SBI Clerk English Sectional Mock Test 03

1. Directions: Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow. Certain words are given in single quotes to help you locate them. Indian cities have long measured heat in the language of the weather report: the maximum temperature, recorded at an airport on the edge of town, announced each evening as if it described the whole city. For a growing number of planners, this number is beginning to look misleading. On the same afternoon, a tree-lined residential colony and a dense market a few kilometres away can differ in surface temperature by more than ten degrees. The weather station sees neither. The difference matters because heat does not harm people equally. A construction worker on an 'exposed' site, a vendor without shade and an elderly person in a tin-roofed room on the top floor experience a city that the official forecast barely describes. Night-time temperatures are an especially poor guide. Concrete and asphalt that absorb heat by day release it slowly after sunset, so that in the most crowded neighbourhoods the air hardly cools before morning. It is this lack of relief, rather than the peak of the afternoon, that doctors increasingly link to deaths during heatwaves. Some cities have responded with heat action plans that open cooling centres, shift working hours and issue early warnings. Such plans save lives, but they treat heat as an emergency to be managed rather than a condition to be designed out. The more 'durable' remedies are slower and less visible: roofs painted white to reflect sunlight, trees planted where people actually walk, and building rules that allow air to move between houses. None of these measures is expensive on its own. Their difficulty lies in the fact that they must be carried out across thousands of buildings by owners who will not see any reward for years. It would be a mistake, then, to judge a heat plan by the number of warnings it issues. A better test is whether, ten summers from now, the hottest neighbourhoods are any cooler than they are today.

   Q1.Why does the passage describe the officially announced maximum temperature as 'misleading'?

   • A.It is recorded at night, when temperatures are lowest
   • B.Planners deliberately alter it before it is announced
   • C.It always exaggerates how hot the city actually is
   • D.It is recorded at one location and misses large differences in heat between parts of the same city
   • E.The instruments at airport weather stations are usually faulty

2. Q2.According to the passage, which aspect of heat do doctors increasingly link to deaths during heatwaves?

   • A.The high temperatures recorded at airports
   • B.The sudden fall in temperature just after sunset
   • C.The heat absorbed by trees in residential colonies
   • D.The failure of the air to cool at night in crowded neighbourhoods
   • E.The peak temperature reached in the afternoon

3. Q3.What is the author's main criticism of existing heat action plans?

   • A.They have failed to save any lives during heatwaves
   • B.They manage heat as a short-term emergency instead of reducing it through lasting changes
   • C.They do not include cooling centres for workers
   • D.They are too expensive for most cities to afford
   • E.They issue too few warnings to the public

Start the test to answer these. Correct answers and explanations are shown after you submit.