SAT , GRE , GMAT - AL-Daily

1. 1
Section 2
Time - 30 minutes
24 Questions
Q1.
Q2.
Q3.
Taken from “Master of many trades” by Robert Twigger
I. Our hunch that it‘s easier to learn when you‘re young isn‘t completely wrong, or
at least it has a real basis in neurology. However, the pessimistic assumption that
learning somehow ‗stops‘ when you leave school or university or hit thirty is at
odds with the evidence. It appears that a great deal depends on the nucleus
basalis, located in the basal forebrain. Among other things, this bit of the brain
produces significant amounts of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that regulates
the rate at which new connections are made between brain cells. This in turn
dictates how readily we form memories of various kinds, and how strongly we
retain them. When the nucleus basalis is ‗switched on‘, acetylcholine flows and
new connections occur. When it is switched off, we make far fewer new
connections.
II. Between birth and the age of ten or eleven, the nucleus basalis is permanently
‗switched on‘. It contains an abundance of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine,
and this means new connections are being made all the time. Typically this
means that a child will be learning almost all the time — if they see or hear
something once they remember it. But as we progress towards the later teenage
years the brain becomes more selective. From research into the way stroke
victims recover lost skills it has been observed that the nucleus basalis only

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switches on when one of three conditions occur: a novel situation, a shock, or
intense focus, maintained through repetition or continuous application.
Q4. A neurotransmitter is:
a. a chemical in the brain
b. a device that measures the rate at which connections are made between brain cells
c. a part of the brain that controls the functioning of the nucleus basalis
d. a process of transmitting information
Q5. The purpose of this passage is to:
a. explain how learning occurs due to chemical activity in the brain
b. show that people can keep learning throughout their lives
c. show that we have no control over our brain‘s ability to learn
d. explain the workings of the nucleus basalis
Taken from “Poetry Isn’t as Useless as a Lot of Poets Say It Is” by Noah Berlatsky
I. Poetry is useless.
II. That's the prevailing sentiment in our culture, as far as I can tell. CEOs and
lawyers rule the world. Policemen protect property and keep the peace and
provide material for television dramas. Athletes and rock stars and movie stars
make tons of money and provide material for gossip columns. But poets? Who
cares? "It is difficult to imagine a world without movies, plays, novels and music,
but a world without poems doesn't have to be imagined," as Newsweek said way
back in 2003, when a large gift to Poetry magazine was supposed to change the
face of poetry but, unsurprisingly, didn't. A 2002 Survey of Public Participation
in the Arts found that about 14 percent of the people in the U.S. read poetry,
which seems generous. To compare poetry to other art/entertainment genres on
Google Trends is to see the obvious. Poetry doesn't move public conversation; its
only use, the thinking goes, is to give some handful of people tenure so they can
spend their days in the ivory tower endlessly recycling their unentertaining
irrelevance.
Q6. In the first paragraph, why does the author mention CEOs, lawyers, policemen,
athletes, rock stars and movie stars?
a. to provide examples of professionals who are more useful to society than poets
b. to show that many professions seem more relevant in our culture than writing poetry
c. to show that poetry is less interesting than most other professions
d. to explain why such few people become poets
Q7. According to the passage, which of the following is true for poetry?
a. it does not attract any readers
b. a world without it is hard to imagine
c. it provides employment for academics
d. people should be discouraged from writing it

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From “Crops, Towns, Governments” by James C.Scott
I. It‘s a good bet a culture is in trouble when its best-known intellectuals start
ransacking the cultural inventory of its ancestors and its contemporary inferiors
for tips on how to live. The malaise is all the more remarkable when the culture in
question is the modern American variant of Enlightenment rationalism and
progress, a creed not known for self-doubt or failures of nerve. The deeper the
trouble, the more we are seen to have lost our way, the further we must go
spatially and temporally to find the cultural models that will help us. In the
stronger versions of this quest, there is either a place – a Shangri-la – or a time, a
Golden Age, that promises to reset our compass to true north. Anthropology and
history implicitly promise to provide such models. Anthropology can show us
radically different and satisfying forms of human affiliation and co-operation that
do not depend on the nuclear family or inherited wealth. History can show that
the social and political arrangements we take for granted are the contingent
result of a unique historical conjuncture.
II. Jared Diamond, ornithologist, evolutionary biologist and geographer, is best
known as the author of Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody
for the Last 13,000 Years, one of the most influential accounts of how most of us
came to live in places with huge concentrations of people, grain and domesticated
animals, and how this helped create the world of massive inequalities and
disparate life chances with which we now live. Diamond‘s was not a simple, self-
congratulatory ‗rise of the West‘ story, telling how some peoples and cultures
showed themselves to be essentially cleverer, braver or more rational than others.
Instead, he demonstrated the importance of impersonal environmental forces:
plants and herd animals amenable to domestication, pathogens, a favorable
climate and geography that aided the rise of early states in the Fertile Crescent
and the Mediterranean. These initial advantages were compounded by interstate
competition in metallurgy for armaments and navigational devices. His argument
was much praised for its bold and original synthesis, and much criticized by
historians and anthropologists for reducing the arc of human history to a handful
of environmental conditions. There was no denying, however, that Diamond‘s
simple quasi-Darwinian view of human selection was ‗good to think with‘.
Q8. According to paragraph 1, what do anthropology and history implicitly promise us?
a. rationalism and progress that will lead to success
b. insights that will help us out of the troubles we currently face
c. new social and political arrangements
d. ideas that lead to self-doubt and failures of nerve
Q9. In the second paragraph, which of the following is not given as a reason for the rise
of the west?
a. plant and herd animals amenable to domestication
b. pathogens
c. clever, braver and more rational people
d. a favorable climate and geography

