Pj
Reading Comprehension (3 questions - title based, factual and inference based)
[Not convinced with the original solutions/explanations provided]
Evolutionary biology has long rested on the belief that the major animal forms of today - known as phyla - date from an 'explosive' event or series of events that occurred about 550 million years ago at the start of what is known as the Cambrian period. The belief is based on fossil data: animal fossils tended to be sparse in deposits formed prior to the Cambrian period, and abundant thereafter. The Cambrian explosion, if true, is also extremely puzzling, because conventional thinking does not fit in well with the possibility of radical evolutionary developments taking place within relatively brief intervals of time (here 'brief' is to be understood in a geological time-frame: 10 million years would certainly qualify).
A spectacular finding, made recently by Shuhai Xiao and colleagues at the Harvard and Beijing Universities, undermines the sanctity of the Cambrian explosion theory. The researchers have reported the existence of superbly preserved animal embryos in the Doushantuo phosphate deposits in southern China. The stratum is 570 million years old approximately, and the complexity of the embryos suggest that their evolutionary ancestry must be far older than would have been guessed hitherto. This may also mark the beginning of a rapprochement between palaeontologists, (whose best estimates of the time of divergence of the animal phyla was 565 million years ago) and molecular biologists, who had inferred (on the basis of DNA sequence analysis) that the time of divergence had to be at least 1,000 million years ago.
The fossils identified by Xiao and colleagues are spherical and about half a millimetre in diameter. They are broken into 2, 4, or 8 sub-units that look exactly like dividing animal embryos. The overall size of the fossils is the same "irrespective of how many sub-units" they contain, reinforcing the inference that they were indeed embryos - initial embryonic development is not accompanied by increase in size - and not crystalline aggregations of inert matter, for example.
These fossilised embryos confirm in their appearance, an old theory due to Hackel, that in the beginning, multi-cellular animals must have been microscopic creatures that resembled the embryos of the animals of today. Multi-cellular algal fossils have been dated to about 1,000 million years ago, and the present work indicates a similar age for animal fossils too. As the authors point out, Doushantuo embryos constitute the first geological evidence in support of the hypothesis that the chief lineages of multi-cellular life diversified much before large animals came on the scene. If verified by future studies, the implication will be that evolutionary pressure for an increase in size must have come only long after an extensive exploration of shapes and forms had taken place.
'If the Doushantuo phosphate deposit dated from the Cambrian period, the 'explosion' theory would stand corrected.' This statement is:
1) true 2) false 3) unverifiable 4) the central idea of the passage.
Qs 2 Fact based-
The work of Xiao and colleagues is a vote in favour of:
1) conventional thinking in evolutionary biology.
2) palaeontologists.
3) molecular biologists.
4) none of the above.
Qs 3 Title of passage-
Which of the following can be a suitable title for the passage?
1) Back to the future 2) Smaller but older 3) Old is gold 4) Back to Hackel
Hello everyone
I have attached the Google Drive link in this mail to the comprehensive CAT material which can be a great help for your preparation and also a collection of previous years mocks. I have tried to arrange it as much as possible but still it can be confusing a bit so I am just enlisting the important folders.
1) Barron's Audio Vocab
2) Totalgadha (contains theory of all the topics with best examples)
3) Presentation(This is the complete theory relevant to CAT and strongly recommended)
In case of any confusion or further help feel free to reply and do share this material with all your friends. Best of luck for your preparation.
Drive Link : https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B1x59CIQzF-BSzcyTUFoZFF5N0E&usp=sharing
If anybody interested in buying complete IMS CAT E-Test Series(with additional kit for other exams like XAT, IIFT etc.) at a lesser rate can PM me. Thought of going for CAT-16 but will be joining IIM-Udaipur now.
correct sequence of adverbs?
- manner,time,place,frequency
- manner,place,time,frequency
0 voters
Answer please.
#pj
A. The distinctive and easily recognizable behaviour of a flock of birds or a swarm of bees, for example, is the product of interaction of individual birds or bees following relatively simple behavioural rules.
B. This is true even of relatively simple chemicals like water: H2O undergoes a phase transition from liquid to solid at 32 degree Fahrenheit.
C. The behaviour of complex systems cannot be predicted by simply aggregating or scaling up the behaviour of the parts that constitute them.
D. In many cases, the relationship between parts and wholes is nonlinear, that is, increasing input A increases output B up to a certain point; whereupon it creates a qualitatively different and unexpected output C.
E. The group behaviour 'emerges' as a result of the interaction of the individuals that make it up.
Directions for question: Read the argument and answer the question that follows.
It was co-incidental that two separate teams of scientists discovered the remains of tyrannosauruses on two separate locations of the same island. The first team found that the tyrannosaurus, who was a female, had developed wings; however, it was not possible for it to fly and support its weight during its flight. The other team discovered that the tyrannosaurus, who was a male, had no traces of wings and its structure was no different from what was already known to the scientists. Eventually, both the discoveries made the scientists and island dwellers realize that the island contained many undiscovered treasures and answers.
