CAT Mock Test- 5 - CAT

Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. 

With our climate-impacted world now highly prone to fires, extreme storms and sea-level rise, nuclear energy is touted as a possible replacement for the burning of fossil fuels for energy - the leading cause of climate change. Nuclear power can demonstrably reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Yet scientific evidence and recent catastrophes call into question whether nuclear power could function safely in our warming world. Wild weather, fires, rising sea levels, earthquakes and warming water temperatures all increase the risk of nuclear accidents, while the lack of safe, long-term storage for radioactive waste remains a persistent danger.

The Santa Susana Field Laboratory property has had a long history of contaminated soil and groundwater. Indeed, a 2006 advisory panel compiled a report suggesting that workers at the lab, as well as residents living nearby, had unusually high exposure to radiation and industrial chemicals that are linked to an increased incidence of some cancers. Discovery of the pollution prompted California’s DTSC in 2010 to order cleanup of the site by its current owner - Boeing - with assistance from the US Department of Energy and NASA. But the required cleanup has been hampered by Boeing’s legal fight to perform a less rigorous cleaning.

Like the Santa Susana Field Lab, Chernobyl remains largely unremediated since its meltdown in 1986. With each passing year, dead plant material accumulates and temperatures rise, making it especially prone to fires in the era of climate change. Radiation releases from contaminated soils and forests can be carried thousands of kilometres away to human population centres, according to experts.

Kate Brown, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019), and Tim Mousseau, an evolutionary biologist at the University of South Carolina, also have grave concerns about forest fires. ‘Records show that there have been fires in the Chernobyl zone that raised the radiation levels by seven to 10 times since 1990,’ Brown says. Further north, melting glaciers contain ‘radioactive fallout from global nuclear testing and nuclear accidents at levels 10 times higher than elsewhere’. As ice melts, radioactive runoff flows into the ocean, is absorbed into the atmosphere, and falls as acid rain. ‘With fires and melting ice, we are basically paying back a debt of radioactive debris incurred during the frenzied production of nuclear byproducts during the 20th century,’ Brown concludes. 

Flooding is another symptom of our warming world that could lead to nuclear disaster. Many nuclear plants are built on coastlines where seawater is easily used as a coolant. Sea-level rise, shoreline erosion, coastal storms and heat waves - all potentially catastrophic phenomena associated with climate change - are expected to get more frequent as the Earth continues to warm, threatening greater damage to coastal nuclear power plants. ‘Mere absence of greenhouse gas emissions is not sufficient to assess nuclear power as a mitigation for climate change,’ conclude Natalie Kopytko and John Perkins in their paper ‘Climate Change, Nuclear Power, and the Adaptation-Mitigation Dilemma’ (2011) in Energy Policy.

Proponents of nuclear power say that the reactors’ relative reliability and capacity make this a much clearer choice than other non-fossil-fuel sources of energy, such as wind and solar, which are sometimes brought offline by fluctuations in natural resource availability. Yet no one denies that older nuclear plants, with an aged infrastructure often surpassing expected lifetimes, are extremely inefficient and run a higher risk of disaster.
Heidi Hutner & Erica Cirino
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Q. What was the conclusion based on the research by the MIT ?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions.

Country music has often been misrepresented to the world. Early on, it was deemed ‘hillbilly music’ by the very recording industry producing it, stereotypically linking it to a supposedly degenerate and backwards culture. We can see this image echoed on the front page of Variety in 1926, where the music critic Abel Green first defines the audience: ‘The “hill-billy” is a North Carolina or Tennessee and adjacent mountaineer type of illiterate white whose creed and allegiance are to the Bible … and the phonograph.’ Then the music got its lashing when Green described it as ‘the sing-song, nasal-twanging vocalising of a Vernon Dalhart or a Carson Robison … reciting the banal lyrics of a Prisoner’s Song or The Death of Floyd Collins …’

These kinds of negative projections of the people who have made country music, and have listened to it, linger even unto today. The stereotype is that they all harbour conservative political and social beliefs, setting them as sexist, racist, jingoistic and fundamentalist Christian by nature. But this image is a lie. For, right from the start, country music spoke up with a progressive voice.

One early example of this is from Blind Alfred Reed, who crafted How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live? (1929). The song takes on the unjust practices of groups in power, such as in the lines: ‘preachers preach for gold and not for souls’ and ‘Officers kill without a cause.’ It presents the entirety of the working class as being victimised at the very dawn of the Great Depression. But Reed also wrote the religious song There’ll Be No Distinction There (1929), which illustrated an egalitarian afterlife in the lines: ‘We’ll all sit together in the same kind of pews, / The whites and the coloured folks, the gentiles and the Jews.’ But Reed was not alone in expressing sympathy for the working class or in calling out for a more equitable society: others from this early era - such as Uncle Dave Macon, Fiddlin’ John Carson and Henry Whitter - expressed similar sentiments, just as Johnny Cash, Steve Earle and John Rich have done in later decades.

