The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

Passage:

[S]pices were a global commodity centuries before European voyages. There was a complex chain of relations, yet consumers had little knowledge of producers and vice versa. Desire for spices helped fuel European colonial empires to create political, military, and commercial networks under a single power.

Historians know a fair amount about the supply of spices in Europe during the medieval period – the origins, methods of transportation, the prices – but less about demand. Why go to such extraordinary efforts to procure expensive products from exotic lands? Still, demand was great enough to inspire the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco Da Gama, launching the first fateful wave of European colonialism. . . .

So, why were spices so highly prized in Europe in the centuries from about 1000 to 1500? One widely disseminated explanation for medieval demand for spices was that they covered the taste of spoiled meat. . . . Medieval purchasers consumed meat much fresher than what the average city-dweller in the developed world of today has at hand. However, refrigeration was not available, and some hot spices have been shown to serve as an anti-bacterial agent. Salting, smoking, or drying meat were other means of preservation. Most spices used in cooking began as medical ingredients, and throughout the Middle Ages spices were used as both medicines and condiments. Above all, medieval recipes involve the combination of medical and culinary lore in order to balance food’s humeral properties and prevent disease. Most spices were hot and dry and so appropriate in sauces to counteract the moist and wet properties supposedly possessed by most meat and fish. . . .

Where spices came from was known in a vague sense centuries before the voyages of Columbus. Just how vague may be judged by looking at medieval world maps . . . To the medieval European imagination, the East was exotic and alluring. Medieval maps often placed India close to the so-called Earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden described in the Bible.

Geographical knowledge has a lot to do with the perceptions of spices’ relative scarcity and the reasons for their high prices. An example of the varying notions of scarcity is the conflicting information about how pepper is harvested. As far back as the 7th century, Europeans thought that pepper in India grew on trees “guarded” by serpents that would bite and poison anyone who attempted to gather the fruit. The only way to harvest pepper was to burn the trees, which would drive the snakes underground. Of course, this bit of lore would explain the shriveled black peppercorns, but not white, pink, or other colors.

Spices never had the enduring allure or power of gold and silver or the commercial potential of new products such as tobacco, indigo, or sugar. But the taste for spices did continue for a while beyond the Middle Ages. As late as the 17th century, the English and the Dutch were struggling for control of the Spice Islands: Dutch New Amsterdam, or New York, was exchanged by the British for one of the Moluccan Islands where nutmeg was grown.

Question: In the context of the passage, the people who heard the story of pepper trees being guarded by snakes would be least likely to arrive at the conclusion that?

1. It is no surprise that the pepper supply is so limited.
2. This is why pepper is so hot.
3. Pepper is costly for good reason.
4. It is not advisable to go to India to harvest the pepper themselves.

Question 4: In the context of the passage, which one of the following conclusions CANNOT be reached?

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

Passage:

(. . .) There are three other common drivers for carnivore-human attacks, some of which are more preventable than others. Natural aggression-based conflicts – such as those involving females protecting their young or animals protecting a food source – can often be avoided as long as people stay away from those animals and their food.

Carnivores that recognise humans as a means to get food, are a different story. As they become more reliant on human food they might find at campsites or in rubbish bins, they become less avoidant of humans. Losing that instinctive fear response puts them into more situations where they could get into an altercation with a human, which often results in that bear being put down by humans. “A fed bear is a dead bear,” says Servheen, referring to a common saying among biologists and conservationists.

Predatory or predation-related attacks are quite rare, only accounting for 17% of attacks in North America since 1955. They occur when a carnivore views a human as prey and hunts it like it would any other animal it uses for food. (. . .)

Then there are animal attacks provoked by people taking pictures with them or feeding them in natural settings such as national parks which often end with animals being euthanised out of precaution. “Eventually, that animal becomes habituated to people, and [then] bad things happen to the animal. And the folks who initially wanted to make that connection don’t necessarily realise that,” says Christine Wilkinson, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, California, who’s been studying coyote-human conflicts.

After conducting countless postmortems on all types of carnivore-human attacks spanning 75 years, Penteriani’s team believes 50% could have been avoided if humans reacted differently. A 2017 study co-authored by Penteriani found that engaging in risky behaviour around large carnivores increases the likelihood of an attack.

Two of the most common risky behaviours are parents leaving their children to play outside unattended and walking an unleashed dog, according to the study. Wilkinson says 66% of coyote attacks involve a dog. “[People] end up in a situation where their dog is being chased, or their dog chases a coyote, or maybe they’re walking their dog near a den that’s marked, and the coyote wants to escort them away,” says Wilkinson.

Experts believe climate change also plays a part in the escalation of human-carnivore conflicts, but the correlation still needs to be ironed out. “As finite resources become scarcer, carnivores and people are coming into more frequent contact, which means that more conflict could occur,” says Jen Miller, international programme specialist for the US Fish & Wildlife Service. For example, she says, there was an uptick in lion attacks in western India during a drought when lions and people were relying on the same water sources.

(. . .) The likelihood of human-carnivore conflicts appears to be higher in areas of low-income countries dominated by vast rural landscapes and farmland, according to Penteriani’s research. “There are a lot of working landscapes in the Global South that are really heterogeneous, that are interspersed with carnivore habitats, forests and savannahs, which creates a lot more opportunity for these encounters, just statistically,” says Wilkinson.

Question: Given the insights provided by Penteriani’s research and Wilkinson’s statement, which of the following conclusions can be drawn about the relationship between landscape heterogeneity and human-carnivore conflicts?

1. Homogeneous landscapes with uniform agricultural practices are more likely to experience high rates of human-carnivore conflicts due to the predictability of resources.
2. Low-income countries with vast, contiguous wilderness areas are less prone to human-carnivore conflicts because these areas lack the human presence necessary for such encounters.
3. The diversity and interspersion of working landscapes with carnivore habitats in rural areas increase the statistical probability of encounters between humans and carnivores.
4. Landscape heterogeneity, characterized by a mix of farmland and natural habitats, inherently reduces the chances of human-carnivore conflicts by providing more refuge for wildlife away from human activity.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

Passage:

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.

Question: Which one of the following hypothetical scenarios, if true, would most strongly undermine the central ideas of the passage?

1. Schools that teach endangered languages can preserve the language only for a generation.
2. Most liberal arts students will pursue jobs in publishing and human resource management rather than doctorates in linguistics.
3. A liberal arts education requires that, in addition to being fluent in English, students gain fluency in two of the top five most spoken languages globally.
4. Recording a dying language that has only a few remaining speakers freezes it in time: it stops evolving further.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

Passage:

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. . . .

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 is unlikely to disagree with any of the following EXCEPT:

1. Space contamination should be minimised until the possibility of life on the astronomical body being explored is ruled out.
2. That while NASA’s earlier missions were not ideal in their approach to space contamination, they likely did no grave damage.
3. The proposal for a zonal segregation of the Martian landscape into regions for different purposes.
4. The exorbitant costs of continuing to keep the space environment pristine may be unsustainable.