List of top Verbal and Logical Ability Questions

Carefully read the following statement:
The payoff from ____ in education is so ____ and ____ that it is almost ____ as a predictor of economic change over a five to ten year period.
Fill in the blanks meaningfully, in the above statement, from the following options.

Carefully read the following statement:
Though he thought of himself as a/an ___ person, his boss's abusive behaviour made him talk back. However, as he engaged in a/an ___ with his boss, all he got in response was a/an ___, which only filled him with ____
Fill in the blanks meaningfully, in the above statement, from the following options:

Which of the following sentence contains correct and meaningful usage of the underlined words?

A spirit that lives in this world and does not wear the shirt of love, such an existence in a deep disgrace.
Be foolish in love, because love is all there is.
There is no way into presence except through love exchange.
If someone asks, But what is love? Answer, dissolving the will.
True freedom comes to those who have escaped the question of freewill and fate.
Love is an emperor. The two worlds play across him. He barely notices their tumbling game.
Love and lover live in eternity. Other desires are substitute for that way of being.
How long do you lay embracing a corpse? Love rather the soul, which cannot be held.
Anything born in spring dies in the fall, but love is not seasonal.
With wine pressed from grapes, expect a hangover.
But this love path has no expectations. You are uneasy riding the body?
Dismount, travel lighter. Wings will be given.
Be clear like mirror holding nothing.
Be clean of pictures and the worry that comes with images.
Gaze into what is not ashamed or afraid of any truth.
Contain all human faces in your own without any judgment of them.
Be pure emptiness. What is inside of that? You ask. Silence is all I can say.
Lovers have some secrets they keep.

Please read the passage below and answer the questions that follow Labor and capital are the opposite poles of capitalist society. This polarity begins in each enterprise and is realized on a national and even international scale as a giant duality of classes which dominates the social structure. And yet this polarity is incorporated in a necessary identity between the two. Whatever its form, whether as money or commodities or means of production, capital is labor: it is labor that has been performed in the past, the objectified product of preceding phases of the cycle of production which becomes capital only through appropriation by the capitalist and its use in the accumulation of more capital. At the same time, as living labor which is purchased by the capitalist to set the production process into motion, labor is capital. That portion of money capital which is set aside for the payment of labor, the portion which in each cycle is converted into living labor power, is the portion of capital which stands for and corresponds to the working population, and upon which the latter subsists. Before it is anything else, therefore, the working class is the animate part of capital, the part which will set in motion the process that yields to the total capital its increment of surplus value. As such, the working class is first of all, raw material for exploitation. This working class lives a social and political existence of its own, outside the direct grip of capital. It protests and submits, rebels or is integrated into bourgeois society, sees itself as a class or loses sight of its own existence, in accordance with the forces that act upon it and the moods, conjunctures, and conflicts of social and political life. But since, in its permanent existence, it is the living part of capital, its occupational structure, modes of work, and distribution through the industries of society are determined by the ongoing processes of the accumulation of capital. It is seized, released, flung into various parts of the social machinery and expelled by others, not in accord with its own will or self-activity, but in accord with the movement of capital.

