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English Questions: Sentence Fillers Set – 18(New Pattern)

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Hello Aspirants.
Welcome to Online English Section with explanation in Affairs Cloud.com. Here we are creating question sample in sentence fillers, which is BASED ON SBI PO/IBPS PO/CLERK/LIC AAO/RRB & SSC CGL EXAM and other competitive exams !!!

Directions (Q.1-10): In each of the following questions a short passage is given with one of the lines in the passage missing and represented by a blank. Select the best out of the five answer choices given, to make the passage complete and coherent (coherent means logically complete and sound).

  1. In the first instance, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the U.S. promoted economic integration among its European allies as an essential condition for the post-war revival of world trade. At war’s end, wealth had become concentrated in the new superpower — it accounted for 48% of world industrial capacity and 70% of gold reserves. ___________________________Its European allies were too poor to provide a market and the notorious ‘meat-axe’ 80th Congress unwilling to undertake a programme for European reconstruction.
    1. Mainstream commentaries on Mr. Trump’s attacks on the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) do not place the trans Atlantic relationship in the broader historical context.
    2. President Donald Trump’s incendiary tour of Europe has justly generated extensive coverage for his disregard for diplomatic niceties and attacks on his allies.
    3. In this context, Mr. Trump’s blistering attack on European states for not meeting their military spending obligations is misplaced.
    4. With the demobilisation of some 10 million soldiers in the U.S., the shift to a peacetime economy needed allies to open their markets to U.S. products and investments.
    5. Unlike the U.S. which is bordered by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Europe has no need for navies to patrol distant oceans and match the U.S. in defence spending.
    Answer : 4)

  2. The political class manages a democracy. _________________________It is astounding that India’s political parties have had next to nothing to say on the repeal of Section 377 while the hearings are on. Even the Indian Psychiatric Society has rushed through a position paper stating that homosexuality is not a mental disorder. Though this has come a full 45 years after a similar ruling by its American counterpart, it at least reflects a concern with being seen as credible.
    1. In the Westminster model that we follow, this opportunity goes to the political party that gains power every five years.
    2. Even as the hearings in the Supreme Court have been covered extensively in the media, it has willy nilly drawn attention to two related aspects — namely the role of the political class and the question of the democratic content of the Indian LGBT movement itself.
    3. Post-colonial India, though a democracy with some considerable achievements, has failed miserably to interrogate the laws under which it is governed.
    4. the Supreme Court of India has turned the tables by entertaining a curative petition in the matter of its own ruling in 2013 that Section 377 is not violative of India’s Constitution.
    5. The colonial administrator had an eagle eye, as he had even identified animals as potential partners of man in this unholy act.
    Answer : 1)

  3. Banks may be compelled to engage in a quick-fire sale of stressed assets due to arbitrary deadlines on the resolution process. ________________________. Also, it is often in the interest of the majority of creditors to take the time to extract the most out of their assets. Meanwhile, the biggest obstacle to bad loan resolution is the absence of buyers who can purchase stressed assets from banks, and the unwillingness of banks to sell their loans at a deep discount to their face value. Unless the government can solve this problem, the bad loan problem is likely to remain unresolved for some time to come.
    1. It is part of the “Sashakt” plan approved by the government to address the problem of resolving bad loans.
    2. According to banker Sunil Mehta, who headed a panel that recommended the plan, disagreement between joint lenders is the biggest problem in resolving stressed assets.
    3. The government hopes that the holdout problem, where the objections of a few lenders prevent a settlement between the majority lenders
    4. This will work against the interests of lenders looking to get the best price for their stressed assets.
    5. Over the last few years, Indian banks have been forced by the Reserve Bank of India to recognize troubled assets on their books, but their resolution has remained a challenge.
    Answer : 4)

  4. The formal sector stands at the apex of India’s labour market pyramid, agriculture being at the bottom, employing 50% of the workforce. ____________________ In fact, it is this sector that has grown in recent decades at the expense of the other two sectors mentioned above. Moreover, nearly half of the informal labour workers are self-employed in household (or own account) enterprises, often engaging unpaid family labour. Varying degrees of under-employment or disguised unemployment are the defining feature of informal labour markets.
    1. Since 1972-73, the five-yearly Employment-Unemployment Surveys (EUS) conducted by the National Sample Survey (NSS) have been the mainstay for analysing labour market trends.
    2. Though infrequent, the database has served a valuable purpose of capturing the complexities of the labour market; access to household-level data lately has spawned rich and granular analyses of the informal economy.
    3. As the last round of the EUS was in held in 2011-12, there is no reliable way of updating employment trends.
    4. The EUS has been replaced with an annual Period Labour Force Survey, and a time use survey.
    5. The remaining workers are in the non-farm informal sector, spread across rural and urban areas.
    Answer : 5)

