Microsoft Sample Verbal Questions

DIRECTIONS for questions 1-4:Study the passages below and answer the questions that follow the passage.

Passage-1

Twenty-first-century readers can be broadly divided into two categories: those who read e-books (in an electronic, digital format) and those like me who prefer to curl up with the original printed version. And so what if the world's largest online retailer Amazon announced that it was selling 105 e-books for every 100 print books? Amazon also announced that sales of print books were going up. Going to bed with a paperback or hardcover may be old-fashioned, but you can fall asleep while reading without worrying about the battery life on the e-reader. "As we get older, we get honester," goes the first line of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 1956 Russian poem, Zima Junction. As we get older, we also get more sleepless. And for those who like to read, nothing can be as soothing as a book that makes you forget the problems that keep you awake and takes you away to a different world until you fall asleep. Even the most sophisticated e-reader is not as user-friendly as a paperback or a hardcover that you can carry in all kinds of weather (from snowstorms to tsunamis) and wherever you go (from the office, the park and the zoo, to the hospital or even the metro that has just started rolling in India's pensioner's paradise-turned-Silicon Plateau). You can even take a book to war. A copy of Three Men in a Boat (one of the funniest books in English literature, first published in 1889) was found in the knapsack of a British soldier who was killed at Spion Kop during the Boer War of 1900. Watch a telecast of any cricket match anywhere in the world and the camera invariably zooms in on that one male or female spectator who is reading a printed book, with the cameraman voyeuristically trying to give the viewers a glimpse of the cover and title. Maybe, one day, someone will publish a book titled 'What to read at the match!' In the very first summer after World War-II ended and cricket resumed in England, the poet-turned-sports commentator John Arlott wrote a book, 'Off for the cricket', which perhaps explains why Arlott was called the voice of summer. Books remain the ideal gift for all occasions and festivals. I have forgotten much of what they taught me at schools, but I remember the books presented to me at annual prize distribution functions.