In 1982, a raging controversy broke out over a forest act drafted by the Government of India. This act sought to strengthen the already extensive powers enjoyed by the forest bureaucracy in controlling the extraction, disposal and sale of forest produce. It also gave forest officials greater powers to strictly regulate the entry of any person into reserved forest areas. While forest officials justified the act on the grounds that it was necessary to stop the continuing deforestation, it was bitterly opposed by representatives of grassroots organisations, who argued that it was a major violation of the rights of peasants and tribals living in and around forest areas. . . .

The debate over the draft forest act fuelled a larger controversy over the orientation of state forest policy. It was pointed out, for example, that the draft act was closely modelled on its predecessor, the Forest Act of 1878. The earlier Act rested on a usurpation of rights of ownership by the colonial state which had little precedent in precolonial history. It was further argued that the system of forestry introduced by the British—and continued, with little modification, after 1947—emphasised revenue generation and commercial exploitation, while its policing orientation excluded villagers who had the most longstanding claim on forest resources. Critics called for a complete overhaul of forest administration, pressing the government to formulate policy and legislation more appropriate to present needs. . . .

That debate is not over yet. The draft act was shelved, though it has not as yet been formally withdrawn. Meanwhile, the 1878 Act (as modified by an amendment in 1927) continues to be in operation. In response to its critics, the government has made some important changes in forest policy, e.g., no longer treating forests as a source of revenue, and stopping ecologically hazardous practices such as the clearfelling of natural forests. At the same time, it has shown little inclination to meet the major demand of the critics of forest policy—namely, abandoning the principle of state monopoly over forest land by handing over areas of degraded forests to individuals and communities for afforestation.

. . . [The] 1878 Forest Act itself was passed only after a bitter and prolonged debate within the colonial bureaucracy, in which protagonists put forward arguments strikingly similar to those being advanced today. As is well known, the Indian Forest Department owes its origin to the requirements of railway companies. The early years of the expansion of the railway network, c. 1853 onwards, led to tremendous deforestation in peninsular India owing to the railway’s requirements of fuelwood and construction timber. Huge quantities of durable timbers were also needed for use as sleepers across the newly laid tracks. Inexperienced in forestry, the British called in German experts to commence systematic forest management. The Indian Forest Department was started in 1864, with Dietrich Brandis, formerly a Lecturer at Bonn, as the first Inspector General of Forests. The new department needed legislative backing to function effectively, and in the following year, 1865, the first forest act was passed. . . .

Correct Answer: Option 3

Explanation: The controversy widened when critics pointed out that the 1982 draft act was modelled on the 1878 colonial law. This shifted the debate from one law to the broader orientation of forest policy.

Why other options wrong: Rights violations explain the initial controversy, not the expansion of the debate. Claims about commercial exploitation or opposition intensity do not capture why the issue became a larger policy critique.

Once a society accepts a secular mode of creativity, within which the creator replaces God, imaginative transactions assume a self-conscious form. The tribal imagination, on the other hand, is still to a large extent dreamlike and hallucinatory. It admits fusion between various planes of existence and levels of time in a natural and artless manner. In tribal stories, oceans fly in the sky as birds, mountains swim in water as fish, animals speak as humans and stars grow like plants. Spatial order and temporal sequence do not restrict the narrative. This is not to say that tribal creations have no conventions or rules, but simply that they admit the principle of association between emotion and the narrative motif. Thus stars, seas, mountains, trees, men and animals can be angry, sad or happy.

It might be said that tribal artists work more on the basis of their racial and sensory memory than on the basis of a cultivated imagination. In order to understand this distinction, we must understand the difference between imagination and memory. In the animate world, consciousness meets two immediate material realities: space and time. We put meaning into space by perceiving it in terms of images. The image-making faculty is a genetic gift to the human mind—this power of imagination helps us understand the space that envelops us. With regard to time, we make connections with the help of memory; one remembers being the same person today as one was yesterday.

The tribal mind has a more acute sense of time than the sense of space. Somewhere along the history of human civilization, tribal communities seem to have realized that domination over territorial space was not their lot. Thus, they seem to have turned almost obsessively to gaining domination over time. This urge is substantiated in their ritual of conversing with their dead ancestors: year after year, tribals in many parts of India worship terracotta or carved-wood objects representing their ancestors, aspiring to enter a trance in which they can converse with the dead. Over the centuries, an amazingly sharp memory has helped tribals classify material and natural objects into a highly complex system of knowledge. . . .

One of the main characteristics of the tribal arts is their distinct manner of constructing space and imagery, which might be described as ‘hallucinatory’. In both oral and visual forms of representation, tribal artists seem to interpret verbal or pictorial space as demarcated by an extremely flexible ‘frame’. The boundaries between art and non-art become almost invisible. A tribal epic can begin its narration from a trivial everyday event; tribal paintings merge with living space as if the two were one and the same. And within the narrative itself, or within the painted imagery, there is no deliberate attempt to follow a sequence. The episodes retold and the images created take on the apparently chaotic shapes of dreams. In a way, the syntax of language and the grammar of painting are the same, as if literature were painted words and painting were a song of images.

Correct Option: 1

Rationale: The passage states that when tribal communities failed to dominate space, they turned toward domination over time. Ritual communication with ancestors is given as direct evidence of this temporal focus.

Why other options wrong: Option 2 describes instruments rather than purpose. Option 3 describes a consequence, not intent. Option 4 contradicts the passage’s explicit statement that territorial domination was abandoned.

Difficulty: Easy

Correct Option: 2

Rationale: The passage describes a tribal imagination that merges time, space, and species, allowing stars, seas, and animals to take on human qualities. This fusion is best described as existential fluidity.

Why other options wrong: Option 1 is explicitly contrasted with tribal creativity in the passage. Option 3 is contradicted by the claim that tribal art has its own rules. Option 4 introduces a judgemental tone absent from the text.

Difficulty: Medium

Correct Option: 2

Rationale: The passage distinguishes imagination as the faculty that gives meaning to space through images, and memory as the faculty that connects human experience through time. Option 2 captures this distinction accurately.

Why other options wrong: Option 1 narrows the concept incorrectly to a specific cultural context. Options 3 and 4 fail to reflect the explicit space–time division described.

Difficulty: Medium

In [my book “Searches”], I chronicle how big technology companies have exploited human language for their gain. We let this happen, I argue, because we also benefit somewhat from using the products. It’s a dynamic that makes us complicit in big tech’s accumulation of wealth and power: we’re both victims and beneficiaries. I describe this complicity, but I also enact it, through my own internet archives: my Google searches, my Amazon product reviews and, yes, my ChatGPT dialogues. . . .

People often describe chatbots’ textual output as “bland” or “generic” – the linguistic equivalent of a beige office building. OpenAI’s products are built to “sound like a colleague”, as OpenAI puts it, using language that, coming from a person, would sound “polite”, “empathetic”, “kind”, “rationally optimistic” and “engaging”, among other qualities. OpenAI describes these strategies as helping its products seem “professional” and “approachable”. This appears to be bound up with making us feel safe . . .