Country music has also spoken out on women’s issues, such as in Loretta Lynn’s hit The Pill (1975). The song celebrates freedom from pregnancy, with the narrator noting how her husband has always been carefree and unfaithful while she was tied down with ‘a couple [babies] in my arms’ and another one on the way. Lynn’s message here is clear - she despises this kind of unequitable relationship, as she bluntly states in her autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter (1976): ‘Well, shoot, I don’t believe in double standards, where men can get away with things that women can’t.’ In the country-music market, this song stands out as an unabashed and rather radical call for sexual liberation and biological control, challenging the man’s past sexual prerogative and presenting a situation where the woman may also enjoy a variety of sexual liaisons without the social/economic restrictions that come with pregnancy, childbirth and childcare. Lynn rejoices both in the song and in her own overall personal belief that the contraceptive pill will allow women greater control of their own lives.

Q. Which of the following adds the least depth to the author’s argument?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions.

Country music has often been misrepresented to the world. Early on, it was deemed ‘hillbilly music’ by the very recording industry producing it, stereotypically linking it to a supposedly degenerate and backwards culture. We can see this image echoed on the front page of Variety in 1926, where the music critic Abel Green first defines the audience: ‘The “hill-billy” is a North Carolina or Tennessee and adjacent mountaineer type of illiterate white whose creed and allegiance are to the Bible … and the phonograph.’ Then the music got its lashing when Green described it as ‘the sing-song, nasal-twanging vocalising of a Vernon Dalhart or a Carson Robison … reciting the banal lyrics of a Prisoner’s Song or The Death of Floyd Collins …’

These kinds of negative projections of the people who have made country music, and have listened to it, linger even unto today. The stereotype is that they all harbour conservative political and social beliefs, setting them as sexist, racist, jingoistic and fundamentalist Christian by nature. But this image is a lie. For, right from the start, country music spoke up with a progressive voice.

One early example of this is from Blind Alfred Reed, who crafted How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live? (1929). The song takes on the unjust practices of groups in power, such as in the lines: ‘preachers preach for gold and not for souls’ and ‘Officers kill without a cause.’ It presents the entirety of the working class as being victimised at the very dawn of the Great Depression. But Reed also wrote the religious song There’ll Be No Distinction There (1929), which illustrated an egalitarian afterlife in the lines: ‘We’ll all sit together in the same kind of pews, / The whites and the coloured folks, the gentiles and the Jews.’ But Reed was not alone in expressing sympathy for the working class or in calling out for a more equitable society: others from this early era - such as Uncle Dave Macon, Fiddlin’ John Carson and Henry Whitter - expressed similar sentiments, just as Johnny Cash, Steve Earle and John Rich have done in later decades.

Country music has also spoken out on women’s issues, such as in Loretta Lynn’s hit The Pill (1975). The song celebrates freedom from pregnancy, with the narrator noting how her husband has always been carefree and unfaithful while she was tied down with ‘a couple [babies] in my arms’ and another one on the way. Lynn’s message here is clear - she despises this kind of unequitable relationship, as she bluntly states in her autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter (1976): ‘Well, shoot, I don’t believe in double standards, where men can get away with things that women can’t.’ In the country-music market, this song stands out as an unabashed and rather radical call for sexual liberation and biological control, challenging the man’s past sexual prerogative and presenting a situation where the woman may also enjoy a variety of sexual liaisons without the social/economic restrictions that come with pregnancy, childbirth and childcare. Lynn rejoices both in the song and in her own overall personal belief that the contraceptive pill will allow women greater control of their own lives.

Q. The passage makes all the following claims EXCEPT:

1. “Hill-billy” was considered a derogatory word.
2. Country music was more progressive than it was perceived to be.
3. The audience of country music was diverse.

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions.

Country music has often been misrepresented to the world. Early on, it was deemed ‘hillbilly music’ by the very recording industry producing it, stereotypically linking it to a supposedly degenerate and backwards culture. We can see this image echoed on the front page of Variety in 1926, where the music critic Abel Green first defines the audience: ‘The “hill-billy” is a North Carolina or Tennessee and adjacent mountaineer type of illiterate white whose creed and allegiance are to the Bible … and the phonograph.’ Then the music got its lashing when Green described it as ‘the sing-song, nasal-twanging vocalising of a Vernon Dalhart or a Carson Robison … reciting the banal lyrics of a Prisoner’s Song or The Death of Floyd Collins …’

These kinds of negative projections of the people who have made country music, and have listened to it, linger even unto today. The stereotype is that they all harbour conservative political and social beliefs, setting them as sexist, racist, jingoistic and fundamentalist Christian by nature. But this image is a lie. For, right from the start, country music spoke up with a progressive voice.

