MCQ Test: Passage Inference - 1 - Bank Exams MCQ

Direction: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
On August 3, 1492 , Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos , Spain , with less than a hundred crew members to discover a new route to Asia. After spending a difficult time at sea, the party sighted land early on the morning ofOctober 12, 1492. They set foot on an island in the Bahamas which they named Al Salvador. Columbus presumed that the indigenous people were Native Indians as he was under the mistaken belief that he had set foot on Indian soil. Probably some 10 million American Indians were natives to the land before the large-scale inhabitation by Europeans and subsequent annihilation of Native Americans started.
However, it took more than a hundred years after Columbus discovered America for the Europeans to finally take the momentous decision to make the New World their home.
The Native Americans actually welcomed the pale-skinned visitors primarily out of curiosity than anything else. They were fascinated by the steel knives and swords, fire spewing cannons, brass and copper utensils, etc. that these visitors brought with them. Eventually, cultural differences erupted. The natives could not stomach the arrogance of the newcomers and the scant respect they paid to nature. The European settlers viewed every resource — plants, animals, and people as something to be commercially exploited.
The native Indians were vastly outnumbered in the wars that ensued. The resistance they put up never proved enough to stop the European settlers. The nomadic lifestyle of the Indians, the relatively unsophisticated weapons at their disposal, the unwillingness of some of their own people to defend themselves, and the diseases of the white men — all contributed to the virtual elimination of their race. Some of the diseases brought by Europeans from their overcrowded cities that decimated the natives were: small pox, plague, measles, cholera, typhoid, and malaria. These deadly diseases, to which most natives had developed no resistance, devastated many tribes between 1775 and 1850.
America was named after an Italian navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the Northern parts of South America in 1499 and 1500 and later announced to the world about the discovery of a new continent.

Q. From the passage we can infer that in comparison to the Europeans, Native Americans were

Direction: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
It is believed that Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice between 1596 and 1598. The classification of this play as a ‘comedy’ could stupefy many modern day youngsters who are used to a somewhat different meaning. But during Shakespeare’s times, a comedy was as poignant and melodramatic as a tragedy with separation, struggle, and heightened tensions being the central theme. However, the ending was always a happy one with at least the hero and heroine getting married, if not their friends too. Many people feel more comfortable with the term ‘problem plays’ or ‘tragicomedies’ than ‘comedies’ being used for such plays.
This play tends to stir up a hornet’s nest and ruffle feathers whenever it is discussed or staged. As The Merchant of Venice can be viewed from different perspectives, it evokes several reactions including extreme sympathy for the villain, the Jewish moneylender Shylock, and anger against the hero, his friend Bassanio, and Bassanio’s wife, Portia. Shakespeare has been accused of anti-Semitism because of the contemptuous utterances of his hero who even calls the villain a ‘cur’, a derogatory word that means ‘an aggressive mongrel dog.’
Critics of this play overlook the possibility that Shakespeare was just commenting upon the social situation prevailing during his time. A dispassionate analysis — not possible by a casual reading of such classics — will reveal the superb portrayal of the deep anguish experienced by the marginalized or ostracized sections of society. Sample these lines of Shylock that are bitingly rational as well as emotional.
“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means……If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? .....The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard, but I will better the instruction.”
These powerful words put by Shakespeare into the mouth of a man portrayed as a villain would not be so potent if this master dramatist had no deep-felt empathy for a character, who probably was more wronged than he wronged others. These sentences probably also explain the discomfort of we modernists when such dramas are called
‘comedies.’
Q. From the passage, we can infer that the author is

Direction: Answer the question based on the information given in the passage.
The need for knowledge of the constitution and functions, in the concrete, of human nature is great just because the teacher's attitude to subject matter is so different from that of the pupil. The teacher presents in actuality what the pupil represents only in posse. That is, the teacher already knows the things which the student is only learning. Hence the problem of the two is radically unlike. When engaged in the direct act of teaching, the instructor needs to have subject matter at his fingers' ends; his attention should be upon the attitude and response of the pupil. To understand the latter in its interplay with subject matter is his task, while the pupil's mind, naturally, should be not on itself but on the topic in hand. Or to state the same point in a somewhat different manner: the teacher should be occupied not with subject matter in itself but in its interaction with the pupils' present needs and capacities. Hence simple scholarship is not enough.