Trust is a challenge for artificial intelligence (AI) companies, partly because their products regularly produce falsehoods and reify sexist, racist, US-centric cultural norms. While the companies are working on these problems, they persist: OpenAI found that its latest systems generate errors at a higher rate than its previous system. In the book, I wrote about the inaccuracies and biases and also demonstrated them with the products. When I prompted Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator to produce a picture of engineers and space explorers, it gave me an entirely male cast of characters; when my father asked ChatGPT to edit his writing, it transmuted his perfectly correct Indian English into American English. Those weren’t flukes. Research suggests that both tendencies are widespread.

In my own ChatGPT dialogues, I wanted to enact how the product’s veneer of collegial neutrality could lull us into absorbing false or biased responses without much critical engagement. Over time, ChatGPT seemed to be guiding me to write a more positive book about big tech – including editing my description of OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, to call him “a visionary and a pragmatist”. I’m not aware of research on whether ChatGPT tends to favor big tech, OpenAI or Altman, and I can only guess why it seemed that way in our conversation. OpenAI explicitly states that its products shouldn’t attempt to influence users’ thinking. When I asked ChatGPT about some of the issues, it blamed biases in its training data – though I suspect my arguably leading questions played a role too. When I queried ChatGPT about its rhetoric, it responded: “The way I communicate is designed to foster trust and confidence in my responses, which can be both helpful and potentially misleading.”. . .

OpenAI has its own goals, of course. Among them, it emphasizes wanting to build AI that “benefits all of humanity”. But while the company is controlled by a non-profit with that mission, its funders still seek a return on their investment. That will presumably require getting people using products such as ChatGPT even more than they already are – a goal that is easier to accomplish if people see those products as trustworthy collaborators.

Correct Option: 1

Rationale: The author uses the “beige office building” analogy to describe the style and tone of the AI’s output, characterizing it as “bland,” “generic,” and designed to sound “polite,” “empathetic,” and “safe” (fostering trust). Option 1 refers to how AI companies explain or defend their errors (“blamed biases in its training data”). This is a procedural defense mentioned later in the text, not a description of the “bland” aesthetic or tone represented by the beige building metaphor.

Why other options wrong: Option 2 (“generalized responses”) aligns with the text’s description of “bland” and “generic.” Option 3 (“foster trust”) aligns with the text’s description of strategies to make us “feel safe” and seem “professional.” Option 4 (“warm, polite”) aligns with the text’s description of the AI sounding like a “colleague,” “polite,” and “empathetic.”

Difficulty: Moderate

Studies showing that income inequality plays a positive role in economic growth are largely based on three arguments. The first argument focuses on investment indivisibilities wherein large sunk costs are required when implementing new fundamental innovations. Without stock markets and financial institutions to mobilize large sums of money, a high concentration of wealth is needed for individuals to undertake new industrial activities accompanied by high sunk costs . . . [One study] shows the relation between economic growth and income inequality for 45 countries during 1966-1995. [It was found] that the increase in income inequality has a significant positive relationship with economic growth in the short and medium term. Using system GMM, [another study estimated] the relation between income inequality and economic growth for 106 countries during 1965–2005 period. The results show that income inequality has a positive impact on economic growth in the short run, but the two are negatively correlated in the long run. The second argument is related to moral hazard and incentives . . . Because economic performance is determined by the unobservable level of effort that agents make, paying compensations without taking into account the economic performance achieved by individual agents will fail to elicit optimum effort from the agents. Thus, certain income inequalities contribute to growth by enhancing worker motivation . . . and by giving motivation to innovators and entrepreneurs . . . Finally, [another study] point[s] out that the concentration of wealth or stock ownership in relation to corporate governance contributes to growth. If stock ownership is distributed and owned by a large number of shareholders, it is not easy to make quick decisions due to the conflicting interests among shareholders, and this may also cause a free-rider problem in terms of monitoring and supervising managers and workers. . . .

Various studies have examined the relationships between income inequality and economic growth, and most of these assert that a negative correlation exists between the two. . . . Analyzing 159 countries for 1980–2012, they conclude that there exists a negative relation between income inequality and economic growth; when the income share of the richest 20% of population increases by 1%, the GDP decreases by 0.08%, whereas when the income share of the poorest 20% of population increases by 1%, the GDP increases by 0.38%. Some studies find that inequality has a negative impact on growth due to poor human capital accumulation and low fertility rates . . . while [others] point out that inequality creates political instability, resulting in lower investment. . . . [Some economists] argue that widening income inequality has a negative impact on economic growth because it negatively affects social consensus or social capital formation. One important research topic is the correlation between democratization and income redistribution. [Some scholars] explain that social pressure for income redistribution rises as income inequality increases in a democratic society. In other words, when democratization extends suffrage to a wider class of people, the increased political power of low- and middle-income voters results in broader support for income redistribution and social welfare expansion. However . . . if the rich have more political influence than the poor, the democratic system actually worsens income inequality rather than improving it.

Correct Option: 4

Rationale:

The first half of the passage presents three specific arguments to explain why income inequality might positively affect economic growth:

1. High Sunk Costs: Inequality helps mobilize funds for large sunk costs when financial markets are absent.
2. Incentive Alignment: Inequality solves moral hazard issues by aligning incentives and rewarding effort.
3. Concentrated Ownership: Concentrated wealth aids corporate governance by facilitating quick decisions, whereas dispersed ownership slows this down.

Additionally, the studies cited in this section specifically highlight that this positive relationship is observed in the short and medium term or short run, contrasting it with the long run. Option 4 accurately synthesizes these three specific mechanisms and the temporal context provided in the text.

Wrong Options:

Option 1 is incorrect because the passage explicitly states that inequality and growth are negatively correlated in the long run, contradicting the claim that it boosts growth in every period.

Option 2 is incorrect because it states the exact opposite of the passage. The text argues that distributed ownership makes it difficult to make quick decisions and causes free-rider problems.

Option 3 is incorrect because it misrepresents the argument. The primary function of the section is not to critique stock markets, but to explain why inequality is useful in specific contexts.

Difficulty: Medium

There is a group in the space community who view the solar system not as an opportunity to expand human potential but as a nature preserve, forever the provenance of an elite group of scientists and their sanitary robotic probes. These planetary protection advocates [call] for avoiding “harmful contamination” of celestial bodies. Under this regime, NASA incurs great expense sterilizing robotic probes in order to prevent the contamination of entirely theoretical biospheres. . . .

Transporting bacteria would matter if Mars were the vital world once imagined by astronomers who mistook optical illusions for canals. Nobody wants to expose Martians to measles, but sadly, robotic exploration reveals a bleak, rusted landscape, lacking oxygen and flooded with radiation ready to sterilize any Earthly microbes. Simple life might exist underground, or down at the bottom of a deep canyon, but it has been very hard to find with robots. . . . The upsides from human exploration and development of Mars clearly outweigh the welfare of purely speculative Martian fungi. . . .

