Reading Comprehension Questions with Solution (Test 2)

Instruction for 1 to 5:

The Union Government’s present position vis-a-vis the upcoming United  Nations conference on racial and related discrimination worldwide seems to be  the following: discuss race please, not caste; caste is our very own and not at  all as bad as you think. The gross hypocrisy of that position has been lucidly  underscored by Kancha Ilaiah. Explicitly, the world community is to be cheated  out of considering the matter on the technicality that caste is not, as a concept,  tantamount to a racial category. Internally, however, allowing the issue to be  put on the agenda at the said conference would, we are patriotically  admonished, damage the country’s image. Somehow, India’s virtual beliefs  elbow out concrete actualities. Inverted representations, as we know, have  often been deployed in human histories as balm for the forsaken — religion  being the most persistent of such inversions. Yet, we would humbly submit that  if globalising our markets is thought as good for the ‘national’ pocket,  globalising our social inequities might not be so bad for the mass of our people.  After all, racism was as uniquely institutionalized in South Africa as caste  discrimination has been within our society; why then can’t we permit the world  community to express itself on the latter with a fraction of the zeal with which,  through the years, we pronounced on the former?  

As to the technicality about whether or not caste is admissible into an agenda  about race (that the conference is also about ‘related discriminations’ tends to  be forgotten), a reputed sociologist has recently argued that where race is a  ‘biological’ category caste is a ‘social’ one. Having earlier fiercely opposed  implementation of the Mandal Commission Report, the said sociologist is at  least to be complemented now for admitting, however tangentially, that caste  discrimination is a reality, although, in his view, incompatible with racial  discrimination. One would like quickly to offer the hypothesis that biology, in  important ways that affect the lives of many millions, is in itself perhaps a social  construction. But let us look at the matter in another way. If it is agreed — as  per the position today at which anthropological and allied scientific  determinations rest — that the entire race of homo sapiens derived from an  original black African female (called ‘Eve’), then one is hard put to understand  how, one some subsequent ground, ontological distinctions are to be drawn  either between races or castes. Let us also underline the distinction between  the supposition that we are all god’s children and the rather more  substantiated argument about our descent from ‘Eve’, lest both positions are  thought to be equally diversionary. It then stands to reason that all subsequent  distinctions are, in modern parlance, ‘constructed’ ones, and like all ideological constructions, attributable to changing equations between knowledge and  power among human communities through contested histories here, there,  and elsewhere. This line of thought receives, thankfully, extremely  consequential buttress from the findings of the Human Genome Project.  Contrary to earlier (chiefly 19th-century colonial) persuasions on the subject of  race, as well as, one might add, the somewhat infamous Jensen offerings in the  20th century from America, those finding deny the genetic difference between  ‘races’. If anything, they suggest that environmental factors impinge on gene  function, as a dialectic seems to unfold between nature and culture. It would  thus seem that ‘biology’ as the constitution of pigmentation enters the picture  first only as a part of that dialectic. Taken together, the original mother  stipulation and the Genome findings ought indeed to furnish ground for human  equality across the board, as well as yield policy initiatives towards equitable  material dispensations aimed at building a global order where, in Hegel’s  stirring formulation, only the rational constitutes the right. Such, sadly, is not  the case as every day fresh arbitrary grounds for discrimination are constructed  in the interests of sectional dominance.  

Q1. When the author writes ‘globalizing our social inequities’, the reference is  to 

Q2. According to the author, ‘inverted representations as a balm for the  forsaken’

Q3. Based on the passage, which broad areas unambiguously fall under the  purview of the UN conference being discussed?

1. Racial prejudice  
2. Racial pride  
3. Discrimination, racial or otherwise  
4. Caste-related discrimination  
5. Race-related discrimination

Q4. According to the author, the sociologist who argued that race is a  ‘biological’ category and caste is a ‘social’ one,

Q5. An important message in the passage, if one accepts a dialectic between  nature and culture, is that

Instruction for 6 to 9:

In the modern scientific story, light was created not once but twice. The first  time was in the Big Bang, when the universe began its existence as a glowing,  expanding, fireball, which cooled off into darkness after a few million years.  The second time was hundreds of millions of years later, when the cold  material condensed into dense suggests under the influence of gravity, and  ignited to become the first stars. Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal,  named the long interval between these two enlightenments the cosmic ‘Dark  Age’. The name describes not only the poorly lit conditions but also the  ignorance of astronomers about that period. Nobody knows exactly when the  first stars formed, or how they organized themselves into galaxies — or even  whether stars were the first luminous objects. They may have been preceded  by quasars, which are mysterious, bright spots found at the centers of some  galaxies. Now two independent groups of astronomers, one led by Robert  Becker of the University of California, Davis, and the other by George  Djorgovski of Caltech, claim to have peered far enough into space with their  telescopes (and therefore backward enough in time) to observe the closing  days of the Dark age. The main problem that plagued previous efforts to study  the Dark Ages was not the lack of suitable telescopes, but rather the lack of  suitable things at which to point them. Because these events took place over  13 billion years ago, if astronomers are to have any hope of unraveling them  they must study objects that are at least 13 billion light years away. The best  prospects are quasars because they are so bright and compact that they can be  seen across vast stretches of space. The energy source that powers a quasar is  unknown, although it is suspected to be the intense gravity of a giant black  hole. However, at the distances required for the study of Dark Age, even  quasars are extremely rare and faint. Recently some members of Dr Becker’s  team announced their discovery of the four most distant quasars known. All  the new quasars are terribly faint, a challenge that both teams overcame by  peering at them through one of the twin Keck telescopes in Hawaii. These are  the world’s largest, and can therefore collect the most light. The new work by  Dr Becker’s team analyzed the light from all four quasars. Three of them  appeared to be similar to ordinary, less distant quasars. However, the fourth  and most distant, unlike any other quasar ever seen, showed unmistakable  signs of being shrouded in a fog because new-born stars and quasars emit  mainly ultraviolet light, and hydrogen gas is opaque to ultraviolet. Seeing this  fog had been the goal of would-be Dark Age astronomers since 1965, when James Gunn and Bruce Peterson spelled out the technique for using quasars as  backlighting beacons to observe the fog’s ultraviolet shadow. 

The fog prolonged the period of darkness until the heat from the first stars and  quasars had the chance to ionize the hydrogen (breaking it into its constituent  parts, protons, and electrons). Ionized hydrogen is transparent to ultraviolet  radiation, so at that moment the fog lifted and the universe became the well-lit  place it is today. For this reason, the end of the Dark Age is called the ‘Epoch of  Re-ionisation’. Because the ultraviolet shadow is visible only in the most distant  of the four quasars, Dr Becker’s team concluded that the fog had dissipated  completely by the time the universe was about 900 million years old, and one seventh of its current size.

Q6. In the passage, the Dark Age refers to 

Q7. Astronomers find it difficult to study the Dark Ages because 

Q8. The four most distant quasars discovered recently.

Q9. The fog of hydrogen gas seen through the telescopes.