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Verbal Ability Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension Questions | Prasnya
Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension > Verbal Ability
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82Q
01
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. To me, a "classic" means precisely the opposite of what my predecessors understood: a work is classical by reason of its resistance to contemporaneity and supposed universality, by reason of its capacity to indicate human particularity and difference in that past epoch. The classic is not what tells me about shared humanity—or, more truthfully put, what lets me recognize myself as already present in the past, what nourishes in me the illusion that everything has been like me and has existed only to prepare the way for me. Instead, the classic is what gives access to radically different forms of human consciousness for any given generation of readers, and thereby expands for them the range of possibilities of what it means to be a human being.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
26 November 2017
02
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. A translator of literary works needs a secure hold upon the two languages involved, supported by a good measure of familiarity with the two cultures. For an Indian translating works in an Indian language into English, finding satisfactory equivalents in a generalized western culture of practices and symbols in the original would be less difficult than gaining fluent control of contemporary English. When a westerner works on texts in Indian languages the interpretation of cultural elements will be the major challenge, rather than control over the grammar and essential vocabulary of the language concerned. It is much easier to remedy lapses in language in a text translated into English, than flaws of content. Since it is easier for an Indian to learn the English language than it is for a Briton or American to comprehend Indian culture, translations of Indian texts is better left to Indians.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
26 November 2017
03
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. For each of the past three years, temperatures have hit peaks not seen since the birth of meteorology, and probably not for more than 110,000 years. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is at its highest level in 4 million years. This does not cause storms like Harvey - there have always been storms and hurricanes along the Gulf of Mexico - but it makes them wetter and more powerful. As the seas warm, they evaporate more easily and provide energy to storm fronts. As the air above them warms, it holds more water vapour. For every half a degree Celsius in warming, there is about a 3% increase in atmospheric moisture content. Scientists call this the Clausius-Clapeyron equation. This means the skies fill more quickly and have more to dump. The storm surge was greater because sea levels have risen 20 cm as a result of more than 100 years of human-related global warming which has melted glaciers and thermally expanded the volume of sea water.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
04
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. The process of handing down implies not a passive transfer, but some contestation in defining what exactly is to be handed down. 2. Wherever Western scholars have worked on the Indian past, the selection is even more apparent and the inventing of a tradition much more recognizable. 3. Every generation selects what it requires from the past and makes its innovations, some more than others. 4. It is now a truism to say that traditions are not handed down unchanged, but are invented. 5. Just as life has death as its opposite, so is tradition by default the opposite of innovation.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
05
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. Scientists have for the first time managed to edit genes in a human embryo to repair a genetic mutation, fuelling hopes that such procedures may one day be available outside laboratory conditions. 2. The cardiac disease causes sudden death in otherwise healthy young athletes and affects about one in 500 people overall. 3. Correcting the mutation in the gene would not only ensure that the child is healthy but also prevents transmission of the mutation to future generations. 4. It is caused by a mutation in a particular gene and a child will suffer from the condition even if it inherits only one copy of the mutated gene. 5. In results announced in Nature this week, scientists fixed a mutation that thickens the heart muscle, a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
06
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. The study suggests that the disease did not spread with such intensity, but that it may have driven human migrations across Europe and Asia. 2. The oldest sample came from an individual who lived in southeast Russia about 5,000 years ago. 3. The ages of the skeletons correspond to a time of mass exodus from today's Russia and Ukraine into western Europe and central Asia, suggesting that a pandemic could have driven these migrations. 4. In the analysis of fragments of DNA from 101 Bronze Age skeletons for sequences from Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the disease, seven tested positive. 5. DNA from Bronze Age human skeletons indicate that the black plague could have emerged as early as 3,000 BCE, long before the epidemic that swept through Europe in the mid-1300s.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
07
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. This visual turn in social media has merely accentuated this announcing instinct of ours, enabling us with easy-to-create, easy-to-share, easy-to-store and easy-to-consume platforms, gadgets and apps. 2. There is absolutely nothing new about us framing the vision of who we are or what we want, visually or otherwise, in our Facebook page, for example. 3. Turning the pages of most family albums, which belong to a period well before the digital dissemination of self-created and self-curated moments and images, would reconfirm the basic instinct of documenting our presence in a particular space, on a significant occasion, with others who matter. 4. We are empowered to book our faces and act as celebrities within the confinement of our respective friend lists, and communicate our activities, companionship and locations with minimal clicks and touches. 5. What is unprecedented is not the desire to put out news feeds related to the self, but the ease with which this broadcast operation can now be executed, often provoking (un)anticipated responses from beyond one's immediate location.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
08
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. People who study children's language spend a lot of time watching how babies react to the speech they hear around them. 2. They make films of adults and babies interacting, and examine them very carefully to see whether the babies show any signs of understanding what the adults say. 3. They believe that babies begin to react to language from the very moment they are born. 4. Sometimes the signs are very subtle - slight movements of the baby's eyes or the head or the hands. 5. You'd never notice them if you were just sitting with the child, but by watching a recording over and over, you can spot them.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
09
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Neuroscientists have just begun studying exercise's impact within brain cells — on the genes themselves. 2. Even there, in the roots of our biology, they've found signs of the body's influence on the mind. 3. It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes. 4. In today's technology-driven, plasma-screened-in world, it's easy to forget that we are born movers — animals, in fact — because we've engineered movement right out of our lives. 5. It's only in the past few years that neuroscientists have begun to describe these factors and how they work, and each new discovery adds awe-inspiring depth to the picture
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
10
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. The water that made up ancient lakes and perhaps an ocean was lost. 2. Particles from the Sun collided with molecules in the atmosphere, knocking them into space or giving them an electric charge that caused them to be swept away by the solar wind. 3. Most of the planet's remaining water is now frozen or buried, but clues over the past decade suggested that some liquid water, a presumed necessity for life, might survive in underground aquifers. 4. Data from NASA's MAVEN orbiter show that solar storms stripped away most of Mars's once-thick atmosphere. 5. A recent study reveals how Mars lost much of its early water, while another indicates that some liquid water remains.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
11
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. The implications of retelling of Indian stories, hence, take on new meaning in a modern India. 2. The stories we tell reflect the world around us. 3. We cannot help but retell the stories that we value - after all, they are never quite right for us - in our time. 4. And even if we manage to get them quite right, they are only right for us - other people living around us will have different reasons for telling similar stories. 5. As soon as we capture a story, the world we were trying to capture has changed.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
12
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. Before plants can take life from atmosphere, nitrogen must undergo transformations similar to ones that food undergoes in our digestive machinery. 2. In its aerial form nitrogen is insoluble, unusable and is in need of transformation. 3. Lightning starts the series of chemical reactions that need to happen to nitrogen, ultimately helping it nourish our earth. 4. Nitrogen - an essential food for plants - is an abundant resource, with about 22 million tons of it floating over each square mile of earth. 5. One of the most dramatic examples in nature of ill wind that blows goodness is lightning.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
13
Direction of the question: The six sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4,5 and 6) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of six numbers as your answer. 1. This has huge implications for the health care system as it operates today, where depleted resources and time lead to patients rotating in and out of doctor's offices, oftentimes receiving minimal care or concern (what is commonly referred to as "bed side manner") from doctors. 2. The placebo effect is when an individual's medical condition or pain shows signs of improvement based on a fake intervention that has been presented to them as a real one and used to be regularly dismissed by researchers as a psychological effect. 3. The placebo effect is not solely based on believing in treatment, however, as the clinical setting in which treatments are administered is also paramount. 4. That the mind has the power to trigger biochemical changes because the individual believes that a given drug or intervention will be effective could empower chronic patients through the notion of our bodies' capacity for self-healing. 5. Placebo effects are now studied not just as foils for "real" interventions but as a potential portal into the self-healing powers of the body.
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
26 November 2017
14
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. Johnson treated English very practically, as a living language, with many different shades of meaning and adopted his definitions on the principle of English common law - according to precedent. 2. Masking a profound inner torment, Johnson found solace in compiling the words of a language that was, in its coarse complexity and comprehensive genius, the precise analogue of his character. 3. Samuel Johnson was a pioneer who raised common sense to heights of genius, and a man of robust popular instincts whose watchwords were clarity, precision and simplicity. 4. The 18th century English reader, in the new world of global trade and global warfare, needed a dictionary with authoritative acts of definition of words of a language that was becoming seeded throughout the first British empire by a vigorous and practical champion. 5. The Johnson who challenged Bishop Berkeley's solipsist theory of the nonexistence of matter by kicking a large stone ("I refute it thus") is the same Johnson for whom language must have a daily practical use.
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
26 November 2017
15
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Although we are born with the gift of language, research shows that we are surprisingly unskilled when it comes to communicating with others. 2. We must carefully orchestrate our speech if we want to achieve our goals and bring our dreams to fruition. 3. We often choose our words without thought, oblivious of the emotional effects they can have on others. 4. We talk more than we need to, ignoring the effect we are having on those listening to us. 5. We listen poorly, without realizing it, and we often fail to pay attention to the subtle meanings conveyed by facial expressions, body gestures, and the tone and cadence of our voice.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
16
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Over the past fortnight, one of its finest champions managed to pull off a similar impression. 2. Wimbledon's greatest illusion is the sense of timelessness it evokes. 3. At 35 years and 342 days, Roger Federer became the oldest man to win the singles title in the Open Era - a full 14 years after he first claimed the title as a scruffy, pony-tailed upstart. 4. Once he had survived the opening week, the second week witnessed the range of a rested Federer's genius. 5. Given that his method isn't reliant on explosive athleticism or muscular ball-striking, both vulnerable to decay, there is cause to believe that Federer will continue to enchant for a while longer.
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
26 November 2017
17
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Those geometric symbols and aerodynamic swooshes are more than just skin deep. 2. The Commonwealth Bank logo - a yellow diamond, with a black chunk sliced out in one corner - is so recognisable that the bank doesn't even use its full name in its advertising. 3. It's not just logos with hidden shapes; sometimes brands will have meanings or stories within them that are deliberately vague or lost in time, urging you to delve deeper to solve the riddle. 4. Graphic designers embed cryptic references because it adds a story to the brand; they want people to spend more time with a brand and have that idea that they are an insider if they can understand the hidden message. 5. But the Comm Bank logo has more to it than meets the eye, as squirrelled away in that diamond is the Southern Cross constellation.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
18
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Translators are like bumblebees. 2. Though long since scientifically disproved, this factoid is still routinely trotted out. 3. Similar pronouncements about the impossibility of translation have dogged practitioners since Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta, published in 1424. 4. Bees, unaware of these deliberations, have continued to flit from flower to flower, and translators continue to translate. 5. In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan pronounced the flight of the bumblebee to be aerodynamically impossible
Numerical
EASY
3 marks
25 November 2018
19
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1,2,3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentence and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. The woodland’s canopy receives most of the sunlight that falls on the trees. 2. Swifts do not confine themselves to woodlands, but hunt wherever there are insects in the air. 3. With their streamlined bodies, swifts are agile flyers, ideally adapted to twisting and turning through the air as they chase flying insects – the creatures that form their staple diet. 4. Hundreds of thousands of insects fly in the sunshine up above the canopy, some falling prey to swifts and swallows
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
20
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. In many cases time inconsistency is what prevents our going from intention to action. 2. For people to continuously postpone getting their children immunized, they would need to be constantly fooled by themselves. 3. In the specific case of immunization, however, it is hard to believe that time inconsistency by itself would be sufficient to make people permanently postpone the decision if they were fully cognizant of its benefits. 4. In most cases, even a small cost of immunization was large enough to discourage most people. 5. Not only do they have to think that they prefer to spend time going to the camp next month rather than today, they also have to believe that they will indeed go next month.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
21
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1,2,3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentence and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. The eventual diagnosis was skin cancer and after treatment all seemed well. 2. The viola player didn’t know what it was; nor did her GP. 3. Then a routine scan showed it had come back and spread to her lungs. 4. It started with a lump on Cathy Perkins’ index finger.
