CAT Mock Test- 2 - CAT

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Recognising our feelings of grief is important, not only because we cannot mourn our losses if we do not acknowledge them, but also because the literature and science of grief offer guidance for how to respond to this pandemic in ways that make psychological healing possible. In his 2008 book, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, the psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues that British society has lost a vital connection to grief, preferring to interpret the pain of unacknowledged or unresolved loss and separation medically, as depression, and opting for what he calls “mental hygiene” - the management of troublesome, superficial symptoms - over the deeper, harder work of mourning. We do not find it easy, in this culture of self-optimisation and life-hacks, to accept that grief is not something you can “get over”, that there is no cure for pain. The act of mourning is not to recover from loss, Leader argues, but rather to find a way to accommodate and live with it. And, if we put off or bypass the work of mourning, the pain of our losses will return to torment us, often in disruptive or unexpected ways.

The anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer argued that the mass deaths of the First World War so overwhelmed British communities that people began to abandon traditional mourning rituals, something that served to transform grief from a communal experience to a private emotion. The pandemic might be accelerating this process, as people are left to mourn alone in lockdown and to pay their final respects over Zoom. And yet, Darian Leader contends that we cannot properly mourn in isolation; mourning is a social task. “A loss, after all, always requires some kind of recognition, some sense that it has been witnessed and made real,” Leader writes. This is why we have such an elemental need to feel heard, why we make the effort to commemorate past conflicts, why post-conflict truth and reconciliation commissions are less about punishment than recognising the crimes. The demands for a public inquiry into the British government’s pandemic response speaks to this need, and to another dimension of pandemic grief. 

Leader argues that public displays of grief help facilitate individual mourning. In his view, it is through public ceremonies that people are able to access their own, personal grief. This is the function performed by traditions of hiring professional mourners to keen at funerals, and it helps explain why celebrity deaths sometimes unleash an outpouring of grief. The near-hysterical response to the death of Princess Diana in 1997 was not, as some newspapers contended, a mark of “mourning sickness” or “crocodile tears”. Rather, the public mood provided people with a way to access their grief over other, unrelated losses.

Those who study grief often point to the inevitability of pain. When people put off the business of mourning, the pain of loss and separation finds a way to reassert itself. Leader describes the phenomenon of “anniversary symptoms”, the findings that adult hospitalisation dates coincide remarkably with anniversaries of childhood losses, or that GP surgery records reveal that people often return to doctors in the same week or month as their previous visit. “Rather than access their memories, the body commemorates them,” Leader writes.

Q. The author cites the example of post-conflict truth and reconciliation commissions to drive home the point that

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Charles Darwin thought the mental capacities of animals and people differed only in degree, not kind—a natural conclusion to reach when armed with the radical new belief that the one evolved from the other. His last great book, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”, examined joy, love and grief in birds, domestic animals and primates as well as in various human races. But Darwin’s attitude to animals—easily shared by people in everyday contact with dogs, horses, even mice—ran contrary to a long tradition in European thought which held that animals had no minds at all. This way of thinking stemmed from the argument of René Descartes, a great 17th-century philosopher, that people were creatures of reason, linked to the mind of God, while animals were merely machines made of flesh—living robots which, in the words of Nicolas Malebranche, one of his followers, “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

For much of the 20th century biology cleaved closer to Descartes than to Darwin. Students of animal behaviour did not rule out the possibility that animals had minds but thought the question almost irrelevant since it was impossible to answer. One could study an organism’s inputs (such as food or the environment) or outputs (its behaviour). But the organism itself remained a black box: unobservable things such as emotions or thoughts were beyond the scope of objective inquiry.

In the past 40 years, however, a wide range of work both in the field and the lab has pushed the consensus away from strict behaviourism and towards that Darwin-friendly view. Progress has not been easy or quick; as the behaviourists warned, both sorts of evidence can be misleading. Laboratory tests can be rigorous, but are inevitably based on animals which may not behave as they do in the wild. Field observations can be dismissed as anecdotal. Running them for years or decades and on a large scale goes some way to guarding against that problem, but such studies are rare.

Nevertheless, most scientists...say with confidence that some animals process information and express emotions in ways that are accompanied by conscious mental experience. They agree that animals...have complex mental capacities; that a few species have attributes once thought to be unique to people, such as the ability to give objects names and use tools; and that a handful of animals—primates, corvids (the crow family) and cetaceans (whales and dolphins)— have something close to what in humans is seen as culture, in that they develop distinctive ways of doing things which are passed down by imitation and example. Dolphins have been found to imitate the behaviour of other dolphins, in their group. No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other.

 Brain mapping reveals that the neurological processes underlying what look like emotions in rats are similar to those behind what clearly are emotions in humans. As a group of neuroscientists seeking to sum the field up put it in 2012, “Humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures...also possess these neurological substrates.”

Q. Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage?

I. There is now a consensus among most scientists that some animals exhibit most of the attributes characteristic of human minds.

II. Some animals are self-aware and are also conscious of their social milieu.

III. Some animal minds are capable of imitative behaviour.

IV. People who rarely came in contact with animals disregarded Darwin's views on animal minds. 

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Charles Darwin thought the mental capacities of animals and people differed only in degree, not kind—a natural conclusion to reach when armed with the radical new belief that the one evolved from the other. His last great book, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”, examined joy, love and grief in birds, domestic animals and primates as well as in various human races. But Darwin’s attitude to animals—easily shared by people in everyday contact with dogs, horses, even mice—ran contrary to a long tradition in European thought which held that animals had no minds at all. This way of thinking stemmed from the argument of René Descartes, a great 17th-century philosopher, that people were creatures of reason, linked to the mind of God, while animals were merely machines made of flesh—living robots which, in the words of Nicolas Malebranche, one of his followers, “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

For much of the 20th century biology cleaved closer to Descartes than to Darwin. Students of animal behaviour did not rule out the possibility that animals had minds but thought the question almost irrelevant since it was impossible to answer. One could study an organism’s inputs (such as food or the environment) or outputs (its behaviour). But the organism itself remained a black box: unobservable things such as emotions or thoughts were beyond the scope of objective inquiry.

In the past 40 years, however, a wide range of work both in the field and the lab has pushed the consensus away from strict behaviourism and towards that Darwin-friendly view. Progress has not been easy or quick; as the behaviourists warned, both sorts of evidence can be misleading. Laboratory tests can be rigorous, but are inevitably based on animals which may not behave as they do in the wild. Field observations can be dismissed as anecdotal. Running them for years or decades and on a large scale goes some way to guarding against that problem, but such studies are rare.

Nevertheless, most scientists...say with confidence that some animals process information and express emotions in ways that are accompanied by conscious mental experience. They agree that animals...have complex mental capacities; that a few species have attributes once thought to be unique to people, such as the ability to give objects names and use tools; and that a handful of animals—primates, corvids (the crow family) and cetaceans (whales and dolphins)— have something close to what in humans is seen as culture, in that they develop distinctive ways of doing things which are passed down by imitation and example. Dolphins have been found to imitate the behaviour of other dolphins, in their group. No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other.

 Brain mapping reveals that the neurological processes underlying what look like emotions in rats are similar to those behind what clearly are emotions in humans. As a group of neuroscientists seeking to sum the field up put it in 2012, “Humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures...also possess these neurological substrates.”

