XAT 2012 Question Paper

The phrase "On a wing and a prayer" means to do something without preparation and hoping to succeed. From the sentence it can be inferred that the Indian team was under prepared and hoping to succeed.

Hence, the correct answer is Option D

From the narrative, it is clear that the act of importing tea into Ireland is an event of the past and that perhaps doing so today is not a "big deal". This means that the act of importing tea should be spoken of in the past perfect tense as we are referring to a past event (of importing tea directly) when standing at a point which itself is a point of past from today's perspective (the point when it was considered a coup). Hence, "had dared" is the most apt for the second blank and hence, B should be the answer.

The sequence of events has to be understood like this: daring to import tea ---> being considered as a coup ----> not a big deal today. 

The given sentence implies that 'libero' was introduced as the Italian default due to Milan's success and it was killed a century later due to their success.
Option D implies the opposite of what has been mentioned in the given sentence. All other option can be implied.
Hence, option D is the correct answer.

Antonym of Chaos is Order.

Antonym of Fact is Fiction.

Antonym of Virtue is Vice.

Antonym of Light is Darkness.

Synonym of Study is Analyse.

All pairs other than D are antonyms of each other. 

Option D is the odd one out because study and analyse are synonyms of each other. 

The argument is that India made up for the loss incurred in literacy rate from 1991 to 2001 by improving in the 5 year span from 2001 to 2006. 
This can be refuted if it can be proven that the progress made in 2001 to 2006 was not good enough in amount to cover the losses incurred in the previous 10 year period. So even if India improved in 2001-06, the improvement might have been marginal and hardly substantial.

This is given to us by option D. Hence, the answer. 

'Embezzlement' means theft or misappropriation of funds placed in one's trust or belonging to one's employer. Option B represents the most appropriate meaning of the given sentence.
Hence, option B is the correct answer.

From the given sentence, we can infer easily that sentence C precedes sentences D and B. We place sentence D and then B because sentence C mentions macro factors first and then micro ones. Hence, C-D-B is a mandatory sequence. 
This is available only in options A and C.
Obviously, the sequence cannot start with sentence A and hence, the sequence E-A-C-D-B has to be the answer.

Consider these sentences from the 4th line of given passage:
"This dichotomy is lost in a model of exclusively self- interested motivation, in which a person’s agency must be entirely geared to his or her own well-being. But once that straitjacket of self-interested motivation is removed, it becomes possible to recognize the indisputable fact that the person’s agency can well be geared to considerations not covered - or at least not fully covered - by his or her own well-being."

They make it clear that the author believes it is incorrect to completely align a person's agency to his/her well being. It is very likely that a person's agency might not be related completely with his/her idea of well being. 
This idea is reflected in option A. 
Option B is not true because it says that both the said issues are completely independent which is not the case. The author clearly mentions that there can be a good correlation between the two but not always or in a complete sense. 
Hence, only A can be thought of as the true sentence. 

The key focus of the passage is to let the reader know that the sense of agency in a person and the sense of well being, even though very strongly correlated, are individual and independent factors. While they may heavily influence each other, one should not mistake them to be the same thing or even assume that knowing the value of one can help us easily arrive at the value of another. 

This can be applied to the industrial success in Japan by understanding that helping their country achieve success in industrial world must have given a sense of satisfaction and achievement (i.e. agency) and to the Japanese people, and also improved their sense of own well being, it is not necessarily the only driver behind the success. The agency of people in contributing to industrial success must also have some roots in reasons other than personal well-being. 
This is best reflected in the option D.

The closing lines of the passage act as a good guide here. It says that if we forget the individuality of the sense of agency and sense of well being and end up correlating them all the time, then we might end up drawing incorrect inferences. 

In the last option given to us, we can see that a politician is going on a hunger strike which means he is putting his sense of well being (by depriving his body of necessity of food) on the backburner but ends up fulfilling his sense of agency by achieving a good image in the minds of his voters. If we would have thought that sense of well being and sense of agency are correlated all the time, then we might never have understood the rationale behind the politician's hunger strike (and some might even have deemed such an event as an impossibility). The incident of hunger strike is a proof that sense of agency might well be driven NOT by sense of well being all the time. And this is the point of the entire passage. Hence, it is an apt answer.