One early example of this is from Blind Alfred Reed, who crafted How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live? (1929). The song takes on the unjust practices of groups in power, such as in the lines: ‘preachers preach for gold and not for souls’ and ‘Officers kill without a cause.’ It presents the entirety of the working class as being victimised at the very dawn of the Great Depression. But Reed also wrote the religious song There’ll Be No Distinction There (1929), which illustrated an egalitarian afterlife in the lines: ‘We’ll all sit together in the same kind of pews, / The whites and the coloured folks, the gentiles and the Jews.’ But Reed was not alone in expressing sympathy for the working class or in calling out for a more equitable society: others from this early era - such as Uncle Dave Macon, Fiddlin’ John Carson and Henry Whitter - expressed similar sentiments, just as Johnny Cash, Steve Earle and John Rich have done in later decades.

Country music has also spoken out on women’s issues, such as in Loretta Lynn’s hit The Pill (1975). The song celebrates freedom from pregnancy, with the narrator noting how her husband has always been carefree and unfaithful while she was tied down with ‘a couple [babies] in my arms’ and another one on the way. Lynn’s message here is clear - she despises this kind of unequitable relationship, as she bluntly states in her autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter (1976): ‘Well, shoot, I don’t believe in double standards, where men can get away with things that women can’t.’ In the country-music market, this song stands out as an unabashed and rather radical call for sexual liberation and biological control, challenging the man’s past sexual prerogative and presenting a situation where the woman may also enjoy a variety of sexual liaisons without the social/economic restrictions that come with pregnancy, childbirth and childcare. Lynn rejoices both in the song and in her own overall personal belief that the contraceptive pill will allow women greater control of their own lives.

Q. What is the author is trying to do by citing the example of Loretta Lynn?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions.

Country music has often been misrepresented to the world. Early on, it was deemed ‘hillbilly music’ by the very recording industry producing it, stereotypically linking it to a supposedly degenerate and backwards culture. We can see this image echoed on the front page of Variety in 1926, where the music critic Abel Green first defines the audience: ‘The “hill-billy” is a North Carolina or Tennessee and adjacent mountaineer type of illiterate white whose creed and allegiance are to the Bible … and the phonograph.’ Then the music got its lashing when Green described it as ‘the sing-song, nasal-twanging vocalising of a Vernon Dalhart or a Carson Robison … reciting the banal lyrics of a Prisoner’s Song or The Death of Floyd Collins …’

These kinds of negative projections of the people who have made country music, and have listened to it, linger even unto today. The stereotype is that they all harbour conservative political and social beliefs, setting them as sexist, racist, jingoistic and fundamentalist Christian by nature. But this image is a lie. For, right from the start, country music spoke up with a progressive voice.

One early example of this is from Blind Alfred Reed, who crafted How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live? (1929). The song takes on the unjust practices of groups in power, such as in the lines: ‘preachers preach for gold and not for souls’ and ‘Officers kill without a cause.’ It presents the entirety of the working class as being victimised at the very dawn of the Great Depression. But Reed also wrote the religious song There’ll Be No Distinction There (1929), which illustrated an egalitarian afterlife in the lines: ‘We’ll all sit together in the same kind of pews, / The whites and the coloured folks, the gentiles and the Jews.’ But Reed was not alone in expressing sympathy for the working class or in calling out for a more equitable society: others from this early era - such as Uncle Dave Macon, Fiddlin’ John Carson and Henry Whitter - expressed similar sentiments, just as Johnny Cash, Steve Earle and John Rich have done in later decades.

Country music has also spoken out on women’s issues, such as in Loretta Lynn’s hit The Pill (1975). The song celebrates freedom from pregnancy, with the narrator noting how her husband has always been carefree and unfaithful while she was tied down with ‘a couple [babies] in my arms’ and another one on the way. Lynn’s message here is clear - she despises this kind of unequitable relationship, as she bluntly states in her autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter (1976): ‘Well, shoot, I don’t believe in double standards, where men can get away with things that women can’t.’ In the country-music market, this song stands out as an unabashed and rather radical call for sexual liberation and biological control, challenging the man’s past sexual prerogative and presenting a situation where the woman may also enjoy a variety of sexual liaisons without the social/economic restrictions that come with pregnancy, childbirth and childcare. Lynn rejoices both in the song and in her own overall personal belief that the contraceptive pill will allow women greater control of their own lives.

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

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions.

