Test: Practice Test - 6 - Class 10 MCQ

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician.” ©2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Another man might have thrown up his
hands—but not Nawabdin. His twelve daughters
acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with
satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of
5 a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course
knew that he must proliferate his sources of
revenue—the salary he received from K. K. Harouni
for tending the tube wells would not even begin to
suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off
10 a condemned electric motor—condemned by him.
He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at
the edge of his master’s fields. He bought broken
radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not
demur even when asked to fix watches, though that
15 enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned
him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took
apart ever kept time again.
K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived
mostly in Lahore. Whenever the old man visited,
20 Nawab would place himself night and day at the door
leading from the servants’ sitting area into the walled
grove of ancient banyan trees where the old
farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator
glasses bent and smudged, Nawab tended the
25 household machinery, the air conditioners, water
heaters, refrigerators, and water pumps, like an
engineer tending the boilers on a foundering steamer
in an Atlantic gale. By his superhuman efforts he
almost managed to maintain K. K. Harouni in the
30 same mechanical cocoon, cooled and bathed and
lighted and fed, that the landowner enjoyed in
Lahore.
Harouni of course became familiar with this
ubiquitous man, who not only accompanied him on
35 his tours of inspection, but morning and night could
be found standing on the master bed rewiring the
light fixture or in the bathroom poking at the water
heater. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the
psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say
40 a word. The landowner, who was cheerfully filing his
nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him
to go ahead.
“Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to
the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube
45 wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is
but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have
earned these gray hairs”—here he bowed his head to
show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties
as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive
50 me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud
hunger within than disgrace in the light of day.
Release me, I ask you, I beg you.”
The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of
speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at
55 his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.
“What’s the matter, Nawabdin?”
“Matter, sir? O what could be the matter in your
service. I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But sir,
on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the
60 many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery
fell on me—I cannot any longer bicycle about like a
bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I
first had the good fortune to enter your employment.
I beg you, sir, let me go.”
65 “And what’s the solution?” asked Harouni, seeing
that they had come to the crux. He didn’t particularly
care one way or the other, except that it touched on
his comfort—a matter of great interest to him.
“Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could
70 somehow limp along, at least until I train up some
younger man.”
The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt
expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the
disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a
75 brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even
managed to extract an allowance for gasoline.
The motorcycle increased his status, gave him
weight, so that people began calling him “Uncle,” and
asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he
80 knew absolutely nothing. He could now range
further, doing a much wider business. Best of all,
now he could spend every night with his wife, who
had begged to live not on the farm but near her
family in Firoza, where also they could educate at
85 least the two eldest daughters. A long straight road
ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way
to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni
lands. Nawab would fly down this road on his new
machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every
90 knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump,
seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial
wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to
whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears
almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his
95 arrival.

Q. Which choice best supports the claim that Nawab performs his duties for Harouni well?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician.” ©2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Another man might have thrown up his
hands—but not Nawabdin. His twelve daughters
acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with
satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of
5 a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course
knew that he must proliferate his sources of
revenue—the salary he received from K. K. Harouni
for tending the tube wells would not even begin to
suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off
10 a condemned electric motor—condemned by him.
He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at
the edge of his master’s fields. He bought broken
radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not
demur even when asked to fix watches, though that
15 enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned
him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took
apart ever kept time again.
K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived
mostly in Lahore. Whenever the old man visited,
20 Nawab would place himself night and day at the door
leading from the servants’ sitting area into the walled
grove of ancient banyan trees where the old
farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator
glasses bent and smudged, Nawab tended the
25 household machinery, the air conditioners, water
heaters, refrigerators, and water pumps, like an
engineer tending the boilers on a foundering steamer
in an Atlantic gale. By his superhuman efforts he
almost managed to maintain K. K. Harouni in the
30 same mechanical cocoon, cooled and bathed and
lighted and fed, that the landowner enjoyed in
Lahore.
Harouni of course became familiar with this
ubiquitous man, who not only accompanied him on
35 his tours of inspection, but morning and night could
be found standing on the master bed rewiring the
light fixture or in the bathroom poking at the water
heater. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the
psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say
40 a word. The landowner, who was cheerfully filing his
nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him
to go ahead.
“Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to
the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube
45 wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is
but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have
earned these gray hairs”—here he bowed his head to
show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties
as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive
50 me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud
hunger within than disgrace in the light of day.
Release me, I ask you, I beg you.”
The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of
speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at
55 his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.
“What’s the matter, Nawabdin?”
“Matter, sir? O what could be the matter in your
service. I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But sir,
on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the
60 many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery
fell on me—I cannot any longer bicycle about like a
bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I
first had the good fortune to enter your employment.
I beg you, sir, let me go.”
65 “And what’s the solution?” asked Harouni, seeing
that they had come to the crux. He didn’t particularly
care one way or the other, except that it touched on
his comfort—a matter of great interest to him.
“Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could
70 somehow limp along, at least until I train up some
younger man.”
The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt
expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the
disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a
75 brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even
managed to extract an allowance for gasoline.
The motorcycle increased his status, gave him
weight, so that people began calling him “Uncle,” and
asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he
80 knew absolutely nothing. He could now range
further, doing a much wider business. Best of all,
now he could spend every night with his wife, who
had begged to live not on the farm but near her
family in Firoza, where also they could educate at
85 least the two eldest daughters. A long straight road
ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way
to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni
lands. Nawab would fly down this road on his new
machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every
90 knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump,
seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial
wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to
whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears
almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his
95 arrival.

Q. In the context of the conversation between Nawab and Harouni, Nawab’s comments in lines 43-52 (“Sir . . . beg you”) mainly serve to