Please read the passage below and answer the questions that follow:
It is sometimes said that consciousness is a mystery in the sense that we have no idea what it is. This is clearly not true. What could be better known to us than our own feelings and experiences? The mystery of consciousness is not what consciousness is, but why it is.
Modern brain imaging techniques have provided us with a rich body of correlations between physical processes in the brain and the experiences had by the person whose brain it is. We know, for example, that a person undergoing stimulation in her or his ventromedial hypothalamus feels hunger. The problem is that no one knows why these correlations hold. It seems perfectly conceivable that ventromedial hypothalamus stimulation could do its job in the brain without giving rise to any kind of feeling at all. No one has even the beginnings of an explanation of why some physical systems, such as the human brain, have experiences. This is the difficulty David Chalmers famously called ‘the hard problem of consciousness’.
Materialists hope that we will one day be able to explain consciousness in purely physical terms. But this project now has a long history of failure. The problem with materialist approaches to the hard problem is that they always end up avoiding the issue by redefining what we mean by ‘consciousness’. They start off by declaring that they are going to solve the hard problem, to explain experience; but somewhere along the way they start using the word ‘consciousness’ to refer not to experience but to some complex behavioural functioning associated with experience, such as the ability of a person to monitor their internal states or to process information about the environment. Explaining complex behaviours is an important scientific endeavour. But the hard problem of consciousness cannot be solved by changing the subject.
In spite of these difficulties, many scientists and philosophers maintain optimism that materialism will prevail.
At every point in this glorious history, it is claimed, philosophers have declared that certain phenomena are too special to be explained by physical science - light, chemistry, life - only to be subsequently proven wrong by the relentless march of scientific progress.
Before Galileo it was generally assumed that matter had sensory qualities: tomatoes were red, paprika was spicy, flowers were sweet smelling. How could an equation capture the taste of spicy paprika? And if sensory qualities can’t be captured in a mathematical vocabulary, it seemed to follow that a mathematical vocabulary could never capture the complete nature of matter. Galileo’s solution was to strip matter of its sensory qualities and put them in the soul (as we might put it, in the mind). The sweet smell isn’t really in the flowers, but in the soul (mind) of the person smelling them ... Even colours for Galileo aren’t on the surfaces of the objects themselves, but in the soul of the person observing them. And if matter in itself has no sensory qualities, then it’s possible in principle to describe the material world in the purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics. This was the birth of mathematical physics. 
But of course Galileo didn’t deny the existence of the sensory qualities. If Galileo were to time travel to the present day and be told that scientific materialists are having a problem explaining consciousness in purely physical terms, he would no doubt reply, “Of course they do, I created physical science by taking consciousness out of the physical world!”

Please read the passage below and answer the questions that follow:
Rene Descartes’ assertion that ideas may be held true with certainty if they are “clear and distinct” provides the context for Peirce’s title, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” Peirce argued that an idea may seem clear if it is familiar. Distinctness depends on having good definitions, and while definitions are desirable they do not yield any new knowledge or certainty of the truth of empirical propositions. Peirce argues that thought needs more than a sense of clarity; it also needs a method for making ideas clear. Once we have made an idea clear, then we can begin the task of determining its truth. The method that Peirce offers came to be known as the pragmatic method and the epistemology on which it depends is pragmatism. Peirce rejected Descartes’ method of doubt. We cannot doubt something, for the sake of method, that we do not doubt in fact. In a later essay, he would state as his rule “Dismiss make-believes.” This refers to Descartes’ method of doubting things, in the safety of his study, such things as the existence of the material world, which he did not doubt when he went out on the street. Peirce proposed that a philosophical investigation can begin from only one state of mind, namely, the state of mind in which we find ourselves when we begin. If any of us examines our state of mind, we find two kinds of thoughts: beliefs and doubts. Peirce had presented the interaction of doubt and belief in an earlier essay “The Fixation of Belief”.
Beliefs and doubts are distinct. Beliefs consist of states of mind in which we would make a statement; doubts are states in which we would ask a question. We experience a doubt as a sense of uneasiness and hesitation. Doubt serves as an irritant that causes us to appease it by answering a question and thereby fixing a belief and putting the mind to rest on that issue. A common example of a doubt would be arriving in an unfamiliar city and not being sure of the location of our destination address in relation to our present location. We overcome this doubt and fix a belief by getting the directions. Once we achieve a belief, we can take the necessary action to reach our destination. Peirce defines a belief subjectively as something of which we are aware and which appeases the doubt. Objectively, a belief is a rule of action. The whole purpose of thought consists in overcoming a doubt and attaining a belief. Peirce acknowledges that some people like to think about things or argue about them without caring to find a true belief, but he asserts that such dilettantism does not constitute thought. The beliefs that we hold determine how we will act. If we believe, rightly or wrongly, that the building that we are trying to reach sits one block to our north, we will walk in that direction. We have beliefs about matters of fact, near and far. For example, we believe in the real objects in front of us and we believe generally accepted historical statements. We also believe in relations of ideas such as that seven and five equal twelve. In addition to these we have many beliefs about science, politics, economics, religion and so on. Some of our beliefs may be false since we are capable of error. To believe something means to think that it is true.