Dancing is a human universal, but why? It is present in human cultures old and new; central to those with the longest continuous histories; evident in the earliest visual art on rock walls from France to South Africa to the Americas, and enfolded in the DNA of every infant who invents movements in joyful response to rhythm and song, long before she can walk, talk or think of herself as an ‘I’. Dancing remains a vital, generative practice around the globe into the present in urban neighbourhoods, on concert stages, as part of healing rituals and in political revolutions. Despite efforts waged by Christian European and American colonists across six continents over 500 years to eradicate indigenous dance traditions and to marginalise dancing within their own societies, dancing continues wherever humans reside. Any answer to the question of why humans dance must explain its ubiquity and tenacity. In so doing, any answer will challenge Western notions of human being that privilege mind over body as the seat of agency and identity.

Current explanations for why humans dance tend to follow one of two approaches. The first, seen in psychological and some philosophical circles, begins with a human as an individual person who chooses to dance (or not) for entertainment, exercise, artistic expression or some other personal reason. Such approaches assume that dance is one activity among others offering benefits to an individual that may be desirable, but not necessary, for human well being. Alternatively, a raft of sociological and anthropological explanations focus on community, asserting that dancing is one of the first means by which the earliest humans solidified strong social bonds irrespective of bloodlines. In these accounts, dancing is eventually replaced by more rational and effective means of social bonding that the dancing itself makes possible, such as language, morality and religion. While the first type of reasoning struggles to explain why so many humans choose to dance, the second struggles to explain why humans continue to dance. What is missing from these accounts?

What if humans are the primates whose capacity to dance (shared by some birds and mammals) was the signature strategy enabling the evolution of a distinctively large and interconnected brain, empathic heart and ecological adaptability? And what if dancing plays this role for humans not just in prehistoric times, but continuing into the present? What if humans are creatures who evolved to dance as the enabling condition of their own bodily becoming?

Recent evidence for such a thesis is gathering across scientific and scholarly disciplines. Time and again, researchers are discovering the vital role played by bodily movement not only in the evolution of the human species, but in the present-day social and psychological development of healthy individuals.

Q. What is the primary purpose of the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions.

Dancing is a human universal, but why? It is present in human cultures old and new; central to those with the longest continuous histories; evident in the earliest visual art on rock walls from France to South Africa to the Americas, and enfolded in the DNA of every infant who invents movements in joyful response to rhythm and song, long before she can walk, talk or think of herself as an ‘I’. Dancing remains a vital, generative practice around the globe into the present in urban neighbourhoods, on concert stages, as part of healing rituals and in political revolutions. Despite efforts waged by Christian European and American colonists across six continents over 500 years to eradicate indigenous dance traditions and to marginalise dancing within their own societies, dancing continues wherever humans reside. Any answer to the question of why humans dance must explain its ubiquity and tenacity. In so doing, any answer will challenge Western notions of human being that privilege mind over body as the seat of agency and identity.

Current explanations for why humans dance tend to follow one of two approaches. The first, seen in psychological and some philosophical circles, begins with a human as an individual person who chooses to dance (or not) for entertainment, exercise, artistic expression or some other personal reason. Such approaches assume that dance is one activity among others offering benefits to an individual that may be desirable, but not necessary, for human well being. Alternatively, a raft of sociological and anthropological explanations focus on community, asserting that dancing is one of the first means by which the earliest humans solidified strong social bonds irrespective of bloodlines. In these accounts, dancing is eventually replaced by more rational and effective means of social bonding that the dancing itself makes possible, such as language, morality and religion. While the first type of reasoning struggles to explain why so many humans choose to dance, the second struggles to explain why humans continue to dance. What is missing from these accounts?

What if humans are the primates whose capacity to dance (shared by some birds and mammals) was the signature strategy enabling the evolution of a distinctively large and interconnected brain, empathic heart and ecological adaptability? And what if dancing plays this role for humans not just in prehistoric times, but continuing into the present? What if humans are creatures who evolved to dance as the enabling condition of their own bodily becoming?

Recent evidence for such a thesis is gathering across scientific and scholarly disciplines. Time and again, researchers are discovering the vital role played by bodily movement not only in the evolution of the human species, but in the present-day social and psychological development of healthy individuals.

Q. What is the author most likely to discuss after the final paragraph?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions.

Dancing is a human universal, but why? It is present in human cultures old and new; central to those with the longest continuous histories; evident in the earliest visual art on rock walls from France to South Africa to the Americas, and enfolded in the DNA of every infant who invents movements in joyful response to rhythm and song, long before she can walk, talk or think of herself as an ‘I’. Dancing remains a vital, generative practice around the globe into the present in urban neighbourhoods, on concert stages, as part of healing rituals and in political revolutions. Despite efforts waged by Christian European and American colonists across six continents over 500 years to eradicate indigenous dance traditions and to marginalise dancing within their own societies, dancing continues wherever humans reside. Any answer to the question of why humans dance must explain its ubiquity and tenacity. In so doing, any answer will challenge Western notions of human being that privilege mind over body as the seat of agency and identity.