4. 4
From “Democracy’s Dual Dangers” by David Runciman
http://chronicle.com/article/Democracys-Dual-Dangers/142971/
I. American democracy is going through one of its periodic bouts of self-loathing.
The public disapproves of the performance of all the branches of government,
even the Supreme Court. Approval ratings for Congress are so low it is tempting
to wonder about the sanity of the small number of people who still express
confidence in it. The recent shutdown in Washington provoked a furious round of
critical commentary from academics and pundits across the political spectrum.
There is near unanimity: This is no way to run a government.
II. These recent travails have also provided plenty of material for commentators who
see in every setback evidence of a broader decline. The historian Niall Ferguson
has been predicting the unwinding of American power and influence for more
than a decade. In the last few years, his warnings have gathered pace: Every time
America's politicians lumber into another hole, Ferguson says I told you so. Even
onetime optimists like Thomas Friedman, of The New York Times, are
undergoing a crisis of faith.
III. Yet there is nothing new about this outburst of disgust with the workings of
democracy. Nor is it distinctively American. Europeans (with the possible
exception of Germans) are just as disenchanted with their elected politicians.
Lamenting the failings of democracy is a permanent feature of democratic life,
one that persists through governmental crises and successes alike.
IV. There is no decade from the past century when it is not possible to find an
extended debate among commentators and intellectuals in the democratic West
about the inadequacies of democratic politics. This is not true of only those
decades when Western democracy was clearly on the ropes, like the 1930s, when
it was menaced by fascism, or the 1970s, when it was threatened by inflation and
oil shock. It's also true of the prosperous and relatively stable decades as well. In
the 1920s, Walter Lippmann led the charge, arguing that democratic publics were
far too ill-informed and inattentive to manage their own affairs. In the 1950s,
academics worried about the banality and exhaustion of democratic life. Daniel
Bell took a positive stance with his claims about the end of ideology, but for the
most part democracy was treated as a cumbersome, careless system of
government, in permanent danger of being outwitted by the Soviets.
Q10. According to the passage, which of the following is true of democracy?
a. The public loathes democracy but academics understand its inherent usefulness.
b. Democracy is criticized during difficult times but adored when a society is
prosperous.
c. Democratic societies always criticize and find flaws with their system of government.
d. Americans are more prone to attacking democracy than Europeans.
Q11. What is the author‘s tone in this passage?
a. Defensive
b. Combative
c. Condescending
d. Instructive

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Q12. In the last paragraph, the word ―banality‖ could best be replaced with:
a. Simplicity
b. Staleness
c. Complication
d. Irrelevance
From “Crimes Against Humanities” by Leon Weiseltier
I. The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in society, and in life, is
not a scientific question. Science confers no special authority, it confers no
authority at all, for the attempt to answer a nonscientific question. It is not for
science to say whether science belongs in morality and politics and art. Those are
philosophical matters, and science is not philosophy, even if philosophy has since
its beginnings been receptive to science. Nor does science confer any license to
extend its categories and its methods beyond its own realms, whose contours are
of course a matter of debate. The credibility of physicists and biologists and
economists on the subject of the meaning of life—what used to be called the
ultimate verities, secularly or religiously constructed—cannot be owed to their
work in physics and biology and economics, however distinguished it is. The
extrapolation of larger ideas about life from the procedures and the conclusions
of various sciences is quite common, but it is not in itself justified; and its
justification cannot be made on internally scientific grounds, at least if the
intellectual situation is not to be rigged. Science does come with a worldview, but
there remains the question of whether it can suffice for the entirety of a human
worldview. To have a worldview, Musil once remarked, you must have a view of
the world. That is, of the whole of the world. But the reach of the scientific
standpoint may not be as considerable or as comprehensive as some of its
defenders maintain.
II. None of these strictures about the limitations of science, about its position in
nonscientific or extra-scientific contexts, in any way impugns the integrity or the
legitimacy or the necessity or the beauty of science. Science is a regular source of
awe and betterment. No humanist in his right mind would believe otherwise. No
humanist in his right mind would believe otherwise. Science is plainly owed this
much support, this much reverence. This much—but no more. In recent years,
however, this much has been too little for certain scientists and certain
scientizers, or propagandists for science as a sufficient approach to the natural
universe and the human universe. In a world increasingly organized around the
dazzling new breakthroughs in science and technology, they feel oddly besieged.
III. They claim that science is under attack, and from two sides. The first is the
fundamentalist strain of Christianity, which does indeed deny the truth of certain
proven scientific findings and more generally prefers the subjective gains of
personal rapture to the objective gains of scientific method. Against this line of
attack, even those who are skeptical about the scientizing enterprise must stand
with the scientists, though it is important to point out that the errors of religious
fundamentalism must not be mistaken for the errors of religion. Too many of the
defenders of science, and the noisy ―new atheists,‖ shabbily believe that they can
refute religion by pointing to its more outlandish manifestations. Only a small

