Reading Comprehension - Practice Papers 2

CBSE Class 11 English Core

Section A
Reading Comprehension

Passage

Read the following carefully and answer the question that follow:
Worm is a software program that is designed to copy itself from one computer to another, without human interaction. Unlike a computer virus, a worm can copy itself automatically. For example, a massmailing email worm is a worm that sends copies of itself via email. A network worm makes copies of itself throughout a network, an Internet worm sends copies of itself via vulnerable computers on the Internet, and so on.
Worms can replicate in great volume. For example, a worm can send out copies of itself to every contact in your email address book, and then it can send itself to all of the contacts your contact’s email address books. Some worms spread very quickly. They clog networks and can cause long waits for you (and everyone else) to view Web pages on the Internet.
Examples of some of the computer worms are the Sasser worm, the Blaster worm, and the Conficker worm.
Trojan are the malicious code which when triggered cause loss, or even theft, of data. Trojans are associated with remote access programs that perform illicit operations such as passwordstealing or which allow compromised machines to be used for targeted denial of service attacks. When a Trojan horse is activated, it may access certain files, folders or even an entire system. It often creates what is known as a “trapdoor” or “backdoor”, which can then be used to thieve a victim’s sensitive information and forward it to another location.

Pick out the correct option: –
1. Unusual error messages are an indicator of :–
  1. worm infection
  2. virus infection
  3. Trojan infection
  4. spam
2. A mass mailing email worm sends :–
  1. multiple copies to one user
  2. multiple copies to multiple users
  3. copies of itself
  4. single copies to multiple users
Answer the following questions :–
1. How can viruses be disguised?
2. What problems do benign viruses create?
3. What do bootrecord infectors infect?
4. What are Trojans associated with?
5. Pick out the word in the passage similar in meaning to kind/friend.
6. Pick out the word in the passage opposite in meaning to illegitimate.

Read the following carefully and answer the question that follow:
Meditation is not an activity or a hobby. It is the attitude on has to life. If you think you are "doing" meditation by sitting alone and closing your eyes. think again. Meditation is not something you do. If you live with clarity meditation will awaken. Meditation is an attitude. You are always with yourself, meaning that you are expressing your true self. When you are close thing which cab bring you close to yourself is meditation. If you are "doing" meditation you will go farther away from yourself.
When you sit to meditate don't do anything, just be there, quiet with yourself. Be present, feel the environment, the atmosphere, just enjoy you own company. To awaken your meditative nature, ther are certain kriyas and one powerful kriya is that your observe your breath. If you cannot observe your breath then count your breaths. Make it your permanent habit from today that your will never spend a day without counting hundered breaths. As you some changes inside. Don't make any effort to breath, letit be natural. Just count it. Countive naute. Slowly you will start feeling that your life is becoming a meditation. What does that mean? That means your life will be full of power, creartivity and strength. The environment is full of vibrations. When vibrations touch your system, your system transforms them into thoughts. Thought is power. I have the power to think and to create thoughts. We never use that power. In our whole life we never think. What we call thinking is not thinking. It is just repeating or parroting. If we knew how to think and what to think, we could create paradise The power to think is the power of cration. Whatever we are now, we created that life with our thoughts, with our imaginations, with our dreams. Whatever you imagine, that becomes. Whatever you think, that becomes. If i know conciously how to use my thoughts, how to use my thinking power, then we make our lives as we want them to be. If you pause a little you will realise we have freedom to think but we are not free to think. We are living in frames; society, system, culture, religion, philosophy- we Since we are not free, we need to first we think. And wisdom comes with consciousness. First discover higher consciousness by cultivating a meditative attitude.

Pick out the correct option
1. According to the outer, a thought is
  1. Power
  2. Energy
  3. Aura
  4. Vibe
2. Meditation is -
  1. An activity
  2. An attitude
  3. A hobby
  4. A habit
Answer the Following Question: -
1. What should we do while meditating?
2. Why are we unable to think?
3. What happens when we meditate?
4. How can paradise be created?
5. Pick out the word similar in meaning to 'strength'.
6. Pick out the word opposite in meaning to 'temporary'

