English: Sentence Completion Set 2
This set contains questions based on Sentence Fillers which has been asked repeatedly in recent banking exams. Practise this set and prepare yourself for upcoming exams like SBI PO, IBPS PO, Clerk and other exams as well. Sentence Fillers has now become an important question of banking exam.
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.
- (………………………………………………………………………….) Only the former, they say, is worth having. They are suspicious of GDP, a crude measure which does not take account of resource depletion, unpaid work, and countless other factors. In its place they advocate more holistic approaches, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a composite index that includes things like the cost of pollution, deforestation and car accidents.
A) But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a British economist, in an essay published in 1966.
B) To its practitioners, ecological economics is neither ecology nor economics, but a fusion of both.
C) There are two ways our economies can grow, ecological economists point out: through technological change, or through more intensive use of resources.
D) The GPI, they point out, is a subjective measure.
E) In 2009 a paper in Nature, a scientific journal, argued that human activity is already overstepping safe planetary boundaries on issues such as biodiversity and climate change.
- Recent mass shootings may mobilise advocates of gun restrictions and could conceivably even spur legislators to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 or pursue other gun legislation. But there is reason to wonder how much of a difference these reforms would make. American civilians own far more guns than anybody else in the world. The land of the free is home to an estimated 270m guns, enough for nearly nine in ten Americans. (………………………………………………………………)
A) Many people attribute the phenomenon to the power of the National Rifle Association (NRA), one of America’s richest and most influential lobbying groups.
B) Opponents of gun control routinely argue that the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” ensures unfettered access to guns.
C) The NRA builds its prestige on a constituency that is more strident and more politically active than proponents of gun-control.
D) Seven years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that a ban on handguns in the home was an affront to the Second Amendment.
E) So even if all new gun purchases were banned tomorrow, there are enough rifles floating around the country to fuel countless more mass shootings.
- It may seem odd that Greece would cave in to the pressure of being expelled from Schengen at a time when the zone’s future itself is uncertain. Yet border checks in Europe, whatever their practical use, are important symbols of who belongs to the club and who does not. The case of Schengen and Greece’s future in it will be revisited in March 2016, when members will consider a longer-term suspension. (………………………………………………………………………….)
A) The first sign of a bust-up came on November 27th, when Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, said that European leaders were keen to shoo Greece out of the visa-free zone.
B) The unprecedented number of migrants entering it in search of a better life caused many states to ask for reinstallation of border controls earlier this year.
C) For now, the continent is struggling to find a way to manage its migrant and border problems without dissolving the project of European unity.
D) But despite the area’s uncertain future, last week expulsion was still used as a threat towards one member state, Greece, which refused to co-operate in the collective effort to alleviate the refugee crisis.
E) The only consequence would be to deprive Greek citizens of the right to travel freely within Schengen and, perhaps more importantly, to force overseas visitors to obtain a visa to enter Greece—a blow to Greece’s tourism-reliant economy.
- Independence and the Gulf states’ control over copious quantities of oil brought little relief. Bedouin clans morphed into sovereign states, but so small were their populations that they relied on the former colonial powers to secure their immense wealth. (…………………………………………………. )Military rulers monopolised power in the Islamic world’s former heartlands, often treating Islam as an obstacle to their modernising projects.
A) Since then Western sanctions have offered a reminder of the lingering hold foreigners continue to exercise over the region.
B) The first suicide bombings in the 1980s were carried out by Shias, with the understanding that the next world would be an improvement.
C) Since the mid-19th century, when the Sunni sultan of the Ottoman empire controlled land on three continents, history has been a tale of Sunni decline.
D) Sunni militias rose up in their place, in Iraq and Syria, in an attempt to stem the advance of Iranian influence.
E) It was in 1920 that Winston Churchill, then Britain’s war secretary, ordered the Royal Air Force to bomb Iraq in an attempt to subdue a rebellion.
- In the 19th century, supporters of nationalisation argued that it boosted economic efficiency. State ownership benefited consumers, the argument went, by ensuring that companies had sufficient investment and profits were passed onto consumers through lower prices. (………………………………………………………………………………………). As a result, the state started to creep into more sectors of the economy.
A) There were significant efficiency improvements in nationalising the postal system and the telegraph network.
B) This was in part due to the rise of trade unions and the move towards a fully democratic political system.
