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Every four years voters across the United States elect a president.
Various factors such as choices in campaign locations, the candidates‘
adherence to polling data and use of the Internet by candidates to reach
potential voters all influence the preference of those voters, but perhaps
none of these is so persuasive as a candidate‘s performance on
nationally televised debates just prior to the election. Newspapers and
television news programs generally attempt to provide thorough
coverage of the debates, further augmenting the effect of good or bad
candidate performances.

In this way, the news media fulfil the traditional role of educating the
public and enabling voters to make better informed decisions about
elected officials. However, the same technology which brings live
debates into millions of living rooms across the nation also limits the
availability of debate coverage by use of ―pool‖ coverage, the sharing of
news coverage with other news organizations. The alternative is
unilateral coverage, in which each news organization covers the event
independently. Most events subject to pool coverage are so planned by
the sponsors because of space limitations or safety concerns for
prominent people attending or participating in the events. Since the
television media require more people and equipment than their print
counterparts, television usually is affected more frequently.

The pool system, when employed to cover debates between presidential

nominees of the major political parties, violates the first amendment.
The Constitution‘s mandate for a free press allows restrictions on press
coverage only when there is a compelling governmental interest at
stake. Presidential debates involve no interest sufficient to justify the
admission of one news organization to the exclusion of all others.

Pool coverage of a presidential debate means that individual

broadcasters are unable to cover the event in their own way and,
consequently, to convey a unique account to their viewers; they must
purchase and use coverage provided by the pool representative or have
no coverage at all. The networks participate reluctantly. Pool coverage
denies an opportunity to gain maximum insight from the debate.
Indeed, the first amendment freedoms afforded the press exist largely
to ensure that the public benefits from the free flow of information. The
Supreme Court has noted that ―it is the right of viewers and listeners,
not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.‖

To overcome the problem of restricted access, television news media

could be divided into four categories: domestic networks, foreign news
services, domestic news services, and independent broadcasters. Some
broadcasters would be denied access, but the critical point is that in the
end, the viewers will benefit, for they will have seen different debate
coverage and, ultimately, will be better informed.
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1. What is the author of the passage primarily concerned with?

A. Arguing in favour of giving more rights to individual broadcasters

B. Describing the pool system of coverage of events
C. Asserting that the first Amendment needs to be amended
D. Describing a problem with media coverage of certain events and
suggesting a solution
E. Criticising the American Presidential election system

2. Which of the following claims does the passage provide some support for?

A. News organizations tend not to cooperate with each other unless they
are forced to do so.
B. Most presidential candidates fare poorly in televised debates because
they are not good public speakers.
C. Current news coverage of presidential debates limits the information
available to the public.
D. Foreign news organizations have generally been uninterested in
American presidential debates.
E. The pool system also has its positive points

3. The author of this passage would probably give his greatest support to which
of the following actions?

A. A decision to allow more news services to cover presidential debates

B. A decision to allow fewer news services to cover presidential debates
C. A decision to ban presidential debates until more news services are
allowed to cover them
D. A decision to ban presidential debates until fewer news services are
allowed to cover them
E. A decision to change the first amendment

4. What role does the last paragraph play in the passage?

A. It provides a general conclusion to the passage

B. It suggests a solution to a problem discussed in the passage
C. It provides specific guidelines that need to be followed in future
D. It describes an action that the author opposes
E. It provides support for the main conclusion of the passage
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Passage – 2

Georges LeClerc (1707-1788) proposed a mechanism for calculating the

age of the Earth using molten spheres of iron and measuring cooling
times, after which he proposed that the Earth was at least 75,000 years
old and perhaps as old as three million years.

Some students may feel that we should not focus on the past, and
that our thoughts should be trained on new knowledge and invention,
rather than antiquated ideas. What these students do not understand is
the importance of the old ideas in shaping our current understanding of
the world around us, and that an outright dismissal of past theories
simply because they have been rejected by new evidence may limit our
understanding of current theories.

There is value of learning about hypotheses that were once espoused

to explain an observed phenomenon, but that have now been long
disproved and invalidated. Darwin‘s theory of natural selection as the
mechanism for evolution is all too often taught in a vacuum in high school
biology classrooms, as if this brilliant naturalist developed a ground-
breaking theory on natural order which had never before been
contemplated in any form. It is only by learning about the gradual
development of evolutionary theory, and the role of some religious
individuals in shaping this theory, that students may come to see the
logic and power behind Darwin‘s relatively simple ideas.

Many of the contributions upon which Darwin built his ideas came
from scientists who were staunch creationists themselves. These
scientists believed that all organisms on Earth had been placed here
through ―special creation,‖ by God, because there was little evidence at
the time to support evolution. LeClerc also perceived that species were
not fixed and could change over time; he even proposed that closely
related species, such as the horse and donkey, had developed from a
common ancestor and had been modified by different climactic
conditions. Yet, LeClerc was a devout Christian creationist and devoted
much of his writing to the debunking of evolutionary ideas. Despite their
commitments to religion, LeClerc and Linnaeus both gave Darwin crucial
raw material to work with—their ideas concerning the similarities between
related species and possible connections with common ancestors cried
out for a reasonable explanation.

For centuries before Darwin, data that challenged the biblical account
of creation was surfacing in many fields of research. As explorers began
to study the forces that shape the Earth, such as mountain building and
volcanic eruptions, accounts from scripture and assertions that the Earth
was very young began to be called into question. Uniformitarian
geologists such as Charles Lyell felt that the only reason mountains and
other features of the Earth‘s terrain had been built the way they had was
because of long, gradual processes that shaped these structures. There
was no way, he felt, that the Earth could be several thousand years old
as asserted in the Bible. In addition, the discovery of new plants,
animals, and fossils as explorers travelled to uncharted regions of the
world aroused suspicion about the paucity of animal and plant ―kinds‖ in
the Bible. Improvements in scientists‘ abilities to estimate the age of the
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Earth and the relative ages of fossils also pushed people to question old
assumptions.

1. Taking into account all that was argued by the author, the main idea of this
passage is that:

A. religious scientists before Darwin greatly influenced his formation of

the theory of natural selection.
B. similarities between species of plants and animals were too great to
ignore as people attempted to explain relationships in nature.
C. Darwin relied on a great deal of information from those who lived
before him as he formed his well-known conclusions about the
mechanisms of evolution.
D. old ideas should not be dismissed simply because they are old and
disproved.
E. There is no connection between old ideas and new ones

2. If the author were teaching a class on evolution in a university in the Unites

States, the passage suggests that the class would spend a significant amount
of time discussing:

A. the origins of Darwin‘s theory of natural selection.

B. details of Darwin‘s theory of natural selection.
C. the Biblical account of creation.
D. taxonomy and classification and their importance in Darwin‘s ideas.
E. the future of evolution

3. The author‘s discussion of Darwin‘s theory in paragraph 3 of the passage

suggests that:

A. Darwin does not deserve the credit he is given for his ideas on
evolutionary theory.
B. Darwin‘s theories should be presented in the context within which they
were originally conceived.
C. Darwin‘s ideas would be properly devalued if people knew the religious
background from which his ideas stemmed.
D. Darwin‘s ideas are simple enough that he didn‘t need much help in
formulating them.
E. Darwin‘s ideas have no place in modern theories of evolution

4. According to the passage, the idea that mountains and other structures take
a great deal of time to form was an idea championed by:

A. catastrophists.
B. Darwinists.
C. creationists.
D. uniformitarians.
E. modern scientists
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Passage – 3

American culture changed forever in the latter part of the twentieth

century with the advent of pop music. Before the 1950s music defined its
own circles, but, at best, only shaded the frame of popular American
culture. The birth of Rock and Roll forever changed that as larger and
larger numbers of youth came, not only to identify with the music they
were listening to, but to identify themselves by that music.

We use pop songs to create for ourselves a particular sort of self-

definition, a particular place in society. The pleasure that a pop song
produces is a pleasure of identification: in responding to a song, we are
drawn into affective and emotional alliances with the performers and with
the performers' other fans. Thus music, like sport, is clearly a setting in
which people directly experience community, feel an immediate bond
with other people, and articulate a collective pride.

At the same time, because of its qualities of abstractness, pop music

is an individualizing form. Songs have a looseness of reference that
makes them immediately accessible. They are open to appropriation for
personal use in a way that other popular cultural forms (television soap
operas, for example) are not—the latter are tied into meanings which we
may reject.

This interplay between personal absorption into music and the sense
that it is, nevertheless, something public, is what makes music so
important in the cultural placing of the individual. Music also gives us a
way of managing the relationship between our public and private
emotional lives. Popular love songs are important because they give
shape and voice to emotions that otherwise cannot be expressed without
embarrassment or incoherence. Our most revealing declarations of
feeling are often expressed in banal or boring language and so our
culture has a supply of pop songs that say these things for us in
interesting and involving ways.

Popular music also shapes popular memory, and organizes our sense
of time. Clearly one of the effects of all music, not just pop, is to focus
our attention on the feeling of time, and intensify our experience of the
present. One measure of good music is its "presence," its ability to "stop"
time, to make us feel we are living within a moment, with no memory or
anxiety about what has come before us, what will come after. It is this
use of time that makes popular music so important in the social
organization of youth. We invest most in popular music when we are
teenagers and young adults—music ties into a particular kind of
emotional turbulence, when issues of individual identity and social place,
the control of public and private feelings, are at a premium. What this
suggests, though, is not that young people need music, but that "youth"
itself is defined by music. Youth is experienced, that is, as an intense
presence, through an impatience for time to pass and a regret that it is
doing so, in a series of speeding, physically insistent moments that have
nostalgia coded into them.
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1. The author's primary purpose in this passage in discussing popular music is

to:

A. account for the importance of popular music in youth culture.

B. contrast several sociological theories about popular music.
C. compare popular music with other forms of popular culture.
D. outline the social functions of popular music.
E. describe how popular music originated

2. While there are obviously many differences between the two, the author of
the passage suggests that one similarity between popular and classical music
is that both:

A. articulate a sense of community and collective pride.

B. give shape to inexpressible emotions.
C. emphasize the feeling of time.
D. define particular age groups.
E. are timeless in nature

3. It can be inferred from the passage that the author's attitude towards love
songs in popular music is that of being:

A. bored by the banality of their language.

B. embarrassed by their emotional incoherence.
C. interested by their expressions of feeling.
D. unimpressed by their social function.
E. disgusted by their mushiness

4. Regardless of what the purpose of the passage is as a whole, in the last

paragraph, the author is predominantly concerned with:

A. defining the experience of youth.

B. describing how popular music defines youth.
C. speculating about the organization of youth movements.
D. analyzing the relationship between music and time.
E. describing the decline of popular music
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Passage – 4

Because we have so deeply interiorized writing, we find it difficult to

consider writing to be an alien technology, as we commonly assume
printing and the computer to be. Most people are surprised to learn that
essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers
were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus, against writing.

Writing, Plato has Socrates say, is inhuman, pretending to establish

outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. Secondly,
Plato‘s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing
will become forgetful, relying on external resource for what they lack in
internal resources. Thirdly, a written text is basically unresponsive,
whereas real speech and thought always exist essentially in a context of
give-and-take between real persons.

Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when

the objects they represent are visual. Thus, for most literates, to think of
words as totally disassociated from writing is psychologically threatening,
for literates‘ sense of control over language is closely tied to the visual
transformations of language. Writing makes ―words‖ appear similar to
things because we think of words as the visible marks signalling words to
decoders, and we have an inability to represent to our minds a heritage
of verbally organized materials except as some variant of writing. A
literate person, asked to think of the word ―nevertheless‖ will normally
have some image of the spelled-out word and be quite unable to think of
the word without adverting to the lettering. Thus the thought processes
of functionally literate human beings do not grow out of simply natural
powers but out of these powers as structured by the technology of
writing.

Without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller

potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations.
Literacy is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science,
but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and
of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral
speech) itself. Literate users of a grapholect such as standard English
have access to vocabularies hundreds of times larger than any oral
language can manage. Thus, in many ways, writing heightens
consciousness. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade
human life but enhances it.

In the total absence of any writing, there is nothing outside the

writer, no text, to enable him or her to produce the same line of thought
again or even verify whether he has done so or not. In primary oral
culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving
carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic
patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence. A judge in an oral culture is
often called upon to articulate sets of relevant proverbs out of which he
can produce equitable decisions in the cases under formal litigation under
him. The more sophisticated orally patterned thought is, the more it is
likely to be marked by set expressions skilfully used. Among the ancient
Greeks, Hesiod, who was intermediate between oral Homeric Greece and
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fully developed Greek literacy, delivered quasiphilosophic material in the

formulaic verse forms from which he had emerged.

1. In paragraph 5 of the passage, the author mentions Hesiod in order to:

A. prove that oral poets were more creative than those who put their
verses in written words.
B. show that some sophisticated expressions can be found among the pre-
literate ancient Greeks.
C. demonstrate that a culture that is partially oral and partially literate
forms the basis of an ideal society.
D. thinking in mnemonic patterns is an unsuccessful memory device.
E. no sophisticated expressions could be found among the pre-literate
ancient Greeks.

2. According to the author, an important difference between oral and literate

cultures can be expressed in terms of:

A. extensive versus limited reliance on memory.

B. chaotic versus structured modes of thought.
C. simple versus complex use of language.
D. barbaric versus civilized forms of communication.
E. presence and absence of books

3. The author refers to Plato in the first and second paragraphs. He brings the
philosopher up primarily in order to:

A. provide an example of literate Greek philosophy.

B. suggest the possible disadvantages of writing.
C. illustrate common misconceptions about writing.
D. define the differences between writing and computer technology.
E. suggest possible benefits of writing

4. The passage is primarily concerned with

A. criticising those who speak against ‗writing‘

B. emphasising the importance of writing
C. assert that writing and consciousness are independent of each other
D. documenting the negative effects of writing
E. discussing how writing has influenced human consciousness
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PRACTICE SET SENTENCE COMPLETION

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ANALOGY

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ANTONYMS