Reading Comprehension is one of the trickiest sections of the CAT exam, yet it plays a crucial role in securing a high score. Practicing a variety of passages not only improves your reading speed but also sharpens your analytical and interpretative skills.
To make your preparation more effective, we’ve compiled the top 100 CAT Reading Comprehension questions along with their detailed answers. Whether you’re aiming to strengthen your basics or fine-tune your strategy, this list will serve as a valuable resource to boost your confidence and performance in the exam.
CAT Reading Comprehension Questions
Directions: Read the given passages carefully and answer the questions that follow each passage.
Many organisations are experiencing the pleasant task and tension of a two-fold increase in the demand for their products and services. Consequently, the emphasis has shifted to the ultimate and inevitable goal of productivity improvement. All along, the term “productivity improvement” was linked with workmen or blue collar productivity: Whenever there was a backlog, more often than not, workmen were blamed for their negative and inflexible altitude to improving their productivity. In other words, blue collar productivity was believed to be the single critical variable in the business process. While it is true to some extent, one cannot underestimate the potential of management and executive productivity. There is enormous scope to improve business results through appropriate strategic interventions which can be done only by executives and managers.
First and foremost is in the area of quality. The rejection level in even well-run organisations is in the region of 15-20 per cent whereas Japanese organisations claim a rejection of few parts per million. When one analyses the causes for this high level of rejection, it is found to be in the manufacturing process. In many organisations in an effort to increase production, somehow or other, to meet market demand, the rejection level goes up. In many cases, such high level of rejection cannot be attributed solely to the negligence of workmen. Managerial and executive productivity lies in reducing the rejection level to zero defect. The type of activities that have to be initiated to achieve this can be performed only by executives and managers. This is possible only if quality systems are properly installed. In many organisations the “IS 9000 fever” ends with just getting the certification by the certifying authority. After this, very few organisations initiate efforts to make conformance a way of life. Getting everyone to conform to the quality systems is a mark of executive and managerial productivity.
Another important area which offers enormous scope for executive productivity is the reduction of Cycle time reduction is possible only if non-value adding activities are systematically identified and eradicated. This can be done only by executives and managers and not by workmen.
Creative and lateral thinking is yet another area offering scope for improving productivity. When one compares the number of suggestions per employee and the number of quality circles in our organisations with that in Japanese organisations, the picture is not encouraging. A supervisor’s production should be measured not by the production figures alone but by the number of creative suggestions from his workmen and the number of quality circles formed, in his section.
Another important area to measure executive productivity is the new product introduction lead time. Under the emerging competitive environment, customers look for new and improved products which offer value for money. If an organisation sticks to its old set standards of new product introduction time, it will be left behind. One should admire when Sony says, “We will make our products obsolete before our customers do so!”
There is yet another area where the productivity of executives and managers can be measured. This is the area of change management. Lot of changes are taking place outside in the environment compelling an organisation to introduce relevant changes inside the company. Practices such as IS 9000, TQM, Zero Defect, Re-engineering, etc., cannot be introduced if workmen have inflexible attitude. There is no point in blaming workmen since resistance to change is but “a natural and human” tendency. The productivity of managers and supervisors lies in changing the attitude of the workmen.
Question 1:
Which of the following, according to the passage, come(s) into the category of what the author has described as being a “pleasant task” but filled with “tensions”?
(a) A company increasing productivity and venturing into export market for the first time
(b) A company undertaking production of new or allied products
(c) A company investing in technology to cut down its employee strength
(d) All the above three categories
[ANS] b
Question 2:
Regarding the roles of managers and workmen in the productivity of a firm, the author says that
(a) Only the former need to take full responsibility for the efficiency of their firm.
(b) Both’ are important with the balance tilting slightly towards the manager.
(c) The latter is to be blamed for any dip in the production levels.
(d) Managers play a critical role in helping workers, and thereby their firm, to reach higher levels of productivity.
[ANS] d
Question 3:
The author cites the example of Sony in order to emphasise the fact that
(a) It is possible for managers and executives to encourage their workmen to put forth innovative and creative ideas.
(b) Greater customer satisfaction through new products is a mark of higher executive productivity.
(c) Offering a wide range to feasible, new and allied products in quick succession for enthusiastic customers is one of the sure sings of higher efficiency on the part managers too,
(d) Customers’ concept of ‘value for money can be satisfied if managers help their blue-collared workers help introduce new products at short intervals.
[ANS] c
Question 4:
Japanese organisations have been cited as examples of places where
(a) Rejection of products on the basis of quality is negligible.
(b) Creative suggestions from employees are innumerable.
(c) Executive productivity is the highest in the world.
(d) All the above are observe.
[ANS] d
Directions: Read the given passages carefully and answer the questions that follow each passage.
It is often said that there is a great conflict between science and religion. It is true that scientists look doubtfully at the scriptural statement that the heavens and the earth were created in a matter of days. From their practical studies of the earth and the heavens, they have proved that creation came into being through a slow evolutionary process, and that the progression of the earth alone, from gases to matter, plants, animal life, and man, required millions of years, so there is a great deal of difference between the findings of the scientists and a literal interpretation of the scriptural texts.
Scientists are often branded as materially minded because of their questioning of unproved religious beliefs. But God does not condemn them for that. His universal laws operate with impartial justice regardless of man’s beliefs. In this sense, God is not a respecter of persons but a respecter of law. He has given us free will and whether we worship Him or not, if we respect His laws, we shall receive the beneficial results of such regard. So, whether or not they are godless, or making their efforts for material gain, those scientists whose research is uncovering more and more of God’s laws are nonetheless working in cooperation with Him to do some good for the world:
Law governs everything in the universe; yet most people have never tried to apply the scientific law of experimentation and research to test religious doctrines. They simply believe, thinking it impossible to investigate and prove the scriptural texts. “We have only to believe”, they assure themselves and others; and that is to be accepted as all that there is to religion. But the Bible tells us that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. Faith is different from belief, which is only the first step. You can believe, at least, until you prove differently.
Faith, however, cannot be contradicted: it is intuitive conviction of the truth, and it cannot be shaken even by contrary evidence. Faith can heal the sick, raise the dead, create a new universe. Science is reasonable, willing to alter its views in the light of new facts. It is sceptical about religion only because it has not experimented in that field, although it is now beginning such research at Harvard. Experimental psychology has greatly advanced and is doing its utmost to understand the inner man.
Scientific knowledge is built upon facts. In religion, it is different. People are given certain facts or truths and told to believe them. After a little while, when their belief is not fulfilled, doubt creeps in; and then they go from religion to religion trying to find proof. You hear about God in churches and temples; you can read about Him in books; but can experience God only through Self-realization attained by practising definite scientific techniques. In India, religion is based upon such scientific methods. Realization is what India specialised in, and those who want to know God should learn her methods.
There is a definite way to experience God. And what is that way? It is scientific experimentation with religious truths. And put into practice what you believe It is possible to put religion into practice, to use it as science that you can prove this by experimenting on yourself. The search for Truth is the most marvellous search in the world. Instead of being merely a matter of attending a Sunday service or performing one’s puja, religions must have a practical side. LeaRN how to build your life around spiritual ideals. Without practical application, religion is of little value. It must create some change in you in your consciousness and in your behaviour.
Question 5:
According to the passage, when a person converts himself from one religion to another, it can be said that
(a) his faith in the doctrines of the previous religion is shaken.
(b) the former religion failed to consolidate his religious beliefs.
(c) the tenets of the first religion are not amenable to experimental verification.
(d) the second religion has offered scientific means to realise God.
[ANS] c
Question 6:
Which of the following are NOT true, according to the passage?
(a) Science is flexible in its outlook while religion can nerve be so.
(b) Science encourages its followers to be more materialistic.
(c) Religion has science and its application as part of its path to the ultimate realisation of God.
(d) As we know that man can let himself be the subject of his religious experiments, he can term religion as science.
(a) (a) and (b)
(b) (b) and (d)
(c) (b) and (c)
(d) (a), (c) and (d)
[ANS] a
Question 7:
One can experience God
(a) by following a religion that encourages us to practise what it preaches.
(b) by building one’s life around one’s spiritual beliefs.
(c) though definite scientific techniques that lead to the spiritual development of one’s self.
(d) by following a religion that changes one’s consciousness and behaviour for the better.
[ANS] c
Question 8:
Scientists need not be accused of being consumerist in their approach because
(a) they are trying to prove religious scriptures as a mere matter of their academic pursuit.
(b) they are operating within God’s laws that can never be prejudiced.
(c) they have God’s covert approval to carry out their experiments.
(d) they are not questioning religion.
[ANS] b
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Directions: Read the given passages carefully and answer the questions that follow each passage.
This will surely be remembered as the year mathematicians finally had to agree that their prized notion of “absolute proof” is an unattainable ideal an excellent goal to strive for, but achievable only in relatively simple cases. Moreover, they were forced to make this adjustment under the harsh glare of the media, following three major news stories about so called mathematical proofs.
In late 2002, Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman, posted on the Internet what he claimed was an outline for a proof of the Poincare conjecture, a famous century-old problem of the branch of mathematics known as topology. If Perelman is correct, he will pocket a $1 million prize offered for a solution by the Clay Mathematics institute. But after months of examining the argument, mathematicians are still unsure whether it is right or not.
Never mind a delay of weeks or months – pity poor Thomas Hales, an American mathematician who has been waiting for five years to hear whether the mathematical community has accepted his 1998 proof of astronomer Johannes Kepler’s 390 year-old conjecture that the most efficient way to pack equal-size spheres (such as cannonballs on a ship, which is how the question arose) is to stack them in the familiar pyramid fashion that greengrocers use to stack oranges on a counter. After examining Hales’s argument for five years, in the spring of 2003, a review panel of world experts finally declared that, whereas they had not found any irreparable error in the proof, they were still not sure that it was correct.
So where does all this leave the field of mathematics? Ever since the idea of proof was introduced by the ancient Greeks around 600 B.C., it has played a major role in the subject. In his mammoth work ‘Elements’, written around 300 B.C., Euclid began by writing’ down axioms – basic assumptions whose truth was assumed to be self-evident and using them, with logically sound arguments, to deduce the theorems of geometry. As mathematicians from the 19th century onward ventured into ever greater heights of abstraction, ‘the axiom-proof approach became an indispensable tool for handling concepts that were frequently counter-intuitive.
So what exactly is a proof? The right-wing definition is that a proof is a logically correct argument that establishes the truth of a given statement. The left-wing definition is that a proof is an argument that convinces a typical mathematician.
The right-wing definition of mathematical proof is an unrealistic ideal, unattainable in the real world. Actual mathematical proofs are all left-wing. An argument becomes a proof when the mathematical community agrees it is such. But at what point does that happen? The three cases I started with highlight the problem. All three arguments are far too long and complicated for anyone to seriously believe these are anything more than left-wing proofs.
Question 9:
The three episodes mentioned in the passage reflect the fact that
(a) it is indeed true that there can never be an error free proof.
(b) an absolute proof may not be attainable in all cases.
(c) modern proofs and theories are too complex and abstract to be proved correct.
(d) all proofs are evanescent by nature.
[ANS] b
Question 10:
Identify the statement that does NOT reflect the contents of the passage.
(a) Axioms are basic assumptions whose truth is assumed to be self-evident.
(b) One of the problems encountered in topology is the Poincare conjecture.
(c) The work ‘Elements’ deals with the theorems of geometry.
(d) The conjecture attributed to Johanne Kepler had started with the problem of stacking oranges in the most efficient way.
[ANS] d
Question 11:
In the context of the passage, mathematicians world-wide.
(a) may sometimes have to settle for proof that is beyond a reasonable doubt.
(b) will have to work harder to gather the relevant absolute proofs.
(c) should identify themselves as left-wing enthusiasts.
(d) Should identify themselves as right-wing enthusiasts.
[ANS] a
Question 12:
Which of the following options best explains the relationship between the first paragraph and the fifth paragraph?
(a) The first paragraph mentions an incident, while the fifth paragraph mentions the factors which led to the incident.