The other likely targets of human exploration, development, and settlement, our moon and the asteroids, exist in a desiccated, radiation-soaked realm of hard vacuum and extreme temperature variations that would kill nearly anything. It’s also important to note that many international competitors will ignore the demands of these protection extremists in any case. For example, China recently sent a terrarium to the moon and germinated a plant seed-with, unsurprisingly, no protest from its own scientific community. In contrast, when it was recently revealed that a researcher had surreptitiously smuggled super-resilient microscopic tardigrades aboard the ill-fated Israeli Beresheet lunar probe, a firestorm was unleashed within the space community. . . .

NASA’s previous human exploration efforts made no serious attempt at sterility, with little notice. As the Mars expert Robert Zubrin noted in the National Review, U.S. lunar landings did not leave the campsites cleaner than they found it. Apollo’s bacteria-infested litter included bags of feces. Forcing NASA’s proposed Mars exploration to do better, scrubbing everything and hauling out all the trash, would destroy NASA’s human exploration budget and encroach on the agency’s other directorates, too. Getting future astronauts off Mars is enough of a challenge, without trying to tote weeks of waste along as well.

A reasonable compromise is to continue on the course laid out by the U.S. government and the National Research Council, which proposed a system of zones on Mars, some for science only, some for habitation, and some for resource exploitation. This approach minimizes contamination, maximizes scientific exploration . . . Mars presents a stark choice of diverging human futures. We can turn inward, pursuing ever more limited futures while we await whichever natural or manmade disaster will eradicate our species and life on Earth. Alternatively, we can choose to propel our biosphere further into the solar system, simultaneously protecting our home planet and providing a backup plan for the only life we know exists in the universe. Are the lives on Earth worth less than some hypothetical microbe lurking under Martian rocks?

Question

The author mentions all of the following reasons to dismiss concerns about contaminating Mars EXCEPT:

Step 1: Identify reasons actually mentioned in the passage

1. Competitor countries won’t follow rules

• Passage: “many international competitors will ignore the demands of these protection extremists in any case. For example, China… sent a terrarium to the moon… no protest.”
• Cause → Effect → Result: Competitors ignore sterilization rules → contamination inevitable → NASA’s strict sterilization pointless.
• Supported.

2. Earlier explorations already contaminated environments

• Passage: “U.S. lunar landings did not leave the campsites cleaner… Apollo’s bacteria-infested litter included bags of feces.”
• Cause → Effect → Result: Past missions contaminated anyway → no pristine environment remains → sterilization is redundant.
• Supported.

3. No evidence of life on Mars

• Passage: “robotic exploration reveals a bleak, rusted landscape… flooded with radiation ready to sterilize any Earthly microbes… simple life might exist underground, but it has been very hard to find.”
• Cause → Effect → Result: Life unlikely/absent → contamination risk negligible.
• Supported.

4. Probes on the moon had little effect on environment

• Passage mentions terrariums germinating a seed, Apollo missions leaving waste — but nowhere does it argue that probes had “little effect on the environment.” Instead, it says Apollo left “bacteria-infested litter.”
• This option is a distortion: it twists the fact of contamination into the opposite (little/no effect).
• Not supported.

Step 2: Answer

Correct Answer: 4) the use of similar probes on astronomical bodies like the moon have had little effect on the environment.

Step 3: Trap Analysis

• Option 1 Trap Avoided: Correctly uses Out of Scope of NASA’s control (competitors ignoring rules).
• Option 2 Trap Avoided: Supported by Evidence of contamination (Apollo waste).
• Option 3 Trap Avoided: Supported by No cause (life) → no effect (contamination).
• Option 4 Trap Detected: Distorted / Twisted Facts — reverses the logic; the passage never minimizes environmental effect, it highlights contamination.

✅ Final Answer: 4

Do you want me to also put this into a CER Table format (Cause | Effect | Result) like we did for Peer Review and Bandicoot RCs, so you get one consolidated revision sheet across all three RCs?

Question

The author mentions all of the following reasons to dismiss concerns about contaminating Mars EXCEPT:

Step 1: Identify reasons actually mentioned in the passage

1. Competitor countries won’t follow rules

• Passage: “many international competitors will ignore the demands of these protection extremists in any case. For example, China… sent a terrarium to the moon… no protest.”
• Cause → Effect → Result: Competitors ignore sterilization rules → contamination inevitable → NASA’s strict sterilization pointless.
• Supported.

2. Earlier explorations already contaminated environments

• Passage: “U.S. lunar landings did not leave the campsites cleaner… Apollo’s bacteria-infested litter included bags of feces.”
• Cause → Effect → Result: Past missions contaminated anyway → no pristine environment remains → sterilization is redundant.
• Supported.

3. No evidence of life on Mars

• Passage: “robotic exploration reveals a bleak, rusted landscape… flooded with radiation ready to sterilize any Earthly microbes… simple life might exist underground, but it has been very hard to find.”
• Cause → Effect → Result: Life unlikely/absent → contamination risk negligible.
• Supported.

4. Probes on the moon had little effect on environment

• Passage mentions terrariums germinating a seed, Apollo missions leaving waste — but nowhere does it argue that probes had “little effect on the environment.” Instead, it says Apollo left “bacteria-infested litter.”
• This option is a distortion: it twists the fact of contamination into the opposite (little/no effect).
• Not supported.

Step 2: Answer

Correct Answer: 4) the use of similar probes on astronomical bodies like the moon have had little effect on the environment.

Step 3: Trap Analysis

• Option 1 Trap Avoided: Correctly uses Out of Scope of NASA’s control (competitors ignoring rules).
• Option 2 Trap Avoided: Supported by Evidence of contamination (Apollo waste).
• Option 3 Trap Avoided: Supported by No cause (life) → no effect (contamination).
• Option 4 Trap Detected: Distorted / Twisted Facts — reverses the logic; the passage never minimizes environmental effect, it highlights contamination.

✅ Final Answer: 4

Languages become endangered and die out for many reasons. Sadly, the physical annihilation of communities of native speakers of a language is all too often the cause of language extinction. In North America, European colonists brought death and destruction to many Native American communities. This was followed by US federal policies restricting the use of indigenous languages, including the removal of native children from their communities to federal boarding schools where native languages and cultural practices were prohibited. As many as 75 percent of the languages spoken in the territories that became the United States have gone extinct, with slightly better language survival rates in Central and South America . . .

Even without physical annihilation and prohibitions against language use, the language of the “dominant” cultures may drive other languages into extinction; young people see education, jobs, culture and technology associated with the dominant language and focus their attention on that language. The largest language “killers” are English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, Hindi, and Chinese, all of which have privileged status as dominant languages threatening minority languages.

