List of top Verbal Reasoning Questions

Although any destruction of vitamins caused by food irradiation could be ------ the use of diet supplements, there may be no protection from carcinogens that some fear might be introduced into foods by the process.
Though he refused any responsibility for the failure of the negotiations, Stevenson had no right to ------himself: it was his ------that had caused the debacle.

Five participants at an international conference are planning to take a car trip together. Two persons? the driver and one passenger? will sit in the front seat of the car, and three persons will sit in the back seat. The names of the five participants and all of the languages that each of them speaks are as follows:
Mohsen: Farsi and Hebrew  
Orlando: Italian and Russian 
Shelly: Hebrew and Russian 
Theo: German and Italian 
Ursula: Farsi, German, and Hebrew 
The participants must be seated in the car according to the following restrictions: 
The driver must be Orlando or else Shelly. 
Two persons can be seated side by side only if at least one of the languages they speak is the same.

Yearly percents separated by point of origin of people commuting to jobs

The organizers of a music festival are scheduling exactly six master classes, one class per day for six consecutive days. Three of the classes will be given by violinists and three by pianists. The only musicians who can teach the classes are the violinists F, G, H, and J, and the pianists R, S, T, W, and Z. The festival's organizers must observe the following constraints:
No musician will teach more than one class. 
F will not teach unless the first three classes are taught by violinists. 
If J teaches a class, it will be the sixth.  
R will teach only if T teaches the first class. 
No pianist will teach on a day that immediately precedes or immediately follows a day on which W teaches.

In a small office suite, six offices are arranged in a straight line, one after another, and are consecutively numbered 1 through 6. Exactly six people? P, Q, R, S, T and U? are to be assigned to these six offices, exactly one person to an office, according to the following conditions:
P must be assigned to an office immediately adjacent to the office to which T is assigned. 
Q cannot be assigned to an office immediately adjacent to the office to which S is assigned. 
R must be assigned either to office 1 or to office 6. 
S must be assigned to a lower-numbered office than the office to which U is assigned.

As of the late 1980's. neither theorists nor large- scale computer climate models could accurately predict whether cloud systems would help or hurt a warming globe. Some studies suggested that a four percent
LINE(5)increase in stratocumulus clouds over the ocean could compensate for a doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide, preventing a potentially disastrous planetwide temperature increase. On the other hand, an increase in cirrus clouds could increase global warming. 
LINE(10) That clouds represented the weakest element in climate models was illustrated by a study of fourteen such models. Comparing climate forecasts for a world with double the current amount of carbon dioxide, researchers found that the models agreed quite well if clouds were 
LINE(15)not included. But when clouds were incorporated, a wide range of forecasts was produced. With such discrepancies plaguing the models, scientists could not easily predict how quickly the world's climate would change, nor could they tell which regions would face dustier droughts or deadlier monsoons.

Mary Barton, particularly in its early chapters, is a moving response to the suffering of the industrial worker in the England of the 1840's. What is most impressive about the book is the intense and painstaking effort made
LINE (5) by the author, Elizabeth Gaskell, to convey the experience of everyday life in working-class homes. Her method is partly documentary in nature: the novel includes such features as a carefully annotated reproduction of dialect, the exact details of food prices in an account of a tea
LINE (10)party, an itemized description of the furniture of the Bartons' living room, and a transcription (again annotated) of the ballad "The Oldham Weaver." The interest of this record is considerable, even though the method has a slightly distancing effect. 
LINE (15) As a member of the middle class, Gaskell could hardly help approaching working-class life as an outside observer and a reporter, and the reader of the novel is always conscious of this fact. But there is genuine imaginative re-creation in her accounts of the walk in Green 
LINE (20)Heys Fields, of tea at the Bartons' house, and of John Barton and his friend's discovery of the starving family in the cellar in the chapter "Poverty and Death." Indeed, for a similarly convincing re-creation of such families' emotions and responses (which are more crucial than the 
LINE (25)material details on which the mere reporter is apt to concentrate), the English novel had to wait 60 years for the early writing of D. H. Lawrence. If Gaskell never quite conveys the sense of full participation that would completely authenticate this aspect of Mary Barton, she 
LINE (30)still brings to these scenes an intuitive recognition of feelings that has its own sufficient conviction. The chapter "Old Alice's History " brilliantly dramatizes the situation of that early generation of workers brought from the villages and the countryside to the 
LINE (35)urban industrial centers. The account of Job Legh, the weaver and naturalist who is devoted to the study of biology, vividly embodies one kind of response to an urban industrial environment: an affinity for living things that hardens, by its very contrast with its environment, 
LINE (40)into a kind of crankiness. The early chapters? about factory workers walking out in spring into Green Heys Fields; about Alice Wilson, remembering in her cellar the twig- gathering for brooms in the native village that she will never again see; about Job Legh, intent on 
LINE (45)his impaled insects? capture the characteristic responses of a generation to the new and crushing experience of industrialism. The other early chapters eloquently portray the development of the instinctive cooperation with each other that was already becoming an important tradition among workers.