Read the passage given below the answer the question that follow (1 x 8 = 8 Marks)
Last week was spent glued to TV, watching India getting thrashed by a rejuvenated England at Lord’s. Like most Indians, I too was dispirited by India’s inability to live up to its reputation as the number one team. But at least there was the immense satisfaction of watching the match live and even listening to BBC’s good-humoured Test Match Special on Internet radio.
It was such a change from my schooldays when you had to tune in to a crackling short wave broadcast for intermittent radio commentary. Alternatively, we could go to the cinema, some three weeks after the match, to see a twominute capsule in the Indian News Review that preceded the feature film. It is not that there was no technology available to make life a little more rewarding. Yet, in 1971, when B S Chandrasekhar mesmerized the opposition and gave India its first Test victory at the Oval, there was no TV, except in Delhi.
Those were the bad old days of the short age economy when everything, from cinema tickets to twowheelers, had a black market premium. Telephones were a particular source of exasperation. By the 1970s, the telephone system in cities had collapsed. You may have possessed one of those heavy, black Bakelite instruments but there was no guarantee of a dial tone when you picked up the receiver. The ubiquitous ‘cable fault’ would render a telephone useless for months on end.
What was particularly frustrating was that there was precious little you could do about whimsical public services. In the early 1980s, when opposition MPs complained about dysfunctional telephones, the then communications minister C M Stephen retorted that phones were a luxury and not a right. If people were dissatisfied, he pronounced haughtily, they could return their phones!
Inefficiency was, in fact, elevated into an ideal. When capitalintensive public sector units began running into the red, the regime’s economists deemed that their performance shouldn't be judged by a narrow capitalist yardstick. The public sector, they pronounced, had to exercise ‘social’ choices. India, wrote Jagdish Bhagwati (one of the few genuine ‘dissidents’ of that era), “suffered the tyranny of anticipated consequences from the wrong premises.”
Being an Indian in those days was truly demeaning if you had the misfortune of travelling overseas. Government regulations decreed that a private citizen travelling overseas had the right to buy all of $8. S u b s e q u e n t l y, t h e c e i l i n g w a s r a i s e d t o$ 500 every three years. This meant that Indians had to evolve innovatively illegal methods of buying a few extra dollars or scrounging off‘fortunate NRI relatives. No wonder, escaping from India became a middle class obsession, as did petty hawala.
India was an object of mockery. We were mocked for leading a “ship to mouth” existence while preaching morality to the rest of the world. We were pitied, not least by rich Pakistanis who would compare their spanking new Impala cars to our creaking Ambassadors that were hi perennial short supply.
Enforced socialist austerity bred dishonesty and subterfuge. India’s creative genius became preoccupied with ways to bypass a system that in all seriousness demanded that the betteroff pay 97% of their income in taxes, and where the remuneration of company directors had to be approved by babus sitting in a ministry in Delhi.

Enforced socialist hard measures gave rise to :
1. honesty
2. dishonesty
3. Carelessness
4. Indifference
The narrator felt dispirited as his team :
1. was the number 1 team of the world.
2. could not perform upto people's expectations
3. could not play even 100 overs.
4. performed like professionals.
Why does author call his school day as 'bad old days'?
Why was the ceiling raised every year?
What made Indians an object of mockery?
State Jagdish Bhagwati's Opinion
Find the word meaning close to 'believed'/'considered'.
Find the word meaning opposite to 'legitimate'/'lawful' A.