Please read the passage below and answer the questions that follow:
If history doesn’t follow any stable rules, and if we cannot predict its future course, why study it? It often seems that the chief aim of science is to predict the future - meteorologists are expected to forecast whether tomorrow will bring rain or sunshine; economists should know whether devaluing the currency will avert or precipitate an economic crisis; good doctors foresee whether chemotherapy or radiation therapy will be more successful in curing lung cancer. Similarly, historians are asked to examine the actions of our ancestors so that we can repeat their wise decisions and avoid their mistakes. But it never works like that because the present is just too different from the past. It is a wast of time to study Hannibal’s tactics in the Second Punic War so as to copy them in the Third World War. What worked well in cavalry battles will not necessarily be of much benefit in cyber warfare. Science is not just about predicting the future, though. Scholars in all fields often seek to broaden our horizons, thereby opening before us new and unknown futures. This is especially true of history. Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don’t normally consider. Historians study the past not in order to repeat it, but in order to be liberated from it. Each and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable. We forget that our world was created by an accidental chain of events, and that history shaped not only our technology, politics and society, but also our thoughts, fears and dreams. The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We have felt that grip from the moment we were born, so we assume that it is a natural and inescapable part of who we are. Therefore we seldom try to shake ourselves free, and envision alternative futures. Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn’t want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape - and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.

Directions: In this question, each sentence is divided into four parts (a), (b), (c) and (d). Find out which part of the sentence contains an error. If there is no error, mark your answer as (e).

Direction: Read the following passage and Answer the THREE questions that follow.
Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. Most agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. The lesson of this experiment is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run.
According to the passage, what could be the plausible meaning of ‘hyperbolic discounting?’

Directions: Fill in the blanks with the words that best fit the meaning of the sentence as a whole.
The school headmaster maintained that he could _______ minor lies but could not pardon such _______ lie.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. ("This world"! As if there were any other.) The world, our world is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real Art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable. This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an over cooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.
What does the author mean by, ‘In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability…?’

"Is the net itself profoundly robust and immortal or is it the most ephemeral digital artefact of all?" Today, with so much more of our lives online, the question hits us more forcefully. Sometimes the internet has the memory of an elephant, and sometimes it's an amnesiac. I once went to an online archive and dug up a dispatch from my first-grade class that had appeared as a newspaper filler item in 1977. But there are comments posted to Facebook less than a year ago that have already melted into the ether. The same goes for music and motion pictures.

Direction: Read the following passage and Answer the THREE questions that follow.
As the biggest companies strive to trumpet their environmental activism, the need to match words with deeds is becoming increasingly important. Household names like Costco and Netflix have not provided emissions reduction targets despite saying they want to reduce their impact on climate change. Others, like the agricultural giant Cargill and the clothing company Levi Strauss, have made commitments but have struggled to cut emissions. Technology companies like Google and Microsoft, which run power-hungry data centers, have slashed emissions, but even they are finding that the technology often doesn’t yet exist to carry out their “moonshot” objectives. You can look at a company’s website and see their sustainability report and it will look great, But then when you look at what is behind it, you’ll see there is not a lot of substance behind those commitments or the commitments are not comprehensive enough. To realize the necessary emission reductions, more ambitious targets urgently need to be set. Otherwise, we project emissions for S&P 500 companies will end up being triple of what they should be in 2050 . Slashing emissions is difficult. Businesses must reliably measure how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases they are responsible for. Then companies have to find cleaner energy sources without hurting their operations. Where they can’t find cleaner substitutes, businesses often pay others to reduce emissions or remove carbon from the atmosphere. The task gets even harder when companies begin the process of reducing so-called Scope 3 emissions — pollution caused by suppliers and customers. At oil companies, for example, Scope 3 would include emissions from cars that use gasoline. Other companies that have pledged to cut emissions face different challenges, including coordinating with suppliers and partners. Consider the apparel industry. Much of its contribution to climate change comes from its supply chain. The clothes that Levi Strauss and others put their labels on are often made in factories in places like China, Pakistan and India that remain reliant on coal-fired power plants. The clothes are transported on ships and planes that burn diesel and jet fuel. If we are going to achieve a net-zero carbon economy for real, we will need everyone to act,” said Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental officer. “And that means action can’t be voluntary. We need requirements and standards that everyone is expected to meet.
According to the passage, what would be closest to the idea of a “moonshot” objective?

