List of top Verbal and Logical Ability Questions on Reading Comprehension

Read the following passage and answer the TWO questions that follow.
But as the behavioral economists like to remind us, we are already prone to all sorts of reductions as a species. It’s not just the scientists. We compress complex reality down into abbreviated heuristics that often work beautifully in everyday life for high-frequency, low-significance decisions. Because we are an unusually clever and self-reflective species, we long ago realized that we needed help overcoming those reductive instincts when it really matters. And so we invented a tool called storytelling. At first, some of our stories were even more reductive than the sciences would prove to be: allegories and parables and morality plays that compressed the flux of real life down to archetypal moral messages. But over time the stories grew more adept at describing the true complexity of lived experience, the whorls and the threadlike pressures. One of the crowning achievements of that growth is the realist novel. That, of course, is the latent implication of Prince Andrei’s question: “innumerable conditions made meaningful only in unpredictable moments” would fare well as a description of both War and Peace and Middlemarch, arguably the two totemic works in the realist canon. What gives the novel the grain of truth lies precisely in the way it doesn’t quite run along the expected grooves, the way it dramatizes all the forces and unpredictable variables that shape the choices humans confront at the most meaningful moments of their lives. 
When we read those novels—or similarly rich biographies of historical figures—we are not just entertaining ourselves; we are also rehearsing for our own real-world experiences….

Read the following passage and answer the TWO questions that follow.
Beauty has an aesthetic, but it is not the same as aesthetics, not when it can be embodied, controlled by powerful interests, and when it can be commodified. Beauty can be manners, also a socially contingent set of traits. Whatever power decides that beauty is, it must always be more than reducible to a single thing. Beauty is a wonderful form of capital in a world that organizes everything around gender and then requires a performance of gender that makes some of its members more equal than others. 
Beauty would not be such a useful distinction were it not for the economic and political conditions. It is trite at this point to point out capitalism, which is precisely why it must be pointed out. Systems of exchange tend to generate the kind of ideas that work well as exchanges. Because it can be an idea and a good and a body, beauty serves many useful functions for our economic system. Even better, beauty can be political. It can exclude and include, one of the basic conditions of any politics. Beauty has it all. It can be political, economic, external, individualized, generalizing, exclusionary, and perhaps best of all a story that can be told. Our dominant story of beauty is that it is simultaneously a blessing, of genetics or gods, and a site of conversion. You can become beautiful if you accept the right prophets and their wisdoms with a side of products thrown in for good measure. Forget that these two ideas—unique blessing and earned reward—are antithetical to each other. That makes beauty all the more perfect for our (social and political) time, itself anchored in paradoxes like freedom and property, opportunity and equality

Read the following passage and answer the THREE questions that follow.
What I call fast political thinking is driven by simplified moral frames. These moral frames give us the sense that those who agree with us have the right answer, while those who disagree are unreasonable, or worse. 
Each moral frame sets up an axis of favorable and unfavorable. Progressives use the oppressoroppressed axis. Progressives view most favorably those groups that can be regarded as oppressed or standing with the oppressed, and they view most unfavorably those groups that can be regarded as oppressors. Conservatives use the civilization-barbarism axis. Conservatives view most favorably the institutions that they believe constrain and guide people toward civilized behavior, and they view most unfavorably those people who they see as trying to tear down such institutions. Libertarians use the liberty-coercion axis. Libertarians view most favorably those people who defer to decisions that are made on the basis of personal choice and voluntary agreement, and they view most unfavorably those people who favor government interventions that restrict personal choice. 
If you have a dominant axis, I suggest that you try to learn the languages spoken by those who use the other axes. Don’t worry—learning other languages won’t make it easy for others to convert you to their point of view. By the same token, it will not make it easy to convert others to your point of view. However, you may become aware of assumptions your side makes that others might legitimately question.
What learning the other languages can do is enable you to understand how others think about political issues. Instead of resorting to the theory that people with other views are crazy or stupid or evil, you may concede that they have a coherent point of view. In fact, their point of view could be just as coherent as yours. The problem is that those people apply their point of view in circumstances where you are fairly sure that it is not really appropriate. Consider that there may be situations in which one frame describes the problem much better than the others. For example, I believe that the civil rights movement in the United States is best described using the progressive heuristic of the oppressed and the oppressor. In the 1950s and the early 1960s, the people who had the right model were the people who were fighting for black Americans to have true voting rights, equal access to housing, and an end to the Jim Crow laws. The civilization-barbarism axis and the liberty-coercion axis did not provide the best insight into the issue….

