Hey everyone!
Hope you had a good practice session with the last word list.
Today, we bring to you a practice test of one of the important elements of the Verbal Reasoning section - Reading Comprehension.
According to ETS, the Reading Comprehension in GRE "tests your ability to actively engage with the text, ask questions, formulate and evaluate hypotheses and reflect on the relationship of a particular text to other texts and information."
In simpler words, the GRE RC passages tests your ability to comprehend the text in the passage, understanding the stated and implied messages that the author is trying to convey by understanding their thought process and perspective, and arrive at right inferences to answer the supporting questions.
The GRE RC passages are not specific to any genre. They can be from a wide variety of fields - academia, fiction, history, science, non-academia, English literature, and the list goes on. You do not have to have a prior understanding of the subject matter, all the answers lie in the RC itself. All you need is a lot of practice that will develop an understanding of ways to approach an RC.
An important aspect of solving GRE RC passages is vocabulary. So, do not forget to practice your word lists and keep updating your vocabulary journals with all new words that you find.
Let's now practice some RC passages.
Passage - 1
How do you protect the world's precious tropical forests? Environmentalists and concerned governments have a simple answer: Don't cut rain forests down faster than they can regenerate themselves. Intuition welcomes that formula: as with any other naturally renewable source, the depletion rate should strike a fair balance between present and future generations. So let elephants be hunted or blue whales be harpooned only as fast as they breed.
Actually, the formula is too simple. It assumes that, in order to protect the value of a renewable resource for tomorrow's generations as well as for today's, you should exploit it at the rate which sustains it indefinitely. The case of oil shows that I cannot always be right. Suppose that it takes a million years for nature to replace crude oil pumped out of the ground. The 'sustainable' rate at which you should deplete today's stock of one trillion barrels of oil would then be 1 m barrels a year. At the moment, 60 m barrels are being pumped out every day. The proceeds from this 'unsustainable' rate of extraction are being invested in assets that will earn more money over time than 'sustainable' returns on oil could ever achieve. Future generations therefore can be made better off by rates of extraction that at first sight seem unfair to them.
In order to see whether trees should be treated like oil, you need a better way of calculating the right extraction rate than by looking just at the rate at which the resource renews itself. Two other factors to consider are (a) the real rate of interest, and (b) the relationship of the true cost of depleting a resource to the price at which it can be sold.
Start with the simplest case. Suppose that a forest does not renew itself at all, that the cost of felling trees is zero, and that there is no substantial divergence of interest between the foresters and the society to which they are selling their logs. These improbable foresters will not fell and sell all their trees at once, for this will depress tree prices. They will control the flow of logs so that their profit, which in this costless case is determined by the price of cut trees, rises by the rate of interest. If prices rise by more than the interest rate, the forester will benefit by delaying extraction: in real terms the wood will be more valuable in the future than the money it could be sold for now. If the interest rate is 10%, foresters will slow down extraction so that tree prices rise each year by 10% from, say $100 to $110. If the interest rate rises above the rate that wood prices rise, forest owners benefit by extracting more timber, because in real terms the wood is more valuable now than it will be in future. High interest rates therefore encourage faster tree felling.
How does this translate into the real world? The problem for tropical rain forests, as for other endangered species is that their harvesters have their own perceptions of these criteria.
The thing that most affects those perceptions is poverty. For someone who is short of food, money in the next century is worth a lot less than money today. The solution to this problem is the hardest one to provide: wealth. As people get richer, other things being equal, their tendency to exploit nature ruthlessly will fall.
Other things are not equal. Richer folk also have their perceptions of these criteria distorted. Much tree-felling is done by slash-and-burn farmers, or loggers to whom short-term logging concessions have been granted. Their opportunity to cut down trees is temporary, so they will not reap the benefits of a continuously regenerating forest. Illegal logging also pervades most developing countries. Solutions sound obvious, but are difficult: longer-term logging concessions, crack down on illegal forestry.