When we lose a language, we lose the worldview, culture and knowledge of the people who spoke it, constituting a loss to all humanity. People around the world live in direct contact with their native environment, their habitat. When the language they speak goes extinct, the rest of humanity loses their knowledge of that environment, their wisdom about the relationship between local plants and illness, their philosophical and religious beliefs as well as their native cultural expression (in music, visual art and poetry) that has enriched both the speakers of that language and others who would have encountered that culture. . . .

As educators deeply immersed in the liberal arts, we believe that educating students broadly in all facets of language and culture . . . yields immense rewards. Some individuals educated in the liberal arts tradition will pursue advanced study in linguistics and become actively engaged in language preservation, setting out for the Amazon, for example, with video recording equipment to interview the last surviving elders in a community to record and document a language spoken by no children.

Certainly, though, the vast majority of students will not pursue this kind of activity. For these students, a liberal arts education is absolutely critical from the twin perspectives of language extinction and global citizenship. When students study languages other than their own, they are sensitized to the existence of different cultural perspectives and practices. With such an education, students are more likely to be able to articulate insights into their own cultural biases, be more empathetic to individuals of other cultures, communicate successfully across linguistic and cultural differences, consider and resolve questions in a way that reflects multiple cultural perspectives, and, ultimately extend support to people, programs, practices, and policies that support the preservation of endangered languages.

There is ample evidence that such preservation can work in languages spiraling toward extinction. For example, Navajo, Cree and Inuit communities have established schools in which these languages are the language of instruction and the number of speakers of each has increased.

✅ Final Answer: 3) locals were provided job opportunities in the colonial administration.

Question

It can be inferred from the passage that it is likely South America had a slightly better language survival rate than North America for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

Step 1: What the passage actually says about survival rates

• North America: very high extinction due to (a) massacres and disease, (b) federal bans, (c) boarding schools forcing assimilation.
• Central/South America: slightly better survival (no explicit list of causes, but by comparison, some harsh assimilation practices like U.S. boarding schools were less systematic).

So, any option consistent with fewer killings, less forced schooling, weaker assimilation → plausible reason for higher survival.

Step 2: Evaluate options

1. European colonists allowed children of native speakers to stay at home with their families.

• In North America, children were removed to boarding schools. If in South America children stayed with families, languages survived better.
• Fits cause → effect → result logic.
• Supported.

2. Not many native speakers were killed by European colonists.

• Passage: North America saw large-scale annihilation of communities. If South America had relatively less killing, survival would be better.
• Supported.

3. Locals were provided job opportunities in the colonial administration.

• Passage never mentions colonial administrations offering jobs as a reason for language survival. In fact, association of jobs with dominant language (Spanish, Portuguese) usually pushes minority languages toward extinction, not survival.
• This is opposite logic.
• Not supported → Correct Answer (EXCEPT).

4. The colonial government was unable to mainstream the locals.

• In North America, systematic mainstreaming (boarding schools, bans) killed languages. If South America failed to mainstream locals, survival would indeed be slightly better.
• Supported.

Step 3: Trap Analysis

• Option 1 trap avoided: Correct cause-effect reasoning (boarding schools vs family retention).
• Option 2 trap avoided: Supported by contrasting annihilation levels.
• Option 3 trap detected: Contradicts Evidence – jobs with colonial government = dominance of Spanish/Portuguese, which should accelerate extinction, not prevent it.
• Option 4 trap avoided: Fits the inference (weaker mainstreaming = better survival).

Landing in Australia, the British colonists weren’t much impressed with the small-bodied, slender-snooted marsupials called bandicoots. “Their muzzle, which is much too long, gives them an air exceedingly stupid,” one naturalist noted in 1805. They nicknamed one type the “zebra rat” because of its black-striped rump.

Silly-looking or not, though, the zebra rat-the smallest bandicoot, more commonly known today as the western barred bandicoot-exhibited a genius for survival in the harsh outback, where its ancestors had persisted for some 26 million years. Its births were triggered by rainfall in the bone-dry desert. It carried its breath-mint-size babies in a backward-facing pouch so mothers could forage for food and dig shallow, camouflaged shelters. Still, these adaptations did not prepare the western barred bandicoot for the colonial-era transformation of its ecosystem, particularly the onslaught of imported British animals, from cattle and rabbits that damaged delicate desert vegetation to ravenous house cats that soon developed a taste for bandicoots. Several of the dozenodd bandicoot species went extinct, and by the 1940s the western barred bandicoot, whose original range stretched across much of the continent, persisted only on two predator-free islands in Shark Bay, off Australia’s western coast.

“Our isolated fauna had simply not been exposed to these predators,” says Reece Pedlar, an ecologist with the Wild Deserts conservation program. Now Wild Deserts is using descendants of those few thousand island survivors, called Shark Bay bandicoots, in a new effort to seed a mainland bandicoot revival. They’ve imported 20 bandicoots to a preserve on the edge of the Strzelecki Desert, in the remote interior of New South Wales. This sanctuary is a challenging place, desolate much of the year, with one of the world’s most mercurial rainfall patterns–relentless droughts followed by sudden drenching floods.

The imported bandicoots occupy two fenced “exclosures,” cleared of invasive rabbits (courtesy of Pedlar’s sheepdog) and of feral cats (which slunk off once the rabbits disappeared). A third fenced area contains the program’s Wild Training Zone, where two other rare marsupials (bilbies, a larger type of bandicoot, and mulgaras, a somewhat fearsome fuzzball known for sucking the brains out of prey) currently share terrain with controlled numbers of cats, learning to evade them. It’s unclear whether the Shark Bay bandicoots, which are perhaps even more predator-naive than their now-extinct mainland bandicoot kin, will be able to make that kind of breakthrough.

For now, though, a recent surge of rainfall has led to a bandicoot joey boom, raising the Wild Deserts population to about 100, with other sanctuaries adding to that number. There are also signs of rebirth in the landscape itself. With their constant digging, the bandicoots trap moisture and allow for seed germination so the cattle-damaged desert can restore itself. They have a new nickname-a flattering one, this time. “We call them ecosystem engineers,” Pediar says.

Question 1

According to the text, the western barred bandicoots now have a flattering name because they have…

Correct Answer: 4) aided in altering an arid environment.

• Why correct:
  The passage states: “With their constant digging, the bandicoots trap moisture and allow for seed germination so the cattle-damaged desert can restore itself. They have a new nickname… ecosystem engineers.”
  Cause → Effect → Result: Digging → Traps moisture + enables seed germination → Desert restoration → “ecosystem engineers.”
  So, the flattering name comes from their positive ecological impact, not from numbers or rainfall.

Why others are wrong:

1. led a revival in preserving the species
   – Passage talks about revival attempts (seeding mainland with Shark Bay bandicoots), but the nickname “ecosystem engineers” is tied to landscape restoration, not species preservation.
   – Trap: Partial / Incomplete Reasoning (focuses on preservation but misses the actual ecological cause).
2. grown fivefold in terms of population
   – Population rise (to ~100) is mentioned, but the nickname is unrelated to population growth.
   – Trap: Out of Scope / Irrelevant (mixes demographic growth with ecological engineering).
3. led to a surge and increase of rainfall
   – Rainfall is external (natural trigger), not caused by bandicoots.
   – Trap: Contradicts Evidence (rainfall → joey boom, not bandicoots → rainfall).

