Short Advanced Reading Comprehension Test 23 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.)

In discussing the relative difficulties which the exact and inexact sciences face, let me begin with an analogy. Would you agree that swimmers are less skilful athletes than runners because swimmers do not move as fast as runners? You possibly would not. You would quickly point out that water offers greater resistance to swimmers than the air and ground do to runners! Agreed, that is just the point. In seeking to solve their problems, social scientists encounter greater resistance than physical scientists. The circumstances under which the social scientists must work would drive physical scientists frantic. Here are five of these conditions. He can make few experiments; he cannot measure the results exactly; he cannot control the conditions surrounding the experiments; he is often expected to get quick results with slow-acting economic forces; and he must work with people, not with inanimate objects.

An inexact science is one _____.

The author makes a comparison _____.

_____ is not among the difficulties which a social scientist encounters.

The shocking death of Pamela Basu spurred a series of official actions to cope with carjacking. Within days of her murder, the D.C. City Council passed a law mandating 15-year prison sentences for armed carjackers. Last month, the President signed a law that makes carjacking a federal crime carrying a life sentence if it leads to someone's death. Motorists are scrambling for their own protection. At Auto stores in Detroit, customers can buy a device that silently signals a monitoring station if a car is moved while the alarm system is on. Others want security systems equipped with a "panic button" that activates a siren and flashing lights from inside a car. There is also increased interest in bullet-resistant glass. Jittery motorists hope these measures will buy them some safety till law enforcement can put the brakes on a singularly frightening crime.

In accordance with the newly passed law, any thief who uses a gun to steal a car will _____.

The new law signed by the President _____.

It is inferred from the passage that _____.

While the 1970s had demonstrated the importance of the Gulf region, the 1980s provided evidence of its fragility. In September 1980 Iraq launched an offensive into Iran that turned into a bloody eight years of attrition. The war left hundreds of thousands dead, disrupted vital oil tanker traffic in the Gulf, and led to U.S. intervention in the form of naval escorts for Kuwaiti oil tankers. Meanwhile, the economies of the Gulf states, all of which depend to some degree on oil, were devastated by the crash of oil prices in the mid-1980s. Plummeting oil revenues forced the Gulf states to cut back severely on domestic development projects and services.

Owing to the sudden steep reduction in the income from oil in the mid-1980s, _____.

Any destabilisation of the Gulf region brings about global problems as _____.

In the mid-1980s, _____.

If science has become remote from everyday experience, it has also broken from conventional notions of discovery. In virtually every cutting-edge field, from astrophysics to molecular genetics, the object of discovery is frequently totally inaccessible to the senses, and the process of discovery has become inferential rather than direct. When Wolszczan "discovered" the first planets outside our own solar system, he did not spy them through a telescope: he inferred their presence by the pattern of radio beeps coming from the pulsar they orbit. When chemists "discovered" a substance in broccoli that may prevent cancer, they did not peer at the stalks through a microscope: they looked for the chemical's footprints in the wavy printout of a chromatograph. In palaeontology one can still stub a toe and, by God, definitely and directly discover a fossil. But in other fields, "no one looks at the thing itself anymore," says physicist Nick Samios, director of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. "We look at what the thing does, at the traces it leaves behind."

What was conventionally understood from the conception of discovery was _____.

Which of the discoveries below is directly accessible to the senses?

It isn't right to say that _____.

Finns are the best readers in the industrialised world. The world's highest percentage of engineering is in former Czechoslovakia. The Swiss are tops at math and science. Canada has turned out the highest proportion of university graduates. The Japanese spend proportionately less on education than everybody else. And after a decade of school reform, the United States compares more favourably -though still not impressively - with the rest of the industrialised world than it has in the past, according to a study released last week by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The research, based on figures obtained in 1991 offers the most comprehensive comparison ever made among the educational systems of the world's wealthiest countries.

The passage is about _____.

According to the paragraph, _____.

The research released by the OECD _____.

No place is absolutely safe for travellers; tourists have recently been taken hostage in Turkey, wounded in cafe bombings in Egypt and shot down in the streets of Manila. But it wasn't easy to escape the conclusion that the prevalence of guns in American hands has given deadly force to festering social frustrations. The Washington-based Travel Industry Association of America, the leading tourism trade group, joined Disney in calling for gun control last week. But there was no such call from Florida. The toughest proposal now circulating would ban handguns for those under 18 unless they are used for hunting, gun classes or target shooting. Whether that would have any impact is arguable In a city like Miami locked in its own urban arms race.

What has caused American society to feel annoyingly irritated is _____.

It is suggested that _____.

It is doubtful _____.

In their private councils, Beijing policymakers are engaged in a vigorous dispute on how to fight inflation. One thing is clear to all sides: China needs better tools for fighting inflation. New national taxes introduced this year are supposed to provide the central government with more revenue so it has to print less new money - however, its success at tax collecting in the unruly provinces has been spotty. Beijing also wants to create a strong central bank to regulate the money supply and credit creation. But such a bank will have trouble deploying its main anti-inflationary weapon - higher interest rates - as long as state enterprises would be the first to suffer. The disorganized state enterprises will not be phased out for years until a social security system is devised to give workers a new safety net and until the private sector creates enough jobs to absorb unneeded state employees.

Beijing policy-makers engaged in discussing how to curb inflation all agree that _____.

New taxes levied lately _____.

Another thing that Beijing wants to do is _____.

The media have come to be seen as a destructive force in American life, vastly more interested in tearing things down than in providing the information people really need to know. Americans populate two overlapping realities, the one they live every day and the one they experience vicariously in what they are shown or told. It is the media, directly or indirectly, that shape opinions about how America is doing as a society, and the picture they present is not a pretty one. Local newscasts pile up the bodies at a rate of a murder a minute, tabloid TV feeds on the sins of the rich and famous. Call-in radio has become a festival of complaints. Attack politics assures voters that all seekers and holders of public office are corrupt. Commercials tantalise consumers with the unattainable. "The press likes to think of itself as representing the public voice when it does not at all," Yankelovich says. "It represents the voice of the press, with its own language, its own culture, its own interests."

The media is criticised in the paragraph _____.

It is inferred from the paragraph that _____.

Yankelovich is of the opinion that _____.