere idle curiosity - even though curious persons are seldom idle. Parents do their best to extinguish curiosity in their children because it makes life difficult to be faced every day with a string of answerable questions about what makes fire hot or why grass grows. Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline are invited to join our university. Within the university, they go on asking their questions and trying to find the answers. In the eyes of a scholar, that is mainly what a university is for. Some of the questions that scholars ask seem to the world to be scarcely worth asking let alone answering. They ask questions too minute and specialized for you and me to understand without years of explanation. If the world inquires of one of them why he wants to know the answer to a particular question he may say, especially if he is a scientist, that the answer will in some obscure way make possible a new machine or weapon or gadget. He talks that way because he knows that the world understands and respects utility. But to you who are now part of the university, he will say that he wants to know the answer simply because he does not know it. The way a mountain climber wants to climb a mountain simply because it is there. Similarly a historian when asked by outsiders why he studies history may come out with argument that he has learnt to repeat on such occasions. Something about knowledge of the past making it possible to understand the present and mould the future. But if you really want to know why a historian studies the past, the answer is much simpler: something happened, and he would like to know what. All this does not mean that the answers which scholars find to their questions have no consequences. They may have enormous consequences but these seldom form the reason for asking the question or pursuing the answers. It is true that scholars can be put to work answering questions for the sake of the consequences as thousands are working now, for example, in search of a cure for cancer. But this is not the primary function of the scholar, for the consequences are usually subordinate to the satisfaction of curiosity.
[1] Common people consider some of the questions asked by scholars as unimportant
(a) since they are not worth asking of answering.
(b) because the question is related to new machines and gadgets.
(c) because the common man does’t understand questions without years of explanations.
(d) scholars ask very minute, specialized questions beyond the comprehension of the common man.[2] In the statement ‘that is mainly what a university is for’ ‘that’ refers to
(a) parents refusal to answer questions.
(b) children’s curiosity that survives parents structures.
(c) questions not worth answering.
(d) the aim and scope of the university to provide an opportunity to curious minds to find out the answers to their questions.[3] According to the passage the general public respects
(a) new inventions.
(b) any useful invention.
(c) any invention that makes life easier for them.
(d) a scientist who invents gadgets and machines for them.[4] The writer compares the scientist to
(a) a historian and mountain climber.
(b) a historian.
(c) a mountain climber.
(d) a scholar.[5] The primary function of a scholar is different from the search for a cure for cancer because
(a) the answers to the scholar’s question have no consequence unlike the results of the research involving a cure for cancer.
(b) the answer sought by the scholar is selfish unlike the consequences of cancer research which are for the common weal.
(c) the primary function of a scholar is satisfaction of his mental curiosity, while research involving a cure for cancer demands a constant, systematic and planned pursuit by several scholars.
(d) several scholars work for a cancer cure while a single scholar works with a selfish motive.[6] Idle curiosity means
(a) curiosity is lazy.
(b) idle people are curious.
(c) curiosity is apt.
(d) casual curiosity.asked in SNAP
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83.
“A way to deal with frozen feelings”
Every child experiences all that happens around him with total awareness. In the first seven years the child's brain is like a sponge, taking in all sensory inputs and building his idea of his surroundings. As long as the environment is safe, the child learns with incredible speed. However, when the environment is scary or stressful, the child unlearns past learning just as rapidly.
In the early years of every child's life, whenever there is shock, violence, fear or pain, these intense emotions are imprinted deeply into memory. Whenever the same activity or situation is repeated, the nervous system and body subconsciously re-experience the memory of that trauma.
Any emotional situation that takes us out of the present and into the past means that whenever the same kind of emotion crops up later in our life we return to the past for our reference point. If that point was at age three, we find ourselves behaving like a three-year-old. We feel childish and we behave childishly. Our feelings are the cause of this 'glitch' in our learning process. We know we should be able to make a positive change, but that doesn't change anything.
The process of change need not be traumatic. We couldn't have done any better because we didn't know how to. But we should realise that was then and this is now! We can choose to choose again. It's up to us. It's our movie!
[1] The “Frozen Feelings” being talked about are about
(1) negative childhood experiences
(2) childhood learning patterns
(3) inability to learn as an adult
(4) none of the above.[2] A ‘glitch’ is
(1) a ditch
(2) uneasy emotions
(3) sudden malfunction or breakdownn
(4) learning patterns[3] Identify the correct sentence, based on the paragraph
(1) The process of change needs to be traumatic.
(2) We feel childish and we behave childishly.
(3) Both sentences are incorrect.
(4) Both the sentences are correct.asked in SNAP
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84.
In September of 1929, traders experienced a lack of confidence in the stock market‘s ability to continue its phenomenal rise. Prices fell. For many inexperienced investors, the drop produced a panic. They had all their money tied up in the market, and they were pressed to sell before the prices fell even lower. Sell orders were coming in so fast that the ticker tape at the New York Stock Exchange could not accommodate all the transactions.
To try the reestablish confidence in the market, a powerful group of New York bankers agreed to pool their funds and purchase stock above current market values. Although the buy orders were minimal, they were counting on their reputations to restore confidence on the part of the smaller investors, thereby affecting the number of sell orders. On Thursday, October 24, Richard Whitney, the Vice President of the New York Stock Exchange and a broker for the J.P. Morgan Company, made the effort on their behalf. Initially it appeared to have been successful, then, on the following Tuesday, the crash began again and accelerated. By 1932, stocks were worth only twenty percent of their value at the 1929 high. The results of the crash had extended into every aspect of the economy, causing a long and painful depression, referred to in American history as the Great Depression.
[1] The New York bankers counted on –
a. Current market values
b. The number of sell orders
c. Confidence
d. Their reputation[2] The cause of downfall of share market was-
a. Inexperienced investors
b. Phenomenal decrease
c. Lack of confidence in stock market‘s ability
d. Panic amongst investors[3] Choose the word in the passage that is an antonym of the 'minimal'
a. Negligible
b. Minimum
c. Maximal
d. Significantasked in SNAP
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