Main Idea Based Questions - 1 | English for CLAT PDF Download

Directions: Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follow.

Passage 1

To turn my eyes outwards now and to say a little about the relationship between the Indian writer and the majority white culture in that midst he lives, and with which his work will sooner or later have to deal: Common to many Bombay-raised middle-class children of my generation, I grew up with an intimate knowledge of, and even sense of friendship with, a certain kind of England: a dream-England composed of Test Matches at Lord's presided over by the voice of John Arlott, at which Freddie Trueman bowled unceasingly and without success at Polly Umrigar; of Enid Blyton and Billy Bunter, in which we were even prepared to smile indulgently at portraits such as 'Hurree JamSet Ram Singh,' 'the dusky nabob of Bhanipur.'
I wanted to come to England. I couldn't wait, and to be fair, England has done all right by me, but I find it a little difficult to be properly grateful. I can't escape the view that my relatively easy ride is not the result of the dream- England's famous sense of tolerance and fair play, but of my social class, my freak fair skin, and my 'English' English accent. Take away any of these; the story would have been very different. Because, of course, the dream of England is no more than a dream.
Sadly, it's a dream from which too many white Britons refuse to wake. Recently, on a live radio program, a professional humorist asked me, in all seriousness, why I objected to being called a wog. He said he had always thought it a rather charming word, a term of endearment. 'I was at the zoo the other day, 'he revealed, 'and a zookeeper told me that the wogs were best with the animals; they stuck their fingers in their ears and wiggled them about, and the animals felt at home.'
The ghost of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh walks among us still. As Richard Wright found long ago in America, black-and-white descriptions of society are no longer compatible. Fantasy, or the mingling of fantasy and naturalism, is one way of dealing with these problems. It offers a way of echoing in the form of our work the issues faced by all of us: how to build a new, 'modern' world out of an old, legend-haunted civilization, an old culture that we have brought into the heart of newer ones.
But whatever technical solutions we may find, Indian writers in these islands, like others who have migrated into the north from the south, are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective: because they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this society. We can offer this stereoscopic vision in place of 'whole sight'.
Q: What does the author primarily convey about his experience as an Indian writer in England?
(a) He feels completely accepted due to England's sense of tolerance and fair play.
(b) He attributes his relatively easy experience to his social class, fair skin, and English accent.
(c) He believes that Indian writers cannot effectively write about English culture.
(d) He considers the dream of England to be fully realized in his personal experience.

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Passage 2

 I grew up in a small town not far from Kalimpong. In pre-liberalization India, everything arrived late: not just material things but also ideas. Magazines — old copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic — arrived late too, after the news had become stale by months or, often, years. This temporal gap turned journalism into literature, news into legend, and historical events into something akin to plotless stories. But like those who knew no other life, we accepted this as the norm. The dearth of reading material in towns and villages in socialist India is hard to imagine, and it produced two categories of people: those who stopped reading after school or college, and those — including children — who read anything they could find. I read road signs with the enthusiasm that attaches to reading thrillers. When the iterant kabadiwala, collector of papers, magazines, and rejected things, visited our neighbourhood, I rushed to the house where he was doing business. He bought things at unimaginably low prices from those who’d stopped having any use for them, and I rummaged through his sacks of old magazines. Sometimes, on days when business was good, he allowed me a couple of copies of Sportsworld magazine for free. I’d run home and, ignoring my mother’s scolding, plunge right in — consuming news about India’s victory in the Benson and Hedges Cup....
Two takeaways from these experiences have marked my understanding of the provincial reader’s life: the sense of belatedness, of everything coming late, and the desire for pleasure in language. .... Speaking of belatedness, the awareness of having been born at the wrong time in history, o f inventing things that had already been discovered elsewhere, far away, without our knowledge or cooperation, is a moment of epiphany and deep sadness. I remember a professor’s choked voice, narrating to me how all the arguments he’d made in his doctoral dissertation, written over many, many years of hard work (for there indeed was a time when PhDs were written over decades), had suddenly come to naught after he’d discovered the work of C.W.E. Bigsby. This, I realised as I grew older, was one of the characteristics of provincial life: that they (usually males) were saying trite things with the confidence of someone declaring them for the first time. I, therefore, grew up surrounded by would-be Newtons who claimed to have discovered gravity (again). There’s a deep sense of tragedy attending this sort of thing — the sad embarrassment of always arriving after the party is over. And there’s a harsh word for that sense of belatedness: “dated.” What rescues it is the unpredictability of these anachronistic “discoveries” — the randomness and haphazardness involved in mapping connections among thoughts and ideas, in a way that hasn’t yet been professionalised.
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “The Provincial Reader”, by Sumana Roy, Los Angeles Review of Books]

Q: What does the author primarily convey about his experience growing up in a small town near Kalimpong?
(a) He felt a deep connection to global news and ideas despite the delays in receiving information.
(b) He and others in his town eagerly consumed any reading material they could find, despite its delayed arrival.
(c) He was uninterested in reading and preferred to focus on local events.
(d) He was able to access the latest magazines and newspapers as they arrived faster than expected.