Q. Which of the following views of Descartes and/or his followers cannot be inferred from the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Charles Darwin thought the mental capacities of animals and people differed only in degree, not kind—a natural conclusion to reach when armed with the radical new belief that the one evolved from the other. His last great book, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”, examined joy, love and grief in birds, domestic animals and primates as well as in various human races. But Darwin’s attitude to animals—easily shared by people in everyday contact with dogs, horses, even mice—ran contrary to a long tradition in European thought which held that animals had no minds at all. This way of thinking stemmed from the argument of René Descartes, a great 17th-century philosopher, that people were creatures of reason, linked to the mind of God, while animals were merely machines made of flesh—living robots which, in the words of Nicolas Malebranche, one of his followers, “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

For much of the 20th century biology cleaved closer to Descartes than to Darwin. Students of animal behaviour did not rule out the possibility that animals had minds but thought the question almost irrelevant since it was impossible to answer. One could study an organism’s inputs (such as food or the environment) or outputs (its behaviour). But the organism itself remained a black box: unobservable things such as emotions or thoughts were beyond the scope of objective inquiry.

In the past 40 years, however, a wide range of work both in the field and the lab has pushed the consensus away from strict behaviourism and towards that Darwin-friendly view. Progress has not been easy or quick; as the behaviourists warned, both sorts of evidence can be misleading. Laboratory tests can be rigorous, but are inevitably based on animals which may not behave as they do in the wild. Field observations can be dismissed as anecdotal. Running them for years or decades and on a large scale goes some way to guarding against that problem, but such studies are rare.

Nevertheless, most scientists...say with confidence that some animals process information and express emotions in ways that are accompanied by conscious mental experience. They agree that animals...have complex mental capacities; that a few species have attributes once thought to be unique to people, such as the ability to give objects names and use tools; and that a handful of animals—primates, corvids (the crow family) and cetaceans (whales and dolphins)— have something close to what in humans is seen as culture, in that they develop distinctive ways of doing things which are passed down by imitation and example. Dolphins have been found to imitate the behaviour of other dolphins, in their group. No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other.

 Brain mapping reveals that the neurological processes underlying what look like emotions in rats are similar to those behind what clearly are emotions in humans. As a group of neuroscientists seeking to sum the field up put it in 2012, “Humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures...also possess these neurological substrates.”

Q. For much of the 20th century, students of animal behaviour opined that

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Charles Darwin thought the mental capacities of animals and people differed only in degree, not kind—a natural conclusion to reach when armed with the radical new belief that the one evolved from the other. His last great book, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”, examined joy, love and grief in birds, domestic animals and primates as well as in various human races. But Darwin’s attitude to animals—easily shared by people in everyday contact with dogs, horses, even mice—ran contrary to a long tradition in European thought which held that animals had no minds at all. This way of thinking stemmed from the argument of René Descartes, a great 17th-century philosopher, that people were creatures of reason, linked to the mind of God, while animals were merely machines made of flesh—living robots which, in the words of Nicolas Malebranche, one of his followers, “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

For much of the 20th century biology cleaved closer to Descartes than to Darwin. Students of animal behaviour did not rule out the possibility that animals had minds but thought the question almost irrelevant since it was impossible to answer. One could study an organism’s inputs (such as food or the environment) or outputs (its behaviour). But the organism itself remained a black box: unobservable things such as emotions or thoughts were beyond the scope of objective inquiry.

In the past 40 years, however, a wide range of work both in the field and the lab has pushed the consensus away from strict behaviourism and towards that Darwin-friendly view. Progress has not been easy or quick; as the behaviourists warned, both sorts of evidence can be misleading. Laboratory tests can be rigorous, but are inevitably based on animals which may not behave as they do in the wild. Field observations can be dismissed as anecdotal. Running them for years or decades and on a large scale goes some way to guarding against that problem, but such studies are rare.

Nevertheless, most scientists...say with confidence that some animals process information and express emotions in ways that are accompanied by conscious mental experience. They agree that animals...have complex mental capacities; that a few species have attributes once thought to be unique to people, such as the ability to give objects names and use tools; and that a handful of animals—primates, corvids (the crow family) and cetaceans (whales and dolphins)— have something close to what in humans is seen as culture, in that they develop distinctive ways of doing things which are passed down by imitation and example. Dolphins have been found to imitate the behaviour of other dolphins, in their group. No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other.

 Brain mapping reveals that the neurological processes underlying what look like emotions in rats are similar to those behind what clearly are emotions in humans. As a group of neuroscientists seeking to sum the field up put it in 2012, “Humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures...also possess these neurological substrates.”

Q. Which of the following is a reason why the behaviourists are concerned about the evidence supporting the Darwin-friendly view?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

For traditional Darwinian natural selection to work, the entities in question must display some property or ability that can be inherited, and that results in their having more offspring than the competition. For instance, the first creatures with vision, however fuzzy, were presumably better at avoiding predators and finding mates than the sightless members of their population, and had more surviving progeny for that reason. In technical terms, then, selected entities must exist in populations showing heritable variation in fitness, greater fitness resulting in these entities’ differential reproduction.

Even if inherited properties are the result of undirected or ‘random’ mutation, repeating the selection process over generations will incrementally improve on them. This produces complex adaptations such as the vertebrate eye, with its highly sophisticated function. Lightsensitive areas acquired lenses for focusing and means for distinguishing colours step by advantageous step, ultimately producing modern eyes that are clearly for seeing. So even without an overall purpose, evolution, through selection,  creates something that behaves as if it has a goal.

Back in 1979, when Lovelock’s first popular book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, came out, the wider field of evolutionary biology was becoming a very reductionist discipline. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene had been published three years earlier, and it promoted a hardcore gene-centrism insisting that we look at genes as the fundamental units of selection - that is, the thing upon which natural selection operates. His claim was that genes were the reproducing entities par excellence, because they are the only things that always replicate and produce enduring lineages. Replication here means making fairly exact one-to-one copies, as genes (and asexual organisms such as bacteria) do. Reproduction, though, is a more inclusive and forgiving term - it’s what we humans and other sexual species do, when we make offspring that resemble both parents, but each only imperfectly. Still, this sloppy process exhibits heritable variation in fitness, and so supports evolution by natural selection.

In recent decades, many theorists have come to understand that there can be reproducing or even replicating entities evolving by natural selection at several levels of the biological hierarchy - not just in the domains of replicating genes and bacteria, or even sexual creatures such as ourselves. They have come to embrace something called multilevel selection theory: the idea that life can be represented as a hierarchy of entities nested together in larger entities, like Russian dolls. As the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘genes, cells, social groups and species can all, in principle, enter into change of this kind’.

But to qualify as a thing on which natural selection can operate - a unit of selection - ‘they must be connected by parent-offspring relations; they must have the capacity to reproduce,’ Godfrey-Smith continues. It’s the requirement for reproduction and leaving parent-offspring lineages (lines of descent) we need to focus on here, because they remain essential in traditional formulations. Without reproduction, fitness is undefined, and heritability seems to make no sense. And without lines of descent, at some level, how can we even conceive of natural selection?

Q. All of the following statements can be inferred from the passage, EXCEPT;

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

For traditional Darwinian natural selection to work, the entities in question must display some property or ability that can be inherited, and that results in their having more offspring than the competition. For instance, the first creatures with vision, however fuzzy, were presumably better at avoiding predators and finding mates than the sightless members of their population, and had more surviving progeny for that reason. In technical terms, then, selected entities must exist in populations showing heritable variation in fitness, greater fitness resulting in these entities’ differential reproduction.

Even if inherited properties are the result of undirected or ‘random’ mutation, repeating the selection process over generations will incrementally improve on them. This produces complex adaptations such as the vertebrate eye, with its highly sophisticated function. Lightsensitive areas acquired lenses for focusing and means for distinguishing colours step by advantageous step, ultimately producing modern eyes that are clearly for seeing. So even without an overall purpose, evolution, through selection,  creates something that behaves as if it has a goal.

