List of top Verbal and Logical Ability Questions on Reading Comprehension asked in XAT

Analyse the following passage and provide appropriate answers for the questions that follow: 
An effective way of describing what interpersonal communication is or is not, is perhaps to capture the underlying beliefs using speci c game analogies.
Communication as Bowling: The bowling model of message delivery is probably the most widely held view of communication. I think that’s unfortunate. This model sees the bowler as the sender, who delivers the ball, which is the message. As it rolls down the lane (the channel), clutter on the boards (noise) may de ect the ball (the message). Yet if it is aimed well, the ball strikes the passive pins (the target audience) with a predictable effect. In this one - way model of communication, the speaker (bowler) must take care to select a precisely crafted message (ball) and practice diligently to deliver it the same way every time. Of course, that makes sense only if target listeners are interchangeable, static pins waiting to be bowled over by our words - which they aren’t.
This has led some observers to propose an interactive model of interpersonal communication. Communication as Ping - Pong: Unlike bowling, Ping - Pong is not a solo game. This fact alone makes it a better analogy for interpersonal communication. One party puts the conversational ball in play, and the other gets into position to receive. It takes more concentration and skill to receive than to serve because while the speaker (server) knows where the message is going, the listener (receive) doesn’t. Like a verbal or nonverbal message, the ball may appear straightforward yet have a deceptive spin. Ping - Pong is a back - and - forth game; players switch roles continuously. One moment the person holding the paddle is an initiator; the next second the same player is a responder, gauging the effectiveness of his or her shot by the way the ball comes back. The repeated adjustment essential for good play closely parallels the feedback process described in a number of interpersonal communication theories. Communication as Dumb Charades The game of charades best captures the simultaneous and collaborative nature of interpersonal communication. A charade is neither an action, like bowling a strike, nor an interaction, like a rally in Ping - Pong. It’s a transaction. Charades is a mutual game; the actual play is cooperative. One member draws a title or slogan from a batch of possibilities and then tries to act it out visually for teammates in a silent mini drama. The goal is to get at least one partner to say the exact words that are on the slip of paper. Of course, the actor is prohibited from talking out loud. Suppose you drew the saying “God helps those who help themselves.” For God you might try folding your hands and gazing upward. For helps you could act out offering a helping hand or giving a leg - up boost over a fence. By pointing at a number of real or imaginary people you may elicit a response of them, and by this point a partner may shout out, “God helps those who help themselves.” Success.
Like charades, interpersonal communication is a mutual, on - going process of sending, receiving, and adapting verbal and nonverbal messages with another person to create and alter images in both of our minds. Communication between us begins when there is some overlap between two images, and is effective to the extent that overlap increases. But even if our mental pictures are congruent, communication will be partial as long as we interpret them differently. The idea that “God helps those who help themselves’ could strike one person as a hollow promise, while the other might regard it as a divine stamp of approval for hard work. Dumb Charade goes beyond the simplistic analogy of bowling and ping pong. It views interpersonal communications as a complex transaction in which overlapping messages simultaneously affect and are affected by the other person and multiple other factors.

Analyse the following passage and provide appropriate answers for the questions that follow:
Advances in economic theory in the 1970s and 1980s illuminated the limits of markets; they showed that unfettered markets do not lead to economic e ciency whenever information is imperfect or markets are missing (for instance, good insurance markets to cover the key risks confronting individuals). And information is always imperfect and markets are always incomplete. Nor do markets, by themselves, necessarily lead to economic e ciency when the task of a country is to absorb new technology, to close the “knowledge gap”: a central feature of development. Today, most academic economists agree that markets, by themselves, do not lead to e ciency; the question is whether government can improve matters.
While it is di cult for economics to perform experiments to test their theories, as a chemist or a physicist might, the world provides a vast array of natural experiments as dozens of countries try different strategies. Unfortunately, because each country differs in its history and circumstances and in the myriad of details in the policies - and details do matter - it is often di cult to get a clear interpretation. What is clear, however, is that there have been marked differences in performance, that the most successful countries have been those in Asia, and that in most of the Asian countries, government played a very active role. As we look more carefully at the effects of particular policies, these conclusions are reinforced: there is a remarkable congruence between what economic theory says government should do and what the East Asian governments actually did. By the same token, the economic theories based on imperfect information and incomplete risk markets that predicted that the free ow of short-term capital - a key feature of market fundamentalist policies - would produce not growth but instability have also been borne out 