Assuming that the above argument is true, identify which of the following statements can be inferred from the argument?
a. There are certain islands where traces of dinosaurs and other ancient species can still be unearthed and studied to fill in the gaps. b. The history of evolution provides ample evidence to justify the difference among the male and female species of a race.
c. It is possible that some female tyrannosauruses developed wings, but, whether this physical feature was only specific to females is open to further discovery.
d. The tyrannosaurus was the only species of dinosaurs that had wings but could not fly due to their humungous bodyweight.
e. Scientists are confident that they have already unearthed most of the information about this species of dinosaurs and can make accurate guesses.
Answer and explanation for below:
Answer to this question?
Reading Comprehension - 2 Questions
Please help in solving these questions. Do share your thought process in support of your answer.
Qs 1. In the image below-
http://i.imgur.com/xqjMiw1.png
Qs 2. All of the following could have contributed to inequality in the United States today, except?
a) Differences in educational attainment of its population
b) Increased regulation which leads to fewer entry and exits of firms, thereby reducing the volatility of each worker's earnings
c) Greater immigration and trade as immigrants competing directly for unskilled jobs, and unskilled workers far away, competing through trade, serve to hold down wages of unskilled US workers
d) The entry of women into the workforce and "assortative mating", which means the well-connected and educated tend to mate more often with each other
Ans and approach
What's the meaning of "It won't be long now before we meet." ?
RC
While physical books may be on the road to obsolescence, the road will almost certainly be a long and winding one and books and book reading, at least as we've defined those things in the past, are in their cultural twilight. As a society, we devote ever less time to reading printed words, and even when we do read them, we do so in the busy shadow of the Internet. Some thinkers welcome the eclipse of the book and the literary mind it fostered. Mark Federman, an education researcher, has argued that literacy, as we've traditionally understood it, "is now nothing but a quaint notion, an aesthetic form that is as irrelevant to the real questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited poetry - clearly not devoid of value, but equally no longer the structuring force of society". The time has come, he said, for teachers and students alike to abandon the "linear, hierarchical" world of the book and enter the Web's "world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity" - a world in which "the greatest skill" involves "discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux". Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar, suggests that we shouldn't waste our time mourning the death of deep reading - it was overrated all along. "No one reads War and Peace," he wrote, singling out Tolstoy's epic as the quintessence of high literary achievement. Such proclamations seem a little too staged to take seriously. Although it may be tempting to ignore those who suggest the value of the literary mind has always been exaggerated, that would be a mistake. Their arguments are another important sign of the fundamental shift taking place in society's attitude towards intellectual achievement. Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift - to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably into the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life. Our desire for fast-moving, kaleidoscopic diversions didn't originate with the invention of the World Wide Web. It has been present and growing for many decades, as the pace of our work and home lives has quickened and as broadcast media like radio and television have presented us with a welter of programmes, messages and advertisements. The Internet, though it marks a radical departure from traditional media in many ways, also represents a continuation of the intellectual and social trends that emerged from people's embrace of the electric media of the twentieth century and that have been shaping our lives and thoughts ever since. The distractions in our lives have been proliferating for a long time, but never has there been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to so widely scatter our attention and to do it so insistently. On the Net, there are windows within windows within windows, not to mention long ranks of tabs primed to trigger the opening of even more windows. Multitasking has become so routine that most of us would find it intolerable if we had to go back to computers that could run only one program or open only one file at a time. And yet, even though the question may have been rendered moot, it remains as vital today as it was thirty-five years ago. It points to "a conflict between two different ways of working and two different understandings of how technology should be used to support that work". In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. We have cast our lot with the juggle.
Q-1) The author says that Clay Shirky's statement makes it difficult to take the latter seriously because:
1) disparaging Tolstoy seems calculated to gain attention rather than make a point.
2) deep-reading is not over-rated like Shirky would like us to believe.
3) War and Peace is a masterpiece despite whatever Shirky has to say and spread of the Internet.
4) there is no evidence to say that War and Peace will not be read digitally.
Q-2) Which of the following statements does the author make about the Internet vis-à-vis traditional media?
I. Unlike other media, which entertain, the Internet is seminal in its allowing us to multitask and dispersing our attention span.
II. The Internet has exponentially multiplied the ability of the electronic media to distract our attention.
III. The Internet is the latest in the list of mass mediums, which ever since their inception, have been consistently chipping away at our attention span.
1) Both I and II
2) Both II and III
3) Both I and III
4) I, II and III
Q 3) Which of the following best describes the author's attitude towards the effect the Internet has had on our mindset?
1) nostalgic
2) indifferent
3) ambivalent
4) disappointed