Direction: Read the following passage and Answer the THREE questions that follow. Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. ("This world"! As if there were any other.) The world, our world is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real Art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable. This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an over cooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.
According to the passage, which of the following is NOT an act of interpretation?

Direction: Read the following passage and Answer the THREE questions that follow.
Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. Most agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. The lesson of this experiment is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run.
Which of the following statements can be BEST inferred from the passage about procrastination?

Direction: The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best Answer to each question. Throughout much of recorded human history, China has boasted the largest population in the world – and until recently, by some margin. So news that the Chinese population is now in decline, and will sometime later this year be surpassed by that of India, is big news even if long predicted. This decline in numbers will spur a trend that already concerns demographers in China: a rapidly aging society. By 2040, around a quarter of the Chinese population is predicted to be over the age of 65. In short, this is a seismic shift. It will have huge symbolic and substantive impacts on China in three main areas. This historical turning point in China’s population trend serves as a further wake-up call to move the country’s model more quickly to a post-manufacturing, post-industrial economy – an aging, shrinking population does not fit the purposes of a labour-intensive economic model. As to what it means for China’s economy, and that of the world, population decline and an aging society will certainly provide Beijing with short-term and long-term challenges. In short, it means there will be fewer workers able to feed the economy and spur further economic growth on one side of the ledger; on the other, a growing post-work population will need potentially costly support. It is perhaps no coincidence then that 2022, as well as being a pivotal year for China in terms of demographics, also saw one of the worst economic performances the country has experienced since 1976, according to data released on Jan. 17. How the Chinese government responds to the challenges presented by this dramatic demographic shift will be key. Failure to live up to the expectations of the public in its response could result in a crisis for the Chinese Communist Party, whose legitimacy is tied closely to economic growth. Any economic decline could have severe consequences for the Chinese Communist Party. It will also be judged on how well the state is able to fix its social support system. Indeed, there is already a strong case to be made that the Chinese government has moved too slowly. The onechild policy that played a significant role in the slowing growth, and now decline, in population was a government policy for more than three decades. It has been known since the 1990s that the Chinese fertility rate was too low to sustain current population numbers. Yet it was only in 2016 that Beijing acted and relaxed the policy to allow more couples to have a second, and then in 2021 a third, child. This action to spur population growth, or at least slow its decline, came too late to prevent China from soon losing its crown as the world’s largest nation. Loss of prestige is one thing though, the political impact of any economic downturn resulting from a shrinking population is quite another.
The author claims that, “It is perhaps no coincidence then that 2022, as well as being a pivotal year for China in terms of demographics, also saw one of the worst economic performances the country has experienced since 1976.” Which one of the following statements best expresses the point being made by the author here?

Direction: Read the following passage and Answer the THREE questions that follow. Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. ("This world"! As if there were any other.) The world, our world is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real Art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable. This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an over cooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.
Which of the following BEST explains as to why art is interpreted?