Analyse the following passage and provide appropriate answers for the questions that follow:
The base of Objectivism according to Ayan Rand is explicit: “Existence exists – and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists processing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.” Existence and consciousness are facts implicit in every perception. They are the base of all knowledge (and the precondition of proof): knowledge presupposes something to know and someone to know it. They are absolutes which cannot be questioned or escaped: every human utterance, including the denial of these axioms, implies their use and acceptance. The third axiom at the base of knowledge – an axioms true, in Aristotle’s words, of “being qua being” – is the Law of Identity. This law de nes the essence of existence: to be is to be something, a thing is what it is; and leads to the fundamental principle of all action, the law of causality. The law of causality states that a thing’s actions are determined not by chance, but by its nature, i.e. by what it is. It is important to observe the interrelation of these three axioms. Existence is the rst axiom. The universe exists independent of consciousness. Man is able to adapt his background to his own requirements, but “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” (Francis Bacon). There is no mental process that can change the laws of nature or erase facts. The function of consciousness is not to create reality, but to apprehend it. “Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identi cation.” 

The understanding that the brain has areas of specialization has brought with it the tendency to teach in ways that reflect these specialized functions. For example, research concerning the specialized functions of the left and right hemispheres has led to left and right hemisphere teaching. Recent research suggests that such an approach neither reflects how the brain learns, nor how it functions once learning has occurred. To the contrary, in most ‘higher vertebrates’ brain systems interact together as a whole brain with the external world. Learning is about making connections within the brain and between the brain and outside world. 
What does this mean? Until recently, the idea that the neural basis for learning resided in connections between neurons remained a speculation. Now, there is direct evidence that when learning occurs, neuro-chemical communication between neurons is facilitated, and less input is required to activate established connections over time. This evidence also indicates that learning creates connections between not only adjacent neurons but also between distant neurons, and that connections are made from simple circuits to complex ones and from complex circuits to simple ones.
As connections are formed among adjacent neurons to form circuits, connections also begin to form with neurons in other regions of the brain that are associated with visual, tactile, and even olfactory information related to the sound of the word. Meaning is attributed to ‘sounds of words’ because of these connections. Some of the brain sites for these other neurons are far from the neural circuits that correspond to the component sounds of the words; they include sites in other areas of the left hemisphere and even sites in the right hemisphere. The whole complex of interconnected neurons that are activated by the word is called a neural network.
In early stages of learning, neural circuits are activated piecemeal, incompletely, and weakly. It is like getting a glimpse of a partially exposed and blurry picture. With more experience, practice, and exposure, the picture becomes clearer and more detailed. As the exposure is repeated, less input is needed to activate the entire network. With time, activation and recognition become relatively automatic, and the learner can direct her attention to other parts of the task. This also explains why learning takes time. Time is needed to establish new neutral networks and connections between networks. This suggests that the neutral mechanism for learning is essentially the same as the products of learning. Learning is a process that establishes new connections among networks. The newly acquired skills or knowledge are nothing but formation of neutral circuits and networks.

Certain variants of key behavioural genes, “risk allele” make people more vulnerable to certain mood, psychiatric, or personality disorders. An allele is any of the variants of a gene that takes more than one form. A risk allele, then, is simply a gene variant that increases your likelihood of developing a problem. 
Researchers have identified a dozen-odd gene variants that can increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviours, and other problems — if, and only if, the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood or faces particularly trying experiences later in life. This hypothesis, often called the “stress diathesis” or “genetic vulnerability” model, has come to saturate psychiatry and behavioural science.
Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. According to this new thinking, these “bad genes” can create dysfunctions in unfavourable contexts — but they can also enhance function in favourable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.
This hypothesis has been anticipated by Swedish folk wisdom which has long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children — equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes — do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or well-tended garden. There are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care. According to this orchid hypothesis, risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards.
In this view, having both dandelion and orchid kids greatly raises a family’s (and a species’) chance of succeeding, over time and in any given environment. The behavioural diversity provided by these two different types of temperament also supplies precisely what a smart, strong species needs if it is to spread across and dominate a changing world. The many dandelions in a population provide an underlying stability. The less-numerous orchids, meanwhile, may falter in some environments but can excel in those that suit them. And even when they lead troubled early lives, some of the resulting heightened responses to adversity that can be problematic in everyday life — increased novelty-seeking, restlessness of attention, elevated risk-taking, or aggression — can prove advantageous in certain challenging situations: wars, social strife of many kinds, and migrations to new environments. Together, the steady dandelions and the mercurial orchids offer an adaptive flexibility that neither can provide alone. Together, they open a path to otherwise unreachable individual and collective achievements.

