Q. It is widely assumed that pregnancy and motherhood turn women into sieve-brained shadows of their former selves: the condition called "mummy brain" or "baby brain" is a familiar staple of popular culture. But when Tombeau Cost started digging through the scientific literature, she found little evidence to support it. Indeed, she found evidence to the contrary- at least in rats, ___________________________.
Which of the following best completes the passage above?
A. which become mentally sharper after giving birth.
B. which show few signs of mental slowdown after giving birth.
C. which show no signs of mental slackness after giving birth.
D. which enter a state of delirium after giving birth.
The answer is A. The transition word 'but' indicates that the widely held assumption of pregnancy leading to becoming sieve-brained may not hold true after all. We are in fact told that there is "little evidence to support it". Then we are left with "she found evidence to the contrary- at least in rats....."
Hi Sir,
Please explain the answer to the below question. P.S- I marked the answer as choice "E" but seems that it is an incorrect choice and I could not get any satisfactory explanation on GMAT forum.
Which of the following best completes the passage below?
One tax-reform proposal that has gained increasing support in recent years is the flat tax, which would impose a uniform tax rate on incomes at every level. Opponents of the flat tax say that a progressive tax system, which levies a higher rate of taxes on higher-income taxpayers, is fairer, placing the greater burden on those better able to bear it. However, the present crazy quilt of tax deductions, exemptions, credits, and loopholes benefits primarily the high-income taxpayer, who is consequently able to reduce his or her effective tax rate, often to a level below that paid by the lower-income taxpayer. Therefore, ______
(A) higher-income taxpayers are likely to lend their support to the flat-tax proposal now being considered by Congress
(B) a flat-tax system that allowed no deductions or exemptions would substantially increase actual government revenues
(C) the lower-income taxpayer might well be penalized by the institution of a flat-tax system in this country
(D) the progressive nature of our present tax system is more illusory than real
(E) the flat tax would actually be fairer to the lower-income taxpayer than any progressive tax system could be
Hi Richa,
The argument is a case for bringing in the flat tax system. The author starts by introducing the system and mentioning increasing support for it. He then provides an opposing viewpoint to it (the progressive tax system). But it seems he does this only to be able to weaken the contradictory viewpoint as he immediately pinpoints a large loophole in the extant progressive tax system. The concluding sentence (starting with "Therefore"), which is the missing one, will be a wrap-up or synopsis of how the flat tax system is better by either stating benefits of the flat tax system, or drawbacks of the current progressive tax system, in relation to facts already mentioned in the paragraph.
Option E. is presumptive- it cannot be said with certainty that any form of the progressive tax system would be less fair to the lower-income taxpayer than the flat tax system. There is not enough information to support this claim. After all, even removing the tax deductions, exemptions, credits, and loopholes as present in the system could make the progressive tax system as fair, or more fair, than the flat tax system.
Option D. works best as a concluding sentence. It is an opinion that supports the bringing in of a flat tax system, by removing the present progressive tax system.
582. Look at the facts given. Not much has been given in terms of information on the text's authenticity. Hence, if we are to believe the last statement, it can be true assuming that- the information given about the text is correct. Hence C.
Question 28: We have good reason, of course, to be cynical about the morality of politicians. But if money alone was sufficient to buy the loyalty of legislators, there would be serial instability. Too many politicians, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, can resist everything but temptation.
- And the bane of politics is the lack of ideological anchor among politicians.
- Defection remains an occasional game because money is, at best, a one-time payoff.
- Politicians, alas, suffer from a poverty of philosophy and are driven by narrow self-interest.
- Political defection on the promise of money and power vitiates the political atmosphere.
Q. In accordance with the goal that he assigned to philosophy, Epicurus's teaching had a dogmatic character, in substance if not in form. He called his treatises dialogism, or “conversations.” Since the utility of the doctrines lay in their application, he summarized them in stoicheia, or “elementary propositions,” to be memorized. In this respect, Epicurus was the inventor of the catechetical method. The number of works produced by Epicurus and his disciples reveals an impressive theoretical activity. But no less important was the practical action in living by the virtues taught by him and in honouring the obligations of reciprocal help in the name of friendship.________________________-
[1] In 306 BCE, Epicurus established his school at Athens in his garden, from which it came to be known as The Garden.
[2] In these endeavors, continuous assistance was rendered by Epicurus himself, who, even when old and ill, was occupied in writing letters of admonishment, guidance, and comfort—everywhere announcing his gospel of peace and, under the name of pleasure, inviting to love.