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician.” ©2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Another man might have thrown up his
hands—but not Nawabdin. His twelve daughters
acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with
satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of
5 a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course
knew that he must proliferate his sources of
revenue—the salary he received from K. K. Harouni
for tending the tube wells would not even begin to
suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off
10 a condemned electric motor—condemned by him.
He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at
the edge of his master’s fields. He bought broken
radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not
demur even when asked to fix watches, though that
15 enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned
him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took
apart ever kept time again.
K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived
mostly in Lahore. Whenever the old man visited,
20 Nawab would place himself night and day at the door
leading from the servants’ sitting area into the walled
grove of ancient banyan trees where the old
farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator
glasses bent and smudged, Nawab tended the
25 household machinery, the air conditioners, water
heaters, refrigerators, and water pumps, like an
engineer tending the boilers on a foundering steamer
in an Atlantic gale. By his superhuman efforts he
almost managed to maintain K. K. Harouni in the
30 same mechanical cocoon, cooled and bathed and
lighted and fed, that the landowner enjoyed in
Lahore.
Harouni of course became familiar with this
ubiquitous man, who not only accompanied him on
35 his tours of inspection, but morning and night could
be found standing on the master bed rewiring the
light fixture or in the bathroom poking at the water
heater. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the
psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say
40 a word. The landowner, who was cheerfully filing his
nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him
to go ahead.
“Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to
the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube
45 wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is
but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have
earned these gray hairs”—here he bowed his head to
show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties
as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive
50 me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud
hunger within than disgrace in the light of day.
Release me, I ask you, I beg you.”
The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of
speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at
55 his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.
“What’s the matter, Nawabdin?”
“Matter, sir? O what could be the matter in your
service. I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But sir,
on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the
60 many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery
fell on me—I cannot any longer bicycle about like a
bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I
first had the good fortune to enter your employment.
I beg you, sir, let me go.”
65 “And what’s the solution?” asked Harouni, seeing
that they had come to the crux. He didn’t particularly
care one way or the other, except that it touched on
his comfort—a matter of great interest to him.
“Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could
70 somehow limp along, at least until I train up some
younger man.”
The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt
expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the
disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a
75 brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even
managed to extract an allowance for gasoline.
The motorcycle increased his status, gave him
weight, so that people began calling him “Uncle,” and
asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he
80 knew absolutely nothing. He could now range
further, doing a much wider business. Best of all,
now he could spend every night with his wife, who
had begged to live not on the farm but near her
family in Firoza, where also they could educate at
85 least the two eldest daughters. A long straight road
ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way
to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni
lands. Nawab would fly down this road on his new
machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every
90 knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump,
seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial
wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to
whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears
almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his
95 arrival.

Q. Nawab uses the word “bridegroom” (line 62) mainly to emphasize that he’s no longer

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician.” ©2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Another man might have thrown up his
hands—but not Nawabdin. His twelve daughters
acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with
satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of
5 a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course
knew that he must proliferate his sources of
revenue—the salary he received from K. K. Harouni
for tending the tube wells would not even begin to
suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off
10 a condemned electric motor—condemned by him.
He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at
the edge of his master’s fields. He bought broken
radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not
demur even when asked to fix watches, though that
15 enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned
him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took
apart ever kept time again.
K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived
mostly in Lahore. Whenever the old man visited,
20 Nawab would place himself night and day at the door
leading from the servants’ sitting area into the walled
grove of ancient banyan trees where the old
farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator
glasses bent and smudged, Nawab tended the
25 household machinery, the air conditioners, water
heaters, refrigerators, and water pumps, like an
engineer tending the boilers on a foundering steamer
in an Atlantic gale. By his superhuman efforts he
almost managed to maintain K. K. Harouni in the
30 same mechanical cocoon, cooled and bathed and
lighted and fed, that the landowner enjoyed in
Lahore.
Harouni of course became familiar with this
ubiquitous man, who not only accompanied him on
35 his tours of inspection, but morning and night could
be found standing on the master bed rewiring the
light fixture or in the bathroom poking at the water
heater. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the
psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say
40 a word. The landowner, who was cheerfully filing his
nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him
to go ahead.
“Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to
the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube
45 wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is
but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have
earned these gray hairs”—here he bowed his head to
show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties
as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive
50 me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud
hunger within than disgrace in the light of day.
Release me, I ask you, I beg you.”
The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of
speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at
55 his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.
“What’s the matter, Nawabdin?”
“Matter, sir? O what could be the matter in your
service. I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But sir,
on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the
60 many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery
fell on me—I cannot any longer bicycle about like a
bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I
first had the good fortune to enter your employment.
I beg you, sir, let me go.”
65 “And what’s the solution?” asked Harouni, seeing
that they had come to the crux. He didn’t particularly
care one way or the other, except that it touched on
his comfort—a matter of great interest to him.
“Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could
70 somehow limp along, at least until I train up some
younger man.”
The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt
expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the
disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a
75 brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even
managed to extract an allowance for gasoline.
The motorcycle increased his status, gave him
weight, so that people began calling him “Uncle,” and
asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he
80 knew absolutely nothing. He could now range
further, doing a much wider business. Best of all,
now he could spend every night with his wife, who
had begged to live not on the farm but near her
family in Firoza, where also they could educate at
85 least the two eldest daughters. A long straight road
ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way
to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni
lands. Nawab would fly down this road on his new
machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every
90 knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump,
seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial
wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to
whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears
almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his
95 arrival.

Q. It can reasonably be inferred from the passage that Harouni provides Nawab with a motorcycle mainly because

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician.” ©2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Another man might have thrown up his
hands—but not Nawabdin. His twelve daughters
acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with
satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of
5 a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course
knew that he must proliferate his sources of
revenue—the salary he received from K. K. Harouni
for tending the tube wells would not even begin to
suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off
10 a condemned electric motor—condemned by him.
He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at
the edge of his master’s fields. He bought broken
radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not
demur even when asked to fix watches, though that
15 enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned
him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took
apart ever kept time again.
K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived
mostly in Lahore. Whenever the old man visited,
20 Nawab would place himself night and day at the door
leading from the servants’ sitting area into the walled
grove of ancient banyan trees where the old
farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator
glasses bent and smudged, Nawab tended the
25 household machinery, the air conditioners, water
heaters, refrigerators, and water pumps, like an
engineer tending the boilers on a foundering steamer
in an Atlantic gale. By his superhuman efforts he
almost managed to maintain K. K. Harouni in the
30 same mechanical cocoon, cooled and bathed and
lighted and fed, that the landowner enjoyed in
Lahore.
Harouni of course became familiar with this
ubiquitous man, who not only accompanied him on
35 his tours of inspection, but morning and night could
be found standing on the master bed rewiring the
light fixture or in the bathroom poking at the water
heater. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the
psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say
40 a word. The landowner, who was cheerfully filing his
nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him
to go ahead.
“Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to
the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube
45 wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is
but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have
earned these gray hairs”—here he bowed his head to
show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties
as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive
50 me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud
hunger within than disgrace in the light of day.
Release me, I ask you, I beg you.”
The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of
speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at
55 his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.
“What’s the matter, Nawabdin?”
“Matter, sir? O what could be the matter in your
service. I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But sir,
on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the
60 many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery
fell on me—I cannot any longer bicycle about like a
bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I
first had the good fortune to enter your employment.
I beg you, sir, let me go.”
65 “And what’s the solution?” asked Harouni, seeing
that they had come to the crux. He didn’t particularly
care one way or the other, except that it touched on
his comfort—a matter of great interest to him.
“Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could
70 somehow limp along, at least until I train up some
younger man.”
The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt
expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the
disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a
75 brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even
managed to extract an allowance for gasoline.
The motorcycle increased his status, gave him
weight, so that people began calling him “Uncle,” and
asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he
80 knew absolutely nothing. He could now range
further, doing a much wider business. Best of all,
now he could spend every night with his wife, who
had begged to live not on the farm but near her
family in Firoza, where also they could educate at
85 least the two eldest daughters. A long straight road
ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way
to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni
lands. Nawab would fly down this road on his new
machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every
90 knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump,
seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial
wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to
whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears
almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his
95 arrival.

