Read the following passage and answer the questions based on it.
Eye surgeon Virendar Sangwan has perfected a procedure so cutting-edge that most who have tried it have failed. In an operating theatre in the central Indian city of Hyderabad, he surgically implants corneas grown in a petri dish from stem cells by his colleague Geeta Vemuganti in patients with damaged eyes. Together they perform about 80 corneal regeneration procedures a year, making the L.V. Prasad Eye Institute, where they work, one of the most prolific facilities in the world using stem cells to regenerate tissues of any kind.
The Sangwan-Vemuganti team uses stem cells found in the tissues of living adults, not ones derived from embryos. Teams all over the world are working with adult stem cells, trying to coax them to regrow cells in hearts, brains, livers and other organs, but progress is slow. Besides corneas, scientists have had some success regrowing skin cells and bone tissues, but those procedures remain experimental. "A number of programs around the world have tried to perfect this treatment, but they have had bad outcomes," says University of Cincinnati eye surgeon and stem cell specialist Edward Holland. "It is impressive what they are doing at Prasad." In addition to the Hyderabad project, only Holland's program and a half-dozen others in the world conduct operations using corneas grown from stem cells. The treatment uses stem cells harvested from the limbus, located where the cornea touches the white of the eye. For those with damaged corneas, these cells, called "limbic" and "conjunctiva", are harvested from a patient's good eye, if he has one, or from a close relative. They are placed in a petri dish and chemically tweaked to grow into the lower layer of a cornea, called epithelium. It is then transplanted into the eye of the patient where in most cases it takes hold and grows. In 56% of the cases at the Prasad Institute, the patient could still see clearly 40 months later.
Indians are well known for reverse engineering, meaning they can deduce how drugs are made in order to produce generic versions. But in this case, Sangwan and Vemuganti, a pathologist, developed the technique on their own from reading papers and running experiments in the lab. Sangwan says he had a number of patients with burned eyes who could not be helped with standard corneal transplants from cadavers, so he persuaded Vemuganti to try growing corneas in her lab. "You know how to grow cells, and I know how to do the transplant surgery," Vemuganti recalls him saying. "Why don't we work together?" She smiles and shakes her head. "I had no clue if this was going to work." Vemuganti's major innovation was developing a platform on which to grow corneas. First she designed a circular glass tube about the size of a stack of coins. Then she overlaid the glass with tissue from a human placenta, which is "a good surface to grow corneas on," she says. After that she placed stem cells in four places around a circle, added a growth medium, and watched the corneas begin to grow. Commercial interest among stem cell companies for the procedure has been scant because of the perceived small volume of patients, says venture capitalist Antoun Nabhan, who sits on the board of Cellerant, a leading stem cell company in San Carlos, California. But corneal stem cell treatment may have wider applications, says ophthalmologist Ivan Schwab of the University of California at Davis. "These stem cells are similar to others in the body that make mucous membrane," he says. "These techniques of growing stem cells might one day be used to treat mucous-membrane tissue in the sinuses, bladder, and other organs."
According to the article, Sangwan-Vemuganti team's cutting-edge procedure of implanting cornea grown from stem cells is considered a major advancement by the experts because
Show Hint
- They derive stem cells from embryos.
- Their labs are customised to grow stem cells.
- They regrow cells in hearts, brains, livers with stem cells from tissues of living adults.
- They derive stem cells from tissues of living adults and grow cells in labs.
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
This comprehension question asks why experts consider the Sangwan-Vemuganti procedure a breakthrough. The clue sits in the second paragraph of the passage, which contrasts their method with what other stem cell teams around the world are doing.
- They derive stem cells from embryos: The passage says the opposite, that the team uses adult stem cells, "not ones derived from embryos." This option is wrong.
- Their labs are customised to grow stem cells: Nothing in the passage credits their success to special lab equipment or customisation. This is not supported.
- They regrow cells in hearts, brains, livers with stem cells from tissues of living adults: This describes what other teams around the world are trying, with progress described as slow, not what the Hyderabad team achieved. Their success is in corneas.