  5. In September 2016, the National Human Rights Commission issued notice to the Maharashtra government over reports of 600 children dying due to malnutrition in Palghar. ___________________. An independent survey conducted in Vikramgad block of the district last year found that 57%, 21% and 53% of children in this block were stunted, wasted and underweight, respectively; 27% were severely stunted.
    1. According to NFHS 2015-16, every second tribal child suffers from growth restricting malnutrition due to chronic hunger.
    2. While the State’s per capita income has doubled since 2004 (the result of sustained high economic growth), its nutritional status has not made commensurate progress.
    3. The government responded, promising to properly implement schemes such as Jaccha Baccha and Integrated Child Development Services to check malnutrition.
    4. Even after a decade of double digit economic growth (2004-05 to 2014-15), Palghar’s malnutrition status has barely improved.
    5. In 2005, child malnutrition claimed as many as 718 lives in Maharashtra’s Palghar district alone.
    Answer : 3)

  6. Along the way, organ transplantation in India largely became a private sector activity. ______________________ The rules of market medicine thus dictate who the organs go to. And hospitals that invest large sums in transplantation programmes which include huge payouts to surgeons look for returns.
    1. But it is also important to address certain key drivers behind foreigners getting cardiac transplants.
    2. Therefore, controversy in India over a large percentage of foreign nationals receiving cardiac transplants from deceased donors in India is not surprising.
    3. Heart transplantation has always been in the public eye right from the time Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful human heart transplant in 1967, in Cape Town, Africa.
    4. Hence while the act of donation is a public act and the organs a public good, from that point onwards whatever happens is largely under the private sector.
    5. However, the debate around it is vital because it is a marker of the fault lines in transplantation policy in India that need immediate correction.
    Answer : 4)

  7. Summit styles are personal to each leader. One common feature, however, is that Foreign Office mandarins and ministers in charge of foreign affairs are being pushed into the background. _____________________________ Summit diplomacy again tends to disdain diplomatic rigmarole.
    1. While leadership styles may differ, what is apparent is that leaders engaged in summit diplomacy are not unduly constrained by the need to adhere to the Westphalian order.
    2. Nuanced negotiating stances are no longer the flavour of diplomatic intercourse.
    3. Personal leadership tends to be highly contextual.
    4. At times what appears inappropriate could become the norm.
    5. In the immediate post-war years, however, traditional diplomacy seemed to make a comeback — but more recently, given the inability of traditional diplomacy to sort out intractable problems, summit diplomacy has come into its own.
    Answer : 2)
    Explanation:
    Option 2 is correct

  8. ________________________ It is not good practice when data helps neither educators nor policy makers or the speakers of languages themselves. The Census, a massive exercise that consumes so much time and energy, needs to see how it can help in a greater inclusion of the marginal communities, how our intangible heritage can be preserved, and how India’s linguistic diversity can become an integral part of our national pride.
    1. In pursuit of these, UNESCO has launched a linguistic diversity network and supported research.
    2. Is our language census consistent with these ideas and principles?
    3. While in 2001 the ‘Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity’ accepted the principle of “Safeguarding the linguistic heritage of humanity and giving support to expression
    4. From time to time, UNESCO tries to highlight the key role that language plays in widening access to education, protecting livelihoods and preserving culture and knowledge traditions.
    5. One expects that the Census in India should adequately reflect the linguistic composition of the country.
    Answer : 5)
    Explanation:
    Option 5 is correct

  9. It is not conclusive to give data on sluggish agricultural growth during this regime. ___________________ Nor can we use the data on farmer suicides to make a conclusive argument, as this government has tinkered so much, both with the definition of the term and data collection on it, that the data has been made unusable. Further, in any case, the data on farmer suicides has not been released for 15 months now.
    1. Agricultural production suffered due to consecutive droughts for which it is unfair to blame the government.
    2. Far from helping the farmers, this government has actually harmed them in their hour of crisis.
    3. This is a strong indictment, backed by solid evidence.
    4. Representatives of farmers from across the country will be marching outside Parliament under the banner of All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), an umbrella body of 201 farmer organisations.
    5. Farmers have already passed a vote of no confidence against this government.
    Answer : 1)
    Explanation:
    Option 1 is correct

  10. U.S. President Donald Trump has been entangled in a quagmire of his own making when, in a joint press conference in Helsinki, Finland, last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he refused to accuse Russia of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election (despite allegations by all intelligence agencies in the U.S.). _____________________________
    1. More importantly, setting aside Mr. Trump’s remarks at Helsinki, the moral outrage that Russia had suborned the democratic process in the 2016 election breathtakingly ignores the very many times the U.S. has interfered in the elections of other countries
    2. Widespread condemnation of his refusal to endorse the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies has compelled him to walk back his statements at Helsinki.
    3. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s outburst there against U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower led to a collapse of the summit.
    4. Perhaps the closest parallel was the 1960 Paris summit between the leaders of France, the U.K., the U.S. and the USSR after the U.S. had lied that its spy plane that had been shot down over the USSR had been a weather plane.
    5. Of course, whether Mr. Trump should have gone to Helsinki to meet Mr. Putin at all amidst these allegations is another issue.
    Answer : 2)
    Explanation:
    Option 2 is correct