(b) The first paragraph talks about a reconciliation which was made, and the fifth paragraph provides historical basis which led to such a reconciliation.
(c) The first paragraph talks about a compromise which was made, while the fifth paragraph questions the rationale behind making such a compromise
(d) The first paragraph talks about an agreement which was made and the fifth paragraph mentions the reason for making such an agreement.
[ANS] b
Directions: Read the given passages carefully and answer the questions that follow each passage.
More than a decade has passed since Ester Boserup’s ‘Woman’s Role in Economic Development’ was published. Probably no single work on the subject of women and development has been quoted as often. In the literature on development, the specific role of women had beer, largely ignored, particularly the question of how development affects women’s subordinate position in most societies. Boserup pointed out a variety of subjects that are systematically related to the role of women in the economy.
She emphasized gender as a basic factor in the division of labour, prevalent across countries and regions. Despite the existence of stereotyped sex roles and the universality of women’s concentration in domestic work, Boserup pointed out significant differences in women’s work across countries and regions. She criticised the ‘dubious generalization’ that attributes the provision of food to men in most communities; women too have been’ food providers in many areas of the world. She emphasised the fundamental role women played in African agriculture in contrast to their lesser role in Asian countries and in Latin America as well. While there are many similarities in women’s work in the industrialised urban sector, rural work exhibits diverse patterns associated with the particular characteristics of each area.
Boserup’s analysis pointed to the correlations between women’s work and factors such as population density and landholding. Although she was not always explicit about precise connections, she did suggest the existence of a relationship between these factors and different forms of women’s subordination. For example, she argued that polygamy made it possible for a man to control more land and labour, because each wife was assigned a plot of land to cultivate. Her analysis pointed to an economic basis for polygamy and the bride price. Though it did not explain polygamous arrangements in which wives seem to represent a cost rather than an economic resource for the husband, it created a challenge for others to do so.
Third, Boserup’s book began to delineate the negative effects that colonialism and the penetration of capitalism into subsistence economies have often had on women. She pointed out that European colonial rule, rather than being a ‘liberalising’ factor for African women, contributed to their loss of status. Women often lost their right to land as a result of ‘land reforms introduced by European administrators’.
One of the most common criticisms of Boserup’s book is that it is repetitive. This problem becomes acute because the book fails to go beyond the data that it presents; Boserup rarely attempts to derive any overall theoretical or conceptual structure from her empirical data. These data are rich in insights about the patterns and variations in women’s work across Africa and Asia, but most of her analysis is purely descriptive. Adhoc introductions of values and ideology often take the place of explanations. When Boserup does use theoretical concepts, they tend to fall within the framework of neoclassical economics. In her discussion of the labour market and wage differentials between women and men, she suggests that the individual preference of employers and workers determines the nature of women’s work, and hence their earnings. Boserup analyses demand in the labour market, stating that employers often prefer male over female labour; she analyses supply by stating that women prefer to work in home industries rather than in large enterprises.
This emphasis on preferences constitutes a limited view. There are many cases in which employers prefer women over men: examples include tea plantations, textile-manufacturing firms, and labour- intensive industries operating in many areas of the Third World. Many of these are in fact large enterprises. Therefore, preference is not the adequate explanatory variable.
Question 13:
Which of the following options best captures the author’s attitude towards Boserup’s work?
(a) Commendation for highlighting the role played by women in economic development
(b) Admiration for being the only book on the subject of women and development
(c) Censorious for being worthless as it has completely ignored theoretical concepts and is merely repetitive
(d) Mildly critical for addressing the core issue from a limited perspective
[ANS] d
Question 14:
According to the author, Boserup’s book ‘Woman’s Role in Economic Development’ is constrained by economic.
(a) the use of concepts mostly from neo-classical economics.
(b) the emphasis on gender based hiring by employers.
(c) the assumption of women’s preferences of work places.
(d) all the above factors.
[ANS] d
Question 15:
the author feels Boserup’s book looked into an important aspect of an economy which is
(a) the relationship between the extent of development and the resultant status of women.
(b) the subordinate status of women in a society and the consequent economic gains.
(c) the role of women in an agrarian economy.
(d) highly related to gender disparity and discrimination.
[ANS] a
Question 16:
The arguments of Boserup regarding polygamy are based on the assumption that
(a) population density and landholding affect the role of women in a society’s development.
(b) each wife is an economic resource,
(c) polygamy is form of female subordination.
(d) through polygamy, man can control more land and money.
[ANS] b
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Direction: – The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer for each question.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days. A recent article noted that ‘robots’ shorthand for Al in the tabloids will be able to write a fiction bestseller within 50 years. I suppose that would be shocking to me as a novelist if most fiction bestsellers were not already being written by ‘robots’. A Chinese company lately offered a collection of poems written by a computer program. So, are poets, generally considered to be suicidal in any case, jumping off the cliffs in droves as a consequence? Well, this is a selection from one of the Al poems I found online: “The rain is blowing through the sea / A bird in the sky / A night of light and calm /Sunlight/Now in the sky / Cool heart / The savage north wind/ When I found a new world.”
Yes, there are aspiring poets and sometimes established ones who write like this, connecting words to create an effect. I think they should have been pushed off literary cliffs a long time ago. Because this is not poetry; this is just the technique of assembling words like poetry. There is a difference between the intelligence required to write poetry and the skills required to write it. The fact that lines like this… can be considered poetry does not reflect on the intelligence of Al. It reflects on the intelligence of those readers, writers, critics, editors, publishers and academics who have not yet distinguished between gimmickry and mimicry on the one side and the actual freshness of a chiselled line on the other.
One of the major failures here is that of considering intelligence to be something different from and raised above the activity of living. This leads to the misconception that intelligence can be relegated to something else say, a robot without becoming something else…. Even the argument that Al can enable human beings to lead a gloriously workless existence is based on a similar misconception. Because human intelligence is embedded in human existence, ‘work’ as human activity in the world is not something human beings can do without. To think that Als and robots can just create a lifetime of ‘leisure’ for human beings is to not know what human beings are. It shows a lack of intelligence.
It is because human intelligence is embedded in human living and acting that human beings have the ability to adopt contradictory positions, or no position at all. From the perspective of ‘pure’ intelligence, this seems to be a flaw. But it is only a flaw if one divorces intelligence from living and acting in the world, for the latter often throws up situations of unresolvable ambiguity and ambivalence. There is much that we can do with AI, just as there is much that we have done with the wheel. But to consider Al a replacement for human intelligence or humanity is to repeat an age-old mistake. This mistake relates to god. No matter whether god exists or not, it has always been a mistake to expect him to ‘solve’ problems without human effort. The prophet of Islam is said to have once told a man who claimed that he believed in Allah so much that he never tied up his camel: “First tie up your camel and then believe in Allah”.
Question 17:
The passage supports which of the following inferences?
(a) Human intelligence is inconsistent as it adopts contradictory positions.
(b) Human intelligence is unaffected by the changes in the world.
(c) Human intelligence cannot be passed on to something else.
(d) AI and robots can at best create a lifetime of leisure for human beings.
[ANS] c
Question 18:
“There is a difference between the intelligence required to write poetry and the skills required to write it.” [Paragraph 2] What can be inferred from the given statement?
(a) Poetic skills are only a part of poetic intelligence; they cannot be equated.
(b) Poetic skills cannot exist without the required poetic intelligence, but poetic intelligence can exist on its own.
(c) Poetic intelligence can be programmed into AI, but Al cannot be programmed to possess poetic skills.
(c) The assembling of words like poetry is poetic intelligence, but poetic skills produce original refreshing works of art.
[ANS] a
Question 19:
“First tie up your camel and then believe in Allah” in relation to Al means:
(a) Al is incapable of solving any of our problems.
(b) Al makes no difference to the existence of mankind.
(c) Al can’t replace intelligent human effort.
(d) Al is man’s possession; man must take care of it.
[ANS] c
Question 20:
Which of the following is the main argument in the passage?
(a) Human intelligence is embedded in human living; it cannot be transferred to something else; what is transferred is a different kind of intelligence.
(b) While Al may mimic human behaviour like writing poems or best sellers, it lacks the intelligence associated with creative pursuits.
(c) To consider Al as a replacement for human intelligence is to repeat the age-old mistake of expecting god to solve problems without humans making any effort.
(d) To think that Als and robots can create a lifetime of leisure for human beings shows a lack of intelligence on our part.
[ANS] c
Direction: – The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer for each question.
We have recently been basking in the knowledge that India has fared well in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business (EODB) report. Previously rated the worst-performing BRICS economy, India has now become the median economy among BRICS and the best in South Asia.
The greatest improvements have been recorded in ‘dealing with construction permits’ where the country jumped 129 places to reach 52, and trading across borders’ where India has moved 66 places to reach 80. However, India slipped in the categories of ‘paying taxes’ and ‘resolving insolvency’. The scope of this EODB index is limited after all and, by the World Bank’s own admission, the indicators are not designed to portray the entire macroeconomic scenario of any country or reflect its growth prospects. While this report is a recognition of the positive steps India has taken, our performance here can only be a function of the parameters laid down by the World Bank. This result cannot be extrapolated as an overall improvement in EODB, on the other important parameters.
Policy and regulation remain important factors that must be assessed while measuring the actual EODB. The proposal of retrospective tax was not so long ago and the resultant economic uncertainty should not be forgotten. We also need to deal with the foreign investment reporting format recently instituted by the Reserve Bank of India. This new reporting system is completely contrary to ease of compliance and has served to make foreign investment reporting more confusing and challenging. Similarly, the draft e-commerce policy released last year elicited extensive criticism from across industry.
We should pay heed to several other aspects of our business environment, some of which have been making global news. We can only be attractive to innovative industries if we have in place a robust and predictable system for intellectual property protection. We should introspect about consistently being rated poorly in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. We should be troubled by our position in the Crony Capitalism Index. We should be concerned with our falling rating in the Press Freedom Index which sees our media independence as compromised. We should worry about the anxiety that has loomed most recently, stemming from air pollution in India’s capital city and the resultant health effects on its hapless residents. Finally, there is no denying the real and widespread apprehension that has resulted from the steady rise of populist right-wing sentiment across India and which has drawn rebuke from international human rights organisations.
It is understandable that our policy makers would cite the EODB index as a barometer for how easy it is to conduct business in our country and an indicator of the lack of red tape, cost burden and overall entrepreneurial mobility. Of course, a good rank is expected to translate into a better chance of securing foreign investment and the government expects an even better ranking next year, as the reforms’ benefits are more fully realised.
Question 21:
With reference to the ease of doing business in India, the author would like Indian government to mainly…
(a) avoid being complacent with India’s improved EODB ranking.
(b) reduce red tape in India.
(c) assess what else has to be done in other aspects of the economy.
(d) be careful and ensure that policy decisions are not taken rashly.
[ANS] c
Question 22:
According to the author, which of the following is true about the EODB index of World Bank?
(a) It is not credible and accurate.
(b) There is a need to recalculate the national rankings of ease of doing business.
(c) It does not reflect the state of a country’s economy as a whole nor its growth prospects.
(d) It should not be used as a guide to secure foreign investment.
[ANS] c
Question 23:
The author lists all of the following as unfavourable aspects of our business environment EXCEPT:
(a) lack of intellectual property protection and encouragement to innovative industries.
(b) the fact that success in business depends upon close relationship with the government.
(c) India’s low rank in UN’s Human Development Index related to Human Rights.
(d) lack of freedom of entrepreneurs to move between locations and occupations.
[ANS] d
Question 24:
What point does the author want to convey through the example of ‘retrospective tax proposal?
(a) India ought to improve its ranking in the category of ‘paying taxes”.
(b) India should introspect about being rated poorly in Corruption perceptions index.
(c) Policies and regulations of the government sometimes go against EODB in India.
(d) Foreign investment reporting in India is confusing and challenging.
