Direction: You have a passage with 10 questions following the passage. Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
PASSAGE
Jazz had its beginnings in song. Its roots lie deep in the tradition of Negro folk singing that once flourished throughout the rural Southland of the United States before the Civil War. The Negro, in those days, owned only a few crude musical instruments which he made for himself from boxes, barrels and brooms. His voice was his principal means of musical expression. Songs of work and play, trouble and hope, rose on rich and rhythmic voices everywhere in the South - from peddlers crying their wares to the countryside, from work gangs on the rail roads, from families gathered at the days’s end to sing away their weariness in their unpainted cottages overlooking the cotton fields, from the wayside churches singing with the sounds of Sabbath praise. These were the voices which the early Negro musicians imitated and transferred to their horns when they taught themselves to play the discarded band instruments that come into hands at the close of the Civil War in the eighteensixties. As played by their proud Negro owners, the instruments became extensions of the human voice - “singing horns” which opened the way to Jazz. For this reason there has always been a strong, singing quality to Jazz.
SOME IMPORTANT WORDS
crude : simple and not very accurate
peddler : a person who travels from place to place to sell small objects
wares : things sold in the streets/at a market weariness : tiredness wayside :the area at the side of a road/path
Sabbath : the holiday of the week that is used for resting and worshipping God. (Jews ⇒ Saturday : Christians ⇒ Sunday)
discarded : got rid of something that you no longer wanted/needed.

Direction: You have 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 1760, a man named Tiphaigne de la Roche made a bizarre prediction. In an imaginary story called Giphantie, mirror images of scenes from nature could be captured permanently on a canvas covered with a sticky material. After the material dried in darkness, the image would remain on the canvas forever. At the time, the idea was unheard of. It was not until the following century that the concept of photography was born, starting with some experiments by Nicephore Niepce. Nicephore Niepce, who was a French inventor, was interested in lithography, which is a printmaking technique. He was experimenting with lithography when he found a way of copying etchings onto glass and pewter plates using a chemical that changes when it is exposed to light. He learned to burn images onto the plates and then print the images on paper. He shared his findings with Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, who improved the process and announced it to the French Academy of Sciences in 1839. The Daguerreotype, the photography method named after Daguerre, met with great success. It was so successful, in fact, that French newspapers said the French public had an illness called Daguerreot-ypomania! Daguerreotypes were inexpensive and were suitable for portraiture. People called the Daguerreotype a “mirror with a memory”. Some portrait artists went out of business when Daguerreotypes came into vogue. Others became Daguerreotypists, now known as photographers.
SOME IMPORTANT WORDS
bizarre : very strange or unusual behaviour.
lithography : the process of printing from a smooth surface, for eg. a metal plate, that has been specially prepared so that ink may only stick to the design to be printed.
etchings : pictures that are printed from an etched (cut lines into) piece of glass, metal, etc. in order to make words or a picture) pewter : a grey metal made by mixing tin with lead, used especially in the past for making cups, dishes, etc.
Daguerreotype : a photograph taken using an early process that used a silver plate and mercury gas.
portraiture : the art of making portraits.
vogue : a fashion for something.