Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Test - 34

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

The Positivists, anxious to stake out their claim for history as a science, contributed the weight of their influence to the cult of facts. First ascertain the facts, said the positivists, then draw your conclusions from them…..This is what may [be] called the common-sense view of history. History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions, and so on…[Sir George Clark] contrasted the "hard core of facts" in history with the surrounding pulp of disputable interpretation forgetting perhaps that the pulpy part of the fruit is more rewarding than the hard core.….It recalls the favourite dictum of the great liberal journalist C. P. Scott: "Facts are sacred, opinion is free.". . .

What is a historical fact?..... According to the common-sense view, there are certain basic facts which are the same for all historians and which form, so to speak, the backbone of history—the fact, for example, that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066. But this view calls for two observations. In the first place, it is not with facts like these that the historian is primarily concerned. It is no doubt important to know that the great battle was fought in 1066 and not in 1065 or 1067, and that it was fought at Hastings and not at Eastbourne or Brighton. The historian must not get these things wrong. But [to] praise a historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a necessary condition of his work, but not his essential function. It is precisely for matters of this kind that the historian is entitled to rely on what have been called the "auxiliary sciences" of history—archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, chronology, and so forth….

The second observation is that the necessity to establish these basic facts rests not on any quality in the facts themselves, but on an apriori decision of the historian. In spite of C. P. Scott's motto, every journalist knows today that the most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. . . . The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle was fought at Hastings in 1066 is that historians regard it as a major historical event……... Professor Talcott Parsons once called [science] "a selective system of cognitive orientations to reality." It might perhaps have been put more simply. But history is, among other things, that. The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

The Positivists, anxious to stake out their claim for history as a science, contributed the weight of their influence to the cult of facts. First ascertain the facts, said the positivists, then draw your conclusions from them…..This is what may [be] called the common-sense view of history. History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions, and so on…[Sir George Clark] contrasted the "hard core of facts" in history with the surrounding pulp of disputable interpretation forgetting perhaps that the pulpy part of the fruit is more rewarding than the hard core.….It recalls the favourite dictum of the great liberal journalist C. P. Scott: "Facts are sacred, opinion is free.". . .

What is a historical fact?..... According to the common-sense view, there are certain basic facts which are the same for all historians and which form, so to speak, the backbone of history—the fact, for example, that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066. But this view calls for two observations. In the first place, it is not with facts like these that the historian is primarily concerned. It is no doubt important to know that the great battle was fought in 1066 and not in 1065 or 1067, and that it was fought at Hastings and not at Eastbourne or Brighton. The historian must not get these things wrong. But [to] praise a historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a necessary condition of his work, but not his essential function. It is precisely for matters of this kind that the historian is entitled to rely on what have been called the "auxiliary sciences" of history—archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, chronology, and so forth….

The second observation is that the necessity to establish these basic facts rests not on any quality in the facts themselves, but on an apriori decision of the historian. In spite of C. P. Scott's motto, every journalist knows today that the most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. . . . The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle was fought at Hastings in 1066 is that historians regard it as a major historical event……... Professor Talcott Parsons once called [science] "a selective system of cognitive orientations to reality." It might perhaps have been put more simply. But history is, among other things, that. The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

For our ancestors in the early 1800s, the discovery of bones and footprints was thrilling, bewildering news. This was not just another scientific discovery, like the sighting of a new moon around a distant planet. This was proof of life where no one had ever imagined it. Poets, scientists, and ordinary men and women looked at the dinosaur discoveries and shuddered and marveled. Tennyson (using an archaic word for “tore”) imagined a bygone world that featured “Dragons of the prime, / That tare each other in their slime.” Perhaps Tennyson and his peers would have been less astonished if they had anticipated a world that teemed with huge, violent beasts. But the nineteenth century’s aliens turned up out of the blue, as we have seen, and the public was blindsided in a way that people in today’s world—who have known about the search for ET for decades—could never be.

One of the great hazards in trying to picture the past is forgetting that our forebears didn’t know how their story ended. We read about the Great Depression or the rise of Nazism knowing how it all played out. It’s hard to bear in mind that no one in the 1930s had that privilege. But we flatten out history’s drama—we miss out on people’s fears and hopes and illusions and expectations—when we bring our present-day knowledge with us on our ventures into past ages. In the case of the dinosaur discoveries, it wasn’t simply that no one knew how the story ended. More important, no one even knew what to make of how the story began. That puts the dinosaur story into unusual company. Every once in a great while, people going about their ordinary lives have looked up and seen something they never imagined; A ship with towering masts and billowing sails materialized on the horizon, for instance, in waters that had never known a vessel bigger than a canoe for example. Of all such first encounters, none ever topped the moment when humans first stumbled on bones, footprints, and other evidence that dinosaurs had once roamed the earth.

