English — Set 18

Context: Question No. (12-16) based on the following passage: Today perhaps your only association with the word 'polio' is the Sabin Oral Vaccine that protects children from the disease. Fifty five years ago this was not so. The dreaded disease, which mainly affects the brain and spinal cord, causing stiffening and weakening of muscles, crippling and paralysis - which is Why I am in a wheelchair today. If somebody had predicted, when I was born, that this would happen to me, no one would have believed it. I was seventh child in a family of four pairs of brothers and sisters, with huge 23 year gap between the first and last. I was so fair and brown haired that I looked more look like a foreigner than a Dawood Bohri. I was also considered to be the healthiest of the brood.

Context: Study the following passage and answer the questions based on it. (15- 19 ) Soft bodied animals like caterpillars often fall a prey to voracious hunters like birds or reptiles. Despite having no means to 'actively' defend themselves, with weapons like claws or jaws, they have nevertheless, evolved other equally effective deterrents. A particular species of the caterpillar lives at an altitude over 2,500 metres in the Himalayas. It uses prominent colour to inform would be predators of its in edibility. In the event that an inexperienced or adventurous bird did eat the caterpillar, it would probably vomit it soon after, and subsequently desist from attacking similar species in future. Though this would do the unfortunate victim no good, the species benefits. A rare example of the martyr among animals.

Context: Pick out the best one which can complete incomplete stem correctly and meaningfully.

Context: The world dismisses curiosity by calling it idle or mere idle curiosity even though curious persons are seldom idle. Parents do their best to extinguish curiosity in their children because it makes life difficult to be faced everyday with a string of unanswerable questions about what makes fire hot or why grass grows. Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline are invited to join our university. With the university, they go on asking their questions and trying to find the answers. In the eyes of a scholar, that is what a university for. some of the questions which the scholars ask seem to the world to be scarcely worth asking, let alone answering. they asked questions too minute and specialised for you and me to understand without years of explanation. If the world inquires of one of them why he wants to know the answer to a particular question he may say especially if he is a scientist, that the answer will in some obscure way make possible a new machine or weapon or gadget. He talks that way because he knows that the world understands and respects utility. But to you who are now part of the university, he will say that he wants to know the answer simply because he does not know it, the way the mountain climber wants to climb a mountain, simply because it is there. Similarly a historian asked by an outsider why he studies history may come out with the argument that he has learnt to respect to report on such occasions, something about knowledge of the past making it possible to understand the present and mould the future. But if you really want to know why a historian studies the past, the answer is much simpler, something happened and he would like to know what. All this does not mean that the answers which scholars to find to their enormous consequences but these seldom form the reason for asking the question or pursuing the answers. It is true that scholars can be put to work answering questions for sake of the consequences as thousands are working now, for example, in search of a cure for cancer. But this is not the primary scholars. For the consequences are usually subordinate to the satisfaction of curiosity.