Current explanations for why humans dance tend to follow one of two approaches. The first, seen in psychological and some philosophical circles, begins with a human as an individual person who chooses to dance (or not) for entertainment, exercise, artistic expression or some other personal reason. Such approaches assume that dance is one activity among others offering benefits to an individual that may be desirable, but not necessary, for human well being. Alternatively, a raft of sociological and anthropological explanations focus on community, asserting that dancing is one of the first means by which the earliest humans solidified strong social bonds irrespective of bloodlines. In these accounts, dancing is eventually replaced by more rational and effective means of social bonding that the dancing itself makes possible, such as language, morality and religion. While the first type of reasoning struggles to explain why so many humans choose to dance, the second struggles to explain why humans continue to dance. What is missing from these accounts?

What if humans are the primates whose capacity to dance (shared by some birds and mammals) was the signature strategy enabling the evolution of a distinctively large and interconnected brain, empathic heart and ecological adaptability? And what if dancing plays this role for humans not just in prehistoric times, but continuing into the present? What if humans are creatures who evolved to dance as the enabling condition of their own bodily becoming?

Recent evidence for such a thesis is gathering across scientific and scholarly disciplines. Time and again, researchers are discovering the vital role played by bodily movement not only in the evolution of the human species, but in the present-day social and psychological development of healthy individuals.

Q. Which of the following is the author most likely to support?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions.

Dancing is a human universal, but why? It is present in human cultures old and new; central to those with the longest continuous histories; evident in the earliest visual art on rock walls from France to South Africa to the Americas, and enfolded in the DNA of every infant who invents movements in joyful response to rhythm and song, long before she can walk, talk or think of herself as an ‘I’. Dancing remains a vital, generative practice around the globe into the present in urban neighbourhoods, on concert stages, as part of healing rituals and in political revolutions. Despite efforts waged by Christian European and American colonists across six continents over 500 years to eradicate indigenous dance traditions and to marginalise dancing within their own societies, dancing continues wherever humans reside. Any answer to the question of why humans dance must explain its ubiquity and tenacity. In so doing, any answer will challenge Western notions of human being that privilege mind over body as the seat of agency and identity.

Current explanations for why humans dance tend to follow one of two approaches. The first, seen in psychological and some philosophical circles, begins with a human as an individual person who chooses to dance (or not) for entertainment, exercise, artistic expression or some other personal reason. Such approaches assume that dance is one activity among others offering benefits to an individual that may be desirable, but not necessary, for human well being. Alternatively, a raft of sociological and anthropological explanations focus on community, asserting that dancing is one of the first means by which the earliest humans solidified strong social bonds irrespective of bloodlines. In these accounts, dancing is eventually replaced by more rational and effective means of social bonding that the dancing itself makes possible, such as language, morality and religion. While the first type of reasoning struggles to explain why so many humans choose to dance, the second struggles to explain why humans continue to dance. What is missing from these accounts?

What if humans are the primates whose capacity to dance (shared by some birds and mammals) was the signature strategy enabling the evolution of a distinctively large and interconnected brain, empathic heart and ecological adaptability? And what if dancing plays this role for humans not just in prehistoric times, but continuing into the present? What if humans are creatures who evolved to dance as the enabling condition of their own bodily becoming?

Recent evidence for such a thesis is gathering across scientific and scholarly disciplines. Time and again, researchers are discovering the vital role played by bodily movement not only in the evolution of the human species, but in the present-day social and psychological development of healthy individuals.

Q. What is the main idea behind the second paragraph?

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

The whole civilized world is mourning the death of Asa Gray with a depth of feeling and appreciation perhaps never accorded before to a scholar and man of science. To the editors of this Journal, the loss at the very outset of their labors is serious indeed. They lose a wise and sympathetic adviser of great experience and mature judgment to whom they could always have turned with entire freedom and in perfect confidence; and they lose a contributor whose vast stores of knowledge and graceful pen might, it was reasonable to hope, have long enriched their columns.

The career of Asa Gray is interesting from many points of view. It is the story of the life of a man born in humble circumstances, without the advantages of early education, without inherited genius—for there is no trace in his yeoman ancestry of any germ of intellectual greatness—who succeeded in gaining through native intelligence, industry, and force of character, a position in the very front rank of the scientific men of his age. Among the naturalists who, since Linnæus, have devoted their lives to the description and classification of plants, four or five stand out prominently in the character and importance of their work. In this little group, Asa Gray has fairly won for himself a lasting position. But he was something more than a mere systematist. He showed himself capable of drawing broad philosophical conclusions from the dry facts he collected and elaborated with such untiring industry and zeal. This power of comprehensive generalization he showed in his paper upon the “Characters of Certain New Species of Plants Collected in Japan” by Charles Wright, published nearly thirty years ago. Here he first pointed out the extraordinary similarity between the Floras of Eastern North America and Japan, and then explained the peculiar distribution of plants through the northern hemisphere by tracing their direct descent through geological eras from ancestors which flourished in the arctic regions down to the latest tertiary period. This paper was Professor Gray’s most remarkable and interesting contribution to science. It at once raised him to high rank among philosophical naturalists and drew the attention of the whole scientific world to the Cambridge botanist.

