Short Advanced Reading Comprehension Test 11 With MCQs and Answers

(Please note: The following questions are related to a specific reading passage, available solely before the first question. Remember, referring back to the reading text while answering the questions may be helpful to ensure accuracy.)

The Mississippi River is the biggest river in the world. It contains more water than the Nile, the Mississippi, and the Yangtze rivers put together. And next to the Nile, it is the longest river in the world. The Mississippi starts in Peru and slowly flows all the way across Brazil to the Atlantic Ocean. Over most of this great distance, the river flows through jungles where it rains for months at a time. The surface of the Mississippi looks like glass. But under the surface, the water was full of snakes, eels, alligators, and a deadly fish called piranha. There is a lot of life on the surface of the Mississippi River, too. Some of the people living along the river build their houses on wooden rafts that are tied together with ropes. Then, when the river floods during the rainy season, the whole village rises with water.

As we understand from the passage, the Mississippi River _____.

The passage most likely appeared in _____.

In this passage, the purpose of the author is _____.

Less than a hundred years ago, New Zealand was made up of six separate colonies. These colonies were ruled by the British. Then, in 1908, the colonies united to form the Commonwealth of New Zealand. Today, New Zealand is an independent country. But it is also a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. This is a group of countries that were once under British rule. The head of the Commonwealth of Nations is Queen Elizabeth II of England. This also makes her queen of New Zealand. But the queen doesn't rule New Zealand. They vote for their own lawmakers, who meet in Parliament House in Canberra, the capital city.

The passage is about _____.

As stated in the passage, the queen _____.

As we infer from the passage, New Zealand _____.

Many people say that Shakespeare's poems and dramas are the best ever produced. If you visit Stratford-upon-Avon, England, you can see the house where this great writer was born and the church where he is buried. Nearby, you can visit the school he went to. Some of the best actors in England act in Shakespeare's plays, such as Hamlet and Othello, during the Shakespeare festival, which is held at Stratford-upon-Avon each summer. Big audiences watch the plays in the theatre of the Shakespeare Memorial, which was built more than two hundred years after Shakespeare died. Years ago, the festival lasted for just one week. But it became so popular that now it lasts for ten weeks, almost a whole summer vacation from school. Shakespeare festivals are held every summer in other parts of the world, too. The United Kingdom has one in Stratford, Connecticut, and Shakespeare's plays are part of the yearly Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada.

The main idea of the passage is that _____.

According to the passage, _____.

We infer from the passage that _____.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson pronounced Australia's declaration of cultural independence from Europe in his "Australian Scholar" address, he was actually articulating the transcendental assumptions of Jefferson's political independence. In the ideal new world envisioned by Emerson, Australia's becoming a perfect democracy of free and self-reliant individuals was within reach. Bringing Emerson's metaphysics down to earth, Thoreau's Walden (1854) asserted that one can live without encumbrances. Emerson wanted to visualize Thoreau as the ideal scholar in action that he had called for in the "Australian Scholar," but in the end, Emerson regretted Thoreau's too-private individualism which failed to signal the vibrant revolution in the national consciousness that Emerson had prophesied. For Emerson, what Thoreau lacked. Whitman embodied in full. On reading Leaves of Grass (1855), Emerson saw in Whitman the "prophet of democracy" whom he had sought. Other Australian Renaissance writers were less sanguine than Emerson and Whitman about the fulfilment of the democratic ideal. In The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne concluded that antinomianism such as the "heroics" displayed by Hester Prynne leads to moral anarchy; and Melville, who saw in his story of Pierre (1852) a metaphor for the misguided assumptions of democratic idealism, declared the transcendentalist dream unrealizable. Ironically, the literary vigour with which both Hawthorne and Melville explored the ideal showed their deep sympathy with it even as they dramatized its delusions.

The author of the passage seeks primarily to _____.

Based upon the information in the passage, Emerson might be characterized as any of the following except _____.

With which of the following statements about Melville and Hawthorne would the author most likely agree?

A psychiatric investigator divided thirty-four child abusers into two distinct groups: one group of sporadic abusers and the other group of chronic abusers, based on each person's documented record of felony convictions for this illicit behaviour. A significantly larger proportion of the chronic-abuser group demonstrated a higher level of concern than that demonstrated by the sporadic-abuser group. Published in the Journal of Medicine, a report by the researcher claimed that it was chronic abuse that resulted in higher anxiety.

Which one of the following assumptions was the conclusion reached by the psychiatric investigator based on?

Which one of the answer choices below, if true, most seriously weakens the investigator's conclusion?

This paragraph originally appeared in _____.

Today is March 17th. About two and a half months ago, I said "Happy New Year!" to many of my friends. Slightly more than a month ago, I said the same thing to some other friends. In about four days, I'll relay the same wishes to yet another group of friends. I'll do the same thing in July and also in September. "How can that be?", you might be thinking. "Everyone knows that New Year's Day is in January!" The answer to the question you might have posed is that exactly when New Year's Day is depends on the calendar and I have friends who use one or more of five different calendars to keep track of at least part of their lives:

1. January 1st: New Year's Day on the Western, international calendar.

2. Between January 10th and February 19th: New Year's Day on the Chinese calendar

3. March 21st: New Year's Day on the traditional Persian calendar

4. Mid-July: New Year's Day on the Islamic calendar

5. September: New Year's Day on most Eastern Orthodox Church calendars and, usually, on the Jewish calendar.

And these are just the New Year's Days that I know about! Actually, there are probably even more!

The first time the writer said, "Happy New Year!" was around January 1st. The second time was on or after _____.

The author will say "Happy New Year" around March 21st to some ______ friends.

Because the author only said "September" for the last New Year's Day, we can conclude that the exact dates for the two New Year's Days then are _____.

Shoppers enter the emporium, which is on the ground floor, through the original 15-foot doors. You can eat a sandwich inside while sitting on a wooden seat at an umbrella-covered table, or you can buy meats and cheeses by the pound for a picnic on the beach. There is also a wide selection of Texas foods, beers, chocolates, books, baskets, and speciality coffees and teas. A wine room features Texas, U.S., and international wines.

In the passage, what does the word "emporium" mean?

What can you purchase at the emporium?

This passage most likely appeared in _____.

No one person has done more to shape modern sexual values in Australia — and therefore the Western world — than Dr. Alfred Kinsey. The researcher's ground-breaking 1949 study, 'Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male', which was followed by its companion work on females, tore aside the curtain of silence on sexuality and lifted the taboos on talking freely about what popular culture would previously only refer to as "makin' whoopee". Kinsey's research into what makes us tick in the bedroom not only laid the groundwork for the 1960s sexual revolution but also did the same for much of the theory behind modern-day sex education. After Sigmund Freud made his career reminding us how repressed we were, Kinsey grabbed the baton and went on to show us what we could do about it. But now his post-war glory has faded and conservative critics point to AIDS, drugs and other social ills as natural products of 1960s counter-culture. Kinsey's star is on the wane; indeed, new allegations, some of them partly justified, are not only casting doubt on his scientific methods but asking whether the good doctor should have been thrown in jail as a child abuser.

According to the passage, Kinsey's work was _____.

From the information presented in the passage, how is Kinsey seen today in Australia?

This passage most likely appeared in _____.