Comprehension
Direction: You have two brief passages with 5 questions following each passage. Read the passages carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
PASSAGE
In the technological systems of tomorrow-fast, fluid and self-regulating-machines will deal with the flow of physical materials; men with the flow of information and insight. Machines will increasingly perform tasks. Machines and men both, instead of being concentrated in gigantic factories and factory cities, will be scattered across the globe, linked together by amazingly sensitive, near-instantaneous communications. Human work will move out of the factory and mass office into the community and the home. Machines will be synchronized, as some already are, to the billionth of a second; men will be de-synchronized. The factory whistle will vanish. Even the clock, “the key machine of the modern industrial age” as Lewis Mumford called it a generation ago, will lose some of its power over humans, as distinct from purely technological affairs. Simultaneously, the organisation needed to control technology shift from bureaucracy to Ad-hocracy, from permanence to transience, and from a concern with the present to a focus on the future. In such a world, the most valued attributes of the industrial age become handicaps. The technology of tomorrow requires not millions of lightly lettered men, ready to work in unison at endlessly repetitive jobs, it requires not men who take orders in unblinking fashion, aware that the price of bread is mechanical submission to authority, but men who can make critical judgments, who can weave their way through novel environments, who are quick to spot new relationships in the rapidly changing reality. It requires men who, in C.P. Snow’s compelling terms, “have the future in their bones”.
SOME IMPORTANT WORDS
near- :very immediate instantaneous
synchronized : happened at the same time or moved at the same speed as something.
bureaucracy: a system of government where the officials are not elected.
Adhocracy : a system with a lack of structure; opposite of bureaucracy.
trausience : temporary.
attributes : qualities.
- Near-instantaneous communications may be regarded as a symbol of
-
View Hint View Answer Discuss in Forum
synchronization
Correct Option: D
synchronization
- The future man, according to this passage, must be
-
View Hint View Answer Discuss in Forum
most capable of dealing with the changing reality
Correct Option: B
most capable of dealing with the changing reality
- The technological system of tomorrow will be marked by
-
View Hint View Answer Discuss in Forum
automation
Correct Option: C
automation
Direction: You have two brief passages with 5 questions following each passage. Read the passages carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
PASSAGE
Our awareness of time has reached such a pitch of intensity that we suffer acutely whenever our travels take us into some corner of the world where people are not interested in minutes and seconds. The unpunctuality of the orient, for example is appalling to those who come freshly from a land of fixed meal-times and regular train services. For a modern American or Englishman, waiting is a psychological torture. An Indian accepts the blank hours with
resignation, even with satisfaction. He has not lost the fine art of doing nothing. Our notion of time as a collection of minutes, each of which must be filled with some business or amusement, is wholly alien to the Greek. For the man who lives in a pre-industrial world, time moves at a slow and easy pace; he does not care about each minute, for the good reason that he has not been made conscious of the existence of minutes.
SOME IMPORTANT WORDS
orient :the countries of Asia, especially of eastern Asia, (China, Japan, Russia, etc.)
appalling : shocking; extremely bad.
notion : an idea, a belief or an understanding of something.
alien : not usual or acceptable. pitch : the highest point of something
intensity : the strength of something
acutely : to a severe and dangerous degree
torture : mental/physical suffering blank
hours: leisure/empty time
- The orient in the passage refers to
-
View Hint View Answer Discuss in Forum
China and Japan
Correct Option: A
China and Japan
- According to the author
-
View Hint View Answer Discuss in Forum
the Americans or the Englishmen are punctual
Correct Option: B
the Americans or the Englishmen are punctual