List of top Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Questions on Reading Comprehension asked in Kerala Management Aptitude Test

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Crypto assets, including private crypto currencies and non-fungible tokens, pose a unique challenge to regulators with their issuance as well as the transactions taking place beyond traditional channels involving banks, other financial intermediaries or central banks. With users able to transact on platforms located in other countries and transfer funds easily across borders, ability to tax these transactions and to halt the misuse of these channels for illicit purposes also becomes difficult through unilateral action. Therefore, India and some other countries have been calling for concerted action by all nations and a standardised regulatory framework to regulate these assets. The Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), drafted by the OECD, is in response to this. It primarily seeks to enable exchange of information between countries so https://link.testbook.com/bQQ2EkH1bpb https://link.testbook.com/bQQ2EkH1bpb Page- 5 that all crypto asset related transactions or money transfer done by the residents of a country are available with the government and regulators. Indian regulators were extremely concerned about the surge in trading in crypto assets during the pandemic; about 9 to 11 crore users were estimated to be indulging in speculative trading in these assets. But the Centre’s move to tax gains made in trading crypto assets at punitively high rate in the Union Budget of 2022 and mandating crypto trading platforms to deduct TDS of 1 per cent on sale of these assets have helped restrain this speculative fervour effectively. Trading volume on Indian crypto trading platforms is down over 75 per cent over the last one year. But India, as well as other countries are yet to decide whether holding and trading in crypto assets is a legal activity or not. Also, it is currently not possible to acquire information regarding crypto trading transactions by Indian residents on overseas platforms. The CARF regulation outlines a way in which information can be collected from crypto asset trading platforms and service providers and shared with the countries where the traders or users reside. The framework addresses four areas – one, the scope of crypto currencies covered by the rules, two, the entities and individuals mandated to collect the data and the reporting requirement, three, the kind of transactions which have to be reported and four, the due diligence needed to identify the crypto asset users and to identify the tax jurisdiction to which they belong so that information can be exchanged. The model rules contained in the CARF can be included in the domestic laws and the OECD is planning to work with all jurisdictions over the coming months to implement the framework. The OECD has met decent success with the Common Reporting Standard which has resulted in over 100 countries exchanging information regarding 111 million financial accounts in 2021, helping check tax evasion. Replicating this with crypto transactions may be the way forward to bring all countries onboard in adopting similar rules for regulating crypto assets. Though regulatory scrutiny could result in reducing the speculative activity in this segment, users will be pleased as adoption of these rules will make trading and use of crypto assets a legal activity. This will ensure that those who wish to mine and trade in these assets can continue doing so, but under full regulatory glare.
The fundamental requirement for crypto currency regulation is………………………….
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The Supreme Court’s timely intervention has halted the forcible eviction of some 50,000 people from Haldwani in Uttarakhand, where the occupants are accused of squatting on railway property for decades. The Uttarakhand High Court had taken a tough stand against the residents, and passed a slew of directions that would have entailed their eviction within a week, backed by force, including the deployment of paramilitary forces. It is significant that the Bench underscored the human angle to the issue and spoke about the need for rehabilitation before eviction while staying the order. In an earlier round of litigation over the same land, which adjoins the Haldwani Railway Station, court orders had allowed proceedings against individual occupants under the Public Premises (Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants) Act, 1971, to be completed. This time, too, it was on a PIL that the High Court had passed its orders. The High Court’s detailed judgment shows that the residents’ claim is traceable to a 1907 Office Memorandum that says the area be managed under rules pertaining to ‘nazul land’. The court has ruled that it was not a government order but only a communication on how to manage the land, and it does not amount to declaring it as ‘nazul land’, that is, land that has fallen into the hands of the state by escheat. As one of the nazul rules is that there cannot be sale or lease, the court rejected all claims made by occupants based on purported documents for lease, sale, and, in some cases, purchase through auction. Conflicts between occupants of public land and the state that wants to reclaim the land are a never-ending saga in the country. A shortage of housing, as well as inadequate recognition of the right to shelter, means that large masses of people encroach on vacant land, be it on the bed of water bodies or government property. This often leads to attempts to evict the occupants and spawns litigation. Invariably, there are claims to occupancy rights based on long years of stay at the same location. There are court judgments that stress rehabilitation measures and consultation with the oustees before eviction. Some courts have also recorded the view that mandatory rehabilitation may prove to be an incentive for encroachment. The Haldwani eviction effort has unfortunately taken communal overtones, and there appears to be a clamour for the early eviction of the Muslim residents. India does not have a good record on rehabilitation of those evicted from public spaces, and this case presents an opportunity to the Supreme Court to lay down the law on meaningful rehabilitation as well as effective prevention of encroachments.