Back in 1979, when Lovelock’s first popular book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, came out, the wider field of evolutionary biology was becoming a very reductionist discipline. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene had been published three years earlier, and it promoted a hardcore gene-centrism insisting that we look at genes as the fundamental units of selection - that is, the thing upon which natural selection operates. His claim was that genes were the reproducing entities par excellence, because they are the only things that always replicate and produce enduring lineages. Replication here means making fairly exact one-to-one copies, as genes (and asexual organisms such as bacteria) do. Reproduction, though, is a more inclusive and forgiving term - it’s what we humans and other sexual species do, when we make offspring that resemble both parents, but each only imperfectly. Still, this sloppy process exhibits heritable variation in fitness, and so supports evolution by natural selection.

In recent decades, many theorists have come to understand that there can be reproducing or even replicating entities evolving by natural selection at several levels of the biological hierarchy - not just in the domains of replicating genes and bacteria, or even sexual creatures such as ourselves. They have come to embrace something called multilevel selection theory: the idea that life can be represented as a hierarchy of entities nested together in larger entities, like Russian dolls. As the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘genes, cells, social groups and species can all, in principle, enter into change of this kind’.

But to qualify as a thing on which natural selection can operate - a unit of selection - ‘they must be connected by parent-offspring relations; they must have the capacity to reproduce,’ Godfrey-Smith continues. It’s the requirement for reproduction and leaving parent-offspring lineages (lines of descent) we need to focus on here, because they remain essential in traditional formulations. Without reproduction, fitness is undefined, and heritability seems to make no sense. And without lines of descent, at some level, how can we even conceive of natural selection?

Q. Which of the following could be the reason why the author discusses the example of the vertebrate eye in the second paragraph?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

For traditional Darwinian natural selection to work, the entities in question must display some property or ability that can be inherited, and that results in their having more offspring than the competition. For instance, the first creatures with vision, however fuzzy, were presumably better at avoiding predators and finding mates than the sightless members of their population, and had more surviving progeny for that reason. In technical terms, then, selected entities must exist in populations showing heritable variation in fitness, greater fitness resulting in these entities’ differential reproduction.

Even if inherited properties are the result of undirected or ‘random’ mutation, repeating the selection process over generations will incrementally improve on them. This produces complex adaptations such as the vertebrate eye, with its highly sophisticated function. Lightsensitive areas acquired lenses for focusing and means for distinguishing colours step by advantageous step, ultimately producing modern eyes that are clearly for seeing. So even without an overall purpose, evolution, through selection,  creates something that behaves as if it has a goal.

Back in 1979, when Lovelock’s first popular book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, came out, the wider field of evolutionary biology was becoming a very reductionist discipline. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene had been published three years earlier, and it promoted a hardcore gene-centrism insisting that we look at genes as the fundamental units of selection - that is, the thing upon which natural selection operates. His claim was that genes were the reproducing entities par excellence, because they are the only things that always replicate and produce enduring lineages. Replication here means making fairly exact one-to-one copies, as genes (and asexual organisms such as bacteria) do. Reproduction, though, is a more inclusive and forgiving term - it’s what we humans and other sexual species do, when we make offspring that resemble both parents, but each only imperfectly. Still, this sloppy process exhibits heritable variation in fitness, and so supports evolution by natural selection.

In recent decades, many theorists have come to understand that there can be reproducing or even replicating entities evolving by natural selection at several levels of the biological hierarchy - not just in the domains of replicating genes and bacteria, or even sexual creatures such as ourselves. They have come to embrace something called multilevel selection theory: the idea that life can be represented as a hierarchy of entities nested together in larger entities, like Russian dolls. As the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘genes, cells, social groups and species can all, in principle, enter into change of this kind’.

But to qualify as a thing on which natural selection can operate - a unit of selection - ‘they must be connected by parent-offspring relations; they must have the capacity to reproduce,’ Godfrey-Smith continues. It’s the requirement for reproduction and leaving parent-offspring lineages (lines of descent) we need to focus on here, because they remain essential in traditional formulations. Without reproduction, fitness is undefined, and heritability seems to make no sense. And without lines of descent, at some level, how can we even conceive of natural selection?

Q. Which of the following, if true, would strongly counter Peter Godfrey-Smith’s observations on natural selection?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

For traditional Darwinian natural selection to work, the entities in question must display some property or ability that can be inherited, and that results in their having more offspring than the competition. For instance, the first creatures with vision, however fuzzy, were presumably better at avoiding predators and finding mates than the sightless members of their population, and had more surviving progeny for that reason. In technical terms, then, selected entities must exist in populations showing heritable variation in fitness, greater fitness resulting in these entities’ differential reproduction.

Even if inherited properties are the result of undirected or ‘random’ mutation, repeating the selection process over generations will incrementally improve on them. This produces complex adaptations such as the vertebrate eye, with its highly sophisticated function. Lightsensitive areas acquired lenses for focusing and means for distinguishing colours step by advantageous step, ultimately producing modern eyes that are clearly for seeing. So even without an overall purpose, evolution, through selection,  creates something that behaves as if it has a goal.

Back in 1979, when Lovelock’s first popular book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, came out, the wider field of evolutionary biology was becoming a very reductionist discipline. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene had been published three years earlier, and it promoted a hardcore gene-centrism insisting that we look at genes as the fundamental units of selection - that is, the thing upon which natural selection operates. His claim was that genes were the reproducing entities par excellence, because they are the only things that always replicate and produce enduring lineages. Replication here means making fairly exact one-to-one copies, as genes (and asexual organisms such as bacteria) do. Reproduction, though, is a more inclusive and forgiving term - it’s what we humans and other sexual species do, when we make offspring that resemble both parents, but each only imperfectly. Still, this sloppy process exhibits heritable variation in fitness, and so supports evolution by natural selection.

In recent decades, many theorists have come to understand that there can be reproducing or even replicating entities evolving by natural selection at several levels of the biological hierarchy - not just in the domains of replicating genes and bacteria, or even sexual creatures such as ourselves. They have come to embrace something called multilevel selection theory: the idea that life can be represented as a hierarchy of entities nested together in larger entities, like Russian dolls. As the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘genes, cells, social groups and species can all, in principle, enter into change of this kind’.

But to qualify as a thing on which natural selection can operate - a unit of selection - ‘they must be connected by parent-offspring relations; they must have the capacity to reproduce,’ Godfrey-Smith continues. It’s the requirement for reproduction and leaving parent-offspring lineages (lines of descent) we need to focus on here, because they remain essential in traditional formulations. Without reproduction, fitness is undefined, and heritability seems to make no sense. And without lines of descent, at some level, how can we even conceive of natural selection?

Q. Which of the following is definitely true according to the multi-level selection theory?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

For traditional Darwinian natural selection to work, the entities in question must display some property or ability that can be inherited, and that results in their having more offspring than the competition. For instance, the first creatures with vision, however fuzzy, were presumably better at avoiding predators and finding mates than the sightless members of their population, and had more surviving progeny for that reason. In technical terms, then, selected entities must exist in populations showing heritable variation in fitness, greater fitness resulting in these entities’ differential reproduction.

Even if inherited properties are the result of undirected or ‘random’ mutation, repeating the selection process over generations will incrementally improve on them. This produces complex adaptations such as the vertebrate eye, with its highly sophisticated function. Lightsensitive areas acquired lenses for focusing and means for distinguishing colours step by advantageous step, ultimately producing modern eyes that are clearly for seeing. So even without an overall purpose, evolution, through selection,  creates something that behaves as if it has a goal.