Question 2

The text uses the word ‘exclosures’ because Wild Deserts has adopted a measure of…

Correct Answer: 1) barring the entry of invasive species.

• Why correct:
  The passage says: “The imported bandicoots occupy two fenced ‘exclosures,’ cleared of invasive rabbits… and of feral cats…”
  Cause → Effect → Result: Exclosures (fencing) → exclude invasive rabbits + feral cats → safe habitat for bandicoots.

Why others are wrong:
2) excluding animals to make the islands predator-free
– Wrong setting: Shark Bay islands were predator-free naturally, not because of Wild Deserts’ exclosures.
– Trap: Distorted / Twisted Facts (confuses islands with fenced desert areas).

3. ridding the main desert of feral cats and large bilbies
   – Misleading: Bilbies are actually protected and trained in the Wild Training Zone, not removed. Cats are controlled, not completely eradicated from the main desert.
   – Trap: Contradicts Evidence (bilbies are allies, not excluded).
4. restoring cattle damaged deserts to green landscapes
   – Desert restoration is a result of bandicoot digging, not the fencing exclosures.
   – Trap: Out of Scope / Irrelevant (shifts the effect of digging to the purpose of fencing).

Final Answers:

Q1 → 4
Q2 → 1

The job of a peer reviewer is thankless. Collectively, academics spend around 70 million hours every year evaluating each other’s manuscripts on the behalf of scholarly journals — and they usually receive no monetary compensation and little if any recognition for their effort. Some do it as a way to keep abreast with developments in their field; some simply see it as a duty to the discipline. Either way, academic publishing would likely crumble without them. In recent years, some scientists have begun posting their reviews online, mainly to claim credit for their work. Sites like Publons allow researchers to either share entire referee reports or simply list the journals for whom they’ve carried out a review….

The rise of Publons suggests that academics are increasingly placing value on the work of peer review and asking others, such as grant funders, to do the same. While that’s vital in the publish-or-perish culture of academia, there’s also immense value in the data underlying peer review. Sharing peer review data could help journals stamp out fraud, inefficiency, and systemic bias in academic publishing.….

Peer review data could also help root out bias. Last year, a study based on peer review data for nearly 24,000 submissions to the biomedical journal eLife found that women and non-Westerners were vastly underrepresented among peer reviewers. Only around one in every five reviewers was female, and less than two percent of reviewers were based in developing countries…. Openly publishing peer review data could perhaps also help journals address another problem in academic publishing: fraudulent peer reviews. For instance, a minority of authors have been known to use phony email addresses to pose as an outside expert and review their own manuscripts.…

Opponents of open peer review commonly argue that confidentiality is vital to the integrity of the review process; referees may be less critical of manuscripts if their reports are published, especially if they are revealing their identities by signing them. Some also hold concerns that open reviewing may deter referees from agreeing to judge manuscripts in the first place, or that they’ll take longer to do so out of fear of scrutiny….

Even when the content of reviews and the identity of reviewers can’t be shared publicly, perhaps journals could share the data with outside researchers for study. Or they could release other figures that wouldn’t compromise the anonymity of reviews but that might answer important questions about how long the reviewing process takes, how many researchers editors have to reach out to on average to find one who will carry out the work, and the geographic distribution of peer reviewers.

Of course, opening up data underlying the reviewing process will not fix peer review entirely, and there may be instances in which there are valid reasons to keep the content of peer reviews hidden and the identity of the referees confidential. But the norm should shift from opacity in all cases to opacity only when necessary.

QUESTION 1
According to the passage, some are opposed to making peer reviews public for all the following reasons EXCEPT that it…

Correct answer: 3

Why 3 is correct (the EXCEPT):
– The passage never claims that openness protects reviewers from “unwarranted and unjustified criticism or comments from others,” nor that this is a reason opponents cite.
– Trap type: Out of Scope / Irrelevant (adds a benefit not discussed and not tied to the stated concerns).

Why the other options are wrong (i.e., they are actually mentioned as reasons by opponents):

1. makes reviewers reluctant to review manuscripts, especially if these are critical of the submitted work.
   – Supported: opponents fear referees “may be less critical” if reviews are public and may be “deterred from agreeing to judge manuscripts.”
   – Cause → effect: Open reviewing → fear of exposure → (a) less critical reviews, (b) fewer people agree to review.
   – Trap to avoid: Distorted / Twisted Facts (the option fuses two stated effects: reluctance to review and reduced criticality; the extra phrase “especially if these are critical” is an embellishment but still consistent).
2. delays the manuscript evaluation process as reviewers would take longer to write their reviews.
   – Supported: opponents worry reviewers “will take longer to do so out of fear of scrutiny.”
   – Cause → effect: Open reviewing → fear of scrutiny → slower reviews → delays.
   – Trap to avoid: Vague / Misleading (wording is general—“delays the process”—but accurately captures the stated effect).
3. deters reviewers from producing honest, if critical, reviews that are vital to the sound publishing process.
   – Supported: “referees may be less critical… especially if… revealing their identities.”
   – Cause → effect: Open reviewing + identity exposure → reduced candour/criticism → weaker review quality.
   – Trap to avoid: None (precise restatement of the passage’s concern).

–––––

QUESTION 2
All of the following are listed as reasons why academics choose to review other scholars’ work EXCEPT:

Correct answer: 1

Why 1 is correct (the EXCEPT):
– “Opportunity to expand their influence” is never stated.
– Trap type: Out of Scope / Irrelevant (plausible motivation introduced from outside the text).

Why the other options are wrong (i.e., they are actually mentioned):
2) It is seen as a form of service to the academic community.
– Supported: “some simply see it as a duty to the discipline.”
– Trap to avoid: None (directly supported).

3. Some use this as an opportunity to publicise their own review work.
   – Supported: “some scientists have begun posting their reviews online, mainly to claim credit for their work.” Publicising/credit is the idea.
   – Trap to avoid: Distorted / Twisted Facts (word swap “publicise” vs “claim credit” can mislead; substance matches).
4. It helps them keep current with cutting-edge ideas in their academic disciplines.
   – Supported: “some do it as a way to keep abreast with developments in their field.”
   – Trap to avoid: None (directly supported).

–––––

QUESTION 3
According to the passage, which of the following is the only reason NOT given in favour of making peer review data public?

Correct answer: 3

Why 3 is correct (NOT given):
– The passage does not say that publishing peer-review data “tackles the problem of selecting appropriately qualified reviewers.”
– Trap type: Out of Scope / Irrelevant (introduces a new benefit not argued in the text).