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minority of believers in any of the scriptural religions, for example, have ever
taken scripture literally. When they read, most believers, like most nonbelievers,
interpret. When the Bible declares that the world was created in seven days, it
broaches the question of what a day might mean. When the Bible declares that
God has an arm and a nose, it broaches the question of what an arm and a nose
might mean. Since the universe is 13.8 billion years old, a day cannot mean 24
hours, at least not for the intellectually serious believer; and if God exists, which
is for philosophy to determine, this arm and this nose cannot refer to God,
because that would be stupid.
IV. Interpretation is what ensues when a literal meaning conflicts with what is
known to be true from other sources of knowledge. As the ancient rabbis taught,
accept the truth from whoever utters it. Religious people, or many of them, are
not idiots. They have always availed themselves of many sources of knowledge.
They know about philosophical argument and figurative language. Medieval and
modern religious thinking often relied upon the science of its day. Rationalist
currents flourished alongside anti-rationalist currents, and sometimes became
the theological norm. What was Jewish and Christian and Muslim theology
without Aristotle? When a dissonance was experienced, the dissonance was
honestly explored. So science must be defended against nonsense, but not every
disagreement with science, or with the scientific worldview, is nonsense. The
alternative to obscurantism is not that science be all there is.
V. The second line of attack to which the scientizers claim to have fallen victim
comes from the humanities. This is a little startling, since it is the humanities that
are declining in America, not least as a result of the exaggerated glamour of
science. But some scientists and some scientizers feel prickly and self-pitying
about the humanistic insistence that there is more to the world than science can
disclose. It is not enough for them that the humanities recognize and respect the
sciences; they need the humanities to submit to the sciences, and be subsumed by
them. The idea of the autonomy of the humanities, the notion that thought,
action, experience, and art exceed the confines of scientific understanding, fills
them with a profound anxiety. It throws their totalizing mentality into crisis. And
so they respond with a strange mixture of defensiveness and aggression. As
people used to say about the Soviet Union, they expand because they feel
encircled.
Q13. What does the author say about scientists engaged with the ultimate verities?
a. They must be careful when using scientific methods in this pursuit
b. Their credibility to do so must depend on their accomplishments in scientific
endeavors
c. They must do so by extrapolating larger ideas from procedures and conclusions of
science
d. Their work as scientists does not qualify them to make claims about such things
Q14. Which proposition has been considered by certain scientists as an insufficient
approach to the natural universe and the human universe?
a. Progress depends on dazzling new breakthroughs in science and technology
b. Subjective gains of personal rapture are preferable to objective gains of scientific
method

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c. Science is a worthy pursuit but is not suited to certain areas of inquiry
d. Religion is a valid source of knowledge in the absence of scientific proof
Q15. Which of the following represents the author‘s views about religion?
a. Science is under attack from religious groups
b. Scientists‘ denial of religion is simplistic
c. The errors of religion are preferable to the errors of science
d. The errors of science are preferable to the errors of religion
Q16. What does the author say about interpretation of religious texts?
a. It is not appropriate for scientists to engage in such activities
b. It is used by religious groups to deny the truth of proven scientific findings
c. It shows that religious groups are open to other narratives
d. It is an easy way out when literal meaning conflicts with what is known to be true
Q17. The author implies that science and religion are:
a. Incompatible as ways of understanding the world
b. Both equally valid and equally prone to errors
c. Different areas of inquiry that should overlap
d. Viable alternatives to obscurantism
Q18. The author claims that the humanities:
a. Have victimized the scientizers
b. Are declining not as a result of the exaggerated glamour of science
c. Exceed the confines of scientific understanding
d. Are filled with profound anxiety because of the idea of their autonomy
Q19. In the last paragraph, the Soviet Union serves as:
a. A metaphor
b. A simile
c. A hyperbole
d. None of the above
Give the meanings of the following words as they are used in the passage:
Q20.Verities
Q21. Impugn
Q22. Rapture
Q23. Dissonance
Q24. Obscurantism

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Answers:
1. C
2. B
3. C
4. A
5. B
6. B
7. C
8. B
9. C
10. C
11. D
12. B
13. D
14. C
15. B
16. C
17. D
18. C
19. A
20. Verities: something that is true, as a principle, belief, idea, or statement:
the eternal verities.
21. Impugn:to challenge as false (another's statements, motives, etc.); cast doubt upon.
22.Rapture: ecstatic joy or delight; the carrying of a person to another sphere
of existence;
23. Dissonance: disagreement or incongruity; inharmonious or harsh sound;
discord; cacophony.
24. Obscurantism: deliberate obscurity or evasion of clarity; opposition to the
spread of knowledge.