English Reading Comprehension Set 76

Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the following questions given below it.
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“No man is an Island, entire of itself… And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee”. — John Donne What are the borders of the humanspirit, the contours which shape what we call the soul? That metaphysical question gained viral urgency worldwide when a photograph of the corpse of a three-year-old boy washed up on a beach spread like wildfire over the Net.The child, whose body was picked up and carried away by an anguished border patrolman was, together with other members of his refugee family, drowned when he was trying to cross into Europe in an overcrowded and unsafe vessel from war-torn Syria. The boy is just one of the many thousands of illegal migrants from countries as disparate as Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and various parts of Africa who are desperately — literally at the cost of their lives — fleeing murderous civil war, rape, torture and starvation to seek sanctuary in a Europe already besieged by a host of its own internal problems, including bitter social and political dissension and, in many cases, dire economic distress and unemployment. Even as individual nations and organisations try to grapple with the problem in terms of law enforcement, emigration legalities and ethical compulsions, a number of questions arise which go beyond those constantly mutating diagrams , crisscrossed by arbitrary manmade lines called borders.

Borders demarcate not just where one or more countries end and where others begin; they divide where one definition of humanity ends and another begins. A refugee,often called a displaced person, is one seeking entry, often unsanctioned, not just into another country but into the common domain of all humanity. It is this landscape of our human spirit, of the soul if you prefer, which all of us inescapably share with one another. Geographical and political borders are the illusory fault lines which conceal this essential oneness, this indivisibility. For almost 70 years, generations who have lived and died on the Indian subcontinent have been victims of a psychosomatic disorder which has yet to find mention in any dictionary of geopolitical pharmacology, but could one day come to be defined as borderophobia, a form of intense paranoia which makes us believe that those who live across a line of demarcation, often drawn overnight, are to be demonised, or at least denigrated and despised, as morally, culturally and perhaps even genetically different from we who live on this side of the mythical meridian which separates us. A line is drawn in the shifting dust of history — through military might, colonialism, the rise and fall of rulers — and one people become two antagonists; a single Earth becomes a segregation of strife. Even as an interdependent network of electronic communication seeks unity to make whole again a planet cruelly vivisected by economic and environmental exploitation, the forces of a fratricidal fanaticism gain ground through the cancerous growth of transborder organisations like al- Qaida, IS and other unholy alliances against humanity. Such forces reveal all too clearly that far more perilous to the human legacy than the borders marked on our maps are those unmarked barriers etched deeply within our minds, within our consciousness as to who and what we are and to whom and what we belong. The first, haunting picture of a blue earth taken from outer space gave us an enduringemblem of the fragility of our common destiny. The photograph of a three-year-old sacrificed on the altar of mind-made borders now shows us just how endangered that destiny has become.

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Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it.

1.What does Mutating diagrams signify in the given passage?

a.Borders

b.Maps

c.Drawings

d.Boundary

e.None of these

2.Which of the following can be the suitable title of the passage?

a.Borders of the soul

b.Political boundaries

c.Military disputes

d.All the above

e.None of these

3.Which of the following statement is Not True according to the given passage?

a.Borders divide not only countries but also humanity

b.With the growth of transborder organsations,fratricidal fananticism's force faces loss of life.

c.The photograph of the dead body of a three-year-old boy got viral on internet.

d.Nations and organisations are trying to deal with the problems of law enforcement, emigration legalities and ethical compulsions.

e.None of these

4.Which of the following statement is/are true according to the given passage?

I.  Syria,Afghanistan,Pakistan,Iran are among the countries from where illegal migrants move to other countries.

II. A Europe is besieged by its own internal problems.

III.Generations who have lived and died on the Indian subcontinent more than 70 years have been victims of borderphobia.

a.III

b.II & I

c.II

d.II & III

e.I

5.What is the central idea of the passage?

a.Terrorist attacks create borders and boundaries

b.Borders vilify the humanity

c.Individual disputes among leaders create political unrest

d.All the above

e.None of these

Directions (6-8); Choose the word which is most SIMILAR in meaning of the word printed in bold as used in the passage.

6.Denigrate

a.Defame

b.indifferent

c.commend

d.applaud

e.None of these

7.Endure

a.Halt

b.abide

c.abate

d.oppose

e.None of these

8.Inescapable

a.avoidable

b.formal

c.inevitable

d.abjure

e.None of these

Directions (9-10); Choose the word which is most OPPOSITE in meaning of the word printed in bold as used in the passage.

9.Etch

a.reject

b.accept

c.contour

d.confuse

e.None of these

10.Anguish

a.solace

b.torment

c.tangible

d.solicit

Answers

1.  b

2.  a
3.  b
4.  c
5.  b
6.  a
7.  b
8.  c
9.  d
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