Read the passage given below the answer the question that follow:
IN INDIAN homes, the floor of the house is always the best maintained element, cleaned twice a day and wiped down to a sparkling state. In front of the threshold of the home the floor often is decorated with Rangoli and other ritual diagrams. This is true in rural as well as in many urban homes in metropolitan cities. When building a new home people spend as much money per sq. foot for a beautiful floor as they would spend on the entire structure. Yet, this pride and obsession for a clean floor suddenly vanish as we step out into the street: the floor of the city.
In Delhi where 80% of the people are pedestrians in some stage of their commuting, least attention is paid to pedestrian paths. Delhi’s sidewalks are too narrow, very poorly maintained and full of potholes, poles, junction boxes and dangerous electrical installations, not to speak of the garbage dumps that stink and stare at the pedestrian. Ashram Chowk is a good case in point where thousands of pedestrians change direction from the Mathura Road radial to the Ring Road. A flyover facilitates the automobiles while the pedestrian is orphaned by the investment hungry authorities. One corner of the Ashram Chowk has a ridiculous imitation wood sculpture with an apology of a fountain and across the same Chowk, you have the open mouthed, massive garbage dump right on the pedestrian path, in full exhibition for the benefit of the public. These symbols of poor taste and abject apathy are then connected by narrow dangerous and often waterlogged footpaths for the hapless pedestrians to negotiate. In the night, street lighting in the central median light up the carriageway for cars and leave the pedestrian areas in darkness.
Delhi’s citizens leave home and want to get to their destination as fast they can. No one wants to linger on the road, no leisure walks, no one looks a stranger in the eye. It is on the pedestrian path that the citizen encounters headon the poor pubic management and the excuse called ‘multiplicity of authorities”. One agency makes the road, another dig sit up to lay cables, third one comes after months to clear up the mess and the cycle of unaccountability goes on. Meanwhile crones are spent in repairing the carriageway for vehicles and in construction of flyovers without a care for the pedestrians below. Solution offered is to make an expensive underpass or an ugly foot overbridge, ostensibly for facilitating the pedestrian, while in reality they only facilitate the cars to move faster at the expense of the pedestrians. Take Kashmiri Gate, ITO, Ashram Chowk, AlIMS or Dhaula Kuan. At all these important pedestrian crossover points the story is the same: They have pulled the sidewalk from under the pedestrians feet.
In modern cities across the world, the pedestrian is king. The floor of the city is designed and maintained as an inclusive environment, helping the physically challenged, the old and the infirm, children and the ordinary citizen to move joyfully across the city. Delhi aspires to be ‘ world class city’. Hopefully the authorities would look once again at the floor of Delhi.
The pleasure of strolling on the road is deeply connected to our sense of citizenship and sense of belonging. Pride in the city grows only on a well designed floor of the city

On the basis of your reading of the above passage, make notes on it using headings and subheadings. Also use recognizable abbreviations, wherever necessary (Minimum 4) Supply a suitable title.
Write a summary of the above passage.

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:
Here are some questions to ponder. Do you know why a certain flim star received an arsenal of weapons from a gangster terrorist’ Do you know why witnesses who turn hostile do not get prosecuted for either perjury or wasting police time, or both? Do you know why it takes a decade or longer to try a criminal case in India? Have you ever thought through any solutions to these problems? If you haven’t it might be because of the Type of education you received !
Most of us reluctantly accept the way things are because we have been educated to be accepting. We are not educated to be openly critical. We are not educated to argue, protest or confront. The Brits made no bones about it in their schools we were educated to accept given values and ways of doing things. We were trained to be loyal servants to the status quo.
Most of us oldies were subjected to the traditional approach to learning that focused on mastery of content, with little emphasis on the development of analytical skills and the nurturing of inquiring attitudes. We were the receivers of information, and the teacher was the dispenser. The passivity encouraged by teachers was typified by one of my principals who implored all the girls to be like ‘limpid water in a crystal vase’.
These days I am kept very busy by schools that are running teachertraining courses to introduce the ‘inquiry approach’ to learning. Unlike traditional learning, this approach is focused on using and learning content as a means to develop informationprocessing and problemsolving skills. This system is more studentcentered, with the teacher as a facilitator of learning. There is more emphasis on “how we come to know” and less on “what we know”. Students are more involved in the construction of knowledge through active analysis and investigation. They are encouraged to ask questions, and give opinions and share what they know. They are encouraged to criticise and argue, and confront the conventional wisdom.
At the moment this new approach is restricted to a few schools. However this year the ability to critically analyse has been introduced as part of the CBSE school syllabus. It is a small start but it is a move towards introducing thinking skills into all of our schools. It is the start of a big change.
Our government and bureaucracy are full of old, welleducated people of a traditionalist background, who also see, read and hear the news reports about hostile witnesses, gangsters and film stars, and murders by politician’s sons. Like us they find them outrageous, but they don’t know how to change things. Critical analysis, change management and innovation were not part of their schooling, and in adult life they have not become freely critical, outspoken analysts capable of applying the fruits of their analysis to increasingly complex problems.
We often come across the shortcomings of our government, judiciary and media. With very little effort these shortcomings will become a thing of the past. But they will be a long time coming. Not because our ‘leaders’ and societal managers are unfeeling, immoral, selfseekers. but because they were educated and excelled in consulting a textbook, and regurgitating someone else’s opinion and knowledge. As the newly educated might say: we can expect the same for a long time to come.

On the basis of your readings of the above passage, make motes on it using headings and subheadings. Also use recognizable abbreviations, where ever necessary. (Min. 4). Supply a suitable title.
Write a summary of the above passage.