Passage Comprehension — PPSC previous year questions

Read the following passage and answer Question Numbers 67 and 68 with reference to the passage by choosing the most appropriate option : After a traumatic experience, it’s normal to feel frightened, sad, anxious, and disconnected. But if the upset doesn’t fade, you may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD can develop following any event that makes you fear for your safety. Any event, or series of events, that overwhelms you with feelings of hopelessness and helplessness and leaves you emotionally shattered, can trigger PTSD – especially if the event feels unpredictable and uncontrollable. PTSD can affect people who personally experience the traumatic event, those who witness the event, or those who pick up the pieces afterwards, such as emergency workers and law enforcement officers. PTSD can also result from surgery performed on children too young to fully understand what’s happening to them. Whatever the cause for your PTSD, with treatment and support, one can learn to manage your symptoms, reduce painful memories, and move past the trauma. Following a traumatic event, almost everyone experiences at least some of the symptoms of PTSD. A normal response to trauma becomes PTSD when you get stuck. After a traumatic experience, the mind and the body are in shock. But as you make sense of what happened and process your emotions, you start to come out of it. With PTSD, however, you remain in psychological shock. Your memory of what happened and your feelings about it are disconnected. In order to move on, it’s important to face and feel your memories and emotions. Recovery from PTSD is a gradual, ongoing process. Healing doesn’t happen overnight, nor do the memories of the trauma ever disappear completely. This can make life seem difficult at times. PTSD can make you feel disconnected from others. You may be tempted to withdraw from social activities and your loved ones. But it’s important to stay connected to life and the people who care about you. If you suspect that you or a loved one has post-traumatic stress disorder, it’s important to seek help right away. The sooner PTSD is treated, the easier it is to overcome. This process is much easier with the guidance and support of an experienced therapist or doctor. Treatment for PTSD can relieve symptoms by helping you deal with the trauma you’ve experienced. When looking for a therapist, seek out mental health professionals who specialize in the treatment of trauma and PTSD. Beyond credentials and experience, it’s important to find a PTSD therapist who makes you feel comfortable and safe. Trust your gut; if a therapist doesn’t feel right, look for someone else. For therapy to work, you need to feel comfortable and understood

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it.

There is absolutely no point in complaining that over the years, there has been pressure for increased productivity and higher earnings for workers in industry. There are several ways for increasing employee earnings. Employee earnings can be increased by raising the selling price of the firm's products and services, reducing profits or costs of raw materials, or augmenting labour productivity. However, increasing employee earnings by means other than increased labour productivity jeopardizes the firm's competitive strength in the market. Higher prices usually mean fewer customers, reduced profit means less capital investment, and low-cost materials mean poor product quality. But, increasing labour productivity by enhancing skills and motivation creates an almost unlimited resource. The development of economic resources, human as well as nonhuman, is the product of human effort, and the quality of human effort in large part depends on human motivation.

Enthusing employees with workaholic spirit through traditional authority and financial incentives has become increasingly difficult as employees become economically secure and their dependency on any one particular organisation decreases. According to expectancy theorists, the motivation to work increases when an employee feels his performance is an instrument for obtaining desired rewards. Nevertheless, in many organisations today employees are entitled to organisational rewards just by being employed. Unions, governmental regulations, and the nature of the job itself in some cases prevent management from relating financial rewards to performance. People may be attracted to join and remain in organisations to receive organisational rewards, but being motivated to join an organisation is not the same as being motivated to exert effort in an organisation. The challenge to management is to find and administer alternative forms of incentives which will induce employees to improve work performance. Such alternative forms of reinforcement will require increased understanding of motivational theories and programmes

The urge to reduce the poor to a set of clichés has been with us for as long as there has been poverty: The poor appear, in social theory as much as in literature, by turns lazy or enterprising, noble or thievish, angry or passive, helpless or self-sufficient. It is no surprise that the policy stances that correspond to these views of the poor also tend to be captured in simple formulas: “Free markets for the poor,” “Make human rights substantial,” “Deal with conflict first,” “Give more money to the poorest,” “Foreign aid kills development,” and the like. These ideas all have important elements of truth, but they rarely have much space for average poor women or men, with their hopes and doubts, limitations and aspirations, beliefs and confusion. If the poor appear at all, it is usually as the dramatis personae of some uplifting anecdote or tragic episode, to be admired or pitied, but not as a source of knowledge, not as people to be consulted about what they think or want or do. What is striking is that even people who are poor are just like the rest of us in almost every way. We have the same desires and weaknesses; the poor are no less rational than anyone else—quite the contrary. Precisely because they have so little, we often find them putting much careful thought into their choices: They have to be sophisticated economists just to survive. Yet our lives are as different as liquor and liquorice. And this has a lot to do with aspects of our own lives that we take for granted and hardly think about. All too often, the economics of poverty gets mistaken for poor economics: Because the poor possess very little, it is assumed that there is nothing interesting about their economic existence. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding severely undermines the fight against global poverty: Simple problems beget simple solutions. The field of anti-poverty policy is littered with the detritus of instant miracles that proved less than miraculous. To progress, we have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters and take the time to really understand their lives, in all their complexity and richness