Rehabilitation ………………..
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The stock market regulator’s decision to extend the suspension of trading in derivative contracts of paddy, wheat, chana, mustard, soyabean, crude palm oil and moong by another year, is surprising, given the obvious ineffectiveness of this measure in controlling price increases. Trading in the futures contracts of these commodities was initially suspended for a year in December 2021, in a bid to check food price inflation. But prices continued to surge in the months following the ban, mainly due to increase in consumption following unlocking of the economy after the third wave of the pandemic, and also the supply shock caused by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Price movements following similar trading suspensions in the past too reveal that suspension of trading does not help in checking prices. Also, with CPI for cereals easing a little in the last two months, regulators could have waited for market forces to bring down prices. While policymakers may be focused on controlling inflation, they need to recognise the impact of the ban on the agri-commodity derivatives market in India. SEBI’s move has resulted in halving the daily turnover of commodity derivatives exchanges over the past year. Commodities exchanges have already been struggling to regain investor trust since the NSEL scam in 2013. A sudden suspension of derivatives trading in important commodities, extended over many months, creates uncertainty which will drive away traders and hedgers. Policymakers need to recognise the important role that commodity derivatives play in helping users hedge themselves against price risk. Besides, given the decentralised trading of agri-commodities in APMC mandis across India, the futures market helps in price discovery too. With national online spot trading in agri-commodities through platforms such as e-NAM taking time to realise its potential, it would be good to boost activity in agri derivatives market, instead of curbing it. Spot prices are mainly determined by demand and supply for the commodity; research has shown that it is not possible to establish an explicit link between volatility in future and spot prices — a point of view shared by the Abhijit Sen Committee (2008). However, a supplementary recommendation made by the panel is worth considering — to remove from the futures market those commodities where such a link is established. In order to take an informed decision, a study must be commissioned. The list of such commodities should be shared with stakeholders to remove trading-related uncertainty. That said, there are many shortcomings in the derivatives market for agri commodities that need to be addressed to make them accessible for farmers and other users. The contracts need to be simple in design and exchanges should conduct outreach programmes for farmer producer organisations, through which farmers can use these instruments. Currently, the exchanges are dominated by traders, with the participation of farmers and other users being low. Institutional participation should be encouraged.
Commodity derivatives are …………….
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The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
Artists …….
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No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence. Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.
According to the above passage, the writers up to the end of the nineteenth century………………….the extra-terrestrial intelligence life.
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There are two chief types of inattention whose danger threatens every person. First, we may be thinking about the right things, but not thinking hard enough. We lack mental pressure. Outside thoughts which have no relation to the subject in hand may not trouble us much, but we do not attack our problem with vim. The current in our stream of consciousness is moving too slowly. We do not gather up all our mental forces and mass them on the subject before us in a way that means victory. Our thoughts may be sufficiently focused, but they fail to "set fire." It is like focusing the sun's rays while an eclipse is on. They lack energy. They will not kindle the paper after they have passed through the lens. This kind of attention means mental dawdling. It means inefficiency. For the individual it means defeat in life's battles; for the nation it means mediocrity and stagnation. A college professor said to his faithful but poorly prepared class, "Judging from your worn and tired appearance, young people, you are putting in twice too many hours on study." At this commendation the class brightened up visibly. "But," he continued, "judging from your preparation, you do not study quite half hard enough." Happy is the student who, starting in on his lesson rested and fresh, can study with such concentration that an hour of steady application will leave him mentally exhausted and limp. That is one hour of triumph for him, no matter what else he may have accomplished or failed to accomplish during the time. He can afford an occasional pause for rest, for difficulties will melt rapidly away before him. He possesses one key to successful achievement.