[ANS] c
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Direction: – The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer for each question
Timbuktu, a byword for exotic remoteness, has loomed large in the western imagination for centuries. In medieval times the city was a stopping-off point for trade caravans, carrying gold, slaves, salt and ivory, that crisscrossed the Sahara on their way from the west-African kingdoms to the Mediterranean. It became fabulously wealthy. In the 14th century the Malian King Mansa Musa I possibly the richest man the world has ever known travelled through Timbuktu on a pilgrimage to Mecca with an entourage of 60,000 men and enough gold to cause hyperinflation in Mecca, Cairo and Medina.
The city experienced an intellectual golden age in the 15th and 16th centuries. Scholars from across Africa came to Timbuktu and wrote about almost everything imaginable. Tens of thousands of manuscripts were preserved in beautiful universities and mosques were built out of beige mud and timber. Leo Africanus, a north-African traveller, described Timbuktu in glittering terms, helping the fable grow in Europe till the city was more myth than reality: an El Dorado of the sands.
In the 19th century European explorers furiously competed to be the first to make it to Timbuktu. It was a perilous enterprise: travellers had to contend with not only the Sahara’s beating sun and deadly diseases, but also bands of marauding warriors. Alexander Gordon Laing, a Scottish explorer, was attacked by desert raiders who shot and stabbed him. Somehow, he survived and a few months later became the first European known to have reached Timbuktu, whose streets turned out not to be paved with gold, after all. On his way back he was attacked again by Tuaregs, who reportedly strangled him to death with a turban.
If Timbuktu’s glory days were long gone by the 19th century, the Timbuktu of 2019 is an even sorrier sight. Decades of neglect by the Malian government and desertification in the surrounding countryside has left it impoverished. Timbuktu used to attract a stream of tourists from Europe and America who’d come to see the magnificent 14th-century Djinguereber Mosque and go for camel tours in the desert. But today, it’s too dangerous for all but the hardiest travellers, thanks to an increasingly complicated conflict that is tearing the country apart.
Seven years ago, ethnic Tuareg separatists and jihadists stormed into Timbuktu and took over much of northern Mali. The militants were armed with powerful weapons from Libya’s civil war and enforced a perverse Wahhabi ideology, banning music and destroying or damaging thousands of manuscripts, artefacts and buildings. Alarmed by the militants’ rapid advance in its former colony, France intervened and was soon joined by other international troops. By 2013 the militants had been driven out of the major urban areas and back into the desert.
But the conflict is far from over. What started as a fight between jihadists and the Malian state has become a struggle between a dizzying array of armed groups. Criminal gangs, ethnic militias and groups affiliated to Islamic State and Al Qaeda, are flitting across the region’s porous borders and wreaking havoc. The violence has claimed over 5,000 lives in the Sahel, the belt of land that runs along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, in the last five months alone. Since Timbuktu was liberated, there have been scores of attacks and kidnappings.
Question 25:
What is the main idea of the passage?
(a) Timbuktu serves as a cautionary reminder to how historically famous places decline over long periods.
(b) The mythical West African city of Timbuktu can be traced to the current northern Mali and is a dangerous area occupied by an array of armed groups.
(c) The city of Timbuktu whose commercial and intellectual glory reached mythical proportions in the medieval times is now a dangerous and impoverished city.
(d) The byword for exotic remoteness in the Western imagination, Timbuktu was more a myth than reality akin to the El Dorado of the Sahara.
[ANS] c
Question 26:
According to the author, France:
(a) was asked to form the current government in Mali.
(b) was alarmed by the rapid advance of jihadists in Mali.
(c) has close ties with the Malian government.
(d) is in charge of the international troops in Mali.
[ANS] b
Question 27:
According to the writer, the violence in Mali is:
(a) the result of decades of neglect by the Malian government.
(b) even more complex after international intervention in 2013.
(c) most obvious in the Sahel region.
(d) a consequence of the general upheaval in the area surrounding Mali.
[ANS] b
Question 28:
One may conclude from the passage that Alexander Gordon Laing’s visit to Mali was at a time when Timbuktu was:
(a) prosperous but tending to a decline.
(b) regaining its lost glory.
(c) well on its way to decline.
(d) briefly prosperous after an unfortunate period.
[ANS] c
Direction: – The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer for each question.
It was hard to see the headlines proclaiming that the north magnetic pole is speeding toward Russia and not feel a pang of anxiety. Is Vladimir Putin annexing the North Pole? Or climate change threatening more global chaos? Will malevolent cosmic rays burst through Earth’s magnetic shield?
The stories under the headlines proved less alarming. The sudden lurch of the north magnetic pole turned out to be a phenomenon for which humans bore no responsibility and for which responsible institutions and monitors appeared to have effective solutions.
The magnetic pole is the spot that a compass points to as north; it is distinct from the geographic North Pole, which is where all the lines of longitude meet at the top of the world (and where Santa Claus maintains his workshop). For now, it is situated four degrees south of the geographic North Pole.
The Earth’s magnetic poles, it seems, have always been on the move, and have even swapped places several times over the eons. The reason is that the molten iron deep inside our planet sloshes around, shifting the magnetic field with it. That has not prevented online tabloids from having an apocalyptic field day. The part that feeds their doomsday scenarios is the possibility that the poles are preparing for another polarity reversal, which would cause a compass to point south instead of north. The quirk is normal over the past 20 million years, it has occurred, on average, every 200,000 to 300,000 years. The last one was about 780,000 years ago, so another may be overdue.
That could lead to a temporary weakening of the magnetic field that protects Earth from cosmic radiation. And that’s where the doomsday scenarios pile in. An article in Undark Magazine declared, “It’s time to wake up to the dangers and start preparing,” evoking a world in which a devastating stream of malevolent cosmic radiation would wreak havoc on lives and power grids.
The spectre of an Earth left without a magnetic shield has come up before, notably during the Mayan apocalypse that predicted the world would end in 2012. Back then, NASA posted a response that explained the science of pole reversals and concluded that “there is nothing in the millions of years of geologic record to suggest that any of the 2012 doomsday scenarios, whether or not in reference to a pole reversal, should be taken seriously.”
As it turns out, the geographic North Pole, the location of the planet’s spin axis, is also shifting east, not as strikingly as its magnetic cousin, but for the wrong reasons. The North and South Poles always wander a bit, but the movements have increased, and scientists theorize that the redistribution of mass on Earth as glaciers and ice sheets melt is one of the major reasons.
We have caused the Earth to wobble, and it’s getting worse. Several recently published studies warn that ice at both ends of the Earth is melting far faster, and oceans are warming far faster, than previously thought, suggesting that scientific estimates of a warming planet have been too conservative. Those are the headlines that should be causing real concern.
Question 29:
Which of the following is attributable to human activities in the statement, “we have caused the Earth to wobble?” (Paragraph 8)
(a) Movement of the Magnetic North Pole.
(b) Earth’s magnetic poles swapping positions.
(c) Pole reversal caused by displacement of mass.
(d) Drifting of Earth’s spin axis towards East.
[ANS] d
Question 30:
Which of the following is NOT true about the prediction of apocalypse by the Mayan civilization?
(a) Millions of years of geologic record proved the prediction invalid.
(b) Pole reversal was assumed to be the cause of the apocalypse.
(c) Mayan apocalypse was unrelated to the magnetic field of the Earth.
(d) According to Mayan apocalypse prediction, the world would end in 2012.
[ANS] c
Question 31:
Earth’s Magnetic and Geographic North Poles are comparable in that:
(a) they protect Earth from harmful cosmic radiation.
(b) they are currently wandering off towards the East.
(c) the compass needle always points towards them.
(d) they are situated where the Earth’s spin axis is.
[ANS] b
Question 32:
What according to the passage causes pole reversal?
(a) Movement of Earth’s Magnetic Poles.
(b) Redistribution of mass on Earth.
(c) Weakening of Earth’s magnetic field.
(d) Redistribution of mass within Earth.
[ANS] d
Directions: Read the passages carefully and answer the questions that follow them.
Raise a toast to nine judges of the Supreme Court who have said your right to privacy is fundamental, ranking right up there with rights to life and freedom of expression. Privacy as a fundamental right probably didn’t matter much in 1954, when the first anti-privacy judgement was delivered. It matters now, when companies like Alphabet (owner of Google), Microsoft, online retailers, Facebook and Twitter can snoop into your finances, links with family and friends, mails and opinions.
The SC order implies that your data belongs to you, not to companies or regimes. Big Brother regimes try to manipulate every thought and action of their citizens. The latter descend into a Stalinist hell of self-censorship, paranoia, spying and snitching on each other. In 1952, the Soviets worked out a telephone-based system that allowed a group of people involved in launching rockets and missiles, to communicate across vast distances via a phone network. This was the ancestor of the internet.
Fast forward to 2012, when Russia drew up its Internet Blacklist. Apparently, this was to protect children from harmful content, curb drug use and other evils. That was the fudge. Soon, it expanded to include sites ‘inciting hatred’, ‘suspected extremism’ and ‘deviant behaviour including gay relationships. By August 2014, a ‘Bloggers’ Law’ came into force, where all Wi-Fi and chat-room operators had to collect users’ data, verify their passports and store them.
In July 2016, Russia passed the Yarovskya Law, forcing telecom operators to record and store all conversation, message and internet traffic for six months. This November, a new law will ban all software and websites that try to go around Russian filters. Phrases like “Caucasus’, ‘Crimea’ and ‘Ukraine’ are taboo; Bitcoin has been blocked recently.
On September 20, 1987, the first email was sent out from a primitive system in China. It said, “Across the Great Wall, we can reach every corner in the world. In less than 15 years, a system called the Great Firewall (GFW) controlled all online traffic. In 2003, GFW spawned Golden Shield to monitor and censor content. All backbone providers are owned by the communist state.
Before it walked out of China, Google agreed to block searches on phrases like ‘Tiananmen’ or democracy”. Companies like Yahoo and Microsoft have bowed to all strictures of Beijing. Yet, almost all the hardware that runs Beijing’s spying machinery is outsourced from US companies like Cisco Systems.
In the last three years, India has lurched towards large-scale data snooping. Its primary vector is the Aadhaar ID number and card. The original idea was to stop subsidy leakage. It is now mandatory to have an Aadhaar number to file tax returns and open new bank accounts, enlarging the scope of financial fraud. Infants in Anganwadi creches now need Aadhaar to get a midday meal. Never mind media reports that suggest that the Aadhaar system is about as secure as a sieve.
Question 33:
“Big Brother Regime’ refers to
(a) a country that takes care of its citizens.
(b) a country exercising total control of people’s lives.
(c) a country where snooping is allowed.
(d) a military regime.
[ANS] b
Question 34:
The passage implies that the ostensible reason for introducing Internet Blacklist in Russia in 2012 was ‘fudge” because
(a) the real reason was to curtail individual freedom.
(b) the real reason was to exercise some surveillance on the harmful content on the internet.
(c) the real reason was to bring defaulting telecom operators to book.
(d) the real reason was to confirm the presence of evil data on the internet.
[ANS] a
Question 35:
What is the author’s reaction to the claim that the Aadhaar system is as secure as a sieve?
(a) The Aadhaar acts as a sieve to keep out the undeserving from all welfare schemes
(b) The claim that Aadhaar is safe cannot be taken for granted.
(c) The claim that the Aadhaar system is not a perfect system it is yet to achieve perfection
(d) Aadhaar system can be made safe, but the government doesn’t appear to want to do so
[ANS] b
Question 36:
Which of the following situations in the passage can be described as ironical?
a. After forcing telecom operators to record and store all conversation, message and internet traffic for six months, Russia wants to ban all software and websites that try to go around Russian filters.
b. The first email was sent from China with the lofty aim of reaching across the Great Wall, and it was China that created the Great Firewall to control online traffic.
c. Originally, the Aadhaar was used to stop subsidy leakage, but now its scope is enlarged,
d. American companies Yahoo and Microsoft have yielded to China’s pressure to block contents, and the hardware that runs Beijing’s spying machinery is outsourced from US companies.
(a) a and b
(b) a and d
(c) band d
(d) c and d
[ANS] c
Directions: Read the passages carefully and answer the questions that follow them.
