Speed Test-1

English Comprehension
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Passage I
In the last few years, scientists have a changed understanding of
what the brain can do and how it can be changed by the world around
us. The brain adjusts to the need to do a number of varied tasks it
needs to do simultaneously, i.e. , multitasking.
High tech scanners have revealed that the brain is constantly
changing cells die off, but new ones are created all the time,
depending on what your brain is doing. For example, the brain scans of
London cab drivers have a large-than-normal hippocampus (the area of
the brain that deals with memory and navigation), because they have to
memorize thousands of streets. Thus now, the consequences of
multitasking are controversial some say it reduces the span of
attention while others say it increases working memory capacity.
Multitasking research also points to improvements in fluid
intelligence which helps us make connections, spot patterns and solve
problems. Its opposite to crystalline intelligence, which relies on long
term memory.
Due to the Internet we have outsourced much of our crystalline
intelligence, as we no longer rely on it for memorising facts. We are now
entering a world in which flexible, street smart, fluid intelligence is going
to become more important. When we are multitasking, the brain
responds to the increased information by boosting working memory,
which raises our fluid intelligence. Modern life is making us sharper.
(total words= 230)
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Speed Test-2
English Comprehension
Start Time: .
Passage 2
Which makes ones destiny? Chance or Choice. Many people can say its chance.
Many people can say its choice. After all, luck can only take you so far. To go farther, you
need to have a vision and the conviction and intelligence to realise it. Thats what sets
leaders apart from followers. Leaders dont hesitate to take on seemingly impossible goals
and then inspire everyone else around them to help achieve those goals. Needless to say, a
country needs leaders in every sphere. It needs great politicians to judiciously exercise
power on behalf of all its people; it needs great businessmen to create wealth for everyone;
it needs great scientists, doctors, artists, writers, entertainers, and simply do-gooders.
As we approach the end of the new millenniums first decade, India looks more
alive, more confident, and more prosperous than ever before. Slowly but surely, the centre
of gravity of world economy is shifting to Asia, and India, along with China, is one of the
pillars on which this new world order will rest. At the same time, politically, India faces a
crisis of leadership. A degenerate political system, where caste and communal
considerations rule over issues and ideologies, has meant that even the handful of political
leaders willing to put the nations interest over their own are held hostage by political allies
whose only objective is to protect their narrow constituencies. (total = 232 words)

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Speed Test-3
English Comprehension
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Passage-3

The revolt of the British working class against the hegemony of finance will
undermine the confidence of capitalists and also encourage other countries to follow the
British example.
The VOTE FOR BREXIT REPRESENTS essentially an un-self conscious revolt by
the British people against the hegemony of finance capital. Indeed, since 63 per cent of
Labour votes reportedly voted for Brexit, and the Lobour party, despite years of Blairism,
continues to derive its voting strength substantially from the working class, it would be no
exaggeration to call the Brexit vote a working class revolt against the hegemony of
globalised finance capital. It occurred not just as a protest against the fallout of this
hegemony in the form of crisis and unemployment, and not just as a counter to finance
capitals project of overcoming all (so called) isolationism, but also in the face of a missive
campaign that finance had unleashed against Brexit. And it defined not just German
finance capital but British finance capital as well, based in the City of London.
The City had worked assiduously for a remain verdict, not just because of its
general predilection for globalism, but also specifically because of its apprehension that
Britains opting out of the European Union would allow Frankfurt to move ahead of London
as the financial centre of Europe. It had always been staunchly pro-Europe: it had been
instrumental in pushing Britain into Europe, and also I getting rid of Margaret Thatcher as
Prime Minister when she started expressing anti-Europe sentiments. Indeed, a bewildered
Margaret Thatcher, when she was forced to resign, had reportedly remark: I have never lost
a general election; I have never lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons; I have
never lost an election for the Tory Party leadership; and yet I am no longer Prime Minister!
She had obviously not reckoned with the Citys immense manipulative powers. But even
these came to naught in the E.U. referendum, party because it underestimated the
opposition to E.U., but above all because the British working people working people
remained steadfast in their opposition despite intimidation and blackmail. The outcome of the
hegemony of globalised finance, in the form of neoliberal policies that brought crisis and
unemployment, increasing inequality and absolute poverty, and cuts in the Walfare State,
especially in the National Health Service, proved too much for them to swallow.
A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
The tragedy, however, is that the Left and the Centre-Left (in particular the Labour
Party), with the exception of a small group (the Lexit), completely ignored the sentiment of

the working class which they claim to represent and opposed Brexit, leaving the field open
for racist and ultra-right elements like the U.K Independent party (UKIP) of Nigel Farage, and
a group of Tories including the former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to emerge as the
champions of peoples anger. Not surprisingly, a racist and anti-immigrant hue got imparted
to the Brex-it campaign, and this very fact was then used ironically to justify a remain
vote; but the racist and anti-immigrant hue was itself a result of the abandoning of the
working people by those who should have been leading them, namely the Left and the
Centre-Left. The position of the Left and the Centre-Left thus became a self-fulfill-ing
prophecy: they did not support Brexit because it invoked anti-immigrant feelings; but it
invoked such feelings precisely because they did not support it.
And in the process they ignored the real grievances, whose roots they knew, of the
working people. They could have explained to those who were influenced by the antiimmigration rhetoric that the problem lay not so much in immigration as in the hegemony of
globalised finance capital, which has perpetuated and intensified the crisis because of its
insistence upon austerity, that is, upon drastic cuts in public spending, adversely affecting
employment and incomes. Bringing this fact home to the working people would have made
their un-self-conscious revolt against the hegemony of finance into a self-conscious revolt,
giving it a greater degree of coherence; but it required recognizing the depth of the peoples
grievance, which sadly the Left and the Centre-Left did not do. Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian
Marxist philosopher, has talked of the false consciousness underlying the Brexit vote; but
to the extent it was there, even such false consciousness, as Georg Lukacs had once
pointed out, also has an element of truth in it. The Left, sadly, did not look for this truth.
BASIC CONTRADICTION IN E.U.
The Lefts ambivalence towards the E.D. derives from a basic contradiction in the E.D. itself.
While it does represent a transcendence of the nationalism and national conflicts that had
plunged Europe into two devastation world wars, this transcendence has occurred within the
context of hegemony of globalised finance capital. The PUBLIC SECTOR WORLERS went
on strike across Britain on July 10, 2014, in dispute with the government over working
conditions including pension and pay. Here, striking workers protesting in Trafalgar Square
in central London.
Left, while welcome the former, has naturally been opposed to the latter; but it has believed
that this contradiction could be overcome through democratic struggles within a united
Europe. This assumption, however, is wrong, as has been most recently shown by the
example of Greece. Syriza (Coalition of Radical Left) has proceeded precisely on the basis
of this of this assumption, namely that it could appeal successfully to the democratic
tendency within the E.U.to provide financial accommodation to Greece without imposing
austerity, that is, to thwart the agenda of finance capital to saddle Greece with austerity.
Indeed, so confident had it been about succeeding in the effort that it did not even have a
fallback option. And in the event it had to capitulate miserably before finance capital,
accepting an extraordinarily harsh and humiliating austerity package devised by Wolfgang
Schauble, the German Finance Minister. ( Total Words = 981)

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