LANGUAGE SKILLS PRIMER # 18

A part of CAT Course Material

Language Practice Exercise

RC Passage 1
I grew up in a small town not far from Kalimpong. In pre-liberalization India, everything arrived late: not just
material things but also ideas. Magazines — old copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic — arrived late
too, after the news had become stale by months or, often, years. This temporal gap turned journalism into
literature, news into legend, and historical events into something akin to plotless stories. But like those who knew
no other life, we accepted this as the norm. The dearth of reading material in towns and villages in socialist India is
hard to imagine, and it produced two categories of people: those who stopped reading after school or college, and
those — including children — who read anything they could find. I read road signs with the enthusiasm that
attaches to reading thrillers. When the iterant kabadiwala, collector of papers, magazines, and rejected things,
visited our neighbourhood, I rushed to the house where he was doing business. He bought things at unimaginably
low prices from those who’d stopped having any use for them, and I rummaged through his sacks of old magazines.
Sometimes, on days when business was good, he allowed me a couple of copies of Sportsworld magazine for free.
I’d run home and, ignoring my mother’s scolding, plunge right in — consuming news about India’s victory in the
Benson and Hedges Cup….
Two takeaways from these experiences have marked my understanding of the provincial reader’s life: the sense of
belatedness, of everything coming late, and the desire for pleasure in language. …. Speaking of belatedness, the
awareness of having been born at the wrong time in history, of inventing things that had already been discovered
elsewhere, far away, without our knowledge or cooperation, is a moment of epiphany and deep sadness. I
remember a professor’s choked voice, narrating to me how all the arguments he’d made in his doctoral
dissertation, written over many, many years of hard work (for there indeed was a time when PhDs were written
over decades), had suddenly come to naught after he’d discovered the work of C.W.E. Bigsby. This, I realised as I
grew older, was one of the characteristics of provincial life: that they (usually males) were saying trite things with
the confidence of someone declaring them for the first time. I, therefore, grew up surrounded by would-be
Newtons who claimed to have discovered gravity (again). There’s a deep sense of tragedy attending this sort of
thing — the sad embarrassment of always arriving after the party is over. And there’s a harsh word for that sense
of belatedness: “dated.” What rescues it is the unpredictability of these anachronistic “discoveries” — the
randomness and haphazardness involved in mapping connections among thoughts and ideas, in a way that hasn’t
yet been professionalised. [Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “The Provincial Reader”, by Sumana Roy, Los
Angeles Review of Books]

1. What use was the kabadiwala (wastepicker) to the author?

(A) The kabadiwala bought up all her magazines.
(B) The kabadiwala’s stock of books and magazines were of interest to the author.
(C) The kabadiwala was about to steal the author’s magazines.
(D) The author ordered books online which the kabadiwala delivered.

2. What according to the author is essential about the experience of being a ‘provincial reader’?
(A) Belatedness in the sense of coming late for everything.
(B) Over-eagerness.
(C) Accepting a temporal gap between what was current in the wider world and the time at which these arrived in
the provincial location.
(D) None of the above

3. Why did the author feel a sense of epiphany and deep sadness?
(A) Because the things that felt special and unique to the author, were already established and accepted thought in
the wider world.
(B) Because the author was less well-read than others.
(C) Because the author missed being in a big city.
(D) All the above
4. What does the word ‘anachronistic’ as used in the passage, mean?
(A) Rooted in a non-urban setting
(B) Related to a mofussil area
(C) Connected with another time
(D) Opposed to prevailing sensibilities

5. Which of the following options captures the meaning of the last sentence best?
(A) Though the author feels provincial, she pretends to be from the metropolis.
(B) Though the author feels dated in her access to intellectual ideas, her lack of metropolitan sophistication lets her
engage with the ideas with some originality.
(C) Though the author is aware of the limitedness of her knowledge, she is confident and can hold her own in a
crowd. She also proud of her roots in the small town.
(D) All the above

