All questions of Practice Tests for RCs for CAT Exam

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
Until relatively recently, Shakespeare's contact with the scientific world has gone largely unnoticed among both scholars and general audiences. Perhaps Shakespeare scholars and audiences don't notice the way he takes up science because they are unfamiliar with much of the science he was exposed to, while most scientists don't see Shakespeare as valuable for reflecting on science because they assume he was unfamiliar with it. Usually, even when readers are made aware of Shakespeare's references to this or that scientific subject - perhaps Hamlet's reference to infinity or Lear's allusions to atomism - these are treated as little more than interesting artefacts, window-dressing to Shakespeare's broader human concerns.
A small but growing number of scholars are now taking up the connection between Shakespeare and science. And, spurred perhaps by science fiction, by the ways that science factors in the works of key late-modern writers such as Nabokov, Pynchon, and Wallace, and by the rise of scientific themes in contemporary literary fiction, a growing number of readers are aware that writers can and do take up science, and many are interested in what they do with it.
When we familiarise ourselves with the history of science, we see the imaginative worlds Shakespeare creates to demonstrate science's power to shape our self-understanding, and the power of the literary arts to shape our response to science. We also see that Shakespeare was remarkably prescient about the questions that science would raise for our lives. He explores, for example, how we are personally affected by the uncertainties that cosmological science can introduce, or what it means when scientists claim that our first-hand experience is illusory, or how we respond when science probes into matters of the heart.
Shakespeare takes up references to the morbid art, and to other new discoveries, to show that when scientific investigations yield new ideas about nature, what ensues is an altered relation to ourselves. In fact, Shakespeare explores the philosophical, psychological, and cultural impact of many more scientific fields besides human anatomy, reflecting poetically on theories about germs, atoms, matter, falling bodies, planetary motion, heliocentrism, alchemy, the humours, algebra, Arabic numerals, Pythagorean geometry, the number zero, and the infinite. The inquiries that drove Renaissance science, and the universe it disclosed, are deeply integrated into Shakespeare's poetic worlds.
By the example of his own plays, Shakespeare suggests that one of the poet's most important tasks in an age dominated by science is to survey the full extent of science's power to shape our minds and souls, and then to turn to the poetic imagination in response. He introduces us to new scientific ways of thinking and encourages us to reflect upon the uncertainties and paradoxes that science presents to us. And he shows us how to create the language and poetic ideas that might help us to counteract science's reductionist tendencies.
Yet Shakespeare does so without dismissing the validity of science; instead, he seeks to understand it. Far from creating a bifurcation by which science and poetry are in separate domains, he embraces the world of science and creates poetic worlds that reflect deeply and philosophically on scientific insights and their human implications, recognising that science will become deeply enmeshed in our lives. For Shakespeare, poetry has the power to help us to live with the revelations of science, and so science must make way for poetry.

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.

Back in the 1970s, Raymond Geuss was a young colleague of Richard Rorty in the mighty philosophy department at Princeton. In some ways they were very different: Rorty was a middle-class New Yorker with a talent for reckless generalisation, whereas Geuss was a fastidious scholar-poet from working-class Pennsylvania. But they shared a commitment to left-wing politics, and both of them dissented from the mainstream view of philosophy as a unified discipline advancing majestically towards absolute knowledge. For a while, Rorty and Geuss could bond as the bad boys of Princeton.

The philosophical establishment denounced people like Rorty and Geuss as relativists, bent on destroying the sacred distinction between truth and falsehood. But they defended themselves by pointing out that even if there is such a thing as an almighty final truth, it looks different from diverse points of view, and gets expressed in different words in diverse times and places. They regarded themselves as 'perspectivists' or 'historicists' rather than relativists, and believed that - to borrow a phrase from Thomas Kuhn - philosophy needed to find a 'role for history'.

Geuss seems closest to Lucretius, who despised religion, and maintained that the world has no moral purpose and is utterly indifferent to our existence. Hobbes comes almost as high in Geuss's estimation: he invented the concept of the 'state' as the locus of political sovereignty, and treated it as an 'artificial construct' which pays no regard to such so-called principles as 'natural rights' or 'the common good'. Hegel, as Geuss reads him, was a good disciple of Hobbes because he avoided trying to 'justify' the ways of the world. In the wake of Lucretius, Hobbes, Hegel and Niet-zsche, philosophy seems to be essentially a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by moralistic sentimentality.