The next problem is that loggers do not base their calculations on the true costs of depleting rain forests: they ignore environmental costs. Locally, rain forests prevent soil erosion and flooding. Although these ills are true costs of felling timber, they are borne not by loggers but by farmers downstream. Unfortunately, governments are often too weak or too corrupt to charge loggers for their impact on neighboring farmers, and the right charge is in any case difficult to work out.
The benefits of rain forests extend far beyond their home countries. Rain forests support half the world's species, whose medical value alone is inestimable. Rain forests also absorb carbon dioxide, the build up of which is causing the green house effect. Forests are thus a 'global public good'; every country benefits from their existence. How do you make forest-owners sensitive to the cost of removing this global good? The home countries can hardly be expected to shoulder all these costs. If tropical trees are to be extracted at an appropriate rate, therefore, rich countries need to compensate their poor owners for leaving them alone.
1. Rain forests are useful in the following ways except,
a. they have medical value
b. they help maintaining greenery
c. they prevent soil erosion
d. they prevent the outbreak of mosquitoes and related diseases
2. The only practical solution that the author offers is
a. ban the rich log-sellers
b. the rich countries subsidising the poor for restraint in tree-cutting
c. educate the foresters
d. an accurate analysis of tree regeneration in forests
3. According to the author,
a. if the real interest rate is low compared to the profit from trees, a tree cut is worth more than money in the future
b. if the interest rate is lower than profit from trees, a tree uncut is better than money in the bank
c. if trees are deemed a scarce commodity, foresters will cut them down in a hurry to ensure profits
d. higher interest rates encourage foresters to hold back log-cutting
4. The solution offered by the author is
a. in keeping with the theory that precedes it
b. complicated enough not to be practical
c. theoretically "perfect"
d. skewed in favor of the rich
5. The reason why the theory fails is
a. illegal logging
b. corrupt governments
c. poverty
d. granting of short-term concessions
6. The theoretical method of the author's exercise can be summed up as a
a. strength-weakness analysis
b. comparative analysis
c. cost-benefit analysis
d. financial analysis
Passage - 2
The world's aviation industry is growing increasingly worried about crashes, a recent analysis by Boeing forecasts that unless safety improved jet airliners could be falling out of the sky at the rate of one a week by 2010. And calculation takes no account of the former Soviet Union where safety is a sick joke. The current rate is about one aeroplane crash every two weeks, measuring all serious accidents to all types of transport jets.
The problem, outside Russia, is not that flying is becoming more dangerous, merely more frequent. There are now more than 14 m flights a year, and air travel is growing at over 5% a year. Back in 1960 - fewer people flew, but those who did were 20 times more likely to be killed in a crash than today's passengers. Still, the number of so-called hull-loss crashes of commercial aircraft has risen from an average of about 13 a year in the first 24 years of the jet age to around 20 a year in the past ten years.
Crashes in the early days of commercial jets tended to be caused by technical faults, such as metal fatigue in the airframe or engines. Today pilot fatigue seems more likely. Boeing, which builds more than half the world's commercial airliners, is understandably keen to draw attention to what can go wrong besides planes. The company's analysis shows that in over 60% of all accidents in the past ten years the behaviour of the flight crew was "the dominant cause". By that, Boeing means that there may also have been other problems, but that an accident could have been averted if the crew had done their job correctly.
Boeing's safety experts have joined others in the industry to form an international taskforce to try to eliminate one particular kind of air crash known as 'controlled night into terrain', CFIT. This is what happens when the fight crew has the aircraft under control, everything is working normally yet it hits the ground. Although CFIT accounted for just over a third of crashes in the past six years, it caused 53% of the deaths. Lacking a single answer to the problem, the task force hopes simply for a step-by-step improvement in the way a crew works. Boeing has calculated the chances of cumulative crew errors leading to CFIT. There is one chance in 1,000 that the pilot at the controls would be flying at the wrong altitude; one in 100 that the co-pilot could fail to cross check; air, traffic controllers might fail to spot the wrong altitude one in ten times (it is not really their job); and, based on historical data there is a one in two chance that the pilot would ignore the ground-proximity warning system (GPWS), an alarm that sounds when the aircraft is too near the ground (early models were prone to false alarms). The probability of this chain of events all happening at once is one in 2 m flights - about once every two months at current levels of air traffic.