Numerical
EASY
3 marks
25 November 2018
22
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Displacement in Bengal is thus not very significant in view of its magnitude. 2. A factor of displacement in Bengal is the shifting course of the Ganges leading to erosion of river banks. 3. The nature of displacement in Bengal makes it an interesting case study. 4. Since displacement due to erosion is well spread over a long period of time, it remains invisible. 5. Rapid displacement would have helped sensitize the public to its human costs.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
23
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1,2,3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentence and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. Impartiality and objectivity are fiendishly difficult concepts that can cause all sorts of injustices even if transparently implemented. 2. It encourages us into bubbles of people we know and like, while blinding us to different perspectives, but the deeper problem of ‘transparency’ lies in the words “…and much more”. 3. Twitter’s website says that “tweets you are likely to care about most will show up first in your timeline…based on accounts you interact with most, tweets you engage with, and much more.” 4. We are only told some of the basic principles, and we can’t see the algorithm itself, making it hard for citizens to analyse the system sensibly or fairly or be convinced of its impartiality and objectivity.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
24
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1,2,3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentence and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. But now we have another group: the unwitting enablers. 2. Democracy and high levels of inequality of the kind that have come to characterize the United States are simply incompatible. 3. Believing these people are working for a better world, they are, actually, at most, chipping away at the margins, making slight course corrections, ensuring the system goes on as it is, uninterrupted. 4. Very rich people will always use money to maintain their political and economic power.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
25
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. In the era of smart world, however, 'Universal Basic Income' is an ineffective instrument which cannot address the potential breakdown of the social contract when large swathes of the population would effectively be unemployed. 2. In the era of industrial revolution, the abolition of child labour, poor laws and the growth of trade unions helped families cope with the pressures of mechanised work. 3. Growing inequality could be matched by a creeping authoritarianism that is bolstered by technology that is increasingly able to peer into the deepest vestiges of our lives. 4. New institutions emerge which recognise ways in which workers could contribute to and benefit by economic growth when, rather than if, their jobs are automated.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
26
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. They would rather do virtuous side projects assiduously as long as these would not compel them into doing their day jobs more honourably or reduce the profit margins. 2. They would fund a million of the buzzwordy programs rather than fundamentally question the rules of their game or alter their own behavior to reduce the harm of the existing distorted, inefficient and unfair rules. 3. Like the dieter who would rather do anything to lose weight than actually eat less, the business elite would save the world through social-impact-investing and philanthrocapitalism. 4. Doing the right thing — and moving away from their win-win mentality — would involve real sacrifice; instead, it's easier to focus on their pet projects and initiatives.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
27
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. Self-management is thus defined as the 'individual's ability to manage the symptoms, treatment, physical and psychosocial consequences and lifestyle changes inherent in living with a chronic condition'. 2. Most people with progressive diseases like dementia prefer to have control over their own lives and health-care for as long as possible. 3. Having control means, among other things, that patients themselves perform self management activities. 4. Supporting people in decisions and actions that promote self-management is called self-management support requiring a cooperative relationship between the patient, the family, and the professionals.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
28
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. A Japanese government panel announced that it recommends regulating only genetically modified organisms that have had foreign genes permanently introduced into their genomes and not those whose endogenous genes have been edited. The only stipulation is that researchers and businesses will have to register their modifications to plants or animals with the government, with the exception of microbes cultured in contained environments. Reactions to the decision are mixed. While lauding the potential benefits of genome editing, an editorial opposes across the-board permission. Unforeseen risks in gene editing cannot be ruled out. All genetically modified products must go through the same safety and labeling processes regardless of method.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
29
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Our smartphones can now track our diets, our biological cycles, even our digestive systems and sleep-patterns. 2. Researchers have even coined a new term, “orthosomnia”, to describe the insomnia brought on by paying too much attention to smartphones and sleep-tracking apps. 3. Sleep, nature's soft nurse, is a blissful, untroubled state all too easily disturbed by earthly worries or a guilty conscience. 4. The existence of a market for such apps is unsurprising: shift work, a long-hours culture and blue light from screens have conspired to rob many of us of sufficient rest. 5. A new threat to a good night's rest has emerged – smart-phones, with sleep-tracking apps.
Numerical
EASY
3 marks
25 November 2018
30
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. Should the moral obligation to rescue and aid persons in grave peril, felt by a few, be enforced by the criminal law? Should we follow the lead of a number of European countries and enact bad Samaritan laws? Proponents of bad Samaritan laws must overcome at least three different sorts of obstacles. First, they must show the laws are morally legitimate in principle, that is, that the duty to aid others is a proper candidate for legal enforcement. Second, they must show that this duty to aid can be defined in a way that can be fairly enforced by the courts. Third, they must show that the benefits of the laws are worth their problems, risks and costs.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
31
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Much has been recently discovered about the development of songs in birds. 2. Some species are restricted to a single song learned by all individuals, others have a range of songs. 3. The most important auditory stimuli for the birds are the sounds of other birds. 4. For all bird species there is a prescribed path to development of the final song, 5. A bird begins with the subsong, passes through plastic song, until it achieves the species song.
Numerical
EASY
3 marks
25 November 2018
32
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. The early optimism about sport's deterrent effects on delinquency was premature as researchers failed to find any consistent relationships between sports participation and deviance. As the initial studies were based upon cross-sectional data and the effects captured were short-term, it was problematic to test and verify the temporal sequencing of events suggested by the deterrence theory. The correlation between sport and delinquency could not be disentangled from class and cultural variables known. Choosing individuals to play sports in the first place was problematic, which became more acute in the subsequent decades as researchers began to document just how closely sports participation was linked to social class indicators.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
25 November 2018
33
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. As India looks to increase the number of cities, our urban planning must factor in potential natural disasters and work out contingencies in advance. 2. Authorities must revise data and upgrade infrastructure and mitigation plans even if their local area hasn't been visited by a natural calamity yet. 3. Extreme temperatures, droughts, and forest fires have more than doubled since 1980. 4. There is no denying the fact that our baseline normal weather is changing. 5. It is no longer a question of whether we will be hit by nature's fury but rather when.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
34
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. It was his taxpayers who had to shell out as much as
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2.9bn and $5.1bn last year.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
35
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Comprehending a wide range of emotions, Renaissance music nevertheless portrayed all emotions in a balanced and moderate fashion. Paragraph: A volume of translated Italian madrigals were published in London during the year of 1588. This sudden public interest facilitated a surge of English Madrigal writing as well as a spurt of other secular music writing and publication. __(1)___. This music boom lasted for thirty years and was as much a golden age of music as British literature was with Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth __(2)__. The rebirth in both literature and music originated in Italy and migrated to England; the English madrigal became more humorous and lighter in England as compared to Italy. Renaissance music was mostly polyphonic in texture. ___(3)___. Extreme use of and contrasts in dynamics, rhythm, and tone colour do not occur. __(4)__. The rhythms in Renaissance music tend to have a smooth, soft flow instead of a sharp, well-defined pulse of accents.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
36
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Cartographers design and create maps to communicate information about phenomena located somewhere on our planet. In the past, cartographers did not worry too much about who was going to read their maps. Although some simple “usability” research was done—like comparing whether circle or bar symbols worked best—cartographers knew how to make maps. This has changed now, however, due to all kinds of societal and technological developments. Today, map readers are more demanding—mostly because of the tools they use to read maps. Cartographers, who are also influenced by these trends, are now more interested in seeing if their products are efficient, effective, and appreciated.
Single correct
EASY
3 marks
24 November 2024
37
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs are able to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes and warn humans of impending heart attacks and strokes. Elephants, whales, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and alligators use low-frequency sounds to communicate over long distances, often miles. Many animals also display wide-ranging emotions, including joy, happiness, empathy, compassion, grief, and even resentment and embarrassment. It's not surprising that animals share many emotions with us because we also share brain structures, located in the limbic system, that are the seat of our emotions.
Single correct
EASY
3 marks
24 November 2024
38
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Animals have an interest in fulfilling their basic needs, but also in avoiding suffering, and thus we ought to extend moral consideration. 2. Singer viewed himself as a utilitarian, and presents a direct moral theory concerning animal rights, in contrast to indirect positions, such as welfarist views. 3. He argued for extending moral consideration to animals because, similar to humans, animals have certain significant interests. 4. The event that publicly announced animal rights as a legitimate issue within contemporary philosophy was Peter Singer's Animal Liberation text in 1975. 5. As such, we ought to view their interests alongside and equal to human interests, which results in humans having direct moral duties towards animals.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
39
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed — the effect of an articulation between sign and referent — but to be ‘naturally’ given. Simple visual signs appear to have achieved a ‘near-universality’ in this sense: though evidence remains that even apparently ‘natural’ visual codes are culture specific. However, this does not mean that no codes have intervened; rather, that the codes have been profoundly naturalized. The operation of naturalized codes reveals not the transparency and ‘naturalness’ of language but the depth, the habituation and the near-universality of the codes in use. They produce apparently ‘natural’ recognitions. This has the (ideological) effect of concealing the practices of coding which are present.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
24 November 2024
40
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Urbanites also have more and better options for getting around: Uber is ubiquitous; easy-to-rent dockless bicycles are spreading; battery-powered scooters will be next. 2. When more people use buses or trains the service usually improves because public-transport agencies run more buses and trains. 3. Worsening services on public transport, terrorist attacks in some urban metros and a rise in fares have been blamed for this trend. 4. It seems more likely that public transport is being squeezed structurally as people's need to travel is diminishing as a result of smartphones, video-conferencing, online shopping and so on. 5. There has been a puzzling decline in the use of urban public transport in many countries in the west, despite the growth in urban populations and rising employment.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
41
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: The brain isn't organized the way you might set up your home office or bathroom medicine cabinet. Paragraph: ___(1)___. You can't just put things anywhere you want to. The evolved architecture of the brain is haphazard and disjointed, and incorporates multiple systems, each of which has a mind of its own. __(2)__. Evolution doesn't design things and it doesn't build systems—it settles on systems that, historically, conveyed a survival benefit. There is no overarching, grand planner engineering the systems so that they work harmoniously together. __(3)__. The brain is more like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction ___4__.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
42
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Understanding central Asia's role helps developments make more sense not only across Asia but in Europe, the Americas and Africa. Paragraph: The nations of the Silk Roads are sometimes called ‘developing countries’, but they are actually some of the world's most highly developed countries, the very crossroads of civilization, in advanced states of disrepair.__(1)__. These countries lie at the centre of global affairs: they have since the beginning of history. Running across the spine of Asia, they form a web of connections fanning out in every direction, routes along which pilgrims and warriors, nomads and merchants have travelled, goods and produce have been bought and sold, and ideas exchanged, adapted and refined.__(2)__— . They have carried not only prosperity, but also death and violence, disease and disaster.___(3)__. The Silk Roads are the world's central nervous system, connecting otherwise far-flung peoples and places....___(4)__. It allows us to see patterns and links, causes and effects that remain invisible if one looks only at Europe, or North America.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
24 November 2024
43
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Recent important scientific findings have emerged from crossing the boundaries of scientific fields. They stem from physicists collaborating with biologists, sociologists and others, to answer questions about our world. But physicists and their potential collaborators often find their cultures out of sync. For one, physicists often discard a lot of information while extracting broad patterns; for other scientists, information is not readily disposed. Further, many non-physicists are uncomfortable with mathematical models. Still, the desire to work on something new and different is real, and there are clear benefits from the collision of views.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
44
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: [T]he Europeans did not invent globalisation. Paragraph: The first phase of globalization occurred long before the introduction of either steam or electric power...Chinese consumers at all social levels consumed vast quantities of spices, fragrant woods and unusual plants. The peoples of Southeast Asia who lived in forests gave up their traditional livelihoods and completely reoriented their economies to supply Chinese consumers ___(1)___ . These exchanges of the year 1000 opened some of the routes through which goods and peoples continued to travel after Columbus traversed the mid-Atlantic. ___(2)___. Yet the world of 1000 differed from that of 1492 in important ways....the travellers who encountered one another in the year 1000 were much closer technologically. ___(3)___. They changed and augmented what was already there since 1000. ___(4)___. If globalization hadn't yet begun, Europeans wouldn't have been able to penetrate the markets in so many places as quickly as they did after 1492.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
45
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Different from individuals, states conduct warfare operations using the DIME model-- "diplomacy, information, military, and economics." Most states do everything they can to inflict pain and confusion on their enemies before deploying the military. In fact, attacks on vectors of information are a well-worn tactic of war and usually are the first target when the charge begins. It's common for telecom data and communications networks to be routinely monitored by governments, which is why the open data policies of the web are so concerning to many advocates of privacy and human rights. With the worldwide adoption of social media, more governments are getting involved in low-grade information warfare through the use of cyber troops. According to a study by the Oxford Internet Institute in 2020, cyber troops are "government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online." The Oxford research group was able to identify 81 countries with active cyber troop operations utilizing many different strategies to spread false information, including spending millions on online advertising.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
46
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. The UK is a world leader in developing cultivated meat and the approval of a cultivated pet food is an important milestone. 2. If we're to realise the full potential benefits of cultivated meat the government must invest in research and infrastructure. 3. The first UK applications for cultivated meat produced for humans remain under assessment with the Food Standards Agency. 4. The previous UK government had been looking at fast-tracking the approval of cultivated meat for human consumption. 5. It underscores the potential for new innovation to help reduce the negative impacts of intensive animal agriculture.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
47
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Yet each day the flock produced eggs with calcareous shells though they apparently had not ingested any calcium from land which was entirely lacking in limestone. Paragraph: Early in this century a young Breton schoolboy who preparing himself for a scientific career began to notice a strange fact about hens in his father's poultry yard.___ (1) ___. As they scratched the soil they constantly seemed to be pecking at specks of mica, a siliceous material dotting the ground. ___ (2) ___. No one could explain to Louis Kervran why the chickens selected the mica, or why each time a bird was killed for the family cooking pot no trace of the mica could be found in its gizzard. ____ (3) ____. It took Kervran many years to establish that the chickens were transmuting one element into another. ___ (4) ___.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
48
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. No known real researcher of human behaviour would say that gender is all nature or all nurture. 2. The evidence for a biological basis for gender certainly doesn't mean we should be complacent in the face of sexism. 3. Many people are uncomfortable with the Idea that gender Is not purely a social construct. 4. Despite this empirical truth, researchers who study the biological basis of gender often face political pushback. 5. There's a political preference for gender to be only a reflection of social factors and so entirely malleable.
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
24 November 2024
49
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Science has officially crowned us superior to our early-rising brethren. Paragraph: My fellow night owls, grab a strong cup of coffee and gather around: I have great news. ___(1)___. For a long time, our kind has been unfairly maligned. Stereotyped as lazy and undisciplined. Told we ought to be morning larks. Advised to go to bed early so we can wake before 5am and run a marathon before breakfast like all high-flyers seem to do. Now, however, we are having the last laugh. ___(2)___. It may be a tad more complicated than that. A study published last week, which you may have already seen while scrolling at 1am, suggests that staying up late could be good for brain power. ___(3)___. Is this study a thinly veiled PR exercise conducted by a caffeine-pill company? Nope, it's legit. ___(4)___. Research led by academics at Imperial College London studied data on more than 26,000 people and found that "self-declared 'night owls' generally tend to have higher cognitive scores".
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
50
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. John Cleese told Fox News Digital that comedians do not have the freedom to be funny in 2022. "There's always been limitations on what they're allowed to say," Cleese said. "I think it's particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you're not checking everything you say critically before you move on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you're going because you've never been there before. That's what creativity is -- you have to be allowed to build. And a lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, 'Can I get away with it? I don't think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.' You see what I mean? And that's the death of creativity."
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
51
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Lyric poetry is a genre of private meditation rather than public commitment. The impulse in Marxism toward changing a society deemed unacceptable in its basic design would seem to place demands on lyric poetry that such poetry, with its tendency toward the personal, the small scale, and the idiosyncratic, could never answer. There is within Marxism, however, also a strand of thought that would locate in lyric poetry alternative modes of perception and description that call forth a vision of worlds at odds with a repressive reality or that draw attention to the workings of ideology within the hegemonic culture. The poetic imagination may indeed deflect larger social concerns, but it may also be implicitly critical and utopian.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
52
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: This reality is putting stress on employees who have to pay for transport, desk lunches, more childcare, clothing and that after-work socialisation – costs they haven't incurred for nearly two years. Paragraph: ___(1)___. Prices are rising at their fastest rate in 40 years, consequently, return-to-office-related costs have shot up – think petrol and food, for instance. ___(2)___. Yet wages haven't kept up with inflation – even despite the salary growth many workers have enjoyed during a favorable pandemic labour market. ___(3)___. This is especially jarring for workers who were able to save during remote work, when these expenditures weren't a factor. ___(4)___. In April 2022, Umus, a London university lecturer, told BBC Work life that they were spending nearly a quarter of what they made every day on return-to-work costs.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
53
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Taken outside the village of Trang Bang on June 8, 1972, the picture captured the trauma and indiscriminate violence of a conflict that claimed, by some estimates, a million or more civilian lives. Paragraph: The horrifying photograph of children fleeing a deadly napalm attack has become a defining image not only of the Vietnam War but the 20th century. ___(1)___. Dark smoke billowing behind them, the young subjects' faces are painted with a mixture of terror, pain and confusion. ___(2)___. Soldiers from the South Vietnamese army's 25th Division follow helplessly behind. ___(3)___. The picture was officially titled “The Terror of War,” but the photo is better known by the nickname given to naked 9-year-old at its centre “Napalm Girl”. ___(4)___.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
54
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. When the tradwife puts on that georgic, pinstriped dress, she is not just admiring the visual cues of a fantastical past. She takes these dreams of storybook bliss literally, tracing them backward in time until she reaches a logical conclusion that satisfies her. And by doing so, she ends up delivering an unhappy reminder of just how much our lives consist of artifice and playacting. The tradwife outrages people because of her deliberately regressive ideals. And yet her behaviour is, on some level, indistinguishable from the nontradwife's. The tradwife's trollish genius is to beat us at our own dress-up game. By insisting that the idyllic cottage daydream should be real, right down to the primitive gender roles, she leaves others feeling hollow, cheated. The hullabaloo and headaches she causes may be the price we pay for taking too many things at face value: our just deserts, served Instagram-perfect by a manicured hand and on a gorgeous ceramic dish, with fat, mouthwatering maraschino cherries on top.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
24 November 2024
55
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Many have had to leave their homes behind, with more than 1.3 million people being displaced due to the drought. Passage: Somalia has been dealing with an enormous humanitarian catastrophe, driven by the longest and most severe drought the country has experienced in at least 40 years. ___(1)___. Five consecutive rainy seasons have failed, causing more than 8 million people - almost half of the country's population – to experience acute food insecurity. ___(2)___. More than 43,000 people are believed to have lost their lives, with half of the lives lost likely being children under five. The damage the drought has caused is far-reaching. ___(3)___. Farmers have lost all their agricultural income, while pastoralists have lost more than 3 million livestock, impoverishing entire communities, and leaving them on the brink of famine. ___(4)___. Some, like the pastoralists, may never be able to go back as their livelihoods have been irreversibly wiped out.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
56
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Part of the appeal of forecasting is not just that it seems to work, but that you don't seem to need specialized expertise to succeed at it. 2. The tight connection between forecasting and building a model of the world helps explain why so much of the early interest in the idea came from the intelligence community. 3. This was true even though the latter had access to classified intelligence. 4. One frequently cited study found that accurate forecasters' predictions of geopolitical events, when aggregated using standard scientific methods, were more accurate than the forecasts of members of the US intelligence community who answered the same questions in a confidential prediction market. 5. The aggregated opinions of non-experts doing forecasting have proven to be a better guide to the future than the aggregated opinions of experts.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
57
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. To create a synapse, the neuron has specialized structures, often seen as tiny swellings, at its terminal end of the axon where it stores the chemicals that are emitted to transmit a signal to the next neuron. 2. This fetal warm-up act—the soldering of neural connections before the eyes actually function—is crucial to the performance of the visual system. 3. The reasons for this paring back of synapses is a mystery, but synaptic pruning is thought to sharpen and reinforce the “correct” synapses, while removing the weak and unnecessary ones. 4. Neural connections between the eyes and the brain are formed long before birth, establishing the wiring and the circuitry that allow a child to begin visualizing the world the minute she emerges from the womb. 5. During this rehearsal period, synapses—points of chemical connection—between nerve cells are generated in great excess, only to be pruned back during later development.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
58
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Humans have managed to tweak the underlying biology of various plants and animals to produce high-tech crops and microbes. But regulating these entities is complicated, as the framework of policies and procedures are outdated and not flexible enough to adapt to emerging technology. The question is whether regulation will ever be able to keep up with human innovation, to regulate living things, which are apt to be unpredictable and unique; to capture all the potential risks when new biological entities are introduced, or when they pass on variations of their genes?
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
24 November 2024
59
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: "Everything is old-world, traditional techniques from Mexico," Ava emphasizes. Paragraph: The sisters embrace the ways their great-grandfather built and repaired instruments. ____(1)____. When crafting a Mexican guitarrón used in mariachi music, they use tacote wood for the top of the instrument. Once the wood is cut, they carve the neck and heel from a single block using tools like hand saws, chisels and sandpaper rather than modern power tools — and believe that this traditional method improves the tone of the instrument. ____(2)____. Their store has a three-year waitlist for instruments that take months to create. ____(3)____. The family's artisanship has attracted stars like Los Lobos, who own custom guitars made by all three generations of the Delgado family. ____(4)____. For the sisters, involvement in the family business started at an early age. They each built their first instruments at age 9.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
60
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. In the dynamic realm of creativity, artists often find themselves at the crossroads between drawing inspiration from diverse cultures and inadvertently crossing into the territory of cultural appropriation. Inspiration is the lifeblood of creativity, driving artists to create works that resonate across borders. The globalized nature of the modern world invites artists to draw from a vast array of cultural influences. When approached respectfully, inspiration becomes a bridge, fostering understanding and appreciation of cultural diversity. However, the line between inspiration and cultural appropriation can be thin and easily blurred. Cultural appropriation occurs when elements from a particular culture are borrowed without proper understanding, respect, or acknowledgment. This leads to the commodification of sacred symbols, the reinforcement of stereotypes, and the erasure of the cultural context from which these elements originated. It's essential to recognize that the impact of cultural appropriation extends beyond the realm of artistic expression, influencing societal perceptions and perpetuating power imbalances.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
61
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Zombie cells may contribute to age-related chronic inflammation: this finding could help scientists understand more about the aging process and why the immune system becomes less effective as we get older. Zombie or “senescent” cells are damaged cells that can no longer divide and grow like normal cells. Scientists think that these cells can contribute to chronic health problems when they accumulate in the body. In younger people, the immune system is more effective at clearing senescent cells from the body through a process called apoptosis, but as we age this process becomes less efficient. As a result, there is an accumulation of senescent cells in different organs in the body, either through increased production or reduced clearance by the immune system. The zombie cells continue to use energy though they do not divide, and often secrete chemicals that cause inflammation, which if persistent for longer periods of time can damage healthy cells leading to chronic diseases.