Back in 1979, when Lovelock’s first popular book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, came out, the wider field of evolutionary biology was becoming a very reductionist discipline. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene had been published three years earlier, and it promoted a hardcore gene-centrism insisting that we look at genes as the fundamental units of selection - that is, the thing upon which natural selection operates. His claim was that genes were the reproducing entities par excellence, because they are the only things that always replicate and produce enduring lineages. Replication here means making fairly exact one-to-one copies, as genes (and asexual organisms such as bacteria) do. Reproduction, though, is a more inclusive and forgiving term - it’s what we humans and other sexual species do, when we make offspring that resemble both parents, but each only imperfectly. Still, this sloppy process exhibits heritable variation in fitness, and so supports evolution by natural selection.

In recent decades, many theorists have come to understand that there can be reproducing or even replicating entities evolving by natural selection at several levels of the biological hierarchy - not just in the domains of replicating genes and bacteria, or even sexual creatures such as ourselves. They have come to embrace something called multilevel selection theory: the idea that life can be represented as a hierarchy of entities nested together in larger entities, like Russian dolls. As the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘genes, cells, social groups and species can all, in principle, enter into change of this kind’.

But to qualify as a thing on which natural selection can operate - a unit of selection - ‘they must be connected by parent-offspring relations; they must have the capacity to reproduce,’ Godfrey-Smith continues. It’s the requirement for reproduction and leaving parent-offspring lineages (lines of descent) we need to focus on here, because they remain essential in traditional formulations. Without reproduction, fitness is undefined, and heritability seems to make no sense. And without lines of descent, at some level, how can we even conceive of natural selection?

Q. “So even without an overall purpose, evolution, through selection,  creates something that behaves as if it has a goal” Which of the following best captures the essence of this statement?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Mythology remains important in Western culture. Take, for instance, the role model of the hero, of contemporary revolutionaries, martyrs and dictators. These ideal figures exemplify models of human achievement. Similarly, notions of salvation, progress and ethics are so constitutive of our notions of reality that they’re often communicated through the format of mythology. There’s a surfeit of cultural products that fulfil the function of myth whereby characters and stories give us the means to understand the world we live in. Through superhero comic books, to the obscure immanence of modern art, from visions of paradisiacal vacations, to computer games and the self-mythologising of social media production, we seek a higher ground beyond the banal and the profane. We’ve even replaced the effervescent experience of sacred rites...in our engagement with art, drugs, cinema, rock music and all-night dance parties. Lastly, individuals have developed their own ways to create self-narratives that include mythical transitions in pilgrimages or personal quests to their ancestral lands. Likewise, some seek inner spaces wherein faith and meaning can be transformed into experience.

To prepare for our exploration of contemporary mythology, we can look back at civilisations and consider the function of the stories they told. The story of the flood, for example, recurs in early urban societies, marking a crisis in human-divine relations and man’s experience of gradual self-reliance and separation from nature. Whereas during the Axial Age (800-200 BCE), faith developed in an environment of early trade economies, at which time we observe a concern with individual conscience, morality, compassion and a tendency to look within. According to Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2005), these Axial myths of interiority indicate that people felt they no longer shared the same nature as the gods, and that the supreme reality had become impossibly difficult to access. These myths were a response to the loss of previous notions of social order, cosmology and human good, and represented ways to portray these social transformations in macrocosmic stories, and were reflections of how people tried to make sense of their rapidly changing world.

What constitutes a mythology? It’s an organised canon of beliefs that explains the state of the world. It also delivers an origin story - such as the Hindu Laws of Manu or the Biblical creation story - that creates a setting for how we experience the world. In fact, for Eliade, all myths provided an explanation of the world by virtue of giving an account of where things came from. If all mythologies are origin stories in this sense, what are the origin stories suggested by psychology? Two original elements of human nature are explained in its lore: the story of personhood - that is, what it means to be an individual and have an identity - and, secondly, the story of our physical constitution in the brain. 

Contemporary psychology is a form of mythology insofar as it is an attempt to succor our need to believe in stories that provide a sense of value and signification in the context of secular modernity. The ways in which psychology is used - for example in experiments or self-help literature or personality tests or brain scans - are means of providing rituals to enact the myths of personhood and materialism.

Q. Which of the following statements about mythology cannot be inferred from the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Mythology remains important in Western culture. Take, for instance, the role model of the hero, of contemporary revolutionaries, martyrs and dictators. These ideal figures exemplify models of human achievement. Similarly, notions of salvation, progress and ethics are so constitutive of our notions of reality that they’re often communicated through the format of mythology. There’s a surfeit of cultural products that fulfil the function of myth whereby characters and stories give us the means to understand the world we live in. Through superhero comic books, to the obscure immanence of modern art, from visions of paradisiacal vacations, to computer games and the self-mythologising of social media production, we seek a higher ground beyond the banal and the profane. We’ve even replaced the effervescent experience of sacred rites...in our engagement with art, drugs, cinema, rock music and all-night dance parties. Lastly, individuals have developed their own ways to create self-narratives that include mythical transitions in pilgrimages or personal quests to their ancestral lands. Likewise, some seek inner spaces wherein faith and meaning can be transformed into experience.

To prepare for our exploration of contemporary mythology, we can look back at civilisations and consider the function of the stories they told. The story of the flood, for example, recurs in early urban societies, marking a crisis in human-divine relations and man’s experience of gradual self-reliance and separation from nature. Whereas during the Axial Age (800-200 BCE), faith developed in an environment of early trade economies, at which time we observe a concern with individual conscience, morality, compassion and a tendency to look within. According to Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2005), these Axial myths of interiority indicate that people felt they no longer shared the same nature as the gods, and that the supreme reality had become impossibly difficult to access. These myths were a response to the loss of previous notions of social order, cosmology and human good, and represented ways to portray these social transformations in macrocosmic stories, and were reflections of how people tried to make sense of their rapidly changing world.

What constitutes a mythology? It’s an organised canon of beliefs that explains the state of the world. It also delivers an origin story - such as the Hindu Laws of Manu or the Biblical creation story - that creates a setting for how we experience the world. In fact, for Eliade, all myths provided an explanation of the world by virtue of giving an account of where things came from. If all mythologies are origin stories in this sense, what are the origin stories suggested by psychology? Two original elements of human nature are explained in its lore: the story of personhood - that is, what it means to be an individual and have an identity - and, secondly, the story of our physical constitution in the brain. 

Contemporary psychology is a form of mythology insofar as it is an attempt to succor our need to believe in stories that provide a sense of value and signification in the context of secular modernity. The ways in which psychology is used - for example in experiments or self-help literature or personality tests or brain scans - are means of providing rituals to enact the myths of personhood and materialism.

Q. The author cites the examples of the story of the flood and myth of interiority to drive home the point that

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Mythology remains important in Western culture. Take, for instance, the role model of the hero, of contemporary revolutionaries, martyrs and dictators. These ideal figures exemplify models of human achievement. Similarly, notions of salvation, progress and ethics are so constitutive of our notions of reality that they’re often communicated through the format of mythology. There’s a surfeit of cultural products that fulfil the function of myth whereby characters and stories give us the means to understand the world we live in. Through superhero comic books, to the obscure immanence of modern art, from visions of paradisiacal vacations, to computer games and the self-mythologising of social media production, we seek a higher ground beyond the banal and the profane. We’ve even replaced the effervescent experience of sacred rites...in our engagement with art, drugs, cinema, rock music and all-night dance parties. Lastly, individuals have developed their own ways to create self-narratives that include mythical transitions in pilgrimages or personal quests to their ancestral lands. Likewise, some seek inner spaces wherein faith and meaning can be transformed into experience.

