Ejemplos Verbal

Critical Reasoning – Assumption Questions

Our modern mass culture derives many of its dubious notions about Ancient Egypt from Hollywood films, and especially from those on Biblical subjects. Hollywood, in turn, adopted many of these misconceptions from the writings of the Ancient Greek historian Herodotus. Science has now confirmed that on one matter about which Herodotus and Hollywood were in agreement, they were both mistaken. The discovery and subsequent analysis of the characteristics of the tombs of the workers who participated in the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza provides evidence confirming something that Egyptologists have believed for a long time: that those who raised the Pyramids were not slaves but rather paid workers – free men who, the archaeologists speculate, perhaps felt a degree of pride in participating in the construction of the tomb of their Pharaoh, but who at any rate were definitively not the teams of unwilling slaves depicted in Hollywood epics.

Which of the following assumptions underlies the argument in the passage above?

1. Paid workers are more suitable than are slaves to raise long-lasting constructions such as the Great Pyramid of Giza.
2. The characteristics of the tombs of those who worked on the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza are representative of those of the tombs of the workers who participated in the construction of all the other Pyramids.
3. In ancient Egypt, slaves were not buried in tombs, either when the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed or earlier on in Egyptian history.
4. Hollywood adopted the view that the Pyramids were built by slaves only because that view was sustained by Herodotus.
5. There was sufficient population in ancient Egypt to provide the full-time paid work-force necessary for the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, given that it was not built by slaves.

Answer: B

Critical Reasoning  – Inference Questions

In Botswana, the Ocavango Delta, in reality a flood-plain, is inundated by the waters of the Ocavango river for some three or four months every year, thus becoming a swamp. The large population of lions living there, far from abhorring water, has become accustomed to moving through it and has learnt to hunt in it, given that the antelopes on which its members prey spend more time feeding in the swamps than grazing on dry land. In being relatively at ease in water, these lions resemble jaguars and tigers. They have also grown a longer, fluffier coat, a local adaptation to the fact that the loss of body heat takes place twenty times faster in water than in air. Furthermore, when the plain is flooded, the various prides have come, surprisingly, to allow the incursion of other prides into their territory, since the animals on which they feed tend to move rapidly from one of these territories to another. These facts show that lions are not as immovably averse to water, and not as fiercely territorial, as is commonly thought.

Which of the following can be inferred on the basis of the facts cited above?

1. The lions of the Ocavango Delta are on the way to developing into a rather different species of lion.
2. During the eight or nine months in which the Ocavango Delta is not flooded, the lions in that area revert to the forms of behaviour held to be characteristic of lions.
3. The antelopes on which the lions prey would be safer out of the water than in it.
4. The evolution of species is accelerating in the Ocavango Delta as a result of the very peculiar conditions that prevail in the area.
5. Adaptations to a particular environment do not necessarily depend on that environment’s being the prevailing one.

Answer: E

Sentence Correction

The ocean nearest in size to the Atlantic is the Indian, but it is different from the other one in that it is a relatively warm body of water with few plankton and therefore comparatively little marine life.

1. but it is different from the other one in that it is a relatively warm body of water with few plankton
2. but the latter is different from the former because it is a relatively warm body of water with few plankton
3. but the latter is different from the former in that it is a relatively warm body of water with little plankton
4. but it is different from the other because it is a relatively warm body of water with little plankton
5. but the latter is different from the first in that it is a relatively warm body of water with few plankton

Answer: C

The first edition of Dr Roget’s Thesaurus was published in 1852, and in the subsequent editions of the work the author’s son and grandson tried improving the coherency and layout by making changes that nevertheless left intact the original scheme of the thesaurus.

1. tried improving the coherency and layout by making changes that nevertheless left intact the original scheme of the thesaurus
2. tried to improve the coherency and layout by making changes leaving the original scheme of the thesaurus nevertheless intact
3. tried to improve the coherency and layout by making changes that nevertheless left the original scheme of the thesaurus intact
4. tried improving the coherency and layout that made changes leaving the original scheme of the thesaurus nevertheless intact
5. tried to improve the coherency and layout by making changes that left nevertheless intact the thesaurus’s original scheme

Answer: C