- They derive stem cells from tissues of living adults and grow cells in labs: This lines up exactly with the passage: adult stem cells, grown successfully into corneal tissue, with 80 procedures a year and lasting results in 56 percent of cases.
The fourth option captures both halves of what makes the work notable: the ethically simpler adult-cell source and the lab success in growing it into usable tissue.
Let's summarize:
- The team avoids embryonic stem cells entirely, using adult cells instead.
- Their real achievement is growing those adult cells into working corneal tissue in the lab.
The correct option is the fourth one, describing the use of adult stem cells grown in labs.
Sangwan-Vemuganti procedure is carried out on
Show Hint
- Patients requiring any corneal transplant
- Patients with damaged corneas
- Patients with damaged eyes of any kind
- None of the above
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
This question checks close reading of a single line: who does Sangwan operate on? The passage answers this directly, so the task is to find the option that matches neither more nor less than what is written.
- Patients requiring any corneal transplant: Too broad. The passage is about one specific stem-cell technique, not every type of corneal transplant surgery that exists.
- Patients with damaged corneas: Too narrow. The passage uses the broader phrase "damaged eyes," not the narrower "damaged corneas."
- Patients with damaged eyes of any kind: This is the exact wording used in the passage, "patients with damaged eyes," so it fits precisely.
- None of the above: Ruled out since option 3 is directly supported by the text.
Since the passage states plainly that Sangwan implants the lab-grown corneas "in patients with damaged eyes," the answer that mirrors this phrase without adding or removing scope is the third option.
Let's summarize:
- Always match comprehension answers to the passage's own wording, not a rephrased broader or narrower version.
- Here "damaged eyes" is broader than "damaged corneas" and narrower than "any corneal transplant."
The correct answer is patients with damaged eyes of any kind, option 3.
The world recognises this Indian innovation because Indian scientists are normally known
Show Hint
- To be good at analysing and finding out a method of how an existing drug is made.
- As they are good researchers of drugs.
- As they are good at carrying out experiments to create generic drugs.
- As they are able to carry out drug trials on large samples.
The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
The question is about the reputation the passage gives to Indian scientists in general, which explains why this particular innovation gets extra attention worldwide.
Step 2: Key line from the passage.
"Indians are well known for reverse engineering, meaning they can deduce how drugs are made in order to produce generic versions." Reverse engineering means starting from a finished product and working backward to understand how it was built or made.
Step 3: Apply this to the options.
Deducing how an existing drug is made is precisely what reverse engineering means, so option 1 fits directly. Option 2 is too general and does not capture the specific idea of figuring out an existing method. Option 3 talks about experiments to create generics, which is a step after reverse engineering, not the reputation itself. Option 4 brings in drug trials, which the passage never mentions in this context.
Step 4: Final Answer.
Indians are known for analysing and working out how an existing drug is made, so the answer is option 1. \[ \boxed{\text{To be good at analysing and finding out a method of how an existing drug is made}} \]
The pathologist, Vemuganti, started growing cornea in a petri dish
Show Hint
- By following procedures published in research papers
- By inventing a totally new procedure
- By experimenting with procedures published in journals
- By following the instruction of the transplant surgeon
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
This question is about the process Vemuganti used to work out how to grow corneas in a petri dish. The passage gives the answer through the phrase "reading papers and running experiments in the lab," so the right option has to reflect both halves of that phrase.
- By following procedures published in research papers: This only covers the reading part and leaves out that she also ran her own experiments, so it understates her role.
- By inventing a totally new procedure: This overstates things, since the passage credits published papers as her starting point, not a method she invented from scratch.
- By experimenting with procedures published in journals: This combines both parts correctly, published journal procedures as the base, followed by her own lab experiments to make the method work.
- By following the instruction of the transplant surgeon: The passage shows Sangwan only proposed that they team up, saying "Why don't we work together?"; the actual growing technique was Vemuganti's own doing.
Because Vemuganti's method rested on published research that she then tested and refined herself, the option that best matches this is the third one.
Let's summarize:
- Reading published papers gave her a starting point, but it was her own lab experiments that made the technique work.