The successful thinking needs……………
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Global equity markets turned extremely nervous this week with market benchmarks declining sharply, the primary reason behind this sell-off being the gloomy growth outlook for 2023 projected by the central banks of the US, UK and the European Union, and their resolve to continue aggressive monetary tightening next year. The overarching concern of the three central banks appeared to be pulling inflation down towards their long-term targets and all of them indicated that further monetary tightening was warranted until price stability was restored. The US Federal Reserve hiked the Federal Funds Rate by 50 basis points to 4.25-4.50 per cent and has indicated that the pace of rate hikes will not slacken next year despite inflation moving lower in November. It has also indicated that the terminal rate could be 5.1 per cent, instead of 4.5 per cent projected in September 2022 and that rates will not begin moving lower until 2024. The Bank of England and the European Central Bank too hiked their policy rates by 50 basis points, in a bid to tame raging inflation. Both the US Fed and the ECB used the term ‘restrictive’ to describe the policy stance which they intend to adopt to curb demand. The attempt appears to be to move demand lower to address the demand-supply mismatch. Of concern is the fact that all three central banks appear to be willing to sacrifice near-term growth to ensure price stability. This monetary tightening so far in 2022, is already beginning to impact growth in these regions. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell pointed out that consumer spending has slowed reflecting lower disposable income, prices in the housing segment have cooled due to rising mortgage rates and investments by businesses are coming down. Given the delay in transmission of the rate hikes, demand is expected to further dampen next year, leading to lower growth rates for 2023. The Federal Reserve Board members are now projecting the real GDP growth at 0.5 per cent in 2023, down from the earlier projection of 1.2 per cent. The Bank of England retained the projections given in its November policy meeting — that GDP will continue to decline throughout 2023 and in the first half of 2024 as well due to the impact of high energy prices and rising interest rates. The Euro system staff projections for euro area have also been revised lower for 2023 to 0.5 per cent and they expect a shallow and short-lived recession ahead. This gloomy prognosis for growth in the world’s leading economies does not bode well for India’s merchandise and services trade. The difficult external environment will challenge growth in the domestic IT services industry which is currently fuelling domestic consumption. External finance for Indian corporates will also be difficult due to tightening liquidity, rising interest rates and weakening rupee. While India’s growth projections for next year are among the highest, the economy can not remain insulated from slowing global growth. RB I will have to be mindful of these factors which deciding on its future policy actions.
The capital investments in the Indian Corporate companies are affected by……..
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Nearly six decades after the Green Revolution, it appears that the wheel with respect to the general perception on millets is coming full circle. After being reduced to marginal status during the Green Revolution years, millets are slowly regaining favour among policymakers and consumers. Faced with a food shortage in the 1960s, India opted for an input-intensive push that yielded huge productivity gains in wheat and rice. But now the times have changed; India is self-sufficient in wheat and rice output. But the health effects of wheat and rice overconsumption and the impact on the production side on soil and water resources are no longer in dispute. The Centre observed with regret while heralding the New Year as ‘International Year of Millets’ that millets output in India accounted for 40 per cent of all cultivated grains till the 1960s, against about 16 per cent at present, or 45-50 million tonnes a year now. Millets, with their iron, calcium and zinc content, can make a big difference in combating micro-nutrient deficiency in India, besides diabetes and heart disease. Meanwhile, farmers growing millets can make do with 20 cm of rain annually, against 120-140 cm needed for rice. That millets are by default organic — since the crop does not rely on chemicals and pesticides and its essentially small growers lack the resources to use them — actually makes it a big draw in a world where organic produce is in demand. What is not working for millets is its poor prices, low productivity, processing difficulties and above all, insufficient demand. Prices will rise and infrastructure will come up if demand improves, even as research on hybrids is expected to lift yields. Government agencies at the States and Centre are trying out two approaches to lift demand. First, States such as Odisha are raising rural demand through awareness campaigns, while also distributing millet-based meals through mid-day meal programmes in schools and anganwadis, an approach that is likely to boost market prices, particularly if there is a procurement process to back this up. The second approach is to lift urban demand through promotional campaigns. A NABARD paper has suggested that millet foods be served on trains and flights. Ready to cook millets can work for the young in particular. It is possible that as urban demand picks up, it will challenge the decades-old notion of millets being a non-aspirational food meant for the downtrodden. The Centre has raised MSP for millets, but in the absence of procurement and demand (the former being weak because of the latter), prices have not picked up. Production of millets in India, grown primarily in Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, accounts for 41 per cent of global output. Yet, India is only the fifth largest exporter, earning barely $30 million annually. Being grown by small farmers in dry regions, it is ideally suited to Farmer Producer Organisations. The Budget should give millets a financial and institutional push.
