DPM 100

A to E
A. Words along with their meaning, Pronunciation and usage

Kneejerk (nee-jurk) adj

- of or relating to a knee-jerk.

- reacting according to a certain habitual manner; unthinking.

In a kneejerk reaction, they cancelled their tour when they were blamed for misappropriation
of funds.

Kamikaze (kah-mi-kah-zee) noun

- (during World War II) a member of a special corps in the Japanese air force charged with the
suicidal mission of crashing an aircraft laden with explosives into an enemy target, especially a
warship.

an airplane used for this purpose.

a person or thing that behaves in a wildly reckless or destructive manner.
His motorcycle stunt was akin to a kamikaze act.

Killjoy( kil-joi ) noun

- a person who spoils the joy or pleasure of others; spoilsport

His lack of enthusiasm acted as the killjoy during the picnic.
Knave(neyv) noun

- an unprincipled, untrustworthy, or dishonest person.

-a male servant.
a man of humble position.
The helpless knave stood quietly as the master reprimanded him harshly.

Knapsack (nap-sak ) noun

- a canvas, nylon, or leather bag for clothes, food, and other supplies, carried on the back
by soldiers, hikers.
A knapsack is an essential piece of luggage when you go on a long trek.

Kinsfolk (kinz-fohk) noun

- relatives or kindred.
The kinsfolk of the accident victim were informed by the police about the tragic event.

Kinship (kin-ship) noun

- the state or fact of being of kin; family relationship.

-relationship by nature, qualities, affinity.

I felt a certain kinship with the little girl and tried to soothe her and allay her fears.

Kibbutz (ki-boo ts, -boots) noun

- (in Israel) a community settlement, usually agricultural, organized under collectivist

principles.
The kibbutz were unanimous in their opposition to the new taxes levied by the
government.
Kitsch (kich) noun

- something of tawdry design, appearance, or content created to appeal to popular or

undiscriminating taste.
The murals on the walls were more kitsch than aesthetic art.

Knobble( nob-uh l) verb

- to knob (excess stone).

- to treat (semi refined puddled iron) on a hearth before shingling to produce wrought iron.

The school children , on a visit to the steel plant, were fascinated to watch the process of how
iron was knobbled in the hearth.
B. RC Passage (with Link)

Article 1: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/labour-rights-are-in-free-
fall/article31609817.ece

Summary : This article argues that as India slowly attempts to lift the nationwide lockdown under
compulsion of reviving the economy, labour rights are disappearing at an astonishing pace and
the authoritarian nature of the state is being exposed. The author notes that the move to
suspend labour rights, purportedly to reduce labour costs and thereby stimulate private
investment, is a futile one at the current juncture, as private agents wait and watch for a
predictable environment before committing their money. The article calls upon people to resist
the anti-working class moves of the government.

Article 2: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/getting-india-back-to-the-afghan-high-
table/article31609810.ece

Summary : This article, authored by a former diplomat, argues that India’s Afghan policy needs
to change and that we must openly talk to the Taliban and all political groups in the region,
including those perceived to be close to Pakistan. The author finds it regrettable that India finds
itself on the margins of international diplomacy in spite of having done a lot of groundwork for
the last 18 years since the Taliban was ousted from Kabul in 2001. The article advises that it is
not yet late for New Delhi to take corrective diplomatic action and that talking with all political
groups is the need of the hour.

Article 3: https://aeon.co/essays/the-china-tea-trade-was-a-paradox-of-global-capitalism

Summary : The post-Opium War tea trade has some important things to tell us about the history
of capitalism. Looking beyond the North Atlantic world, in the tea districts of 19th-century China
in particular, modern capitalism continued to develop, flexible and globally oriented in character.
The Chinese tea trade actually represented China's entry point into global capitalism. Such
activity constituted the first truly global division of labour, powered by the regional specialisation
of colonial-world cash crops - or, as W E B Du Bois put it in his book Black Reconstruction: a
'dark and vast sea of human labour in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the
West Indies and Central America and in the United States spawning the world's raw material
and luxury - cotton, wool, coffee, tea ' This global division of labour also reshaped the Chinese
countryside in dynamic and novel ways. In his book An Account of the Cultivation and
Manufacture of Tea in China, Ball wrote that Chinese tea merchants used the burning incense
sticks to track the time of various stages of tea roasting. ' By the late century, new competition
from the tea plantations of eastern India and Ceylon devastated the China trade. In the Chinese
tea trade the peasantry grew tea bushes on their own land, and the workshops operated inside
private homes.

