List of practice Questions

Comprehension:
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
(. . .) There are three other common drivers for carnivore-human attacks, some of which are more preventable than others. Natural aggression-based conflicts – such as those involving females protecting their young or animals protecting a food source – can often be avoided as long as people stay away from those animals and their food.
Carnivores that recognise humans as a means to get food, are a different story. As they become more reliant on human food they might find at campsites or in rubbish bins, they become less avoidant of humans. Losing that instinctive fear response puts them into more situations where they could get into an altercation with a human, which often results in that bear being put down by humans. “A fed bear is a dead bear,” says Servheen, referring to a common saying among biologists and conservationists.
Predatory or predation-related attacks are quite rare, only accounting for 17% of attacks in North America since 1955. They occur when a carnivore views a human as prey and hunts it like it would any other animal it uses for food. (. . .)
Then there are animal attacks provoked by people taking pictures with them or feeding them in natural settings such as national parks which often end with animals being euthanised out of precaution. “Eventually, that animal becomes habituated to people, and [then] bad things happen to the animal. And the folks who initially wanted to make that connection don’t necessarily realise that,” says Christine Wilkinson, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, California, who’s been studying coyote-human conflicts.
After conducting countless postmortems on all types of carnivore-human attacks spanning 75 years, Penteriani’s team believes 50% could have been avoided if humans reacted differently. A 2017 study co-authored by Penteriani found that engaging in risky behaviour around large carnivores increases the likelihood of an attack.
Two of the most common risky behaviours are parents leaving their children to play outside unattended and walking an unleashed dog, according to the study. Wilkinson says 66% of coyote attacks involve a dog. “[People] end up in a situation where their dog is being chased, or their dog chases a coyote, or maybe they’re walking their dog near a den that’s marked, and the coyote wants to escort them away,” says Wilkinson.
Experts believe climate change also plays a part in the escalation of human-carnivore conflicts, but the correlation still needs to be ironed out. “As finite resources become scarcer, carnivores and people are coming into more frequent contact, which means that more conflict could occur,” says Jen Miller, international programme specialist for the US Fish & Wildlife Service. For example, she says, there was an uptick in lion attacks in western India during a drought when lions and people were relying on the same water sources.
(. . .) The likelihood of human-carnivore conflicts appears to be higher in areas of low-income countries dominated by vast rural landscapes and farmland, according to Penteriani’s research. “There are a lot of working landscapes in the Global South that are really heterogeneous, that are interspersed with carnivore habitats, forests and savannahs, which creates a lot more opportunity for these encounters, just statistically,” says Wilkinson.
Comprehension:
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
The history of any major technological or industrial advance is inevitably shadowed by a less predictable history of unintended consequences and secondary effects — what economists sometimes call “externalities.” Sometimes those consequences are innocuous ones, or even beneficial. Gutenberg invents the printing press, and literacy rates rise, which causes a significant part of the reading public to require spectacles for the first time, which creates a surge of investment in lens-making across Europe, which leads to the invention of the telescope and the microscope.
Oftentimes the secondary effects seem to belong to an entirely different sphere of society. When Willis Carrier hit upon the idea of air-conditioning, the technology was primarily intended for industrial use: ensuring cool, dry air for factories that required low-humidity environments. But…it touched off one of the largest migrations in the history of the United States, enabling the rise of metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Las Vegas that barely existed when Carrier first started tinkering with the idea in the early 1900s.
Sometimes the unintended consequence comes about when consumers use an invention in a surprising way. Edison famously thought his phonograph, which he sometimes called “the talking machine,” would primarily be used to take dictation….But then later innovators… discovered a much larger audience willing to pay for musical recordings made on descendants of Edison’s original invention. In other cases, the original innovation comes into the world disguised as a plaything…the way the animatronic dolls of the mid-1700s inspired Jacquard to invent the first “programmable” loom and Charles Babbage to invent the first machine that fit the modern definition of a computer, setting the stage for the revolution in programmable technology that would transform the 21st century in countless ways.
We live under the gathering storm of modern history’s most momentous unintended consequence….carbon-based climate change. Imagine the vast sweep of inventors whose ideas started the Industrial Revolution, all the entrepreneurs and scientists and hobbyists who had a hand in bringing it about. Line up a thousand of them and ask them all what they had been hoping to do with their work. Not one would say that their intent had been to deposit enough carbon in the atmosphere to create a greenhouse effect that trapped heat at the surface of the planet. And yet here we are.
Ethyl (leaded fuel) and Freon belonged to the same general class of secondary effect: innovations whose unintended consequences stem from some kind of waste by-product that they emit. But the potential health threats of Ethyl (unleaded fuel) were visible in the 1920s, unlike, say, the long-term effects of atmospheric carbon build up in the early days of the Industrial Revolution….
Indeed, it is reasonable to see CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) as a forerunner of the kind of threat we will most likely face in the coming decades, as it becomes increasingly possible for individuals or small groups to create new scientific advances — through chemistry or biotechnology or materials science — setting off unintended consequences that reverberate on a global scale.