English: Cloze Test for Upcoming Exams – Set 112

Directions: In the passage given below there are 10 blanks. Every blank has A PAIR of five alternative words given in options (A),(B),(C), (D) and (E). You have to tell which pair is APPROPRIATE according to the context. If all are appropriate then mark your answer as “E”.

Every ten minutes, black Volkswagen _____1______vans ferry delegates from their hotels in Davos, Switzerland, to this year’s World Economic Forum, held from January 17th to 20th. If you could squeeze the world’s eight richest men into one of these vans, they might feel____2____. But they could comfort themselves with an extraordinary statistic: according to Oxfam, a charity, they own as much wealth ($426bn) as half the world’s population combined ($409bn).

To make this striking calculation, the charity draws on data from Forbes magazine, which lists the wealth of the billionaires, and Credit Suisse, which estimates the smaller holdings of everyone else, thanks to painstaking work by three scholars of wealth, Anthony Shorrocks, Jim Davies and Rodrigo Lluberas.

____3____ can nonetheless criticise Oxfam’s headline-grabbing comparison for its handling of debt, the dollar, labour and data. The world’s least wealthy include over 420m adults whose debts exceed their assets, leaving them with negative net worth. Most of this net debt is owed by people in high-income countries. There are, for example, over 21m Americans with a combined wealth of minus $357bn. Only people with relatively good prospects, by global standards, can be so poor; the ____4____of the earth could never borrow so much. If all of the people with sub-zero wealth are ____5____ from the comparison, the poorest half of the remaining population would have a combined wealth equivalent to the richest 98 billionaires.

The Credit Suisse team converts the world’s wealth into dollars at market rates. But the dollar ____6____ further in poor countries. So studies of global poverty typically make currency conversions at “purchasing-power parity” (PPP) instead. Wealth data also exclude the poor’s biggest asset: their labour or “human capital”. The returns on that asset—such as wages—do however appear in income statistics. So whereas the bottom half of the global population have a negligible share of global wealth (only 0.15% at market exchange rates, according to Credit Suisse), they have a ____7____ share of global income (10.6% at PPP in 2013, the latest number available, according to Christoph Lakner of the World Bank).

In valuing the poor’s wealth at $409bn, Oxfam also seems to have committed a ____8____ error. The figure should be just $384bn, according to Mr Shorrocks (although the data are too ____9____ to allow much precision). For what it’s worth, $384bn is less than the wealth of the world’s seven richest men. There would be no need to ____10____ Michael Bloomberg, the world’s eighth-richest person, into the minivan. That would leave room for the magnificent seven to stretch their legs.

  1. applaud, support
    shuttle , subway
    blame, censure
    chide, decry
    All are correct
    Option B

     

  2. encouraged, facilitate
    constrained, loosen
    thwarted, confined
    cramped, obstructed
    All are correct
    Option D

     

  3. deep, dissenting
    amateur, basic
    Pedants, purist
    eccentric, dissident
    All are correct
    Option C

     

  4. wretched, atrocious
    odious, vile
    prime, grubby
    acceptable, marvelous
    All are correct
    Option A

     

  5. expelled, thrown out
    ruled out, banish
    eliminated, prohibited
    excluded, ousted
    All are correct
    Option E

     

  6. friable, whippy
    stretches, limbers
    flaky, springy
    resilient, stiff
    All are correct
    Option B

     

  7. weightier, significant
    higher, significant
    larger, significant
    bigger, significant
    All are correct
    Option D

     

  8. rounding, bulbous
    lardy, lanky
    hippy, plumpish
    paunchy, chubby
    All are correct
    Option A

     

  9. dappled, speckled
    bitty, variable
    patchy, uneven
    inconstant, inadequate
    All are correct
    Option E

     

  10. cram, dilate
    extrude, inflate
    squeeze, crush
    scrounge, gouge
    All are correct
    Option C

     




 

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3 Thoughts to “English: Cloze Test for Upcoming Exams – Set 112”

  1. jaga

    sbi clerk notification out!!!

  2. PHENOMENAL

    plzz give explaination also, thanx

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