The cultivation of millets as popular cereals has not happened due to…………..
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The moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another (in which we must never forget to include wrongful interference with each other's freedom) are more vital to human well-being than any maxims, however important, which only point out the best mode of managing some department of human affairs. They have also the peculiarity, that they are the main element in determining the whole of the social feelings of mankind. It is their observance which alone preserves peace among human beings: if obedience to them were not the rule, and disobedience the exception, everyone would see in every one else a probable enemy, against whom he must be perpetually guarding himself. What is hardly less important, these are the precepts which mankind have the strongest and the most direct inducements for impressing upon one another. By merely giving to each other prudential instruction or exhortation, they may gain, or think they gain, nothing: in inculcating on each other the duty of positive beneficence they have an unmistakeable interest, but far less in degree: a person may possibly not need the benefits of others; but he always needs that they should not do him hurt. Thus the moralities which protect every individual from being harmed by others, either directly or by being hindered in his freedom of pursuing his own good, are at once those which he himself has most at heart, and those which he has the strongest interest in publishing and enforcing by word and deed. It is by a person's observance of these, that his fitness to exist as one of the fellowship of human beings, is tested and decided; for on that depends his being a nuisance or not to those with whom he is in contact. Now it is these moralities primarily, which compose the obligations of justice. The most marked cases of injustice, and those which give the tone to the feeling of repugnance which characterizes the sentiment, are acts of wrongful aggression, or wrongful exercise of power over some one; the next are those which consist in wrongfully withholding from him something which is his due; in both cases, inflicting on him a positive hurt, either in the form of direct suffering, or of the privation of some good which he had reasonable ground, either of a physical or of a social kind, for counting upon.
Moral rules ultimately pave way to………………….
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Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, there has been rage against the machine. From the first saboteurs in France, who tried to destroy power looms in the 17th century to the protests against mechanisation by labour unions and more recently, in the 1990s, against computerisation in India’s public sector by the CPM and Samajwadi Party — tech “disruptions” have led to deep churn in the nature of work. Yet, there is a tendency in the current moment — fed, perhaps, by the narcissistic hyperbole engendered by social media — to view the impending changes in labour and life by developments in artificial intelligence as especially apocalyptic. Two AIpowered apps — ChatGPT and, to a lesser extent, Lensa — are the cause of a seeming moral panic around the nature of intellectual and artistic work. Since ChatGPT — an open-source AI-based text-generating tool — became public in December, everyone from writers, editors, academics to assorted white-collar professionals has been worried about jobs becoming obsolete and plagiarism becoming rampant. In fact, the bot’s creators, OpenAI, recently announced that they would create a watermark of sorts to ensure plagiarism can be easily detected. Lensa, on the other hand, creates stunning portraits with a subtlety hitherto thought to be an exclusively human domain, using AI. The usual defence against the fear that AI will take over tasks that are fundamentally “human” is that no machine will be sophisticated enough to generate the pathos of a Dostoyevsky or the insight of a brilliant academic. The more important question, perhaps, is why upper-class passions and jobs are seen as more “fundamental” in the first place. When computers were used to replace accountants, or entire communities of weavers were lost to mass production, the human condition was not altered. Words and art are arguably no more or less important or human than agriculture and craft. The difference between the powerloom and AI, perhaps, is the power and self-importance of those the technologies “disrupt”.
What is the main theme of the above passage?