Article 4: https://aeon.co/essays/even-the-anthropocene-is-nature-at-work-transforming-itself

Summary : In his book Novacene, James Lovelock writes: 'We must abandon the politically and
psychologically loaded idea that the Anthropocene is a great crime against nature The
Anthropocene is a consequence of life on Earth; an expression of nature. Lovelock follows
Spinoza in believing that humans and our actions are expressions of nature, even when we
appear to destroy nature. By seeking our own advantage and transforming our environment,
human beings don't destroy nature: we are nature, transforming itself. We don't transcend
nature; nature is not an object standing over there, that we do things to. Nature is infinitely
variable, and in causing changes in nature we don't diminish or destroy nature; our actions are
nature changing itself. How would such a state work in practice? Would animals and insects
become citizens? Should rivers and forests have seats at the UN? Should nature be recognised
as a collective subject with legal rights, as has happened in Bolivia and Ecuador? Such
strategies have their uses. For then we understand that everything that happens is nature
changing itself.

Article 5: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200813100648.htm

Summary : Researchers have made a key advance in the green chemistry pursuit of converting
the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into reusable forms of carbon via electrochemical reduction.
C. RC Passage (with Questions)

I cannot resist a literary analogy. The opening sentence of Charles Dickens’ novel David
Copperfield reads : ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that
station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’ The opening sentence of J.D.
Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, reads: ‘If you really want to hear about it , the first
thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like,
and how my parents were occupied ad all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield
kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it’. In the pages that follow, to a close approximation,
Dickens and Salinger use the same few thousand words. There are words that Salinger uses
but not Dickens, like elevator or crap. There are words that Dickens uses but not Salinger , like
caul and pettish. But they will be few compared with the words they share. Probably there is
atleast90 percent lexical concordance between the two books. Yet they are very different books.
The difference lies not in the use of a different set of words, but in the same set of words used in
a different pattern and order. Likewise, the source of the difference between a chimpanzee and
a human being lies not in the different genes, but in the same set of 30,000 genes used in a
different order and pattern.

I see this with confidence for one main reason. The most stunning surprise to great scientists
when they first lifted the lid on animal genomes was the discovery of the same set of genes in
wildly different animals. In the early 1980s, fly geneticists were thrilled to discover a small group
of genes they called the hox genes that seemed to set out the body plan of the fly during its
early development - roughly telling it where to put the head ,the legs ,the wings and so on . But
they were completely unprepared for what came next. Their mouse studying colleagues found
recognizably the same hox genes ,in the same order ,doing the same job. The same gene tells
a mouse embryo where ( but not how )to grow ribs as tells a fly embryo where to grow wings :
you can even swap them between species . Nothing had prepared biologists for this shock. It
meant ,in effect ,that the basic body plan of all animals had been worked out in the genome of a
long extinct ancestor that lived more than 600 million years before and preserved ever since in
its descendants (and that includes you).
Hox genes are the recipes for proteins called ‘transcription factors ‘, which means that their job
is to ‘switch on ‘ other genes. A transcription factor works by attaching itself to a region of DNA
called a promoter. In creatures such as flies and people( as opposed to
bacteria ,say) ,promoters consist of about five separate stretches of DNA code ,usually
upstream of the gene itself ,sometimes downstream. Each of those sequences attracts a
different transcription factor ,which in turn initiates (or blocks ) the transcription of the gene.

Most genes will not be activated until several of their promoters have caught transcription
factors. Each transcription factor is itself a product of another gene somewhere else in the
genome . The function of many genes is therefore to help switch other genes on or off. And the
susceptibility of a gene to being switched on or off depends on the sensitivity of its promoters. If
its promoters have shifted ,or change sequence so that the transcription factors find them more
easily ,the gene may be more active. Or if the change has made the promoters attract blocking
transcription factors rather than enhancing ones ,the gene may be less active.

Q1) Which of the following is NOT TRUE of hox genes ?

(A) they are genes of the same type found in different species.
(B) they play an instructional rolling species.
(C) they are interchangeable between species.
(D) they designed the body plan of species.
(E) their discovery and behavior astonished scientists.

Q2) In this passage ,the author uses a literary analogy to

(A) describe a phenomenon in genetics.

(B) to explain an evolutionary mechanism.
(C) to explain a biological pattern.
(D) to clarify a scientific theory or evolution.
(E) to highlight the differences between genes.
Q3) The difference between Dickens’ novel and Salinger’s novel

(A) is due to the choice of words.

(B) is not in content but in style.
(C) is a reflection of the words which were popular in their times.
(D) is the result of the variation in the use of words.
(E) is the cause of the lexical concordance between the two books.

Q4) It can be understood from the passage that most dreams get activated

(A) only if their promoters have attracted transcription factors.

(B) only if they switch on other jeans only if the promoters had changed sequence.
(C) only if they have five separate stretches of DNA code.
(D) only if all of the above conditions are fulfilled.