Single correct
EASY
3 marks
30 November 2025
62
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. The Bayeux tapestry was, therefore, an obvious way to tell people about the downfall of the English and the rise of the Normans. 2. So if we take expert in Anglo-Saxon culture Gale Owen-Crocker's idea that the tapestry was originally hung in a square with certain scenes facing each other, people would have stood in the centre. 3. Art historian Linda Neagley has argued that pre-Renaissance people interacted with art visually, kinaesthetically (sensory perception through bodily movement) and physically. 4. That would make it an 11th-century immersive space with scenes corresponding and echoing each other, drawing the viewer's attention, playing on their senses and understanding of the story they thought they knew. 5. The Bayeux tapestry would have been hung at eye level to enable this.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
63
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Developments both technological and sociocultural have afforded us far greater freedom over death than we had in the past, and while we are still adapting ourselves to that freedom, we now appreciate the moral importance of this freedom. 2. But I believe that a type of freedom we can call freedom over death – that is, a freedom in which we shape the timing and circumstances of how we die – should be central to this conversation. 3. Legalising assisted dying is but a further step in realising this freedom over death. 4. Many people endorse, through their opinions or their choices, our freedom over death encompassing a right to medical assistance in hastening our deaths. 5. Freedom is a notoriously complex and contested philosophical notion, and I won't pretend to settle any of the big controversies it raises.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
64
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: Historically, silver has been, and still is, an important element in the business of 'show' visible in private houses, churches, government and diplomacy. Paragraph: ____(1)____. Timothy Schroder put it succinctly in suggesting that electric light and eating in the kitchen eroded this need. As he explained to the author, 'Silver, when illuminated by flickering candlelight, comes alive and almost dances before the eyes, but when lit by electric light it becomes flat and dead.' ____(2)____. Domestic and economic changes may have worked against the market, but the London silver trade remained buoyant, thanks to the competition of collectors seeking grand display silver at the top end, and the buyers of 'collectables', like spoons and wine labels and 'novelties', at the bottom. ____(3)____. Another factor that came into play was the systematic collection building of certain American museums over the period. Boston, Huntington Art Gallery and Williamsburg, among others, were largely supplied by London dealers. ____(4)____.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
65
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. But man, woman or otherwise, there is no denying that the quality of our life and character will be significantly shaped by the way we handle our anger. 2. Once the taboos have been broken, women usually experience letting their fists fly as intensely liberating. 3. Though this might seem a stereotype, women—unlike men, who are frequently applauded for unbridled aggression—are often socialized to keep a lid on their ire. 4. Many of them are so at odds with their aggressive feelings that, as a coach, I often have to stop them from pulling their punches and encourage them to extend their arms so their blows might actually reach their fleshy target.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
66
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. It can in fact be integrated into any function (education, medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the effect of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of knowledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the processes that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between 'surplus power' and 'surplus production'. 2. It's a case of 'it's easy once you've thought of it' in the political sphere. 3. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations. 4. In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
67
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Sporting a copper-coloured pixie cut and a pair of pink feather antlers, Torres himself resembles a child’s doodle. 2. His casual millennial delivery, peppered with “um”s and “ah”s, makes surreal concepts sound like items on a brunch menu. 3. Though he may have failed so far in his colour-scouting mission (he hasn’t yet found a new one, he admits), this hour leaves you tickled pink. 4. Like his previous show, My Favourite Shapes, this is an hour of sit-down comedy aided by an overhead camera which relays Torres’s theories – illustrated with crayon squiggles – on to a screen behind him. 5. His inquisitive mind produces interconnected ideas about Catholicism, the blandness of Pixar and what orange sounds like, while his insights train us to spot “highly purple behaviour”.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
68
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. As books age, the cellulose and lignin in the paper begin to break down, releasing a mix of volatile organic compounds into the air. 2. Old books carry a scent that many people instantly recognize—and even love. 3. These compounds are benzaldehyde, which gives off an almond-like scent, vanillin, which smells like vanilla, ethyl hexanol (floral scent), toluene (sweet), and furfural (which has a slightly bready scent). 4. This familiar aroma isn't just dust or mildew; it's actually a result of slow chemical changes happening inside the paper and ink.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
69
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: The region’s Western customers found it hard to believe that Dhaka muslin could possibly have been made by human hands – there were rumour that it was woven by mermaids, fairies and even ghosts. Paragraph: Once upon the silty banks of the Meghna River, a miracle was spun — a fabric so light it was called “baft-hawa”, or woven air. This was Dhaka Muslin — the world’s most coveted cloth. ____(1)____. Handspun from a rare cotton called Phuti Karpas, found nowhere else on Earth, and woven with a 16-step sacred ritual — beginning with cleaning the cotton using the teeth of a river catfish! ____(2)____. Every spring, the maple-like leaves pushed up through the grey, silty soil to produce a single daffodil-yellow flower twice a year, which gave way to a snowy floret of cotton fibres. ____(3)____. Spun at dawn on boats by sharp-eyed young women, its threads were so fine the elderly could barely see them. Motifs of wildflowers, river breeze, and soul were etched into each piece — some so light, a 91-metre bolt could pass through a ring, or a 60' length fit inside a snuffbox. It draped Greek goddesses, Roman nobles, Mughal emperors, and European aristocrats. Marie Antoinette, Empress Joséphine — even Jane Austen adored its floating grace. ____(4)____.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
70
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Pfas are a class of about 15,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant. 2. New research suggests exposure to some common perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (Pfas) cause changes to gene activity and that these changes are linked to health problems including multiple cancers, neurological disorders and autoimmune disease. 3. These Pfas compounds are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down in the environment. 4. The research may also point toward other diseases potentially caused by Pfas that have not yet been identified. 4. The findings are a major step toward determining the mechanism by which the chemicals cause disease and could help doctors identify, detect and treat health problems for those exposed to Pfas before the issues advance.
Numerical
EASY
3 marks
30 November 2025
71
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: While taste is related to judgment, with thinkers at the time often writing, for example, about “judgments of taste” or using the two terms interchangeably, taste retains a vital link to pleasure, embodiment, and personal specificity that is too often elided in post-Kantian ideas about judgment—a link that Arendt herself was working to restore. Paragraph: ____(1) ____. Denneny focused on taste rather than judgment in order to highlight what he believed was a crucial but neglected historical change. ____(2) ____. Over the course of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, across Western Europe, the word taste took on a new extension of meaning, no longer referring specifically to gustatory sensation and the delights of the palate but becoming, for a time, one of the central categories for aesthetic—and ethical—thinking. ____(3) ____. Tracing the history of taste in Spanish, French, and British aesthetic theory, as Denneny did, also provides a means to recover the compelling and relevant writing of a set of thinkers who have been largely neglected by professional philosophy. ____(4) ____.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
72
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. For millennia, in the process of opening up land for agriculture, gardens, grazing and hunting, humans have created ecological “mosaics”, or “patchworks”: landscapes holding a mixture of habitats, like meadows, gardens and forests. These were not designed as nature reserves, but often catered to hugely diverse animal life. Research indicates that European hay meadows cultivated for animal feed were actually more successful at preserving a vast array of species than meadows explicitly cultivated for biodiversity. Studying the early Holocene, researchers have found that human presence was about as likely to increase biodiversity as reduce it. Of course, not all human-created landscapes have the same value. A paved subdivision with astroturfed lawns is very different to a village with diverse vegetable and flower gardens. But scientists continue to find evidence that the old idea of humans as antithetical to nature is also wrong-headed, and that rosy visions of thriving, human-free environments are more imaginary than real.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
73
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. In 1903, left-wing feminist Elizabeth Magie invented The Landlord’s Game, the original version of what became Monopoly. It was designed as a powerful teaching tool to illustrate the dangers of monopolies and how wealth could concentrate in the hands of a few. The game featured a circular path, properties, and a “Go to Jail” space. Magie created two rule sets: one “monopolist” version where players crushed opponents through accumulation, and another, more radical “Prosperity” version, where everyone shared in the wealth, promoting fairness and equity. Years later, unemployed Charles Darrow sold a simplified version to Parker Brothers. They paid Magie only $500 for her patent—without royalties—and credited Darrow as the sole inventor. For decades, his tale of inventing the game in his basement remained the official story, while Magie’s name and her original, anti-capitalist message were left in the shadows.
Single correct
EASY
3 marks
30 November 2025
74
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. ‘Literature on screen’ suggests something more capacious and defining than citation: the possibility that literary adaptations are at once cinema and literature. 2. Even though a growing number of films eligible for Academy Awards for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium borrow that material from print journalism, franchise characters, television series, comic books, video games and toys, academic studies of adaptation remain stubbornly attached to literature as cinema’s natural progenitor. 3. It is as if adaptation studies, by borrowing the cultural cachet of literature, sought to claim its institutional respectability and gravitas even while insuring adaptation’s enduring aesthetic and methodological subordination to literature proper. 4. Beneath this contradictory notion of film adaptations as not merely hybrid texts but texts holding dual citizenship in two modes of presentation is an even more pervasive legacy that haunts adaptation studies: the assumption that the primary context within which adaptations are to be studied is literature.
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
75
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the occurrences which are CALLED knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even if no past had existed.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
76
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. The profound emotional impact of music has inspired ongoing research into its relationship with emotions. 2. Music is a universal phenomenon that utilizes a myriad brain resources. 3. This inherent connection to musical expression is deeply intertwined with human identity and experience. 4. The proclivity to create and appreciate music is ubiquitous among humans, permeating daily life across diverse societies. 5. Engaging with music is among the most cognitively demanding tasks a human can undergo, and it is identified across cultures.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
77
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. The effigy of a candidate establishes a personal link between him and the voters; the candidate does not only offer a programme for judgement, he suggests a physical climate, a set of daily choices expressed in a morphology, a way of dressing, a posture. 2. Some candidates for Parliament adorn their electoral prospectus with a portrait; this presupposes that photography has a power to convert which must be analysed. 3. Inasmuch as photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an ‘ineffable’ social whole, it constitutes an antiintellectual weapon and tends to spirit away ‘politics’ (that is to say a body of problems and solutions) to the advantage of a ‘manner of being’, a socio-moral status. 4. Photography tends to restore the paternalistic nature of elections, whose elitist essence has been disrupted by proportional representation and the rule of parties (the Right seems to use it more than the Left).
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
78
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. The return to the tailor is the juxtaposition of three key things for the mindful Indian shopper. The first is the conscious shift away from the homogeneity of fast fashion, the idea of a hundred other people owning exactly the same Zara trench coat or H&M pleated skirt. The second is an actual understanding of the waste behind the fast fashion market, and wanting not to contribute to that anymore. The last is the shift toward customisation and fit—the idea of having imaginations brought to life and to have them fit exactly; without paying exorbitant rates for that bespoke tailoring. For the individual with a keen fashion sense and a genuine desire to move away from the waste and uniformity of fast fashion without paying the premium for it that indie brands would invariably demand, the tailor is the perfect crossover.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
79
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. When I ask the distinguished LGBTQ activist and writer Cherie Moraga whether she uses Latinx to refer to herself, she tells me, ‘I worked too hard for the “a” in Latina to give it up! I refer to myself as Xicana.’ 2. Of our accumulated ethnic population, only a third use Hispanic to identify themselves, a mere 14 percent use Latino, and less than 2 percent recognize Latinx. 3. They have done this, although gender in languages is grammatical, not sociological or sexual, and found in linguistic families throughout the world, from French to Russian to Japanese. 4. More recently, activists seeking to render our name gender neutral, out of respect for our LGBTQ members, have devised yet another name for us: Latinx.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
80
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. About half of all the oxygen we breathe is made near the surface of the ocean by phytoplankton that photosynthesize just like land-dwelling plants. 2. A team of scientists that includes Boston University experts has discovered they also produce oxygen on the seafloor. 3. The research team used deep-sea chambers that land on the seafloor and enclose the seawater, sediment, polymetallic nodules, and living organisms. 4. The discovery is a surprise considering oxygen is typically created by plants and organisms with help from the sun—not by rocks on the ocean floor. 5. The deep-sea rocks, called polymetallic nodules, don’t only host a surprising number of sea critters.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
81
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: Productivity gains, once expected to feed through to broader living standards, now primarily serve to enhance returns to wealth. Paragraph: Economists now argue that inequality is no longer a by-product of growth but a condition of it. ____ (1) ____. Unlike wages, wealth reflects not just income but also access to assets, favourable institutional conditions – such as low interest rates – and public policies like low taxes and housing shortages. ____ (2) ____. In other words, wealth depends on political choices in ways that income currently does not. It’s not just the inequality itself that is the issue but the erosion of mechanisms that once constrained it. ____ (3) ____. Wealth and income inequality are linked, but where wages have stagnated and collective bargaining has weakened, capital income – derived from profits, rents and interest – has been boosted by design. ____ (4) ____.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
82
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12. Paragraph: The first suggested evidence of a human genetic mutation associated with aggressive behaviour came from a study in 1993. _____(1)____. Genetic and metabolic studies were conducted on a large Dutch family in which several of the males has a syndrome of borderline mental retardation and abnormal behaviour. _____(2)____. The undesirable behaviour included impulsive aggression, arson and exhibitionism. _____(3)____. A point mutation was identified in the eighth exon of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) structural gene which changes glutamine to a termination codon. _____(4)____.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
Showing 82 questions.
Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension > Verbal Ability
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82Q
01
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. To me, a "classic" means precisely the opposite of what my predecessors understood: a work is classical by reason of its resistance to contemporaneity and supposed universality, by reason of its capacity to indicate human particularity and difference in that past epoch. The classic is not what tells me about shared humanity—or, more truthfully put, what lets me recognize myself as already present in the past, what nourishes in me the illusion that everything has been like me and has existed only to prepare the way for me. Instead, the classic is what gives access to radically different forms of human consciousness for any given generation of readers, and thereby expands for them the range of possibilities of what it means to be a human being.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
26 November 2017
02
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. A translator of literary works needs a secure hold upon the two languages involved, supported by a good measure of familiarity with the two cultures. For an Indian translating works in an Indian language into English, finding satisfactory equivalents in a generalized western culture of practices and symbols in the original would be less difficult than gaining fluent control of contemporary English. When a westerner works on texts in Indian languages the interpretation of cultural elements will be the major challenge, rather than control over the grammar and essential vocabulary of the language concerned. It is much easier to remedy lapses in language in a text translated into English, than flaws of content. Since it is easier for an Indian to learn the English language than it is for a Briton or American to comprehend Indian culture, translations of Indian texts is better left to Indians.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
26 November 2017
03
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. For each of the past three years, temperatures have hit peaks not seen since the birth of meteorology, and probably not for more than 110,000 years. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is at its highest level in 4 million years. This does not cause storms like Harvey - there have always been storms and hurricanes along the Gulf of Mexico - but it makes them wetter and more powerful. As the seas warm, they evaporate more easily and provide energy to storm fronts. As the air above them warms, it holds more water vapour. For every half a degree Celsius in warming, there is about a 3% increase in atmospheric moisture content. Scientists call this the Clausius-Clapeyron equation. This means the skies fill more quickly and have more to dump. The storm surge was greater because sea levels have risen 20 cm as a result of more than 100 years of human-related global warming which has melted glaciers and thermally expanded the volume of sea water.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
04
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. The process of handing down implies not a passive transfer, but some contestation in defining what exactly is to be handed down. 2. Wherever Western scholars have worked on the Indian past, the selection is even more apparent and the inventing of a tradition much more recognizable. 3. Every generation selects what it requires from the past and makes its innovations, some more than others. 4. It is now a truism to say that traditions are not handed down unchanged, but are invented. 5. Just as life has death as its opposite, so is tradition by default the opposite of innovation.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
05
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. Scientists have for the first time managed to edit genes in a human embryo to repair a genetic mutation, fuelling hopes that such procedures may one day be available outside laboratory conditions. 2. The cardiac disease causes sudden death in otherwise healthy young athletes and affects about one in 500 people overall. 3. Correcting the mutation in the gene would not only ensure that the child is healthy but also prevents transmission of the mutation to future generations. 4. It is caused by a mutation in a particular gene and a child will suffer from the condition even if it inherits only one copy of the mutated gene. 5. In results announced in Nature this week, scientists fixed a mutation that thickens the heart muscle, a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
06
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. The study suggests that the disease did not spread with such intensity, but that it may have driven human migrations across Europe and Asia. 2. The oldest sample came from an individual who lived in southeast Russia about 5,000 years ago. 3. The ages of the skeletons correspond to a time of mass exodus from today's Russia and Ukraine into western Europe and central Asia, suggesting that a pandemic could have driven these migrations. 4. In the analysis of fragments of DNA from 101 Bronze Age skeletons for sequences from Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the disease, seven tested positive. 5. DNA from Bronze Age human skeletons indicate that the black plague could have emerged as early as 3,000 BCE, long before the epidemic that swept through Europe in the mid-1300s.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
07
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. This visual turn in social media has merely accentuated this announcing instinct of ours, enabling us with easy-to-create, easy-to-share, easy-to-store and easy-to-consume platforms, gadgets and apps. 2. There is absolutely nothing new about us framing the vision of who we are or what we want, visually or otherwise, in our Facebook page, for example. 3. Turning the pages of most family albums, which belong to a period well before the digital dissemination of self-created and self-curated moments and images, would reconfirm the basic instinct of documenting our presence in a particular space, on a significant occasion, with others who matter. 4. We are empowered to book our faces and act as celebrities within the confinement of our respective friend lists, and communicate our activities, companionship and locations with minimal clicks and touches. 5. What is unprecedented is not the desire to put out news feeds related to the self, but the ease with which this broadcast operation can now be executed, often provoking (un)anticipated responses from beyond one's immediate location.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
08
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. People who study children's language spend a lot of time watching how babies react to the speech they hear around them. 2. They make films of adults and babies interacting, and examine them very carefully to see whether the babies show any signs of understanding what the adults say. 3. They believe that babies begin to react to language from the very moment they are born. 4. Sometimes the signs are very subtle - slight movements of the baby's eyes or the head or the hands. 5. You'd never notice them if you were just sitting with the child, but by watching a recording over and over, you can spot them.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
09
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Neuroscientists have just begun studying exercise's impact within brain cells — on the genes themselves. 2. Even there, in the roots of our biology, they've found signs of the body's influence on the mind. 3. It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes. 4. In today's technology-driven, plasma-screened-in world, it's easy to forget that we are born movers — animals, in fact — because we've engineered movement right out of our lives. 5. It's only in the past few years that neuroscientists have begun to describe these factors and how they work, and each new discovery adds awe-inspiring depth to the picture
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
10
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. The water that made up ancient lakes and perhaps an ocean was lost. 2. Particles from the Sun collided with molecules in the atmosphere, knocking them into space or giving them an electric charge that caused them to be swept away by the solar wind. 3. Most of the planet's remaining water is now frozen or buried, but clues over the past decade suggested that some liquid water, a presumed necessity for life, might survive in underground aquifers. 4. Data from NASA's MAVEN orbiter show that solar storms stripped away most of Mars's once-thick atmosphere. 5. A recent study reveals how Mars lost much of its early water, while another indicates that some liquid water remains.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
11
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. The implications of retelling of Indian stories, hence, take on new meaning in a modern India. 2. The stories we tell reflect the world around us. 3. We cannot help but retell the stories that we value - after all, they are never quite right for us - in our time. 4. And even if we manage to get them quite right, they are only right for us - other people living around us will have different reasons for telling similar stories. 5. As soon as we capture a story, the world we were trying to capture has changed.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
12
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. Before plants can take life from atmosphere, nitrogen must undergo transformations similar to ones that food undergoes in our digestive machinery. 2. In its aerial form nitrogen is insoluble, unusable and is in need of transformation. 3. Lightning starts the series of chemical reactions that need to happen to nitrogen, ultimately helping it nourish our earth. 4. Nitrogen - an essential food for plants - is an abundant resource, with about 22 million tons of it floating over each square mile of earth. 5. One of the most dramatic examples in nature of ill wind that blows goodness is lightning.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
13
Direction of the question: The six sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4,5 and 6) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of six numbers as your answer. 1. This has huge implications for the health care system as it operates today, where depleted resources and time lead to patients rotating in and out of doctor's offices, oftentimes receiving minimal care or concern (what is commonly referred to as "bed side manner") from doctors. 2. The placebo effect is when an individual's medical condition or pain shows signs of improvement based on a fake intervention that has been presented to them as a real one and used to be regularly dismissed by researchers as a psychological effect. 3. The placebo effect is not solely based on believing in treatment, however, as the clinical setting in which treatments are administered is also paramount. 4. That the mind has the power to trigger biochemical changes because the individual believes that a given drug or intervention will be effective could empower chronic patients through the notion of our bodies' capacity for self-healing. 5. Placebo effects are now studied not just as foils for "real" interventions but as a potential portal into the self-healing powers of the body.
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
26 November 2017
14
Direction of the question: The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer. 1. Johnson treated English very practically, as a living language, with many different shades of meaning and adopted his definitions on the principle of English common law - according to precedent. 2. Masking a profound inner torment, Johnson found solace in compiling the words of a language that was, in its coarse complexity and comprehensive genius, the precise analogue of his character. 3. Samuel Johnson was a pioneer who raised common sense to heights of genius, and a man of robust popular instincts whose watchwords were clarity, precision and simplicity. 4. The 18th century English reader, in the new world of global trade and global warfare, needed a dictionary with authoritative acts of definition of words of a language that was becoming seeded throughout the first British empire by a vigorous and practical champion. 5. The Johnson who challenged Bishop Berkeley's solipsist theory of the nonexistence of matter by kicking a large stone ("I refute it thus") is the same Johnson for whom language must have a daily practical use.
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
26 November 2017
15
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Although we are born with the gift of language, research shows that we are surprisingly unskilled when it comes to communicating with others. 2. We must carefully orchestrate our speech if we want to achieve our goals and bring our dreams to fruition. 3. We often choose our words without thought, oblivious of the emotional effects they can have on others. 4. We talk more than we need to, ignoring the effect we are having on those listening to us. 5. We listen poorly, without realizing it, and we often fail to pay attention to the subtle meanings conveyed by facial expressions, body gestures, and the tone and cadence of our voice.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
16
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Over the past fortnight, one of its finest champions managed to pull off a similar impression. 2. Wimbledon's greatest illusion is the sense of timelessness it evokes. 3. At 35 years and 342 days, Roger Federer became the oldest man to win the singles title in the Open Era - a full 14 years after he first claimed the title as a scruffy, pony-tailed upstart. 4. Once he had survived the opening week, the second week witnessed the range of a rested Federer's genius. 5. Given that his method isn't reliant on explosive athleticism or muscular ball-striking, both vulnerable to decay, there is cause to believe that Federer will continue to enchant for a while longer.
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
26 November 2017
17
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Those geometric symbols and aerodynamic swooshes are more than just skin deep. 2. The Commonwealth Bank logo - a yellow diamond, with a black chunk sliced out in one corner - is so recognisable that the bank doesn't even use its full name in its advertising. 3. It's not just logos with hidden shapes; sometimes brands will have meanings or stories within them that are deliberately vague or lost in time, urging you to delve deeper to solve the riddle. 4. Graphic designers embed cryptic references because it adds a story to the brand; they want people to spend more time with a brand and have that idea that they are an insider if they can understand the hidden message. 5. But the Comm Bank logo has more to it than meets the eye, as squirrelled away in that diamond is the Southern Cross constellation.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
26 November 2017
18
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Translators are like bumblebees. 2. Though long since scientifically disproved, this factoid is still routinely trotted out. 3. Similar pronouncements about the impossibility of translation have dogged practitioners since Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta, published in 1424. 4. Bees, unaware of these deliberations, have continued to flit from flower to flower, and translators continue to translate. 5. In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan pronounced the flight of the bumblebee to be aerodynamically impossible
Numerical
EASY
3 marks
25 November 2018
19
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1,2,3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentence and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. The woodland’s canopy receives most of the sunlight that falls on the trees. 2. Swifts do not confine themselves to woodlands, but hunt wherever there are insects in the air. 3. With their streamlined bodies, swifts are agile flyers, ideally adapted to twisting and turning through the air as they chase flying insects – the creatures that form their staple diet. 4. Hundreds of thousands of insects fly in the sunshine up above the canopy, some falling prey to swifts and swallows
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
20
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. In many cases time inconsistency is what prevents our going from intention to action. 2. For people to continuously postpone getting their children immunized, they would need to be constantly fooled by themselves. 3. In the specific case of immunization, however, it is hard to believe that time inconsistency by itself would be sufficient to make people permanently postpone the decision if they were fully cognizant of its benefits. 4. In most cases, even a small cost of immunization was large enough to discourage most people. 5. Not only do they have to think that they prefer to spend time going to the camp next month rather than today, they also have to believe that they will indeed go next month.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
21
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1,2,3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentence and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. The eventual diagnosis was skin cancer and after treatment all seemed well. 2. The viola player didn’t know what it was; nor did her GP. 3. Then a routine scan showed it had come back and spread to her lungs. 4. It started with a lump on Cathy Perkins’ index finger.
