Reading Comprehension — Practice

Question 1

Passage: 'Bees communicate the location of food sources through a movement pattern known as the waggle dance. The angle of the dance relative to vertical indicates direction relative to the sun, while the duration of the waggle portion indicates distance. This is among the most sophisticated forms of symbolic communication known outside human language.'

What is the passage's main point?

Accepted Answer

A

Question 2

Passage: 'The Antarctic ice sheet holds roughly 60% of the world's fresh water. Unlike sea ice, which forms from frozen ocean water and does not raise sea levels when it melts, land-based ice sheets like Antarctica's would raise global sea levels significantly if they melted, since that water is not already part of the ocean.'

According to the passage, why does melting sea ice NOT raise sea levels, while melting land ice does?

Accepted Answer

B

Question 3

Passage: 'Many companies now measure employee productivity through digital activity logs — keystrokes, active screen time, application usage. Yet several studies find only a weak correlation between these metrics and actual output quality, since focused thinking time, often the most valuable part of complex work, produces minimal digital activity.'

Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?

Accepted Answer

B

Question 4

Passage: 'The committee's report, running to some four hundred pages, arrives at the strikingly modest conclusion that further study is warranted — a recommendation it could, one suspects, have reached on page one.'

What is the author's tone toward the committee's report?

Accepted Answer

B

Question 5

Passage: 'Early critics dismissed the novel as derivative, a pale echo of its more celebrated predecessors. Decades later, scholars have largely rehabilitated its reputation, arguing that what once read as imitation was in fact deliberate homage.'

As used in the passage, 'rehabilitated' most nearly means

Accepted Answer

B

Question 6

Passage: 'It is tempting to credit a single inventor with a transformative technology, but the electric light bulb, like most major inventions, emerged from parallel, competing efforts — Edison's version succeeded commercially not because it was the first workable bulb, but because it was paired with a viable electrical distribution system, which several rival inventors lacked.'

What is the passage's main point?

Accepted Answer

B

Question 7

Passage: 'A tax designed to discourage a behaviour succeeds, paradoxically, by failing in the long run to raise the revenue initially projected — if the tax truly changes behaviour as intended, the taxed activity shrinks, and so does the tax base it was meant to fund from.'

Which of the following can be inferred?

Accepted Answer

A

Question 8

Passage: 'Coral bleaching occurs when corals, under thermal stress, expel the symbiotic algae living in their tissues. The algae supply the coral with the majority of its energy through photosynthesis; without them, the coral turns white and is at significantly higher risk of starvation, though it is not yet dead and can recover its algae if conditions improve quickly enough.'

According to the passage, is a bleached coral necessarily dead?

Accepted Answer

B

Question 9

Passage: 'The startup's pitch deck promised to 'revolutionise' an industry that has changed remarkably little in the past century for reasons that have nothing to do with a lack of clever ideas.'

What is the author's attitude toward the startup's claim?

Accepted Answer

B

Question 10

Passage: 'The negotiations, initially cordial, grew increasingly fraught as the deadline approached, with both sides retreating to entrenched positions neither had held a week earlier.'

As used in the passage, 'entrenched' most nearly means

Accepted Answer

B

Practice — Reading Comprehension

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