Why the other options are wrong (i.e., they are actually given as reasons in favour):

1. It could address various inefficiencies and fraudulent practices in academic publishing.
   – Supported: “Sharing peer review data could help journals stamp out fraud, inefficiency, and systemic bias.”
   – Cause → effect: Open data → visibility and analytics → less fraud/inefficiency.
   – Trap to avoid: None (verbatim idea).
2. It will deal with peer review fraud such as authors publishing bogus reviews of their work.
   – Supported: “a minority of authors have been known to use phony email addresses… and review their own manuscripts.” Open data helps expose this.
   – Cause → effect: Open data → cross-checks → bogus self-reviews exposed.
   – Trap to avoid: None (directly supported).
3. It would highlight the gender and race biases in reviewer selection.
   – Partly supported and acceptable on CAT: the passage explicitly mentions gender (“only around one in five reviewers was female”) and place-based under-representation (“non-Westerners,” “developing countries”), framed under “bias.” While “race” is not explicitly used, CAT typically accepts the broader “bias” idea here.
   – Cause → effect: Open data → measurable disparities → bias brought to light and addressed.
   – Trap to avoid: Distorted / Twisted Facts (term shift from geography to “race”; don’t over-penalise the wording—core claim of bias exposure is supported).

–––––

Answer key summary
Q1 → 3
Q2 → 1
Q3 → 3

Many human phenomena and characteristics – such as behaviors, beliefs, economies,
genes, incomes, life expectancies, and other things – are influenced both by geographic
factors and by non-geographic factors. Geographic factors mean physical and biological
factors tied to geographic location, including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal
species, soils, and topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under
the term culture, other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual
people. . . .
[T]he differences between the current economies of North and South Korea . . . cannot be
attributed to the modest environmental differences between [them] . . . They are instead due
entirely to the different [government] policies . . . At the opposite extreme, the Inuit and other
traditional peoples living north of the Arctic Circle developed warm fur clothes but no
agriculture, while equatorial lowland peoples around the world never developed warm fur
clothes but often did develop agriculture. The explanation is straightforwardly geographic,
rather than a cultural or historical quirk unrelated to geography. . . . Aboriginal Australia
remained the sole continent occupied only by hunter/gatherers and with no indigenous
farming or herding . . . [Here the] explanation is biogeographic: the Australian continent has
no domesticable native animal species and few domesticable native plant species. Instead,
the crops and domestic animals that now make Australia a food and wool exporter are all
non-native (mainly Eurasian) species such as sheep, wheat, and grapes, brought to Australia
by overseas colonists.
Today, no scholar would be silly enough to deny that culture, history, and individual choices
play a big role in many human phenomena. Scholars don’t react to cultural, historical, and
individual-agent explanations by denouncing “cultural determinism,” “historical determinism,”
or “individual determinism,” and then thinking no further. But many scholars do react to any
explanation invoking some geographic role, by denouncing “geographic determinism” . . .
Several reasons may underlie this widespread but nonsensical view. One reason is that some
geographic explanations advanced a century ago were racist, thereby causing all geographic
explanations to become tainted by racist associations in the minds of many scholars other
than geographers. But many genetic, historical, psychological, and anthropological
explanations advanced a century ago were also racist, yet the validity of newer non-racist
genetic etc. explanations is widely accepted today.
Another reason for reflex rejection of geographic explanations is that historians have a
tradition, in their discipline, of stressing the role of contingency (a favorite word among
historians) based on individual decisions and chance. Often that view is warranted . . . But
often, too, that view is unwarranted. The development of warm fur clothes among the Inuit
living north of the Arctic Circle was not because one influential Inuit leader persuaded other
Inuit in 1783 to adopt warm fur clothes, for no good environmental reason.
A third reason is that geographic explanations usually depend on detailed technical facts of
geography and other fields of scholarship . . . Most historians and economists don’t acquire
that detailed knowledge as part of the professional training.

Answer- 2 dismissal of explanations that involve geographical causes for human behaviour.

The Chinese have two different concepts of a copy. Fangzhipin . . . are imitations where the difference from the original is obvious. These are small models or copies that can be purchased in a museum shop, for example. The second concept for a copy is fuzhipin . . . They are exact reproductions of the original, which, for the Chinese, are of equal value to the original. It has absolutely no negative connotations. The discrepancy with regard to the understanding of what a copy is has often led to misunderstandings and arguments between China and Western museums. The Chinese often send copies abroad instead of originals, in the firm belief that they are not essentially different from the originals. The rejection that then comes from the Western museums is perceived by the Chinese as an insult. . . .

The Far Eastern notion of identity is also very confusing to the Western observer. The Ise Grand Shrine [in Japan] is 1,300 years old for the millions of Japanese people who go there on pilgrimage every year. But in reality this temple complex is completely rebuilt from scratch every 20 years. . . .

The cathedral of Freiburg Minster in southwest Germany is covered in scaffolding almost all year round. The sandstone from which it is built is a very soft, porous material that does not withstand natural erosion by rain and wind. After a while, it crumbles. As a result, the cathedral is continually being examined for damage, and eroded stones are replaced. And in the cathedral’s dedicated workshop, copies of the damaged sandstone figures are constantly being produced. Of course, attempts are made to preserve the stones from the Middle Ages for as long as possible. But at some point they, too, are removed and replaced with new stones.

Fundamentally, this is the same operation as with the Japanese shrine, except in this case the production of a replica takes place very slowly and over long periods of time. . . . In the field of art as well, the idea of an unassailable original developed historically in the Western world. Back in the 17th century [in the West], excavated artworks from antiquity were treated quite differently from today. They were not restored in a way that was faithful to the original. Instead, there was massive intervention in these works, changing their appearance. . . .

It is probably this intellectual position that explains why Asians have far fewer scruples about cloning than Europeans. The South Korean cloning researcher Hwang Woo-suk, who attracted worldwide attention with his cloning experiments in 2004, is a Buddhist. He found a great deal of support and followers among Buddhists, while Christians called for a ban on human cloning. . . . Hwang legitimised his cloning experiments with his religious affiliation: ‘I am Buddhist, and I have no philosophical problem with cloning. And as you know, the basis of Buddhism is that life is recycled through reincarnation. In some ways, I think, therapeutic cloning restarts the circle of life.’

Option: 2. Option 1 is the result of ‘unassailable original’ because to preserve the original, they have to constantly protect the original, keeping certain craftsmen regularly employed. The idea of ‘unassailable original’ is with respect to art. So, we have to keep the discussion limited to art. Both 3 and 4 are a result of the value assigned to the unassailable original. Option 2 is the odd one out.

[Octopuses are] misfits in their own extended families . . . They belong to the Mollusca class Cephalopoda. But they don’t look like their cousins at all. Other molluscs include sea snails, sea slugs, bivalves – most are shelled invertebrates with a dorsal foot. Cephalopods are all arms, and can be as tiny as 1 centimetre and as large at 30 feet. Some of them have brains the size of a walnut, which is large for an invertebrate. . . .