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Passage 3

Until the Keeladi site was discovered, archaeologists by and large believed that the Gangetic plains in the north urbanised significantly earlier than Tamil Nadu. Historians have often claimed that large scale town life in India first developed in the Greater Magadha region of the Gangetic basin. This was during the ‘second urbanisation’ phase. The ‘first urbanisation phase’ refers to the rise of the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation. Tamil Nadu was thought to have urbanised at this scale only by the third century BCE. The findings at Keeladi push that date b ack significantly. … 
Based on linguistics and continuity in cultural legacies, connections between the Indus Valley Civilisation, or IVC, and old Tamil traditions have long been suggested, but concrete archaeological evidence remained absent. Evidence indicated similarities between graffiti found in Keeladi and symbols associated with the IVC. It bolstered the arguments of dissidents from the dominant North Indian imagination, who have argued for years that their ancestors existed contemporaneously with the IVC. … 
All the archaeologists I spoke to said it was too soon to make definitive links between the Keeladi site and the IVC. There is no doubt, however, that the discovery at Keeladi has changed the paradigm. In recent years, the results of any new research on early India have invited keen political interest, because proponents of Hindu nationalism support the notion of Vedic culture as fundamental to the origins of Indian civilisation. … 
The Keeladi excavations further challenge the idea of a single fountainhead of Indian life. They indicate the possibility that the earliest identity that can recognisably be considered ‘Indian’ might not have originated in North India. That wasn’t all. In subsequent seasons of the Keeladi dig, archaeologists discovered that Tamili, a variant of the Brahmi script used for writing inscriptions in the early iterations of the Tamil language, could be dated back to the sixth century BCE, likely a hundred years before previously thought. 
So not only had urban life thrived in the Tamil lands, but people who lived there had developed their own script. ―The evolution of writing is attributed to Ashoka’s edicts, but 2600 years ago writing was prevalent in Keeladi,” Mathan Karuppiah, a proud Madurai local, told me. ―A farmer could write his own name on a pot he owned. The fight going on here is ‘You are not the one to teach me to write, I have learnt it myself.’ ” 
[Excerpted from ―The Dig”, by Sowmiya Ashok, Fifty-Two]

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Passage 4

The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public LiveJournal. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post. 
Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection —this feverish, electric, unliveable hell. The curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. 
Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and moaned about articles that had been commissioned to make people moan. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. 
The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse. Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer. As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct —like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. 
This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-travelled on Instagram; why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; and why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the centre of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. 
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, by Jia Tolentino, Random House, 2019.]

Q: What does the author primarily convey about the evolution of the internet?
(a) The internet started as a space for genuine self-expression but gradually became a tool for self-promotion and alienation.
(b) The internet has always been a source of joy, providing people with constant connection and self-improvement.
(c) The internet was a passing trend that eventually became irrelevant to people's lives.
(d) The internet has never changed and continues to serve its original purpose of free communication.

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Passage 5

Down by the sandy banks of the Yamuna River, the men must work quickly. At a little past 12 a.m. one humid night in May, they pull back the black plastic tarp covering three boreholes sunk deep in the ground. They then drag thick hoses toward a queue of 20-odd tanker trucks idling quietly with their headlights turned off. The men work in a team: While one man fits a hose’s mouth over a borehole, another clambers atop a truck at the front of the line and shoves the tube’s opposite end into the empty steel cistern attached to the vehicle’s creaky frame. ‘On kar!’ someone shouts in Hinglish; almost instantly, his orders to ‘switch it on’ are obeyed. 
Diesel generators, housed in nearby sheds, begin to thrum. Submersible pumps, installed in the borehole’s shafts, drone as they disgorge thousands of gallons of groundwater from deep in the earth. The liquid gushes through the hoses and into the trucks’ tanks. The full trucks don’t wait around. As the hose team continues its work, drivers nose down a rutted dirt path until they reach a nearby highway. There, they turn on their lights and pick up speed, rushing to sell their bounty to factories and hospitals, malls and hotels, apartments and hutments across this city of 25 million. 
Everything about this business is illegal: the boreholes dug without permission, the trucks operating without permits, the water sold without testing or treatment. ‘Water work is night work,’ says a middle-aged neighbour who lives near the covert pumping station and requested anonymity. ‘Bosses arrange buyers, labour fills tankers, the police look the other way, and the muscle makes sure that no one says nothing to nobody.’ Teams like this one are ubiquitous in Delhi, where the official water supply falls short of the city’s needs. A quarter of Delhi’s households live without a piped-water connection; most of the rest receive water for only a few hours each day. 
So residents have come to rely on private truck owners —the most visible strands of a dispersed web of city councillors, farmers, real estate agents, and fixers who source millions of gallons of water each day from illicit boreholes, and sell the liquid for profit. The entrenched system has a local moniker: the water-tanker mafia. 
A 2013 audit found that the city loses 60 percent of its water supply to leakages, theft, and a failure to collect revenue. The mafia defends its work as a community service, but there is a much darker picture of Delhi’s subversive water industry: one of a thriving black market populated by small-time freelance agents who are exploiting a fast-depleting common resource and in turn threatening India’s long-term water security.
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from: “At the Mercy of the Water Mafia”, by Aman Sethi, Foreign Policy]

Q: What does the author primarily convey about the illegal water trade in Delhi?
(a) The water mafia operates openly with full government support and oversight.
(b) The water mafia serves as a necessary service in a city struggling with water shortages.
(c) The water mafia is a formal and regulated business that provides safe drinking water.
(d) The water mafia is a well-organized, legal system that ensures equitable distribution of water.

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