If better training and procedures could halve the chances of the co-pilot failing to cross-check altitude and reduce to one in five the chances of the pilot ignoring the GPWS, the probability of such an accident would fall to one in 10 m - five fold improvement. Boeing's idea for achieving this is to focus on ways of interrupting the chain of events. It amounts to treating what happens on an aircraft flight deck as the next stage in a process that begins with design and manufacture of an airliner and applying the same management techniques, such as aiming for continuous small improvements, throughout.
Not surprisingly, a factor that often crops up when crashes are analysed is the failure of the pilot at the controls to stick to standard fight procedure. But that is not necessarily the pilot's fault: procedures can be cumbersome or illogical, or training inadequate. Or perhaps poor descriptions mean the procedure is misunderstood.
Boeing's statistics offer one insight into how flying procedures work in the air. Its safety team has plotted accident rates for countries against various measurements of culture demised by social anthropologists. Two regions where accidents are more frequent than in America or Europe, and where-pilot deviation from procedure scores highest as a cause of accidents, are Latin America and Asia. These regions also score high on an anthropological scale, known as the Hoffstead power-distance index, which measures the power relationship between two people as perceived by the weaker. Translated to the flight deck, that means that an Asian or a Latin American co-pilot is wonderfully obedient but less likely than his American or European counterpart to tell his boss that he is about to fly into a mountain - until it is too late. It is a high price to pay for deference.
1. A suitable title for the passage would be:
a. Air accidents - pay now and die later
b. Air accidents rate - nightmare scenario in 2010 AD?
c. The anatomy of air crashes and their management
d. Air Crashes - How to prevent them
2. The rate of air accidents would fall to one in 10 m to register a five-fold improvement if better training procedures:
a. could reduce to one in five the changes of pilot ignoring GPWS
b. could reduce by 50% the chances of the co-pilot failing to cross-check altitude
c. could reduce to one in three oversights on the part of the ground crew to check fuel for landing
d. (a) and (b) only
3. Hoffstead power-distance index relates to the role of one of the following in preventing air crashes:
a. pilot
b. co-pilot
c. stewardess
d. flight crew
4. How does Boeing aim to interrupt the chain of events leading to CFIT?
a. Helping the pilots appreciate the need to stick to standard flight procedures
b. Giving flight crew more rest time between two flight duties
c. Training that aims at continuous small improvements throughout - right from the design and manufacture of the aircraft to how pilots ought to behave on the flight deck
d. By improving pilots' concentration through Transcendental Meditation and Yoga
5. All of the following are true except:
a. mental fatigue rather than pilot fatigue accounts for majority of air crashes
b. there is no single answer to the CFIT phenomenon
c. the possibility of chain of events leading to CFIT is one in 2 m flights
d. the problem in aviation industry today is not flying is becoming more dangerous, merely more frequent
Passage - 3
If life exists on Mars, it is most likely to be in the form of bacteria buried deep in the planet's permafrost or lichens growing within rocks, say scientists from NASA. There might even be fossilized Martian algae locked up in ancient lake beds, waiting to be found.
Christopher McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in California told the AAAS that exobiologists, who look for life an other planets, should look for clues among the life forms of the Earth's ultra-cold regions, where conditions are similar to those on Mars.
Lichens, for example, are found within some Antarctic rocks, just beneath the surface where sunlight can still reach them. The rock protects the lichen from cold and absorbs water, providing enough for the lichen's needs, said McKay.