Q. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician.” ©2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Another man might have thrown up his
hands—but not Nawabdin. His twelve daughters
acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with
satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of
5 a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course
knew that he must proliferate his sources of
revenue—the salary he received from K. K. Harouni
for tending the tube wells would not even begin to
suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off
10 a condemned electric motor—condemned by him.
He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at
the edge of his master’s fields. He bought broken
radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not
demur even when asked to fix watches, though that
15 enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned
him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took
apart ever kept time again.
K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived
mostly in Lahore. Whenever the old man visited,
20 Nawab would place himself night and day at the door
leading from the servants’ sitting area into the walled
grove of ancient banyan trees where the old
farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator
glasses bent and smudged, Nawab tended the
25 household machinery, the air conditioners, water
heaters, refrigerators, and water pumps, like an
engineer tending the boilers on a foundering steamer
in an Atlantic gale. By his superhuman efforts he
almost managed to maintain K. K. Harouni in the
30 same mechanical cocoon, cooled and bathed and
lighted and fed, that the landowner enjoyed in
Lahore.
Harouni of course became familiar with this
ubiquitous man, who not only accompanied him on
35 his tours of inspection, but morning and night could
be found standing on the master bed rewiring the
light fixture or in the bathroom poking at the water
heater. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the
psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say
40 a word. The landowner, who was cheerfully filing his
nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him
to go ahead.
“Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to
the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube
45 wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is
but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have
earned these gray hairs”—here he bowed his head to
show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties
as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive
50 me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud
hunger within than disgrace in the light of day.
Release me, I ask you, I beg you.”
The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of
speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at
55 his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.
“What’s the matter, Nawabdin?”
“Matter, sir? O what could be the matter in your
service. I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But sir,
on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the
60 many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery
fell on me—I cannot any longer bicycle about like a
bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I
first had the good fortune to enter your employment.
I beg you, sir, let me go.”
65 “And what’s the solution?” asked Harouni, seeing
that they had come to the crux. He didn’t particularly
care one way or the other, except that it touched on
his comfort—a matter of great interest to him.
“Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could
70 somehow limp along, at least until I train up some
younger man.”
The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt
expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the
disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a
75 brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even
managed to extract an allowance for gasoline.
The motorcycle increased his status, gave him
weight, so that people began calling him “Uncle,” and
asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he
80 knew absolutely nothing. He could now range
further, doing a much wider business. Best of all,
now he could spend every night with his wife, who
had begged to live not on the farm but near her
family in Firoza, where also they could educate at
85 least the two eldest daughters. A long straight road
ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way
to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni
lands. Nawab would fly down this road on his new
machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every
90 knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump,
seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial
wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to
whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears
almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his
95 arrival.

Q. The passage states that the farm managers react to Nawab receiving a motorcycle with

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician.” ©2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Another man might have thrown up his
hands—but not Nawabdin. His twelve daughters
acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with
satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of
5 a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course
knew that he must proliferate his sources of
revenue—the salary he received from K. K. Harouni
for tending the tube wells would not even begin to
suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off
10 a condemned electric motor—condemned by him.
He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at
the edge of his master’s fields. He bought broken
radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not
demur even when asked to fix watches, though that
15 enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned
him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took
apart ever kept time again.
K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived
mostly in Lahore. Whenever the old man visited,
20 Nawab would place himself night and day at the door
leading from the servants’ sitting area into the walled
grove of ancient banyan trees where the old
farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator
glasses bent and smudged, Nawab tended the
25 household machinery, the air conditioners, water
heaters, refrigerators, and water pumps, like an
engineer tending the boilers on a foundering steamer
in an Atlantic gale. By his superhuman efforts he
almost managed to maintain K. K. Harouni in the
30 same mechanical cocoon, cooled and bathed and
lighted and fed, that the landowner enjoyed in
Lahore.
Harouni of course became familiar with this
ubiquitous man, who not only accompanied him on
35 his tours of inspection, but morning and night could
be found standing on the master bed rewiring the
light fixture or in the bathroom poking at the water
heater. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the
psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say
40 a word. The landowner, who was cheerfully filing his
nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him
to go ahead.
“Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to
the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube
45 wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is
but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have
earned these gray hairs”—here he bowed his head to
show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties
as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive
50 me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud
hunger within than disgrace in the light of day.
Release me, I ask you, I beg you.”
The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of
speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at
55 his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.
“What’s the matter, Nawabdin?”
“Matter, sir? O what could be the matter in your
service. I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But sir,
on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the
60 many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery
fell on me—I cannot any longer bicycle about like a
bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I
first had the good fortune to enter your employment.
I beg you, sir, let me go.”
65 “And what’s the solution?” asked Harouni, seeing
that they had come to the crux. He didn’t particularly
care one way or the other, except that it touched on
his comfort—a matter of great interest to him.
“Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could
70 somehow limp along, at least until I train up some
younger man.”
The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt
expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the
disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a
75 brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even
managed to extract an allowance for gasoline.
The motorcycle increased his status, gave him
weight, so that people began calling him “Uncle,” and
asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he
80 knew absolutely nothing. He could now range
further, doing a much wider business. Best of all,
now he could spend every night with his wife, who
had begged to live not on the farm but near her
family in Firoza, where also they could educate at
85 least the two eldest daughters. A long straight road
ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way
to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni
lands. Nawab would fly down this road on his new
machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every
90 knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump,
seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial
wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to
whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears
almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his
95 arrival.