As a Gray did not devote himself to abstract science alone; he wrote as successfully for the student as for the professional naturalist. His long list of educational works have no equals in accuracy and in beauty and compactness of expression. They have had a remarkable influence upon the study of botany in this country during the half century which has elapsed since the first of the series appeared.

Botany, moreover, did not satisfy that wonderful intellect, which hard work only stimulated but did not weary, and one of Asa Gray’s chief claims to distinction is the prominent and commanding position he took in the great intellectual and scientific struggle of modern times, in which, almost alone and single-handed he bore in America the brunt of the disbelief in the Darwinian theory.
But the crowning labor of Asa Gray’s life was the preparation of a descriptive work upon the plants of North America. This great undertaking occupied his attention and much of his time during the last forty years of his life. Less fortunate than his greatest botanical contemporary, George Bentham, who turned from the last page of corrected proof of his work upon the genera of plants to the bed from which he was never to rise again, Asa Gray’s great work is left unfinished. The two volumes of the “Synoptical Flora of North America” will keep his memory green, however, as long as the human race is interested in the study of plants.

But his botanical writings and his scientific fame are not the most valuable legacy which Asa Gray has left to the American people. More precious to us is the example of his life in this age of grasping materialism. It is a life that teaches how industry and unselfish devotion to learning can attain to the highest distinction and the most enduring fame. Great as were his intellectual gifts, Asa Gray was greatest in the simplicity of his character and in the beauty of his pure and stainless life.

Q. Which of the following can be inferred about Asa Gray?
I: He studied at Cambridge University
II: He was a writer
III: He was an editor
IV: He was a confidant of the editors of the journal from which the article is taken

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

The whole civilized world is mourning the death of Asa Gray with a depth of feeling and appreciation perhaps never accorded before to a scholar and man of science. To the editors of this Journal, the loss at the very outset of their labors is serious indeed. They lose a wise and sympathetic adviser of great experience and mature judgment to whom they could always have turned with entire freedom and in perfect confidence; and they lose a contributor whose vast stores of knowledge and graceful pen might, it was reasonable to hope, have long enriched their columns.

The career of Asa Gray is interesting from many points of view. It is the story of the life of a man born in humble circumstances, without the advantages of early education, without inherited genius—for there is no trace in his yeoman ancestry of any germ of intellectual greatness—who succeeded in gaining through native intelligence, industry, and force of character, a position in the very front rank of the scientific men of his age. Among the naturalists who, since Linnæus, have devoted their lives to the description and classification of plants, four or five stand out prominently in the character and importance of their work. In this little group, Asa Gray has fairly won for himself a lasting position. But he was something more than a mere systematist. He showed himself capable of drawing broad philosophical conclusions from the dry facts he collected and elaborated with such untiring industry and zeal. This power of comprehensive generalization he showed in his paper upon the “Characters of Certain New Species of Plants Collected in Japan” by Charles Wright, published nearly thirty years ago. Here he first pointed out the extraordinary similarity between the Floras of Eastern North America and Japan, and then explained the peculiar distribution of plants through the northern hemisphere by tracing their direct descent through geological eras from ancestors which flourished in the arctic regions down to the latest tertiary period. This paper was Professor Gray’s most remarkable and interesting contribution to science. It at once raised him to high rank among philosophical naturalists and drew the attention of the whole scientific world to the Cambridge botanist.

As a Gray did not devote himself to abstract science alone; he wrote as successfully for the student as for the professional naturalist. His long list of educational works have no equals in accuracy and in beauty and compactness of expression. They have had a remarkable influence upon the study of botany in this country during the half century which has elapsed since the first of the series appeared.

Botany, moreover, did not satisfy that wonderful intellect, which hard work only stimulated but did not weary, and one of Asa Gray’s chief claims to distinction is the prominent and commanding position he took in the great intellectual and scientific struggle of modern times, in which, almost alone and single-handed he bore in America the brunt of the disbelief in the Darwinian theory.
But the crowning labor of Asa Gray’s life was the preparation of a descriptive work upon the plants of North America. This great undertaking occupied his attention and much of his time during the last forty years of his life. Less fortunate than his greatest botanical contemporary, George Bentham, who turned from the last page of corrected proof of his work upon the genera of plants to the bed from which he was never to rise again, Asa Gray’s great work is left unfinished. The two volumes of the “Synoptical Flora of North America” will keep his memory green, however, as long as the human race is interested in the study of plants.

