Short Advanced Reading Comprehension Test 36 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.)

Television has been altering the way people live for thirty years. It influences nearly every aspect of modern life: how people use leisure time, how news is reported, how information is learned, and how people think and feel.

Children are particularly susceptible to the effects of television because their minds are growing, developing, and learning much faster than those of adults. While television could be used as an educational tool for children, more often, simple, entertaining cartoons with little or no educational value are shown.

Social scientists, teachers, and parents are troubled by the kinds of television programs children choose to watch. These groups of people are concerned about the media’s impact on young children. They are worried about the effects of televised violence on society, as well as commercials for sugar-coated food.

Most importantly, however, they feel television is one factor that causes declining math and reading scores among schoolchildren. Because of the excessive time spent watching TV, children are spending less time reading and thinking independently.

Indeed, youngsters are watching a lot of television - an average of nearly four hours a day and about 25 hours a week, according to an A. C. Nielsen Co. survey. The set stays on 53 hours a week in homes with pre-schoolers, as opposed to 43 hours weekly in the average U.S. household.

Upon entering kindergarten at age 5, an American child already has spent more hours viewing television than he or she would spend earning a college degree. By the child’s eighteenth birthday, more time has been spent watching television than on any other single activity except sleep. The high-school graduate will have attended school for 11,000 hours, but he or she will have sat for almost twice that many hours in front of the set, exposed to an estimated 35,000 commercials and 18,000 murders.

What is the most essential thing that social scientists, teachers, and parents are concerned about?

Why is television more than just a spare time activity for children?

How many hours a week is the TV set on in the standard U.S. household?

Thirty-five hundred years ago, an incredible explosion blew apart an island and completely destroyed a civilization called Atlantis. Where was Atlantis? What kind of people lived there? Why and how was it destroyed? No one knows the answers to these questions, but there have been hundreds of guesses and theories.

The Greek philosopher Plato (approximately 427 to 347 B.C.) is the primary source for the legend of Atlantis. His description of the “lost continent” still excites the modern mind. Plato’s Atlantis was a kind of paradise - a vast island larger than Libya and Asia put together - with magnificent mountain ranges, green plains that were full of every variety of animals, and luxuriant gardens where the fruit was fair and wondrous and in infinite abundance.

The earth was rich with precious metals, especially the one prized most highly by the ancients, orichalcum, an alloy of copper, perhaps brass. The capital of Atlantis was beautifully constructed in white, black, and red stone. The city was carefully planned - in five zones built in perfect concentric circles. Each circular zone was built inside a larger one.

Plato says that the capital’s canals and its nearby port were full of vessels and merchants coming from all parts, who, from their numbers, kept up a multitudinous sound of human voices, and din and clatter of all sorts night and day. The city was full of life, activity, and culture.

Plato lived _____.

In accordance with Plato, how large was Atlantis?

The fruit on Atlantis was _____.

The need for a surgical operation, especially an emergency operation, almost always comes as a severe shock to the patient and his family. Despite modern advances, most people still have an irrational fear of hospitals and anaesthetics. Patients often do not believe they really need surgery - cutting into a part of the body as opposed to treatment with drugs.

In the early years of this century, there was little specialisation in surgery. A good surgeon was capable of performing almost every operation that had been devised up to that time. Today, the situation is different. Operations are now being carried out that weren’t even dreamed of fifty years ago.

The heart can be safely opened and its valves repaired. Clogged blood vessels can be cleaned out, and broken ones mended or replaced. A lung, the whole stomach, or even part of the brain can be removed and still permit the patient to live a comfortable and satisfactory life. However, not every surgeon wants to or is qualified to carry out every type of modern operation.

Many people are afraid of being operated on ______.

Surgeons in the early years of this century, compared with contemporary ones, _____.

Open heart surgery has been probable _____.

The unfavourable effects of cigarette smoking on the heart have frequently been described, but the exact source of these effects has not been clarified. Some investigators believe nicotine to be the culprit. There has been some experimental work in animals indicating that large doses of nicotine, in conjunction with cholesterol feeding and vitamin D, could produce a disease of the arteries resembling that seen in humans.

An alternative explanation has been offered by other scientists who have pointed to the possible role of carbon monoxide inhaled with cigarette smoke.

It is emphasized in the passage that nicotine _____.

In accordance with the passage, studies into the adverse effects of smoking _____.

The main concern of the passage is to _____.

Agriculture remains the most fundamental area of development. Here, it seems the most intractable problems of resistance to change exist. One may argue that scientific training in agriculture by itself is unlikely to have any marked impact on agricultural output.

Any attempt at vocational training in agriculture presupposes that a meaningful structure of incentive exists for the individual farmer to increase his output, improve his techniques, and expand his range of activities. Without such incentives and opportunities, agricultural education can have little impact.

The writer is of the opinion that improvements in the field of agriculture _____.

We can infer from the passage that the agricultural community _____.

The writer concludes that vocational training in agriculture _____.

Some decades ago, there was hardly such a subject as the economics of education. Today, it is one of the most quickly growing branches of economics. Together with health economics, it makes up the core of human resources, a field of inquiry which, in the last few years, has been silently revolutionizing such traditional subjects as growth economics, labour economics, international trade, and public finance.

Consequently, the economics of education, with its concept of human investment, has rapidly transformed large areas of orthodox economics.

The writer implies that the term the economics of education _____.

In accordance with the passage, the economics of education _____.

The writer suggests that the earlier branches of economics _____.

Tigers grow to lengths of ten feet or more and can be bigger than the largest lion. They have huge strengths. They clutch their prey, holding on with their claws, and depend on the crushing bite of their powerful jaws to end the struggle. They swim very well and can often be seen splashing about in water on very hot days, as they apparently suffer from the heat. However, when the air is chilly, they avoid wet or damp vegetation.

They can climb, but do not approach the leopard’s ability in this regard. They can negotiate treacherous rocky areas but generally prefer to stay on level ground. They are not as well equipped with senses as one might expect. They apparently depend on their hearing while hunting. Their eyesight is not particularly good, and they seem unable to spot their prey until it moves.

It is implied in the passage that tigers _____.

As is pointed out in the passage, a flat terrain _____.

From the passage, we infer that contrary to what is generally thought, _____.

Scientists have long sought ways to define and measure human intelligence. While theories of intelligence have grown more sophisticated since the 1800s, when some believed mental abilities were determined by the size of a person’s head, researchers still do not agree about certain fundamental principles of human thought.

Therefore, they continue to debate such basic questions as whether heredity or the environment is more important in forming intelligence.

As we infer from the passage, the age-old controversy about whether intelligence depends upon heredity or the environment _____.

In accordance with the passage, in the early nineteenth century, some people held the view that a person's mental capacity _____.

One may infer from the passage that a full understanding of the nature and the capacity of human intelligence _____.