List of top Verbal Reasoning Questions

A circus has seven fenced enclosures, numbered 1 through 7, for two animals: a lion and a tiger. Each enclosure is connected to adjacent enclosures by interior gates. There are exactly eight such gates, each connecting one enclosure to exactly one other enclosure: enclosure 1 is connected to enclosures 2, 3 and 4; enclosure 3 to enclosures 1, 2, 4, and 5; and enclosure 5 to enclosures 3, 6, and 7. These gates provide the only connections between enclosures. Occasionally a trainer moves the animals. Taking either animals from one enclosure to an adjacent enclosure through a gate is called a "transfer."  
The following conditions are strictly observed: 
The two animals cannot be together in any enclosure or gate. 
Transfers cannot occur simultaneously In moving either one animal or both to a specified enclosure or enclosures, the minimum number of trans- fers needed to achieve the specified result are used.

A newsstand will display exactly one copy each of six different magazines— M, O, P, S, T, and V— in a single row on a rack. Each magazine will occupy exactly one of the six positions, numbered consecutively 1 through 6. The magazines must be displayed in accordance with the following rules: 
Either P or else T occupies position 1.  
Either S or else T occupies position 6. 
M and O, not necessarily in that order, occupy consecutively numbered positions. 
V and T, not necessarily in that order, occupy consecutively numbered positions.

Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, their dimensions and appearance, were determined by technologists artisans, designers, inventors, and engineers---using
LINE(5) non-scientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. In the development of Western technology, it has been non-verbal thinking 
LINE(10), by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details of our material surroundings. Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture in the minds of those who built them. 
LINE(15) The creative shaping process of a technologist's mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of nonverbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of right- 
LINE(20)ness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber? Where should the valves be placed? Should it have a long or short piston? Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirements, by limitations of available 
LINE(25)space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions, such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientific component of design remains primary. 
Design courses, then, should be an essential element 
LINE(30)in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock-in-trade of the artist, not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed to entail "hard thinking," nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive 
LINE(35) stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal or mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric views of industrial processes for 
LINE(40)its historical record of American engineering, the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architectural schools. It courses in design, which in a strongly analytical 
LINE(45)engineering curriculum provide the background required for practical problem- solving, are not provided, we can expect to encounter silly but costly errors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high-speed railroad cars loaded with sophisticated 
LINE(50)controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan sucked snow into the electrical system. Absurd ran- dom failures that plague automatic control systems are not merely trivial aberrations; they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumed to be primarily a problem in mathematics.

Influenced by the view of some twentieth-century feminists that women's position within the family is one of the central factors determining women's social position, some historians have underestimated the
LINE (5) significance of the woman suffrage movement. These historians contend that nineteenth-century suffrages m was less radical and, hence, less important than, for example, the moral reform movement or domestic feminism— two nineteenth-century movements in which women struggled 
LINE (10) for more power and autonomy within the family. True, by emphasizing these struggles, such historians have broadened the conventional view of nineteenth- century feminism, but they do a historical disservice to suffragism. Nineteenth-century feminists and anti- 
LINE (15) feminist alike perceived the suffragists' demand for enfranchisement as the most radical element in women's protest, in part because suffragists were demanding power that was not based on the institution of the family, women's traditional sphere. When evaluating 
LINE (20) nineteenth-century feminism as a social force, contemporary historians should consider the perceptions of actual participants in the historical events.

One explanation for the tendency of animals to be more vigilant in smaller groups than in larger ones assumes that the vigilant behavior— looking up, for example— is aimed at predators. If individuals on the
LINE (5) edge of a group are more vigilant because they are at greater risk of being captured, then individuals on aver- age would have to be more vigilant in smaller groups, because the animals on the periphery of a group form a greater proportion of the whole group as the size of the 
LINE (10)group diminishes. 
However, a different explanation is necessary in cases where the vigilant behavior is not directed at predators. J. Krebs has discovered that great blue herons look up more often when in smaller flocks than when in larger 
LINE (15)ones, solely as a consequence of poor feeding conditions. Krebs hypothesizes that the herons in smaller flocks are watching for herons that they might follow to better feeding pools, which usually attract larger numbers of the birds.

The earliest controversies about the relationship between photography and art centered on whether photography's fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine allowed it to be a fine art as distinct from
LINE(5) merely a practical art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the defense of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was instead a privileged 
LINE(10)way of seeing, a revolt against commonplace vision, and no less worthy an art than painting. 
Ironically, now that photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or irrelevant to label it as such. Serious photographers variously 
LINE(15) claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing events, exploring themselves — anything but making works of art. In the nineteenth century, photography's association with the real world placed it in an ambivalent relation to art; late in the twentieth 
LINE(20)century, an ambivalent relation exists because of the Modernist heritage in art. That important photographers are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their own work is not involved with art, shows the extent to which 
LINE(25)they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of Modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art. Photographers' disclaimers of any interest in making art tell us more about the harried status of the contemporary 
LINE(30) notion of art than about whether photography is or is not art. For example, those photographers who suppose that, by taking pictures, they are getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified by painting remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined 
LINE(35)they were getting away from the intellectual austerity of classical Modernist painting by concentrating on the physical act of painting. Much of photography's prestige today derives from the convergence of its aims with those of recent art, particularly with the dismissal of abstract 
LINE(40)art implicit in the phenomenon of Pop painting during the 1960's. Appreciating photographs is a relief to sensibilities tired of the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical Modernist painting— that is, abstract art as developed in different ways by Picasso, 
LINE(45)Kandinsky, and Matisse— presupposes highly developed skills of looking and a familiarity with other paintings and the history of art. Photography, like Pop painting, reassures viewers that art is not hard; photography seems to be more about its subjects than about art. 
LINE(50) Photography, however, has developed all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art. Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the pro- motion of photography as an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far that the 
LINE (55)public will forget that photography is a distinctive and exalted activity— in short, an art.

On each day of the Monday through Friday workweek, exactly two of three employees—George, Hilda, and Irene—must remain on duty in the office to answer tele- phones during the noon to 1 p.m. lunch break. In the scheduling of telephone duty, the following constraints must be met：
Hilda and Irene have telephone duty together on Tuesday. 
George and Hilda have telephone duty together on Thursday. 
No one can have telephone duty on more than four of the five days of the week.

In a benefit concert each of exactly seven solo performers— Harris, Jones, McIntyre, Nelson, Strapp, Trevino, and Williams— will sing. The concert director is deciding the order in which the performers will sing and is assigning each to exactly one of seven time slots, numbered consecutively 1 through 7, according to the following conditions： 
Harris must sing at some time before McIntyre sings. Strapp must sing at some time before Jones sings. 
Trevino must sing either immediately before or immediately after Nelson sings. 
Williams must be assigned to time slot 3.