Q. According to the passage, what does Nawab consider to be the best result of getting the motorcycle?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Elsa Youngsteadt, “Decoding a Flower’s Message.” ©2012 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific
Research Society.
Texas gourd vines unfurl their large, flared
blossoms in the dim hours before sunrise. Until they
close at noon, their yellow petals and mild, squashy
aroma attract bees that gather nectar and shuttle
5 pollen from flower to flower. But “when you
advertise [to pollinators], you advertise in an
open communication network,” says chemical
ecologist Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for
Chemical Ecology in Germany. “You attract not just
10 the good guys, but you also attract the bad guys.” For
a Texas gourd plant, striped cucumber beetles are
among the very bad guys. They chew up pollen and
petals, defecate in the flowers and transmit the
dreaded bacterial wilt disease, an infection that can
15 reduce an entire plant to a heap of collapsed tissue in
mere days.
In one recent study, Nina Theis and Lynn Adler
took on the specific problem of the Texas
gourd—how to attract enough pollinators but not
20 too many beetles. The Texas gourd vine’s main
pollinators are honey bees and specialized squash
bees, which respond to its floral scent. The aroma
includes 10 compounds, but the most
abundant—and the only one that lures squash bees
25 into traps—is 1,4-dimethoxybenzene.
Intuition suggests that more of that aroma should
be even more appealing to bees. “We have this
assumption that a really fragrant flower is going to
attract a lot of pollinators,” says Theis, a chemical
30 ecologist at Elms College in Chicopee,
Massachusetts. But, she adds, that idea hasn’t really
been tested—and extra scent could well call in more
beetles, too. To find out, she and Adler planted
168 Texas gourd vines in an Iowa field and,
35 throughout the August flowering season, made half
the plants more fragrant by tucking
dimethoxybenzene-treated swabs deep inside their
flowers. Each treated flower emitted about 45 times
more fragrance than a normal one; the other half of
40 the plants got swabs without fragrance.
The researchers also wanted to know whether
extra beetles would impose a double cost by both
damaging flowers and deterring bees, which might
not bother to visit (and pollinate) a flower laden with
45 other insects and their feces. So every half hour
throughout the experiments, the team plucked all the
beetles off of half the fragrance-enhanced flowers and
half the control flowers, allowing bees to respond to
the blossoms with and without interference by
50 beetles.
Finally, they pollinated by hand half of the female
flowers in each of the four combinations of fragrance
and beetles. Hand-pollinated flowers should develop
into fruits with the maximum number of seeds,
55 providing a benchmark to see whether the
fragrance-related activities of bees and beetles
resulted in reduced pollination.
“It was very labor intensive,” says Theis.
“We would be out there at four in the morning, three
60 in the morning, to try and set up before these flowers
open.” As soon as they did, the team spent the next
several hours walking from flower to flower,
observing each for two-minute intervals “and writing
down everything we saw.”
65 What they saw was double the normal number of
beetles on fragrance-enhanced blossoms.
Pollinators, to their surprise, did not prefer the
highly scented flowers. Squash bees were indifferent,
and honey bees visited enhanced flowers less often
70 than normal ones. Theis thinks the bees were
repelled not by the fragrance itself, but by the
abundance of beetles: The data showed that the more
beetles on a flower, the less likely a honey bee was to
visit it.
75 That added up to less reproduction for
fragrance-enhanced flowers. Gourds that developed
from those blossoms weighed 9 percent less and had,
on average, 20 fewer seeds than those from normal
flowers. Hand pollination didn’t rescue the seed set,
80 indicating that beetles damaged flowers directly
—regardless of whether they also repelled
pollinators. (Hand pollination did rescue fruit
weight, a hard-to-interpret result that suggests that
lost bee visits did somehow harm fruit development.)
85 The new results provide a reason that Texas gourd
plants never evolved to produce a stronger scent: “If
you really ramp up the odor, you don’t get more
pollinators, but you can really get ripped apart by
your enemies,” says Rob Raguso, a chemical ecologist
90 at Cornell University who was not involved in the
Texas gourd study.

Q. The primary purpose of the passage is to

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Elsa Youngsteadt, “Decoding a Flower’s Message.” ©2012 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific
Research Society.
Texas gourd vines unfurl their large, flared
blossoms in the dim hours before sunrise. Until they
close at noon, their yellow petals and mild, squashy
aroma attract bees that gather nectar and shuttle
5 pollen from flower to flower. But “when you
advertise [to pollinators], you advertise in an
open communication network,” says chemical
ecologist Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for
Chemical Ecology in Germany. “You attract not just
10 the good guys, but you also attract the bad guys.” For
a Texas gourd plant, striped cucumber beetles are
among the very bad guys. They chew up pollen and
petals, defecate in the flowers and transmit the
dreaded bacterial wilt disease, an infection that can
15 reduce an entire plant to a heap of collapsed tissue in
mere days.
In one recent study, Nina Theis and Lynn Adler
took on the specific problem of the Texas
gourd—how to attract enough pollinators but not
20 too many beetles. The Texas gourd vine’s main
pollinators are honey bees and specialized squash
bees, which respond to its floral scent. The aroma
includes 10 compounds, but the most
abundant—and the only one that lures squash bees
25 into traps—is 1,4-dimethoxybenzene.
Intuition suggests that more of that aroma should
be even more appealing to bees. “We have this
assumption that a really fragrant flower is going to
attract a lot of pollinators,” says Theis, a chemical
30 ecologist at Elms College in Chicopee,
Massachusetts. But, she adds, that idea hasn’t really
been tested—and extra scent could well call in more
beetles, too. To find out, she and Adler planted
168 Texas gourd vines in an Iowa field and,
35 throughout the August flowering season, made half
the plants more fragrant by tucking
dimethoxybenzene-treated swabs deep inside their
flowers. Each treated flower emitted about 45 times
more fragrance than a normal one; the other half of
40 the plants got swabs without fragrance.
The researchers also wanted to know whether
extra beetles would impose a double cost by both
damaging flowers and deterring bees, which might
not bother to visit (and pollinate) a flower laden with
45 other insects and their feces. So every half hour
throughout the experiments, the team plucked all the
beetles off of half the fragrance-enhanced flowers and
half the control flowers, allowing bees to respond to
the blossoms with and without interference by
50 beetles.
Finally, they pollinated by hand half of the female
flowers in each of the four combinations of fragrance
and beetles. Hand-pollinated flowers should develop
into fruits with the maximum number of seeds,
55 providing a benchmark to see whether the
fragrance-related activities of bees and beetles
resulted in reduced pollination.
“It was very labor intensive,” says Theis.
“We would be out there at four in the morning, three
60 in the morning, to try and set up before these flowers
open.” As soon as they did, the team spent the next
several hours walking from flower to flower,
observing each for two-minute intervals “and writing
down everything we saw.”
65 What they saw was double the normal number of
beetles on fragrance-enhanced blossoms.
Pollinators, to their surprise, did not prefer the
highly scented flowers. Squash bees were indifferent,
and honey bees visited enhanced flowers less often
70 than normal ones. Theis thinks the bees were
repelled not by the fragrance itself, but by the
abundance of beetles: The data showed that the more
beetles on a flower, the less likely a honey bee was to
visit it.
75 That added up to less reproduction for
fragrance-enhanced flowers. Gourds that developed
from those blossoms weighed 9 percent less and had,
on average, 20 fewer seeds than those from normal
flowers. Hand pollination didn’t rescue the seed set,
80 indicating that beetles damaged flowers directly
—regardless of whether they also repelled
pollinators. (Hand pollination did rescue fruit
weight, a hard-to-interpret result that suggests that
lost bee visits did somehow harm fruit development.)
85 The new results provide a reason that Texas gourd
plants never evolved to produce a stronger scent: “If
you really ramp up the odor, you don’t get more
pollinators, but you can really get ripped apart by
your enemies,” says Rob Raguso, a chemical ecologist
90 at Cornell University who was not involved in the
Texas gourd study.

Q. As presented in the passage, Theis and Adler’s research primarily relied on which type of evidence?

Which statement about striped cucumber beetles can most reasonably be inferred from the passage?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Elsa Youngsteadt, “Decoding a Flower’s Message.” ©2012 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific
Research Society.
Texas gourd vines unfurl their large, flared
blossoms in the dim hours before sunrise. Until they
close at noon, their yellow petals and mild, squashy
aroma attract bees that gather nectar and shuttle
5 pollen from flower to flower. But “when you
advertise [to pollinators], you advertise in an
open communication network,” says chemical
ecologist Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for
Chemical Ecology in Germany. “You attract not just
10 the good guys, but you also attract the bad guys.” For
a Texas gourd plant, striped cucumber beetles are
among the very bad guys. They chew up pollen and
petals, defecate in the flowers and transmit the
dreaded bacterial wilt disease, an infection that can
15 reduce an entire plant to a heap of collapsed tissue in
mere days.
In one recent study, Nina Theis and Lynn Adler
took on the specific problem of the Texas
gourd—how to attract enough pollinators but not
20 too many beetles. The Texas gourd vine’s main
pollinators are honey bees and specialized squash
bees, which respond to its floral scent. The aroma
includes 10 compounds, but the most
abundant—and the only one that lures squash bees
25 into traps—is 1,4-dimethoxybenzene.
Intuition suggests that more of that aroma should
be even more appealing to bees. “We have this
assumption that a really fragrant flower is going to
attract a lot of pollinators,” says Theis, a chemical
30 ecologist at Elms College in Chicopee,
Massachusetts. But, she adds, that idea hasn’t really
been tested—and extra scent could well call in more
beetles, too. To find out, she and Adler planted
168 Texas gourd vines in an Iowa field and,
35 throughout the August flowering season, made half
the plants more fragrant by tucking
dimethoxybenzene-treated swabs deep inside their
flowers. Each treated flower emitted about 45 times
more fragrance than a normal one; the other half of
40 the plants got swabs without fragrance.
The researchers also wanted to know whether
extra beetles would impose a double cost by both
damaging flowers and deterring bees, which might
not bother to visit (and pollinate) a flower laden with
45 other insects and their feces. So every half hour
throughout the experiments, the team plucked all the
beetles off of half the fragrance-enhanced flowers and
half the control flowers, allowing bees to respond to
the blossoms with and without interference by
50 beetles.
Finally, they pollinated by hand half of the female
flowers in each of the four combinations of fragrance
and beetles. Hand-pollinated flowers should develop
into fruits with the maximum number of seeds,
55 providing a benchmark to see whether the
fragrance-related activities of bees and beetles
resulted in reduced pollination.
“It was very labor intensive,” says Theis.
“We would be out there at four in the morning, three
60 in the morning, to try and set up before these flowers
open.” As soon as they did, the team spent the next
several hours walking from flower to flower,
observing each for two-minute intervals “and writing
down everything we saw.”
65 What they saw was double the normal number of
beetles on fragrance-enhanced blossoms.
Pollinators, to their surprise, did not prefer the
highly scented flowers. Squash bees were indifferent,
and honey bees visited enhanced flowers less often
70 than normal ones. Theis thinks the bees were
repelled not by the fragrance itself, but by the
abundance of beetles: The data showed that the more
beetles on a flower, the less likely a honey bee was to
visit it.
75 That added up to less reproduction for
fragrance-enhanced flowers. Gourds that developed
from those blossoms weighed 9 percent less and had,
on average, 20 fewer seeds than those from normal
flowers. Hand pollination didn’t rescue the seed set,
80 indicating that beetles damaged flowers directly
—regardless of whether they also repelled
pollinators. (Hand pollination did rescue fruit
weight, a hard-to-interpret result that suggests that
lost bee visits did somehow harm fruit development.)
85 The new results provide a reason that Texas gourd
plants never evolved to produce a stronger scent: “If
you really ramp up the odor, you don’t get more
pollinators, but you can really get ripped apart by
your enemies,” says Rob Raguso, a chemical ecologist
90 at Cornell University who was not involved in the
Texas gourd study.

Q. The author indicates that it seems initially plausible that Texas gourd plants could attract more pollinators if they

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Elsa Youngsteadt, “Decoding a Flower’s Message.” ©2012 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific
Research Society.
Texas gourd vines unfurl their large, flared
blossoms in the dim hours before sunrise. Until they
close at noon, their yellow petals and mild, squashy
aroma attract bees that gather nectar and shuttle
5 pollen from flower to flower. But “when you
advertise [to pollinators], you advertise in an
open communication network,” says chemical
ecologist Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for
Chemical Ecology in Germany. “You attract not just
10 the good guys, but you also attract the bad guys.” For
a Texas gourd plant, striped cucumber beetles are
among the very bad guys. They chew up pollen and
petals, defecate in the flowers and transmit the
dreaded bacterial wilt disease, an infection that can
15 reduce an entire plant to a heap of collapsed tissue in
mere days.
In one recent study, Nina Theis and Lynn Adler
took on the specific problem of the Texas
gourd—how to attract enough pollinators but not
20 too many beetles. The Texas gourd vine’s main
pollinators are honey bees and specialized squash
bees, which respond to its floral scent. The aroma
includes 10 compounds, but the most
abundant—and the only one that lures squash bees
25 into traps—is 1,4-dimethoxybenzene.
Intuition suggests that more of that aroma should
be even more appealing to bees. “We have this
assumption that a really fragrant flower is going to
attract a lot of pollinators,” says Theis, a chemical
30 ecologist at Elms College in Chicopee,
Massachusetts. But, she adds, that idea hasn’t really
been tested—and extra scent could well call in more
beetles, too. To find out, she and Adler planted
168 Texas gourd vines in an Iowa field and,
35 throughout the August flowering season, made half
the plants more fragrant by tucking
dimethoxybenzene-treated swabs deep inside their
flowers. Each treated flower emitted about 45 times
more fragrance than a normal one; the other half of
40 the plants got swabs without fragrance.
The researchers also wanted to know whether
extra beetles would impose a double cost by both
damaging flowers and deterring bees, which might
not bother to visit (and pollinate) a flower laden with
45 other insects and their feces. So every half hour
throughout the experiments, the team plucked all the
beetles off of half the fragrance-enhanced flowers and
half the control flowers, allowing bees to respond to
the blossoms with and without interference by
50 beetles.
Finally, they pollinated by hand half of the female
flowers in each of the four combinations of fragrance
and beetles. Hand-pollinated flowers should develop
into fruits with the maximum number of seeds,
55 providing a benchmark to see whether the
fragrance-related activities of bees and beetles
resulted in reduced pollination.
“It was very labor intensive,” says Theis.
“We would be out there at four in the morning, three
60 in the morning, to try and set up before these flowers
open.” As soon as they did, the team spent the next
several hours walking from flower to flower,
observing each for two-minute intervals “and writing
down everything we saw.”
65 What they saw was double the normal number of
beetles on fragrance-enhanced blossoms.
Pollinators, to their surprise, did not prefer the
highly scented flowers. Squash bees were indifferent,
and honey bees visited enhanced flowers less often
70 than normal ones. Theis thinks the bees were
repelled not by the fragrance itself, but by the
abundance of beetles: The data showed that the more
beetles on a flower, the less likely a honey bee was to
visit it.
75 That added up to less reproduction for
fragrance-enhanced flowers. Gourds that developed
from those blossoms weighed 9 percent less and had,
on average, 20 fewer seeds than those from normal
flowers. Hand pollination didn’t rescue the seed set,
80 indicating that beetles damaged flowers directly
—regardless of whether they also repelled
pollinators. (Hand pollination did rescue fruit
weight, a hard-to-interpret result that suggests that
lost bee visits did somehow harm fruit development.)
85 The new results provide a reason that Texas gourd
plants never evolved to produce a stronger scent: “If
you really ramp up the odor, you don’t get more
pollinators, but you can really get ripped apart by
your enemies,” says Rob Raguso, a chemical ecologist
90 at Cornell University who was not involved in the
Texas gourd study.

