Reading Comprehension Test 71

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
[/passage-header]What car makers often mean when they say a car is well-designed, is that it appeals to men, particularly to their less noble instinct. 'Beautiful body'. 'She must move like a dream'. But auto-macho is going out of style. In America, 47% of new private cars are bought by women, up from 36% in 1989. Add the influence women have on a family's car-buying, and it is probable that women are more influential overall in choosing cars than men. So, car makers are learning to create designs that appeal to them. Women tend to buy cheaper cars, largely because working women tend to have lower income. In America, they buy 55% of the small cars, 44% of medium-sized ones, but only 28% of large and luxurious models. They put more store on reliability than men do, probably a hidden reason for the rise in Japanese imports. American car makers are now tailoring certain versions of their cars with women in mind. And they are learning that design can sway even normally pragmatic women as a comparison between Ford's Thunderbird and Mercury Cougar demonstrates. The Thunderbird is a high-performance car - i.e., it goes fast and is styled to look aggressive. Less than 40% of Thunderbirds are bought by women. But the same car with a more sedate body, a different name (The Cougar) and different advertising is as popular with women as it is with men.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and accordingly, fill in the blank:
[/passage-header]When we perceive an object, we automatically tend to label it (like nice, bad, wet, dry, light, dark, etc). And our mind reacts on the basis of our own mental labeling of an object. No wonder we tend to react to situations in a subjective manner. All perceived objects are conditioned by our senses and our own mind. This leads to the dramatic conclusion that we are not and, by definition, can never be objective. Our labeling leads not only to problems like anger and attachment but also to the most basic problem: that we think we are somehow separate from the outside world. But are we separate from the outside world? When we see something, for example, a table, it appears to be separate from the rest of the world, just standing there by itself. But is that correct? How could the table stand there without the ground supporting it? How could the table exist without a carpenter making it from pieces of wood? The pieces of wood come from a tree, which comes from a seed, water, soil, air, the sun and its nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms, etc. Every object needs causes and conditions to exist, just like we need our parents, food, air, clothes and many more things to exist. In this way, it becomes impossible to maintain that 'I' am separate from the outside world, however much it feels that way.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
[/passage-header]So wonderfully is the plane shaped that in flight it will largely take care of itself. It always wants to do the right thing, whatever is necessary to keep itself flying. Many people think that on the slightest lapse of the pilot's attention an airplane will go into a spin. Actually, a stall or a spin is brought on only by heavy misuse of the controls. Generally speaking, an airplane left to itself does not want to drop, it wants to fly. A careless pilot sometimes leaves his airplane standing on the airport with the engine idling while he goes for a cup of coffee-and it has happened that such an airplane has run away, taken off and flown itself, pilotless, for a couple of hours.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Rahul Dravid is not merely India's most dependable, most consistent or most valuable batsman. He is all of these. But the time has come to recognize that on the basis of his performances in the last three years he is, quite simply, India's best batsman. He is not merely the fortress providing India's dazzling batsmen with a cushion, he has become the pivot around which the Indian batting revolves. Sachin Tendulkar was India's batsman of the 90s. Rahul Dravid has made this decade his very own. To see a good ball hit for four is a spectacle; surviving a great ball requires no less skill, but it rarely elicits a sense of wonderment. It is easy to be agog over a batsman responding to a sharp short ball with an explosive hook, but we often miss the artfulness and skill involved in leaving a bouncer.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Culture is not merely learning. It is discrimination, understanding of life. Liberal education aims at producing moral gifts as well as intellectual, sweetness of temper as much as sanity of outlook. Into the art of living, the cultured man carries a certain grace, a certain distinction which redeems him from the sterile futility of aimless struggle. Culture is not a pose of intellect or a code of convention, but an attitude of life which finds nothing human, alien, common or unclean. An education that brings up a young man in entire indifference to the misery and poverty surrounding him, to the general stringency of life, to the dumb pangs of tortured bodies and the lives submerged in the shadows, is essentially a failure. If we do not realize the solidarity of the human community, nor have human relations with those whom the world passes by as the lowly and lost, we are not cultured.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Rahul Dravid is not merely India's most dependable, most consistent or most valuable batsman. He is all of these. But the time has come to recognize that on the basis of his performances in the last three years he is, quite simply, India's best batsman. He is not merely the fortress providing India's dazzling batsmen with a cushion, he has become the pivot around which the Indian batting revolves. Sachin Tendulkar was India's batsman of the 90s. Rahul Dravid has made this decade his very own. To see a good ball hit for four is a spectacle; surviving a great ball requires no less skill, but it rarely elicits a sense of wonderment. It is easy to be agog over a batsman responding to a sharp short ball with an explosive hook, but we often miss the artfulness and skill involved in leaving a bouncer.