Q5)It can be inferred from the passage that Dickinson and Salinger

(A) make music a large number of same words in different contexts to different effect.
(B) make use of a small number of similar words in the same context.
(C) make use of a large number of same words with different meaning.
(D) Narrate similar experiences in the first few pages of their book by using different
vocabulary.
(E) came up with wholly different novels by following a different technique of using like
words.
D. Quantitative Aptitude

Q.1 ABC is an equilateral triangle of side 3 cm. CD and BG are parallel and DE = FE = FG, then
what is the length of BF?

(A) 3 (B) 7 (C) 8 (D) 2

Q.2 In the figure given below, triangle ABC and triangle CDE are equilateral such that ACE is a
straight line. G and F are midpoints of DE and BC respectively. If area of triangle ABC is 48
square units and area of triangle CDE is 120 square units, find the area of triangle AFG (in
square units).

(A) 20 (B) 16 (C) 24 (D) Data insufficient

Directions for questions Q.3 to Q.5:

Number of family members(of age 30 to 50) in five groups of joint families A,B,C,D,E in 2005
are 27,46,50,74,110 respectively and, in 2010 are 38,39,60,82,110 respectively.
Q.3 What is the minimum possible number of family members (out these five families) who
crossed the age of 50 years between 2005 and 2010?
(A) 7 (B) 29 (C) 22 (D) Data insufficient

Q.4 If the number of family members who crossed the age of 50 years between 2005 and 2010
in family C is the maximum possible then what is the number of family members who entered
the age group of 30 to 50 years between 2005 and 2010?
(A) 50 (B) 10 (C) 60 (D) 40

Q.5 What is the least possible number of family members out of these five families who entered
the 30 to 50 years between 2005 and 2010?
(A) 20 (B) 29 (C) 22 (D) 7

Q.6 A train is going from City A to city B and makes 5 stops on the way. 3 persons enter the
train after it has started from city A with 3 different tickets. How many different sets of tickets
they may have had?
(A) 6C3 (B) 7C3 (C) 6P3 (D) 15C3

Q.7 Six “x” have to be placed in the squares of the figure given below, such that each row
contains at least one “x” . In how many different ways can this be done?

(A) 155 (B) 55 (C) 154 (D) None of these

Q.8 Find the coefficient of x4 in the expansion of (1-x+x2)5

4 x 2 + 12 x + 13
Q.9 For real values of x, what is the maximum value of the expression ?
2x 2 + 6 x + 5
(A) 12 (B) 8 (C) 9 (D) 6

Q.10 Batsman of Indian fraud league are given instructions by a bookie that they would score
the runs in each over defined by the following function.
f(n) = n, for 0 < n ≤ 10
= n – f(n-10), for 10 < n ≤ 30
n
=   , for 30 < n ≤ 50
 3
f(n) is number of runs being scored in nth over and [x] is the greatest integer less than or equal
to x. Find the total runs scored by India if they played all the 50 overs following the instructions.
(A) 155 (B) 555 (C) 461 (D) 573
E. DILR – 1 Set

Directions Q.1 to Q.4:

Table-1 shows the number of ships that arrived at Mumbai port on different days of the week
from October 9th to 15th (i.e. from Sunday to Saturday).

October 9th October 10th October 11th October 12th October 13th October 14th October 15th
Day Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
Number of ships arrived 28 47 40 45 40 35 25

Each of the ships mentioned in Table-1 departs from the port in the next week, starting from
October 16th to October 22nd (i.e. Sunday to Saturday). Table-2 shows the number of ships that
departed from the port on different days.

October 16th October 17th October 18th October 19th October 20th October 21th October 22th
Day Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
Number of ships departed 37 43 50 45 35 30 20

Further, no ship arriving at the port can depart from the port on or before the 5 th day after the
day on which it arrived. Also, no ship can remain at the port after the 10 th day after the day on
which it arrived. For example, a ship which arrived on Wednesday cannot depart on or before
the next Monday but it must definitely depart on or before the next Saturday.

Q.1 if, of the ships that arrived on Monday, October 10 th , 22 ships departed on the next Sunday
then the number of ships that arrived on Sunday, October 9 th, and Departed after the next
Sunday is
(A) 13 (B) 15 (C) 22 (D) 24
Q.2 If in the above table, all the ships that arrived on or before Tuesday, left on or before next
Tuesday, then the number of ships that arrived on Wednesday and departed on the next
Tuesday is
(A) 10 (B) 15 (C) 20 (D) 25

Q.3 If 20 ships that arrived on Wednesday departed on Friday, the number of ships that arrived
on Friday and departed on Thursday is at least
(A) 5 (B) 10 (C) 25 (D) 30

Q.4 The number of ships that arrived on Tuesday and departed on Monday is at least
(A) 0 (B) 3 (C) 5 (D) 10