After successfully completing the CAT 2016 sprint series, we are back with the SNAP 2016 sprint preparation series – Verbal 2 to boost your prep. This will continue for the last 10 days leading to SNAP 2016 and will cover almost all the question types that you need to know come the 18th of December.
SNAP 2016 sprint preparation series – Verbal 2
Directions for questions 1 – 3: Read the passage and answer within its context.
Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus became part of the greatest story ever told. Many things have changed in the intervening years. The hotel industry worries more about overbuilding than overcrowding, and if they had to meet an unexpected influx, few inns would have managed to accommodate the weary guests. Now it is the census taker that does the travelling in the fond hope that a highly mobile population will stay put long enough to get a good sampling. Methods of gathering, recording and evaluating information have presumably been improved a great deal. And where then it was the modest purpose of Rome to obtain a simple head count as an adequate basis for levying taxes, now batteries of complicated statistical series furnished by governmental agencies and private organizations are eagerly scanned and interpreted by sages and seers to get a clue for future events.
The Bible does not tell us how the Roman census takers made out, and as regards our more immediate concern, the reliability of present-day economic forecasting, there are considerable differences of opinion. They were aired at the celebration of the 125th anniversary of the American Statistical Association. There was the thought that business forecasting might well be on its way from an art to a science, and some speakers talked about new-fangled computers and high-faulting mathematical systems in terms of excitement and endearment, which we, at least in our younger years when these things mattered, would have associated more readily with the description of a fair maiden.
But others pointed to a deplorable record of highly esteemed forecasts and forecasters with a batting average below that of the Mets and the President elect of the Association cautioned that “highpowered statistical methods are usually in order where the facts are crude and inadequate, statisticians assume.” We left his birthday party somewhere between hope and despair and with the conviction, not really newly acquired, that proper statistical methods applied to ascertainable facts have their merits in economic forecasting as long as neither forecaster nor public is deluded into mistaking the delineation of probabilities and trends for a prediction of certainties of mathematical exactitude.
1. According to the passage, taxation in Roman times was based on
a. mobility
b. wealth
c. population
d. census takers
2. The author refers to the Mets primarily in order to
a. show that sports do not depend on statistics
b. contrast verifiable and unverifiable methods of record keeping
c. indicate the changes in attitudes from Roman days to the present
d. illustrate the failure of statistical predictions.
3. The author’s tone can best be described as
a. jocular
b. scornful
c. pessimistic
d. humanistic
4. Disinterested is closest in meaning to
a. bored
b. unbiased
c. not interested
d. indifferent
5. Choose the option which is nearly opposite in meaning to BERATE
a. grant
b. praise
c. refer
d. purchase
6. Arrange the following in the right order to make a complete sentence
i. with interconnected vibrating balls and springs
ii. in a naive sense, a field in physics may be envisioned as if space were filled
iii. as the displacement of a ball from its rest position
iv. and the strength of the field can be visualized
a. ii, i, iv, iii
b. i, ii, iii, iv
c. iv, iii, ii, I
d. iii, iv, i, ii
7. Find the odd one out.
a. latent
b. natural
c. inborn
d. inherent
8. He told the teacher that __________ .
a. he was liked by the whole class
b. you are liked by the whole class
c. he is liked by the whole class
d. you were liked by the whole class
9. Match the several meanings of the word COMPLEX with their appropriate usages.
| Meaning | Usage | ||
| 1) | complicated | 5) | A new sports complex is coming up for the Common Wealth Games. |
| 2) | abnormal state of mind |
6) | Culture is a complex whole of many things. |
| 3) | group of structures |
7) | She has a complex about being overweight. |
| 4) | mixture | 8) | His motives in carrying out the crime were complex. |
a. 1-6, 2-8, 3-7, 4-5
b. 1-8, 2-7, 3-5, 4-6
c. 1-5, 2-7, 3-6, 4-8
d. 1-8, 2-5, 3-6, 4-7
10. Which does not make a sensible word/phrase when added to the word: Honey
a. pot
b. suckle
c. comb
d. taste
Directions for questions 11 – 16: Read the passage and answer within its context.
Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is getting nightmares because of the Nano, Tata’s soon-to-be-launched Rs. one lakh car. Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) says that it isn’t the Nano by itself but cars overall that give her nightmares. The villains in my nightmares are neither the Nano nor cars overall, but stupid government policies that subsidize and encourage pollution, adulteration and congestion.
Sanctimonious greens call the Nano disastrous because of its affordability – millions more will now clog roads and consume more fossil fuel. This is elitism parading as virtue. Elite greens own cars, but cannot stand the poorer masses becoming mobile, since the consequent congestion will eat into the time of the elite!
More logical would be a protest against big cars that use more space and fuel, or highly polluting old cars. Instead, green hypocrites aim at a new car with the lowest cost, best mileage and least emissions. The Nano will not burden us with too many cars. India has very few cars per person by world standards. London and New York have ultra-high car densities, yet have clearer air than Delhi. Our problem is too many bad policies, not too many cars.
We subsidize vehicles on a gargantuan scale invisible to lay folk. Roads and flyovers cost crores to build and maintain, yet road use is free (save on a few toll roads). Traffic police and lights are costly, yet are provided free. These invisible subsidies starve cities of funds to expand roads and public transport. Land in cities now costs lakhs per square metre. Yet parking is free in the suburbs, and often costs just Rs. 10 day per day in city centres. A single parking space of 23 square meters occupies land worth Rs. 40 lakhs. A car occupies more space than an office desk, yet the desk space pays full commercial rent while parking space costs just about Rs. 10 per day.
