SBI PO Mains 2017: English Quiz based on New Pattern – 1

In each question
below, two parts of sentence are given with two blank spaces between them.
Choose from the options given, which can fill up the blanks in proper sequence
to makes the sentences meaningfully complete.

1. Mars has been
much possessed by death. ______. H.G. Wells, in “The War of the Worlds”,
imagined Martian invaders bringing death to Earth; in “The Martian Chronicles”
Ray Bradbury pictured humans living among Martian ghosts seeing Earth destroyed
in a nuclear spasm. ______.  Perhaps that
is why the dream of taking new life to Mars is such a stirring one. Elon Musk,
an entrepreneur, has built a rocket company, SpaceX, from scratch in order to
make his dream come true.

(i) How odd,
then, that Mr Musk’s motivation is born in part of a fear as misplaced as it is
striking.

(ii) In the late
19th century Percival Lowell, an American astronomer, persuaded much of the
public that the red planet was dying of desertification.
(iii) Science was not much cheerier than science fiction: space probes revealed
that having once been warmer and wetter, Mars is now cold, crated and
all-but-airless.

(A) ii and i
(B) i and ii
(C) ii and iii
(D) I and iii
(E) iii and i

2. Like much
great art, Bruce Springsteen’s finest songs transmute the particular into the
eternal. The more tightly local their focus-those boys from the casino dancing
with their shirts open in “Sandy”, that tilt-a-whirl down on the South beach
drag-the more universal they magically become. _________.  __________. At the heart of his oeuvre, and
of his book, is his painful relationship with his father, a sometime pool shark
whom, as a child, Mr Springsteen fetched from bars in Freehold, New Jersey for
his long-suffering mother.

(i) As he puts
it in “Born to Run”, his new autobiography, he sings about “the joy and
heartbreak of everyday life”, of humdrum defeat and defiance, the pull of home
and the road’s allure, familiar dichotomies somehow elevated, in his ballads,
into a new American mythology.

(ii) Mr.
Springsteen explains how he tried to dodge his inheritance of self-destruction
and depression, treating the latter with counselling, pills and the
self-administered therapy of music.

(iii) As “Born
to Run” recounts, those songs feel authentic because they are.

(A) i and ii
(B) iii and i
(C) ii and i
(D) i and iii
(E) ii and iii

3. The
destination was decided in June, by simple majority: Britain is leaving the
European Union. The journey, however, will be complex and perilous, beset by
wrong turnings, chicanes and elephant traps. _______.But at the Conservative
Party conference this week the new prime minister could delay no longer. In a
speech that thrilled party activists, she declared that she will invoke Article
50 of the European Union treaty by the end of the March, trigerring a two-year
countdown that should see the Britain leave the union in early 2019._______.

(i) Brexit will
determine Britain’s fortune in the decades to come.

(ii) She hinted
that she would be prepared to steer Britain towards a harder sort of Brexit,
involving a wide separation of labour, product and financial markets.

(iii) With 64m
Britons in the back seat, perhaps this is why Theresa May has avoided talking
about the road ahead.

(A) ii and i
(B) i and ii
(C) iii and ii
(D) i and iii
(E) ii and iii

4. _________.
It’s not new, nor is it dissimilar to a discontent spreading throughout the
world, often manifested in skepticism towards international institutions,
trade, agreements and immigration. _______.Much of this discontent is driven by
fears that are not fundamentally economic.

(i) It’s true
that a certain anxiety over the forces of globalization, immigration,
technology, even change itself, has taken hold in America.

(ii) It can be
seen in Britain’s recent vote to leave the European Union and the rise of
populist parties around the world.

(iii)But some of
discontent is rooted in legitimate concerns about long-term economic forces.

(A) i and ii

(B) i and iii
(C) ii and iii
(D) ii and i
(E) ii and ii

5. As IS
contracts, the coalition’s generals seem even more confident._______. _______.
Iraq’s prime minister Haider-al-Abadi, from the Shia majority, has embraced
Sunni Arabs, rebuilding their force of irregulars that his predecessor largely
disbanded.

(i)Despite
falling oil prices, rapidly expanding production has helped meet the cost.

(ii)A third
contingent in six months arrived last month, quietly pushing the total of
American troops in Iraq to over 5000.

(iii) Iraq’s
army, which crumbled in the face of IS’s advance to the outskirts of Bagdad in
2014, has recovered its strength, thanks to American retraining and arms
supplies, including drones and F-16s for its rebuilt and retrained air force.

(A) i and iii
(B) ii and iii
(C) ii and i
(D) i and ii
(E) iii and i

In each of the
following question five choices are given. You have to choose the odd one among
the given choices and mark that as your answer.

6. (A) George W. Bush looked into Vladimir
Putin’s eyes and thought he saw his soul. He was wrong.
(B) Donald Trump appears to want to go much further and forge an entirely new
strategic alignment with Russia.
(C) Barack Obama attempted to “reset” relations with Russia, but by the end of
his term in office Russia had annexed Crimea, stirred up conflict elsewhere in
Ukraine and filled the power vacuum that Mr. Obama had left in Syria.
(D) Can he succeed, or will he be a third American president in a row to be
outfoxed by Mr. Putin?
(E) Mr Bannon, while admitting that Russia is a kleptocracy, sees Mr Putin as
part of a global revolt by nationalists and traditionalists against the liberal
elite-and therefore a natural ally for Mr. Trump.

7. (A) The chain folding patterns seen in
the nature bring certain pairs of amino acids close together predictably enough
for the fact to be used in the virtual-folding process.
(B) Protein chains form because amine groups and acid groups and acid groups
like to react together and link up.
(C) The third is a single hydrogen atom. But the fourth can be any combination
of atoms able to bond with the central carbon atom.     
(D) An amino acid has four arms, each connected to a central carbon atom. Two
arms are amine group and the acid group that give the molecule its name.
(E) In its fourth arm, called the side chain, which gives each type of amino
acids its individual characteristics.

8. (A) Jin Xing was country’s most
successful dancer before becoming a colonel in an army entertainment troupe.
(B) Ms Jin notes approvingly how Sai “rebelled “against what had appeared to be
her destiny as a pauper.
(C) He trained dancers in Brussels and Rome, before returning to China for a
sex-change operation.
(D) Her rejection of being a man flies in the face of Confucian culture.
(E) As a woman, she resumed her career as a ballerina, set up by the country’s
first ballet company, ran a bar in Beijing and married a German businessman.

9. (A) The range of reproductive options
has steadily widened.
(B) Last year another practice was added-mitochondrial transplantation or, as
the headlines would have it, three-parent children.
(C) ICSI, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, in which a sperm cell is physically
inserted into an egg bringing fatherhood to otherwise infertile men.
(D) A report published on February 14th by America’s National Academy of
Sciences gives qualified support to research into gene-editing techniques so precise
that genetic diseases like hemophilia and sickle cell anaemia can be fixed
before an embryo even starts to develop.
(E) AID (artificial insemination by donor), which dates back to the 19th
century and IVF (in vitro fertilization), first used in 1970s have become
everyday techniques.

Answers:
1. B
2. D
3. C
4. A
5. E
6. E
7. A
8. B
9. D