Q. As used in line 38, “treated” most nearly means

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Elsa Youngsteadt, “Decoding a Flower’s Message.” ©2012 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific
Research Society.
Texas gourd vines unfurl their large, flared
blossoms in the dim hours before sunrise. Until they
close at noon, their yellow petals and mild, squashy
aroma attract bees that gather nectar and shuttle
5 pollen from flower to flower. But “when you
advertise [to pollinators], you advertise in an
open communication network,” says chemical
ecologist Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for
Chemical Ecology in Germany. “You attract not just
10 the good guys, but you also attract the bad guys.” For
a Texas gourd plant, striped cucumber beetles are
among the very bad guys. They chew up pollen and
petals, defecate in the flowers and transmit the
dreaded bacterial wilt disease, an infection that can
15 reduce an entire plant to a heap of collapsed tissue in
mere days.
In one recent study, Nina Theis and Lynn Adler
took on the specific problem of the Texas
gourd—how to attract enough pollinators but not
20 too many beetles. The Texas gourd vine’s main
pollinators are honey bees and specialized squash
bees, which respond to its floral scent. The aroma
includes 10 compounds, but the most
abundant—and the only one that lures squash bees
25 into traps—is 1,4-dimethoxybenzene.
Intuition suggests that more of that aroma should
be even more appealing to bees. “We have this
assumption that a really fragrant flower is going to
attract a lot of pollinators,” says Theis, a chemical
30 ecologist at Elms College in Chicopee,
Massachusetts. But, she adds, that idea hasn’t really
been tested—and extra scent could well call in more
beetles, too. To find out, she and Adler planted
168 Texas gourd vines in an Iowa field and,
35 throughout the August flowering season, made half
the plants more fragrant by tucking
dimethoxybenzene-treated swabs deep inside their
flowers. Each treated flower emitted about 45 times
more fragrance than a normal one; the other half of
40 the plants got swabs without fragrance.
The researchers also wanted to know whether
extra beetles would impose a double cost by both
damaging flowers and deterring bees, which might
not bother to visit (and pollinate) a flower laden with
45 other insects and their feces. So every half hour
throughout the experiments, the team plucked all the
beetles off of half the fragrance-enhanced flowers and
half the control flowers, allowing bees to respond to
the blossoms with and without interference by
50 beetles.
Finally, they pollinated by hand half of the female
flowers in each of the four combinations of fragrance
and beetles. Hand-pollinated flowers should develop
into fruits with the maximum number of seeds,
55 providing a benchmark to see whether the
fragrance-related activities of bees and beetles
resulted in reduced pollination.
“It was very labor intensive,” says Theis.
“We would be out there at four in the morning, three
60 in the morning, to try and set up before these flowers
open.” As soon as they did, the team spent the next
several hours walking from flower to flower,
observing each for two-minute intervals “and writing
down everything we saw.”
65 What they saw was double the normal number of
beetles on fragrance-enhanced blossoms.
Pollinators, to their surprise, did not prefer the
highly scented flowers. Squash bees were indifferent,
and honey bees visited enhanced flowers less often
70 than normal ones. Theis thinks the bees were
repelled not by the fragrance itself, but by the
abundance of beetles: The data showed that the more
beetles on a flower, the less likely a honey bee was to
visit it.
75 That added up to less reproduction for
fragrance-enhanced flowers. Gourds that developed
from those blossoms weighed 9 percent less and had,
on average, 20 fewer seeds than those from normal
flowers. Hand pollination didn’t rescue the seed set,
80 indicating that beetles damaged flowers directly
—regardless of whether they also repelled
pollinators. (Hand pollination did rescue fruit
weight, a hard-to-interpret result that suggests that
lost bee visits did somehow harm fruit development.)
85 The new results provide a reason that Texas gourd
plants never evolved to produce a stronger scent: “If
you really ramp up the odor, you don’t get more
pollinators, but you can really get ripped apart by
your enemies,” says Rob Raguso, a chemical ecologist
90 at Cornell University who was not involved in the
Texas gourd study.

Q. What did Theis and Adler do as part of their study that most directly allowed Theis to reason that “bees were repelled not by the fragrance itself” (lines 70-71)?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Elsa Youngsteadt, “Decoding a Flower’s Message.” ©2012 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific
Research Society.
Texas gourd vines unfurl their large, flared
blossoms in the dim hours before sunrise. Until they
close at noon, their yellow petals and mild, squashy
aroma attract bees that gather nectar and shuttle
5 pollen from flower to flower. But “when you
advertise [to pollinators], you advertise in an
open communication network,” says chemical
ecologist Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for
Chemical Ecology in Germany. “You attract not just
10 the good guys, but you also attract the bad guys.” For
a Texas gourd plant, striped cucumber beetles are
among the very bad guys. They chew up pollen and
petals, defecate in the flowers and transmit the
dreaded bacterial wilt disease, an infection that can
15 reduce an entire plant to a heap of collapsed tissue in
mere days.
In one recent study, Nina Theis and Lynn Adler
took on the specific problem of the Texas
gourd—how to attract enough pollinators but not
20 too many beetles. The Texas gourd vine’s main
pollinators are honey bees and specialized squash
bees, which respond to its floral scent. The aroma
includes 10 compounds, but the most
abundant—and the only one that lures squash bees
25 into traps—is 1,4-dimethoxybenzene.
Intuition suggests that more of that aroma should
be even more appealing to bees. “We have this
assumption that a really fragrant flower is going to
attract a lot of pollinators,” says Theis, a chemical
30 ecologist at Elms College in Chicopee,
Massachusetts. But, she adds, that idea hasn’t really
been tested—and extra scent could well call in more
beetles, too. To find out, she and Adler planted
168 Texas gourd vines in an Iowa field and,
35 throughout the August flowering season, made half
the plants more fragrant by tucking
dimethoxybenzene-treated swabs deep inside their
flowers. Each treated flower emitted about 45 times
more fragrance than a normal one; the other half of
40 the plants got swabs without fragrance.
The researchers also wanted to know whether
extra beetles would impose a double cost by both
damaging flowers and deterring bees, which might
not bother to visit (and pollinate) a flower laden with
45 other insects and their feces. So every half hour
throughout the experiments, the team plucked all the
beetles off of half the fragrance-enhanced flowers and
half the control flowers, allowing bees to respond to
the blossoms with and without interference by
50 beetles.
Finally, they pollinated by hand half of the female
flowers in each of the four combinations of fragrance
and beetles. Hand-pollinated flowers should develop
into fruits with the maximum number of seeds,
55 providing a benchmark to see whether the
fragrance-related activities of bees and beetles
resulted in reduced pollination.
“It was very labor intensive,” says Theis.
“We would be out there at four in the morning, three
60 in the morning, to try and set up before these flowers
open.” As soon as they did, the team spent the next
several hours walking from flower to flower,
observing each for two-minute intervals “and writing
down everything we saw.”
65 What they saw was double the normal number of
beetles on fragrance-enhanced blossoms.
Pollinators, to their surprise, did not prefer the
highly scented flowers. Squash bees were indifferent,
and honey bees visited enhanced flowers less often
70 than normal ones. Theis thinks the bees were
repelled not by the fragrance itself, but by the
abundance of beetles: The data showed that the more
beetles on a flower, the less likely a honey bee was to
visit it.
75 That added up to less reproduction for
fragrance-enhanced flowers. Gourds that developed
from those blossoms weighed 9 percent less and had,
on average, 20 fewer seeds than those from normal
flowers. Hand pollination didn’t rescue the seed set,
80 indicating that beetles damaged flowers directly
—regardless of whether they also repelled
pollinators. (Hand pollination did rescue fruit
weight, a hard-to-interpret result that suggests that
lost bee visits did somehow harm fruit development.)
85 The new results provide a reason that Texas gourd
plants never evolved to produce a stronger scent: “If
you really ramp up the odor, you don’t get more
pollinators, but you can really get ripped apart by
your enemies,” says Rob Raguso, a chemical ecologist
90 at Cornell University who was not involved in the
Texas gourd study.

