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English Test 56

Directions for Questions from 1 to 3:

The passage given below is followed by a question. Choose the most appropriate answer to question

The difficulties historians face in establishing cause-and-effect relations in the history of human societies are broadly similar to the difficulties facing
astronomers, climatologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, geologists, and palaeontologists. To varying degrees each of these fields is plagued
by the impossibility of performing replicated, controlled experimental interventions, the complexity arising from enormous numbers of variables, the
resulting uniqueness of each system, the consequent impossibility of formulating universal laws, and the difficulties of predicting emergent
properties and future behaviour. Prediction in history, as in other historical sciences, is most feasible on large spatial scales and over long times,
when the unique features of millions of small-scale brief events become averaged out. Just as I could predict the sex ratio of the next 1,000
newborns but not the sexes of my own two children, the historian can recognize factors that made inevitable the broad outcome of the collision
between American and Eurasian societies after 13,000 years of separate developments, but not the outcome of the 1960 U.S. presidential election.
The details of which candidate said what during a single televised debate in October 1960 Could have given the electoral victory to Nixon instead of
to Kennedy, but no details of who said what could have blocked the European conquest of Native Americans.

How can students of human history profit from the experience of scientists in other historical sciences? A methodology that has proved useful
involves the comparative method and so-called natural experiments. While neither astronomers studying galaxy formation nor human historians can
manipulate their systems in controlled laboratory experiments, they both can take advantage of natural experiments, by comparing systems
differing in the presence or absence (or in the strong or weak effect) of some putative causative factor. For example, epidemiologists, forbidden to
feed large amounts of salt to people experimentally, have still been able to identify effects of high salt intake by comparing groups of humans who
already differ greatly in their salt intake; and cultural anthropologists, unable to provide human groups experimentally with varying resource
abundances for many centuries, still study long-term effects of resource abundance on human societies by comparing recent Polynesian populations
living on islands differing naturally in resource abundance.

The student of human history can draw on many more natural experiments than just comparisons among the five inhabited continents.
Comparisons can also utilize large islands that have developed complex societies in a considerable degree of isolation (such as Japan, Madagascar,
Native American Hispaniola, New Guinea, Hawaii, and many others), as well as societies on hundreds of smaller islands and regional societies within
each of the continents. Natural experiments in any field, whether in ecology or human history, are inherently open to potential methodological
criticisms. Those include confounding effects of natural variation in additional variables besides the one of interest, as well as problems in inferring
chains of causation from observed correlations between variables. Such methodological problems have been discussed in great detail for some of
the historical sciences. In particular, epidemiology, the science of drawing inferences about human diseases by comparing groups of people (often
by retrospective historical studies), has for a long time successfully employed formalized procedures for dealing with problems similar to those facing
historians of human societies.

In short, I acknowledge that it is much more difficult to understand human history than to understand problems in fields of science where history is
unimportant and where fewer individual variables operate. Nevertheless, successful methodologies for analyzing historical problems have been
worked out in several fields. As a result, the histories of dinosaurs, nebulae, and glaciers are generally acknowledged to belong to fields of science
rather than to the humanities.

1. According to the author, which of the following statements would be true?

j Students of history are missing significant opportunities by not conducting any natural experiments.
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j Complex societies inhabiting large islands provide great opportunities for natural experiments.
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j Students of history are missing significant opportunities by not studying an adequate variety of natural experiments.
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j A unique problem faced by historians is their inability to establish cause and effect relationships.
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j Cultural anthropologists have overcome the problem of confounding variables through natural experiments.
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i Skip this question
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2. According to the author, why is prediction difficult in history?

(1) .
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)

j Historical explanations are usually broad so that no prediction is possible

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j Historical out comers depend upon a large number of factors and hence predictions is difficult for each case.
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j Historical sciences, by their very nature, are not interested in a multitude of minor factors, which might be important in a specific historical
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outcome.
j Historians are interested in evolution of human history and hence are only interested in log term predictions.
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j Historical sciences suffer from the inability to conduct controlled experiments and therefore have explanations based on a few long-term
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factors.
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3. Why do islands with considerable degree of isolation provide valuable insights into human history?

60.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)

j Isolated islands may evolve differently and this difference is of interest to us.
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j Isolated islands increase the number of observations available to historians.
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j Isolated islands, differing in their endowments and size may evolve differently and this difference can be attributed to their endowments and
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size.
j Isolated islands, in so far as they are inhabited, arouse curiosity about how human beings evolved there.
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j None
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i Skip this question
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Directions for Questions from 4 to 6:

The sentence given in the question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labeled with a letter. Choose the most
logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

4. A. In the west, Allied Forces had fought their way through southern Italy as far as Rome.
B. In June 1944 Germany's military position in World War Two appeared hopeless.
C. In Britain, the task of amassing the men and materials for the liberation of northern Europe had been completed.
D. The Red Army was poised to drive the Nazis back through Poland.
E. The situation on the eastern front was catastrophic.

j EDACB
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j BEDAC
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j BDECA
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j CEDAB
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j -null-
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i Skip this question
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5. A. He felt justified in bypassing Congress altogether on a variety of moves.

B. At times he was fighting the entire Congress.
C. Bush felt he had a mission to restore power to the presidency.
D. Bush was not fighting just the democrats.
E. Representative democracy is a messy business, and a CEO of the White House does not like a legislature of second guessers and time wasters.

j CAEDB
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j DBAEC
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j CEADB
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j ECDBA
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j -null-
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i Skip this question
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6. A. The two neighbours never fought each other.

B. Fights involving three male fiddler crabs have been recorded, but the status of the participants was unknown.
C. They pushed or grappled only with the intruder.
D. We recorded 17 cases in which a resident that was fighting an intruder was joined by an immediate neighbour, an ally.
E. We therefore tracked 268 intruder males until we saw them fighting a resident male.

j BEDAC
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j DEBAC
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j BDCAE
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j BCEDA
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j -null-
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i Skip this question
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Directions for Questions from 7 to 10:

Tthe following questions has a paragraph with one italicized word that does not make sense. Choose the most appropriate replacement for that
word from the options given below the paragraph.
7. Or there is the most fingummy diplomatic note on record: when Philip of Macedon wrote to the Spartans that, if he came within their borders, he
would leave not one stone of their city, they wrote back the one word - "If".

j witty
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j rude
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j simple
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j terse
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j -null-
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i Skip this question
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8. It is klang to a sensitive traveller who walks through this great town, when he sees the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars,
mostly women, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for alms.

j amusing
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j irritating
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j disgusting
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j distressing
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j -null-
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i Skip this question
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9. Women squat, heads covered, beside huge piles of limp fodder and blunk oil lamps, and just about all the cows in the three towns converge upon
this spot. Sinners, supplicants and yes, even scallywags hand over a few coins for a crack at redemption and a handful of grass.

j shining
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j bright
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j sputtering
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j effulgent
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j -null-
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i Skip this question
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10. Intelligent design derives from an early 19th-century explanation of the natural world given by an English clergyman, William Paley. Paley was the
populariser of the famous watchmaker analogy. Proponents of intelligent design are crupping Paley's argument with a new gloss from molecular
biology.

j destroying
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j testing
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j resurrecting
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j questioning
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j -null-
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i Skip this question
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