The dinosaur story took on its modern shape around 1800, but it almost began far earlier, back in 1677. In that year, workmen digging in a quarry about twenty miles from Oxford University found a massive bone. They brought it to Robert Plot, a much-admired naturalist. Plot ventured a guess. “It must have been the Bone of some Elephant,” brought to Britain more than a thousand years before when the Romans had invaded. Plot rushed to compare his mystery bone and other giant bones in the museum’s collection with the elephant’s bones. Nothing matched! So horses were out, and oxen were out, and elephants were out, too. What was left?

Plot spelled out the only remaining possibility. “Notwithstanding their extravagant Magnitude, they must have been the Bones of Men or Women.” By way of support for this eye-catching claim, Plot went on to provide a pages-long list of human giants throughout history. Some had been described by Greek and Roman authors in antiquity, and some were more recent. From our vantage point, this seems silly. But Plot was not a silly man. He was open-minded and methodical, and he had gathered all the evidence he could find. But he was, like all of us, a creature of his own era. Which meant, in his case, that he could not imagine other eras and other creatures and a world before humans. The bone would eventually be properly identified, but not until 1824. It would take that long to come up with an explanation that would have struck Plot and his successors as far more outlandish than a world replete with human giants.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

For our ancestors in the early 1800s, the discovery of bones and footprints was thrilling, bewildering news. This was not just another scientific discovery, like the sighting of a new moon around a distant planet. This was proof of life where no one had ever imagined it. Poets, scientists, and ordinary men and women looked at the dinosaur discoveries and shuddered and marveled. Tennyson (using an archaic word for “tore”) imagined a bygone world that featured “Dragons of the prime, / That tare each other in their slime.” Perhaps Tennyson and his peers would have been less astonished if they had anticipated a world that teemed with huge, violent beasts. But the nineteenth century’s aliens turned up out of the blue, as we have seen, and the public was blindsided in a way that people in today’s world—who have known about the search for ET for decades—could never be.

One of the great hazards in trying to picture the past is forgetting that our forebears didn’t know how their story ended. We read about the Great Depression or the rise of Nazism knowing how it all played out. It’s hard to bear in mind that no one in the 1930s had that privilege. But we flatten out history’s drama—we miss out on people’s fears and hopes and illusions and expectations—when we bring our present-day knowledge with us on our ventures into past ages. In the case of the dinosaur discoveries, it wasn’t simply that no one knew how the story ended. More important, no one even knew what to make of how the story began. That puts the dinosaur story into unusual company. Every once in a great while, people going about their ordinary lives have looked up and seen something they never imagined; A ship with towering masts and billowing sails materialized on the horizon, for instance, in waters that had never known a vessel bigger than a canoe for example. Of all such first encounters, none ever topped the moment when humans first stumbled on bones, footprints, and other evidence that dinosaurs had once roamed the earth.

The dinosaur story took on its modern shape around 1800, but it almost began far earlier, back in 1677. In that year, workmen digging in a quarry about twenty miles from Oxford University found a massive bone. They brought it to Robert Plot, a much-admired naturalist. Plot ventured a guess. “It must have been the Bone of some Elephant,” brought to Britain more than a thousand years before when the Romans had invaded. Plot rushed to compare his mystery bone and other giant bones in the museum’s collection with the elephant’s bones. Nothing matched! So horses were out, and oxen were out, and elephants were out, too. What was left?

Plot spelled out the only remaining possibility. “Notwithstanding their extravagant Magnitude, they must have been the Bones of Men or Women.” By way of support for this eye-catching claim, Plot went on to provide a pages-long list of human giants throughout history. Some had been described by Greek and Roman authors in antiquity, and some were more recent. From our vantage point, this seems silly. But Plot was not a silly man. He was open-minded and methodical, and he had gathered all the evidence he could find. But he was, like all of us, a creature of his own era. Which meant, in his case, that he could not imagine other eras and other creatures and a world before humans. The bone would eventually be properly identified, but not until 1824. It would take that long to come up with an explanation that would have struck Plot and his successors as far more outlandish than a world replete with human giants.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

For our ancestors in the early 1800s, the discovery of bones and footprints was thrilling, bewildering news. This was not just another scientific discovery, like the sighting of a new moon around a distant planet. This was proof of life where no one had ever imagined it. Poets, scientists, and ordinary men and women looked at the dinosaur discoveries and shuddered and marveled. Tennyson (using an archaic word for “tore”) imagined a bygone world that featured “Dragons of the prime, / That tare each other in their slime.” Perhaps Tennyson and his peers would have been less astonished if they had anticipated a world that teemed with huge, violent beasts. But the nineteenth century’s aliens turned up out of the blue, as we have seen, and the public was blindsided in a way that people in today’s world—who have known about the search for ET for decades—could never be.