Q. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Elsa Youngsteadt, “Decoding a Flower’s Message.” ©2012 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific
Research Society.
Texas gourd vines unfurl their large, flared
blossoms in the dim hours before sunrise. Until they
close at noon, their yellow petals and mild, squashy
aroma attract bees that gather nectar and shuttle
5 pollen from flower to flower. But “when you
advertise [to pollinators], you advertise in an
open communication network,” says chemical
ecologist Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for
Chemical Ecology in Germany. “You attract not just
10 the good guys, but you also attract the bad guys.” For
a Texas gourd plant, striped cucumber beetles are
among the very bad guys. They chew up pollen and
petals, defecate in the flowers and transmit the
dreaded bacterial wilt disease, an infection that can
15 reduce an entire plant to a heap of collapsed tissue in
mere days.
In one recent study, Nina Theis and Lynn Adler
took on the specific problem of the Texas
gourd—how to attract enough pollinators but not
20 too many beetles. The Texas gourd vine’s main
pollinators are honey bees and specialized squash
bees, which respond to its floral scent. The aroma
includes 10 compounds, but the most
abundant—and the only one that lures squash bees
25 into traps—is 1,4-dimethoxybenzene.
Intuition suggests that more of that aroma should
be even more appealing to bees. “We have this
assumption that a really fragrant flower is going to
attract a lot of pollinators,” says Theis, a chemical
30 ecologist at Elms College in Chicopee,
Massachusetts. But, she adds, that idea hasn’t really
been tested—and extra scent could well call in more
beetles, too. To find out, she and Adler planted
168 Texas gourd vines in an Iowa field and,
35 throughout the August flowering season, made half
the plants more fragrant by tucking
dimethoxybenzene-treated swabs deep inside their
flowers. Each treated flower emitted about 45 times
more fragrance than a normal one; the other half of
40 the plants got swabs without fragrance.
The researchers also wanted to know whether
extra beetles would impose a double cost by both
damaging flowers and deterring bees, which might
not bother to visit (and pollinate) a flower laden with
45 other insects and their feces. So every half hour
throughout the experiments, the team plucked all the
beetles off of half the fragrance-enhanced flowers and
half the control flowers, allowing bees to respond to
the blossoms with and without interference by
50 beetles.
Finally, they pollinated by hand half of the female
flowers in each of the four combinations of fragrance
and beetles. Hand-pollinated flowers should develop
into fruits with the maximum number of seeds,
55 providing a benchmark to see whether the
fragrance-related activities of bees and beetles
resulted in reduced pollination.
“It was very labor intensive,” says Theis.
“We would be out there at four in the morning, three
60 in the morning, to try and set up before these flowers
open.” As soon as they did, the team spent the next
several hours walking from flower to flower,
observing each for two-minute intervals “and writing
down everything we saw.”
65 What they saw was double the normal number of
beetles on fragrance-enhanced blossoms.
Pollinators, to their surprise, did not prefer the
highly scented flowers. Squash bees were indifferent,
and honey bees visited enhanced flowers less often
70 than normal ones. Theis thinks the bees were
repelled not by the fragrance itself, but by the
abundance of beetles: The data showed that the more
beetles on a flower, the less likely a honey bee was to
visit it.
75 That added up to less reproduction for
fragrance-enhanced flowers. Gourds that developed
from those blossoms weighed 9 percent less and had,
on average, 20 fewer seeds than those from normal
flowers. Hand pollination didn’t rescue the seed set,
80 indicating that beetles damaged flowers directly
—regardless of whether they also repelled
pollinators. (Hand pollination did rescue fruit
weight, a hard-to-interpret result that suggests that
lost bee visits did somehow harm fruit development.)
85 The new results provide a reason that Texas gourd
plants never evolved to produce a stronger scent: “If
you really ramp up the odor, you don’t get more
pollinators, but you can really get ripped apart by
your enemies,” says Rob Raguso, a chemical ecologist
90 at Cornell University who was not involved in the
Texas gourd study.