C) The most pernicious effect of this was to slow down the overall growth of the economy.
D) Having a big single company rather than lots of little privately-owned ones would increase productivity through harnessing economies of scale.
E) Domestic fuel prices have fallen by 30% in real terms since privatisation in the 1980s, for instance, benefiting the poor, who spend the greatest share of their income on it, more than the rich.
- (………………………………………………………………): parents in America are also turning away from fee-paying schools. In both countries, the result is more pressure on state resources. And falling private school attendance is likely to be one reason why the well-off are grabbing an ever-larger share of government spending. The decline of private schools—long desired by many on the left—could turn out to have tricky consequences.
A) The growing unpopularity of private education is not just an English phenomenon
B) Some have closed, others have merged and many more have simply focused on teaching fewer pupils for more money.
C) The fall in numbers is largely confined to the lower end of the market.
D) One study found that fees had gone up by around 20% between 2010 and 2015.
E) Although the number of school-age children has risen since 2008, independent schools have barely grown.
- (………………………………………………………..) Terrorists and criminals cross national borders easily. Law-enforcement should be able to do the same. The police should have access to databases such as passenger name records on internal European flights, and the fingerprints of people who have arrived claiming refugee status. Interior ministers are already pushing strongly for this. Public worries about privacy and abuse of power are reasonable, but the answer to that is good intelligence oversight.
A) Each government sets different rules for what data may be looked at, by whom and with what authority.
B) The attacks also reignited a long-running debate about encryption—encoding messages such as e-mails, in ways that even government intelligence agencies cannot break
C) Breaking down barriers to information-sharing is a much better idea.
D) The internet has fostered a culture in which anybody can pretend to be who they like, or give no details at all.
E) We do not allow anonymous births, cars, planes or bank-accounts. Insisting on absolute anonymity online looks a bit anomalous.
- Presidential pardons and commutations are prone to misuse, of course. George W Bush was pilloried for in effect eliminating the prison sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former White House aide, in 2007. Mr Libby had been sentenced to 30 months in prison for leaking the identity of a CIA operative who opposed the Iraq war. (…………………………………………….)
A) Obama’s record on pardons offers an intriguing glimpse of his views on criminality and justice.
B) According to statistics provided by the Department of Justice, 64 applicants have been pardoned in the four years between December 2010 and December 2014
C) The American president can pardon any person convicted in a federal court, but the vast majority of presidential pardons are granted after a conviction has been served.
D) In a stroke, Mr Bush’s reprieve erased the deliberative work of the judicial system and the penalty dealt to an official working on his behalf.
E) A pardoned man or woman therefore enjoys the same rights as ordinary citizens, but only, in most cases, after suffering the fate of a rightfully or wrongfully held conviction.
- In 1905, Einstein had put forth his special theory of relativity, which concerned itself with objects and experimenters travelling at speeds near that of light. (………………………………………………………………………..)His flash of insight was to fuse the three dimensions of space with that of time and create a single, mutable whole: spacetime. To make sure that light was always seen to move at light speed, the theory predicted weird effects like the shrinking of physical extent or stretching of time as objects got faster.
A) After the 1919 eclipse, general relativity lapsed into the shadows.
B) Einstein took this to be an absolute speed limit.
C) Physicists were distracted by another flashy new theory, quantum mechanics, or working on the physics of atomic nuclei, which was also booming.
D) By now they are taken to be fundamental constituents of the cosmos and to lie at the centres of most galaxies.
E) Matter is not pulled by gravity, it falls along the path of least resistance, tracing out the shape of spacetime itself.
- Identity and language are closely entwined, but the high level of bilingualism in Malta has made code-switching rife. The use of English is increasingly present in informal speech—some words are even adopted and given a new life in Italian forms. (………………………………………………….) Others dismiss such concerns as irrelevant. Professor Joseph Brincat, who teaches linguistics at the University of Malta, says it is too early to say whether Maltese will survive.
A) Maltese developed in parallel with the nationalities of those who ruled it, absorbing new elements and fitting them into its simplified Arabic structures.
B) Some fear this intrusion could cause the language to be abandoned.
C) Much like its society, Malta’s language is the result of centuries of cultural mingling.
D) From as early as the ninth century until 1964, when the country became independent, a series of conquerors left their mark on all aspects of Maltese life
E) The Sicilians and the Knights of Malta followed.