[3] Several fundamental concepts characterize the philosophy of Epicurus.
[4] In popular parlance, Epicureanism thus means devotion to pleasure, comfort, and high living, with a certain nicety of style.
Most people have noticed that vision can play tricks. A straight stick submerged in water looks bent, though it is not; railroad tracks seem to converge in the distance, but they do not; and a page of English-language print reflected in a mirror cannot be read from left to right, though in all other circumstances it can. Each of these phenomena is misleading in some way.________________
[1] But does seeing a straight stick out of water provide a good reason for thinking that, when it is in water, it is not bent?
[2] But how does one know that the wheels on the train do not converge at that point also?
[3] Thus, the difficulty cannot be resolved by appealing to input from the other senses.
[4] Anyone who believes that the stick is bent, that the railroad tracks converge, and so on is mistaken about how the world really is.
Q. Complete the given para with one of the options given below.
The better behaviour resulting from smart devices is just one threat to the insurance industry. Conventional risk pools (for home or car insurance, for example) are shrinking as preventable accidents decline, leaving the slow-footed giants of the industry at risk. Business is instead moving to digital-native insurers, many of which are offering low premiums to those willing to collect and share their data. Yet the biggest winners could be tech companies rather than the firms that now dominate the industry. Insurance is increasingly reliant on the use of technology to change behaviour; firms act as helicopter parents to policyholders, warning of impending harm—slow down; reduce your sugar intake; call the plumber—the better to reduce unnecessary payouts.
- The growing mountain of personal data available to individuals and, crucially, to firms is giving those with the necessary processing power the ability to distinguish between low-risk and high-risk individuals.
- Cheap sensors and the tsunami of data they generate can improve our lives; blackboxes in cars can tell us how to drive more carefully and wearable devices will nudge us toward healthier lifestyles.
- Yet this sort of relationship relies on trust, and the Googles and Apples of the world, on which consumers rely day-by-day and hour-by-hour, may be best placed to win this business.
- The uncertainty that underpins the need for insurance is now shrinking thanks to better insights into individual risks.
In accordance with the goal that he assigned to philosophy, Epicurus"s teaching had a dogmatic character, in substance if not in form. He called his treatises dialogismoi, or “conversations.” Since the utility of the doctrines lay in their application, he summarized them in stoicheia, or “elementary propositions,” to be memorized. In this respect, Epicurus was the inventor of the catechetical method. The number of works produced by Epicurus and his disciples reveals an impressive theoretical activity. But no less important was the practical action in living by the virtues taught by him and in honouring the obligations of reciprocal help in the name of friendship.________________________-
[1] In 306 BCE, Epicurus established his school at Athens in his garden, from which it came to be known as The Garden.
[2] In these endeavours, continuous assistance was rendered by Epicurus himself, who, even when old and ill, was occupied in writing letters of admonishment, guidance, and comfort—everywhere announcing his gospel of peace and, under the name of pleasure, inviting to love.
[3] Several fundamental concepts characterize the philosophy of Epicurus.
[4] In popular parlance, Epicureanism thus means devotion to pleasure, comfort, and high living, with a certain nicety of style.
Complete the given paragraph with one of the following options given below
By calling for exempting unionized businesses from the minimum wage, unions are creating more incentives for employers to favor unionized workers over the non-unionized sort. Such exemptions strengthen their power. This is useful because for all the effort unions throw at raising the minimum wage, laws for better pay have an awkward habit of undermining union clout.
- High rates of unionization make minimum-wage rules unnecessary as collaborative wage setting achieves the flexibility goals of a low minimum wage and the fairness goals of a high one.
- Workers who have no real alternative to employment in the unregulated shadows of the labor market are even more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse than workers with the legal right to take low wages.
- The labor ethos of worker solidarity seems hollow if non-union workers are underpriced by union workers and left unemployed or scrambling for unauthorized work.
- Once employers are obliged to pay the same minimum wage to both unionized and non-unionized labor, workers often see less reason to pay the dues to join a union.
Complete the given paragraph with one of the following options given below:
The real threat from ISIS is not territorial but ideological. Fighters are flocking to the fledgling caliphate because they are attracted to the notion that violence and bloodshed can create a space of totalitarian homogeneity. It’s not simply the attraction of a particular religious interpretation. ISIS offers a counter-narrative to nationalism and the emptiness of godless globalization. The society that the caliphate has created is multi-ethnic, transnational, and fully conversant in the latest technology.