Q. The primary function of the seventh and eighth paragraphs (lines 65-84) is to

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Elsa Youngsteadt, “Decoding a Flower’s Message.” ©2012 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific
Research Society.
Texas gourd vines unfurl their large, flared
blossoms in the dim hours before sunrise. Until they
close at noon, their yellow petals and mild, squashy
aroma attract bees that gather nectar and shuttle
5 pollen from flower to flower. But “when you
advertise [to pollinators], you advertise in an
open communication network,” says chemical
ecologist Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for
Chemical Ecology in Germany. “You attract not just
10 the good guys, but you also attract the bad guys.” For
a Texas gourd plant, striped cucumber beetles are
among the very bad guys. They chew up pollen and
petals, defecate in the flowers and transmit the
dreaded bacterial wilt disease, an infection that can
15 reduce an entire plant to a heap of collapsed tissue in
mere days.
In one recent study, Nina Theis and Lynn Adler
took on the specific problem of the Texas
gourd—how to attract enough pollinators but not
20 too many beetles. The Texas gourd vine’s main
pollinators are honey bees and specialized squash
bees, which respond to its floral scent. The aroma
includes 10 compounds, but the most
abundant—and the only one that lures squash bees
25 into traps—is 1,4-dimethoxybenzene.
Intuition suggests that more of that aroma should
be even more appealing to bees. “We have this
assumption that a really fragrant flower is going to
attract a lot of pollinators,” says Theis, a chemical
30 ecologist at Elms College in Chicopee,
Massachusetts. But, she adds, that idea hasn’t really
been tested—and extra scent could well call in more
beetles, too. To find out, she and Adler planted
168 Texas gourd vines in an Iowa field and,
35 throughout the August flowering season, made half
the plants more fragrant by tucking
dimethoxybenzene-treated swabs deep inside their
flowers. Each treated flower emitted about 45 times
more fragrance than a normal one; the other half of
40 the plants got swabs without fragrance.
The researchers also wanted to know whether
extra beetles would impose a double cost by both
damaging flowers and deterring bees, which might
not bother to visit (and pollinate) a flower laden with
45 other insects and their feces. So every half hour
throughout the experiments, the team plucked all the
beetles off of half the fragrance-enhanced flowers and
half the control flowers, allowing bees to respond to
the blossoms with and without interference by
50 beetles.
Finally, they pollinated by hand half of the female
flowers in each of the four combinations of fragrance
and beetles. Hand-pollinated flowers should develop
into fruits with the maximum number of seeds,
55 providing a benchmark to see whether the
fragrance-related activities of bees and beetles
resulted in reduced pollination.
“It was very labor intensive,” says Theis.
“We would be out there at four in the morning, three
60 in the morning, to try and set up before these flowers
open.” As soon as they did, the team spent the next
several hours walking from flower to flower,
observing each for two-minute intervals “and writing
down everything we saw.”
65 What they saw was double the normal number of
beetles on fragrance-enhanced blossoms.
Pollinators, to their surprise, did not prefer the
highly scented flowers. Squash bees were indifferent,
and honey bees visited enhanced flowers less often
70 than normal ones. Theis thinks the bees were
repelled not by the fragrance itself, but by the
abundance of beetles: The data showed that the more
beetles on a flower, the less likely a honey bee was to
visit it.
75 That added up to less reproduction for
fragrance-enhanced flowers. Gourds that developed
from those blossoms weighed 9 percent less and had,
on average, 20 fewer seeds than those from normal
flowers. Hand pollination didn’t rescue the seed set,
80 indicating that beetles damaged flowers directly
—regardless of whether they also repelled
pollinators. (Hand pollination did rescue fruit
weight, a hard-to-interpret result that suggests that
lost bee visits did somehow harm fruit development.)
85 The new results provide a reason that Texas gourd
plants never evolved to produce a stronger scent: “If
you really ramp up the odor, you don’t get more
pollinators, but you can really get ripped apart by
your enemies,” says Rob Raguso, a chemical ecologist
90 at Cornell University who was not involved in the
Texas gourd study.

Q. In describing squash bees as “indifferent” (line 68), the author most likely means that they

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Elsa Youngsteadt, “Decoding a Flower’s Message.” ©2012 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific
Research Society.
Texas gourd vines unfurl their large, flared
blossoms in the dim hours before sunrise. Until they
close at noon, their yellow petals and mild, squashy
aroma attract bees that gather nectar and shuttle
5 pollen from flower to flower. But “when you
advertise [to pollinators], you advertise in an
open communication network,” says chemical
ecologist Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for
Chemical Ecology in Germany. “You attract not just
10 the good guys, but you also attract the bad guys.” For
a Texas gourd plant, striped cucumber beetles are
among the very bad guys. They chew up pollen and
petals, defecate in the flowers and transmit the
dreaded bacterial wilt disease, an infection that can
15 reduce an entire plant to a heap of collapsed tissue in
mere days.
In one recent study, Nina Theis and Lynn Adler
took on the specific problem of the Texas
gourd—how to attract enough pollinators but not
20 too many beetles. The Texas gourd vine’s main
pollinators are honey bees and specialized squash
bees, which respond to its floral scent. The aroma
includes 10 compounds, but the most
abundant—and the only one that lures squash bees
25 into traps—is 1,4-dimethoxybenzene.
Intuition suggests that more of that aroma should
be even more appealing to bees. “We have this
assumption that a really fragrant flower is going to
attract a lot of pollinators,” says Theis, a chemical
30 ecologist at Elms College in Chicopee,
Massachusetts. But, she adds, that idea hasn’t really
been tested—and extra scent could well call in more
beetles, too. To find out, she and Adler planted
168 Texas gourd vines in an Iowa field and,
35 throughout the August flowering season, made half
the plants more fragrant by tucking
dimethoxybenzene-treated swabs deep inside their
flowers. Each treated flower emitted about 45 times
more fragrance than a normal one; the other half of
40 the plants got swabs without fragrance.
The researchers also wanted to know whether
extra beetles would impose a double cost by both
damaging flowers and deterring bees, which might
not bother to visit (and pollinate) a flower laden with
45 other insects and their feces. So every half hour
throughout the experiments, the team plucked all the
beetles off of half the fragrance-enhanced flowers and
half the control flowers, allowing bees to respond to
the blossoms with and without interference by
50 beetles.
Finally, they pollinated by hand half of the female
flowers in each of the four combinations of fragrance
and beetles. Hand-pollinated flowers should develop
into fruits with the maximum number of seeds,
55 providing a benchmark to see whether the
fragrance-related activities of bees and beetles
resulted in reduced pollination.
“It was very labor intensive,” says Theis.
“We would be out there at four in the morning, three
60 in the morning, to try and set up before these flowers
open.” As soon as they did, the team spent the next
several hours walking from flower to flower,
observing each for two-minute intervals “and writing
down everything we saw.”
65 What they saw was double the normal number of
beetles on fragrance-enhanced blossoms.
Pollinators, to their surprise, did not prefer the
highly scented flowers. Squash bees were indifferent,
and honey bees visited enhanced flowers less often
70 than normal ones. Theis thinks the bees were
repelled not by the fragrance itself, but by the
abundance of beetles: The data showed that the more
beetles on a flower, the less likely a honey bee was to
visit it.
75 That added up to less reproduction for
fragrance-enhanced flowers. Gourds that developed
from those blossoms weighed 9 percent less and had,
on average, 20 fewer seeds than those from normal
flowers. Hand pollination didn’t rescue the seed set,
80 indicating that beetles damaged flowers directly
—regardless of whether they also repelled
pollinators. (Hand pollination did rescue fruit
weight, a hard-to-interpret result that suggests that
lost bee visits did somehow harm fruit development.)
85 The new results provide a reason that Texas gourd
plants never evolved to produce a stronger scent: “If
you really ramp up the odor, you don’t get more
pollinators, but you can really get ripped apart by
your enemies,” says Rob Raguso, a chemical ecologist
90 at Cornell University who was not involved in the
Texas gourd study.

Q. According to the passage, Theis and Adler’s research offers an answer to which of the following questions?