Daily parking charges range from $30 (Rs. 630) in Washington to $60 (Rs. 1260) in New York. CSE launched a sensible campaign to raise parking fees in Delhi to Rs. 120 per day, but was foiled. So, parking space now exceeds green space, a scathing comment on priorities.
The world price of crude oil has risen 13 fold since 1998 to over $139 per barrel, but Indian petrol prices ave barely doubled. Left Front politicians, who once wanted to soak the rich, now want to subsidize them. Under-recoveries of oil companies’ total may be Rs. 2,00,000 crore, even after a recent price hike. This is far more than the cost of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (education for all) and the Employment Guarantee Scheme put together.
We sanctimoniously lecture rich countries to reduce their green house emissions, yet subsidize our own. Diesel is subsidized to be cheaper than petrol. So, Indian car makers produce the highest proportion of diesel cars in the world. Diesel fumes contain suspended particles that are highly toxic. This subsidy kills.
So does kerosene provided at throwaway prices, ostensibly to benefit poor villagers. One third of all kerosene is used to adulterate petrol and diesel. This causes horrendous pollution even in the greenest of cars.
What’s the way forward? We must abolish subsidies and raise taxes on vehicles and fuels to reflect their full social cost. The biggest but least visible subsidy is for parking, and we should start there. Many car owners in the West take public transport to work since parking space downtown is costly and scarce. We should levy parking fees on an hourly, not daily, basis. Rs. 10 per hour could be a starting point in the metros.
In parts of Tokyo, you cannot own a car unless you own a private parking space. This is too extreme for India, but indicates the future path. If we charge owners the full social cost of parking, people will buy smaller and perhaps fewer vehicles, and fewer still will take them to work. That will slash congestion and pollution.
Cities should levy stiff annual taxes on vehicles, not a one-time tax, and use the revenue to constantly expand public transport and roads. This will create economic synergy: Private transport will finance public transport. London and New York have high density public transport as well as high car density. Apart from underground rail, cities need elevated roads to ease congestion and pollution. Lata Mangeshkar helped kill a proposal for an elevated road near her Mumbai flat: perhaps she felt her throat and singing would be affected. She did not care that the throats of poor people living on the pavements were far worse affected by fumes, and might get relief if some fumes were diverted to a higher level. What elitism!
Next, some medicine that will be really bitter, politically. The excise duty on all automotive vehicles should be raised to reflect their social costs. Fuel subsidies should be abolished. Price differentials between petrol, diesel and kerosene should be removed, ending incentives for adulteration. Diesel cars should bear a heavy additional cess to finance improved healthcare for those affected by their emission of harmful particulate matter. That is a long, politically difficult agenda. Only part of it will ever be achieved. Yet that is the way to go, rather than agitate the Nano.
11. By ‘Sanctimonious greens’ the writer refers to
a. aristocratic environmentalists
b. the rich
c. environmentalists with a ‘holier than thou’ attitude
d. those who decry deforestation
12. The elite are
a. jealous of Nano owners
b. afraid of traffic jams and depletion of fossil fuel
c. afraid of reaching their destinations late
d. full of disdain that the poor can afford cars
13. The paradox of the situation is that
a. bigger cars mean more fuel, more space and more pollution
b. though India has fewer cars the Nano will bring more pollution
c. London and New York have more cars and less pollution
d. though India is smaller than the US its cars cause more pollution
14. In saying 23 square metres of parking space costs 40 lakhs, the writer is ______
a. caustic
b. exaggerating
c. sarcastic
d. ironical
15. The writer blames India for
a. subsidizing kerosene whereby greenhouse emissions are indirectly subsidized
b. subsidizing diesel
c. for increasing the cost of parking by the hour
d. for not making it mandatory for car owners to own parking space
16. The most suitable title for this passage is
a. Polluting Politics
b. No No Nano
c. Submerge Subsidies
d. More Cars, Less Pollution
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Solutions:
1. “And where then it was the modest purpose of Rome to obtain a simple head count as an adequate basis for levying taxes… “And so, option c.
2. “deplorable record of highly esteemed forecasts…” suggests that the author is talking about the failure of statistical predictions. Option d.
3. The authors tries to explain the topic by using humour as a mechanism (comparison of the forecasters’ accuracy with the Mets batting averages and so on). Anyway, the tone is not scornful, pessimistic or humanistic. Option a.
4. There is a subtle difference between disinterested and uninterested. Uninterested is simply not showing interest in proceedings while disinterested is basically someone who does not have a particular liking for someone. Both unbiased and indifferent are applicable and in some cases, even not interested would work. As SNAP does not give any answer keys, a lot of institutes went for option d which seems to have matched with the candidates’ final scores.
5. Option b.
6. Fairly straightforward. Option a is correct.
7. Latent is the odd man out. Option a.
8. Option a is the best fit in terms of tense and pronoun.
9. Option b is correct.
10. Honeytaste is not a word and so, option d is the answer.
11. It is obvious that the author means the sanctimonious i.e. supposedly pure greens i.e. people who seem to care about the environment when he says ‘sanctimonious greens’. Option c.
12. Option d is correct.
13. Option c is correct.
14. The author shows the irony between the value of the land and the cost that it earns. Option d.
15. Option b.
16. The passage is not exclusively about Nano and so, option b is out. He also focuses on policies and not politics and so, option a is out. Option d focuses on the number of cars when there are a lot of important factors to worry about. Option c is probably the best option among the given four.
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You can follow the entire sprint series here: SNAP 2016 Sprint Preparation Series by Learningroots
Also, you can check out all the articles under the series by going to this page: SNAP 2016 Sprint Preparation Series Timetable