Direction: The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best Answer to each question. Throughout much of recorded human history, China has boasted the largest population in the world – and until recently, by some margin. So news that the Chinese population is now in decline, and will sometime later this year be surpassed by that of India, is big news even if long predicted. This decline in numbers will spur a trend that already concerns demographers in China: a rapidly aging society. By 2040, around a quarter of the Chinese population is predicted to be over the age of 65. In short, this is a seismic shift. It will have huge symbolic and substantive impacts on China in three main areas. This historical turning point in China’s population trend serves as a further wake-up call to move the country’s model more quickly to a post-manufacturing, post-industrial economy – an aging, shrinking population does not fit the purposes of a labour-intensive economic model. As to what it means for China’s economy, and that of the world, population decline and an aging society will certainly provide Beijing with short-term and long-term challenges. In short, it means there will be fewer workers able to feed the economy and spur further economic growth on one side of the ledger; on the other, a growing post-work population will need potentially costly support. It is perhaps no coincidence then that 2022, as well as being a pivotal year for China in terms of demographics, also saw one of the worst economic performances the country has experienced since 1976, according to data released on Jan. 17. How the Chinese government responds to the challenges presented by this dramatic demographic shift will be key. Failure to live up to the expectations of the public in its response could result in a crisis for the Chinese Communist Party, whose legitimacy is tied closely to economic growth. Any economic decline could have severe consequences for the Chinese Communist Party. It will also be judged on how well the state is able to fix its social support system. Indeed, there is already a strong case to be made that the Chinese government has moved too slowly. The onechild policy that played a significant role in the slowing growth, and now decline, in population was a government policy for more than three decades. It has been known since the 1990s that the Chinese fertility rate was too low to sustain current population numbers. Yet it was only in 2016 that Beijing acted and relaxed the policy to allow more couples to have a second, and then in 2021 a third, child. This action to spur population growth, or at least slow its decline, came too late to prevent China from soon losing its crown as the world’s largest nation. Loss of prestige is one thing though, the political impact of any economic downturn resulting from a shrinking population is quite another.
The author claims that, “Loss of prestige is one thing though, the political impact of any economic downturn resulting from a shrinking population is quite another.” Which one of the following statements best expresses the point being made by the author?

Direction: Read the following poem and Answer the TWO questions that follow.
Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.
A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.
Cold worlds shake from the oar
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes. A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;
Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.
Which of the following best captures the theme of the poem?

Direction: Read the following passage and Answer the THREE questions that follow.
Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. Most agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. The lesson of this experiment is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run.
According to the passage, in regard to time, which of the following statements gives the BEST reason for procrastination?

Direction: Read the following passage and Answer the THREE questions that follow. As the biggest companies strive to trumpet their environmental activism, the need to match words with deeds is becoming increasingly important. Household names like Costco and Netflix have not provided emissions reduction targets despite saying they want to reduce their impact on climate change. Others, like the agricultural giant Cargill and the clothing company Levi Strauss, have made commitments but have struggled to cut emissions. Technology companies like Google and Microsoft, which run power-hungry data centers, have slashed emissions, but even they are finding that the technology often doesn’t yet exist to carry out their “moonshot” objectives. You can look at a company’s website and see their sustainability report and it will look great, But then when you look at what is behind it, you’ll see there is not a lot of substance behind those commitments or the commitments are not comprehensive enough. To realize the necessary emission reductions, more ambitious targets urgently need to be set. Otherwise, we project emissions for S&P 500 companies will end up being triple of what they should be in 2050 . Slashing emissions is difficult. Businesses must reliably measure how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases they are responsible for. Then companies have to find cleaner energy sources without hurting their operations. Where they can’t find cleaner substitutes, businesses often pay others to reduce emissions or remove carbon from the atmosphere. The task gets even harder when companies begin the process of reducing so-called Scope 3 emissions — pollution caused by suppliers and customers. At oil companies, for example, Scope 3 would include emissions from cars that use gasoline. Other companies that have pledged to cut emissions face different challenges, including coordinating with suppliers and partners. Consider the apparel industry. Much of its contribution to climate change comes from its supply chain. The clothes that Levi Strauss and others put their labels on are often made in factories in places like China, Pakistan and India that remain reliant on coal-fired power plants. The clothes are transported on ships and planes that burn diesel and jet fuel. If we are going to achieve a net-zero carbon economy for real, we will need everyone to act,” said Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental officer. “And that means action can’t be voluntary. We need requirements and standards that everyone is expected to meet.
Which of the following statement(s) is NOT in consonance with the author’s views, as expressed in the passage?