Numerical
EASY
3 marks
25 November 2018
22
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Displacement in Bengal is thus not very significant in view of its magnitude. 2. A factor of displacement in Bengal is the shifting course of the Ganges leading to erosion of river banks. 3. The nature of displacement in Bengal makes it an interesting case study. 4. Since displacement due to erosion is well spread over a long period of time, it remains invisible. 5. Rapid displacement would have helped sensitize the public to its human costs.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
23
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1,2,3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentence and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. Impartiality and objectivity are fiendishly difficult concepts that can cause all sorts of injustices even if transparently implemented. 2. It encourages us into bubbles of people we know and like, while blinding us to different perspectives, but the deeper problem of ‘transparency’ lies in the words “…and much more”. 3. Twitter’s website says that “tweets you are likely to care about most will show up first in your timeline…based on accounts you interact with most, tweets you engage with, and much more.” 4. We are only told some of the basic principles, and we can’t see the algorithm itself, making it hard for citizens to analyse the system sensibly or fairly or be convinced of its impartiality and objectivity.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
24
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1,2,3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentence and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. But now we have another group: the unwitting enablers. 2. Democracy and high levels of inequality of the kind that have come to characterize the United States are simply incompatible. 3. Believing these people are working for a better world, they are, actually, at most, chipping away at the margins, making slight course corrections, ensuring the system goes on as it is, uninterrupted. 4. Very rich people will always use money to maintain their political and economic power.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
25
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. In the era of smart world, however, 'Universal Basic Income' is an ineffective instrument which cannot address the potential breakdown of the social contract when large swathes of the population would effectively be unemployed. 2. In the era of industrial revolution, the abolition of child labour, poor laws and the growth of trade unions helped families cope with the pressures of mechanised work. 3. Growing inequality could be matched by a creeping authoritarianism that is bolstered by technology that is increasingly able to peer into the deepest vestiges of our lives. 4. New institutions emerge which recognise ways in which workers could contribute to and benefit by economic growth when, rather than if, their jobs are automated.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
26
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. They would rather do virtuous side projects assiduously as long as these would not compel them into doing their day jobs more honourably or reduce the profit margins. 2. They would fund a million of the buzzwordy programs rather than fundamentally question the rules of their game or alter their own behavior to reduce the harm of the existing distorted, inefficient and unfair rules. 3. Like the dieter who would rather do anything to lose weight than actually eat less, the business elite would save the world through social-impact-investing and philanthrocapitalism. 4. Doing the right thing — and moving away from their win-win mentality — would involve real sacrifice; instead, it's easier to focus on their pet projects and initiatives.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
27
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. Self-management is thus defined as the 'individual's ability to manage the symptoms, treatment, physical and psychosocial consequences and lifestyle changes inherent in living with a chronic condition'. 2. Most people with progressive diseases like dementia prefer to have control over their own lives and health-care for as long as possible. 3. Having control means, among other things, that patients themselves perform self management activities. 4. Supporting people in decisions and actions that promote self-management is called self-management support requiring a cooperative relationship between the patient, the family, and the professionals.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
28
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. A Japanese government panel announced that it recommends regulating only genetically modified organisms that have had foreign genes permanently introduced into their genomes and not those whose endogenous genes have been edited. The only stipulation is that researchers and businesses will have to register their modifications to plants or animals with the government, with the exception of microbes cultured in contained environments. Reactions to the decision are mixed. While lauding the potential benefits of genome editing, an editorial opposes across the-board permission. Unforeseen risks in gene editing cannot be ruled out. All genetically modified products must go through the same safety and labeling processes regardless of method.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
29
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Our smartphones can now track our diets, our biological cycles, even our digestive systems and sleep-patterns. 2. Researchers have even coined a new term, “orthosomnia”, to describe the insomnia brought on by paying too much attention to smartphones and sleep-tracking apps. 3. Sleep, nature's soft nurse, is a blissful, untroubled state all too easily disturbed by earthly worries or a guilty conscience. 4. The existence of a market for such apps is unsurprising: shift work, a long-hours culture and blue light from screens have conspired to rob many of us of sufficient rest. 5. A new threat to a good night's rest has emerged – smart-phones, with sleep-tracking apps.
Numerical
EASY
3 marks
25 November 2018
30
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. Should the moral obligation to rescue and aid persons in grave peril, felt by a few, be enforced by the criminal law? Should we follow the lead of a number of European countries and enact bad Samaritan laws? Proponents of bad Samaritan laws must overcome at least three different sorts of obstacles. First, they must show the laws are morally legitimate in principle, that is, that the duty to aid others is a proper candidate for legal enforcement. Second, they must show that this duty to aid can be defined in a way that can be fairly enforced by the courts. Third, they must show that the benefits of the laws are worth their problems, risks and costs.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
31
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. Much has been recently discovered about the development of songs in birds. 2. Some species are restricted to a single song learned by all individuals, others have a range of songs. 3. The most important auditory stimuli for the birds are the sounds of other birds. 4. For all bird species there is a prescribed path to development of the final song, 5. A bird begins with the subsong, passes through plastic song, until it achieves the species song.
Numerical
EASY
3 marks
25 November 2018
32
Direction of the question: Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph. The early optimism about sport's deterrent effects on delinquency was premature as researchers failed to find any consistent relationships between sports participation and deviance. As the initial studies were based upon cross-sectional data and the effects captured were short-term, it was problematic to test and verify the temporal sequencing of events suggested by the deterrence theory. The correlation between sport and delinquency could not be disentangled from class and cultural variables known. Choosing individuals to play sports in the first place was problematic, which became more acute in the subsequent decades as researchers began to document just how closely sports participation was linked to social class indicators.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
25 November 2018
33
Direction of the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in. 1. As India looks to increase the number of cities, our urban planning must factor in potential natural disasters and work out contingencies in advance. 2. Authorities must revise data and upgrade infrastructure and mitigation plans even if their local area hasn't been visited by a natural calamity yet. 3. Extreme temperatures, droughts, and forest fires have more than doubled since 1980. 4. There is no denying the fact that our baseline normal weather is changing. 5. It is no longer a question of whether we will be hit by nature's fury but rather when.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
34
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer. 1. It was his taxpayers who had to shell out as much as
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2.9bn and $5.1bn last year.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
25 November 2018
35
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Comprehending a wide range of emotions, Renaissance music nevertheless portrayed all emotions in a balanced and moderate fashion. Paragraph: A volume of translated Italian madrigals were published in London during the year of 1588. This sudden public interest facilitated a surge of English Madrigal writing as well as a spurt of other secular music writing and publication. __(1)___. This music boom lasted for thirty years and was as much a golden age of music as British literature was with Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth __(2)__. The rebirth in both literature and music originated in Italy and migrated to England; the English madrigal became more humorous and lighter in England as compared to Italy. Renaissance music was mostly polyphonic in texture. ___(3)___. Extreme use of and contrasts in dynamics, rhythm, and tone colour do not occur. __(4)__. The rhythms in Renaissance music tend to have a smooth, soft flow instead of a sharp, well-defined pulse of accents.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
36
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Cartographers design and create maps to communicate information about phenomena located somewhere on our planet. In the past, cartographers did not worry too much about who was going to read their maps. Although some simple “usability” research was done—like comparing whether circle or bar symbols worked best—cartographers knew how to make maps. This has changed now, however, due to all kinds of societal and technological developments. Today, map readers are more demanding—mostly because of the tools they use to read maps. Cartographers, who are also influenced by these trends, are now more interested in seeing if their products are efficient, effective, and appreciated.
Single correct
EASY
3 marks
24 November 2024
37
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs are able to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes and warn humans of impending heart attacks and strokes. Elephants, whales, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and alligators use low-frequency sounds to communicate over long distances, often miles. Many animals also display wide-ranging emotions, including joy, happiness, empathy, compassion, grief, and even resentment and embarrassment. It's not surprising that animals share many emotions with us because we also share brain structures, located in the limbic system, that are the seat of our emotions.
Single correct
EASY
3 marks
24 November 2024
38
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Animals have an interest in fulfilling their basic needs, but also in avoiding suffering, and thus we ought to extend moral consideration. 2. Singer viewed himself as a utilitarian, and presents a direct moral theory concerning animal rights, in contrast to indirect positions, such as welfarist views. 3. He argued for extending moral consideration to animals because, similar to humans, animals have certain significant interests. 4. The event that publicly announced animal rights as a legitimate issue within contemporary philosophy was Peter Singer's Animal Liberation text in 1975. 5. As such, we ought to view their interests alongside and equal to human interests, which results in humans having direct moral duties towards animals.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
39
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed — the effect of an articulation between sign and referent — but to be ‘naturally’ given. Simple visual signs appear to have achieved a ‘near-universality’ in this sense: though evidence remains that even apparently ‘natural’ visual codes are culture specific. However, this does not mean that no codes have intervened; rather, that the codes have been profoundly naturalized. The operation of naturalized codes reveals not the transparency and ‘naturalness’ of language but the depth, the habituation and the near-universality of the codes in use. They produce apparently ‘natural’ recognitions. This has the (ideological) effect of concealing the practices of coding which are present.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
24 November 2024
40
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Urbanites also have more and better options for getting around: Uber is ubiquitous; easy-to-rent dockless bicycles are spreading; battery-powered scooters will be next. 2. When more people use buses or trains the service usually improves because public-transport agencies run more buses and trains. 3. Worsening services on public transport, terrorist attacks in some urban metros and a rise in fares have been blamed for this trend. 4. It seems more likely that public transport is being squeezed structurally as people's need to travel is diminishing as a result of smartphones, video-conferencing, online shopping and so on. 5. There has been a puzzling decline in the use of urban public transport in many countries in the west, despite the growth in urban populations and rising employment.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
41
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: The brain isn't organized the way you might set up your home office or bathroom medicine cabinet. Paragraph: ___(1)___. You can't just put things anywhere you want to. The evolved architecture of the brain is haphazard and disjointed, and incorporates multiple systems, each of which has a mind of its own. __(2)__. Evolution doesn't design things and it doesn't build systems—it settles on systems that, historically, conveyed a survival benefit. There is no overarching, grand planner engineering the systems so that they work harmoniously together. __(3)__. The brain is more like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction ___4__.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
42
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Understanding central Asia's role helps developments make more sense not only across Asia but in Europe, the Americas and Africa. Paragraph: The nations of the Silk Roads are sometimes called ‘developing countries’, but they are actually some of the world's most highly developed countries, the very crossroads of civilization, in advanced states of disrepair.__(1)__. These countries lie at the centre of global affairs: they have since the beginning of history. Running across the spine of Asia, they form a web of connections fanning out in every direction, routes along which pilgrims and warriors, nomads and merchants have travelled, goods and produce have been bought and sold, and ideas exchanged, adapted and refined.__(2)__— . They have carried not only prosperity, but also death and violence, disease and disaster.___(3)__. The Silk Roads are the world's central nervous system, connecting otherwise far-flung peoples and places....___(4)__. It allows us to see patterns and links, causes and effects that remain invisible if one looks only at Europe, or North America.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
24 November 2024
43
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Recent important scientific findings have emerged from crossing the boundaries of scientific fields. They stem from physicists collaborating with biologists, sociologists and others, to answer questions about our world. But physicists and their potential collaborators often find their cultures out of sync. For one, physicists often discard a lot of information while extracting broad patterns; for other scientists, information is not readily disposed. Further, many non-physicists are uncomfortable with mathematical models. Still, the desire to work on something new and different is real, and there are clear benefits from the collision of views.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
44
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: [T]he Europeans did not invent globalisation. Paragraph: The first phase of globalization occurred long before the introduction of either steam or electric power...Chinese consumers at all social levels consumed vast quantities of spices, fragrant woods and unusual plants. The peoples of Southeast Asia who lived in forests gave up their traditional livelihoods and completely reoriented their economies to supply Chinese consumers ___(1)___ . These exchanges of the year 1000 opened some of the routes through which goods and peoples continued to travel after Columbus traversed the mid-Atlantic. ___(2)___. Yet the world of 1000 differed from that of 1492 in important ways....the travellers who encountered one another in the year 1000 were much closer technologically. ___(3)___. They changed and augmented what was already there since 1000. ___(4)___. If globalization hadn't yet begun, Europeans wouldn't have been able to penetrate the markets in so many places as quickly as they did after 1492.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
45
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Different from individuals, states conduct warfare operations using the DIME model-- "diplomacy, information, military, and economics." Most states do everything they can to inflict pain and confusion on their enemies before deploying the military. In fact, attacks on vectors of information are a well-worn tactic of war and usually are the first target when the charge begins. It's common for telecom data and communications networks to be routinely monitored by governments, which is why the open data policies of the web are so concerning to many advocates of privacy and human rights. With the worldwide adoption of social media, more governments are getting involved in low-grade information warfare through the use of cyber troops. According to a study by the Oxford Internet Institute in 2020, cyber troops are "government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online." The Oxford research group was able to identify 81 countries with active cyber troop operations utilizing many different strategies to spread false information, including spending millions on online advertising.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
46
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. The UK is a world leader in developing cultivated meat and the approval of a cultivated pet food is an important milestone. 2. If we're to realise the full potential benefits of cultivated meat the government must invest in research and infrastructure. 3. The first UK applications for cultivated meat produced for humans remain under assessment with the Food Standards Agency. 4. The previous UK government had been looking at fast-tracking the approval of cultivated meat for human consumption. 5. It underscores the potential for new innovation to help reduce the negative impacts of intensive animal agriculture.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
47
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Yet each day the flock produced eggs with calcareous shells though they apparently had not ingested any calcium from land which was entirely lacking in limestone. Paragraph: Early in this century a young Breton schoolboy who preparing himself for a scientific career began to notice a strange fact about hens in his father's poultry yard.___ (1) ___. As they scratched the soil they constantly seemed to be pecking at specks of mica, a siliceous material dotting the ground. ___ (2) ___. No one could explain to Louis Kervran why the chickens selected the mica, or why each time a bird was killed for the family cooking pot no trace of the mica could be found in its gizzard. ____ (3) ____. It took Kervran many years to establish that the chickens were transmuting one element into another. ___ (4) ___.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
48
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. No known real researcher of human behaviour would say that gender is all nature or all nurture. 2. The evidence for a biological basis for gender certainly doesn't mean we should be complacent in the face of sexism. 3. Many people are uncomfortable with the Idea that gender Is not purely a social construct. 4. Despite this empirical truth, researchers who study the biological basis of gender often face political pushback. 5. There's a political preference for gender to be only a reflection of social factors and so entirely malleable.
