reading comprehension Practice Questions Answers Test with Solutions & More Shortcuts

DIRECTIONS:

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below. Certain words/phrases are printed in bold to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions.

PASSAGE

In the second week of August 1998, just a few days after the incidents of bombing the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-esSalaam, a high-powered, brain-storming session was held near Washington D.C., to discuss various aspects of terrorism. The meeting was attended by ten of America's leading experts in various fields such as germ and chemical warfare, public health, disease control and also by the doctors and the law-enforcing officers. Being asked to describe the horror of possible bio-attack, one of the experts narrated the following gloomy scenario.

A culprit in a crowded business centre or in a busy shopping mall of a town empties a test tube containing some fluid, which in turn creates an unseen cloud of germ of a dreaded disease like anthrax capable of inflicting a horrible death within 5 days on any one who inhales it. At first 500, or so victims feel that they have mild influenza which may recede after a day or two. Then the symptoms return again and their lungs start filling with fluid. They rush to local hospitals for treatment, but the panic-stricken people may find that the medicare services run quickly out of drugs due to excessive demand. But no one would be able to realise that a terrorist attack has occurred. One cannot deny the possibility that the germ involved would be of contagious variety capable of causing an epidermic. The meeting concluded that such attacks, apart from causing immediate human tragedy, would have dire long-term effects on the political and social fabric of a country by way of ending people's trust on the competence of the government.

The experts also said that the bombs used in Kenya and Tanzania were of the old-fashion variety and involved quantities of high explosives, but new terrorism will prove to be more deadly and probably more elusive than hijacking an aeroplane or a gelignite of previous decades. According to Bruce Hoffman, an American specialist on political violence, old terrorism generally had a specific manifesto - to overthrow a colonial power or the capitalist system and so on. These terrorists were not shy about planting a bomb or hijacking an aircraft and they set some limit to their brutality. Killing so many innocent people might turn their natural supporters off. Political terrorists want a lot of people watching but not a lot of people dead. "Old terrorism sought to change the world while the new sort is often practised by those who believe that the world has gone beyond redemption", he added.

Hoffman says, "New terrorism has no long-term agenda but is ruthless in its short-term intentions. It is often just a cacophonous cry of protest or an outburst of religious intolerance or a protest against the West in general and the US in particular. Its perpetrators may be religious fanatics or diehard opponent of a government and see no reason to show restraint. They are simply intent on inflicting the maximum amount of pain on the victim."

DIRECTIONS:

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words in the passage are printed in bold to help you to locate them easily while answering some of the questions.

PASSAGE

At one time it would have been impossible to imagine the integration of different religious thoughts, ideas and ideals. That is because of the closed society, the lack of any communication or interdependence on other nations. People were happy and content amongst themselves; they did not need any more. The physical distance and cultural barriers prevented any exchange of thought and beliefs. But such is not the case today. Today, the world has become a much smaller place, thanks to the adventures and miracles of science. Foreign nations have become our next-door neighbors. Mingling of population is bringing about an interchange of thought. We are slowly realizing that the world is a single cooperative group1. Other religions have become forces with which we have to reckon and we are seeking for ways and means by which we can live together in peace and harmony.

We cannot have religious unity and peace so long as we assert that we are in possession of the light and all others are grouping in the darkness That very assertion is a challenge to a fight. The political ideal of the world is not so much a single empire with a homogeneous, Civilization and single communal will a brotherhood of free nations differing profoundly in life and mind, habits and institutions, existing side by side in peace and order, harmony and cooperation and each contributing to the world its own unique and specific best, which is irreducible to , the terms of the others. The cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century, and the nationalism of , the nineteenth are combined in our ideal of a world commonwealth, which allows every branch of the human family to find freedom, security and selfrealization in the larger life of man , kind. I see no hope for the religious future of the world, if this ideal is not extended to the religious, sphere also?, When two or three different systems claim that they contain the revelation of the very core and center of truth and the acceptance of it is the exclusive pathway to heaven, conflicts are inevitable. In such conflicts one religion will not, allow others to steal a march over it and no one can gain ascendancy until the world is reduced to dust and ashes. To obliterate every other religion than, ones is a sort of Bolshevism in religion which we must try to prevent.

We can do so only if we accept something like the Indian solution, which seeks the unity of religion not in a common creed but in a common quest. Let us believe in a unity of spirit and not of organization, a unity which secures ample liberty not only for every individual but for every type of organized life which has proved itself effective. For almost all historical forms of life and thought can claim the sanction of experience and so the authority of God. The world would be a much poorer thing if one creed absorbed the rest. God wills a rich harmony and not a colorless uniformity. The comprehensive and synthetic spirit of Indianism had made it a mighty forest with a thousand waving aims each fulfilling its function and all directed by the spirit of God. Each thing in its place and all associated in the divine concert making with their various voices and even dissonance, as Heraclitus would say, the most exquisite harmony should be our ideal.