Q. It can be inferred from the paragraph that:

Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the question based on what is written/ implied therein.
In the early days of Internet marketing, online advertisers employed banner and pop-up ads to attract customers. These techniques reached large audiences, generated many sales leads, and came at a low cost. However, a small number of Internet users began to consider these advertising techniques intrusive and annoying. Yet because marketing strategies relying heavily on banners and pop-ups produced results, companies  invested growing amounts of money into purchasing these ad types in hopes of capturing market share in  the burgeoning online economy. As consumers became more sophisticated, frustration with these online advertising techniques grew. Independent programmers began to develop tools that blocked banner and pop-up ads. The popularity of these tools exploded when the search engine Google, at the time an increasingly popular website fighting to solidify its place on the Internet with giants Microsoft and Yahoo, offered free software enabling users to block pop-up ads. The backlash against banner ads grew as new web browsers provided users the ability to block image-based ads such as banner ads. Although banner and pop-up ads still exist, they are far less prominent than during the early days of the Internet.A major development in online marketing came with the introduction of pay-per-click ads. Unlike banner or pop-up ads, which originally required companies to pay every time a website visitor saw an ad, pay-per-click ads allowed companies to pay only when an interested potential customer clicked on an ad. More importantly, however, these ads circumvented the pop-up and banner blockers. As a result of these advantages and the incredible growth in the use of search engines, which provide excellent venues for pay-per-click advertising, companies began turning to pay-per-click marketing in droves. However, as with the banner and pop-up ads that preceded them, pay-per-click ads came with their drawbacks. When companies began pouring billions of dollars into this emerging medium, online advertising specialists started to notice the presence of what would later be called click fraud: representatives of a company with no interest in the product advertised by a competitor click on the competitor's ads simply to increase the marketing cost of the competitor. Click fraud grew so rapidly that marketers sought to diversify their online positions away from pay- per-click marketing through new mediums. Although pay-per-click advertising remains a common and effective advertising tool, marketers adapted yet again to the changing dynamics of the Internet by adopting new techniques such as pay-per-performance advertising, search engine optimization, and affiliate marketing. As the pace of the Internet's evolution increases, it seems all the more likely that advertising successfully on the Internet will require a strategy that shuns constancy and embraces change.
Q. Which statement you can infer from the paragraph

Direction: A wide range of water conflicts appear throughout history, though rarely are traditional wars waged over water alone. Instead, water has historically been a source of tension and a factor in conflicts that start for other reasons. However, water conflicts arise for several reasons, including territorial disputes, a fight for resources, and strategic advantage.
Water conflicts in India have penetrated every level. It has divided every segment of our society, political parties, states, regions and sub-regions within states, districts, castes and groups and individual farmers. Water conflicts within and between many developing countries are taking a serious turn. Fortunately, the “water wars”, forecast by so many, have not yet materialized. War has taken place, but over oil, not water. Water is radically altering and affecting political boundaries all over the world, between as well as within countries. In India, water conflicts are likely to worsen before they begin to be resolved. Until then they pose a significant threat to economic growth, security and health of the ecosystem and the victims are likely to be the poorest of the poor as well as the very sources of water-rivers, wetlands and aquifers.
Conflicts might have negative connotations, but they are logical developments in the absence of proper democratic, legal and administrative mechanisms to handle issues at the root of water conflicts. Part of the problem stems from the specific nature of water, namely that water is divisible and amenable to sharing; one unit of water by one is a unit denied to others; it has multiple uses and users and involves resultant trade-offs. Excludability is an innate problem and very often exclusion costs involved are very high: it involves the issue of graded scales and boundaries and need for evolving a corresponding understanding around them. Finally, the way water is planned, used and managed causes externalities, both positive and negative, and many of them are unidirectional and asymmetric.
There is a relatively greater visibility as well as a greater body of experience in evolving policies, frameworks, legal set-ups and administrative mechanisms dealing with immobile natural resources, however, contested the space may be.
Reformists as well as revolutionary movements are rooted in issues related to land. Several political and legal interventions addressing the issue of equity and societal justice have been attempted. Most countries have gone through land reforms of one type or another. Issues related to forests have also generated a body of comprehensive literature on forest resources and right. Though conflicts over them have not necessarily been effectively or adequately resolved, they have received much more serious attention, have been studied in their own right and practical as well as theoretical means of dealing with them have been sought. In contrast, water conflicts have not received the same kind of attention.

