SBI CBO: 28-question practice mock

The volume of digital retail payments in India has grown at a pace few regulators anticipated, and the instrument responsible is one that charges the customer nothing. That design choice was deliberate: a payment system carrying no fee for the payer spreads faster than one that does. It also created a problem that has not been solved. Someone must still pay for the servers, the fraud checks and the settlement guarantees, and with the customer exempt and the merchant discount rate on small transactions set at zero, the cost has settled on the banks that sponsor the system. They have absorbed it so far because a customer who pays digitally is a customer whose deposits stay within the bank, and the deposit is worth more than the processing cost. This logic holds while volumes are concentrated in large banks with cheap deposits. It weakens sharply for smaller institutions, which carry the same per-transaction cost against a costlier deposit base. Regulators are therefore being pressed to permit a fee somewhere in the chain, and are reluctant, because every proposal so far shifts the charge to the merchant, and the merchants most sensitive to it are the small ones whose adoption the system was built to win.

Cities are, on average, several degrees warmer than the countryside that (1)____ them, a difference that widens on still summer nights. Much of this extra heat is (2)____ by concrete and asphalt during the day and released slowly after dark. Trees offer a cheap (3)____: their canopies block sunlight before it reaches the pavement, and the water they give off cools the surrounding air. Yet tree cover in many fast-growing cities is (4)____, cleared for roads and buildings faster than it can be replanted. Planners who once treated greenery as mere decoration are now coming to (5)____ it as basic infrastructure.