- Nothing in the passage suggests she was simply following the surgeon's instructions.
The correct answer is that she started by experimenting with procedures published in journals, option 3.
In the context of the passage, choose the correct set of meanings for the words: PLATFORM and GENERIC
Show Hint
- Lab table; related to genes
- Method; related to genes
- Lab experiments; without a brand name
- Methodology; without a brand name
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
This is a vocabulary-in-context question: both "platform" and "generic" have common meanings, a stage, or related to genes, that do not fit how they are used in the passage. The task is to work out the passage-specific sense of each word before matching the pair.
- Lab table; related to genes: "Platform" here is not a physical table; it is described as a whole growing system. "Generic" in this passage is about drugs without a brand name, not about genes. Both parts are wrong.
- Method; related to genes: "Method" is close for "platform," but "related to genes" is still wrong for "generic," which the passage uses in a pharmaceutical, not genetic, sense.
- Lab experiments; without a brand name: "Without a brand name" correctly captures "generic," but "platform" is more than just lab experiments; it is the overall systematic method Vemuganti built for growing corneas.
- Methodology; without a brand name: This pairs a full systematic method, platform, with the correct pharmaceutical sense of generic, without a brand name. Both halves match the passage.
Since Vemuganti's "platform" is described as a complete growing system, it is best read as a methodology, and "generic versions" of drugs in this passage means versions sold without the original brand name.
Let's summarize:
- Context, not a word's first dictionary meaning, decides word sense in these questions.
- Platform means methodology and generic means without a brand name, in this passage.
The correct answer is option 4, methodology and without a brand name.
Top Questions on Reading Comprehension
- The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
For early postcolonial literature, the world of the novel was often the nation. Postcolonial novels were usually [concerned with] national questions. Sometimes the whole story of the novel was taken as an allegory of the nation, whether India or Tanzania. This was important for supporting anti-colonial nationalism, but could also be limiting - land-focused and inward looking.
My new book "Writing Ocean Worlds" explores another kind of world of the novel: not the village or nation, but the Indian Ocean world. The book describes a set of novels in which the Indian Ocean is at the centre of the story. It focuses on the novelists Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Lindsey Collen and Joseph Conrad [who have] centred the Indian Ocean world in the majority of their novels. . . Their work reveals a world that is outward-looking full of movement, border-crossing and south-south interconnection. They are all very different - from colonially inclined (Conrad) to radically anti-capitalist (Collen), but together draw on and shape a wider sense of Indian Ocean space through themes, images, metaphors and language. This has the effect of remapping the world in the reader's mind, as centred in the interconnected global south. ... The Indian Ocean world is a term used to describe the very long-lasting connections among the coasts of East Africa, the Arab coasts, and South and East Asia.
These connections were made possible by the geography of the Indian Ocean. For much of history, travel by sea was much easier than by land, which meant that port cities very far apart were often more easily connected to each other than to much closer inland cities. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that what we now call globalisation first appeared in the Indian Ocean. This is the interconnected oceanic world referenced and produced by the novels in my book. For their part Ghosh, Gurnah, Collen and even Conrad reference a different set of histories and geographies than the ones most commonly found in fiction in English. Those [commonly found ones] are mostly centred in Europe or the US, assume a background of Christianity and whiteness, and mention places like Paris and New York. The novels in [my] book highlight instead a largely Islamic space, feature characters of colour and centralise the ports of Malindi, Mombasa, Aden, Java and Bombay. . . . It is a densely imagined, richly sensory image of a southern cosmopolitan culture which provides for an enlarged sense of place in the world.