PASSAGE 2

Until the Keeladi site was discovered, archaeologists by and large believed that the Gangetic plains in the north
urbanised significantly earlier than Tamil Nadu. Historians have often claimed that large scale town life in India first
developed in the Greater Magadha region of the Gangetic basin. This was during the ‘second urbanisation’ phase.
The ‘first urbanisation phase’ refers to the rise of the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation. Tamil Nadu was thought
to have urbanised at this scale only by the third century BCE. The findings at Keeladi push that date back
significantly. … Based on linguistics and continuity in cultural legacies, connections between the Indus Valley
Civilisation, or IVC, and old Tamil traditions have long been suggested, but concrete archaeological evidence
remained absent. Evidence indicated similarities between graffiti found in Keeladi and symbols associated with the
IVC. It bolstered the arguments of dissidents from the dominant North Indian imagination, who have argued for
years that their ancestors existed contemporaneously with the IVC. … All the archaeologists I spoke to said it was
too soon to make definitive links between the Keeladi site and the IVC. There is no doubt, however, that the
discovery at Keeladi has changed the paradigm. In recent years, the results of any new research on early India have
invited keen political interest, because proponents of Hindu nationalism support the notion of Vedic culture as
fundamental to the origins of Indian civilisation. … The Keeladi excavations further challenge the idea of a single
fountainhead of Indian life. They indicate the possibility that the earliest identity that can recognisably be
considered ‘Indian’ might not have originated in North India. That wasn’t all. In subsequent seasons of the Keeladi
dig, archaeologists discovered that Tamili, a variant of the Brahmi script used for writing inscriptions in the early
iterations of the Tamil language, could be dated back to the sixth century BCE, likely a hundred years before
previously thought. So not only had urban life thrived in the Tamil lands, but people who lived there had developed
their own script. “The evolution of writing is attributed to Ashoka’s edicts, but 2600 years ago writing was
prevalent in Keeladi,” Mathan Karuppiah, a proud Madurai local, told me. “A farmer could write his own name on a
pot he owned. The fight going on here is ‘You are not the one to teach me to write, I have learnt it myself.’ ”
[Excerpted from “The Dig”, by Sowmiya Ashok, Fifty-Two]

6. What was the assumption about the origin of urban life in India before the Keeladi dig?
(A) The origins lay in the northern Gangetic plains, which urbanised earlier than the south.
(B) The Indus Valley Civilization was the first urban civilization of India.
(C) The second urbanization was known to be in the Magadha empire.
(D) Both (A) and (B)

7. “The Keeladi excavations further challenge the idea of a single fountainhead of Indian life.” — in elaboration of
this sentence, which of these options follows?
(A) Dominant theories of how urban and modern life came about in ancient India were proved wrong by the
Keeladi archaeological dig.
(B) Neither the Indus Valley Civilization, nor the ancient urban civilization of Magadha are clear explanations of how
urban life emerged in the Keeladi region of southern India in the third century BCE.
(C) The Keeladi archaeological dig proved that Indian urban and modern life emerged independently in several
historical periods and geographies, and no one theory is enough to explain it.
(D) None of the above
8. Language, including a script similar to the Brahmi script, emerged in Keeladi in the sixth century BCE. Which of
the following is the most convincing conclusion from this statement?
(A) Keeladi is a centre of culture and learning far superior to any others in ancient India.
(B) People of Keeladi were illiterate and could not use language to inscribe on their pots and pans.
(C) Ancient urban history of India, as we know it today, could significantly be altered by the findings of the
advances achieved by the Keeladi civilization.
(D) All the above

9. BCE is the acronym for:

(A) Before the Common Era
(B) Before Colloquial Era
(C) Before Chapel Eternal
(D) Behind Christ Era

10. “A farmer could write his own name on a pot he owned. The fight going on here is ‘You are not the one to teach
me to write, I have learnt it myself.’ ” — These sentences imply:
(A) That the Keeladi civilization was an inegalitarian one.
(B) That the Keeladi civilization did not conserve the access to education and literacy only for the elite.
(C) That the farmers of the Keeladi civilization were also potters.
(D) All the above

PASSAGE 2

The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social
connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public
LiveJournal. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers
per post. Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced
connection—this feverish, electric, unliveable hell.
The curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I’d guess, was around
2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had
become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a
three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where
everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and moaned about articles that had been commissioned to make people
moan. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be
ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that
promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like
something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.
Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to
glimmer. As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around
living life and be visible to other people. But on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to
communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built
around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct—like the
main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute
for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-travelled on Instagram;
why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; and why, on Twitter, making a righteous political
statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself. The everyday madness perpetuated by
the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the centre of the universe. It’s
as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes
everything look like our own reflection.
11. Which of the following statements can be inferred from the above passage?
(A) The internet expanded very slowly
(B) The internet can be used to cause harm
(C) The internet is addictive
(D) The main purpose of social media platforms is to dissuade people from showing off

12. All the following statements are ‘truisms’, except:

(A) The internet has changed the way the world works.
(B) A preference for cat videos can reveal a lot about your personality.
(C) Like with any tool, digital technology has both advantages and disadvantages.
(D) Only time can tell what the future holds.

13. Which of the following comes closest to the underlined sentence in the passage?
(A) The way we use the internet says a lot about who we are.
(B) The internet has reduced the distance between people living across the world.
(C) The internet has the ability to customise what we access based on our identity.
(D) The internet only shows us what we don’t want to see.

14. Which of the following is a metaphor?

(A) the village of the internet
(B) this feverish, electric, unliveable hell
(C) three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success
(D) all the above

15. Which of the following categories best describes this piece of writing?
(A) Non-fiction essay
(B) Fiction
(C) Academic paper
(D) Poem

1. B 2. C 3. A 4. C 5. B
6. A 7. C 8. C 9. A 10. B
11. B 12. B 13. C 14. D 15. A