Because of the dead-air space that might be missed by turbulent hot air bouncing around above a fire, smoke detectors should be installed either on the ceiling at least four inches from the nearest wall, or high on a wall at least four, but no further than twelve, inches from the ceiling. Detectors should not be mounted near windows, exterior doors, or other places where drafts might direct the smoke away from the unit. Nor should they be placed in kitchens and garages, where cooking and gas fumes are likely to cause false alarms.
Which organizational scheme does this list of instructions follow?
- hierarchical order
- comparison-contrast
- cause-and-effect
- chronological order by topic
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
Analyzing the Organization:
The instructions are given in a sequence that follows the logical steps for smoke detector placement and considerations. Hence, they are organized chronologically by topic, addressing different aspects in a systematic way.
What is the main focus of this passage?
- how fire fighters carry out their responsibilities
- the proper installation of home smoke detectors
- the detection of dead-air space on walls and ceilings
- the detection of dead-air space on walls and ceilings
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
Analyzing the Context:
The passage discusses installing detectors away from dead-air spaces, which are areas where stagnant air might prevent smoke from reaching the detector. It specifies that detectors be placed away from the corners where the wall meets the ceiling to avoid these spaces.
The passage implies that dead-air space is most likely to be found
- on a ceiling, between four and twelve inches from a wall
- close to where a wall meets a ceiling.
- near an open window.
- in kitchens and garages.
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
Analyzing the Context:
The passage discusses installing detectors away from dead-air spaces, which are areas where stagnant air might prevent smoke from reaching the detector. It specifies that detectors be placed away from the corners where the wall meets the ceiling to avoid these spaces.
The passage states that, compared with people who do not have smoke detectors, persons who live in homes with smoke detectors have a
- 50\(\%\) better chance of surviving a fire.
- 50\(\%\) better chance of preventing a fire.
- 75\(\%\) better chance of detecting a hidden fire
- 100\(\%\) better chance of not being injured in a fire.
The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
Interpreting the Information:
The passage emphasizes the importance of smoke detectors in providing early warnings, which significantly increase the chances of surviving a fire by allowing for timely evacuation.
A smoke detector should NOT be installed near a window because
- outside fumes may trigger a false alarm.
- a draft may create dead-air space.
- a draft may pull smoke away from the detector.
- outside noises may muffle the sound of the detector.
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
Analyzing the Problem:
The passage explicitly warns against installing smoke detectors near windows or exterior doors because drafts in these areas could direct smoke away from the detector, preventing it from detecting smoke effectively.
The passage indicates that one responsibility of a fire fighter is to
- install smoke detectors in the homes of residents in the community.
- check homes to see if smoke detectors have been properly installed.
- develop fire safety programs for community leaders and school teachers.
- speak to school children about the importance of preventing fires.
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
Identifying the Firefighter’s Role:
The passage discusses firefighters visiting schools specifically to speak about fire safety, including the importance and installation of smoke detectors, indicating their role in educating young students about fire prevention.
A smoke detector must always be placed
- outside at least one of the bedrooms on any level of the home.
- outside all bedrooms in a home.
- in all hallways of a home.
- in kitchens where fires are most likely to start.
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
Interpreting Placement Guidelines:
According to the fire safety guidelines mentioned in the passage, smoke detectors should be installed outside every sleeping area. This ensures optimal coverage for detecting smoke that may arise from any part of the home while people are sleeping, thereby enhancing safety for all occupants.
Top Questions on Reading Comprehension
- Shown below are letters ‘e’ taken from four popular logos, arranged in a sequence. Which of the options is the correct sequence?
- UCEED - 2026
- English Language Comprehension
- Reading Comprehension
- Shown below are four options, each showing consecutive frames representing the movement of a pendulum of an old-style wall clock for an animation movie. Which is the correct option?
- UCEED - 2026
- English Language Comprehension
- Reading Comprehension
- Acrucial moderating factor in how people experience comparisons is self-esteem. Individuals with high self-esteem are more likely to interpret upward comparison as informative rather than threatening. They are more resilient in the face of others’ success and more likely to believe they can reach their own goals. In contrast, people with low self-esteem are more prone to interpret comparison as judgment, reinforcing negative self-views and triggering feelings of inadequacy.
This dynamic creates a self-reinforcing loop. People with high self-esteem are less vulnerable to upward comparison, which intensifies those doubts. Those with a secure sense of self are more likely to use comparison as a learning tool. The same external stimulus—a colleague’s achievements, a friend’s popularity—can have radically different effects depending on internal stability.