But his botanical writings and his scientific fame are not the most valuable legacy which Asa Gray has left to the American people. More precious to us is the example of his life in this age of grasping materialism. It is a life that teaches how industry and unselfish devotion to learning can attain to the highest distinction and the most enduring fame. Great as were his intellectual gifts, Asa Gray was greatest in the simplicity of his character and in the beauty of his pure and stainless life.

Q. Which of the following is not an aspect of Asa Gray’s written work?

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

The whole civilized world is mourning the death of Asa Gray with a depth of feeling and appreciation perhaps never accorded before to a scholar and man of science. To the editors of this Journal, the loss at the very outset of their labors is serious indeed. They lose a wise and sympathetic adviser of great experience and mature judgment to whom they could always have turned with entire freedom and in perfect confidence; and they lose a contributor whose vast stores of knowledge and graceful pen might, it was reasonable to hope, have long enriched their columns.

The career of Asa Gray is interesting from many points of view. It is the story of the life of a man born in humble circumstances, without the advantages of early education, without inherited genius—for there is no trace in his yeoman ancestry of any germ of intellectual greatness—who succeeded in gaining through native intelligence, industry, and force of character, a position in the very front rank of the scientific men of his age. Among the naturalists who, since Linnæus, have devoted their lives to the description and classification of plants, four or five stand out prominently in the character and importance of their work. In this little group, Asa Gray has fairly won for himself a lasting position. But he was something more than a mere systematist. He showed himself capable of drawing broad philosophical conclusions from the dry facts he collected and elaborated with such untiring industry and zeal. This power of comprehensive generalization he showed in his paper upon the “Characters of Certain New Species of Plants Collected in Japan” by Charles Wright, published nearly thirty years ago. Here he first pointed out the extraordinary similarity between the Floras of Eastern North America and Japan, and then explained the peculiar distribution of plants through the northern hemisphere by tracing their direct descent through geological eras from ancestors which flourished in the arctic regions down to the latest tertiary period. This paper was Professor Gray’s most remarkable and interesting contribution to science. It at once raised him to high rank among philosophical naturalists and drew the attention of the whole scientific world to the Cambridge botanist.

As a Gray did not devote himself to abstract science alone; he wrote as successfully for the student as for the professional naturalist. His long list of educational works have no equals in accuracy and in beauty and compactness of expression. They have had a remarkable influence upon the study of botany in this country during the half century which has elapsed since the first of the series appeared.

Botany, moreover, did not satisfy that wonderful intellect, which hard work only stimulated but did not weary, and one of Asa Gray’s chief claims to distinction is the prominent and commanding position he took in the great intellectual and scientific struggle of modern times, in which, almost alone and single-handed he bore in America the brunt of the disbelief in the Darwinian theory.
But the crowning labor of Asa Gray’s life was the preparation of a descriptive work upon the plants of North America. This great undertaking occupied his attention and much of his time during the last forty years of his life. Less fortunate than his greatest botanical contemporary, George Bentham, who turned from the last page of corrected proof of his work upon the genera of plants to the bed from which he was never to rise again, Asa Gray’s great work is left unfinished. The two volumes of the “Synoptical Flora of North America” will keep his memory green, however, as long as the human race is interested in the study of plants.

But his botanical writings and his scientific fame are not the most valuable legacy which Asa Gray has left to the American people. More precious to us is the example of his life in this age of grasping materialism. It is a life that teaches how industry and unselfish devotion to learning can attain to the highest distinction and the most enduring fame. Great as were his intellectual gifts, Asa Gray was greatest in the simplicity of his character and in the beauty of his pure and stainless life.

Q. According to the passage, what were Gray’s views on Darwin?

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

The whole civilized world is mourning the death of Asa Gray with a depth of feeling and appreciation perhaps never accorded before to a scholar and man of science. To the editors of this Journal, the loss at the very outset of their labors is serious indeed. They lose a wise and sympathetic adviser of great experience and mature judgment to whom they could always have turned with entire freedom and in perfect confidence; and they lose a contributor whose vast stores of knowledge and graceful pen might, it was reasonable to hope, have long enriched their columns.

The career of Asa Gray is interesting from many points of view. It is the story of the life of a man born in humble circumstances, without the advantages of early education, without inherited genius—for there is no trace in his yeoman ancestry of any germ of intellectual greatness—who succeeded in gaining through native intelligence, industry, and force of character, a position in the very front rank of the scientific men of his age. Among the naturalists who, since Linnæus, have devoted their lives to the description and classification of plants, four or five stand out prominently in the character and importance of their work. In this little group, Asa Gray has fairly won for himself a lasting position. But he was something more than a mere systematist. He showed himself capable of drawing broad philosophical conclusions from the dry facts he collected and elaborated with such untiring industry and zeal. This power of comprehensive generalization he showed in his paper upon the “Characters of Certain New Species of Plants Collected in Japan” by Charles Wright, published nearly thirty years ago. Here he first pointed out the extraordinary similarity between the Floras of Eastern North America and Japan, and then explained the peculiar distribution of plants through the northern hemisphere by tracing their direct descent through geological eras from ancestors which flourished in the arctic regions down to the latest tertiary period. This paper was Professor Gray’s most remarkable and interesting contribution to science. It at once raised him to high rank among philosophical naturalists and drew the attention of the whole scientific world to the Cambridge botanist.