To prepare for our exploration of contemporary mythology, we can look back at civilisations and consider the function of the stories they told. The story of the flood, for example, recurs in early urban societies, marking a crisis in human-divine relations and man’s experience of gradual self-reliance and separation from nature. Whereas during the Axial Age (800-200 BCE), faith developed in an environment of early trade economies, at which time we observe a concern with individual conscience, morality, compassion and a tendency to look within. According to Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2005), these Axial myths of interiority indicate that people felt they no longer shared the same nature as the gods, and that the supreme reality had become impossibly difficult to access. These myths were a response to the loss of previous notions of social order, cosmology and human good, and represented ways to portray these social transformations in macrocosmic stories, and were reflections of how people tried to make sense of their rapidly changing world.

What constitutes a mythology? It’s an organised canon of beliefs that explains the state of the world. It also delivers an origin story - such as the Hindu Laws of Manu or the Biblical creation story - that creates a setting for how we experience the world. In fact, for Eliade, all myths provided an explanation of the world by virtue of giving an account of where things came from. If all mythologies are origin stories in this sense, what are the origin stories suggested by psychology? Two original elements of human nature are explained in its lore: the story of personhood - that is, what it means to be an individual and have an identity - and, secondly, the story of our physical constitution in the brain. 

Contemporary psychology is a form of mythology insofar as it is an attempt to succor our need to believe in stories that provide a sense of value and signification in the context of secular modernity. The ways in which psychology is used - for example in experiments or self-help literature or personality tests or brain scans - are means of providing rituals to enact the myths of personhood and materialism.

Q. Why does the author refer to contemporary psychology as a form of mythology?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Mythology remains important in Western culture. Take, for instance, the role model of the hero, of contemporary revolutionaries, martyrs and dictators. These ideal figures exemplify models of human achievement. Similarly, notions of salvation, progress and ethics are so constitutive of our notions of reality that they’re often communicated through the format of mythology. There’s a surfeit of cultural products that fulfil the function of myth whereby characters and stories give us the means to understand the world we live in. Through superhero comic books, to the obscure immanence of modern art, from visions of paradisiacal vacations, to computer games and the self-mythologising of social media production, we seek a higher ground beyond the banal and the profane. We’ve even replaced the effervescent experience of sacred rites...in our engagement with art, drugs, cinema, rock music and all-night dance parties. Lastly, individuals have developed their own ways to create self-narratives that include mythical transitions in pilgrimages or personal quests to their ancestral lands. Likewise, some seek inner spaces wherein faith and meaning can be transformed into experience.

To prepare for our exploration of contemporary mythology, we can look back at civilisations and consider the function of the stories they told. The story of the flood, for example, recurs in early urban societies, marking a crisis in human-divine relations and man’s experience of gradual self-reliance and separation from nature. Whereas during the Axial Age (800-200 BCE), faith developed in an environment of early trade economies, at which time we observe a concern with individual conscience, morality, compassion and a tendency to look within. According to Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2005), these Axial myths of interiority indicate that people felt they no longer shared the same nature as the gods, and that the supreme reality had become impossibly difficult to access. These myths were a response to the loss of previous notions of social order, cosmology and human good, and represented ways to portray these social transformations in macrocosmic stories, and were reflections of how people tried to make sense of their rapidly changing world.

What constitutes a mythology? It’s an organised canon of beliefs that explains the state of the world. It also delivers an origin story - such as the Hindu Laws of Manu or the Biblical creation story - that creates a setting for how we experience the world. In fact, for Eliade, all myths provided an explanation of the world by virtue of giving an account of where things came from. If all mythologies are origin stories in this sense, what are the origin stories suggested by psychology? Two original elements of human nature are explained in its lore: the story of personhood - that is, what it means to be an individual and have an identity - and, secondly, the story of our physical constitution in the brain. 

Contemporary psychology is a form of mythology insofar as it is an attempt to succor our need to believe in stories that provide a sense of value and signification in the context of secular modernity. The ways in which psychology is used - for example in experiments or self-help literature or personality tests or brain scans - are means of providing rituals to enact the myths of personhood and materialism.

Q. Which of the following statements about human behaviour cannot be inferred from the first paragraph?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Mythology remains important in Western culture. Take, for instance, the role model of the hero, of contemporary revolutionaries, martyrs and dictators. These ideal figures exemplify models of human achievement. Similarly, notions of salvation, progress and ethics are so constitutive of our notions of reality that they’re often communicated through the format of mythology. There’s a surfeit of cultural products that fulfil the function of myth whereby characters and stories give us the means to understand the world we live in. Through superhero comic books, to the obscure immanence of modern art, from visions of paradisiacal vacations, to computer games and the self-mythologising of social media production, we seek a higher ground beyond the banal and the profane. We’ve even replaced the effervescent experience of sacred rites...in our engagement with art, drugs, cinema, rock music and all-night dance parties. Lastly, individuals have developed their own ways to create self-narratives that include mythical transitions in pilgrimages or personal quests to their ancestral lands. Likewise, some seek inner spaces wherein faith and meaning can be transformed into experience.

To prepare for our exploration of contemporary mythology, we can look back at civilisations and consider the function of the stories they told. The story of the flood, for example, recurs in early urban societies, marking a crisis in human-divine relations and man’s experience of gradual self-reliance and separation from nature. Whereas during the Axial Age (800-200 BCE), faith developed in an environment of early trade economies, at which time we observe a concern with individual conscience, morality, compassion and a tendency to look within. According to Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2005), these Axial myths of interiority indicate that people felt they no longer shared the same nature as the gods, and that the supreme reality had become impossibly difficult to access. These myths were a response to the loss of previous notions of social order, cosmology and human good, and represented ways to portray these social transformations in macrocosmic stories, and were reflections of how people tried to make sense of their rapidly changing world.

What constitutes a mythology? It’s an organised canon of beliefs that explains the state of the world. It also delivers an origin story - such as the Hindu Laws of Manu or the Biblical creation story - that creates a setting for how we experience the world. In fact, for Eliade, all myths provided an explanation of the world by virtue of giving an account of where things came from. If all mythologies are origin stories in this sense, what are the origin stories suggested by psychology? Two original elements of human nature are explained in its lore: the story of personhood - that is, what it means to be an individual and have an identity - and, secondly, the story of our physical constitution in the brain. 

Contemporary psychology is a form of mythology insofar as it is an attempt to succor our need to believe in stories that provide a sense of value and signification in the context of secular modernity. The ways in which psychology is used - for example in experiments or self-help literature or personality tests or brain scans - are means of providing rituals to enact the myths of personhood and materialism.

Q. The author cites the examples of psychological experiments, self-help literature, brain scans and personality tests because

The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the author’s position.

Auctions use the principle of scarcity, whereby we overvalue things that we think might run out. Auction items are scarce in that they are unique (only one person can have them), and scarce in time (after the bids are finished, you’ve lost your chance). Think how many shop sales successfully rely on scarcity heuristics such as “Last day of sale!”, or “Only 2 left in stock!”, and you’ll get a feel for how powerful this persuasion principle can be. The other principle used by auctions is that of “social proof”. We all tend to take the lead from other people; if everybody does something, or says something, most of us join in before we think about what we really should do. Auctions put you in intimate contact with other people who are all providing social proof that the sale item is important and valuable.

DIRECTIONS for the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence as your answer:

1. And, to say that someone is or is not intelligent has never been merely a comment on their mental faculties.
2. But the notion that intelligence could determine one’s station in life was already much older.
3. The idea that intelligence could be quantified, like blood pressure or shoe size, was barely a century old when I took the test that would decide my place in the world.
4. It is always also a judgment on what they are permitted to do. 