[passage-header]"To My Own Soul"[/passage-header]Hold yet a while, Strong 17986Heart,
Not part a lifelong yoke
Though blighted looks the present, future gloom.
30494And age it seems since you I began our
March up hill or down. Sailing smooth o'er

84383Seas that are rare-
53215Thou nearer unto me, than oft-times I myself-
Proclaiming mental moves before they were!
46958Reflector true-Thy pulse so timed to mine,
33461Thou perfect note of thoughts, however fine-

Shall we now part, 62846Recorder, say?
In thee is friendship, 76723faith,
For thou didst warn when evil thoughts were
29960brewing-
And though, alas, thy warning thrown away,
Went on the same as ever-good and true.
[passage-footer]
[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Among the myths taken as fact by the environmental managers of most corporations is the belief that environmental regulations affect all competitors in a given industry uniformly. In reality, regulatory costs- and therefore compliance- fall unevenly, economically disadvantaging some companies and benefiting others. For example, a plant situated near a number of larger non-compliant competitors is less likely to attract the attention of local regulators than is an isolated plant, and less attention means lower costs. Additionally, large plants can spread compliance costs such as waste treatment across a larger revenue base; on the other hand, some smaller plants may not even be subject to certain provisions such as permit or reporting requirements by virtue of their size. Finally, older production technologies often continue to generate toxic wastes that were not regulated when the technology was first adopted. New regulations have imposed extensive compliance costs on companies still using older industrial coal-fired burners that generate high sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide outputs, for example, whereas new facilities generally avoid processes that would create such waste products. By realizing that they have discretion and that not all industries are affected equally by environmental regulation, environmental managers can help their companies to achieve a competitive edge by anticipating regulatory pressure and exploring all possibilities for addressing how changing regulations will affect their companies specifically.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
[/passage-header]Milankovitch proposed in the early twentieth century that the ice ages were caused by variations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun. For some time this theory was considered untestable, largely because there was no sufficiently precise chronology of the ice ages with which the orbital variations could be matched.
To establish such a chronology, it is necessary to determine the relative amounts of land ice that existed at various times in the Earth's past. A recent discovery makes such a determination possible: relative land-ice volume for a given period can be deduced from the ratio of two oxygen isotopes, 16 and 18, found in ocean sediments.
Almost all the oxygen in water is oxygen 16, but a few molecules out of every thousand incorporate the heavier isotope 18. When an ice age begins, the continental ice sheets grow, steadily reducing the amount of water evaporated from the ocean that will eventually return to it. Because heavier isotopes tend to be left behind when water evaporates from the ocean surfaces, the remaining ocean water becomes progressively enriched in oxygen 18. The degree of enrichment can be determined by analyzing ocean sediments of the period, because these sediments are composed of calcium carbonate shells of marine organisms, shells that were constructed with oxygen atoms drawn from the surrounding ocean. The higher the ratio of oxygen 18 to oxygen 16 in a sedimentary specimen, the more land ice there was when the sediment was laid down. 
As an indicator of shifts in the Earth's climate, the isotope record has two advantages. First, it is a global record: there is remarkably little variation in isotope ratios in sedimentary specimens taken from different continental locations. Second, it is a more continuous record than that taken from rocks on land. Because of these advantages, sedimentary evidence can be dated with sufficient accuracy by radiometric methods to establish a precise chronology of the ice ages. The dated isotope record shows that the fluctuations in global ice volume over the past several hundred thousand  years have a pattern: an ice age occurs roughly once every 100,000 years. These data have established a strong connection between variations in the Earth's orbit and the periodicity of the ice ages. However, it is important to note that other factors, such as volcanic particulates or variations
 in the amount of sunlight received by the Earth, could potentially have affected the climate. The advantage of the Milankovitch theory is that it is testable; changes in the Earth's orbit can be calculated and dated by applying Newton's laws of gravity to progressively earlier configurations of the bodies in the solar system. Yet the lack of information about other possible factors affecting global climate does not make them unimportant.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows. [/passage-header]In 1955, Maurice Duverger published The Political Role of Women, the first behavioralist, multinational comparison of women's electoral participation ever to use election data and survey data together. His study analyzed women's patterns of voting, political candidacy, and political activism in four European countries during the first half of the twentieth century. Duverger's research findings were that women voted somewhat less frequently than men (the difference narrowing the longer women had the vote) and were slightly more conservative.
Duverger's works set an early standard for the sensitive analysis of women's electoral activities. Moreover, to Duverger's credit, he placed his findings in the context of many of the historical processes that had shaped these activities. However, since these contexts have changed over time, Duverger's approach has proved more durable than his actual findings. In addition, Duverger's discussion of his findings was hampered by his failure to consider certain specific factors important to women's electoral participation at the time he collected his data: the influence of political regimes, the effects of economic factors, and the ramifications of political and social relations between women and men. Given this failure, Duverger's study foreshadowed the enduring limitations of the behaviorist approach to the multinational study of women's political participation.