One of the great hazards in trying to picture the past is forgetting that our forebears didn’t know how their story ended. We read about the Great Depression or the rise of Nazism knowing how it all played out. It’s hard to bear in mind that no one in the 1930s had that privilege. But we flatten out history’s drama—we miss out on people’s fears and hopes and illusions and expectations—when we bring our present-day knowledge with us on our ventures into past ages. In the case of the dinosaur discoveries, it wasn’t simply that no one knew how the story ended. More important, no one even knew what to make of how the story began. That puts the dinosaur story into unusual company. Every once in a great while, people going about their ordinary lives have looked up and seen something they never imagined; A ship with towering masts and billowing sails materialized on the horizon, for instance, in waters that had never known a vessel bigger than a canoe for example. Of all such first encounters, none ever topped the moment when humans first stumbled on bones, footprints, and other evidence that dinosaurs had once roamed the earth.

The dinosaur story took on its modern shape around 1800, but it almost began far earlier, back in 1677. In that year, workmen digging in a quarry about twenty miles from Oxford University found a massive bone. They brought it to Robert Plot, a much-admired naturalist. Plot ventured a guess. “It must have been the Bone of some Elephant,” brought to Britain more than a thousand years before when the Romans had invaded. Plot rushed to compare his mystery bone and other giant bones in the museum’s collection with the elephant’s bones. Nothing matched! So horses were out, and oxen were out, and elephants were out, too. What was left?

Plot spelled out the only remaining possibility. “Notwithstanding their extravagant Magnitude, they must have been the Bones of Men or Women.” By way of support for this eye-catching claim, Plot went on to provide a pages-long list of human giants throughout history. Some had been described by Greek and Roman authors in antiquity, and some were more recent. From our vantage point, this seems silly. But Plot was not a silly man. He was open-minded and methodical, and he had gathered all the evidence he could find. But he was, like all of us, a creature of his own era. Which meant, in his case, that he could not imagine other eras and other creatures and a world before humans. The bone would eventually be properly identified, but not until 1824. It would take that long to come up with an explanation that would have struck Plot and his successors as far more outlandish than a world replete with human giants.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

For our ancestors in the early 1800s, the discovery of bones and footprints was thrilling, bewildering news. This was not just another scientific discovery, like the sighting of a new moon around a distant planet. This was proof of life where no one had ever imagined it. Poets, scientists, and ordinary men and women looked at the dinosaur discoveries and shuddered and marveled. Tennyson (using an archaic word for “tore”) imagined a bygone world that featured “Dragons of the prime, / That tare each other in their slime.” Perhaps Tennyson and his peers would have been less astonished if they had anticipated a world that teemed with huge, violent beasts. But the nineteenth century’s aliens turned up out of the blue, as we have seen, and the public was blindsided in a way that people in today’s world—who have known about the search for ET for decades—could never be.

One of the great hazards in trying to picture the past is forgetting that our forebears didn’t know how their story ended. We read about the Great Depression or the rise of Nazism knowing how it all played out. It’s hard to bear in mind that no one in the 1930s had that privilege. But we flatten out history’s drama—we miss out on people’s fears and hopes and illusions and expectations—when we bring our present-day knowledge with us on our ventures into past ages. In the case of the dinosaur discoveries, it wasn’t simply that no one knew how the story ended. More important, no one even knew what to make of how the story began. That puts the dinosaur story into unusual company. Every once in a great while, people going about their ordinary lives have looked up and seen something they never imagined; A ship with towering masts and billowing sails materialized on the horizon, for instance, in waters that had never known a vessel bigger than a canoe for example. Of all such first encounters, none ever topped the moment when humans first stumbled on bones, footprints, and other evidence that dinosaurs had once roamed the earth.

The dinosaur story took on its modern shape around 1800, but it almost began far earlier, back in 1677. In that year, workmen digging in a quarry about twenty miles from Oxford University found a massive bone. They brought it to Robert Plot, a much-admired naturalist. Plot ventured a guess. “It must have been the Bone of some Elephant,” brought to Britain more than a thousand years before when the Romans had invaded. Plot rushed to compare his mystery bone and other giant bones in the museum’s collection with the elephant’s bones. Nothing matched! So horses were out, and oxen were out, and elephants were out, too. What was left?

Plot spelled out the only remaining possibility. “Notwithstanding their extravagant Magnitude, they must have been the Bones of Men or Women.” By way of support for this eye-catching claim, Plot went on to provide a pages-long list of human giants throughout history. Some had been described by Greek and Roman authors in antiquity, and some were more recent. From our vantage point, this seems silly. But Plot was not a silly man. He was open-minded and methodical, and he had gathered all the evidence he could find. But he was, like all of us, a creature of his own era. Which meant, in his case, that he could not imagine other eras and other creatures and a world before humans. The bone would eventually be properly identified, but not until 1824. It would take that long to come up with an explanation that would have struck Plot and his successors as far more outlandish than a world replete with human giants.

DIRECTIONS for the question: There is a sentence missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide in which blank (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

DIRECTIONS for the question: There is a sentence missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide in which blank (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.