The appeal to state’s rights is of the most potent symbols of the American Civil War, but confusion abounds as to the historical and present meaning of this federalist principle. The concept of state’s rights had been an old idea by 1860. The original thirteen colonies in America in the 1700s, separated from the mother country in Europe by a vast ocean, were used to making many of their own decisions and ignoring quite a few of the rules imposed on them from abroad. During the American Revolution, the founding fathers were forced to compromise with the states to ensure ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of a united country. In fact, the original Constitution banned slavery, but Virginia would not accept it.
The debate over which powers rightly belonged to the states and which powers belonged to the Federal Government, became heated again in the 1820s and 1830s fuelled by the divisive issue of whether slavery would be allowed in the forming of new territories, as the nation expanded westward. The Missouri Compromise in 1820 tried to solve this problem but succeeded only temporarily. (It established lands west of the Mississippi and below latitude 36°30′ as slave and north of the line except Missouri as free.) Abolitionist groups sprang up in the North, making Southerners feel that their way of life was under attack.
As the North and the South became more and more different, their goals and desires also separated. Arguments over national policy grew even fiercer. The North’s economic progress as the Southern economy began to stall fuelled fires of resentment. By the 1840s and 1850s, North and South had each evolved extreme positions that had as much to do with serving their own political interests as with the morality of slavery.
As long as there were equal number of slave-holding states in the South as non-slave-holding states in the North, the two regions had even representation in the Senate, and neither could dictate to the other. However, each new territory that applied for statehood threatened to upset this balance of power. Non-violent attempts at resolution culminated in violence in 1859, resulting in feeling of severe insecurity among the southern states. When anti-slavery Republican, Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election in 1860, Southerners were sure that the North meant to take away their right to govern themselves, abolish slavery, and destroy the Southern economy. Having exhausted their legal and political options, they felt that the only way to protect themselves from this Northern assault was to no longer be a part of the United States of America. Although the Southern states seceded separately, without intending to form a new nation, they soon banded together in a loose coalition. Northerners, however, led by Abraham Lincoln viewed secession as an illegal act. All this naturally resulted in the Civil War.
Question 37:
The passage is primarily concerned with
(a) discussing the importance of states’ right in a federation.
(b) analyzing reasons for a historical incident.
(c) contrasting the political philosophies of two regions
(d) discussing importance of slavery in Southern states’ economy.
[ANS] b
Question 38:
It can be inferred that the Missouri Compromise undertook the establishment of certain territories as slave territories in order to
(a) pacify the Northern states that have strong anti-slavery sentiment.
(b) allay the fears of Southern states in relation to their dependence on slavery
(c) decide which powers were bestowed with states and with which Federal Government.
(d) facilitate the expansion of the country westward.
[ANS] b
Question 39:
All of the following were the reasons for concerns of Southern states EXCEPT
(a) lack of power balance between the South and non-slave-holding states in the Senate.
(b) the existence of original thirteen colonies during 1700s
(c) increased activity of abolitionists in the North.
(d) addition of new territories that attained statehood and favored Northern philosophy about slavery.
[ANS] b
Question 40:
According to the passage, the adoption of extreme position by the North and the South was
(a) purely for political reasons.
(b) purely for ethical reasons.
(c) for both political and ethical reasons.
(d) for economic and political reasons.
[ANS] c
Directions: Read the passages carefully and answer the questions that follow them.
One of the keenly contested issues about the complex phenomenon designated by the popular expression globalisation is the relationship between its economic aspect, which is rapidly spreading to all parts of the globe, and its political and legal aspects, which are fairly tightly circumscribed by territorially bounded nation-states.
According to one view, since a legal, if not political, basis is required for any serious economic activity, the state’, in some form, will survive and will get re-established. Prem Shankar Jha, one of our leading journalists, says that globalisation will rout the extant nation-state and the international order based on nation-states, and as there is nothing in sight to take place, chaos and war is the most likely scenario to emerge.
What are usually perceived and celebrated as the economic aspects of capitalism, says Jha, its aggressive growth and opening up of new opportunities, have always been set in larger societal, political and institutional containers”. And it is in the very nature of capitalism to break out of its container from time to time.
When production became the central and essential feature of capitalism, it broke its original container, with all the social and political disruptions that it involved, but entered a new container, a small nation-state, England. Capitalism’s propensity to reach out continued, partly into other nation-state, the United States, which soon became capitalism’s “home state,”
Today, what has so far been the national-international container of capitalism is being broken down and capitalism is aiming to convert the globe itself into its new container. “This “says Jha, “is the process that the world refers to as globalisation” Jha continues:” What the world is going through is not without precedent. Growing disorder, eruptions of violence and decades of insecurity have accompanied each rebirth of capitalism in the past. And capitalism cannot come to have, the larger societal nuances and attributes to emerge as the new ‘container of the emerging phase of capitalism. The global spread of capitalist production, the global disruption of ownership of capital, the global flow of capitalist finance and the global sway of capitalist corporation, all made possible by changes in technology, have substantially, eroded the power of nation states and even the international order that nation states had built up.
Jha, it would appear, has succumbed to the common error of thinking of the future as a mere extrapolation of the past and the present. True, one cannot predict the future. And yet, if one just looks around, one can see other kinds of possibilities. What if the countries now underwriting the huge payments deficits of the U.S. decide not to do so? What if the political balance shifts with, let us say, the major countries of Asia making a united stand against the U.S.? What if some military debacle of the U.S. leads to popular uprisings within the U.S. itself? What if the losers all over the world of the present form of globalisation unite to block its onward march?
Yes, Prem Shankar Jha, nature has unexpected ways of bringing order out of chaos, and so there may be light beyond the present darkness.
Question 41:
Within the context of capitalism, what does Jha see as the reason behind much of the resistance and blood shed?
(a) The rebellious nature of nation-states
(b) The failure of capitalism to satisfy the unique nature and needs of different nation states economically
(c) The economically less productive systems of some of the nation states fail to satisfy people before capitalist standards
(d) Centralised power, the most crucial aspect of capitalism
[ANS] b
Question 42:
Which among the following is untrue?
(a) The economic advantage of capitalism is possible only, within pre-set ‘containers of the society.
(b) A capitalist system has to break out of this ‘container consistently to survive itself.
(c) There will be total loss of control, once capitalism makes the whole world its ‘container”.
(d) There will be total loss of control with capitalism’s failure of making the whole world its ‘container”.
[ANS] c
Question 43:
There is reason to be optimistic about the future because
(a) countries can think of politically restricting capitalism.
(b) people would naturally reject capitalism.
(c) nation-states would reassert themselves.
(d) capitalism can be seen in a positive light.
[ANS] a
Question 44:
What is the most important weapon for capitalism?
(a) Violence
(b) Hegemony
(c) Economic prosperity
(d) Technology
[ANS] d
Directions: Read the passages carefully and answer the questions that follow them.
How do penguins keep warm? Penguins have feathers to keep them warm, right? Well partly right, feathers work on land, but in the water where penguins spend quite a bit of their lives, they’re not so good. What really keeps penguins warm in the sea is a sub-cutaneous (under-the-skin) layer of fat. A penguins” fat layer is what protects them against the cold while in the sea. On the land however their feathers fulfil the function of keeping them warm. Penguin feathers aren’t like the large flat feathers that flying birds have, they are short with an under-layer of fine woolly down.
Ice and snow are cold. Lying on snow, you would be really cold as there would be a large area of contact to lose body heat though conduction. Stand up and immediately your area of contact reduces enormously, stand on tip-toes and your area of contact is reduced to a minimum. This is what penguins do except they don’t stand on tip-toes when it’s really cold, they rock backwards on their heels, holding their toes up. They stop themselves from falling over backwards by using their stiff tail feathers that have no blood flow and so lose no heat as the third element of a tripod. The emperor penguins secret is huddling. Really just an extension of the “be big” method of surviving extreme cold.
Emperor penguins have developed a social behaviour that when it gets cold, they huddle together in groups that may comprise several thousand penguins. That way for most of the group, where their feathers end, instead of all of them having to face the biting wind and relentless cold, most of them have another warm penguin to shield them instead. Of course, it’s not quite so great for the individuals on the outside of the group as they only have a part of their body protected and warmed by the other penguins. So there is a continual movement of penguins from the outside of the group to the centre so displacing the warmer and more protected penguins to the outside where they will take their turn in the worst places against the wind and raw cold.
Emperor penguins are one of nature’s great survivors. They can endure the frigid cold of an Antarctic winter, when temperatures plummet to -20°C or below. To prevent themselves freezing to death, they huddle together in tightly-packed groups to conserve heat and shelter themselves from the intense winds. Now it seems these huddles can actually be too good at keeping the emperor penguins warm. In the time-lapse below, you can see that penguin huddles constantly rotate. The most obvious behaviour is that penguins on the outskirts regularly muscle their way inside the huddle. That is easily understandable. Those on the outside of the huddle face the direct hit of Antarctica’s icy wind chill.
But there is something else going on. The penguins on the inside get too hot, so after a while they need a little room to cool off. Penguins seeking to lose some body heat actually break huddles apart, say researchers in a new paper in the journal Animal Behaviour. Within the huddles, penguins barely lose any heat. The little they lose comes from their heads or from breathing in icy air. That means they regularly find themselves in toasty temperatures of 37.5°C, which is significantly higher than they like.
Question 45:
According to the passage, which of the following provides thermal insulation for penguins?
(a) A sub-cutaneous layer of fat
(b) Overlapping densely packed feathers
(c) An under-layer of fine woolly down
(d) A high density of feathers per unit area
[ANS] c
Question 46:
According to the passage, what are the elements of the tripod for penguins to reduce contact with the icy surface and so reduce heat loss?
(a) A toe, a heel and tail
(b) Heels and tail
(c) Toes and tail
(d) Toes, heels and tail
[ANS] b
Question 47:
There is a continual movement of penguins from the outside of the group to the centre when penguins huddle in groups for which of the following reasons?
(a) Unlike other warm-blooded marine animals, penguins are still relatively small.
(b) Penguins feathers make a surface almost impenetrable to wind or water.
(c) Penguins on the outside of the huddle face the direct hit of the icy wind chill.
(d) The penguins on the inside get too hot, so after a while they need a little room to cool off.
[ANS] c
Question 48:
Which of the following calculations show that penguins benefit when they huddle together for warmth?
(a) A solitary penguin could burn up 100 g of fat per day to stay warm and alive while huddling penguins also need only about 100 g per day.
(b) A solitary penguin could burn up 200 g of fat per day to stay warm and alive while huddling penguins need only about 100 g per day.
(c) A solitary penguin could burn up 100 g of fat per day to stay warm and alive while huddling penguins need about 200 g per day.
(d) A solitary penguin could burn up 200 g of fat per day to stay warm and alive while huddling penguins need about 300 g per day.
[ANS] b
Direction: The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
Above the frozen ocean, Antarctica can be eerily quiet. Below, though, the Southern Ocean is a living soundscape dominated by Weddell seals. These pinnipeds typically emit high-pitched pings that sound like laser guns in a science-fiction movie…. But, research now reveals that a significant portion of their calls are at ultrasonic frequencies, high pitches well beyond the 20-kilohertz limit of most human hearing. University of Oregon marine biologist Paul Cziko installed a livestreaming audio and video system at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station in 2017, allowing scientists to listen in on the massive mammals” underwater calls. Data from the setup yielded surprising results: The seals sometimes vocalized at extremely high, ultrasonic frequencies of more than 200 kilohertz.
Ultrasonic calls cast a narrower, more precise sound beam than lower-frequency ones. Bats and toothed whales have specialized anatomy that lets them use such beams for echolocation, sensing their surroundings by deciphering the rebounding sound waves. Seals, however, lack the necessary anatomical structures. So why do they make these sounds? Cziko and his colleagues suspect Weddell seals use ultrasonic calls for less specific orientation purposes. In the early 1970s, William Schevill and William Watkins, both at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, came to a similar conclusion after using the era’s limited technology to record Weddell seals’ ultrasonic vocalizations, likely for the first time.
