Choose the option that best summarizes the passage given below.
Some decisions will be fairly obvious - "no brainers." Your bank account is low, but you have a two week vacation coming up and you want to get away to some place warm to relax with your family. Will you accept your in-laws' offer of free use of their Florida beach front condo? Sure. You like your current employer and feel ready to move forward in career. Will you step in for your boss for three weeks while she attends a professional development course? Of course.
Show Hint
- Some decisions are obvious under certain circumstances. You may, for example, readily accept a relatives offer of free holiday accomodation or step in for your boss while she is away, if you like the employer.
- Some decisions are no-brainers. You need not think while making them. Examples are condo offers from in-laws and job offers from bosses when your bank account is low ot the boss is away.
- Easy decisions are called "no brainers" because they do not require any cerebral activity. Examples such as accepting free holiday accomodation abound in our lives
- Accepting an offer from in-laws when you are short on funds and want a holiday is a no-brainer. Another no-brainer is taking the boss job when she is away
- The author tries to say that, for eg. accepting a holiday from relatives under some circumstances is a no brainer. He gives other similar examples.
The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Understanding the Concept:
This question requires summarizing a given passage. A good summary should capture the main idea of the passage and its key supporting points concisely and accurately, without adding new information or focusing too narrowly on minor details.
Step 3: Detailed Explanation:
First, let's break down the original passage:
Main Idea: Some decisions are very easy or obvious, called "no-brainers."
Example 1: When you are low on money but want a vacation, accepting a free condo from in-laws is a no-brainer. This highlights the context of "certain circumstances" (low funds).
Example 2: When you like your employer and want to advance your career, stepping in for your boss is a no-brainer. This again highlights the context (liking the employer, career ambition).
Now let's evaluate the options against this breakdown:
(A) Some decisions are obvious under certain circumstances...
This option perfectly captures the main idea ("obvious under certain circumstances") and accurately restates the two examples provided in the passage. It is a comprehensive and precise summary.
(B) Some decisions are no-brainers. You need not think while making them...
This option is good, but the phrase "You need not think" is a slight exaggeration. The passage says "fairly obvious," which is less extreme. Also, it contains a typo ("ot").
(C) Easy decisions are called "no brainers" because they do not require any cerebral activity...
Similar to (B), "do not require any cerebral activity" is an overstatement. This summary also only vaguely alludes to the examples ("accepting free holiday accomodation abound"), making it less complete than (A).
(D) Accepting an offer from in-laws... is a no-brainer. Another no-brainer is taking the boss job...
This option only lists the examples. It fails to state the main idea or the definition of a "no-brainer." It is a list of details, not a summary of the whole passage.
(E) The author tries to say that...
This option describes the author's writing strategy rather than summarizing the content of the passage itself. It provides commentary on the passage, not a summary of its message.
Step 4: Final Answer:
Option (A) is the best summary because it states the main point accurately (decisions are obvious under certain circumstances) and includes the key supporting examples from the text.
Top Questions on Reading Comprehension
For the past two years at FasCorp, there has been a policy to advertise any job opening to current employees and to give no job to an applicant from outside the company if a FasCorp employee applies who is qualified for the job. This policy has been strictly followed, yet even though numerous employees of FasCorp have been qualified for any given entry-level position, some entry-level jobs have been filled with people from outside the company.
If the information provided is true, which of the following must on the basis of it also be true about FasCorp during the past two years?- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Reading Comprehension
As an example of the devastation wrought on music publishers by the photocopier, one executive noted that for a recent choral festival with 1,200 singers, the festival’s organizing committee purchased only 12 copies of the music published by her company that was 5 performed as part of the festival.
Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the support the example lends to the executive’s contention that music publishers have been devastated by the photocopier?- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Reading Comprehension
- In the 1970s, two debates engaged many scholars of early United States history. One focused on the status of women, primarily White women. Turning on the so-called golden age theory, which posited that during the eighteenth-century colonial era, American women enjoyed a brief period of high status relative to their English contemporaries and to nineteenth-century American women, this debate pitted scholars who believed women’s lives deteriorated after 1800 against those who thought women’s lives had been no better before 1800. At issue were the causes of women’s subordination: were these causes already in place when the English first settled North America or did they emerge with the rise of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism?
The second debate, the so-called origins debate, concerned the emergence of racial slavery in the southern colonies: was slavery the inevitable result of the deep-rooted racial prejudice of early British colonists or did racial prejudice arise only after these planters instituted slave labor?
Although these debates are parallel in some respects, key differences distinguished them. Whereas the debate over women’s status revolved around implicit comparisons of colonial women to their counterparts in the antebellum period (1800--1860), thus inviting comment from scholars of both historical periods, the origins debate was primarily confined to a discussion about slavery in colonial America. Second, in contrast to the newness of the debate over women’s status and its continued currency throughout the early 1980s, the debate over race and slavery, begun in the 1950s, had lost some of its urgency with the publication of Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), widely regarded as the last word on the subject.
Each debate also assumed a different relationship to the groups whose histories it concerned. In its heyday, the origins debate focused mainly on White attitudes toward Africans rather than on Africans themselves. With few exceptions, such as Wood’s Black Majority (1974) and Mullin’s Flight and Rebellion (1972), which were centrally concerned with enslaved African men, most works pertaining to the origins debate focused on the White architects, mostly male, of racial slavery. In contrast, although women’s historians were interested in the institutions and ideologies contributing to women’s subordination, they were equally concerned with documenting women’s experiences. As in the origins debate, however, early scholarship on colonial women defined its historical constituency narrowly, women’s historians focusing mainly on affluent White women.
Over time, however, some initial differences between the approaches taken by scholars in the two fields faded. In the 1980s, historians of race and slavery in colonial America shifted their attention to enslaved people; interest in African American culture grew, thereby bringing enslaved women more prominently into view. Historians of early American women moved in similar directions during the decade and began to consider the effect of racial difference on women’s experience.- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Reading Comprehension
- The most plausible justification for higher taxes on automobile fuel is that fuel consumption harms the environment and thus adds to the costs of traffic congestion. But the fact that burning fuel creates these “negative externalities” does not imply that no tax on fuel could ever be too high. Economics is precise about the tax that should, in principle, be levied to deal with negative externalities:
the tax on a liter of fuel should be equal to the harm caused by using a liter of fuel.
If the tax is more than that, its costs (including the inconvenience to those who would rather have used their cars) will exceed its benefits (including any reduction in congestion and pollution).- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Reading Comprehension
- Objectively, of course, the various ecosystems that sustain life on the planet proceed independently of human agency, just as they operated before the hectic ascendancy of Homo sapiens. But it is also true that it is difficult to think of a single such system that has not, for better or worse, been substantially modified by human culture. Nor is this simply the work of the industrial centuries. It has been happening since the days of ancient Mesopotamia. It is coeval with the origins of writing, and has occurred throughout our social existence. And it is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have.
- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Reading Comprehension
Questions Asked in GMAT exam
- If y = 3, then y³(y³-y) =
- GMAT - 2025
- Algebra
If \(8x + 5x + 2x + 4x = 114\), then, \(5x + 3 = ?\)
- GMAT - 2025
- Algebra
If \(r = 5 z\) then \(15 z = 3 y,\) then \(r =\)
- GMAT - 2025
- Algebra
- Solve the following equation for A: 2A/3 = 8 + 4A
- GMAT - 2025
- Algebra
- Over the past 7 weeks, the Smith family had weekly grocery bills of $74, $69, $64, $79, $64, $84, and $77. What was the Smiths' average (arithmetic mean) weekly grocery bill over the 7-week period?
- GMAT - 2025
- Averages