Read the following passage and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all. And over the years, I’ve become convinced of one key, overarching fact about the ignorant mind. One should not think of it as uninformed. Rather, one should think of it as misinformed. 
An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power. As the humorist Josh Billings once put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Ironically, one thing many people “know” about this quote is that it was first uttered by Mark Twain or Will Rogers—which just ain’t so.) Because of the way we are built, and because of the way we learn from our environment, we are all engines of misbelief. And the better we understand how our wonderful yet kludge-ridden, Rube Goldberg engine works, the better we—as individuals and as a society—can harness it to navigate toward a more objective understanding of the truth.

Read the following passage and answer the THREE questions that follow.
If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination. 
Any given vaccine can fail to produce immunity in an individual, and some vaccines, like the influenza vaccine, are less effective than others. But when enough people are vaccinated with even a relatively ineffective vaccine, viruses have trouble moving from host to host and cease to spread, sparing both the unvaccinated and those in whom vaccination has not produced immunity. This is why the chances of contracting measles can be higher for a vaccinated person living in a largely unvaccinated community than they are for an unvaccinated person living in a largely vaccinated community. 
The unvaccinated person is protected by the bodies around her, bodies through which disease is not circulating. But a vaccinated person surrounded by bodies that host disease is left vulnerable to vaccine failure or fading immunity. We are protected not so much by our own skin, but by what is beyond it. The boundaries between our bodies begin to dissolve here. Donations of blood and organs move between us, exiting one body and entering another, and so too with immunity, which is a common trust as much as it is a private account. Those of us who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors.

Read the passage carefully and answer the following question.
Geologists have been investigating a potential cycle in geological events for a long time. Back in the 1920s and 30s, scientists of the era had suggested that the geological record had a 30-million-year cycle, while in the 1980s and 90s researchers used the best-dated geological events at the time to give them a range of the length between 'pulses' of 26.2 to 30.6 million years. Now, everything seems to be in order – 27.5 million years is right about where we'd expect. A study late last year suggested that this 27.5-million-year mark is when mass extinctions happen, too.
Which of the following statements can be BEST concluded from the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following question.
Labouring is simply what we do to survive. We labour to eat. To keep our bodies healthy. To keep roof over our heads, and to keep life reproducing. All animals labour, with or without coaxing….There’s nothing special about labour, save for the fact that without it we would die. Work, on the other hand, gives collective meaning to what we do. When we work to producesomething we both put something into and leave something lasting in the world: a table, a house,a book, a car, a rug, a high precision piece of engineering with which we can order the days into time, or keep a body breathing.
Which of the following statements can be BEST concluded from the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following question.
One theory of accidents is what experts call the Swiss Cheese model. A slab of Swiss cheese hasseveral holes, randomly and unevenly distributed over its surface. If several slabs are stackedtogether, it would be impossible for something to slip through unless all the holes happen to lineup.
If even one slab doesn’t align, the impending catastrophe will meet a layer of resistance, and theworst is averted. Aviation professionals will tell you that plane crashes never happen for a singlereason. There may be an identifiable primary factor, but it’s usually a chain of events, an array of circumstances neatly piling up.
Which of the following statements can be BEST concluded from the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the THREE questions that follow.
What does a good life look like to you? For some, the phrase may conjure up images of a close-knit family, a steady job, and a Victorian house at the end of a street arched with oak trees. Others may focus on the goal of making a difference in the world, whether by working as a nurse or teacher, volunteering, or pouring their energy into environmental activism. According to Aristotlean theory, the first kind of life would be classified as “hedonic”—one based on pleasure, comfort, stability, and strong social relationships. The second is “eudaimonic,” primarily concerned with the sense of purpose and fulfilment one gets by contributing to the greater good. The ancient Greek philosopher outlined these ideas in his treatise Nicomachean Ethics, and the psychological sciences have pretty much stuck them ever since when discussing the possibilities of what people might want out of their time on Earth. But a new paper, published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Review, suggests there’s another way to live a good life. It isn’t focused on happiness or purpose, but rather it’s a life that’s “psychologically rich.” 
What is a psychologically rich life? According to authors Shige Oishi, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and Erin Westgate, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida, it’s one characterized by “interesting experiences in which novelty and/or complexity are accompanied by profound changes in perspective.” 
Studying abroad, for example, is one way that college students often introduce psychological richness into their lives. As they learn more about a new country’s customs and history, they’re often prompted to reconsider the social mores of their own cultures. Deciding to embark on a difficult new career path or immersing one’s self in avant-garde art (the paper gives a specific shout-out to James Joyce’s Ulysses) also could make a person feel as if their life is more psychologically rich. 
Crucially, an experience doesn’t have to be fun in order to qualify as psychologically enriching. It might even be a hardship. Living through war or a natural disaster might make it hard to feel as though you’re living a particularly happy or purposeful life, but you can still come out of the experience with psychological richness. Or you might encounter less dramatic but nonetheless painful events: infertility, chronic illness, unemployment. Regardless of the specifics, you may experience suffering but still find value in how your experience shapes your understanding of yourself and the world around you.

Read the passage carefully and answer the THREE questions that follow.
What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to. This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are. It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false.

Read the passage carefully and answer the THREE questions that follow.
What Arendt does for us is to remind us that our “publicness” is as important to our flourishing as our sociability and our privacy. She draws a distinction between what it means to act “socially” and what is means to act “politically.” The social realm for Arendt is both the context where all our basic survival needs “are permitted to appear in public” and also the realm of “behaviour.” One of the things she fears about modern societies is that society – focused on how we behave and what we will permit for ourselves and others – becomes the realm of conformism. This is worrying not just because we don’t really get vibrant societies out of conformism and sameness, but also, Arendt says because there is a risk that we think this is all there is to our living together. We lose ourselves in the tasks of managing behaviour and forget that our true public task is to act, and to distinguish ourselves in doing so. The risk, says Arendt, is therefore that we confuse behaviour with action, that in modern liberal societies “behaviour replaces action as the foremost mode of human relationship.” This confusion can happen in any area of our modern lives and institutions, secular or faith-based. None is immune. 
Arendt wants to drive home the point that the healthy public life requires that we do not just see ourselves as social actors but also as fully public persons, committed to judging and acting as members of a common world we want to inhabit and pass on. Arendt tells us that public action is action in which we stand out, are individuated, become in some way excellent in a manner that is of service to others and a greater good. This is the space where we take risks, subject our common life to scrutiny, seek justice (that sometimes requires us to transgress what seem like accepted laws) in order to be increasingly open to the claims and needs of other humans – ones who are not our household and our kin.

Read the passage carefully and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes. 
This is easiest to introduce with a tragic case. British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: i.e., as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand. In at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalisation. 
Stupidity will often arise in cases like this, when an outdated conceptual framework is forced into service, mangling the user’s grip on some new phenomenon. It is important to distinguish this from mere error. We make mistakes for all kinds of reasons. Stupidity is rather one specific and stubborn cause of error. Historically, philosophers have worried a great deal about the irrationality of not taking the available means to achieve goals: Tom wants to get fit, yet his running shoes are quietly gathering dust. The stock solution to Tom’s quandary is simple willpower. Stupidity is very different from this. It is rather a lack of the necessary means, a lack of the necessary intellectual equipment. Combatting it will typically require not brute willpower but the construction of a new way of seeing our self and our world. Such stupidity is perfectly compatible with intelligence: Haig was by any standard a smart man.

Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Dileep Dosan sells dosas in front of an upscale hospital at a city in Punjab. He only sells two varieties of dosas: plain for ₹25 and masala for ₹40.
His dosa stall is popular amongst the hospital staff members, who mostly hail from South India and form his core clientele. They frequent his stall during office hours as they find his dosas to be reasonably priced. Though the hospital staff members can visit the upscale food court on the top floor of the hospital, they prefer his stall for breakfast and lunch, and even for occasional evening snacks. His daily sale volume varies between 300 and 400 dosas, in which the demand for masala dosas is around 50-60%.

Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Korkai is a serene village, nestled in a small island, separated from the mainland by a strait — the world forgot to name. Its inhabitants are mostly fishermen; a few are cattle-grazers too. A boat ride across the strait is the only mode of transport to the mainland. 
Budugu, the boatman, ferries people, cattle, and bicycles across the strait in his boat for a living. The remoteness and the lack of connection to the mainland has served him well. He has a family of five. His two daughters are away studying in a city college and dream of corporate jobs in the cities. His ailing mother and wife complete his family. 
Budugu sent his daughters to study in the city as there is only one school in Korkai, run by an NGO. The NGO prepares the village kids for higher studies. For those who cannot go to cities, the NGO teaches them about the virtues of the local way of life. 
Budugu is a member of the village Panchayat that runs the village administration. At Korkai, hardly anyone remembers the local MLA or MP. Interestingly, the local MLA visited last week, and informed the islanders of major changes planned for the region: urgent construction of a bridge connecting the island to the mainland, and real estate development. She announced that the island will become a well-known eco-tourism destination in the state. She stressed that the local livelihood, dependent on fortunes at the sea, might enjoy the certainty in minimum wages, meted out by the eco-resort owners. Nevertheless, some villagers fear that the bridge will irreversibly change their lives and livelihoods.

Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Fundamental Research in Science for Corporate Applications (FuRSCA) is an R&D unit of a Public Sector Undertaking (PSU). FuRSCA’s employees are research scientists who assist the Public Sector Undertaking through their R&D. Given the far-reaching implications of its research, FuRSCA was established as a separate entity near the factory of the PSU. 
FuRSCA has three levels of hierarchy viz.: junior, senior and chief scientists and all of them reside on the campus. Hence, every scientist, regardless of hierarchy, resides in a house that is similar in all aspects. Though the scientists are entitled to a house rent allowance (HRA), given the distance of FuRSCA from the city, housing them on the campus makes sense. 
The new recruits are provided a transit accommodation in the institute’s studio apartments, until vacant houses are available. For these recruits, a queue has been created on the basis of their date of joining and not on hierarchy, with the most recent recruit going to the last in the queue. Execution of this policy is the responsibility of the FuRSCA Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), who reports to the Director of FuRSCA

Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.
A2Z is a state-funded leading engineering college in the country, renowned for its teaching and placements. Now, A2Z aspires to be a global leader in research as well. A2Z has, therefore, decided to push for better quality research from its newly recruited faculty members. In the past, a few faculty members were confirmed because of their exceptional teaching feedback even though their research output was below par. Currently, the Dean, in consultation with the academic council, has included the quality of research as a mandatory requirement along with teaching excellence for the confirmation of the newly recruited faculty members. (The academic council comprises of the senior faculty members from different departments.)
Initially, newly recruited faculty members are put on a probation for three years. Either they are confirmed or their probation is extended or their services are terminated, based on teaching and research contributions. Once confirmed, their job is secure along with other additional perquisites.
Aparna joined the social sciences department of A2Z two years back. She is amongst the many faculty members, recruited after the new norms for confirmation were introduced. She completed her doctorate from a reputed university in the USA, with a significant research contribution. However, after joining A2Z, Aparna got deeply involved in social outreach as COVID-19 was spreading. Though her social outreach has given her immense satisfaction, she has nothing to show against research contributions; further, it has impacted her teaching effectiveness. Her confirmation is due in a year.

Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Raghubir, a reputed doctor, practices medicine in a tier-three city. He owns an imported SUV which he bought 10 years ago, using his hard- earned savings of nearly 5 years. Initially, he used to take it for long rides, but for the last 6-7 years, he only commutes to his clinic, a 10-minute drive from his home. 
The SUV has been his proud possession, but it demands high maintenance. Also, the diesel guzzling SUV does not comply with the new emission norms being introduced in the tier-one and tier-two cities. Of late, a few newspapers reported that the new emission norms may be introduced in tier-three cities as well. This news has worried Raghubir.

Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Future Leaders is one of the most prestigious private schools in a small town, next to an industrial hub. Most of its students come from affluent families, but there are some who belong to middleincome and lower middle-income families as well. The school charges an annual fee of ₹2 lakhs, inclusive of all charges, payable at the beginning of the academic year. Roughly 20% of the fees collected goes into paying the salaries of the teachers, another 30% for the upkeep of the school, and roughly 20% for miscellaneous expenses in running day-to-day businesses like supply, cleaning etc. The remaining goes into an exigency corpus. 
This year, like the rest of the country, the town has been hit by the coronavirus pandemic. The classes have been shifted online. The local authorities have mandated that all schools have to reduce their fees by 20%. Further, parents should be given extended time to pay the fees if they are in financial distress. Six months into the academic year, only 40% of the parents have paid even the reduced annual fees.

Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Sundaresan was a professor of Corporate Responsibility at a premium management institution. As a requirement of his course, students had to synthesize sustainability challenges, faced by thermal power companies and submit an assignment on them. Though it was an individual assignment, some students sought permission from Sundaresan to work on the assignment as a team. Sundaresan knew that collaboration fosters peer learning, and therefore, allowed them to work in teams. However, he mandated that a team should not exceed three members. While 15 students elected to work individually, other 15 formed teams of three each, and another 10 formed teams of two members each.

Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.
Twitter is not on the masthead of a newspaper. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.
Based on the passage, the writer’s disappointment can be BEST summarized as:

Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.
We can think of the history of life on earth as a vast, long-term experiment in pure competition. Every living organism is competing with all other living organisms for resources (nutrients, sunlight, water, territory, etc.). Nature, or the natural world, is a laboratory of unfettered competition. It’s a dog-eat-dog, no-holds- barred, day-in and day-out struggle.
There are no governmental regulators to protect the weak or favor the strong. All organisms are given a chance, but not necessarily an equal chance. As the climate and the environment change (and change they do), some organisms are favored over others at times, but these advantages are fleeting. What nature gives, nature can take away.
Which of the following can be BEST concluded from the passage?

Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.
The painting, which is in poor condition, suggests that a highly advanced artistic culture existed some 44,000 years ago, punctuated by folklore, religious myths and spiritual belief. The scene may be regarded not only as the earliest dated figurative art in the world but also as the oldest evidence for the communication of a narrative in Palaeolithic art.
"This is noteworthy, given that the ability to invent fictional stories may have been the last and most crucial stage in the evolutionary history of human language and the development of modern-like patterns of cognition” researchers said.
Which of the following can be BEST concluded from the passage?

Read the following passage and answer the two questions that follow.
We stand before this great world. The truth of our life depends upon our attitude of mind towards it - an attitude which is formed by our habit of dealing with it according to the special circumstance of our surroundings and our temperaments. It guides our attempts to establish relations with the universe either by conquest or by union, either through the cultivation of power or through that of sympathy. And thus, in our realization of the truth of existence, we put our emphasis either upon the principle of dualism or upon the principle of unity.

Read the following passage and answer the three questions that follow.
Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens. The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: The very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted. We answer the phone, look up something on the Internet, check our email, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the novelty-seeking, reward-seeking centers of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the detriment of our staying on task. It is the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugarcoated tasks.
In the old days, if the phone rang and we were busy, we either didn’t answer or we turned the ringer off. When all phones were wired to a wall, there was no expectation of being able to reach us at all times—one might have gone out for a walk or be between places, and so if someone couldn’t reach you (or you didn’t feel like being reached), that was considered normal. Now more people have cell phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them. This expectation is so ingrained that people in meetings routinely answer their cell phones to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t talk now, I’m in a meeting.” Just a decade or two ago, those same people would have let a landline on their desk go unanswered during a meeting, so different were the expectations for reachability.

Read the following passage and answer the three questions that follow.
Considering the multitude of situations in which we humans use numerical information, life without numbers is inconceivable. But what was the benefit of numerical competence for our ancestors, before they became Homo sapiens? Why would animals crunch numbers in the first place? It turns out that processing numbers offers a significant benefit for survival, which is why this behavioral trait is present in many animal populations.
Several studies examining animals in their ecological environments suggest that representing number enhances an animal’s ability to exploit food sources, hunt prey, avoid predation, navigate in its habitat, and persist in social interactions. Before numerically competent animals evolved on the planet, single-celled microscopic bacteria — the oldest living organisms on earth — already exploited quantitative information. The way bacteria make a living is through their consumption of nutrients from their environment. Mostly, they grow and divide themselves to multiply. However, in recent years, microbiologists have discovered they also have a social life and are able to sense the presence or absence of other bacteria; in other words, they can sense the number of bacteria. Take, for example, the marine bacterium Vibrio fisher. It has a special property that allows it to produce light through a process called bioluminescence, similar to how fireflies give off light. If these bacteria are in dilute water solutions (where they are alone), they make no light. But when they grow to a certain cell number of bacteria, all of them produce light simultaneously. Therefore, Vibrio Fischer can distinguish when they are alone and when they are together.
Somehow they have to communicate cell number, and it turns out they do this using a chemical language. They secrete communication molecules, and the concentration of these molecules in the water increases in proportion to the cell number. And when this molecule hits a certain amount, called a quorum, it tells the other bacteria how many neighbor's there are, and all bacteria glow. This behavior is called “quorum sensing”: The bacteria vote with signaling molecules, the vote gets counted, and if a certain threshold (the quorum) is reached, every bacterium responds. This behavior is not just an anomaly of Vibrio fisher; all bacteria use this sort of quorum sensing to communicate their cell number in an indirect way via signaling molecules.