Reading Comprehension Test 12

[passage-header]Read the following passage carefully and answer the question given below:[/passage-header]People are seldom aware that their comfortable living depends upon the work of several thousands of persons. The first thing, for instance, almost everyone looks forward to in the morning is a hot cup of tea. This cup of tea involves the work of thousands of people. This can be easily shown. Consider the number of things we require to prepare a cup of tea, such as clean drinking water, tea, sugar, milk, gas, burner, pot, crockery, strainer, spoon and so on.

Tea is grown in distant plantations and made available to the consumers through a vast network employing hundreds of workers. Consider further the machinery required for sugar mills. The production of this machinery involves a long chain of processes and operations - mining of coal and iron ore, manufacture of steel and machine tools, in which thousands of workers are employed. The same argument holds good with regard to the supply of milk. The production of other items such as gas, burner, crockery, spoons, etc., requires the service of hundreds of workers. And recall how agitated we are if the milk van is late in the morning, maybe because its tire has burst on the way. This may be due to its poor maintenance or the poor condition of the roads.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and complete the summary by filling in the appropriate word.[/passage-header]The Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean are a rocky, lonely spot, but they are also one of the most unusual places in the world. The reason is that they are the home of some of the last giant tortoises left on earth.
Weighing hundreds of pounds, these tortoises wander slowly around the rocks and sand of the islands. Each of these islands has its own particular kinds of tortoises. There are seven different kinds of tortoises on the eight islands. Hundreds of years ago, thousands of tortoises wandered around these islands. All that changed when people started landing there. When people first arrived, their ships had no refrigerators. This meant that fresh food was always a problem for the sailors on board. The giant tortoises provided a solution to this problem. Ships would anchor off the islands, and crew would seize as many tortoises as they could. Once the animals were aboard the ship, the crew would roll the tortoises onto their backs and use them for soups and stews.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and complete the summary by filling in the appropriate word.[/passage-header]The Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean are a rocky, lonely spot, but they are also one of the most unusual places in the world. The reason is that they are the home of some of the last giant tortoises left on earth.
Weighing hundreds of pounds, these tortoises wander slowly around the rocks and sand of the islands. Each of these islands has its own particular kinds of tortoises. There are seven different kinds of tortoises on the eight islands. Hundreds of years ago, thousands of tortoises wandered around these islands. All that changed when people started landing there. When people first arrived, their ships had no refrigerators. This meant that fresh food was always a problem for the sailors on board. The giant tortoises provided a solution to this problem. Ships would anchor off the islands, and crew would seize as many tortoises as they could. Once the animals were aboard the ship, the crew would roll the tortoises onto their backs and use them for soups and stews.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Orang-utans require less food than humans, pound-for-pound, lead author Herman Pontzer said. When they do eat, orang-utans nibble mostly on ripe fruit, along with smaller portions of leaves and seed. Even in captivity, this diet doesn't diminish as orang-utans get up and go. They wake up early after a long night's sleep, explained Pontzer, an assistant professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Then they spend the day socializing, exploring their indoor or outdoor enclosures. They also regularly engage in games with researchers. According to a study, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these activities of the orang-utans, taken together, add up to the same level of exercise performed by humans in physically demanding agricultural lifestyles. In the wild, orang-utans live in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra where food availability is highly variable and unpredictable, Pontzer added. Like fresh fruit from the garden, the pickings are often feast or famine. But the trade-off, he added, is that low energy throughout means less energy is available to do things like grow and reproduce. So orang-utans grow slowly and reproduce slowly, which is evolutionarily risky because an orang-utan might die before it passes on its genes. Human mothers can have a child every two to four years, but orang-utans in the wild only reproduce every seven to eight years. Orang-utans are highly endangered, with many lost due to human activities such as logging, mining, and the illegal pet trade. Pontzer hopes the study will highlight how much information we will lose about our closest relatives and our own evolutionary history if we let them go extinct.

[passage-header]Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]New research findings on the ability of a fetus to recognize its mother's voice and even distinguish it from other female voices confirm what the scientists have speculated about for more than twenty years, that experiences in the womb help shape newborn preferences and behavior.

Dr. Barbara Kisilevsky, a Queen's University professor of nursing, along with a team of psychologists at Queen's and obstetricians in Hangzhou, China, found that fetuses are capable of learning in the womb and can remember and recognize their mother's voice before they are even born. Their research findings are published in the international journal Psychological Science. 