Q. Which of the following can be inferred about water conflicts?

DIRECTIONS for the question : Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
Health is wealth. In the life of a human being health occupies an important place. Preservation of health should be the primary duty of mankind. Health is man's normal condition, his birth right. It is the result of living in accordance with the natural laws, pertaining to the body, mind and environment. A healthy environment facilities good health but it is the unhealthy environment due to over population, excessive industrialization, air and water pollution etc. that is threatening the life with many dreadful diseases. In the contemporary India many people have been gripped by the clutch of disease like cancer, diabetes, hypertension, AIDS etc. although people of ancient India were said to be relatively healthy. At present people are suffering from various mental disorders also because they are racing blindly towards fame and having only one aim in life that is to achieve the big status in society. There is no field of human endeavor that has been so misunderstood as health. While health which connotes well being and the absence of illness has a low profile, it is illness representing the failure of health which virtually monopolizes attention because of the fear of pain, disability and death. This provides the medical practitioner power over the patients which can be misused. Till recently, patients had implicit faith in their doctor whom they loved and respected, not only for his knowledge but also in the total belief that practitioners of this noble profession, guided by ethics, always placed the patient’s interest above all other considerations. Our indigenous system of medicine like Ayurveda and yoga have been more concerned with the promotion of health. Healthy practices like cleanliness, proper diet, exercise and meditation are part of culture which sustains people even in the prevailing conditions of poverty in rural India and in unhygienic urban slums. These systems consider disease as an aberration resulting from disturbance of the equilibrium of health, which must be corrected by gentle restoration of this balance through proper diet, medicines and the establishment of mental peace. They also teach the graceful acceptance of old age with its infirmities resulting from degenerative process as well as of death which is inevitable. This is in marked contrast to the western concept of life as a struggle against disease, aging and death which must be fought and conquered with the knowledge and technology derived from their science: a science which, with its narrow dissecting and qualifying approach, has provided us the understanding of the microbial causes of communicable diseases and provided highly effective technology for their prevention, treatment and control.

Q. Which of the following can be inferred about the position of the author in writing the passage?
A. Critical and objective assessment of the present situation.
B. Passionate supporter of western system in present context.
C. Supremacy of ancient Indian system in today’s world.

Direction: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
During our college days there was a common teaser we used to discuss “what is there that comes in our lives and never goes back, and what is that which goes and never comes back?” The answer was known to almost everybody but still someone will raise his or her hand and answer the riddle as if the answer was known to him/her only, and the answer was: "It’s old age that comes and never goes back and it’s the innocent childhood that goes and never comes back”. But this riddle got lost somewhere in the struggle of life.
The struggle for “bread and butter” is so cruel that the age and innocence of childhood have no meaning for it but still there are imprudent men who laugh at the time and say “we will never allow the child within us taken away by the kidnappers of time" and such people always enjoy the company of that child within.
I vividly remember the days when my father used to have a strange kind of joy on his face seeing thick black clouds, and as soon as rain started, he would run outside the house like a child (he was 58 at that time) and jump and sometime roll down on ground enjoying the freshly made rainwater pond, singing a song of his choice.
We used to get surprised at his child-like act and would ask him repeatedly to come back inside else he would catch cold or fever but he would always say, "Beta mere andar jo bachcha hai voh mujhe kehta hai mein abhi mara nahin hoon, chalo barish mein nahate hain, and I cannot stop my feet to stay within the four walls."
Today my father is no more with us but whenever there is torrential rain and my own children enjoy the rain as papa used to do, I always feel his presence around, whispering into my ears, if you want to live a pleasant and long life, never let the child within you die.
Nature has given us so many gifts to enjoy and rain is one of them but most of us ignore the joys coming in our way, falling prey to the tiring day-to-day life. But I never forget to pay a tribute to my father and always become a child with my children whenever they enjoy rain. Only a hot cup of coffee brings me back to my adulthood after the rain and keeps my father alive, the child alive.