Direction: The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best Answer to each question.
Throughout much of recorded human history, China has boasted the largest population in the world – and until recently, by some margin. So news that the Chinese population is now in decline, and will sometime later this year be surpassed by that of India, is big news even if long predicted. This decline in numbers will spur a trend that already concerns demographers in China: a rapidly aging society. By 2040, around a quarter of the Chinese population is predicted to be over the age of 65. In short, this is a seismic shift. It will have huge symbolic and substantive impacts on China in three main areas. This historical turning point in China’s population trend serves as a further wake-up call to move the country’s model more quickly to a post-manufacturing, post-industrial economy – an aging, shrinking population does not fit the purposes of a labour-intensive economic model. As to what it means for China’s economy, and that of the world, population decline and an aging society will certainly provide Beijing with short-term and long-term challenges. In short, it means there will be fewer workers able to feed the economy and spur further economic growth on one side of the ledger; on the other, a growing post-work population will need potentially costly support. It is perhaps no coincidence then that 2022, as well as being a pivotal year for China in terms of demographics, also saw one of the worst economic performances the country has experienced since 1976, according to data released on Jan. 17. How the Chinese government responds to the challenges presented by this dramatic demographic shift will be key. Failure to live up to the expectations of the public in its response could result in a crisis for the Chinese Communist Party, whose legitimacy is tied closely to economic growth. Any economic decline could have severe consequences for the Chinese Communist Party. It will also be judged on how well the state is able to fix its social support system. Indeed, there is already a strong case to be made that the Chinese government has moved too slowly. The onechild policy that played a significant role in the slowing growth, and now decline, in population was a government policy for more than three decades. It has been known since the 1990s that the Chinese fertility rate was too low to sustain current population numbers. Yet it was only in 2016 that Beijing acted and relaxed the policy to allow more couples to have a second, and then in 2021 a third, child. This action to spur population growth, or at least slow its decline, came too late to prevent China from soon losing its crown as the world’s largest nation. Loss of prestige is one thing though, the political impact of any economic downturn resulting from a shrinking population is quite another.
None of the following statements is implied by the arguments of the passage, EXCEPT:

Direction: Read the following poem and Answer the TWO questions that follow.
Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.
A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.
Cold worlds shake from the oar
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes. A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;
Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.
Which of the following best captures the theme of the poem?
Which of the following best interprets the lines - Stars open among the lilies

Direction: Read the following passage and Answer the THREE questions that follow. As the biggest companies strive to trumpet their environmental activism, the need to match words with deeds is becoming increasingly important. Household names like Costco and Netflix have not provided emissions reduction targets despite saying they want to reduce their impact on climate change. Others, like the agricultural giant Cargill and the clothing company Levi Strauss, have made commitments but have struggled to cut emissions. Technology companies like Google and Microsoft, which run power-hungry data centers, have slashed emissions, but even they are finding that the technology often doesn’t yet exist to carry out their “moonshot” objectives. You can look at a company’s website and see their sustainability report and it will look great, But then when you look at what is behind it, you’ll see there is not a lot of substance behind those commitments or the commitments are not comprehensive enough. To realize the necessary emission reductions, more ambitious targets urgently need to be set. Otherwise, we project emissions for S&P 500 companies will end up being triple of what they should be in 2050 . Slashing emissions is difficult. Businesses must reliably measure how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases they are responsible for. Then companies have to find cleaner energy sources without hurting their operations. Where they can’t find cleaner substitutes, businesses often pay others to reduce emissions or remove carbon from the atmosphere. The task gets even harder when companies begin the process of reducing so-called Scope 3 emissions — pollution caused by suppliers and customers. At oil companies, for example, Scope 3 would include emissions from cars that use gasoline. Other companies that have pledged to cut emissions face different challenges, including coordinating with suppliers and partners. Consider the apparel industry. Much of its contribution to climate change comes from its supply chain. The clothes that Levi Strauss and others put their labels on are often made in factories in places like China, Pakistan and India that remain reliant on coal-fired power plants. The clothes are transported on ships and planes that burn diesel and jet fuel. If we are going to achieve a net-zero carbon economy for real, we will need everyone to act,” said Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental officer. “And that means action can’t be voluntary. We need requirements and standards that everyone is expected to meet.
Based on the passage, which of the following is NOT an example of environmental activism?