It makes sense for these molluscs to have added protection in the form of a higher cognition; they don’t have a shell covering them, and pretty much everything feeds on cephalopods, including humans. But how did cephalopods manage to secure their own invisibility cloak? Cephalopods fire from multiple cylinders to achieve this in varying degrees from species to species. There are four main catalysts – chromatophores, iridophores, papillae and leucophores. . . .

[Chromatophores] are organs on their bodies that contain pigment sacs, which have red, yellow and brown pigment granules. These sacs have a network of radial muscles, meaning muscles arranged in a circle radiating outwards. These are connected to the brain by a nerve. When the cephalopod wants to change colour, the brain carries an electrical impulse through the nerve to the muscles that expand outwards, pulling open the sacs to display the colours on the skin. Why these three colours? Because these are the colours the light reflects at the depths they live in (the rest is absorbed before it reaches those depths). . . .

Well, what about other colours? Cue the iridophores. Think of a second level of skin that has thin stacks of cells. These can reflect light back at different wavelengths. . . . It’s using the same properties that we’ve seen in hologram stickers, or rainbows on puddles of oil. You move your head and you see a different colour. The sticker isn’t doing anything but reflecting light – it’s your movement that’s changing the appearance of the colour. This property of holograms, oil and other such surfaces is called “iridescence”. . . .

Papillae are sections of the skin that can be deformed to make a texture bumpy. Even humans possess them (goosebumps) but cannot use them in the manner that cephalopods can. For instance, the use of these cells is how an octopus can wrap itself over a rock and appear jagged or how a squid or cuttlefish can imitate the look of a coral reef by growing miniature towers on its skin. It actually matches the texture of the substrate it chooses.

Finally, the leucophores: According to a paper, published in Nature, cuttlefish and octopuses possess an additional type of reflector cell called a leucophore. They are cells that scatter full spectrum light so that they appear white in a similar way that a polar bear’s fur appears white. Leucophores will also reflect any filtered light shown on them . . . If the water appears blue at a certain depth, the octopuses and cuttlefish can appear blue; if the water appears green, they appear green, and so on and so forth.

Option: 3. The answer to this question can be found only in the first paragraph or the second paragraph. We must look for the word ‘misfit’ and find the reasons behind those misfits. The one that is not the reason is the right answer. It is clearly given in the passage that most are shelled but octopuses are not. 2 goes out. They have higher cognition (higher implies that this too is an exception). 1 goes out because of this. The first paragraph also says that they are all arms, whereas others are shelled with a dorsal foot. Thus 4 also goes out. 3 is not an exception because there is no clarity whether this is a point of difference or similarity. The other three options are quite clear because they stand out as reasons behind octopuses being misfits.

When we teach engineering problems now, we ask students to come to a single ” best” solution defined by technical ideals like low cost, speed to build, and ability to scale. This way of teaching primes students to believe that their decision-making is purely objective, as it is grounded in math and science. This is known as technical-social dualism, the idea that the technical and social dimensions of engineering problems are readily separable and remain distinct throughout the problem-definition and solution process.

Nontechnical parameters such as access to a technology, cultural relevancy or potential harms are deemed political and invalid in this way of learning. But those technical ideals are at their core social and political choices determined by a dominant culture focused on economic growth for the most privileged segments of society. By choosing to downplay public welfare as a critical parameter for engineering design, we risk creating a culture of disengagement from societal concerns amongst engineers that is antithetical to the ethical code of engineering.

In my field of medical devices, ignoring social dimensions has real consequences. . . . Most FDA-approved drugs are incorrectly dosed for people assigned female at birth, leading to unexpected adverse reactions. This is because they have been inadequately represented in clinical trials.

Beyond physical failings, subjective beliefs treated as facts by those in decision-making roles can encode social inequities. For example, spirometers, routinely used devices that measure lung capacity, still have correction factors that automatically assume smaller lung capacity in Black and Asian individuals. These racially based adjustments are derived from research done by eugenicists who thought these racial differences were biologically determined and who considered nonwhite people as inferior. These machines ignore the influence of social and environmental factors on lung capacity.

Many technologies for systemically marginalized people have not been built because they were not deemed important such as better early diagnostics and treatment for diseases like endometriosis, a disease that afflicts 10 percent of people with uteruses. And we hardly question whether devices are built sustainably, which has led to a crisis of medical waste and health care accounting for 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Social justice must be made core to the way engineers are trained. Some universities are working on this. . . . Engineers taught this way will be prepared to think critically about what problems we choose to solve, how we do so responsibly and how we build teams that challenge our ways of thinking.

Individual engineering professors are also working to embed societal needs in their pedagogy. Darshan Karwat at the University of Arizona developed activist engineering to challenge engineers to acknowledge their full moral and social responsibility through practical self-reflection. Khalid Kadir at the University of California, Berkeley, created the popular course Engineering, Environment, and Society that teaches engineers how to engage in place-based knowledge, an understanding of the people, context and history, to design better technical approaches in collaboration with communities. When we design and build with equity and justice in mind, we craft better solutions that respond to the complexities of entrenched systemic problems.

Option: 1. We have to find the reasons for discrimination and then mark the one that is not the reason. Option 2 is the reason for discrimination because it focuses on privileged section of society. Option 3 and 4 also have reasons in them. Option 3 because it says nonwhite people are inferior, and option 4 because it mentions subjective beliefs as reasons behind social inequities. Option 1 talks about sustainability, not discrimination.

It’s easy to forget that most of the world’s languages are still transmitted orally with no widely established written form. While speech communities are increasingly involved in projects to protect their languages – in print, on air and online – orality is fragile and contributes to linguistic vulnerability. But indigenous languages are about much more than unusual words and intriguing grammar: They function as vehicles for the transmission of cultural traditions, environmental understandings and knowledge about medicinal plants, all at risk when elders die and livelihoods are disrupted.

Both push and pull factors lead to the decline of languages. Through war, famine and natural disasters, whole communities can be destroyed, taking their language with them to the grave, such as the indigenous populations of Tasmania who were wiped out by colonists. More commonly, speakers live on but abandon their language in favor of another vernacular, a widespread process that linguists refer to as “language shift” from which few languages are immune. Such trading up and out of a speech form occurs for complex political, cultural and economic reasons – sometimes voluntary for economic and educational reasons, although often amplified by state coercion or neglect. Welsh, long stigmatized and disparaged by the British state, has rebounded with vigor.

Many speakers of endangered, poorly documented languages have embraced new digital media with excitement. Speakers of previously exclusively oral tongues are turning to the web as a virtual space for languages to live on. Internet technology offers powerful ways for oral traditions and cultural practices to survive, even thrive, among increasingly mobile communities. I have watched as videos of traditional wedding ceremonies and songs are recorded on smartphones in London by Nepali migrants, then uploaded to YouTube and watched an hour later by relatives in remote Himalayan villages . . .Globalization is regularly, and often uncritically, pilloried as a major threat to linguistic diversity. But in fact, globalization is as much process as it is ideology, certainly when it comes to language. The real forces behind cultural homogenization are unbending beliefs, exchanged through a globalized delivery system, reinforced by the historical monolingualism prevalent in much of the West.