Alone — he was alone again — again condemned to silence — again face to face with nothingness! Alone! — never again to see the face, never again to hear the voice of the only human being who united him to earth! Was not Faria’s fate the better, after all — to solve the problem of life at its source, even at the risk of horrible suffering? The idea of suicide, which his friend had driven away and kept away by his cheerful presence, now hovered like a phantom over the abb´e’s dead body. 
“If I could die,” he said, “I should go where he goes, and should assuredly find him again. But how to die? It is very easy,” he went on with a smile; “I will remain here, rush on the first person that opens the door, strangle him, and then they will guillotine me.” But excessive grief is like a storm at sea, where the frail bark is tossed from the depths to the top of the wave. Dantes recoiled from the idea of so infamous a death, and passed suddenly from despair to an ardent desire for life and liberty.
“Die? Oh, no,” he exclaimed — “not die now, after having lived and suffered so long and so much! Die? yes, had I died years ago; but now to die would be, indeed, to give way to the sarcasm of destiny. No, I want to live; I shall struggle to the very last; I will yet win back the happiness of which I have been deprived. Before I die I must not forget that I have my executioners to punish, and perhaps, too, who knows, some friends to reward. Yet they will forget me here, and I shall die in my dungeon like Faria.” As he said this, he became silent and gazed straight before him like one overwhelmed with a strange and amazing thought. Suddenly he arose, lifted his hand to his brow as if his brain were giddy, paced twice or thrice round the dungeon, and then paused abruptly by the bed.
“Just God!” he muttered, “whence comes this thought? Is it from thee? Since none but the dead pass freely from this dungeon, let me take the place of the dead!” Without giving himself time to reconsider his decision, and, indeed, that he might not allow his thoughts to be distracted from his desperate resolution, he bent over the appalling shroud, opened it with the knife which Faria had made, drew the corpse from the sack, and bore it along the tunnel to his own chamber, laid it on his couch, tied around its head the rag he wore at night around his own, covered it with his counterpane, once again kissed the ice-cold brow, and tried vainly to close the resisting eyes, which glared horribly, turned the head towards the wall, so that the jailer might, when he brought the evening meal, believe that he was asleep, as was his frequent custom; entered the tunnel again, drew the bed against the wall, returned to the other cell, took from the hiding-place the needle and thread, flung off his rags, that they might feel only naked flesh beneath the coarse canvas, and getting inside the sack, placed himself in the posture in which the dead body had been laid, and sewed up the mouth of the sack from the inside.

Creative thinking can be used by management teams to produce actions that will potentially increase innovation and identify opportunities. Brainstorming is one technique that can enhance creativity. Brainstorming is usually regarded as a method to be used with groups of people. Although, it can be employed with individuals, the benefit of involving a group is that one person’s idea can help to stimulate even more ideas by other group members.
Underlying brainstorm is the idea that people’s creativity is restricted because they tend to reject ideas at too early a stage. This can be because they may be imposing imaginary constraints on a problem or making false assumptions. Alternatively, they may be unable to see a problem from multiple perspectives, or they may be stereotyping problems and possible solutions and hence failing to see their wider potential. Involvement of people with different perspectives enriches the idea generation.

For private goods, competitive markets ensure efficiency despite the decentralized nature of the information about individual’s tastes and firm technologies. Implicitly, market competition solved adverse selection problems and the fixed-price contracts associated with exogenous prices solve moral hazard problems. However, markets fail for pure public goods and public intervention is thus needed. In this case, the mechanisms used for those collective decisions must solve the incentive problem of acquiring the private information that agents have about their references for public goods. Voting mechanisms are particular incentive mechanisms without any monetary transfers for which the same question of strategic voting, i.e., not voting according to the true preferences, can be raised. For private goods, increasing returns to scale create a situation of natural monopoly far away from the world of competitive markets. When the monopoly has private information about its cost or demand, its regulation by a regulatory commission becomes a principal-agent problem.
Note: Public goods are those in which individuals cannot be excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others, while an individual can be excluded in case of private goods.

The Disciplinary Committee of Nation Political Party (NPP) is meeting today to decide on the future of two of their party members, Mr. Loyal and his son Mr. Prodigal. Mr. Prodigal is the prime accused in the brutal murder of Mr. Victim, an opposition party leader. Mr. Prodigal is in police custody and his appeal for bail has got rejected. Mr. Loyal claims that his son is innocent and Mr. Victim’s death was the result of internal rivalry in the opposition party. Though Mr. Loyal is not accused in this case, his weakness for his son is well known. The media is blaming him for influencing key witnesses to protect his son. Severe criticism of his father-son duo, both by the media and some social activists, is damaging the image of the party. However, Mr. Loyal has significant followers within the party and is considered an asset to the party. Any harsh decision against Mr. Loyal would adversely affect the future of NPP and could even lead to a split in the party. This would benefit the opposition. 