Seven science students— John, Kate, Luz, Mark, Nelson, Olga, and Pat— are to be divided into three groups. One group will consist of three students, and the other groups will consist of two students each. The following conditions apply to the assignment of students to groups:
John cannot be assigned to the group to which Luz is assigned 
Nelson must be assigned to the group to which Pat is assigned.  
Olga must be assigned to the group consisting of three students.

A circus magician has a "magic box " that has exactly six chambers designed to hold at least two animals each. There are five trained animals— a frog, a hen, a mouse, a parakeet, and a rabbit. On the front of the box, chambers 1, 2, and 3 are arranged in a straight line so that chamber 1 is directly adjacent to chamber 2, and chamber 2 is directly adjacent to chamber 3. On the back of the box, the cham- bers are also arranged in a straight line with chamber 4 directly adjacent to chamber 5, and chamber 5 directly adjacent to chamber 6. No chamber in the front of the box is directly adjacent to a chamber in the back. When working with the animals, the magician must obey the following restrictions:
None of the chambers can contain more than two animals at the same time. 
The mouse cannot be in the same chamber as any other animal, and any chamber directly adjacent to the chamber that the mouse occupies must remain empty. 
Neither the hen nor the frog can be in the same chamber as the parakeet.

A landscape designer has available two trees each of eight different species — linden, maple, pine, quince, redbud, spruce, tupelo, and walnut— from which a selection must be made for planting at two different locations. For planting at each location, the designer will select exactly four trees, representing four different tree species, according to the following conditions:
If quince is planted at location 1, spruce cannot be planted at location 2.
If linden and quince are planted at location 1, pine must be planted at location 2.
If pine is planted at location 2, quince and tupelo must be planted at location 1.
Spruce cannot be planted at location 1 unless linden and pine are planted at location 2.

As people age, their cells become less efficient and less able to replace damaged components. At the same time their tissues stiffen. For example, the lungs and the heart muscle expand less successfully, the blood vessels
LINE (5) become increasingly rigid, and the ligaments and tendons tighten.
Few investigators would attribute such diverse effects to a single cause. Nevertheless, researchers have discovered that a process long known to discolor and toughen 
LINE(10)foods may also contribute to age- related impairment of both cells and tissues. That process is nonenzymatic glycosylation, whereby glucose becomes attached to proteins without the aid of enzymes. When enzymes attach glucose to proteins (enzymatic glycosylation), they do so 
LINE(15)at a specific site on a specific protein molecule for a specific purpose. In contrast, the nonenzymatic process adds glucose haphazardly to any of several sites along any available peptide chain within a protein molecule. This nonenzymatic glycosylation of certain proteins 
LINE(20)has been understood by food chemists for decades, although few biologists recognized until recently that the same steps could take place in the body. Nonenzymatic glycosylation begins when an aldehyde group (CHO) of glucose and an amino group (NH2) of a protein are 
LINE(25)attracted to each other. The molecules combine, forming what is called a Schiff base within the protein. This com- bination is unstable and quickly rearranges itself into a stabler, but still reversible, substance known as an Amadori product. 
LINE(30) If a given protein persists in the body for months or years, some of its Amadori products slowly dehydrate and rearrange themselves yet again, into new glucose-derived structures. These can combine with various kinds of molecules to form irreversible structures named advanced 
LINE(35)glycosylation end products (AGE's). Most AGE's are yellowish brown and fluorescent and have specific spectrographic properties. More important for the body, many are also able to cross-link adjacent proteins, particularly ones that give structure to tissues and organs. Although 
LINE(40)no one has yet satisfactorily described the origin of all such bridges between proteins, many investigators agree that extensive cross-linking of proteins probably contributes to the stiffening and loss of elasticity characteristic of aging tissues. 
LINE(45) In an attempt to link this process with the development of cataracts (the browning and clouding of the lens of the eye as people age), researchers studied the effect of glucose on solutions of purified crystallin, the major protein in the lens of the eye. Glucose-free solutions 
LINE(50) remained clear, but solutions with glucose caused the proteins to form clusters, suggesting that the molecules had become cross-linked. The clusters diffracted light, making the solution opaque. The researchers also discovered that the pigmented cross-links in human 
LINE(55)cataracts have the brownish color and fluorescence characteristic of AGE's. These data suggest that nonenzymatic glycosylation of lens crystalline may contribute to cataract formation.