DIRECTIONS for the question: The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence as your answer:

1. Now, tech giants like Facebook and Twitter are actively copying Clubhouse.
2. Its growth is undeniable thanks to figures as disparate as Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk and, Trump consigliere Roger Stone — not to mention regular people craving conversation after nearly a year of lockdown.
3. Now, with more than two million users and the app on the precipice of the mainstream, Clubhouse has become a flashpoint in the broader culture wars around censorship, online harassment, and the far-reaching powers of Big Tech.
4. They are doling out the new talking features for their billions of users, giving a preview of what the future of online life is likely to look like.

DIRECTIONS for the question: Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out.

1. The band consists of vocalist Anthony Kiedis, bassist Flea, drummer Chad Smith, and guitarist John Frusciante.
2. Their music incorporates elements of alternative rock, funk, punk rock and psychedelic rock.
3. Alternative rock is a category of rock music that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1970s and became widely popular in the 1990s.
4. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are an American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1983, and with over 80 million records sold worldwide, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are one of the best-selling bands of all time.
5. They have won six Grammy Awards, and in 2012 were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In order to boost the overall production, the use of pesticides in commercial farming is something that has become a necessity. But the overuse of pesticides has had a negative impact on overall ecology of the area. One, pesticides leads to the killing of bees and butterflies. The bees and butterflies among others are pollinators and are needed in perpetuating plant cycles and evolution. Secondly, the overuse of pesticides gives rise to mutant pests, which develop resistance to pesticides and continue to breed.
From the passage above, it can be inferred that:
1. The use of pesticides does more harm than good in the overall scheme of things and there should be a rethink whether pesticides should be used.
2. The use of pesticides needs to be limited to those chemicals which do not impact bees and butterflies so that these can flourish.
3. The use of pesticides needs to be managed in such a way that no one specie is targeted and no one specie assumes a dominant position in any particular crop cycles.
4. The use of pesticides needs to be limited to the ones that do not cause any mutation and do not lead to the creation of super-pests.

Large fiscal deficits do not cause an increase in inflation. If this was the case, the countries with the highest amount of fiscal deficits would also have the maximum inflation. In a statistical study, wherein the fiscal deficit figures for different countries were standardized and made comparable to each other, no standardized co-relation between fiscal deficit and inflation was found.
Considering the above statements to be true, which of the following can be inferred?
1. Countries with large fiscal deficits tend to control inflation.
2. Accurate comparisons of fiscal deficits of countries cannot be made.
3. A reduction in fiscal deficit does not necessarily lead to a reduction in inflation.
4. Countries with high inflation figures never have similarly large fiscal deficits.

There are 7 oil wells which are connected as shown in the below diagram. The oil wells act only as storage and do not produce any oil by themselves. The whole distribution of oil starts from A as per the directions shown. Each of B, C, D, E and F oil wells have a limited capacity and the extra oil that flows into the oil well through the inflow pipes is distributed equally into all the outflow pipes. The maximum capacity of each oil pipe is 8 million litres. The maximum capacity of each oil well is marked in the diagram. The difference of the maximum capacity of a pipe and the oil that flows in that pipe is called the slack of that pipe. The pipes that are connected to A have an initial slack value of zero.

Q. Find the amount of oil that flow in the D-G pipeline.

There are 7 oil wells which are connected as shown in the below diagram. The oil wells act only as storage and do not produce any oil by themselves. The whole distribution of oil starts from A as per the directions shown. Each of B, C, D, E and F oil wells have a limited capacity and the extra oil that flows into the oil well through the inflow pipes is distributed equally into all the outflow pipes. The maximum capacity of each oil pipe is 8 million litres. The maximum capacity of each oil well is marked in the diagram. The difference of the maximum capacity of a pipe and the oil that flows in that pipe is called the slack of that pipe. The pipes that are connected to A have an initial slack value of zero.

Q. Find the slack in the F-G pipeline.

There are 7 oil wells which are connected as shown in the below diagram. The oil wells act only as storage and do not produce any oil by themselves. The whole distribution of oil starts from A as per the directions shown. Each of B, C, D, E and F oil wells have a limited capacity and the extra oil that flows into the oil well through the inflow pipes is distributed equally into all the outflow pipes. The maximum capacity of each oil pipe is 8 million litres. The maximum capacity of each oil well is marked in the diagram. The difference of the maximum capacity of a pipe and the oil that flows in that pipe is called the slack of that pipe. The pipes that are connected to A have an initial slack value of zero.

Q. If the oil well G distributes all the oil that flows into it to 20 oil reservoirs, then what is the value of the oil that flows into each oil reservoir from G.

There are 7 oil wells which are connected as shown in the below diagram. The oil wells act only as storage and do not produce any oil by themselves. The whole distribution of oil starts from A as per the directions shown. Each of B, C, D, E and F oil wells have a limited capacity and the extra oil that flows into the oil well through the inflow pipes is distributed equally into all the outflow pipes. The maximum capacity of each oil pipe is 8 million litres. The maximum capacity of each oil well is marked in the diagram. The difference of the maximum capacity of a pipe and the oil that flows in that pipe is called the slack of that pipe. The pipes that are connected to A have an initial slack value of zero.

Q. The pipe C-D has a leakage problem and hence is closed. Find the slack in the D-G pipe in this situation.

A merchant can buy goods at the rate of Rs. 20 per good. The particular good is part of an overall collection and the value is linked to the number of items that are already on the market. So, the merchant sells the first good for Rs. 2, second one for Rs. 4, third for Rs. 6…and so on. If he wants to make an overall profit of at least 40%, what is the minimum number of goods he should sell?

Read the below information carefully and answer the following questions.

There are 100 students in a class. Each of the students has to opt for one or more of the three specializations among Finance, Operations and Marketing. The number of students who opted for Marketing is more than the number of students who opted for Finance which is more than the number of students who opted for Operations which is more than the number of students who opted for exactly two of the three specializations which is more than the number of students who opted for all three specializations. At least one student opted for all three specializations.

Q. What is the minimum number of students who opted for Marketing?

Read the below information carefully and answer the following questions.

There are 100 students in a class. Each of the students has to opt for one or more of the three specializations among Finance, Operations and Marketing. The number of students who opted for Marketing is more than the number of students who opted for Finance which is more than the number of students who opted for Operations which is more than the number of students who opted for exactly two of the three specializations which is more than the number of students who opted for all three specializations. At least one student opted for all three specializations.

Q. What is the maximum number of students who opted for only Finance?

Read the below information carefully and answer the following questions.

There are 100 students in a class. Each of the students has to opt for one or more of the three specializations among Finance, Operations and Marketing. The number of students who opted for Marketing is more than the number of students who opted for Finance which is more than the number of students who opted for Operations which is more than the number of students who opted for exactly two of the three specializations which is more than the number of students who opted for all three specializations. At least one student opted for all three specializations.

Q. What is the maximum number of students who opted for Finance and Operations but not Marketing?

Consider 4 players A,B,C,D are playing a carrom match. The carrom match has 9 white, 9 black and 1 red coin. A,C are teammates and B,D are teammates. A round has four turns and a round is said to be completed when all the four players have completed their turns. The following is known about the rules of the carrom match.

• A and C choose white colour for their team and A takes the first shot, followed by B,C,D respectively.
• When a player pockets a coin of his chosen colour, he gets another chance in his turn.This continues until he does not pocket any coin, or when he pockets a coin of the opponents colour, which signals the end of his turn. The next player then starts his turn.
• Any player who pockets the red coin, which is worth 5 points, should follow with pocketing a coin of his colour. If he pockets a coin of the opposite colour after pocketing the red, the red is awarded to the opposite team. If the player does not pocket any coin after pocketing the red, the red coin is placed back on to the board.
• When there is only one coin of black or white and a red coin left on the board, the black/white coin should not be pocketed. Instead, the red coin is to be pocketed. If by mistake the lone coin is pocketed, it is to be placed back in the centre.
• The game ends when one of the teams pockets all their coins. The points are calculated as follows.