- We may well look back at the first year of the Islamic State and wax nostalgic about how comparatively placid it was.
- And yet it also offers a very specific, historically grounded identity.
- However, ISIS is not a state. States are part of the world that ISIS rejects.
- It has a 100-year plan for taking over the world and imposing its own version of Islamic orthodoxy.
The notion of giving offence suggests that certain beliefs are so important or valuable to certain people that they should be put beyond the possibility of being insulted, caricatured or even questioned. The importance of the principle of free speech is precisely that it provides a challenge to the idea that some questions are beyond contention, and thus acts as a challenge to authority. Once we give up on the right to offend in the name of “tolerance” or “respect,” we constrain our ability to challenge those in power, and therefore to challenge injustice.
- For such diverse societies to function and to be fair, we need to show respect for other peoples, cultures, and viewpoints, and quell offensive voices.
- The right to subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism is the bedrock of an open, diverse, just society.
- If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism
- The more that policymakers give license for people to be offended, the more that people will seize the opportunity to feel offended.
Question: What is meant by coming 'to feel at home' in a new place, or with new people? It is simply that, at first, when we take up our quarters in a new room, we do not know what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards and corners. When after a few days we have learned the range of all these possibilities, the feeling of strangeness disappears.___________________
[1] The same is true when a great happiness awaits us.
[2] Let now this haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left without an object, and immediately uneasiness takes possession of the mind.
[3] And so it does with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any essentially new manifestations from their character.
[4] None of the above.
Question: Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere familiarity with things is able to produce a feeling of their rationality. The empiricist school has been so much struck by this circumstance as to have laid it down that the feeling of rationality and the feeling of familiarity are one and the same thing, and that no other kind of rationality than this exists. The daily contemplation of phenomena juxtaposed in a certain order begets an acceptance of their connection, as absolute as the repose engendered by theoretic insight into their coherence. To explain a thing is to pass easily back to its antecedents; to know it is easily to foresee its consequents.______________
[1] The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is perfectly obvious; 'natural selection,' in fact, was bound to bring it about sooner or later.
[2] Custom, which lets us do both, is thus the source of whatever rationality the thing may gain in our thought.
[3] A dog's curiosity about the movements of his master or a strange object only extends as far as the point of deciding what is going to happen next.
[4] The wrath of science against miracles, of certain philosophers against the doctrine of free-will, has precisely the same root.
Question: Conceive the joy of a lover of nature who, leaving the art galleries, wanders out among the trees and wild flowers and birds that the pictures of the galleries have sentimentalized. It is some such joy that the man who truly loves the noblest in letters feels when tasting for the first time the simple delights of Russian literature. French and English and German authors, too, occasionally, offer works of lofty, simple naturalness._____________
[1] Another essentially Russian trait is the quite unaffected conception that the lowly are on a plane of equality with the so-called upper class.
[2] A democratic spirit is reflected, breathing a broad humanity, a true universality, an unstudied generosity that proceed not from the intellectual conviction that to understand all is to forgive all, but from an instinctive feeling that no man has the right to set himself up as a judge over another, that one can only observe and record.
[3] But the very keynote to the whole of Russian literature is simplicity, naturalness, veraciousness.
[4] Though Pushkin heads the list of those writers who made the literature of their country world-famous, he was still a romanticist, in the universal literary fashion of his day.
Complete the given paragraph with one of the following options given below:
Question: The only guarantee we have of taste is that it will change. In response to novelty, even as the resistance to the unfamiliar reaches a threshold, fluency begets liking. Consider the case of the Sydney Opera House. A few decades ago, the now widely cherished building was the center of a national scandal. Not only did the building not fit the traditional form of an opera house; it did not fit the traditional form of a building. No one thought an opera house could look like the Sydney Opera House until architect Jørn Utzon, taking his idea from a peeled orange, said it could. Utzon changed the idea of what one could ask for in the building, projecting future tastes no one knew they had.
- As a dominant sculptural building that can be seen and experienced from all sides, the Sydney Opera House is the focal point of Sydney Harbor and a reflection of its character.
- In fact, had Utzon had been left to finish his masterpiece, it would have been more beautiful, more functional and less costly than what it turned out to be.
- Utzon made the building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available technology, and he persevered through extraordinary malicious criticism to a building that changed the image of an entire country.
- The world changed around the building, in response to it, which is why, in the curious words of one architecture critic, “Utzon’s breathtaking building looks better today than ever.”