Bright Engineering College (BEC) has listed 20 elective courses for the next term and students have to choose any 7 of them. Simran, a student of BEC, notices that there are three categories of electives: Job-oriented (J), Quantitative-oriented (Q) and Grade-oriented (G). Among these 20 electives, some electives are both Job and Grade-oriented but are not Quantitative-oriented (JG type). QJ type electives are both Job and Quantitative-oriented but are not Grade-oriented and QG type electives are both Quantitative and Grade-oriented but are not Job-oriented. Simran also notes that the total number of QJ type electives is 2 less than QG type electives. Similarly, the total number of QG type electives is 2 less than JG type and there is only 1 common elective (JQG) across three categories. Furthermore, the number of only Quantitative-oriented electives is same as only Job-oriented electives, but less than the number of only Grade-oriented electives. Each elective has at least one registration and there is at least one elective in each category, or combinations of categories. 

A few years back Mr. Arbit and Mr. Boring started an oil refinery business. Their annual earning is currently just 50,000 million rupees. They are now exploring various options to improve the business. Mr. Xanadu, a salesperson from Innovative Technology Solutions (ITS), is trying to sell a new oil refinery technology to Mr. Arbit and Mr. Boring. This technology could potentially enhance their annual earning to 150,000 million rupees within a year. But they have to make one-time investment of 100,000 million rupees to implement the technology. If the technology is not successful, the investment would be lost. Mr. Arbit and Mr. Boring are discussing about possible risks of the investment.

Life Saving Pharmaceuticals (LSP) is India-based Pharmaceuticals Company. Their business mostly revolves around a couple of generic drugs and a few patented drugs. LSP operates in 30 odd countries and more than 50% of their sales volume is from outside India. 

Mohan’s was a popular fast-food joint at Connaught Place, Delhi. Initially Mohan handled his business alone. His sons, Ram and Kishan, joined the business after graduation from college. Ram was entrepreneurial in nature. Subsequently, another branch of Mohan’s was opened in Panipat. Mohan had chosen Ram to head the Panipat branch. Though Ram increased sales in short time, he had stopped using premium quality organic vegetables, the speciality of Mohan’s. Mohan and Kishan were not happy with his way of doing business.
Now, the foremost challenge for Mohan was to sort out this issue with Ram. Mohan knew that replacing Ram with Kishan was difficult as Kishan did not want to leave Delhi. However, giving a freehand to Ram might have long term negative consequences. Mohan was confused about the future course of actions. 

There is an essential and irreducible ‘duality’ in the normative conceptualization of an individ ual person. We can see the person in terms of his or her ‘agency’, recognizing and respecting his or her ability to form goals, commitments, values, etc., and we can also see the person in terms of his or her ‘well-being’. This dichotomy is lost in a model of exclusively self-interested motivation, in which a person’s agency must be entirely geared to his or her own well-being. But once that straitjacket of self-interested motivation is removed, it becomes possible to rec ognize the indisputable fact that the person’s agency can well be geared to considerations not covered- or at least not fully covered- by his or her own well-being. Agency may be seen as important (not just instrumentally for the pursuit of well-being, but also intrinsically), but that still leaves open the question as to how that agency is to be evaluated and appraised. 
Even though the use of one’s agency is a matter for oneself to judge, the need for careful assess ment of aims, objective, allegiances, etc., and the conception of the good, may be important and exacting. To recognize the distinction between the ‘agency aspect’ and the ‘well-being aspect’ of a person does not require us to take the view that the person’s success as an agent must be independent, or completely separable from, his or her success in terms of well-being. A person may well feel happier and better off as a result of achieving what he or she wanted to achieve- perhaps for his or her family, or community, or class, or party, or some other cause. Also it is quite possible that a person’s well-being will go down as a result of frustration if there is some failure to achieve what he or she wanted to achieve as an agent, even though those achievements are not directly concerned with his or her well-being.
There is really no sound basis for demanding that the agency aspect and the well-being aspect of a person should be independent of each other, and it is, I suppose, even possible that every change in one will affect the other as well. However, the point at issue is not the plausibility of their independence, but the sustainability and relevance of the distinction. The fact that two variables may be so related that one cannot change without the other, does not imply that they are the same variable, or that they will have the same values, or that the value of one can be obtained from the other on basis of some simple transformation. The importance of an agency achievement does not rest entirely on the enhancement of well-being that it may indirectly cause. The agency achievement and well-being achievement, both of which have some distinct importance, may be casually linked with each other, but this fact does not compromise the specific importance of either. In so far as utility-based welfare calculations concentrate only on the well-being of the person, ignoring the agency aspect, or actually fails to distinguish between the agency aspect and well-being aspect altogether, something of real importance is lost.