No of points = (No of coins of opposite team left)*2 + points from pocketing red coin. The team with the most points wins.

Q. Consider the case when 6 White coins have been pocketed at the end of the first round. (All players have had one turn each). What is the maximum number of coins that D could have pocketed in the first round, if the game does not end in the first round ?

Consider 4 players A,B,C,D are playing a carrom match. The carrom match has 9 white, 9 black and 1 red coin. A,C are teammates and B,D are teammates. A round has four turns and a round is said to be completed when all the four players have completed their turns. The following is known about the rules of the carrom match.

• A and C choose white colour for their team and A takes the first shot, followed by B,C,D respectively.
• When a player pockets a coin of his chosen colour, he gets another chance in his turn.This continues until he does not pocket any coin, or when he pockets a coin of the opponents colour, which signals the end of his turn. The next player then starts his turn.
• Any player who pockets the red coin, which is worth 5 points, should follow with pocketing a coin of his colour. If he pockets a coin of the opposite colour after pocketing the red, the red is awarded to the opposite team. If the player does not pocket any coin after pocketing the red, the red coin is placed back on to the board.
• When there is only one coin of black or white and a red coin left on the board, the black/white coin should not be pocketed. Instead, the red coin is to be pocketed. If by mistake the lone coin is pocketed, it is to be placed back in the centre.
• The game ends when one of the teams pockets all their coins. The points are calculated as follows.

No of points = (No of coins of opposite team left)*2 + points from pocketing red coin. The team with the most points wins.

Q. If a white coin is the last coin to be pocketed in the game but Black wins and  k is the difference between the points of white team and black team, find the number of possible values for k?

Consider 4 players A,B,C,D are playing a carrom match. The carrom match has 9 white, 9 black and 1 red coin. A,C are teammates and B,D are teammates. A round has four turns and a round is said to be completed when all the four players have completed their turns. The following is known about the rules of the carrom match.

• A and C choose white colour for their team and A takes the first shot, followed by B,C,D respectively.
• When a player pockets a coin of his chosen colour, he gets another chance in his turn.This continues until he does not pocket any coin, or when he pockets a coin of the opponents colour, which signals the end of his turn. The next player then starts his turn.
• Any player who pockets the red coin, which is worth 5 points, should follow with pocketing a coin of his colour. If he pockets a coin of the opposite colour after pocketing the red, the red is awarded to the opposite team. If the player does not pocket any coin after pocketing the red, the red coin is placed back on to the board.
• When there is only one coin of black or white and a red coin left on the board, the black/white coin should not be pocketed. Instead, the red coin is to be pocketed. If by mistake the lone coin is pocketed, it is to be placed back in the centre.
• The game ends when one of the teams pockets all their coins. The points are calculated as follows.

No of points = (No of coins of opposite team left)*2 + points from pocketing red coin. The team with the most points wins.

Q. Find the sum of all possible points that a team can score.

5 friends- Jack, Kiara, Liam, Mike and Nico went for a quiz competition and had to appear for an MCQ test, which was the first round for elimination. The test was fairly simple. It had just four questions and each question had 3 options- A, B and C. The five friends sat down in a continuous line, one behind the other, all facing the same direction. Except for the  person sitting in front among these 5 friends, all the others copied at least one answer from the person sitting immediately in front of him. Furthermore, for each of the pairs of friends sitting continuously, exactly one answer was same.

We are also given some additional facts-

1. Exactly two friends marked the answer as option B for Q1 and neither of the two were sitting at the first or the fifth position.
2. The person sitting in the second position, who was not Liam, marked the answer as option B for Q3, which he copied.
3. Jack, who was sitting immediately in front of Liam, marked the answer as option C for exactly two questions, while Nico marked the answer as option C only for Q1.
4. The person sitting in the last position, who was not Liam, marked the answer as option B for Q2 and Mike, who was not in the last position, did not mark the answer to Q3 as option B.
5. Each of the four friends who copied the answer did so for a different question and each friend marked the answer as option A for at least one question, as option B for at least one question and as option C for at least one question.
6. The person sitting in the middle marked the answer to Q2 as option C, which he did not copy.
7. The answers of two persons sitting one behind another are the same only if the person sitting at the back copied the answer.

Q. What was the answer marked by the person sitting in the last position for Q4?

5 friends- Jack, Kiara, Liam, Mike and Nico went for a quiz competition and had to appear for an MCQ test, which was the first round for elimination. The test was fairly simple. It had just four questions and each question had 3 options- A, B and C. The five friends sat down in a continuous line, one behind the other, all facing the same direction. Except for the  person sitting in front among these 5 friends, all the others copied at least one answer from the person sitting immediately in front of him. Furthermore, for each of the pairs of friends sitting continuously, exactly one answer was same.

We are also given some additional facts-

1. Exactly two friends marked the answer as option B for Q1 and neither of the two were sitting at the first or the fifth position.
2. The person sitting in the second position, who was not Liam, marked the answer as option B for Q3, which he copied.
3. Jack, who was sitting immediately in front of Liam, marked the answer as option C for exactly two questions, while Nico marked the answer as option C only for Q1.
4. The person sitting in the last position, who was not Liam, marked the answer as option B for Q2 and Mike, who was not in the last position, did not mark the answer to Q3 as option B.
5. Each of the four friends who copied the answer did so for a different question and each friend marked the answer as option A for at least one question, as option B for at least one question and as option C for at least one question.
6. The person sitting in the middle marked the answer to Q2 as option C, which he did not copy.
7. The answers of two persons sitting one behind another are the same only if the person sitting at the back copied the answer.

Q. Which Question number did Kiara copy from her friend?

5 friends- Jack, Kiara, Liam, Mike and Nico went for a quiz competition and had to appear for an MCQ test, which was the first round for elimination. The test was fairly simple. It had just four questions and each question had 3 options- A, B and C. The five friends sat down in a continuous line, one behind the other, all facing the same direction. Except for the  person sitting in front among these 5 friends, all the others copied at least one answer from the person sitting immediately in front of him. Furthermore, for each of the pairs of friends sitting continuously, exactly one answer was same.

We are also given some additional facts-

1. Exactly two friends marked the answer as option B for Q1 and neither of the two were sitting at the first or the fifth position.
2. The person sitting in the second position, who was not Liam, marked the answer as option B for Q3, which he copied.
3. Jack, who was sitting immediately in front of Liam, marked the answer as option C for exactly two questions, while Nico marked the answer as option C only for Q1.
4. The person sitting in the last position, who was not Liam, marked the answer as option B for Q2 and Mike, who was not in the last position, did not mark the answer to Q3 as option B.
5. Each of the four friends who copied the answer did so for a different question and each friend marked the answer as option A for at least one question, as option B for at least one question and as option C for at least one question.
6. The person sitting in the middle marked the answer to Q2 as option C, which he did not copy.
7. The answers of two persons sitting one behind another are the same only if the person sitting at the back copied the answer.

Q. For how many questions did Liam and the friend sitting in the first position mark the same answer?

5 friends- Jack, Kiara, Liam, Mike and Nico went for a quiz competition and had to appear for an MCQ test, which was the first round for elimination. The test was fairly simple. It had just four questions and each question had 3 options- A, B and C. The five friends sat down in a continuous line, one behind the other, all facing the same direction. Except for the  person sitting in front among these 5 friends, all the others copied at least one answer from the person sitting immediately in front of him. Furthermore, for each of the pairs of friends sitting continuously, exactly one answer was same.

We are also given some additional facts-

1. Exactly two friends marked the answer as option B for Q1 and neither of the two were sitting at the first or the fifth position.
2. The person sitting in the second position, who was not Liam, marked the answer as option B for Q3, which he copied.
3. Jack, who was sitting immediately in front of Liam, marked the answer as option C for exactly two questions, while Nico marked the answer as option C only for Q1.
4. The person sitting in the last position, who was not Liam, marked the answer as option B for Q2 and Mike, who was not in the last position, did not mark the answer to Q3 as option B.
5. Each of the four friends who copied the answer did so for a different question and each friend marked the answer as option A for at least one question, as option B for at least one question and as option C for at least one question.
6. The person sitting in the middle marked the answer to Q2 as option C, which he did not copy.
7. The answers of two persons sitting one behind another are the same only if the person sitting at the back copied the answer.

Q. For all the responses combined for the four questions, which option was the least chosen one among the three?

Six friends- Aman, Billu, Dinesh, Ekansh, Ganesh and Hritesh went for a trip together across 5 different cities- Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi and Bangalore in that order. Each of the six friends made certain expenses in each of the five cities . It is known that the total amount remaining with each of the six friends before visiting Delhi was the same. The following graph shows the amount of money spent (in thousands ) in each city by the six friends:

Note : All values are either multiples of 5 or 10 (in thousands )

Q. Which friend had the least amount with him before the start of the tour?

Six friends- Aman, Billu, Dinesh, Ekansh, Ganesh and Hritesh went for a trip together across 5 different cities- Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi and Bangalore in that order. Each of the six friends made certain expenses in each of the five cities . It is known that the total amount remaining with each of the six friends before visiting Delhi was the same. The following graph shows the amount of money spent (in thousands ) in each city by the six friends:

Note : All values are either multiples of 5 or 10 (in thousands )

Q. Which friend had the highest amount left with him after the tour to Bangalore?

Six friends- Aman, Billu, Dinesh, Ekansh, Ganesh and Hritesh went for a trip together across 5 different cities- Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi and Bangalore in that order. Each of the six friends made certain expenses in each of the five cities . It is known that the total amount remaining with each of the six friends before visiting Delhi was the same. The following graph shows the amount of money spent (in thousands ) in each city by the six friends:

Note : All values are either multiples of 5 or 10 (in thousands )

Q. If each of the friends spent at least 50% of the amount (in all the trips including Bangalore) they initially had before the start of the tour,  what is the maximum amount of money with any friend before the beginning of Mumbai trip?

Six friends- Aman, Billu, Dinesh, Ekansh, Ganesh and Hritesh went for a trip together across 5 different cities- Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi and Bangalore in that order. Each of the six friends made certain expenses in each of the five cities . It is known that the total amount remaining with each of the six friends before visiting Delhi was the same. The following graph shows the amount of money spent (in thousands ) in each city by the six friends:

Note : All values are either multiples of 5 or 10 (in thousands )

Q. If Ganesh was left with Rs. 30,000 at the end of the entire trip, what is the amount of money left with Billu after his trip to Mumbai?

Directions: The following state-wise demographic information is available for the different states in North-East India. This demographic findings is conducted every 5 years, and the latest one was conducted this year in 2016.

Sex Ratio is defined as the number of females per 1000 males.
Birth Rate is the number of live births per 1000 population in a year
Literacy Rate is the percentage of the population who have the ability to read and write.
Each of these figures have been rounded off to the nearest integer.

The Government of India wants to track all these parameters and note key areas where the states have improved in the past 5 years. A higher sex ratio, higher literacy rate, and lower birth rate across this period is what the Government of India wants from these states.

How many of these states saw an increase in the sex ratio figure by more than 3% during the 2011-2016 period?

A classroom of 40 students and 1 teacher has an average weight of 48kgs. When the teacher left, the average weight drops by 1.25%. 2 more students join the class and the average weight further drops by 0.4 kgs. What is the average weight (in Kgs) of the 2 new students?

Shyam bought fresh grapes which have 80% concentration of water. He stored them for few days such that the quantity of water drops down by 60% of the original quantity in the grapes. He then mixed these dried grapes with fresh grapes in the ratio of 5:8 by weight. What is the approximate percentage of water in the resulting mixture?

Find the product of all possible real values of x satisfying

|x + 5|x - 7|| + |6x + 7| x - 7|| = 79

If f(x² - x) = x⁴ - 2x³ + 3x² - 2x - 3, find the value of

f(f(6))/f(5)

How many obtuse-angled isosceles triangles with integer sides are possible with a semiperimeter of 21 units?

A square field ABCD of side 10metres has a grass cover all over its area. 2 cows have been tied at A and D such that they can never touch each other apart from at only one point. They complete all the grass in their reach. A third cow is then tied at B with a rope of the exact same length as the other two. What is the total area of the grass cover left in the reach of this cow(in m²m)?

A large solid cube of steel of side 1 metre is molten and recast into a number of smaller cubes of side 5cm or 10cm. If it is known that the number of 5cm cubes was at least double the number of 10cm cubes, what is the minimum percentage increase in the total surface area in this process?

What is the ratio of the areas of a square and a regular hexagon with an equal perimeter?

Find the number of integer values of x ( x<100) satisfying the following:

The cost price of 10 shirts and 5 trousers together is Rs. 10,000, A shopkeeper sells shirts at a profit of 15% and trousers at a loss of 10% and his overall gain is Rs. 275. Find the cost price of a shirt.

The total cost of 10 knives, 14 scissors and 15 blades is Rs. 799. The total cost of 20 knives, 25 scissors and 13 blades is Rs. 1110. What would be the total cost of 10 knives, 20 scissors and 49 blades?

If log 360 = a, log 300 = b find the value of log 432 in terms of a and b

If 8 < α^b < 64, find the number of ordered pairs (a,b) such that both are natural numbers.

What is the remainder when 45⁵⁰ is divided by 13?

If the HCF of two natural numbers is 10 and their LCM is 1000, find the number of possible pair of numbers satisfying this criterion.

A toothpaste manufacturer sells toothpaste to a wholesaler at a price such that the manufacturer has a profit of 10%. The wholesaler sells the toothpaste to a retailer such that the profit earned is 20% of the cost price of manufacturing it. The retailer sells the toothpaste to customers at mentioned MRP and gets 20% profit from the sales. If the customer had to pay Rs 312 for one tube of toothpaste, what will be the profit earned by the wholesaler by selling 5 toothpaste tubes to the retailer?

Sonali bought eggs at Rs 90 a dozen. She kept few eggs to herself and sold the remaining eggs such that the profit she made was 33 1/3 ​% of the money she spent to buy all the eggs. At what markup % did she sell the remaining eggs if she kept 1/3​ of the eggs for herself?

How many terms are common in the two series:
2, 11, 20, 29, 38, ...., 9002
-1, 9, 19, 29, 39, ...., 10009

An escalator is moving up. Rohit and his girlfriend walk up the moving escalator. Rohit has a walking speed one and half times that of his girlfriend. Rohit reaches the top after taking 40 steps, while his girlfriend does so after taking 30 steps. If the escalator is switched off, how many steps would Rohit take to walk up to the top?

A man invested Rs. 80000 in a bond which gives 10% p.a interest compounded half yearly. If the annual rate of interest is increased by 20% at the end of every half year. What will be the interest earned (in Rs.) for one and a half years?

A work is done by three persons A, B and C. A alone takes 9 minutes to manufacture a single bolt, while B and C working together take 6 minutes to manufacture a single bolt. If the entire task requires manufacturing of 30 such bolts, and all three work together, then how many minutes does the trio need to work for?