There are two different ways of responding to this predicament. Geuss sketches one of them in a scintillating chapter on Theodor Adorno, the twentieth-century aesthete who sought to combine classical Marxism with disdain for the stupidity of the masses. Adorno, you might say, showed signs of intellectual mysophobia, or Platonistic revulsion from impurity, and Geuss - who regards Plato as an 'intellectual bully' - is uneasy about Adorno's 'relentless negativism'. He finds an amiable alternative in Michel de Montaigne who, having no desire to correct the follies of humanity, was 'free of all these pathologies'.

Geuss pays tribute to Montaigne for never 'wagging his finger', but in the end he sides with Adorno. He is a bit of a mysophobe himself, and that seems to be why he never formed a lasting alliance with his old comrade in Princeton. He recalls an occasion when Rorty told him that he found inspiration in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who saw the whole of human existence as a vast 'conversation', in which we should try to include everyone, even those with whom we disagree. Geuss tried to convince Rorty that Gadamer was 'a reactionary, distended windbag', but Rorty continued on his way: he started to call himself, half-jokingly, a 'bourgeois liberal'. Geuss was not amused by Rorty's jokes, and found his casualness hard to forgive.

Geuss concludes by suggesting that philosophy is dead: the excitement, creativity and inventiveness replaced by dutiful recitations and historical re-enactments. But in this bracing and approachable book he gives himself the lie, demonstrating that there is life in philosophy yet.

Directions: The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
We've all heard about the search for life on other planets, but what about looking on other moons?
In a paper published June 13 in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Southern Queensland have identified more than 100 giant planets that potentially host moons capable of supporting life. Their work will guide the design of future telescopes that can detect these potential moons and look for tell-tale signs of life, called 'biosignatures', in their atmospheres.
Since the 2009 launch of NASA's Kepler telescope, scientists have identified thousands of planets outside our solar system, which are called exoplanets. A primary goal of the Kepler mission is to identify planets that are in the habitable zones of their stars, meaning they're neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water – and potentially life – to exist.
Terrestrial (rocky) planets are prime targets in the quest to find life because some of them might be geologically and atmospherically similar to Earth. Another place to look is the many gas giants identified during the Kepler mission. While not a candidate for life themselves, Jupiter-like planets in the habitable zone may harbour rocky moons, called exomoons, that could sustain life.
''There are currently 175 known moons orbiting the eight planets in our solar system. While most of these moons orbit Saturn and Jupiter, which are outside the Sun's habitable zone, that may not be the case in other solar systems,'' said Stephen Kane, an associate professor of planetary astrophysics and a member of the UCR's Alternative Earths Astrobiology Center. ''Including rocky exomoons in our search for life in space will greatly expand the places we can look.''
The researchers identified 121 giant planets that have orbits within the habitable zones of their stars. At more than three times the radii of the Earth, these gaseous planets are less common than terrestrial planets, but each is expected to host several large moons.
Scientists have speculated that exomoons might provide a favourable environment for life, perhaps even better than Earth. That's because they receive energy not only from their star, but also from radiation reflected from their planet. Until now, no exomoons have been confirmed
''Now that we have created a database of the known giant planets in the habitable zone of their star, observations of the best candidates for hosting potential exomoons will be made to help refine the expected exomoon properties. Our follow-up studies will help inform future telescope design so that we can detect these moons, study their properties, and look for signs of life,'' said Michelle Hill, an undergraduate student at the University of Southern Queensland who is working with Kane and will join UCR's graduate program in the fall.