Monolingualism – the condition of being able to speak only one language – is regularly accompanied by a deep-seated conviction in the value of that language over all others. Across the largest economies that make up the G8, being monolingual is still often the norm, with multilingualism appearing unusual and even somewhat exotic. The monolingual mindset stands in sharp contrast to the lived reality of most the world, which throughout its history has been more multilingual than unilingual. Monolingualism, then, not globalization, should be our primary concern.

Multilingualism can help us live in a more connected and more interdependent world. By widening access to technology, globalization can support indigenous and scholarly communities engaged in documenting and protecting our shared linguistic heritage. For the last 5,000 years, the rise and fall of languages was intimately tied to the plow, sword and book. In our digital age, the keyboard, screen and web will play a decisive role in shaping the future linguistic diversity of our species.

Option 4. Options 1,2 and 3 have been discussed as reasons behind decline or disappearance of a language. The author talks positively about internet in preserving languages. Thus 4 is the best choice.

Although one of the most contested concepts in political philosophy, human nature is something on which most people seem to agree. By and large, according to Rutger Bregman in his new book Humankind, we have a rather pessimistic view – not of ourselves exactly, but of everyone else. We see other people as selfish, untrustworthy and dangerous and therefore we behave towards them with defensiveness and suspicion. This was how the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes conceived our natural state to be, believing that all that stood between us and violent anarchy was a strong state and firm leadership.

But in following Hobbes, argues Bregman, we ensure that the negative view we have of human nature is reflected back at us. He instead puts his faith in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century French thinker, who famously declared that man was born free and it was civilisation – with its coercive powers, social classes and restrictive laws – that put him in chains.

Hobbes and Rousseau are seen as the two poles of the human nature argument and it’s no surprise that Bregman strongly sides with the Frenchman. He takes Rousseau’s intuition and paints a picture of a prelapsarian idyll in which, for the better part of 300,000 years, Homo sapiens lived a fulfilling life in harmony with nature . . . Then we discovered agriculture and for the next 10,000 years it was all property, war, greed and injustice. . . .

It was abandoning our nomadic lifestyle and then domesticating animals, says Bregman, that brought about infectious diseases such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, malaria, cholera and plague. This may be true, but what Bregman never really seems to get to grips with is that pathogens were not the only things that grew with agriculture – so did the number of humans. It’s one thing to maintain friendly relations and a property-less mode of living when you’re 30 or 40 hunter-gatherers following the food. But life becomes a great deal more complex and knowledge far more extensive when there are settlements of many thousands.

“Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress and wilderness with war and decline,” writes Bregman. “In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.” Whereas traditional history depicts the collapse of civilisations as “dark ages” in which everything gets worse, modern scholars, he claims, see them more as a reprieve, in which the enslaved gain their freedom and culture flourishes. Like much else in this book, the truth is probably somewhere between the two stated positions.

In any case, the fear of civilisational collapse, Bregman believes, is unfounded. It’s the result of what the Dutch biologist Frans de Waal calls “veneer theory” – the idea that just below the surface, our bestial nature is waiting to break out. . . . There’s a great deal of reassuring human decency to be taken from this bold and thought-provoking book and a wealth of evidence in support of the contention that the sense of who we are as a species has been deleteriously distorted. But it seems equally misleading to offer the false choice of Rousseau and Hobbes when, clearly, humanity encompasses both.

Bregman contrasts preagriculutral societies with agricultural societies. In answering the first question, we have to find the opinion of Bregman, who clearly supports Rousseau, clearly demonstrated in the third paragraph.  Rousseau believes that “for the better part of 300,000 years, Homo sapiens lived a fulfilling life in harmony with nature . . . Then we discovered agriculture and for the next 10,000 years it was all property, war, greed and injustice.”

From this we see that there is ample support for choice 1. The rest can go out. Bregman is not an environmentalist; he is more of a social scientist. This eliminates 2.  Again, choice 3 takes the focus away from bringing out the difference between pre-agricultural society and post -agricultural society.   Bregman’s focus in not on population but on “human nature and human conditions”. 1 is the best choice.

Option A.

The printing press enabled rapid access to new information and the sharing of new ideas. See paragraph 2: ‘one press could crank out 3,000 pages a day…..Medical information passed more freely and quickly….The printing press offered the prospect that tyrants would never be able to kill a book or suppress an idea.’

The other options miss the main idea, as the comparison is not made because the technology was ‘new and revolutionary’, or because it encouraged reading or offered information in several languages.

Hence, the answer is It enabled rapid access to new information and the sharing of new ideas

Choice A is the correct answer.

Option A.

In the paragraph, the passage argues that the reason why storytellers are still fascinated by the story of Aladdin is not just because of the story’s narrative drama or the way it reflects the history of the French and the Middle East, but because it is a story about ‘Middle Easterners coming to Paris and that speaks to our world today’. In other words, the tale of Aladdin resonates even today.

The question is “Which of the following is the primary reason for why storytellers are still fascinated by the story of Aladdin?”

Hence, the answer is The traveller’s experience that inspired the tale of Aladdin resonates even today.

Choice A is the correct answer.

According to the paragraph, “Many studies from the 1970s onward demonstrated the ways in which women’s gendered identities were negotiated differently “at home” than they were “away,” thereby showing women’s self-development through travel.“

So, option A is correct.

Hence, the answer is, “their identity was redefined when they were away from home.”

The author states that ‘the political trajectory of the postwar subcontinent has militated against popular remembrance of the war…’ as both nations needed ‘fresh stories for self-legitimization rather than focusing on shared wartime experiences’. That is, rather than looking into shared wartime experiences with Pakistan, India focused on building an independent, non-colonial political identity after independence.­

There is no evidence in the paragraph to support any of the other options.

Hence, the answer is has been focused on building an independent, non-colonial political identity.

Choice B is the correct answer.

The question asks us to pick the option that those who support decentralisation are least likely to cite, i.e. the option that does not support the argument for decentralisation.

The last paragraph explains how decentralisation begets corruption: journalists in bigger cities are less likely to hold bureaucrats in smaller cities accountable. Those who support decentralisation are not likely to mention this while making their point.

More independence, fresh thinking and lower costs in smaller cities are, on the other hand, arguments for decentralisation.

Hence, the answer is It could weaken the nexus between bureaucrats and media in the capital.

Choice D is the correct answer.

B is correct

Note the observation in paragraph 4: “At other sites, where the scientists found faster pulse rates, the opposite would have happened—seals with faster rates would have happened to arrive first.”

Hence, the answer is, “the male northern elephant seals of Isla Guadalupe with faster call pulse rates might have been the original settlers of the southern rookeries.