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The Union Cabinet has cleared a ₹17,490-crore National Green Hydrogen (NGH) mission that aims to facilitate the production of hydrogen from renewable energy. Hydrogen is an essential industrial fuel that has a range of uses from producing ammonia, making steel and cement, to powering fuel cells that can run buses and cars. However, the cheapest way to manufacture this is to rely on fossil fuel such as coal and natural gas and this produces carbon emissions. The concerns over global warming and the gradual but steady embrace of alternative fuels have stoked the world’s interest in producing hydrogen from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind energy. This, however, is relatively expensive. It costs between $0.9 to $1.5 to produce a kilogramme of hydrogen from coal and anywhere from $3.5 to $5.5 per kg to produce it from renewable energy sources. Just as solar power tariffs in India have now dipped below that of coal power, the government hopes that ‘green hydrogen’, or that produced entirely from renewable energy, will also cost less than the current price to make hydrogen from fossil fuel sources. The NGH mission aims to create an enabling environment for the Indian industry to develop the infrastructure to produce and transport green hydrogen from certain nerve centres to production hubs where they can be used in various industrial applications. The NGH mission has committed to finance — the details are not yet available — the manufacturing of electrolysers, which use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. By 2030, the goal is to have at least 5 million metric tonnes of annual green hydrogen production, electrolyser capacity of 60-100 gigawatt and a 125-gigawatt renewable energy capacity for green hydrogen and its associated transmission network. Green hydrogen, because of the entailed expenses, currently accounts for less than 1% of global hydrogen production and India’s aim is to become a global, industrial hub and exporter of such hydrogen. While this is a worthy ambition, India’s track record in becoming a high-technology manufacturing hub raises doubts on whether this is achievable by 2030. Despite policies, India has not managed to be a net exporter of solar cells, semiconductors or wind power components. This is because India’s underlying manufacturing base continues to be weak and unable to efficiently absorb and utilise global capital. For India to realise ambitions, it must strengthen its small manufacturing and allied enterprises infrastructure which, rather than large industries, will be the mainstay of any green economy.
What is the main limiting factor for India to become a manufacturing hub of Green Hydrogen?
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Recent macro-economic data, including the official Index of Eight Core Industries for November and S&P Global’s survey-based Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for the manufacturing and services sectors for December, offer mixed signals on the underlying momentum in the economy. The government’s provisional data show that output across the core industries, spanning coal to electricity, grew by an average 5.4% year-on-year in November. Double-digit expansions in cement, coal, electricity and steel led the index higher. However, on a sequential basis, contractions in six of the eight sectors, including in the heavyweight sectors of electricity and refinery products, which together represent almost half the index, kept average core output unchanged. While electricity output shrank 2.1% from October, refinery products contracted by 3.1% sequentially. Only production of coal and cement expanded both year-on-year and month-on-month, signalling that non-power demand for coal and construction activity may have begun gaining some traction in the third fiscal quarter. The uptrend in cement is heartening as consumption of the key building material spans the job-intensive housing and infrastructure segments and, if sustained, could help undergird broader economic momentum. The 12.3% year-on-year and 15.1% sequential expansion in coal output is also a positive augury as it indicates an improvement in availability of the fuel to fire captive power plants and furnaces in the crucial process and metal-making industries. Separately, the more up-to-date December PMI data show that manufacturing momentum strengthened appreciably as businesses reported the fastest rise in new orders since February 2021. The private survey of purchasing managers at about 400 manufacturers signalled that average output growth across these firms hit a 13-month high last month, with the PMI reading of 57.8 pointing to the strongest sectoral expansion since October 2020. Producers of goods stepped up hiring to help them meet a backlog of orders. And though the increase in jobs was the slowest since September, employment across the sector rose for a tenth straight month reflecting the heightened optimism among manufacturers. The PMI survey shows that overall output charge inflation across the private sector has intensified, with manufacturers reporting inflation in selling prices outpacing gains in input costs for the first time in almost two-and-a-half years. Policymakers can illafford to drop their guard on inflation at this stage.
The increasing manufacturing growth might lead to …………………………
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The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown; no one can say why the same peculiarity in different individuals of the same species, and in individuals of different species, is sometimes inherited and sometimes not so; why the child often reverts in certain characters to its grandfather or grandmother or other much more remote ancestor; why a peculiarity is often transmitted from one sex to both sexes or to one sex alone, more commonly but not exclusively to the like sex. It is a fact of some little importance to us, that peculiarities appearing in the males of our domestic breeds are often transmitted either exclusively, or in a much greater degree, to males alone. A much more important rule, which I think may be trusted, is that, at whatever period of life a peculiarity first appears, it tends to appear in the offspring at a corresponding age, though sometimes earlier. In many cases this could not be otherwise: thus the inherited peculiarities in the horns of cattle could appear only in the offspring when nearly mature; peculiarities in the silkworm are known to appear at the corresponding caterpillar or cocoon stage. But hereditary diseases and some other facts make me believe that the rule has a wider extension, and that when there is no apparent reason why a peculiarity should appear at any particular age, yet that it does tend to appear in the offspring at the same period at which it first appeared in the parent. I believe this rule to be of the highest importance in explaining the laws of embryology. These remarks are of course confined to the first appearance of the peculiarity, and not to its primary cause, which may have acted on the ovules or male element; in nearly the same manner as in the crossed offspring from a short-horned cow by a long-horned bull, the greater length of horn, though appearing late in life, is clearly due to the male element.
