Parajumble for Bank Exams 2019: Special Quiz 8

A) It’s found in everything from computers to kitchen floors, Barbie dolls to bicycle helmets, car bumpers, and IV blood bags.
B) In the United States, plastic goes to make an annual 50 billion water bottles – now so ubiquitous that environmental activists have initiated ‘ban the bottle’ campaigns.
C) Plastic, of course, can be wonderful stuff, with a range of applications.
D) We also use an estimated 200 billion plastic straws each year to slurp our sodas; 100 billion plastic bags to haul our groceries home and toss our trash; and, just in 2014, enough plastic Keurig coffee pods to circle the globe 12 times.

A. Non-performing assets, restructured loans and written-off assets – collectively called ‘stressed assets’ – have become a major challenge to the country’s banking system.
B. To combat it, the government promulgated the Banking Regulation (Amendment) Ordinance
C. It was passed to deal with stressed assets, particularly those in consortium or multiple banking arrangements.
D. The ordinance enables the Union government to authorize the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to direct banking companies to resolve the issues related to specific stressed assets, by initiating insolvency resolution progress wherever required.

A) Pharmacies across the country went on a one-day strike to highlight their concerns about the threat from e-pharmacies, and the cost that will be imposed by new regulations on the sale of medicines.
B) Traditional pharmacies have been knocking at the doors of the government for some time now as they face intense competition from e-pharmacies.
C) The strike, called by the All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists, had the support of well over eight lakh pharmacies.
D) But perhaps the only thing clear from the AICOD’s demands is its intention to protect the business interests of traditional brick-and-mortar pharmacies, even if it comes at the cost of the consumer’s interest.

P. In these circumstances, nationalism had a positive, and liberating, effect.
Q. Nationalism has always been a seductive ideology, not just among us Indians, but for people across the world.
R. In the not-too-distant past, all this was welcome because the ‘other’ was either a foreign power or an oligarch or a dictator.
S. What nationalism does best is to create a sense of ‘Us vs. Them’ in nearly every case.

A) Yet there are actually more trees in London than people.
B) This may equate to less than equal to 20 a year per tree, but the real value may be much higher, given how hard it is to quantify the wider benefits of trees and how long they live.
C) And now, new work by researchers at University College London shows that pockets of this urban jungle store as much carbon per hectare as tropical rainforests.
D) Most people would never think of London as a forest.