Q. What do you infer out of the passage?

Direction: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
During our college days there was a common teaser we used to discuss “what is there that comes in our lives and never goes back, and what is that which goes and never comes back?” The answer was known to almost everybody but still someone will raise his or her hand and answer the riddle as if the answer was known to him/her only, and the answer was: "It’s old age that comes and never goes back and it’s the innocent childhood that goes and never comes back”. But this riddle got lost somewhere in the struggle of life.
The struggle for “bread and butter” is so cruel that the age and innocence of childhood have no meaning for it but still there are imprudent men who laugh at the time and say “we will never allow the child within us taken away by the kidnappers of time" and such people always enjoy the company of that child within.
I vividly remember the days when my father used to have a strange kind of joy on his face seeing thick black clouds, and as soon as rain started, he would run outside the house like a child (he was 58 at that time) and jump and sometime roll down on ground enjoying the freshly made rainwater pond, singing a song of his choice.
We used to get surprised at his child-like act and would ask him repeatedly to come back inside else he would catch cold or fever but he would always say, "Beta mere andar jo bachcha hai voh mujhe kehta hai mein abhi mara nahin hoon, chalo barish mein nahate hain, and I cannot stop my feet to stay within the four walls."
Today my father is no more with us but whenever there is torrential rain and my own children enjoy the rain as papa used to do, I always feel his presence around, whispering into my ears, if you want to live a pleasant and long life, never let the child within you die.
Nature has given us so many gifts to enjoy and rain is one of them but most of us ignore the joys coming in our way, falling prey to the tiring day-to-day life. But I never forget to pay a tribute to my father and always become a child with my children whenever they enjoy rain. Only a hot cup of coffee brings me back to my adulthood after the rain and keeps my father alive, the child alive.

Q. What do you infer out of the passage?

DIRECTION for the question: The question has a text portion followed by four alternative summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the text. An increase in the median income of the middle class does not cause average levels of education for the middle class to go up. If they did, then countries with the highest median income of the middle class would also have the highest levels of education for this class. In fact, when the median income of the middle class is made suitably comparable for different countries (accounting for inflation, currency fluctuations and purchasing power parity), there is no such co-relation.

Q. Which of the following can be correctly inferred from the statements above?

Direction: Answer the question based on the information given in the passage.
An increase in the level of serotonin levels in the human body is known to significantly enhance the mood of the person and in some cases, help people overcome depression. Serotonin taken orally does not pass into the pathways of the central nervous system, because it does not cross the blood–brain barrier. However, tryptophan and its metabolite 5-hydroxytryptophan (5- HTP), from which serotonin is synthesized, does cross the blood–brain barrier. These agents are available as dietary supplements, and may be effective serotonergic agents.

Q: Which of the following can be correctly inferred from the statements above?

Direction: Answer the question based on the information given in the passage.
A being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others. A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. When he moves he stirs them and reciprocally. We might as well try to imagine a business man doing business, buying and selling, all by himself, as to conceive it possible to define the activities of an individual in terms of his isolated actions. The manufacturer moreover is as truly socially guided in his activities when he is laying plans in the privacy of his own counting house as when he is buying his raw material or selling his finished goods. Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act.