Cziko notes the 1970s team only recorded one call type, a chirp that started at 30 kilohertz and then descended in frequency. With the new system’s advanced hydrophone, Cziko’s team was able to record Weddell seals making at least nine call types spanning the ultrasonic range, including chirps, trills and “U-shaped whistles.” In two years’ worth of recording, 17 percent of all Weddell seals’ calls were ultrasonic, with the animals using this range more often during the Southern Hemisphere winter. Annual sunlight cycles may play a role in the seals’ seasonal call behavior. Antarctica experiences four months of 24-hour sunlight during summer, and winters have long periods of complete darkness. “We know that seals have really good low-light vision,” says Lisa Munger, a marine mammal bio acoustician at the University of Oregon “But when there’s no light, they’ve got to be using something else to find their way around. Echoes from ultrasonic calls may provide enough basic environmental information to help seals return to breathing holes in the ice or to locate food.”
High-frequency vocalizations travel shorter distances than lower-frequency ones, and this may also help Weddell seals communicate without alerting predators. “These sounds might be really useful if you’re trying to communicate with someone that’s a few feet away,” Munger says. “But you don’t want the sound to get out into the open water, where there are killer whales.” Another hypothesis is that if you have territorial males broadcasting threats to each other and you just hear the low-frequency [calls], you might interpret that as a background threat. But if all of the sudden you hear the high-frequency … that could mean ‘I’m threatening you, not the general world.”
Question 49:
Which of the following, IF FALSE, would weaken the main idea of the passage?
(a) The range beyond 20 kilohertz is not the optimal communication range for Weddell seals.
(b) Nearly 90% of the underwater vocalizations produced by Antarctica’s Weddell seals occur at pitches beyond the limits of human hearing.
(c) Weddell seals survive on the oxygen in the water below the frozen ocean surface without the need to breathe surface air.
(d) The conclusions of the study undertaken in the 1970s were severely limited by the technology used to record Weddell seals’ ultrasonic vocalizations.
[ANS] a
Question 50:
Which of the following inferences can be drawn from the second paragraph?
(a) Weddell seals use of ultrasonic sounds for echolocation was first discovered in the 1970s.
(b) Weddell seals lack the anatomical structures to process ultrasonic sounds.
(c) Weddell seals do not locate objects by using reflected sound.
(d) Mammals and birds use rebounding sound waves to locate objects.
[ANS] c
Question 51:
According to Lisa Munger…
(a) Wendell seals use higher frequency vocalizations to communicate over large distances.
(b) Weddell seals use reflected sound waves for echolocation, though in a limited sense.
(c) Weddell seals are able to see well in the dark winters of the Antarctic.
(d) Higher frequency calls help Weddell seals to alert other seals about predators.
[ANS] b
Question 52:
The passage hypothesizes that that the higher frequency calls of Weddell seals serve all the following purposes
EXCEPT:
(a) To keep predators at bay
(b) To locate access to surface air
(c) To echolocate
(d) To find food
[ANS] c
Direction: The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
In the seventeenth century, the English word Physics, Physicks or even Physiques had come to signify the study of the phenomena of nature, as used by Thomas Hobbes in 1656. Physics and natural philosophy were synonymous, both indicating, according to John Harris’s 1704 lexicon, the “Speculative Knowledge of all Natural Bodies and of their Proper Natures, Constitutions, Powers and Occupations.” Whether living things were to be included in “natural bodies” was left undecided. It is not far from my own favorite description of particle physies, which is a search for the basic building blocks of nature and for the rules by which they combine.
The full title of Isaac Newton’s 1687 masterpiece Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica recalls Galileo Galilei’s warning that physics is “written in the language of mathematics.” Just as Galileo and Johannes Kepler depended upon the mathematical techniques described by Euclid, so did Newton rely on his own development of the basic principles of calculus. Albert Einstein, too, needed tensor analysis and differential geometry. Today’s string theorists count on mathematics not yet invented.
Quantitative science depends on measurement; measurements are expressed in numbers. Our number system is based on ten but some earlier systems were based on twenty-perhaps because our barefoot ancestors counted on their toes as well as on their fingers. Computers, using simple yes-no binary numbers, are both digital and digitless.
Four millennia ago, our Sumerian and Babylonian antecedents favoured 12 for the number of hours of daylight, signs of the zodiac, and months of the year. They also introduced the 360 degrees of the circle, and, for a while, used a year of that many days.
In the measurement of time, early civilizations recognized three natural but incommensurate periods, each of which now has a precise meaning: 1) the solar year, the interval between successive vernal equinoxes, 2) the lunar month, that between successive new moons, and 3) the solar day, that between successive sunsets. To deal with this issue the Sumerians came up with a remarkably accurate lunisolar calendar based on the near equality between 19 solar years and 235 lunar months. Their year consisted of 12 lunar months, one for each sign of the zodiac.
Most people now use the same civil calendar with 12 months satisfying the refrain, “Thirty days hath September/April, June, and November…” and a year of 365 days. An extra day is added to February every four years, except for those divisible by 100 but not 400. The last stipulation was added by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, thereby replacing the Julian calendar, which Julius Caesar had introduced in 46 BCE, which has a leap year every four years.
Question 53:
According to the passage, what was most probably the reason for Galileo’s “warning”?
(a) To distinguish between natural philosophy and physics.
(b) That physicists were not paying attention to mathematics.
(c) To bring awareness that mathematics was a language.
(d) To caution against the anomalies that arise in theoretical physics.
[ANS] a
Question 54:
According to the author, his own description of particle physics is similar to the John Harris’s definition of natural philosophy because:
(a) Both are speculative
(b) Both are mathematical models that describe phenomena.
(c) Both study nature at the fundamental level.
(d) Both exclude the study of living things.
[ANS] c
Question 55:
The author refers to Sumerian, Babylonian and other early civilizations mainly for which of the following purposes?
(a) To explain the origin of different number systems based on 10, 12 and 20.
(b) To show that mathematics is integral to science.
(c) To explain the history of time measurement.
(d) To explain the origin of the modern calendar.
[ANS] b
Question 56:
It can be validly inferred from the passage that the Sumerians:
(a) formulated the civil calendar that most people use today.
(b) reconciled the natural time cycles into an accurate calendar.
(c) could not resolve the discrepancy between solar months and solar year.
(d) first defined a solar day as the period between two successive sunsets.
[ANS] b
Direction: The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
This past spring, television viewers in Britain were treated to a six-part series called Civilization about the rise (and possible fall, if China has its way) of the West, hosted by the historian Niall Ferguson. The series offered a highly reductive version of history, identifying “the West” with qualities such as competition, scientific inquiry and the rule of law, and denigrating societies from Asia to the Middle East and Latin America for lacking these virtues. In effect, it provided a usable past for those who see the world as riven by a clash of civilizations.
One episode explored why after independence the United States forged ahead economically while the nations of Latin America stagnated. In an unusual twist, Ferguson chose South Carolina, a state governed by a tight-knit planter oligarchy, as a model of Jeffersonian democracy resting on small property ownership, in contrast to the autocratic societies south of the border organized around latifundia. Only after forty-five minutes of the one-hour show did Ferguson mention the existence of slaves the majority of South Carolina’s population. When slavery was finally discussed, it was presented not as a crucial structural feature of early American society but as a moral dilemma, an “original sin” expiated by the election of Barack Obama.
Among the many virtues of Robin Blackburn’s The American Crucible is its demonstration that slavery must be at the centre of any account of Western ascendancy, without the colonization of the New World, Blackburn notes at the outset, the West as we know it would not exist, and without slavery there could have been no colonization. Between 1500 and 1820, African slaves constituted about 80 percent of those who crossed the Atlantic from east to west. More than any other institution, the slave plantation underpinned the extraordinary expansion of Western power and the region’s prosperity in relation to the rest of the world.
Blackburn emphasizes that far from being static, New World slavery was a constantly evolving institution, and he identifies three broad eras in its history. In the first, which he dates from about 1500 to 1650, slavery was cantered in the Spanish colonies, small-scale and urban-based. By 1630 half the population of the great colonial cities Lima, Havana and Mexico City consisted of African slaves and their descendants. But in the countryside, in the silver and gold mines that enriched the Spanish crown and on the haciendas, ruled by powerful colonial settlers, the indigenous population performed most of the labour.
At the time, the Spanish Empire lacked an extensive plantation system. By 1770 colonial exports and re-exports, mostly of slave-produced goods, represented between a third and a half of Atlantic trade. The profits swelled merchants” coffers and the treasuries of European nation-states. By this time, too, the slave plantation had become a highly versatile economic unit, well adapted to the demands of the capitalist marketplace and quite modern in its methods of production, marketing and credit arrangements. Far from a retrograde drag on economic development, slavery was “a sinew of national strength” and of economic prosperity. In the nineteenth century, slavery entered its third era, one rife with contradictions….
Question 57:
The author thinks that Niall Ferguson’s presentation of western history was
(a) Simplistic
(b) Unrealistic
(c) Contrarian
(d) Patronising
[ANS] a
Question 58:
According to Robin Blackburn’s The American Crucible, all of the following are true about slavery EXCEPT:
(a) It was the cause of industrialization and capitalism in the West.
(b) It was integral to the economic development of “the West”.
(c) It paved the way for the expansion of Western power through colonisation.
(d) It adapted to the key features of the economy of the West.
[ANS] a
Question 59:
The author refers to Ferguson’s choice of South Carolina as an unusual twist for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:
(a) South Carolina symbolised the moral dilemma of slavery existing in America.
(b) The comparison of South Carolina with Latin America was misplaced.
(c) The driver of South Carolina’s economy was not competition and scientific enquiry.
(d) Slaves made up the majority of the population of South Carolina.
[ANS] a
Question 60:
Based on the information in the passage, which of the following is the central argument of Robin Blackburn’s The American Crucible?
(a) The foundation of colonization was forged in the crucible of the New World.
(b) The history of the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas.
(c) Slavery formed the basis of the expansion of Western power and prosperity.
(d) Centuries of enslavement promoted the rise of capitalism in the West.
[ANS] c
Direction: The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
Research indicates that a range of speaker attributes affect children’s selective trust. These include perceived speaker age, moral characteristics, familiarity, previous accuracy, and expertise.
Listeners use information about how a statement is made to judge the veracity of the statement. Speaking circuitously, for example, can signal deceptive intent. In addition to circuitous speech, nonverbal leakage may also indicate deceptive behavior. Thus, listeners may be able to detect manipulative communicators by attending to their nonverbal leakage.
The role of nonverbal behavior in children’s epistemic vigilance toward possible deception has received limited attention. One study appears to show that children’s understanding of the relevance of verbal-facial inconsistency is late-developing. However, this conclusion may have been affected by methodological peculiarities of the study. In their study, preschool, second, and fourth grade students heard an adult declare either a positive, neutral, or negative statement coupled with either a positive, neutral, or negative facial expression. The participants were asked to judge whether the speakers were lying, telling the truth, or unsure. Results showed that pre-schoolers performed poorly and did not use inconsistency as a cue to lying. This ability increased with age, such that second and fourth graders attributed truth more often to consistent speakers than to inconsistent speakers.
These results are open to interpretation. Although they seem to suggest that young children fail to use inconsistency as a cue to lying, the procedure used in this study required that children verbally accuse an adult of lying something the younger children might have been hesitant to do. To address this, it would be advisable to use a behavioural, non-confrontational method of assessing children’s trust in the speaker.
Similarly, of the published studies that have examined children’s ability to use cues to infer that someone might be lying to them, most do not investigate children’s spontaneous use of epistemic vigilance against misleading informants. Indeed, most existing studies explicitly label or highlight the informant’s intention to deceive or be tricky. Other studies in this area present evidence of children’s ability to protect against deceptive information after multiple exposures with the same speaker, which gives children a chance to learn over time that a particular informant has a history of deception. Such studies contribute to our understanding of how young children can come to practice epistemic vigilance against bad sources of information, but do not offer evidence of how children may engage in this important process spontaneously and without the help of explicit labelling or multi-trial learning.