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
Until relatively recently, Shakespeare's contact with the scientific world has gone largely unnoticed among both scholars and general audiences. Perhaps Shakespeare scholars and audiences don't notice the way he takes up science because they are unfamiliar with much of the science he was exposed to, while most scientists don't see Shakespeare as valuable for reflecting on science because they assume he was unfamiliar with it. Usually, even when readers are made aware of Shakespeare's references to this or that scientific subject - perhaps Hamlet's reference to infinity or Lear's allusions to atomism - these are treated as little more than interesting artefacts, window-dressing to Shakespeare's broader human concerns.
A small but growing number of scholars are now taking up the connection between Shakespeare and science. And, spurred perhaps by science fiction, by the ways that science factors in the works of key late-modern writers such as Nabokov, Pynchon, and Wallace, and by the rise of scientific themes in contemporary literary fiction, a growing number of readers are aware that writers can and do take up science, and many are interested in what they do with it.
When we familiarise ourselves with the history of science, we see the imaginative worlds Shakespeare creates to demonstrate science's power to shape our self-understanding, and the power of the literary arts to shape our response to science. We also see that Shakespeare was remarkably prescient about the questions that science would raise for our lives. He explores, for example, how we are personally affected by the uncertainties that cosmological science can introduce, or what it means when scientists claim that our first-hand experience is illusory, or how we respond when science probes into matters of the heart.
Shakespeare takes up references to the morbid art, and to other new discoveries, to show that when scientific investigations yield new ideas about nature, what ensues is an altered relation to ourselves. In fact, Shakespeare explores the philosophical, psychological, and cultural impact of many more scientific fields besides human anatomy, reflecting poetically on theories about germs, atoms, matter, falling bodies, planetary motion, heliocentrism, alchemy, the humours, algebra, Arabic numerals, Pythagorean geometry, the number zero, and the infinite. The inquiries that drove Renaissance science, and the universe it disclosed, are deeply integrated into Shakespeare's poetic worlds.
By the example of his own plays, Shakespeare suggests that one of the poet's most important tasks in an age dominated by science is to survey the full extent of science's power to shape our minds and souls, and then to turn to the poetic imagination in response. He introduces us to new scientific ways of thinking and encourages us to reflect upon the uncertainties and paradoxes that science presents to us. And he shows us how to create the language and poetic ideas that might help us to counteract science's reductionist tendencies.
Yet Shakespeare does so without dismissing the validity of science; instead, he seeks to understand it. Far from creating a bifurcation by which science and poetry are in separate domains, he embraces the world of science and creates poetic worlds that reflect deeply and philosophically on scientific insights and their human implications, recognising that science will become deeply enmeshed in our lives. For Shakespeare, poetry has the power to help us to live with the revelations of science, and so science must make way for poetry.

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
Not for the first time, I watched as one of our PhD students was loaded into an ambulance and taken to hospital. He had collapsed in one of the university research labs about 20 minutes earlier. A few hours later we received word from the hospital that the student was now alert and all tests were normal. Just as I had seen previously, the student had fainted as a result of stress, anxiety and fatigue.
This was not what I had in mind when I accepted a position as a non-academic member of staff. Rather than the relaxed conditions I expected, I found myself in the most stressful environment I had ever experienced.
I initially assumed this was isolated to my university. However with a little online research, I found these toxic conditions were commonplace in universities the world over. Having been part of the university system for some time, I'm now able to see past the imposing architecture and impressive titles.
These figures sit uncomfortably next to the professed ideals of these institutions. Our universities claim to exist to provide our most brilliant minds the freedom to nurture their greatest ideas and inspire the next generation.
To facilitate this, the organisation provides infrastructure and services. With these resources, hundreds of academics are then free to pursue their goals and further their own positions as quasi-entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, these untethered conditions are also very favourable for those with an unhinged sense of entitlement. It strikes me that a rogue professor can often operate on campus with virtual impunity.
Even a well-meaning academic has to juggle many responsibilities. For example, a research professor must teach hundreds of undergraduates, supervise a team of PhD researchers, manage research grants and collaborations and edit publications and dissertations. Very few professors are able to accomplish all this without the overwhelming burden affecting their character and judgement. The resulting stress often manifests as poor judgement and negative behaviour.
Unfortunately, the ones most likely to be on the receiving end of this are the PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and non-academic staff, who are often on short employment contracts. These people are in very tenuous positions and have little if any recourse. This situation creates a dynamic where the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour are often blurred.
There are also many academics who can only muddle through by riding on the coattails of students. Sadly, students are also vulnerable to the theft of data, ideas and materials; not only by their colleagues, but sometimes by their own supervisor. In a university environment, this type of bad behaviour is unfortunately so frequent, it is too often normalised and ignored.
The surprising tolerance of this type of behaviour is likely a result of academia being a product of itself. After all, all academics were once long-suffering PhD students. Hence because of the familiarity, academia often fails to see the gravity of the situation.
But the wider community would be shocked to know this behaviour was so prevalent at the very highest level of education. The community expects so much more from people calling themselves ''doctor'' or ''professor''. The current model of postgraduate research is severely flawed and should be urgently addressed. If we don't, the vicious circle will continue.