Q. It can be inferred from the paragraph that:

DIRECTIONS: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:

Helium – an inert, odourless, monatomic element known to lay people as the substance that makes balloons float and voices squeak when inhaled – could be gone from this planet within a generation.
Helium itself is not rare; there is actually a plentiful supply of it in the cosmos. In fact, 24 per cent of our galaxy’s elemental mass consists of helium, which makes it the second most abundant element in our universe. Because of its lightness, however, most helium vanished from our own planet many years ago. Consequently, only a miniscule proportion – 0.00052%, to be exact – remains in earth’s atmosphere. Helium is the byproduct of millennia of radioactive decay from the elements thorium and uranium. The helium is mostly trapped in subterranean natural gas bunkers and commercially extracted through a method known as fractional distillation.
The loss of helium on Earth would affect society greatly. Defying the perception of it as a novelty substance for parties and gimmicks, the element actually has many vital applications in society. Probably the most well known commercial usage is in airships and blimps. But helium is also instrumental in deep-sea diving, where it is blended with nitrogen to mitigate the dangers of inhaling ordinary air under high pressure; as a cleaning agent for rocket engines; and, in its most prevalent use, as a coolant for superconducting magnets in hospital MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners. The possibility of losing helium forever poses the threat of a real crisis because its unique qualities are extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible to duplicate.

Q: A very small amount of helium remains in the earth's atmosphere because-

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow. 

Delhi reportedly produces 10,000 metric tonnes of garbage every day and the space to dump this garbage is a major problem. East Delhi's Ghazipur garbage dump stands at 65 metres tall, very close to the height of Qutub Miner, which stands at 73 metres. As Mumbai reeled under a heatwave, fire broke out in the city's largest landfill site at Deonar on 26 March 2018. Dhapa dumping ground in Kolkata has been burning since November 2018 and the thick smoke billowing out of the site is making the city's polluted air even more toxic. Since 20 October fires caused by toxic gases have been raging inside a landfill in Bhalswa, an urban village in North Delhi where a 40-acre graveyard of waste waits for its own death. Toxic smoke from a blaze at the Okhla landfill in the national capital caused health problems amongst local residents. 

State governments and municipal corporations have started to take cognizance of the problems of waste management. Maharashtra government imposed a complete ban on plastic carry bags and thermocol cutlery, becoming the 18th state of the county to impose such a ban. Two hundred residents' associations/buildings in south Mumbai decided to become plastic-free as a drive against single-use plastics was launched here. The Golden Temple will replace the use of plastic carry bags with compostable ones to make its contribution to environment protection. The Telangana government issued guidelines to ban plastic usage in urban local bodies in the state. 

With Mount Pirana growing at an alarming rate, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has finally put its foot down. The corporation will not collect domestic waste if it is not segregated into dry and wet. With an aim to resolve waste management problems of residents in Gurugram. the agency responsible for solid waste management in the city has taken the local management approach by appointing ward managers in each of the 35 wards. Soon, all the municipalities and corporations in Tamil Nadu will begin sending non-recyclable waste to the cement plants and thermal power stations to be incinerated and converted into fuel. The municipal corporation in Cuttack will enforce a new set of regulations, including fines for littering roads in front of homes. 

Q. The first paragraph of the passage mainly talks about the:

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow. 

Delhi reportedly produces 10,000 metric tonnes of garbage every day and the space to dump this garbage is a major problem. East Delhi's Ghazipur garbage dump stands at 65 metres tall, very close to the height of Qutub Miner, which stands at 73 metres. As Mumbai reeled under a heatwave, fire broke out in the city's largest landfill site at Deonar on 26 March 2018. Dhapa dumping ground in Kolkata has been burning since November 2018 and the thick smoke billowing out of the site is making the city's polluted air even more toxic. Since 20 October fires caused by toxic gases have been raging inside a landfill in Bhalswa, an urban village in North Delhi where a 40-acre graveyard of waste waits for its own death. Toxic smoke from a blaze at the Okhla landfill in the national capital caused health problems amongst local residents. 