Bacteria have also been found in 3-million-year-old permafrost dug up from Siberia. If there are any bacteria alive on Mars today, they would have had to survive from the time before the planet cooled more than 3 billion years ago. Nevertheless, McKay is optimistic: "It may be possible that bacteria frozen into the permafrost at the Martian South Pole may be viable."
McKay said algae are found in Antarctic lakes with permanently frozen surfaces. Although no lakes are thought to exist on Mars today, they might have existed long ago. If so, the dried-out Martian lake beds may contain the fossilized remains of algae. On Earth, masses of microscopic algae form large, layered structures known as stromatolites, which survive as fossils on lake beds, and the putative Martian algae might have done the same thing, said Jack Farmer, one of McKay's colleagues.
The researchers are compiling a list of promising Martian lake beds to be photographed from spacecraft, said Farmer. Those photographs could help to select sites for lenders that would search for signs of life, past or present. "If we find algae on Mars, I would say the Universe is lousy with algae," McKay said. "Intelligence would be another question."
1. The most primitive forms of life likely to exist on the planet Mars are all the following except:
a. lichen
b. villus and spore
c. bacteria in the permafrost
d. fossilized algae in the dried-up lake beds
2. According to Christopher McKay, for finding life on other planets explorers should look for clues among the earth's ultra cold regions for all the following reasons except:
a. ammonia and methane, necessary for early formation of life of earth, are found on the Martian Surface
b. earths' ultra cold regions are similar to those on Mars
c. lichens are found within the Antarctic rocks in extreme conditions
d. bacteria have been found in the permafrost dug up in Siberia
3. All of the following are true, except:
a. if any bacteria are alive today on Mars, they must have survived from the time before the planet cooled
b. 3-million year-old Siberian permafrost has revealed, digging up, bacteria
c. bacteria frozen into permafrost at the Martian South pole may be viable
d. pace photographs of Martian craters should reveal to explorers signs of life there
Passage - 4
Democracy may have become a standard form of government around the world, but it is one that still leaves many people dissatisfied. Turnouts flag; voters defect from political parties to lobbying groups; extremists flourish. Such revolts, some say, reflect a feeling among voters that their voices go unheard. The average citizen votes only every few years, usually with an infinitesimal influence on the electoral outcome. If enthusiasm for democracy is to be sustained, ways may have to be found to make individuals feel more involved.
In any democracy, politics is likely to be largely a matter of communicating. People with ideas will want to rally voters; voters will want to be heard by politicians; politicians will often want to argue with both camps. Now the technology of communication is undergoing revolutionary change. The Internet, a network of Computers through which anybody with a computer and a modem can address 30m other people almost for free, has opened up vast new possibilities. In time, telephone and cable will provide ways for viewers to send and receive torrents of facts and ideas. Such changes will inevitably affect the nature of political debate. Might they improve, even save, democracy?
The question has been much discussed, mainly in the United States. There, enthusiasts such as Alvin and Heidi Toffler are keen on what they call 'semi-direct democracy'. The Toffler's argue in their most recent book, "Creating a New Civilization", that voters should be allowed to make more policy decisions; they have long been chums of Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House of Representatives, leader of the Republican new right and a fellow techno-enthusiast.
The belief that technology should give ordinary people more of a voice in politics chimes well with the many Americans who are suspicious of a Washington, DC, 'mafia'. It also appeals to some on the moderate left who want voters to take a more thoughtful interest in politics. Last year Al Gore spoke in Buenos Aires of "forging a new Athenian age of democracy". In Britain, Demos, a left-of-centre think-tank with considerable influence over Tony Blair, the Labour Party leader, explored related ideas in two studies published last year.
Others take a more pessimistic view. Jonathan Rauch (who writes for The Economist) argues, in a book called 'Demosclerosis', that interest groups are already a dangerous impediment to good government. Their lobbying activities have been made vastly easier by the telephone, the fax and the computerized database. Time magazine argued recently that, far from listening only to themselves, America's politicians were "too plugged in" to lobbyists.