The last few decades of research have made it clear that all children are equipped with mechanisms that guide whom they trust and from whom they prefer to learn. Nevertheless, here remains a large gap in our knowledge about how children protect themselves against potentially deceptive speakers when these defensive mechanisms develop, what cues they are based on, and how successful they are.
Question 61:
All of the following can be inferred from the passage EXCEPT:
(a) Nonverbal cues are important indicators of deceptive intent in speakers.
(b) Young children lack the ability to protect themselves against deceptive information.
(c) Our knowledge of how and when children develop epistemic vigilance against misinformation is limited.
(d) Older children are more likely to report verbal-facial inconsistency than pre-schoolers.
[ANS] b
Question 62:
All the following would be “consistent behavior’ according to the passage EXCEPT:
(a) A man while shopping for a car in a showroom nodded while mentioning that he fancied a particular car,
(b) A college freshman shrugged his shoulders when told to watch a documentary that might help his understanding of a challenging subject.
(c) A saleswoman complimented a potential customer who was trying out an outfit, without noticing that the dress was outsized.
(d) A battalion of soldiers letting out a war cry and charging at the enemy.
[ANS] c
Question 63:
“Epistemic vigilance”, in the context of the passage, may mean all of the following EXCEPT:
(a) Recognizing behavior that allows speakers to influence the listeners.
(b) Protecting one from forming false beliefs based on what others say.
(c) Taking a critical stance toward the information we receive.
(d) Paying special attention to cues that suggest deception or misinformation.
[ANS] a
Question 64:
According to the author, published studies examining children’s selective trust does NOT include:
(a) the speaker’s intention to deceive
(b) children’s past experiences of deception
(c) children’s ability to identify whom to trust and whom to learn from.
(d) children’s untaught defense against deceptive communication.
[ANS] d
DIRECTIONS: The passage given below is followed by a set of four questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
A poet, somewhere in Siberia, or the Balkans, or West Africa, 60,000 years ago, recites thousands of memorised lines in the course of an evening. The lines are packed with fixed epithets and clichés. The bard is not concerned with originality, but with intonation and delivery: he or she is perfectly attuned to the circumstances of the day, and to the mood and expectations of his or her listeners. The poet’s words would in no way have been anchored in visible signs, in text. Words had no worldly reality other than the sound made when they were spoken.
It is difficult to imagine how differently language would have been experienced in a culture of ‘primary orality’. There would be nowhere to ‘look up a word’, no authoritative source telling us the shape the word ‘actually’ takes. Say it over and over again, or it will slip away. This necessary condition of survival is important for understanding the relatively repetitive nature of epic poetry. In the absence of fixed, textual anchors for words, there would be a sharp sense that language is charged with power, almost magic: the idea that words, when spoken, can bring about new states of affairs in the world. They do not so much describe, as invoke.
Writing was developed, first in the ancient Near East and soon after in Greece. Words were now anchored and, though spellings could change from one generation to another, or one region to another, there were now physical traces that endured, which could be transmitted, consulted and pointed to in settling questions about the use or authority of spoken language. Writing rapidly turned customs into laws, agreements into contracts, genealogical lore into history. What had once been fundamentally temporal and singular was transformed into something eternal (as in, ‘outside of time’) and general. Even the simple act of making everyday lists of common objects – an act impossible in a primary oral culture was already a triumph of abstraction and systematisation. From here it was just one small step to ‘philosophy”.
Homer’s epic poetry, which originates in the same oral epic traditions as those of the Balkans or of West Africa, was written down, frozen, fixed, and from this it became ‘literature’. There are no arguments in the Iliad: much of what is said arises from metrical exigencies, the need to fill in a line with the right number of syllables, or from epithets whose function is largely mnemonic (and thus unnecessary when transferred into writing). Yet Homer would become an authority for early philosophers nonetheless: revealing truths about humanity not by argument or debate, but by declamation, now frozen into text.
Plato would express extreme concern about the role, if any, that poets should play in society. But he was not talking about poets as we think of them: he had in mind reciters, bards who incite emotions with living performances, invocations and channellings of absent persons and beings. It is not orality that philosophy rejects, necessarily: Socrates himself rejected writing. Plato would also ensure the philosophical canonisation of his own mentor by writing down what Socrates would have preferred to merely say, and so would have preferred to have lost to the wind. Arguably, it is in virtue of Plato’s recording that we might say, today, that Socrates was a philosopher.
Plato and Aristotle, both, were willing to learn from Homer, once he had been written down. And Socrates, though Plato still felt he had to write him down, was already engaged in a sort of activity very different from poetic recitation. This was dialectic: the structured, working-through of a question towards an end that has not been predetermined even if this practice emerged indirectly from forms of reasoning only actualised with the advent of writing.
Question 65:
According to the passage, three of the following choices are true of the bard in Siberia or the Balkans or West Africa, 60,000 years ago. Pick the exception.
(a) He would have made use of visible signs in writing and bothered about the original source of his recitation.
(b) He would have used sobriquets in his verse extensively.
(c) He would have been concerned with inflection and tone.
(d) He would have kept in mind the expectations of the people who listened to his monologue.
[ANS] a
Question 66:
Which of the following choices correctly cites the difference between Socrates and Plato, as can be ascertained from the passage?
(a) Plato loathed the reciters and bards of his day while Socrates eulogized them.
(b) Plato identified himself with a form of oral culture and Socrates went beyond poetic recitation to evolve dialectic reasoning.
(c) Socrates identified himself with a form of oral culture while Plato preferred to write down what he heard in discourses.
(d) There is no difference cited in the passage both Plato and Socrates were willing to learn from Homer once he had been written down.
[ANS] c
Question 67:
What is the primary concern of the author in the passage?
(a) To make us understand the scope and nature of philosophical enquiry.
(b) To discuss the intellectual importance of the writing process.
(c) To explain how philosophy evolved.
(d) To discuss how philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures.
[ANS] b
Question 68:
What can be inferred from the passage regarding philosophy?
(a) Philosophy first developed in the ancient Near East and then in Greece.
(b) The metrical exigencies in Homer’s Iliad became the base for the development of philosophy.
(c) Without oral culture, hypotheses in philosophy could never be made.
(d) The emergence of writing has facilitated the development of philosophy.
[ANS] d
DIRECTIONS: The passage given below is followed by a set of four questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
In the 1980s companies often paid stratospheric prices to acquire established brands. With many of the best brands snapped up, extending existing brands is becoming popular again.
From booze to lipstick, consumer brands were the prizes which sparked some of the biggest takeover battles and grandest break-up schemes of the 1980s. Bidders and break-up artists thought they could sell well-known brands or exploit them better than existing managers.
The steam has gone out of the takeover market, and few big brands still carry “for sale” signs. After a massive reshuffle of brand portfolios, managers in consumer goods industries are returning to an old standby of marketing: brand-stretching.
Brand stretching – using the recognition value and reputation of a brand-name in a new product area is often a quick and cheap way for a company to invade a new market. But brands are not endlessly elastic. Stretching can also undermine the credibility of the original product. Consumers either may not believe that the new product shares any of the characteristics of the old, or they may simply forget what was attractive about the original item.
Nevertheless, many companies are beginning to stretch their brands for the same reason that they once scrambled to buy established brands at ever- higher prices: launching a new brand can be even riskier and more expensive. Nielsen, a market-research firm, found that, of America’s top twenty-two brands back in 1925, nineteen still led their product categories 60 years later. Britain’s top ten grocery brands have an average age of forty-two.
Brand-stretching can save money. OC & C, a London based consultancy, recently studied five years’ worth of new-product launches by one multinational client. Its findings? The advertising and promotion costs per consumer persuaded to try out each new product were 36% less for stretched brands than for completely new ones. Not only did stretched products need less advertising, but consumers were also more willing to give names they already knew an initial trial. Even well after a new product’s launch, stretched brands have a higher survival rate. OC & C found that, of products launched by the same multinational six years ago, only about 30% of new brands exist today, while over 50% of stretched ones do. Another concept which has caught on in recent times is personal branding. This is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands. While previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, the personal-branding concept suggests instead that success comes from self-packaging.
Personal branding often involves the application of one’s name to various products. Donald Trump uses his last name extensively on his buildings and on the products he endorses (e.g. Trump Tower). “Your brand is a perception or emotion, maintained by somebody other than you, that describes the total experience of having a relationship with you.”
Branding is all about product perception. And when that product is you, it’s even more critical the branding process be so perfect that the decision can’t be anything but in your favour. That, in a nutshell, is the premise of Peter Montoya’s The Brand Called You. According to it, a personal brand is ‘a personal identity that stimulates precise, meaningful perceptions in its audience about the values and qualities that person stands for, personally and professionally.’ And, before you ask, no, it’s not the same as advertising and PR. The purpose of creating a personal brand is not to make you famous, emphasises Montoya. It’s about enhancing your sphere of influence, because that’s what generates wealth. Of course, you may become famous, but that’s just a welcome extra, not the ultimate goal. A personal brand is about keeping you and your business top-of-mind, telling people you can create value and helping business come to you, rather than have you scout for work. Personal branding is a reflection of reality ……………… Montoya lists several strategies for creating a personal brand, from the obvious (send targeted press releases, maintain a Web site and pay personal attention to customers) to the unusual (create a personal brochure and use it instead of business cards, send out personal postcards instead of the usual direct mailers).
Question 69:
What can be inferred from the finding of Nielsen’s research on brands as presented in the passage?
(a) Consumers take a long time to place their trust in a particular brand but once their trust is betrayed, they can renounce their faith in the brand in a very short span of time,
(b) Brand loyalty of consumers in the 1980s was questionable.
(c) Once established brands are difficult to displace.
(d) The risks of brand-stretching are outweighed by the fact that it is considerably easy and cheaper to market stretched brands than to launch new brands.
[ANS] c
Question 70:
It can be inferred from the passage that stretched brands
(a) emerged, as a concept, after the biggest takeover battles and grandest break-up schemes of the 1980s. began to lose their glamour.
(b) have a higher survival rate and cost less per customer than new brands.
(c) almost always end up undermining the credibility of the original version.
(d) provided a powerful counterweight to takeover battles and break-up schemes of the 1980s.
[ANS] b
Question 71:
According to Montoya, how is personal branding different from advertising and PR?
(a) Personal branding lays more emphasis on personalized approach whereas advertising and PR are more customary.
(b) The former establishes your identity while advertising and PR modify your perceptions.
(c) In the case of the former, the emphasis is more on communicating your self-worth, whereas the latter aims at making you well-known.
(d) Personal branding is a reflection of reality whereas advertising and PR project larger than life images of the product.
[ANS] c
Question 72:
Which of the following cannot be inferred about personal branding from the passage?
(a) Becoming famous is not the primary objective in personal branding.
(b) Personal branding can enhance the emotional connection or experience with a client and can increase your net worth.
(c) Your personal brand is the mental impression prospective associates have of you.
(d) Self-improvement is thought to be as significant a skill set as self- packaging in the personal branding exercise.
[ANS] d
DIRECTIONS: The passage given below is followed by a set of four questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
Scientists find it difficult to know which facts are important and which irrelevant, unless they already have a framework or theory into which they could fit the facts. This is not being ‘unscientific’ in any way. Scientists do not work with unambiguous facts, they have to place facts in context, to interpret them within a particular framework or theory. In cosmology or atomic physics, this process is relatively uncontroversial. But when we are dealing with the question of human nature /origins, the creation of the framework within which one places the facts can be contentious, and open to political, philosophical and cultural influences. Virtually all our evolutionary theories about human origins are relatively unconstrained by fossil data.
They have often said far more about the theorists than about what actually happened. Today, the questions of ‘how and when did we become human?” remain culturally loaded. The key issue for many Darwinists is the similarity of humans and apes. Humans share 98 percent of their genes with chimpanzees. If we take away our clothes, possessions and language, observes Jared Diamond, then we begin to look like an ape. If we remove our marks of humanity, we no longer appear to be human: not a very profound claim. But Diamond doesn’t leave it there. Humanity without their humanity are revealed to be ‘what they really are’. Diamond’s argument is that ‘what we really are’, the essence of humanity, has little to do with conventional indices of humanness: language, culture, technology, and so on. Rather it is expressed principally through our animal heritage.