State governments and municipal corporations have started to take cognizance of the problems of waste management. Maharashtra government imposed a complete ban on plastic carry bags and thermocol cutlery, becoming the 18th state of the county to impose such a ban. Two hundred residents' associations/buildings in south Mumbai decided to become plastic-free as a drive against single-use plastics was launched here. The Golden Temple will replace the use of plastic carry bags with compostable ones to make its contribution to environment protection. The Telangana government issued guidelines to ban plastic usage in urban local bodies in the state. 

With Mount Pirana growing at an alarming rate, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has finally put its foot down. The corporation will not collect domestic waste if it is not segregated into dry and wet. With an aim to resolve waste management problems of residents in Gurugram. the agency responsible for solid waste management in the city has taken the local management approach by appointing ward managers in each of the 35 wards. Soon, all the municipalities and corporations in Tamil Nadu will begin sending non-recyclable waste to the cement plants and thermal power stations to be incinerated and converted into fuel. The municipal corporation in Cuttack will enforce a new set of regulations, including fines for littering roads in front of homes. 

The first paragraph of the passage mainly talks about the:

Read the passage and based on it choose one of the given inferences that you draw from it.

The author says that a sluggish growth in the world economy for the foreseeable future means that India should take a look at its economic policy and consider replacing the premise on which the policies were set. He concludes, by saying that India should increase its public investment in order to meet the growing demands.

Q. What is the tone of the passage?

Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.
Growth may be defined as the quantitative increase in size or mass. When weight is measured in kilograms and height in centimetres from time to time, we can know how much growth has occurred in a child. When the organs of the body grow, the number, the size and the weight of their cells increase. Growth can be measured in terms of the change in length, width, depth and volume in a specific time period. Although growth is a characteristic of living beings, in all living beings, the rate of growth also depends on nutrition and living conditions, including the environment at home.
Growth, development and maturation occur side by side. Growth is a quantitative increase in size through increase in number of cells or elongation of cells. Development may be defined as the progression of changes, both qualitative and quantitative, which lead to an undifferentiated mass of cells to a highly organised state. Maturation is a measure of functional capacity. For example, a child begins to speak by making unintelligible sounds. Then, slowly it acquires the capacity for speaking in a manner, which is easily understood by others. Another example of maturation is when a child begins to crawl and then matures to a state of walking on two legs. Similarly, organs of reproduction reach maturity at the end of puberty.

Q. According to the passage, the quantitative increase in size is called – 

DIRECTIONS: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:

Helium – an inert, odourless, monatomic element known to lay people as the substance that makes balloons float and voices squeak when inhaled – could be gone from this planet within a generation.
Helium itself is not rare; there is actually a plentiful supply of it in the cosmos. In fact, 24 per cent of our galaxy’s elemental mass consists of helium, which makes it the second most abundant element in our universe. Because of its lightness, however, most helium vanished from our own planet many years ago. Consequently, only a miniscule proportion – 0.00052%, to be exact – remains in earth’s atmosphere. Helium is the byproduct of millennia of radioactive decay from the elements thorium and uranium. The helium is mostly trapped in subterranean natural gas bunkers and commercially extracted through a method known as fractional distillation.
The loss of helium on Earth would affect society greatly. Defying the perception of it as a novelty substance for parties and gimmicks, the element actually has many vital applications in society. Probably the most well known commercial usage is in airships and blimps. But helium is also instrumental in deep-sea diving, where it is blended with nitrogen to mitigate the dangers of inhaling ordinary air under high pressure; as a cleaning agent for rocket engines; and, in its most prevalent use, as a coolant for superconducting magnets in hospital MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners. The possibility of losing helium forever poses the threat of a real crisis because its unique qualities are extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible to duplicate.

Q: Helium cannot help/make-