This remapping is particularly powerful for the representation of Africa. In the fiction, sailors and travellers are not all European. . . African, as well as Indian and Arab characters, are traders, nakhodas (dhow ship captains), runaways, villains, missionaries and activists. This does not mean that Indian Ocean Africa is romanticised. Migration is often a matter of force; travel is portrayed as abandonment rather than adventure, freedoms are kept from women and slavery is rife. What it does mean is that the African part of the Indian Ocean world plays an active role in its long, rich history and therefore in that of the wider world.- CAT - 2023
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Reading Comprehension
- The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Many human phenomena and characteristics - such as behaviors, beliefs, economies, genes, incomes, life expectancies, and other things - are influenced both by geographic factors and by non-geographic factors. Geographic factors mean physical and biological factors tied to geographic location, including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal species, soils, and topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under the term culture, other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual people.... [T]he differences between the current economies of North and South Korea ... cannot be attributed to the modest environmental differences between [them] ... They are instead due entirely to the different [government] policies ... At the opposite extreme, the Inuit and other traditional peoples living north of the Arctic Circle developed warm fur clothes but no agriculture, while equatorial lowland peoples around the world never developed warm fur clothes but often did develop agriculture. The explanation is straightforwardly geographic, rather than a cultural or historical quirk unrelated to geography. . . Aboriginal Australia remained the sole continent occupied only by hunter/gatherers and with no indigenous farming or herding ... [Here the] explanation is biogeographic: the Australian continent has no domesticable native animal species and few domesticable native plant species. Instead, the crops and domestic animals that now make Australia a food and wool exporter are all nonnative (mainly Eurasian) species such as sheep, wheat, and grapes, brought to Australia by overseas colonists.
Today, no scholar would be silly enough to deny that culture, history, and individual choices play a big role in many human phenomena. Scholars don't react to cultural, historical, and individual-agent explanations by denouncing "cultural determinism," "historical determinism," or "individual determinism," and then thinking no further. But many scholars do react to any explanation invoking some geographic role, by denouncing "geographic determinism" ... Several reasons may underlie this widespread but nonsensical view. One reason is that some geographic explanations advanced a century ago were racist, thereby causing all geographic explanations to become tainted by racist associations in the minds of many scholars other than geographers. But many genetic, historical, psychological, and anthropological explanations advanced a century ago were also racist, yet the validity of newer non-racist genetic etc. explanations is widely accepted today. Another reason for reflex rejection of geographic explanations is that historians have a tradition, in their discipline, of stressing the role of contingency (a favorite word among historians) based on individual decisions and chance. Often that view is warranted . . . But often, too, that view is unwarranted. The development of warm fur clothes among the Inuit living north of the Arctic Circle was not because one influential Inuit leader persuaded other Inuit in 1783 to adopt warm fur clothes, for no good environmental reason. A third reason is that geographic explanations usually depend on detailed technical facts of geography and other fields of scholarship ... Most historians and economists don't acquire that detailed knowledge as part of the professional training.- CAT - 2023
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Reading Comprehension
- [Fifty] years after its publication in English [in 1972], and just a year since [Marshall] Sahlins himself died—we may ask: why did [his essay] "Original Affluent Society" have such an impact, and how has it fared since? ... Sahlins's principal argument was simple but counterintuitive: before being driven into marginal environments by colonial powers, huntergatherers, or foragers, were not engaged in a desperate struggle for meager survival. Quite the contrary, they satisfied their needs with far less work than people in agricultural and industrial societies, leaving them more time to use as they wished. Hunters, he quipped, keep bankers' hours. Refusing to maximize, many were "more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game." . . . The so-called Neolithic Revolution, rather than improving life, imposed a harsher work regime and set in motion the long history of growing inequality ...
Moreover, foragers had other options. The contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who had long been surrounded by farmers, knew they had alternatives and rejected them. To Sahlins, this showed that foragers are not simply examples of human diversity or victimhood but something more profound: they demonstrated that societies make real choices. Culture, a way of living oriented around a distinctive set of values, manifests a fundamental principle of collective self-determination. . .
But the point [of the essay] is not so much the empirical validity of the data-the real interest for most readers, after all, is not in foragers either today or in the Paleolithic-but rather its conceptual challenge to contemporary economic life and bourgeois individualism. The empirical served a philosophical and political project, a thought experiment and stimulus to the imagination of possibilities.