Writing of the Iroquois nation, Smith has argued that through the chiefs' council, tribal chiefs traditionally maintained complete control over the political affairs of both the Iroquois tribal league and the individual tribes
LINE (5) belonging to the league, whereas the sole jurisdiction over religious affairs resided with the shamans. According to Smith, this division was maintained until the late nineteenth century, when the dissolution of the chiefs' council and the consequent diminishment of the 
LINE(10) chiefs' political power fostered their increasing involvement in religious affairs. 
However, Smith fails to recognize that this division of power between the tribal chiefs and shamans was not actually rooted in Iroquois tradition; rather, it resulted 
LINE(15) from the Iroquois' resettlement on reservations early in the nineteenth century. Prior to resettlement, the chiefs' council controlled only the broad policy of the tribal league; individual tribes had institutions? most important, the longhouse? to govern their own affairs. In the 
LINE(20) longhouse, the tribe's chief influenced both political and religious affairs.

(This passage is adapted from an article published in 1981.)

The term "remote sensing" refers to the techniques of measurement and interpretation of phenomena from a distance. Prior to the mid-1960's the interpretation of film images was the primary means for remote sensing of the Earth's geologic features. With the development of the optomechanical scanner, scientists began to construct digital multispectral images using data beyond the sensitivity range of visible light photography. These images are constructed by mechanically aligning pictorial representations of such phenomena as the reflection of light waves outside the visible spectrum, the refraction of radio waves, and the daily changes in temperature in areas on the Earth's surface. Digital multispectral imaging has now become the basic tool in geologic remote sensing from satellites.

The advantage of digital over photographic imaging is evident: the resulting numerical data are precisely known, and digital data are not subject to the vagaries of difficult-to-control chemical processing. With digital processing, it is possible to combine a large number of spectral images. The acquisition of the first multispectral digital data set from the multispectral scanner (MSS) aboard the satellite Landsat in 1972 consequently attracted the attention of the entire geologic community. Landsat MSS data are now being applied to a variety of geologic problems that are difficult to solve by conventional methods alone. These include specific problems in mineral and energy resource exploration and the charting of glaciers and shallow seas.

A more fundamental application of remote sensing is to augment conventional methods for geologic mapping of large areas. Regional maps present compositional, structural, and chronological information for reconstructing geologic evolution. Such reconstructions have important practical applications because the conditions under which rock units and other structural features are formed influence the occurrence of ore and petroleum deposits and affect the thickness and integrity of the geologic media in which the deposits are found.

Geologic maps incorporate a large, varied body of specific field and laboratory measurements, but the maps must be interpretative because field measurements are always limited by rock exposure, accessibility and labor resources. With remote-sensing techniques it is possible to obtain much geologic information more efficiently than it can be obtained on the ground. These techniques also facilitate overall interpretation. Since detailed geologic mapping is generally conducted in small areas, the continuity of regional features that have intermittent and variable expressions is often not recognized, but in the comprehensive views of Landsat images these continuities are apparent. However, some critical information cannot be obtained through remote sensing, and several characteristics of the Landsat MSS impose limitations on the acquisition of diagnostic data. Some of these limitations can be overcome by designing satellite systems specifically for geologic purposes; but, to be most effective, remote-sensing data must still be combined with data from field surveys and laboratory tests, the techniques of the earlier twentieth century.
Although the development of new infrastructure (such public facilities as power plants, schools, and bridges) is usually determined by governmental planning, sometimes this development can be planned more flexibly and realistically by private investors who anticipate profit from the collection of user fees. Such profits can contribute to the financing of more infrastructure if demand proves great enough, whereas the reluctance of developers to invest in such projects can signal that additional infrastructure is not needed. During the economic boom of the 1980's, for example, the state of Virginia authorized private developers to build a \$300 million toll road. These developers obtained the needed right-of-way from property owners, but by 1993 they still had not raised the necessary financing. The unwillingness of investors to finance this project does not negate the viability of privately financed roads; rather, it illustrates a virtue of private financing. If a road appears unlikely to attract enough future traffic to pay for the road, then it should not be built.
The passage advocates for the private financing of public infrastructure, arguing that it can be more flexible and realistic than government planning. The core idea is that private investors, driven by the anticipation of profit from user fees, provide a natural market test for new projects. If investors are willing to finance a project (like a toll road), it suggests there is sufficient demand. Conversely, if they are reluctant, it signals that the project may not be needed. The passage uses the example of a privately authorized toll road in Virginia during the 1980s that failed to secure financing by 1993. The author presents this failure not as a weakness of private financing, but as a "virtue": it prevented a road from being built that was unlikely to attract enough traffic to be profitable.
BELLICOSE:
ABJURE:
SALUTARY:
LUGUBRIOUSNESS:
PRESCIENCE:
INVETERATE:
EVOKE:
OSTENTATION:
BRISTLE: