Reading Comprehension (GMAT)

What is the tone of the author of the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
It is admitted that at a hasty glance, there may certainly seem some danger of our faith in life's value collapsing, together with our belief in God. It is admitted that this is not in the least irrational. But it is contended that a scientific study of the past will show us that these fears are groundless, and will reassure us as to the future. We are referred to a new branch of knowledge, the philosophy of history, and we are assured that this will set all our doubts to rest. This philosophy of history resembles the practical wisdom learnt by the man of the world. As long as a man is inexperienced and new to life, each calamity as it comes to him seems something unique and overwhelming, but as he lives on, suffers more of them, and yet finds that he is not overwhelmed, he learns to reduce them to their right dimensions, and is able, with sufficient self- possession, to let each of them teach some useful lesson to him.
Thus, if we were not better instructed, we might naturally take the present decline of faith to be an unprecedented calamity that was ushering in an eve of darkness and utter ruin. But the philosophy of history puts the whole matter in a different light. It teaches us that the condition of the world in our day, though not normal, is yet by no means peculiar. It points to numerous parallels in former ages, and treats the rise and fall of creeds as regular phenomena in human history, whose causes and recurrence we can distinctly trace. Other nations and races have had creeds, and have lost them; they have thought, as some of us think, that the loss would ruin them: and yet they have not been ruined. Creeds, it is contended, were imaginative, provisional, and mistaken expressions of the underlying and indestructible sense of the nobility of human life. They were artistic, not scientific. A statue of Apollo, for instance, or a picture of the Madonna, were just representations of what men aimed at producing on earth, not of what actually existed in heaven, and if we look back at the greatest civilizations of antiquity, we shall find, it is said, that what gave them vigor and intensity were purely human interests: and though religion may certainly have had some reflex action on life, this action was either merely political or was else injurious.
It is thus that intense Greek life is presented to us, the influence of which is still felt in the world. Its main stimulus we are told was frankly human. It would have lost none of its keenness if its theology had been taken from it. The same holds true now. And there, we see the positive worth of life; we see already realized what we are now growing to realize once more. Christianity, with its supernatural aims and objects, is an ‘episode of disease and delirium;’ it is a confusing dream, from which we are at last awaking.

What is the most suitable title for the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
It is admitted that at a hasty glance, there may certainly seem some danger of our faith in life's value collapsing, together with our belief in God. It is admitted that this is not in the least irrational. But it is contended that a scientific study of the past will show us that these fears are groundless, and will reassure us as to the future. We are referred to a new branch of knowledge, the philosophy of history, and we are assured that this will set all our doubts to rest. This philosophy of history resembles the practical wisdom learnt by the man of the world. As long as a man is inexperienced and new to life, each calamity as it comes to him seems something unique and overwhelming, but as he lives on, suffers more of them, and yet finds that he is not overwhelmed, he learns to reduce them to their right dimensions, and is able, with sufficient self- possession, to let each of them teach some useful lesson to him.
Thus, if we were not better instructed, we might naturally take the present decline of faith to be an unprecedented calamity that was ushering in an eve of darkness and utter ruin. But the philosophy of history puts the whole matter in a different light. It teaches us that the condition of the world in our day, though not normal, is yet by no means peculiar. It points to numerous parallels in former ages, and treats the rise and fall of creeds as regular phenomena in human history, whose causes and recurrence we can distinctly trace. Other nations and races have had creeds, and have lost them; they have thought, as some of us think, that the loss would ruin them: and yet they have not been ruined. Creeds, it is contended, were imaginative, provisional, and mistaken expressions of the underlying and indestructible sense of the nobility of human life. They were artistic, not scientific. A statue of Apollo, for instance, or a picture of the Madonna, were just representations of what men aimed at producing on earth, not of what actually existed in heaven, and if we look back at the greatest civilizations of antiquity, we shall find, it is said, that what gave them vigor and intensity were purely human interests: and though religion may certainly have had some reflex action on life, this action was either merely political or was else injurious.
It is thus that intense Greek life is presented to us, the influence of which is still felt in the world. Its main stimulus we are told was frankly human. It would have lost none of its keenness if its theology had been taken from it. The same holds true now. And there, we see the positive worth of life; we see already realized what we are now growing to realize once more. Christianity, with its supernatural aims and objects, is an ‘episode of disease and delirium;’ it is a confusing dream, from which we are at last awaking.

What does the author mainly try to convey in the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
It is admitted that at a hasty glance, there may certainly seem some danger of our faith in life's value collapsing, together with our belief in God. It is admitted that this is not in the least irrational. But it is contended that a scientific study of the past will show us that these fears are groundless, and will reassure us as to the future. We are referred to a new branch of knowledge, the philosophy of history, and we are assured that this will set all our doubts to rest. This philosophy of history resembles the practical wisdom learnt by the man of the world. As long as a man is inexperienced and new to life, each calamity as it comes to him seems something unique and overwhelming, but as he lives on, suffers more of them, and yet finds that he is not overwhelmed, he learns to reduce them to their right dimensions, and is able, with sufficient self- possession, to let each of them teach some useful lesson to him.
Thus, if we were not better instructed, we might naturally take the present decline of faith to be an unprecedented calamity that was ushering in an eve of darkness and utter ruin. But the philosophy of history puts the whole matter in a different light. It teaches us that the condition of the world in our day, though not normal, is yet by no means peculiar. It points to numerous parallels in former ages, and treats the rise and fall of creeds as regular phenomena in human history, whose causes and recurrence we can distinctly trace. Other nations and races have had creeds, and have lost them; they have thought, as some of us think, that the loss would ruin them: and yet they have not been ruined. Creeds, it is contended, were imaginative, provisional, and mistaken expressions of the underlying and indestructible sense of the nobility of human life. They were artistic, not scientific. A statue of Apollo, for instance, or a picture of the Madonna, were just representations of what men aimed at producing on earth, not of what actually existed in heaven, and if we look back at the greatest civilizations of antiquity, we shall find, it is said, that what gave them vigor and intensity were purely human interests: and though religion may certainly have had some reflex action on life, this action was either merely political or was else injurious.
It is thus that intense Greek life is presented to us, the influence of which is still felt in the world. Its main stimulus we are told was frankly human. It would have lost none of its keenness if its theology had been taken from it. The same holds true now. And there, we see the positive worth of life; we see already realized what we are now growing to realize once more. Christianity, with its supernatural aims and objects, is an ‘episode of disease and delirium;’ it is a confusing dream, from which we are at last awaking.

In trying to create an impression of cognitive growth in non-humans, the author makes use of

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
We have been taught that we are Homo sapiens, the sapient humans. We have also been told that we are the thinking animals, the only ones; the obvious implication being that other animals do not think. We also dare to believe that we are perhaps the finest product of evolution. Such baptism has given rise to a bloated feeling of ascendancy among us. This intellect or cognition enables us to draw inferences from information and come to a conclusion.
Jean Piaget, the Swiss philosopher and child psychologist, went so far as to call children “tiny thinking sacks”. He suggested that children’s cognitive development occurs in four stages. There is the sensory motor stage up to the age of two, when a child experiences the world around him. Then there is the pre-operational stage between the age of 2 and 7 years, when he masters motor skills. It is followed by the third stage the concrete operational one, between the age of 7 and 11. By the age of 11 he develops abstract thinking. In the operational stages, sapience takes hold and develops swiftly. This is also referred to as transitive inference.
There is, however, evidence to suggest that the domain of sapience is definitely not occupied by humans alone, and we might be just a little better off than some other creatures.
Macmillan's Magazine reminisces about a debate about evolution in 1860 between Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford and the naturalist Thomas Huxley. The Bishop, in a mocking tone, asked, “Is it through your grandfather or your grandmother that you claim descent from a monkey?” On this Mr. Huxley, slowly and deliberately replied, “I would not be ashamed to have a monkey for my ancestor; but I would be ashamed to be connected with a man who uses his great gifts to obscure the truth”.
A whole series of facts are now known which reduce the gap between humans and animals. The resemblance between humans and chimpanzees is not only external. In a study, forty years ago, Dr Jane Goodall showed that chimpanzees have traces of cognition which are comparable, at least to our children. Dr. Goodall went on to record their tool making abilities. She noticed that wild chimpanzees hunted, ate meat, resorted to warfare to extend their territory and were even capable of cannibalism. In another instance, Dr. Marc Hauser of Harvard and Thomas Geissman of University of Hanover have found out that, apes can make music – Solo and Coral, with rhythm added. Some researchers have also been able to teach chimpanzees a large number of symbols in the form of hand gestures. Behaviorally, between humans and apes, there are some startling similarities, almost too human to be true. If we look straight into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent, self-assured personality looks back at us. If they aren’t sapient, how can we be?

The essential peculiarities of Numidia, in turn, are reflected in

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
To the east and west, there are wide stretches of woodland, rounded hill-summits, streams and torrents which pour through the valleys and glens. But towards the south the verdure grows sparse; arid mountain-tops appear, crushed down as blunted cones; the sterility of the desert becomes perceptible amid the wealth of vegetation. This full-foliaged land has its harsh and stern localities. The African light, however, softens all that. The deep green of the oaks and pines runs into waves of warm and ever-altering tints which are a caress and a delight for the eye. A man has it thoroughly brought home to him that he is in a land of the sun.
To say the least, it is a country of strongly marked features which affords the strangest contrast with the surrounding districts. This wooded Numidia, with its flowing brooks, its fields where the cattle graze, differs in the highest degree from the Numidia towards Setif – a wide, desolate plain, where the stubble of the wheat-fields, the sandy steppes, roll away in monotonous undulations to the cloudy barrier of Mount Atlas which closes the horizon. And this rough and melancholy plain in its turn offers a striking contrast with the coast region of Boujeiah and Hippo, which is not unlike the Italian Campania in its mellowness and gaiety. Such clear-cut differences between the various parts of the same province doubtlessly explain the essential peculiarities of the Numidian character. The bishop Augustine, who carried his pastoral cross from one end to the other of this country, and was its acting and thinking soul, may perhaps have owed to it the contrasts and many-sidedness of his own rich nature.

The author uses the phrase “transitive inference” to convey which of the following?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
We have been taught that we are Homo sapiens, the sapient humans. We have also been told that we are the thinking animals, the only ones; the obvious implication being that other animals do not think. We also dare to believe that we are perhaps the finest product of evolution. Such baptism has given rise to a bloated feeling of ascendancy among us. This intellect or cognition enables us to draw inferences from information and come to a conclusion.
Jean Piaget, the Swiss philosopher and child psychologist, went so far as to call children “tiny thinking sacks”. He suggested that children’s cognitive development occurs in four stages. There is the sensory motor stage up to the age of two, when a child experiences the world around him. Then there is the pre-operational stage between the age of 2 and 7 years, when he masters motor skills. It is followed by the third stage the concrete operational one, between the age of 7 and 11. By the age of 11 he develops abstract thinking. In the operational stages, sapience takes hold and develops swiftly. This is also referred to as transitive inference.
There is, however, evidence to suggest that the domain of sapience is definitely not occupied by humans alone, and we might be just a little better off than some other creatures.
Macmillan's Magazine reminisces about a debate about evolution in 1860 between Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford and the naturalist Thomas Huxley. The Bishop, in a mocking tone, asked, “Is it through your grandfather or your grandmother that you claim descent from a monkey?” On this Mr. Huxley, slowly and deliberately replied, “I would not be ashamed to have a monkey for my ancestor; but I would be ashamed to be connected with a man who uses his great gifts to obscure the truth”.
A whole series of facts are now known which reduce the gap between humans and animals. The resemblance between humans and chimpanzees is not only external. In a study, forty years ago, Dr Jane Goodall showed that chimpanzees have traces of cognition which are comparable, at least to our children. Dr. Goodall went on to record their tool making abilities. She noticed that wild chimpanzees hunted, ate meat, resorted to warfare to extend their territory and were even capable of cannibalism. In another instance, Dr. Marc Hauser of Harvard and Thomas Geissman of University of Hanover have found out that, apes can make music – Solo and Coral, with rhythm added. Some researchers have also been able to teach chimpanzees a large number of symbols in the form of hand gestures. Behaviorally, between humans and apes, there are some startling similarities, almost too human to be true. If we look straight into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent, self-assured personality looks back at us. If they aren’t sapient, how can we be?

What can be said about the choice of Thomas Huxley’s words in the retort that he made in the debate mentioned in the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
We have been taught that we are Homo sapiens, the sapient humans. We have also been told that we are the thinking animals, the only ones; the obvious implication being that other animals do not think. We also dare to believe that we are perhaps the finest product of evolution. Such baptism has given rise to a bloated feeling of ascendancy among us. This intellect or cognition enables us to draw inferences from information and come to a conclusion.
Jean Piaget, the Swiss philosopher and child psychologist, went so far as to call children “tiny thinking sacks”. He suggested that children’s cognitive development occurs in four stages. There is the sensory motor stage up to the age of two, when a child experiences the world around him. Then there is the pre-operational stage between the age of 2 and 7 years, when he masters motor skills. It is followed by the third stage the concrete operational one, between the age of 7 and 11. By the age of 11 he develops abstract thinking. In the operational stages, sapience takes hold and develops swiftly. This is also referred to as transitive inference.
There is, however, evidence to suggest that the domain of sapience is definitely not occupied by humans alone, and we might be just a little better off than some other creatures.
Macmillan's Magazine reminisces about a debate about evolution in 1860 between Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford and the naturalist Thomas Huxley. The Bishop, in a mocking tone, asked, “Is it through your grandfather or your grandmother that you claim descent from a monkey?” On this Mr. Huxley, slowly and deliberately replied, “I would not be ashamed to have a monkey for my ancestor; but I would be ashamed to be connected with a man who uses his great gifts to obscure the truth”.
A whole series of facts are now known which reduce the gap between humans and animals. The resemblance between humans and chimpanzees is not only external. In a study, forty years ago, Dr Jane Goodall showed that chimpanzees have traces of cognition which are comparable, at least to our children. Dr. Goodall went on to record their tool making abilities. She noticed that wild chimpanzees hunted, ate meat, resorted to warfare to extend their territory and were even capable of cannibalism. In another instance, Dr. Marc Hauser of Harvard and Thomas Geissman of University of Hanover have found out that, apes can make music – Solo and Coral, with rhythm added. Some researchers have also been able to teach chimpanzees a large number of symbols in the form of hand gestures. Behaviorally, between humans and apes, there are some startling similarities, almost too human to be true. If we look straight into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent, self-assured personality looks back at us. If they aren’t sapient, how can we be?

Which of the following is the most relevant in context of “the decline of faith”?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
It is admitted that at a hasty glance, there may certainly seem some danger of our faith in life's value collapsing, together with our belief in God. It is admitted that this is not in the least irrational. But it is contended that a scientific study of the past will show us that these fears are groundless, and will reassure us as to the future. We are referred to a new branch of knowledge, the philosophy of history, and we are assured that this will set all our doubts to rest. This philosophy of history resembles the practical wisdom learnt by the man of the world. As long as a man is inexperienced and new to life, each calamity as it comes to him seems something unique and overwhelming, but as he lives on, suffers more of them, and yet finds that he is not overwhelmed, he learns to reduce them to their right dimensions, and is able, with sufficient self- possession, to let each of them teach some useful lesson to him.
Thus, if we were not better instructed, we might naturally take the present decline of faith to be an unprecedented calamity that was ushering in an eve of darkness and utter ruin. But the philosophy of history puts the whole matter in a different light. It teaches us that the condition of the world in our day, though not normal, is yet by no means peculiar. It points to numerous parallels in former ages, and treats the rise and fall of creeds as regular phenomena in human history, whose causes and recurrence we can distinctly trace. Other nations and races have had creeds, and have lost them; they have thought, as some of us think, that the loss would ruin them: and yet they have not been ruined. Creeds, it is contended, were imaginative, provisional, and mistaken expressions of the underlying and indestructible sense of the nobility of human life. They were artistic, not scientific. A statue of Apollo, for instance, or a picture of the Madonna, were just representations of what men aimed at producing on earth, not of what actually existed in heaven, and if we look back at the greatest civilizations of antiquity, we shall find, it is said, that what gave them vigor and intensity were purely human interests: and though religion may certainly have had some reflex action on life, this action was either merely political or was else injurious.
It is thus that intense Greek life is presented to us, the influence of which is still felt in the world. Its main stimulus we are told was frankly human. It would have lost none of its keenness if its theology had been taken from it. The same holds true now. And there, we see the positive worth of life; we see already realized what we are now growing to realize once more. Christianity, with its supernatural aims and objects, is an ‘episode of disease and delirium;’ it is a confusing dream, from which we are at last awaking.

The author is likely to agree with all of the following, except

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
To the east and west, there are wide stretches of woodland, rounded hill-summits, streams and torrents which pour through the valleys and glens. But towards the south the verdure grows sparse; arid mountain-tops appear, crushed down as blunted cones; the sterility of the desert becomes perceptible amid the wealth of vegetation. This full-foliaged land has its harsh and stern localities. The African light, however, softens all that. The deep green of the oaks and pines runs into waves of warm and ever-altering tints which are a caress and a delight for the eye. A man has it thoroughly brought home to him that he is in a land of the sun.
To say the least, it is a country of strongly marked features which affords the strangest contrast with the surrounding districts. This wooded Numidia, with its flowing brooks, its fields where the cattle graze, differs in the highest degree from the Numidia towards Setif – a wide, desolate plain, where the stubble of the wheat-fields, the sandy steppes, roll away in monotonous undulations to the cloudy barrier of Mount Atlas which closes the horizon. And this rough and melancholy plain in its turn offers a striking contrast with the coast region of Boujeiah and Hippo, which is not unlike the Italian Campania in its mellowness and gaiety. Such clear-cut differences between the various parts of the same province doubtlessly explain the essential peculiarities of the Numidian character. The bishop Augustine, who carried his pastoral cross from one end to the other of this country, and was its acting and thinking soul, may perhaps have owed to it the contrasts and many-sidedness of his own rich nature.

In the passage, the author most likely describes children as “tiny thinking sacks” in order to

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
We have been taught that we are Homo sapiens, the sapient humans. We have also been told that we are the thinking animals, the only ones; the obvious implication being that other animals do not think. We also dare to believe that we are perhaps the finest product of evolution. Such baptism has given rise to a bloated feeling of ascendancy among us. This intellect or cognition enables us to draw inferences from information and come to a conclusion.
Jean Piaget, the Swiss philosopher and child psychologist, went so far as to call children “tiny thinking sacks”. He suggested that children’s cognitive development occurs in four stages. There is the sensory motor stage up to the age of two, when a child experiences the world around him. Then there is the pre-operational stage between the age of 2 and 7 years, when he masters motor skills. It is followed by the third stage the concrete operational one, between the age of 7 and 11. By the age of 11 he develops abstract thinking. In the operational stages, sapience takes hold and develops swiftly. This is also referred to as transitive inference.
There is, however, evidence to suggest that the domain of sapience is definitely not occupied by humans alone, and we might be just a little better off than some other creatures.
Macmillan's Magazine reminisces about a debate about evolution in 1860 between Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford and the naturalist Thomas Huxley. The Bishop, in a mocking tone, asked, “Is it through your grandfather or your grandmother that you claim descent from a monkey?” On this Mr. Huxley, slowly and deliberately replied, “I would not be ashamed to have a monkey for my ancestor; but I would be ashamed to be connected with a man who uses his great gifts to obscure the truth”.
A whole series of facts are now known which reduce the gap between humans and animals. The resemblance between humans and chimpanzees is not only external. In a study, forty years ago, Dr Jane Goodall showed that chimpanzees have traces of cognition which are comparable, at least to our children. Dr. Goodall went on to record their tool making abilities. She noticed that wild chimpanzees hunted, ate meat, resorted to warfare to extend their territory and were even capable of cannibalism. In another instance, Dr. Marc Hauser of Harvard and Thomas Geissman of University of Hanover have found out that, apes can make music – Solo and Coral, with rhythm added. Some researchers have also been able to teach chimpanzees a large number of symbols in the form of hand gestures. Behaviorally, between humans and apes, there are some startling similarities, almost too human to be true. If we look straight into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent, self-assured personality looks back at us. If they aren’t sapient, how can we be?