List of top Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Questions

Much as an electrical lamp transforms electrical energy into heat and light, the visual “apparatus” of a human being acts as a transformer of light into sight. Light projected from a source or reflected by an object enters the cornea and lens of the eyeball. The energy is transmitted to the retina of the eye whose rods and cones are activated. The stimuli are transferred by nerve cells to the optic nerve and to the brain, man is a binocular animal, and the impressions from his two eyes are translated into sight — a rapid, compound analysis of the shape, form, colour, size, position, and motion of the things he sees. Photometry is the science of measuring light. The illuminating engineer and designer employ photometric data constantly in their work. In all fields of application of light and lighting, they predict their choice of equipment, lamps, wall finishes, colours of light and backgrounds, and other factors affecting the illumination of premises or scene to be rendered, in great part from data supplied originally by photometric laboratory. Today extensive tables and charts of photometric data are used widely, constituting the basis for many details of design. Although the lighting designer may not be called upon to the detailed work of making measurements or plotting data in the form of photometric curves and analyzing them, an understanding of the terms used and their derivation form valuable background knowledge. The perception of colour is a complex visual sensation, intimately related to light. The apparent colour of an object depends primarily upon four factors: its ability to reflect various colours of light, the nature of the light by which it is seen, the colour of its surroundings, and the characteristics and state of adaptation of the eye. In most discussions of colour, a distinction is made between white and coloured objects. White is the colour name most usually applied to a material that diffusely transmits a high percentage of all the hues of light. Colours that have no hue are termed neutral or achromatic. colours. They include white, off-white, all shades of gray, down to black. All coloured objects selectively absorb certain wavelengths of light and reflect or transmit others in varying degrees. Inorganic materials, chiefly metals such as copper and brass, reflect light from their surfaces. Hence we have the term “surface” or “metallic” colours, as contrasted with “body” or “pigment” colours. In the former, the light reflected from the surface is often tinted. Most paints, on the other hand, have body or pigment colours. In these, light is reflected from the surface without much colour change, but the body material absorbs some colours and reflects others, hence, the diffuse reflection from the body of the material is coloured but often appears to be overlaid and diluted with a “white” reflection from the glossy surface of the paint film. In paints and enamels, the pigment particles, which are usually opaque, are suspended in a vehicle such as oil or plastic. The particles of a dye, on the other hand, are considerably finer and may be described as colouring matter in solution. The dye particles are more often transparent or translucent.

Deborah Mayo is a philosopher of science who has attempted to capture the implications of the new experimentalism in a philosophically rigorous way. Mayo focuses on the detailed way in which claims are validated by experiment, and is concerned with identifying just what claims are borne out and how. A key idea underlying her treatment is that a claim can only be said to be supported by experiment if the various ways in which the claim could be false have been investigated and eliminated. A claim can only be said to be borne out by experiment, and a severe test of a claim, as usefully construed by Mayo, must be such that the claim would be unlikely to pass it if it were false.
Her idea can be explained by some simple examples. Suppose Snell’s law of refraction of light is tested by some very rough experiments in which very large margins of error are attributed to the measurements of angles of incidence and refraction, and suppose that the re- sults are shown to be compatible with the law within those margins of error. Has the law been supported by experiments that have severely tested it? From Mayo’s perspective the answer s “no”, because, owing to the roughness of the measurements, the law of refraction would be quite likely to pass this test even if it were false and some other law differing not too much from Snell’s law were true. An exercise I carried out in my school-teaching days serves to drive this point home. My students had conducted some not very careful experiments to test Snell’s law. I there presented them with some alternative laws of refraction that had been suggested in antiquity and mediaeval times, prior to the discovery of Snell’s law, and invited the students to test them with the measurements they had used, to test Snell’s law; because of the wide margins of error they had attributed to their measurements, all of these alternative laws pass the test. This clearly brings out the point that the experiments in question did not constitute a severe test of Snell’s law. The law would have passed the test even if it were false and one of the historical alternatives true.

An expert group has sounded a timely warning on what ‘environmentally destructive tourism’ will mean to national parks and wildlife sanctuaries and the objectives they are supposed to serve. Given the unique and rare wildlife the country has been endowed with, the rationale for using the resources for attracting tourists from abroad is unassailable. This necessarily postu- lates that the flora and the fauna should be protected and conserved. As a matter of fact, much of the government’s interest in wildlife preservation has to do with the tremendous prospect of tourist traffic on that account. Yet the risk of the revenue-earning motivation overrunning the conservation imperatives is very real, the lure of the coveted foreign exchange that goes with this business only, is serving to enhance it several folds.
Even with the tourist inflow far below the potential, the pressure of visitors is said to have been already felt on the tiger reserves. With the Government of India’s declared intent to boost tourism quite justified for its own reasons, the need for eliminating the risk assumes a greater sense of urgency. The study team has noted that most of the 41 national parks and 165 wildlife sanctuaries surveyed are open to the tourists. The less frequented among them may not require special attention immediately in this respect as much as the ones that are major tourist attraction do. These include the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Maharashtra, Nandankanan in Orissa and Bannerghatta in Karnataka.
Over a year ago, the Indian Board for Wildlife expressed concern over the looming danger, and decided that the core areas of national parks and sanctuaries should be kept totally free from biotic disturbances, and the visitor be permitted to view the wildlife only from the areas marked out for the purpose. And now, the expert group has come up with the suggestion that a case by case evaluation be done of the “capacity” as well as the “limitations” of all the national parks and wildlife sanctuaries and based on such assessment an area-specific plan for tourist promotion within the “safety” norms be charted. That this is the most scientific way of going about the job, and that there is no time to lose can be readily conceded.

Choose the correct sequence of sentences:
[I.] But she gained courage as she went on
[II.] She was a little nervous about it just at first
[III.] and opened their eyes and mouths so very wide
[IV.] the two creatures got so close to her, one on each side \bigskip