With its title's nod toward The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith's famously skeptical portrait of America's postwar prosperity and inequality, and dripping with New Left contempt for consumerism, "The Original Affluent Society" brought this critical perspective to bear on the contemporary world. It did so through the classic anthropological move of showing that radical alternatives to the readers' lives really exist. If the capitalist world seeks wealth through ever greater material production to meet infinitely expansive desires, foraging societies follow "the Zen road to affluence": not by getting more, but by wanting less. If it seems that foragers have been left behind by "progress," this is due only to the ethnocentric self-congratulation of the West. Rather than accumulate material goods, these societies are guided by other values: leisure, mobility, and above all, freedom. . .
Viewed in today's context, of course, not every aspect of the essay has aged well. While acknowledging the violence of colonialism, racism, and dispossession, it does not thematize them as heavily as we might today. Rebuking evolutionary anthropologists for treating present-day foragers as "left behind" by progress, it too can succumb to the temptation to use them as proxies for the Paleolithic. Yet these characteristics should not distract us from appreciating Sahlins's effort to show that if we want to conjure new possibilities, we need to learn about actually inhabitable worlds.- CAT - 2023
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Reading Comprehension
- RESIDENTS of Lozère, a hilly department in southern France, recite complaints familiar to many rural corners of Europe. In remote hamlets and villages, with names such as Le Bacon and Le Bacon Vieux, mayors grumble about a lack of local schools, jobs, or phone and internet connections. Farmers of grazing animals add another concern: the return of wolves. Eradicated from France last century, the predators are gradually creeping back to more forests and hillsides. "The wolf must be taken in hand," said an aspiring parliamentarian, Francis Palombi, when pressed by voters in an election campaign early this summer. Tourists enjoy visiting a wolf park in Lozère, but farmers fret over their livestock and their livelihoods.
As early as the ninth century, the royal office of the Luparii-wolf-catchers-was created in France to tackle the predators. Those official hunters (and others) completed their job in the 1930s, when the last wolf disappeared from the mainland. Active hunting and improved technology such as rifles in the 19th century, plus the use of poison such as strychnine later on, caused the population collapse. But in the early 1990s the animals reappeared. They crossed the Alps from Italy, upsetting sheep farmers on the French side of the border. Wolves have since spread to areas such as Lozère, delighting environmentalists, who see the predators' presence as a sign of wider ecological health. Farmers, who say the wolves cause the deaths of thousands of sheep and other grazing animals, are less cheerful. They grumble that green activists and politically correct urban types have allowed the return of an old enemy.
Various factors explain the changes of the past few decades. Rural depopulation is part of the story. In Lozère, for example, farming and a once-flourishing mining industry supported a population of over 140,000 residents in the mid- 19th century. Today the department has fewer than 80,000 people, many in its towns. As humans withdraw, forests are expanding. In France, between 1990 and 2015, forest cover increased by an average of 102,000 hectares each year, as more fields were given over to trees. Now, nearly one-third of mainland France is covered by woodland of some sort. The decline of hunting as a sport also means more forests fall quiet. In the mid-to-late 20th century over 2m hunters regularly spent winter weekends tramping in woodland, seeking boars, birds and other prey. Today the Fédération Nationale des Chasseurs, the national body, claims 1.1 m people hold hunting licences, though the number of active hunters is probably lower. The mostly protected status of the wolf in Europe-hunting them is now forbidden, other than when occasional culls are sanctioned by the state-plus the efforts of NGOs to track and count the animals, also contribute to the recovery of wolf populations.
As the lupine population of Europe spreads westwards, with occasional reports of wolves seen closer to urban areas, expect to hear of more clashes between farmers and those who celebrate the predators' return. Farmers' losses are real, but are not the only economic story. Tourist venues, such as parks where wolves are kept and the animals' spread is discussed, also generate income and jobs in rural areas.- CAT - 2023
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Reading Comprehension
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Questions Asked in SNAP exam
In the following figure, the smaller triangle represents teachers; the big triangle represents politicians; circle represents graduates and rectangle represents members of Parliament. Different regions are being represented by letters of English alphabet. On the basis of the above diagram, answer the following questions: 
- SNAP - 2024
- Venn Diagrams