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
24 November 2024
49
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Science has officially crowned us superior to our early-rising brethren. Paragraph: My fellow night owls, grab a strong cup of coffee and gather around: I have great news. ___(1)___. For a long time, our kind has been unfairly maligned. Stereotyped as lazy and undisciplined. Told we ought to be morning larks. Advised to go to bed early so we can wake before 5am and run a marathon before breakfast like all high-flyers seem to do. Now, however, we are having the last laugh. ___(2)___. It may be a tad more complicated than that. A study published last week, which you may have already seen while scrolling at 1am, suggests that staying up late could be good for brain power. ___(3)___. Is this study a thinly veiled PR exercise conducted by a caffeine-pill company? Nope, it's legit. ___(4)___. Research led by academics at Imperial College London studied data on more than 26,000 people and found that "self-declared 'night owls' generally tend to have higher cognitive scores".
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
50
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. John Cleese told Fox News Digital that comedians do not have the freedom to be funny in 2022. "There's always been limitations on what they're allowed to say," Cleese said. "I think it's particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you're not checking everything you say critically before you move on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you're going because you've never been there before. That's what creativity is -- you have to be allowed to build. And a lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, 'Can I get away with it? I don't think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.' You see what I mean? And that's the death of creativity."
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
51
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Lyric poetry is a genre of private meditation rather than public commitment. The impulse in Marxism toward changing a society deemed unacceptable in its basic design would seem to place demands on lyric poetry that such poetry, with its tendency toward the personal, the small scale, and the idiosyncratic, could never answer. There is within Marxism, however, also a strand of thought that would locate in lyric poetry alternative modes of perception and description that call forth a vision of worlds at odds with a repressive reality or that draw attention to the workings of ideology within the hegemonic culture. The poetic imagination may indeed deflect larger social concerns, but it may also be implicitly critical and utopian.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
52
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: This reality is putting stress on employees who have to pay for transport, desk lunches, more childcare, clothing and that after-work socialisation – costs they haven't incurred for nearly two years. Paragraph: ___(1)___. Prices are rising at their fastest rate in 40 years, consequently, return-to-office-related costs have shot up – think petrol and food, for instance. ___(2)___. Yet wages haven't kept up with inflation – even despite the salary growth many workers have enjoyed during a favorable pandemic labour market. ___(3)___. This is especially jarring for workers who were able to save during remote work, when these expenditures weren't a factor. ___(4)___. In April 2022, Umus, a London university lecturer, told BBC Work life that they were spending nearly a quarter of what they made every day on return-to-work costs.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
53
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Taken outside the village of Trang Bang on June 8, 1972, the picture captured the trauma and indiscriminate violence of a conflict that claimed, by some estimates, a million or more civilian lives. Paragraph: The horrifying photograph of children fleeing a deadly napalm attack has become a defining image not only of the Vietnam War but the 20th century. ___(1)___. Dark smoke billowing behind them, the young subjects' faces are painted with a mixture of terror, pain and confusion. ___(2)___. Soldiers from the South Vietnamese army's 25th Division follow helplessly behind. ___(3)___. The picture was officially titled “The Terror of War,” but the photo is better known by the nickname given to naked 9-year-old at its centre “Napalm Girl”. ___(4)___.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
54
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. When the tradwife puts on that georgic, pinstriped dress, she is not just admiring the visual cues of a fantastical past. She takes these dreams of storybook bliss literally, tracing them backward in time until she reaches a logical conclusion that satisfies her. And by doing so, she ends up delivering an unhappy reminder of just how much our lives consist of artifice and playacting. The tradwife outrages people because of her deliberately regressive ideals. And yet her behaviour is, on some level, indistinguishable from the nontradwife's. The tradwife's trollish genius is to beat us at our own dress-up game. By insisting that the idyllic cottage daydream should be real, right down to the primitive gender roles, she leaves others feeling hollow, cheated. The hullabaloo and headaches she causes may be the price we pay for taking too many things at face value: our just deserts, served Instagram-perfect by a manicured hand and on a gorgeous ceramic dish, with fat, mouthwatering maraschino cherries on top.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
24 November 2024
55
Direction of the question: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Sentence: Many have had to leave their homes behind, with more than 1.3 million people being displaced due to the drought. Passage: Somalia has been dealing with an enormous humanitarian catastrophe, driven by the longest and most severe drought the country has experienced in at least 40 years. ___(1)___. Five consecutive rainy seasons have failed, causing more than 8 million people - almost half of the country's population – to experience acute food insecurity. ___(2)___. More than 43,000 people are believed to have lost their lives, with half of the lives lost likely being children under five. The damage the drought has caused is far-reaching. ___(3)___. Farmers have lost all their agricultural income, while pastoralists have lost more than 3 million livestock, impoverishing entire communities, and leaving them on the brink of famine. ___(4)___. Some, like the pastoralists, may never be able to go back as their livelihoods have been irreversibly wiped out.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
56
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Part of the appeal of forecasting is not just that it seems to work, but that you don't seem to need specialized expertise to succeed at it. 2. The tight connection between forecasting and building a model of the world helps explain why so much of the early interest in the idea came from the intelligence community. 3. This was true even though the latter had access to classified intelligence. 4. One frequently cited study found that accurate forecasters' predictions of geopolitical events, when aggregated using standard scientific methods, were more accurate than the forecasts of members of the US intelligence community who answered the same questions in a confidential prediction market. 5. The aggregated opinions of non-experts doing forecasting have proven to be a better guide to the future than the aggregated opinions of experts.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
57
Direction of the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. To create a synapse, the neuron has specialized structures, often seen as tiny swellings, at its terminal end of the axon where it stores the chemicals that are emitted to transmit a signal to the next neuron. 2. This fetal warm-up act—the soldering of neural connections before the eyes actually function—is crucial to the performance of the visual system. 3. The reasons for this paring back of synapses is a mystery, but synaptic pruning is thought to sharpen and reinforce the “correct” synapses, while removing the weak and unnecessary ones. 4. Neural connections between the eyes and the brain are formed long before birth, establishing the wiring and the circuitry that allow a child to begin visualizing the world the minute she emerges from the womb. 5. During this rehearsal period, synapses—points of chemical connection—between nerve cells are generated in great excess, only to be pruned back during later development.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
24 November 2024
58
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Humans have managed to tweak the underlying biology of various plants and animals to produce high-tech crops and microbes. But regulating these entities is complicated, as the framework of policies and procedures are outdated and not flexible enough to adapt to emerging technology. The question is whether regulation will ever be able to keep up with human innovation, to regulate living things, which are apt to be unpredictable and unique; to capture all the potential risks when new biological entities are introduced, or when they pass on variations of their genes?
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
24 November 2024
59
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: "Everything is old-world, traditional techniques from Mexico," Ava emphasizes. Paragraph: The sisters embrace the ways their great-grandfather built and repaired instruments. ____(1)____. When crafting a Mexican guitarrón used in mariachi music, they use tacote wood for the top of the instrument. Once the wood is cut, they carve the neck and heel from a single block using tools like hand saws, chisels and sandpaper rather than modern power tools — and believe that this traditional method improves the tone of the instrument. ____(2)____. Their store has a three-year waitlist for instruments that take months to create. ____(3)____. The family's artisanship has attracted stars like Los Lobos, who own custom guitars made by all three generations of the Delgado family. ____(4)____. For the sisters, involvement in the family business started at an early age. They each built their first instruments at age 9.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
60
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. In the dynamic realm of creativity, artists often find themselves at the crossroads between drawing inspiration from diverse cultures and inadvertently crossing into the territory of cultural appropriation. Inspiration is the lifeblood of creativity, driving artists to create works that resonate across borders. The globalized nature of the modern world invites artists to draw from a vast array of cultural influences. When approached respectfully, inspiration becomes a bridge, fostering understanding and appreciation of cultural diversity. However, the line between inspiration and cultural appropriation can be thin and easily blurred. Cultural appropriation occurs when elements from a particular culture are borrowed without proper understanding, respect, or acknowledgment. This leads to the commodification of sacred symbols, the reinforcement of stereotypes, and the erasure of the cultural context from which these elements originated. It's essential to recognize that the impact of cultural appropriation extends beyond the realm of artistic expression, influencing societal perceptions and perpetuating power imbalances.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
61
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Zombie cells may contribute to age-related chronic inflammation: this finding could help scientists understand more about the aging process and why the immune system becomes less effective as we get older. Zombie or “senescent” cells are damaged cells that can no longer divide and grow like normal cells. Scientists think that these cells can contribute to chronic health problems when they accumulate in the body. In younger people, the immune system is more effective at clearing senescent cells from the body through a process called apoptosis, but as we age this process becomes less efficient. As a result, there is an accumulation of senescent cells in different organs in the body, either through increased production or reduced clearance by the immune system. The zombie cells continue to use energy though they do not divide, and often secrete chemicals that cause inflammation, which if persistent for longer periods of time can damage healthy cells leading to chronic diseases.
