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.
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.
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 on a gorgeous ceramic dish, with fat, mouthwatering maraschino cherries on top.
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.
The author’s overall tone in the first paragraph can be described as
The author is unlikely to disagree with any of the following EXCEPT:
The contrasting reactions to the Chinese and Israeli “contaminations” of lunar space
The author mentions all of the following reasons to dismiss concerns about contaminating Mars EXCEPT:
Which one of the following is both a reason for Moutai’s success as well as a possible threat to that success?
In the context of the passage we can infer that to succeed in the liquor industry in China, a marketing firm must consider all of the following factors affecting the Chinese liquor market EXCEPT that
The phrase “would make it an invention to rival gunpowder” has been used in the passage in a sense that is
In the context of the passage, it is most likely that the author refers to Moutai’s marketing strategy as “the unholy trinity” because
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?
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.
In the context of the passage, which one of the following hypothetical scenarios, if true, is NOT an example of the kind of loss that occurs when a language becomes extinct?
It can be inferred from the passage that it is likely South America had a slightly better language survival rate than North America for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:
The author believes that a liberal arts education combined with participation in language preservation empower students in all of the following ways EXCEPT that they will
Which one of the following hypothetical scenarios, if true, would most strongly undermine the central ideas of the passage?
The author terms language “the operating system of our civilization” for all the following reasons EXCEPT that it
The tone of the passage could best be described as
We can infer that the author is most likely to agree with which of the following statements?
The author identifies all of the following as dire outcomes of the capture of language by AI EXCEPT that it could
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 favourable 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 Worklife that they were spending nearly a quarter of what they made every day on return-to-work costs.
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)___.
A circular plot of land is divided into two regions by a chord of length 10√3 meters such that the chord subtends an angle of 120° at the center. Then, the area, in square meters, of the smaller region is
The midpoints of sides AB, BC, and AC in ∆ABC are M, N, and P, respectively. The medians drawn from A, B, and C intersect the line segments MP, MN and NP at X, Y, and Z, respectively. If the area of ∆ABC is 1440 sq cm, then the area, in sq cm, of ∆XYZ is
The number of all positive integers up to 500 with non-repeating digits is
The sum of all distinct real values of x that satisfy the equation 10x + 4/10x = 81/2, is
If 1068 is divided by 13, the remainder is
In a group of 250 students, the percentage of girls was at least 44% and at most 60%. The rest of the students were boys. Each student opted for either swimming or running or both. If 50% of the boys and 80% of the girls opted for swimming while 70% of the boys and 60% of the girls opted for running, then the minimum and maximum possible number of students who opted for both swimming and running, are