The idea of demarcating certain areas within the country as special economic zones to promote investment and growth is not new. A large country unable to provide the kind of facilities and environment that can attract foreign investment throughout the country often finds it feasible and attractive to carve up some of its areas where such facilities can be provided. The laws and procedures for setting up new industries are waived to make the area business-friendly with developed infrastructure and a one-window interaction with government. In addition, huge tax benefits are promised to lure investors. China’s experience shows that if chalked out and implemented with care such a policy can accelerate the flow of capital and technology from abroad and thereby speed up growth. 
However, SEZs may not be the best option in all situations to clear the bottlenecks in growth. India’s experience with export processing zones (EPZs) bears this out. They have failed in India for the simple reason that the factors that made the SEZs successful in China have been absent here. In India, as in China, EPZs were thought of as a way of providing an escape route from the stranglehold of control that prevailed over the Indian economy. But even while promising to ease the rigours of controls, Indian policy-makers could not give up their pen chant for micromanaging from the centre and undoing the promised relaxations with all kinds of qualifications and “guidelines”.
Over last two decades India has evolved into a market economy and much of governmental control has disappeared, but the flow of foreign direct investment has not reached anywhere near the levels of China. Besides, infrastructure building has fallen far short of what is required. Even after three years of the enactment of the Electricity Act (2003), private investment in electricity generation is still a trickle with the states refusing to give up the monopoly of their electricity boards in the matter of purchase of the power generated. While swearing by growth, governments at both the centre and the states cite the fiscal responsibility laws to plead their helplessness in making the required investments to improve infrastructure.
Given the situation, the SEZs have apparently been thought of as a simple way out. In its enthusiasm for SEZs the commerce ministry forgot two critical lessons of the Chinese experi ence, viz., that an SEZ must be of an adequate size to provide opportunities for reaping the benefits of large-scale operations and their number should be few. Every industry or economic activity worth its name is now seeking SEZ status. Proposals are now being floated to invite foreign educational institutions to come to India with promises of SEZ treatment! The finance ministry apprehends a loss of nearly 1,75,000 crore in direct taxes, customs duties and excise duties over the next five years.

Analyse the following passage and provide appropriate answers that follow. 
We can answer Fermi’s Paradox in two ways. Perhaps our current science over - estimates the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps, evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self - limiting, even self - exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space ships would be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later.
I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual - reality narcissism. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot.
The fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological tness, rather than tracking tness itself. This was a key insight of evolutionary psychology in the early 1990s; although evolution favours brains that tend to maximize tness (as measured by numbers of great - grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. As a result, brains must evolve shortcuts: tness - promoting tricks, cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on an average, under ancestrally normal conditions. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological tness, but it’s even better at delivering fake tness - subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real - world effects.
Fitness - faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our psychological resistance to it. With the invention of Xbox 360, people would rather play a high - resolution virtual ape in Peter Jackson’s King Kong than be a perfect – resolution real human. Teens today must nd their way through a carnival of addictively tness faking entertainment products. The traditional staples of physical, mental and social development - athletics, homework dating - are neglected. The few young people with the self - control to pursue the meritocratic path often get distracted at the last minute.
Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical reality and in 2005 focus shifted to virtual entertainment. Freud’s pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle. Today we narrow - cast human - interest stories to each other, rather than broadcasting messages of universal peace and progress to other star systems. Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of tness - faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species – to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures and less to their children.
Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Some individuals and families may start with an “irrational” Luddite abhorrence of entertainment technology, and they may evolve ever more self - control, conscientiousness and pragmatism by combining the family values of the religious right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace. They wait patiently for our tness faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical - minded breeders will inherit the Earth as like - minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they nally achieve contacts, it will not be a meeting of novel readers and game - players. It will be a meeting of dead - serious super - parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox.

Answer questions on the basis of the information below. 
Five reviews of the recently published novel, Caught in a Blizzard, are reproduced below. The reviews and the reviewers are identi ed as indicated by the numbers.
a: This novel can change your life - for the good, as it has changed mine. It has made me re ect critically about my life.
b: The novel has become a popular piece of literature, more among the youth than among the older population. 
c: The author uses the plot in her novel to present her philosophy about life in a positive light, rather than relying on the merits of the philosophy per se. 
d: The author is known to be a writer of great power. The intricate and captivating plots in her novels shows that she has a subtle and ingenious mind. 
e: People have been jolted out of their beliefs about love and other different aspects of life after reading this novel.