While previous research on infant development has demonstrated that newborns prefer to listen to their own mother's voice than to that of a female stranger and will even change their behavior to elicit their mother's voice, Dr. Kisilevsky's research proves that this 'preference/recognition' begins before birth. 

"This is an extremely exciting finding that provides evidence of sustained attention, memory, and learning by the fetus," says Dr. Kisilevsky. "The fetuses learn about their mother's voice in the womb and then prefer it, after birth. Our findings provide evidence that in-utero experience has an impact on newborn infant behavior and development and that voice recognition may play a role in mother-infant attachment."

The findings also suggest that the foundation for speech perception and language acquisition is laid before birth, says Dr. Kisilevsky. Therefore, the precocious language processing abilities observed in newborns and young infants may not be due to a hardwired speech processing module in the brain as has been assumed, but may instead stem from the interaction of the fetus with its environment.

Along with researchers at Zhejiang University, China, Dr. Kisilevsky tested 60 fetuses. Thirty fetuses were played a two-minute audiotape of their own mother reading a poem and 30 fetuses were played the voice of a female stranger reading the poem. The researchers found that the fetuses responded to their own mother's voice with heart-rate acceleration and to the stranger's voice with a heart-rate deceleration. The responses lasted during the two-minute tape as well as for at least two minutes after the offset of the voices.

"These results tell us that the fetuses heard and responded to both voices and that there was sustained attention to both voices," notes Dr. Kisilevsky. "But, because they responded differently to the two voices, we know they had to recognize their own mother's voice. We believe they are probably already learning about language in general and their own language specifically."

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows.[/passage-header]Competitiveness is defined as the ability to add value better than the others in the globalized economic environment. In other words, for the Indian AC&R industry to succeed, it should be able to add value better than its competitors across the globe. Despite the poor infrastructure, there is a growing sentiment that India can do it. We have made rapid strides in manufacturing and service sectors, and the international community is admiring many of our Indian companies. I indeed believe that India can become the global economic powerhouse, and it can rival China as the world's factory. I believe that India can become a major exporter of the AC&R equipment. A recent report by Make-Singh & Company comprehensively addresses the status of the global and local trends, and an action plan for the industry to achieve rapid growth. It also outlines what the Government can do to promote the growth of this vital industry so that it can fulfill its potential to preserve food, increase productivity and contribute to the quality of life. But, the challenges are many. Compared to the stature our industry has in most countries, including the developing Asian countries, the Indian AC&R industry still has a long, long way to go. To become a major exporter, we need, primarily, a scale of manufacture. To acquire scale, we need a large domestic market, which we need to build. We have a long way to go in terms of customer education. The usage and application of products itself are questionable. We come across retailers using deep freezers for storing bottles as well as butter and other products, which are not supposed to be stored in freezers. The consumers do not use several innovative features that are available. The country also lacks standards in terms of building codes such as ceiling heights. It is not only the government which will have to act but also the builders, architects, consultants and industry players. By our working together, this industry can grow at least 3 to 5 times faster than it has grown in the past.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]The United States must learn to lose this war - a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time (well, of the next few years, anyway). The cost of leaving will certainly be high, just not anywhere near as high as trying to 'stay the course', which can only magnify and postpone the disaster. And yet, regrettable to say, even if this difficult step is taken, no one should imagine that democracy will be achieved by this means. The great likelihood is something else - something worse, perhaps a recrudescence of dictatorship or Civil War, or both.  An interim period, probably very brief, of international trusteeship, is the best solution, yet it is unlikely to be a good solution. It is merely better than any other recourse. The good options have probably passed us by. They may never have existed. If the people of Iraq are given back their country, there isn't the slightest guarantee that they will use the privilege to create a liberal democracy. The creation of democracy is an organic process that must proceed from the will of the local people. Sometimes that will is present, more often it is not. Vietnam provides an example. Vietnam today enjoys the self-determination it battled to achieve for so long, but it has not become a democracy. On the other hand, just because Iraq's future remains to be decided by its talented people, it would also be wrong to categorically rule out the possibility that they will escape tyranny and create a democratic government for themselves. The United States and other countries might even find ways of offering modest assistance in the project. It's just that it is beyond the power of the United States to create democracy for them. The matter is not in our hands. It never was.