The genetic proximity of Man and ape is without question. One could say, given the tiny genetic difference, that our humanity does not lie in our genes. Or one could argue we are little more than another ape, and the roots of our behaviour must lie in our animal, and in particular ape, ancestry. In adopting the second argument. Darwinists like Diamond are doing more than taking an objective look at the human condition. They are interpreting the scientific data through a particular philosophical lens. They are projecting their vision of what it means to be human on to the data.
For all Robert Foley’s protestations, then, that evolutionary questions are merely technical ones, Darwinian explanations also draw on philosophical and cultural assumptions about what constitutes humanity, how humans relate to the non-human animal world. If the Victorian insistence on a biological chasm between man and ape originated from an almost mythical belief in human progress, today’s insistence that humans are nothing more than another kind of ape is the consequence of a century’s worth of disillusionment with such optimism. Foley notes: The history of the twentieth century has transformed our vision of humanity, leading to a ‘loss of confidence in the extent to which humans could be said to be on a pedestal above the swamp of animal brutishness.’
The almost boundless capacity of humans to do damage to each other has, in the twentieth century, rather dented human self-esteem ……. Apes have become more angelic, the angels, or at least their human representatives, more apish. Originally, humans were thought to be the advanced form of life (the angels), and other animals the more primitive, now it may be argued that the animal within us is our noble side, and humanity the darker side a complete reversal of the original Victorian image …….
The fact that scientific explanations of humanness are shaped by wider influences does not necessarily mean that they are wrong. We have to understand arguments about human nature as simultaneously scientific and cultural claims. We need to ask ourselves two intertwined questions. First, what data have scientists produced about human origins, human behaviour, the human mind? And second, what is it about humanness that is being said through particular interpretations of this data? i.e., What does science tell us about being human, and what do scientific theories about human origins tell us about the non-scientific influences upon their stories? Putting the two together will tell us much, both about humanness and about the present state of humanity.
Question 73:
Which of the following correctly points out the difference in the field of cosmology and evolutionary biology as discussed in the first para of the passage?
(a) In the former, one does not work with unambiguous facts while in the latter, theorists work with ambiguous facts that are influenced by philosophy and culture.
(b) In the former, theories are twisted to suit facts while in the latter, facts are twisted to suit theories.
(c) In the former, the creation of the framework within which one places the facts is uncontroversial, but in the latter it is controversial.
(d) In the former, one considers it a capital mistake to theorize before one has data while in the latter, one projects contemporary concerns onto the past.
[ANS] c
Question 74:
What is the style of the passage?
(a) Narrative.
(b) Analytical.
(c) Descriptive.
(d) Argumentative.
[ANS] d
Question 75:
In the author’s opinion.
(a) Jared Diamond implies that the essence of humanity lies in our inherited traits.
(b) Jared Diamond believes that clothes, possessions, cuture, technological and linguistic prowess are the distinguishing features of man.
(c) Man’s genetic similarity to apes leads him to behave in a beastly manner.
(d) If an ape wore clothes and could talk, it would be indistinguishable from man.
[ANS] a
Question 76:
Which of the following stories pertaining to today’s times would be told by a Darwinist to highlight the essence of humanity?
(a) The story of the ascent of man from his brutish origin.
(b) The tale of the fall of man back into beastliness.
(c) The story of the descent of Man and the ascent of humanity.
(d) The story of the convergence of the human and ape evolutionary tree lines.
[ANS] a
DIRECTIONS: The passage given below is followed by a set of four questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
Kurt Vonnegut once advised: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” The idea that people become what they do is my favourite idea. This explanation of how people acquire attitudes and traits was formalized by the social psychologist Daryl Bem in his self-perception theory. People draw inferences about who they are, Bem suggested, by observing their own behaviour. Self-perception theory turns common wisdom on its head. People act the way they do because of their personality traits and attitudes, right? They return a lost wallet because they are honest and recycle their trash because they care about the environment. While it is true that behaviour emanates from people’s inner dispositions, Bem’s insight was to suggest that the reverse also holds. If we return a lost wallet, there is an upward tick on our honesty meter. After we drag the recycling bin to the curb, we infer that we really care about the environment. Hundreds of experiments have confirmed the theory and shown when this self-inference process is most likely to operate (e.g., when people believe they freely chose to behave the way they did, and when they weren’t sure at the outset how they felt).
Self-perception theory is elegant in its simplicity. But it is also quite deep, with important implications for the nature of the human mind. Two other powerful ideas follow from it. The first is that we are strangers to ourselves. After all, if we knew our own minds, why would we need to guess what our preferences are from our behaviour? If our minds were an open book, we would know exactly how honest we are. Instead, we often need to look to our behaviour to figure out who we are. Self-perception theory thus anticipated the revolution in psychology in the study of human consciousness, a revolution that revealed the limits of introspection. But it turns out that we don’t just use our behaviour to reveal our dispositions we infer dispositions that weren’t there before. Often, our behaviour is shaped by subtle pressures around us, but we fail to recognize those pressures. As a result, we mistakenly believe that our behaviour emanated from some pre-existing inner disposition. For instance, our competitive spirit may prompt behaviour that is considered altruistic, but we believe it to be an innate altruism at work.
Question 77:
The boldfaced part of the text can be best replaced by…………….?
(a) strongest tendencies
(b) characteristic tendencies
(c) inherent strengths
(d) immanent tendencies
[ANS] d
Question 78:
What is the meaning of the word ‘Altruism’ in the last line of the passage-
(a) Selfless act
(b) Selfish act
(c) Inner strength
(d) Vanity
[ANS] a
Question 79:
Which of the following is true from the passage?
(a) Most people know how they will behave most of the times.
(b) We can identify the pressures that make or mar our behaviour.
(c) We sometimes use effect to misidentify cause.
(d) Self-perception theory states that people act the way they do because of their personality traits and attitudes.
[ANS] c
Question 80:
Consider the statement given below:
It is implicit in several versions of psychotherapy, in which clients are encouraged to change their behaviour first, with the assumption that changes in their inner dispositions will follow.
How does the above statement relate to the main point of the passage?
(a) It reveals an alternate side to the theory.
(b) It shows how the theory can be misused due to an inherent flaw.
(c) It describes a hypothetical situation and argues in favour of a particular hypothesis of the theory.
(d) It reiterates a point of the theory and mentions its practical implication,
[ANS] d
Directions: Read the following passage carefully and choose the best answers for the questions that follow each passage.
Although Darwin’s theory of natural selection transformed the understanding of life by turning all eyes to evolution, the subsequent decades saw a successful effort to side-line it in favour of less disturbing candidates for mechanisms of change. People were ready to accept the idea of evolutionary transformation as long as it seemed orderly, progressive and purposeful. Lamarckian ideas, suggesting that individuals could improve themselves through their own striving and then pass on these improvements to their offspring, were a popular alternative. Arguments such as these did not confront respectable men with undignified implications about their relationship to monkeys, or threaten to make the universe look meaningless. By the century’s end Darwinism was in eclipse, but the cracks it had made in the foundations of existential belief were beyond repair.
Bowler argues that without Darwin the foundations would have remained undamaged: nobody else would have succeeded in advancing a sufficiently powerful theory of natural selection and establishing it before other thinkers had set different agendas. Although several people glimpsed the principle of natural selection, none grasped or developed it as Darwin did. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had the epiphany while seized by fever in a hut on an island in the East Indies, but by then Darwin was more than twenty years ahead of him, and comfortably established in a country house near London.
However, Bowler’s argument does imply that Wallace’s insight was crucial, since it jolted Darwin into getting natural selection onto the table while there was still space for it.
Bowler exonerates Darwinism of the historical evils for which it has been blamed, up to and including both world wars. The counterfactual method justifies itself most emphatically in Bowler’s systematic exposition of how theories of racial hierarchy, the identification of might with right, heartlessness towards the poor, eugenics and eventually Nazism had more than enough material to establish themselves without appropriating anything from Darwin except his name. ‘Social Darwinism’ was not, in fact, Darwinian. Nineteenth-century racial thought seethed with denials of common descent: Darwin’s vision of humankind as a single species was a moderating influence.
Question 81:
The passage is primarily concerned with.
(a) defending a controversial theory.
(b) putting a theory into perspective.
(c) criticizing an accepted scientific opinion.
(d) contrasting competing theories.
[ANS] b
Question 82:
The information in the passage suggests that Bowler believes that which of the following would be true if Darwinism had not gained currency?
(a) Darwinism would have gained its place in the science of life sooner or later.
(b) Evolutionary biology would have been less conducive to existential belief.
(c) Evolutionary theories would not have upset the apple-cart of existential belief.
(d) Science would have witnessed a disruption in the gradual evolution in nature.
[ANS] c
Question 83:
Which of the following statements about Wallace’ epiphany can be inferred from information in the passage?
(a) Wallace downplayed selection theory in the face of criticism.
(b) Wallace was accused by Darwin for being prematurely right.
(c) Wallace’s attitude towards Darwin’s disturbing idea made them rivals.
(d) Wallace conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection.
[ANS] d
Question 84:
It can be inferred from the passage that the “Social Darwinism” mentioned in the last paragraph is based on which of the following assumptions?
(a) What is right in developmental biology should be right for society.
(b) Social conflicts eliminate weak members who have little to contribute anyway.
(c) Superior social groups outcompete inferior social groups.
(d) Cooperation between groups in a society leads to social progress.
[ANS] c
Directions: Read the following passage carefully and choose the best answers for the questions that follow each passage.
Mailer entered the heavyweight division of postwar novelists with his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, but at the time of his epistolary back and forth with Styron, his ranking had slipped badly. He was in danger of becoming publishing’s version of box office poison. Barbary Shore, his second novel, was a cramped political allegory that creaked as slowly as a Val Lewton movie (without the dream languor), and his third, a sun-bleached scroll of Hollywood decadence called The Deer Park, suffered agonies of editorial, rebuff and Benzedrine fuelled rewrites; it was met by a spate of mortifying reviews a shredded nerves saga Mailer would recount in Advertisement for Myself, in the beginning Styron and Mailer buck each other up, forming a party of two.
Courtesy of the postal service, Styron/Mailer share not only dislikes, but confidences, expressions of vulnerability. When Mailer begins a letter admitting he’s been ‘kind of depressed lately’, Styron owns up to his own low spirits, lifting the curtain on his depressive sloughs. ‘Perhaps I’ll change some as I get older but it seems to me that life is a long grey depression interrupted by moments of high hilarity.’
Four years later, in March 1958, the friendship had gone south with a vengeance. The provocation was word form a ‘reliable source’ that Styron had spread disparaging remarks about Mailer’s wife, Adele, whereupon Mailer challenged Styron ‘to a fight. Styron responded to this vivid proposition with a raised chin or two of Southern Yankee pride, declining to trade knuckle sandwiches over such a calumnious accusation, ‘So utterly false, that it does not deserve even this much of a reply.
Styron admitted decades later, he probably had been badmouthing Adele, but he was also right that something else was eating Mailer; status envy. Mailer may have been the greater literary lion, but as a social lion Styron left him back at the watering hole.
After the dissolution of diplomatic relations following the Adele affair, Mailer renamed Styron something fierce in Advertisement for Myself, and Styron retaliated by caricaturing Mailer in Set This House on Fire (1960). The mayhem escalated. In a notorious St Valentine’s Day massacre of his literary rivals in Esquire in 1963 called ‘Some Children of the Goddess’, Mailer not only performed a gruesome autopsy of Set This House on Fire ‘the magnum opus of a fat spoiled rich boy’, but also sought to jam a crowbar between Styron and James, Jones of whose friendship he was jealous, revealing that Styron had hosted a gathering where the evening’s entertainment consisted of reading aloud choice execrable passages form the galleys of Some Came Running for everyone’s merriment. It was a little low of Mailer to squeal on Styron’s perfidy, since he had been at the party and joined in the laughter at Jone’s clunkers, albeit with a somewhat sick feeling that was presumably his conscience calling. But he wasn’t going to let a little bit of hypocrisy arrest his trigger finger. The anecdote fitted too nicely into the evidence folder of Mailer’s bill of indictment, which charged Styron with being a first class literary operator oiling the levers of influence and laying on the flattery with forked tongue -a courtly racketeer. Styron’s real offence wasn’t that he played the insider game, but that he was so good at it. Styron had married a woman of means, the former Rose Burgunder, whose parents owned a department store in Baltimore (they first met at a graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins University), and, despite heavy turbulence, the two remained married for more than half a century. Whereas Mailer would find himself batting out magazine assignments for money and pulling a wagon train of alimony payments unable to afford Styron’s luxury of discreet pauses between novels lasting Wolcott.