As a Gray did not devote himself to abstract science alone; he wrote as successfully for the student as for the professional naturalist. His long list of educational works have no equals in accuracy and in beauty and compactness of expression. They have had a remarkable influence upon the study of botany in this country during the half century which has elapsed since the first of the series appeared.

Botany, moreover, did not satisfy that wonderful intellect, which hard work only stimulated but did not weary, and one of Asa Gray’s chief claims to distinction is the prominent and commanding position he took in the great intellectual and scientific struggle of modern times, in which, almost alone and single-handed he bore in America the brunt of the disbelief in the Darwinian theory.
But the crowning labor of Asa Gray’s life was the preparation of a descriptive work upon the plants of North America. This great undertaking occupied his attention and much of his time during the last forty years of his life. Less fortunate than his greatest botanical contemporary, George Bentham, who turned from the last page of corrected proof of his work upon the genera of plants to the bed from which he was never to rise again, Asa Gray’s great work is left unfinished. The two volumes of the “Synoptical Flora of North America” will keep his memory green, however, as long as the human race is interested in the study of plants.

But his botanical writings and his scientific fame are not the most valuable legacy which Asa Gray has left to the American people. More precious to us is the example of his life in this age of grasping materialism. It is a life that teaches how industry and unselfish devotion to learning can attain to the highest distinction and the most enduring fame. Great as were his intellectual gifts, Asa Gray was greatest in the simplicity of his character and in the beauty of his pure and stainless life.

Q. Which of the following best explains the reason behind the author stating Asa Gray as less fortunate than George Bentham?

Four sentences are given below. These sentences, when rearranged in proper order, form a logical and meaningful paragraph. Rearrange the sentences and enter the correct order as the answer.

1. Wherever the rhythm was most delicate, wherever the emotion was most ecstatic, her art was the most beautiful, and yet, although she sometimes spoke to a little tune, it was never singing, as we sing to-day, never anything but speech.
2. I have always known that there was something I disliked about singing, and I naturally dislike print and paper, but now at last I understand why, for I have found something better.
3. A friend, who was here a few minutes ago, has sat with a beautiful stringed instrument upon her knee, her fingers passing over the strings, and has spoken to me some verses from Shelley’s Skylark and Sir Ector’s lamentation over the dead Launcelot out of the Morte d’Arthur and some of my own poems.
4. I have just heard a poem spoken with so delicate a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect a respect for its meaning, that if I were a wise man and could persuade a few people to learn the art I would never open a book of verses again.

Five sentences are given below. Four of which when arranged in a proper order, form a logical and meaningful paragraph. Identify the sentence that does not belong to the paragraph and enter its number as your answer.

1. With the modern tendency toward specialization, the natural outgrowth of necessity, there is no inherent reason why the bones of a building should not be devised by one man and its fleshly clothing by another, so long as they understand one another, and are in ideal agreement, but there is in general all too little understanding, and a confusion of ideas and aims.
2. Preoccupied as he is with the building's strength, safety, economy; solving new and staggeringly difficult problems with address and daring, he has scant sympathy with such inconsequent matters as the stylistic purity of a façade, or the profile of a moulding.
3. To the designer, on the other hand, the engineer appears in the light of a subordinate to be used for the promotion of his own ends, or an evil to be endured as an interference with those ends.
4. In the field of domestic architecture these dramatic contrasts are less evident, less sharply marked.
5. To the average structural engineer the architectural designer is a mere milliner in stone, informed in those prevailing architectural fashions of which he himself knows little and cares less.

Five sentences are given below labelled as 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Of these, four sentences, when arranged properly, make a meaningful and coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out.

1. Even where the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by side, and the former was not derived in any sense from the latter.
2. To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers.
3. The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation.
4. That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
5. The two were congruent, but neither was subordinate.

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 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 of the four numbers as your answer:

1. Yet, its implications in disrupting traditional power structures are often grossly underestimated.

2. The digital revolution, much like previous revolutions, has been a source of profound economic and social transformation.

3. Historically, revolutions have redefined space for innovation and freedom, creating unforeseen opportunities for decentralization.

4. Conversely, it opens a Pandora's Box of heightened surveillance, control, and societal imbalance, overshadowing its emancipatory potential.