The first appearance of the peculiarity occurs owing to………………
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Marriage, with all its ceremonies, its rights, and its duties, fills their imagination from infancy to age; and I do not believe there is a country upon earth in which a larger portion of the wealth of the community is spent in the ceremonies, or where the rights are better secured, or the duties better enforced, notwithstanding all the disadvantages of the laws of polygamy. Not one man in ten can afford to maintain more than one wife, and not one in ten of those who can afford it will venture upon 'a sea of troubles' in taking a second, if he has a child by the first. One of the evils which press most upon Indian society is the necessity which long usage has established of squandering large sums in marriage ceremonies. Instead of giving what they can to their children to establish them, and enable them to provide for their families and rise in the world, parents everywhere feel bound to squander all they can borrow in the festivities of their marriage. Men in India could never feel secure of being permitted freely to enjoy their property under despotic and unsettled governments, the only kind of governments they knew or hoped for; and much of the means that would otherwise have been laid out in forming substantial works, with a view to a return in income of some sort or another, for the remainder of their own lives and of those of their children, were expended in tombs, temples, sarāis, tanks, groves, and other works—useful and ornamental, no doubt, but from which neither they nor their children could ever hope to derive income of any kind. The same feeling of insecurity gave birth, no doubt, to this preposterous usage, which tends so much to keep down the great mass of the people of India to that grade in which they were born, and in which they have nothing but their manual labour to depend upon for their subsistence. Every man feels himself bound to waste all his stock and capital, and exhaust all his credit, in feeding idlers during the ceremonies which attend the marriage of his children, because his ancestors squandered similar sums, and he would sink in the estimation of society if he were to allow his children to be married with less.
Indian society spends huge money in the marriage on account of……………
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As soon as the light in the bedroom went out there was a stirring and a fluttering all through the farm buildings. Word had gone round during the day that old Major, the prize Middle White boar, had had a strange dream on the previous night and wished to communicate it to the other animals. It had been agreed that they should all meet in the big barn as soon as Mr. Jones was safely out of the way. Old Major (so he was always called, though the name under which he had been exhibited was Willingdon Beauty) was so highly regarded on the farm that everyone was quite ready to lose an hour's sleep in order to hear what he had to say. At one end of the big barn, on a sort of raised platform, Major was already ensconced on his bed of straw, under a lantern which hung from a beam. He was twelve years old and had lately grown rather stout, but he was still a majestic-looking pig, with a wise and benevolent appearance in spite of the fact that his tushes had never been cut. Before long the other animals began to arrive and make themselves comfortable after their different fashions. First came the three dogs, Bluebell, Jessie, and Pincher, and then the pigs, who settled down in the straw immediately in front of the platform. The hens perched themselves on the window-sills, the pigeons fluttered up to the rafters, the sheep and cows lay down behind the pigs and began to chew the cud. The two cart-horses, Boxer and Clover, came in together, walking very slowly and setting down their vast hairy hoofs with great care lest there should be some small animal concealed in the straw. Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal. Boxer was an enormous beast, nearly eighteen hands high, and as strong as any two ordinary horses put together. A white stripe down his nose gave him a somewhat stupid appearance, and in fact he was not of first-rate intelligence, but he was universally respected for his steadiness of character and tremendous powers of work. After the horses came Muriel, the white goat, and Benjamin, the donkey. Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm, and the worst tempered. He seldom talked, and when he did, it was usually to make some cynical remark—for instance, he would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies. Alone among the animals on the farm he never laughed. If asked why, he would say that he saw nothing to laugh at. Nevertheless, without openly admitting it, he was devoted to Boxer; the two of them usually spent their Sundays together in the small paddock beyond the orchard, grazing side by side and never speaking.
Identify the odd man out.