Liberating or corrupting? The question echoes an old one that a century's experience of universal suffrage has not resolved: Can voters be trusted to take sensible decisions, or are they too malleable and short sighted? There is also a newer issue: who benefits more from new technologies, voters at large or Internet groups?
Those who emphasize the invigorating power of communications are particularly keen to find ways in which the Internet can be used for governments to talk to voters and vice-versa. The provision of public information is a task for which the Internet might have been purpose-built. The American administration has made more than 100,000 documents available on the Internet, says Michael Nelson, in charge of information technology at the White House. Probably all of this material would have been published on paper in pre-internet days. But it has become much easier for, say, American environmentalists to consult the Toxics Release Inventory (which lists some of the nasty air emissions that chemical plants give off), search through it by zip code and pick out the nearest plant.
Unfortunately, most governments are no more enthusiastic about putting information into cyberspace than they are about publishing it in other ways. And, though many more people may be able to read it, information from, say, the European Commission is not necessarily more useful or, indeed, comprehensible simply because it is on the Internet.
For politicians, the Internet offers a new way to talk directly to voters. It has no effective space limits: posting 10,000 words there costs scarcely more than posting 100. Access is more or less open to all. Kim Alexander, of the California Voter Foundation, set up an Internet server before the 1994 Congressional elections on which voters could tap into 300 electronic documents, most of them put together by the candidates. "The media cover candidates only when they say something nasty about their opponents," Ms Alexander complains. In the run-up to the election, these documents were consulted 14,000 times. She is devising an even more elaborate package for the 1996 elections: candidate biographies, press releases, endorsements. She sees the voter as an employer, examining candidates as if they were prospective employees.
California, with more computers and modems than anywhere else on earth, is the perfect testing ground for such projects. But even in California, the average user of online services is white, male, highly educated, well-off and 29 years old: not very different from the minority of Californians who cast votes in elections. If such services are to spread civic awareness, computers and modems will need a wider diffusion. Techniques will also be needed to keep voters interested once the novelty wears off: as newspapers well know, that means good editing - and some spice.
1. Even in a place like California, with more computers and modems than anywhere, if Internet service is to spread civic awareness, all of the following, except one, will be required to make this a reality.
a. A wider diffusion of computers and modems among the segments pf its people
b. Better facilities for people in cyber education
c. Better editing, with some spicy stuff, to keep people involved with the Internet
d. Newer techniques to keep voters interested even after the novelty wears off
2. Among the views highlighting the role of interest groups and lobbyists in denying ordinary people greater say in the governance of the polity, are all of the following except:
a. American politicians do not listen to themselves; instead they are too "plugged in" to interest groups
b. interest groups are a dangerous impediment to good government
c. they influence the print and electronic media in projecting views slanting towards interest groups
d. the lobbying activities of interest groups are facilitated by the telephone, fax and computerized database
3. 'Semi-direct democracy' concept of Alvin and Heidi Toffler argues for:
a. forging a new Athenian age of democracy
b. voters having more powers to legislate on some vital issues
c. voters being allowed to make more policy decisions
d. giving voters powers to recall ineffective House representatives
4. For politicians, Internet is an unexpected boon because of all the following except:
a. it offers a new way to talk to voters
b. it has no effective space limits: posting 10,000 words there costs as little as posting 100
c. it provides simple information such as average voter age, average voter education, professional profiles, etc.
d. access is more or less open to all
5. All of the following are true, except:
a. In California the average, white male, highly educated user of computer on line services, is no different from the minority-of voters
b. Ms Kim Alexander sees the voter as an employer examining candidates
c. According to the writer, information from European Commission is necessarily more useful because it is on the Internet
d. Alvin and Heidi Toffler have published the latest book: 'Creating a New Civilization'
Answers to these RC passages would be published in the next post.
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