Question 85:
The primary purpose of the passage is to
(a) highlight the literary rivalry between Mailer and Styron.
(b) chart the relationship between two literary giants.
(c) trace the political motivation behind the literary success of Styron.
(d) contrast the critical and commercial records of Styron and Mailer.
[ANS] b
Question 86:
The passage implies which of the following about Adele Mailer?
(a) Styron targeted Adele to vent his frustration at Mailer’s soaring literary reputation.
(b) Mailer was right when he rebuked Styron for slandering Adele.
(c) Adele had an affair with Styron without Mailer’s knowledge.
(d) Adele was only an ostensible reason for Mailer’s antagonism.
[ANS] d
Question 87:
In the context of the passage “perfidy” most likely means
(a) guilt.
(b) treachery.
(c) sense of humour.
(d) lack of appreciation.
[ANS] b
Question 88:
Some Came Running’ was written by
(a) Mailer.
(b) Styron.
(c) Jones.
(d) None of the above
[ANS] c
Directions: Read the following passage carefully and choose the best answers for the questions that follow each passage.
It was August 1941, four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In search of a strategic Pacific Ocean base, American sailors landed on the shores of Palmyra Atoll, a flyspeck on the map about 1,000 miles southwest of Hawali. They found a paradise of Technicolor corals, crystalline lagoons and lush native forests.
Isolated wildernesses such as Palmyra, which is now a National Wildlife Refuge, provide precious natural laboratories and hold a powerful allure in the popular consciousness. However, few scientists or policymakers have considered how to tailor conservation approaches to the unique challenges of these places which, until recently, were protected by their own. remoteness.
A paper called “Conservation at the edges of the world in the issue of Biological Conservation, examines different conservation methods for remote areas. Palmyra is one of the “model remote sites” described in depth in the article.
The researchers assert that globalization is rapidly eroding isolation, and now is the time to protect scientifically valuable far-flung ecosystems. They suggest that some of the logistical cultural and economic challenges of conserving remote places can be turned into opportunities for biodiversity management.
Palmyra is one of the Northern Line Island, atolls once only accessible by rare ship traffic. Now, passenger airlines and cruise ships make regular stops in the area. Commercial fishing boats ply the waters of even the most isolated atolls and sea-tossed trash, litters shorelines.
Still, the atoll remains a natural wonderland. It has one of the world’s most intact coral reef ecosystems, “Preserving the last remaining undisturbed ecosystems is the only way to avoid posing intact biodiversity reservoirs”, said study co-author Firoenza Micheli, a biology professor affiliated with the Standford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Hopkins Marine Stations. Like preventive medicine. Micheli said “it is a relatively small investment we can make to prepare for the highly uncertain future ahead of us”.
“Beyond their instructive worth to scientists, many of us can and should take satisfaction in simply knowing that there still remain spots of our planet out there where life advances. For the moment, in ways that it has for millennia”, Me Cauley said. As remoteness degrades across our planet, the value and importance of these sites to science and society will only increase”.
Question 89:
Which of the following best describes the purpose of the sentence “however, few scientists ……own remoteness”?
(a) To explain why remote sites rich in natural resources must not be dominated by humans.
(b) To show that formal protection is needed to conserve ecosystems no longer remote.
(c) To clarify that the insulation of remote sites provides de facto protection.
(d) To introduce tourism planning as an essential ingredient to effective management of remote atolls.
[ANS] b
Question 90:
The primary purpose of the passage is to
(a) present findings that examine why remote wilderness matters and the need for its conservation.
(b) argue that managing biodiversity should be a prerogative of policymakers.
(c) discuss how and why the Palmyra Atoll was irreversibly commercially exploited.
(d) explain the research methods used in a study on atolls in the Pacific base.
[ANS] a
Question 91:
The passage states that an atoll is a
(a) tropical paradise.
(b) remote ecosystem.
(c) biodiversity cache.
(d) coral reef Island.
[ANS] d
Question 92:
The passage suggests which of the following about Palmyra?
a. It possesses near-pristine nature,
b. It is a bank of evolutionary knowledge.
c. It is undisturbed by humans.
(a) a and b
(b) band c
(c) a and c
(d) a, b and c
[ANS] a
Directions: Read the following passage carefully and choose the best answers for the questions that follow each passage.
Governments are too often urged to actively promote formal school and college education among citizens. Many even go on to say that it is the basic duty of the government to make sure every child is given quality education at least until a certain age, and parents should be held accountable for it. If not, several experts argue, the fruits of education may never reach a vast majority of the population who are ignorant of its immense economic benefits.
“Economic Freedom and Human Capital Investment,” a 2017 paper by Horst Feldmann published in the Journal of Institutional Economics, however, offers an alternative view of how education works. Feldmann argues that education is no different from any other investment that seamlessly occurs whenever people are given the economic freedom to fully enjoy its benefits. There might then be very little need for a government to actively promote education among citizens, as they are likely to invest in it anyway. After all, when the right conditions exist, investment in education should happen just as a matter of course. In fact, Feldmann argues, this is very similar to how investment in physical capital works.
A factory, for instance, gets built whenever taxes are not too high and laws not too burdensome to discourage investors. Low taxes and stable property rights encourage investors to invest in risky ventures without any unreasonable fear about the future. Similarly, the author argues, people will invest in education whenever they are granted the economic freedom to fully enjoy its benefits. Again, this is for the obvious reason that the return on education increases as the level of economic freedom rises. When people, thanks to lower tax rates, are allowed to retain most of the higher income that they gain from each incremental level of education, it makes sense to invest in education. On the other hand, when the government decides to tax the higher incomes of educated individuals at even higher rates, it makes very little sense to invest in educating oneself further. The same incentives apply to parents who decide on whether to invest in their children’s education.
Feldmann in his study uses data on enrolment in secondary education in a total of 109 countries over four decades as a proxy to measure the effect of economic freedom, as measured by the “Economic Freedom of the World” index, on capital investment. He says that poverty is not a deterrent to investment in education. The author argues that poor families will find it far easier to access capital markets when there is greater economic freedom. Investors looking for profits are more likely to invest in funding a poor child’s education when their returns on such investment are enhanced by economic freedom.
Question 93:
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
(a) The government has absolutely no role in promoting education.
(b) Banks and financial institutions are unlikely to demand collateral for education loans when acquiring degrees fetches good salary.
(c) “Economic Freedom of the World” index relates only to capital investment.
(d) Parents invest in education of their children because they believe that they will be taken care of by their children when they (parents) are old.
[ANS] b
Question 94:
Which of the following is an assumption made by Horst Feldmann?
(a) Increase in the return on education is directly proportional to the level of economic freedom.
(b) Parents are generally ignorant about the value of education.
(c) The number of students going for higher education is gradually declining.
(d) People go for higher education only to increase their earnings.
[ANS] d
Question 95:
Which of the following is supported by the passage?
(a) There should be nil taxes for highly educated professionals with great expertise.
(b) In a survey, Feldmann found that 109 countries lagged behind in education because of higher taxes.
(c) Higher income corresponding to each higher level of education will in itself be the best motivation to invest in education.
(d) Return on education is guaranteed in a free economy.
[ANS] c
Question 96:
Which of the following accurately summarizes the central idea of the passage?
(a) Any form of government control affects the economy adversely.
(b) The economy of a nation becomes vibrant when people are educated.
(c) Spread of education should be achieved not by governmental incentives, but by corporate responsibilities.
(d) Human capital can be built up when people enjoy economic freedom.
[ANS] d
Directions: The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer for each question.
Many of our psychological traits are innate in origin. There is overwhelming evidence from twin, family and general population studies that all manner of personality traits, as well as things such as intelligence, sexuality and risk of psychiatric disorders, are highly heritable.
But exactly how does our genetic heritage influence our psychological traits? Are there dedicated genetic and neural modules underlying underlying various cognitive functions? What does it mean to say we have found ‘genes for intelligence’, or extraversion, or schizophrenia? This commonly used ‘gene for X’ construction is unfortunate in suggesting that such genes have a dedicated function: that it is their purpose to cause X. This is not the case at all.
From the perspective of molecular biology, a gene is a stretch of DNA that codes for a specific protein. So there is a gene for the protein haemoglobin, which carries oxygen around in the blood, and genes for metabolic enzymes and neurotransmitter receptors and antibodies, and so on. It is right to think of the purpose of these genes as encoding those proteins with those cellular or physiological functions.
But from the point of view of heredity, a gene is some physical unit that can be passed from parent to offspring that is associated with some trait or condition. There is a gene for sickle-cell anaemia, for example, that explains how the disease runs in families. The key idea linking these two different concepts of the gene is variation: the ‘gene’ for sickle-cell anaemia is really just a mutation or change in sequence in the stretch of DNA that codes for haemoglobin. That mutation does not have a purpose it only has an effect.
So, when we talk about genes for intelligence, say, what we really mean is genetic variants that cause differences in intelligence. These might be having their effects in highly indirect ways. Though we all share a human genome, with a common plan for making a human body and a human brain, wired so as to confer our general human nature, genetic variation in that plan arises inevitably, as errors creep in each time DNA is copied to make new sperm and egg cells. The accumulated genetic variation leads to variation in how our brains develop and function, and ultimately to variation in our individual natures.
This is not metaphorical. We can directly see the effects of genetic variation on our brains. Neuroimaging technologies reveal extensive individual differences in the size of various parts of the brain, including functionally defined areas of the cerebral cortex. They reveal how these areas are laid out and interconnected, and the pathways by which they are activated and communicate with each other under different conditions. All these parameters are at least partly heritable some highly so.
That said, the relationship between these kinds of neural properties and psychological traits is far from simple. There is a long history of searching for correlations between isolated parameters of brain structure or function and specific behavioural traits, and certainly no shortage of apparently positive associations in the published literature. But for the most part, these have not held up to further scrutiny. It turns out that the brain is simply not so modular: even quite specific cognitive functions rely not on isolated areas but on interconnected brain subsystems. And the high-level properties that we recognise as stable psychological traits cannot even be linked to the functioning of specific subsystems but emerge instead from the interplay between them.
Question 97:
What is this passage about?
(a) The relationship between genes and physiological traits.
(b) The influence of genetic heritage on psychological traits.
(c) The evolution of traits as a result of DNA variation.
(d) The insignificance of nurture in shaping behaviour.
[ANS] b
Question 98:
Which of the following assumptions, if true, would nullify what the author is trying to say?
(a) Cognitive functions or mental states have direct molecular underpinnings.
(b) Functionally defined areas of the brain are not identical in different people.
(c) Different areas of the brain are interconnected.
(d) The idea of a gene varies between molecular biology and heredity studies.
[ANS] a
Question 99:
Based on the passage, which of the following is NOT true about genes?
(a) Genes encode proteins with certain cellular functions.
(b) Genes explain how diseases run in families.
(c) Genes may cause changes in intelligence.
(d) Genes are directly and evidently related to psychological behaviours.
[ANS] d
Question 100:
Why does the author use the phrase “this is not metaphorical” at the beginning of paragraph 6?
(a) To support the claim that genetic variations actually affect the physical structure of the brain.
(b) To explain the significance of genetic variants in relation to the cerebral cortex.
(c) To build the case for the research on genomes that is discussed later.
(d) To back the discussion about genes as DNA codes for proteins.
[ANS] a
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