reading comprehension section 12 Detailed Explanation And More Example

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

The University Grants Commissions directive to college and university lecturers to spend a minimum of 22 hours a week in direct teaching is the product Of budgetary cutbacks rather than pedagogic wisdom. It may seem odd, at first blush, that teachers should protest about teaching a mere 22 hours. However, If one considers the amount of time academics require to prepare lectures of good qualify as well as the time they need to spend doing research, It is clear that most conscientious teacher's work more than 40 hours a week. In university systems around the world, lecturers rarely spend more than 12 to 15 hours In direct teaching activities a week. The average college lecturer in India does not have any office space.

If computers are available, internet connectivity is unlikely. Libraries are poorly stocked. Now the UGC says universities must implement a complete freeze on all permanent recruitment, abolish all posts which have been vacant for more than a year, and cut staff strength by 10 percent. And it is in order to ensure that these cutbacks do not affect the quantum of teaching that existing lecturers are being asked to work longer. Obviously, the quality of teaching and academic work in general will decline. While it is true that some college teachers do not take their classes regularly, the UGC and the Institutions concerned must find a proper way to hold them accountable. An absentee teacher will continue to play truant even if the number of hours he is required to teach goes up.

All of us are well aware of the unsound state that the Indian higher education system is in today. Thanks to years of sustained financial neglect most Indian universities and colleges do no research worth the name. Even as the number of students entering colleges has increased dramatically, public investment in higher education has actually declined in relative terms. Between 1985 and 1997, when public expenditure on higher education as a percentage of outlays on all levels of education grew by more than 60 percent in Malaysia and 20 percent in Thailand, India showed a decline of more than 10 percent. Throughout the world, the number of teachers in higher education per million population grew by more than 10 percent In the same period in India it fell by one percent. Instead of transferring the burden of government apathy on to the backs of the teachers, the UGC should insist that the needs of the country's university system are adequately catered for.

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."