Self-esteem also influences how people choose their comparison targets. Research has found that individuals often engage in “selective comparison,” seeking out those who confirm their existing beliefs about themselves. This can become a subtle form of self-sabotage. Someone who feels unworthy may subconsciously seek out targets that reinforce that sense, perpetuating a narrative of inferiority. One of the most promising antidotes to social comparison is temporal comparison—evaluating oneself not against others, but against one’s own past. This method has been shown to increase motivation and satisfaction, especially when individuals can see concrete progress. Temporal comparison activates the same reward circuits as social comparison but avoids the threat systems associated with social ranking. It also reinforces agency: individuals focus on what they can control and improve rather than what others control. In therapeutic and coaching settings, temporal comparison is used to help clients build self-efficacy and track growth over time.
Moreover, people who focus on self-improvement rather than social dominance are less likely to fall into cycles of envy or self-pity. They can still use others as inspiration, but they do so without attaching their self-worth to the outcome. This is not to say they never compare—but that they focus on learning, rather than judgment. The most skilful approach to comparison may lie in eliminating it, but in reframing it as feedback. When we interpret comparison as information rather than a verdict, we can ask, “What can I learn from this?” This shift turns comparison into a growth tool. Teachers mentor their students, not as rivals. Psychologists emphasize that the key variable here is mindset.
A fixed mindset sees comparison as a threat. If someone else is better, it means we are worse. A growth mindset sees comparison as a map. If someone else has reached a certain level, it means the path exists. This reframing is not just a cognitive trick. It changes the emotional tone of comparison, making it more likely to inspire than to wound. Reframing also requires emotional regulation—the ability to notice an initial pang of envy or shame without reacting impulsively. With practice, individuals can learn to pause, reflect, and reinterpret their emotional responses. Over time, this builds resilience and self-trust, allowing comparison to become a learning tool rather than a cage.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
When people who are talking don’t share the same culture, knowledge, values, and assumptions, mutual understanding can be especially difficult. Such understanding is possible through the negotiation of meaning. To negotiate meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. You also need the flexibility in world view, and a generous tolerance for mistakes, as well as a talent for finding the right metaphor to communicate the relevant parts of unshared experiences or to highlight the shared experiences while demphasizing the others. Metaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in large measure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorize your experiences. Problems of mutual understanding are not exotic; they arise in all extended conversations where understanding is important.
When it really counts, meaning is almost never communicated according to the CONDUIT metaphor, that is, where one person transmits a fixed, clear proposition to another by means of expressions in a common language, where both parties have all the relevant common knowledge, assumptions, values, etc. When the chips are down, meaning is negotiated: you slowly figure out what you have in common, what it is safe to talk about, how you can communicate unshared experience or create a shared vision. With enough flexibility in bending your world view and with luck and charity, you may achieve some mutual understanding.
Communication theories based on the CONDUIT metaphor turn from the pathetic to the evil when they are applied indiscriminately on a large scale, say, in government surveillance or computerized files. There, what is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included, and it is assumed that the words in the file have meaning in themselves—disembodied, objective, understandable meaning. When a society lives by the CONDUITmetaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are the likely products.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humanity such a burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons. Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might hide from the problems and the generals. To the contrary, there was a high insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coart forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, but always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
...Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
Questions Asked in ATMA exam
- What will be the remainder left when 268+368 is divided by 97?
- ATMA - 2021
- Mathematical Reasoning
- Given below is a statement followed by 2 inferences. Choose the inference that can be inferred from the given statement by selecting the right option.
Statement: Out of 400 students who have appeared for an exam, a total of 40% students have passed out of which 100 are girls.
Inference:
I. Number of boys who passed the exam is less than the number of girls who passed the exam.
II. The number of girls who appeared in the exam is more than the number of boys who appeared in the exam.- ATMA - 2021
- Statements and Assumptions
- Given below is a question followed by 2 statements.
Which of the following statement(s) is/are sufficient to answer the question?
Question: What is the measure of angle A in triangle ABC?
Statements:
I. Triangle ABC is isosceles
II. The measure of the angle B in triangle ABC is 45 degrees- ATMA - 2021
- Statements and Assumptions
- Given below is a question followed by 2 statements.
Which of the following statement(s) is/are sufficient to answer the question?
Question: Does John went to market yesterday?
Statements:
I. John goes to market every alternate days
II. Today is Wednesday- ATMA - 2021
- Statements and Assumptions
- Assuming the statement given in each question to be true, choose the inference as one of the following:
(A)-True
(B)-False
(C) - Uncertain
(D)-None of the options.
Statement: Some sweets contain sugar.
Inference: Some sweets do not contain sugar.- ATMA - 2021
- Statements and Assumptions