Single correct
EASY
3 marks
30 November 2025
62
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. The Bayeux tapestry was, therefore, an obvious way to tell people about the downfall of the English and the rise of the Normans. 2. So if we take expert in Anglo-Saxon culture Gale Owen-Crocker's idea that the tapestry was originally hung in a square with certain scenes facing each other, people would have stood in the centre. 3. Art historian Linda Neagley has argued that pre-Renaissance people interacted with art visually, kinaesthetically (sensory perception through bodily movement) and physically. 4. That would make it an 11th-century immersive space with scenes corresponding and echoing each other, drawing the viewer's attention, playing on their senses and understanding of the story they thought they knew. 5. The Bayeux tapestry would have been hung at eye level to enable this.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
63
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Developments both technological and sociocultural have afforded us far greater freedom over death than we had in the past, and while we are still adapting ourselves to that freedom, we now appreciate the moral importance of this freedom. 2. But I believe that a type of freedom we can call freedom over death – that is, a freedom in which we shape the timing and circumstances of how we die – should be central to this conversation. 3. Legalising assisted dying is but a further step in realising this freedom over death. 4. Many people endorse, through their opinions or their choices, our freedom over death encompassing a right to medical assistance in hastening our deaths. 5. Freedom is a notoriously complex and contested philosophical notion, and I won't pretend to settle any of the big controversies it raises.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
64
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: Historically, silver has been, and still is, an important element in the business of 'show' visible in private houses, churches, government and diplomacy. Paragraph: ____(1)____. Timothy Schroder put it succinctly in suggesting that electric light and eating in the kitchen eroded this need. As he explained to the author, 'Silver, when illuminated by flickering candlelight, comes alive and almost dances before the eyes, but when lit by electric light it becomes flat and dead.' ____(2)____. Domestic and economic changes may have worked against the market, but the London silver trade remained buoyant, thanks to the competition of collectors seeking grand display silver at the top end, and the buyers of 'collectables', like spoons and wine labels and 'novelties', at the bottom. ____(3)____. Another factor that came into play was the systematic collection building of certain American museums over the period. Boston, Huntington Art Gallery and Williamsburg, among others, were largely supplied by London dealers. ____(4)____.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
65
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. But man, woman or otherwise, there is no denying that the quality of our life and character will be significantly shaped by the way we handle our anger. 2. Once the taboos have been broken, women usually experience letting their fists fly as intensely liberating. 3. Though this might seem a stereotype, women—unlike men, who are frequently applauded for unbridled aggression—are often socialized to keep a lid on their ire. 4. Many of them are so at odds with their aggressive feelings that, as a coach, I often have to stop them from pulling their punches and encourage them to extend their arms so their blows might actually reach their fleshy target.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
66
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. It can in fact be integrated into any function (education, medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the effect of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of knowledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the processes that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between 'surplus power' and 'surplus production'. 2. It's a case of 'it's easy once you've thought of it' in the political sphere. 3. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations. 4. In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
67
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Sporting a copper-coloured pixie cut and a pair of pink feather antlers, Torres himself resembles a child’s doodle. 2. His casual millennial delivery, peppered with “um”s and “ah”s, makes surreal concepts sound like items on a brunch menu. 3. Though he may have failed so far in his colour-scouting mission (he hasn’t yet found a new one, he admits), this hour leaves you tickled pink. 4. Like his previous show, My Favourite Shapes, this is an hour of sit-down comedy aided by an overhead camera which relays Torres’s theories – illustrated with crayon squiggles – on to a screen behind him. 5. His inquisitive mind produces interconnected ideas about Catholicism, the blandness of Pixar and what orange sounds like, while his insights train us to spot “highly purple behaviour”.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
68
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. As books age, the cellulose and lignin in the paper begin to break down, releasing a mix of volatile organic compounds into the air. 2. Old books carry a scent that many people instantly recognize—and even love. 3. These compounds are benzaldehyde, which gives off an almond-like scent, vanillin, which smells like vanilla, ethyl hexanol (floral scent), toluene (sweet), and furfural (which has a slightly bready scent). 4. This familiar aroma isn't just dust or mildew; it's actually a result of slow chemical changes happening inside the paper and ink.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
69
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: The region’s Western customers found it hard to believe that Dhaka muslin could possibly have been made by human hands – there were rumour that it was woven by mermaids, fairies and even ghosts. Paragraph: Once upon the silty banks of the Meghna River, a miracle was spun — a fabric so light it was called “baft-hawa”, or woven air. This was Dhaka Muslin — the world’s most coveted cloth. ____(1)____. Handspun from a rare cotton called Phuti Karpas, found nowhere else on Earth, and woven with a 16-step sacred ritual — beginning with cleaning the cotton using the teeth of a river catfish! ____(2)____. Every spring, the maple-like leaves pushed up through the grey, silty soil to produce a single daffodil-yellow flower twice a year, which gave way to a snowy floret of cotton fibres. ____(3)____. Spun at dawn on boats by sharp-eyed young women, its threads were so fine the elderly could barely see them. Motifs of wildflowers, river breeze, and soul were etched into each piece — some so light, a 91-metre bolt could pass through a ring, or a 60' length fit inside a snuffbox. It draped Greek goddesses, Roman nobles, Mughal emperors, and European aristocrats. Marie Antoinette, Empress Joséphine — even Jane Austen adored its floating grace. ____(4)____.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
70
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Pfas are a class of about 15,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant. 2. New research suggests exposure to some common perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (Pfas) cause changes to gene activity and that these changes are linked to health problems including multiple cancers, neurological disorders and autoimmune disease. 3. These Pfas compounds are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down in the environment. 4. The research may also point toward other diseases potentially caused by Pfas that have not yet been identified. 4. The findings are a major step toward determining the mechanism by which the chemicals cause disease and could help doctors identify, detect and treat health problems for those exposed to Pfas before the issues advance.
Numerical
EASY
3 marks
30 November 2025
71
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: While taste is related to judgment, with thinkers at the time often writing, for example, about “judgments of taste” or using the two terms interchangeably, taste retains a vital link to pleasure, embodiment, and personal specificity that is too often elided in post-Kantian ideas about judgment—a link that Arendt herself was working to restore. Paragraph: ____(1) ____. Denneny focused on taste rather than judgment in order to highlight what he believed was a crucial but neglected historical change. ____(2) ____. Over the course of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, across Western Europe, the word taste took on a new extension of meaning, no longer referring specifically to gustatory sensation and the delights of the palate but becoming, for a time, one of the central categories for aesthetic—and ethical—thinking. ____(3) ____. Tracing the history of taste in Spanish, French, and British aesthetic theory, as Denneny did, also provides a means to recover the compelling and relevant writing of a set of thinkers who have been largely neglected by professional philosophy. ____(4) ____.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
72
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. For millennia, in the process of opening up land for agriculture, gardens, grazing and hunting, humans have created ecological “mosaics”, or “patchworks”: landscapes holding a mixture of habitats, like meadows, gardens and forests. These were not designed as nature reserves, but often catered to hugely diverse animal life. Research indicates that European hay meadows cultivated for animal feed were actually more successful at preserving a vast array of species than meadows explicitly cultivated for biodiversity. Studying the early Holocene, researchers have found that human presence was about as likely to increase biodiversity as reduce it. Of course, not all human-created landscapes have the same value. A paved subdivision with astroturfed lawns is very different to a village with diverse vegetable and flower gardens. But scientists continue to find evidence that the old idea of humans as antithetical to nature is also wrong-headed, and that rosy visions of thriving, human-free environments are more imaginary than real.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
73
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. In 1903, left-wing feminist Elizabeth Magie invented The Landlord’s Game, the original version of what became Monopoly. It was designed as a powerful teaching tool to illustrate the dangers of monopolies and how wealth could concentrate in the hands of a few. The game featured a circular path, properties, and a “Go to Jail” space. Magie created two rule sets: one “monopolist” version where players crushed opponents through accumulation, and another, more radical “Prosperity” version, where everyone shared in the wealth, promoting fairness and equity. Years later, unemployed Charles Darrow sold a simplified version to Parker Brothers. They paid Magie only $500 for her patent—without royalties—and credited Darrow as the sole inventor. For decades, his tale of inventing the game in his basement remained the official story, while Magie’s name and her original, anti-capitalist message were left in the shadows.
Single correct
EASY
3 marks
30 November 2025
74
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. ‘Literature on screen’ suggests something more capacious and defining than citation: the possibility that literary adaptations are at once cinema and literature. 2. Even though a growing number of films eligible for Academy Awards for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium borrow that material from print journalism, franchise characters, television series, comic books, video games and toys, academic studies of adaptation remain stubbornly attached to literature as cinema’s natural progenitor. 3. It is as if adaptation studies, by borrowing the cultural cachet of literature, sought to claim its institutional respectability and gravitas even while insuring adaptation’s enduring aesthetic and methodological subordination to literature proper. 4. Beneath this contradictory notion of film adaptations as not merely hybrid texts but texts holding dual citizenship in two modes of presentation is an even more pervasive legacy that haunts adaptation studies: the assumption that the primary context within which adaptations are to be studied is literature.
Numerical
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
75
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the occurrences which are CALLED knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even if no past had existed.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
76
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. The profound emotional impact of music has inspired ongoing research into its relationship with emotions. 2. Music is a universal phenomenon that utilizes a myriad brain resources. 3. This inherent connection to musical expression is deeply intertwined with human identity and experience. 4. The proclivity to create and appreciate music is ubiquitous among humans, permeating daily life across diverse societies. 5. Engaging with music is among the most cognitively demanding tasks a human can undergo, and it is identified across cultures.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
77
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. The effigy of a candidate establishes a personal link between him and the voters; the candidate does not only offer a programme for judgement, he suggests a physical climate, a set of daily choices expressed in a morphology, a way of dressing, a posture. 2. Some candidates for Parliament adorn their electoral prospectus with a portrait; this presupposes that photography has a power to convert which must be analysed. 3. Inasmuch as photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an ‘ineffable’ social whole, it constitutes an antiintellectual weapon and tends to spirit away ‘politics’ (that is to say a body of problems and solutions) to the advantage of a ‘manner of being’, a socio-moral status. 4. Photography tends to restore the paternalistic nature of elections, whose elitist essence has been disrupted by proportional representation and the rule of parties (the Right seems to use it more than the Left).
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
78
Direction of the question: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. The return to the tailor is the juxtaposition of three key things for the mindful Indian shopper. The first is the conscious shift away from the homogeneity of fast fashion, the idea of a hundred other people owning exactly the same Zara trench coat or H&M pleated skirt. The second is an actual understanding of the waste behind the fast fashion market, and wanting not to contribute to that anymore. The last is the shift toward customisation and fit—the idea of having imaginations brought to life and to have them fit exactly; without paying exorbitant rates for that bespoke tailoring. For the individual with a keen fashion sense and a genuine desire to move away from the waste and uniformity of fast fashion without paying the premium for it that indie brands would invariably demand, the tailor is the perfect crossover.
Single correct
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
79
Direction of the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer. 1. When I ask the distinguished LGBTQ activist and writer Cherie Moraga whether she uses Latinx to refer to herself, she tells me, ‘I worked too hard for the “a” in Latina to give it up! I refer to myself as Xicana.’ 2. Of our accumulated ethnic population, only a third use Hispanic to identify themselves, a mere 14 percent use Latino, and less than 2 percent recognize Latinx. 3. They have done this, although gender in languages is grammatical, not sociological or sexual, and found in linguistic families throughout the world, from French to Russian to Japanese. 4. More recently, activists seeking to render our name gender neutral, out of respect for our LGBTQ members, have devised yet another name for us: Latinx.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
80
Direction of the question: Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. About half of all the oxygen we breathe is made near the surface of the ocean by phytoplankton that photosynthesize just like land-dwelling plants. 2. A team of scientists that includes Boston University experts has discovered they also produce oxygen on the seafloor. 3. The research team used deep-sea chambers that land on the seafloor and enclose the seawater, sediment, polymetallic nodules, and living organisms. 4. The discovery is a surprise considering oxygen is typically created by plants and organisms with help from the sun—not by rocks on the ocean floor. 5. The deep-sea rocks, called polymetallic nodules, don’t only host a surprising number of sea critters.
Numerical
MEDIUM
3 marks
30 November 2025
81
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: Productivity gains, once expected to feed through to broader living standards, now primarily serve to enhance returns to wealth. Paragraph: Economists now argue that inequality is no longer a by-product of growth but a condition of it. ____ (1) ____. Unlike wages, wealth reflects not just income but also access to assets, favourable institutional conditions – such as low interest rates – and public policies like low taxes and housing shortages. ____ (2) ____. In other words, wealth depends on political choices in ways that income currently does not. It’s not just the inequality itself that is the issue but the erosion of mechanisms that once constrained it. ____ (3) ____. Wealth and income inequality are linked, but where wages have stagnated and collective bargaining has weakened, capital income – derived from profits, rents and interest – has been boosted by design. ____ (4) ____.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
82
Direction of the question: The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph. Sentence: In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12. Paragraph: The first suggested evidence of a human genetic mutation associated with aggressive behaviour came from a study in 1993. _____(1)____. Genetic and metabolic studies were conducted on a large Dutch family in which several of the males has a syndrome of borderline mental retardation and abnormal behaviour. _____(2)____. The undesirable behaviour included impulsive aggression, arson and exhibitionism. _____(3)____. A point mutation was identified in the eighth exon of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) structural gene which changes glutamine to a termination codon. _____(4)____.
Single correct
HARD
3 marks
30 November 2025
Showing 82 questions.