Reading Comprehension: every CAT question since 2020

Correct option: They shared a professional debate over where criminal responsibility begins and ends.

The final paragraph stresses that, despite a common background, these men were divided by arguments about the limits of responsibility. The other options describe earlier parts of the passage (the pre-expert courtroom, symptoms being classified, how jurors read defendants), not the link the last paragraph draws.

Correct option: Nineteenth-century physicians who studied and treated insanity.

The passage presents alienists as doctors of madness and forerunners of psychiatrists. Options about foreigners or outsiders take the word's everyday sense and ignore the passage's definition.

Correct option: Judgement, insanity, punishment, responsibility.

The passage is about how courts judged a defendant's mind, how insanity was defined and how that tied responsibility to punishment, which D covers fully. The closest distractor mixes in peripheral words (such as patriotism) that the passage only touches on.

Correct option: Religious affiliation, an identity marker like race or gender.

The word sits in a list of identity categories, so it means a person's faith, not an admission. Reading it as "confessing" a crime or a belief ignores its role as a noun in that list.

Correct option: It sets out three routes (investment, incentives, governance) by which inequality may help growth, with short-run gains and long-run costs.

The passage presents the three arguments and mixed evidence on timing, which D captures. The tempting option says the passage argues that inequality speeds growth, but the author reports the case neutrally and includes the negative long-run evidence.

Correct option: Narrowing the vote and banning opposition parties.

The passage ties democratization to extending the vote so that low- and middle-income voters gain power, so shrinking voting rights reverses it. Caps on donations or public funding are reforms within a democracy, not its reversal.

Correct option: It identifies the specific conditions under which inequality can support growth, mainly in the short run.

The three mechanisms are each conditional (large up-front costs, unobservable effort, concentrated ownership), which C keeps. Options that make the claim universal, or reverse the ownership point, misread the passage.

Correct option: Rewarding productive workers on verifiable performance.

The incentive argument says that effort which cannot be observed is drawn out only when pay tracks results, so performance-linked rewards fit. The option about concentrated ownership belongs to the governance argument instead.

Correct option: To defend electronic music against two objections: that it isn't music and that it is "inhuman".

The opening raises both objections and the rest of the passage answers them, so the whole passage is a defence. Options that read it as a contrast, or that promote one supporting remark to the main goal, miss this structure.

Correct option: Unfamiliar structural vocabulary can block hearing it as music, but the barrier fades once listeners learn that language.

The author treats the difficulty as a learning gap that can be overcome. The tempting option turns it into a permanent verdict against electronic music, which the author never says.

Correct option: It does not help separate musical sounds from non-musical ones.

The description moves away from older ideas of music and helps listeners accept electronic work as music. Nowhere is it used to sort sounds into musical and non-musical, so A is the exception.

Correct option: Particular: unique, one of a kind.

The author says the medium's appeal lies in exploring distinctive new forms, so the phrase signals uniqueness. "Generic" means the opposite and would contradict that point.

Correct option: That sports bettors alone caused the market rebound.

The passage offers bettors only as one possible factor, so "sole cause" goes beyond it. The other options restate what the passage says about contagion, rule changes after extreme events and heavy tails.

Correct option: Noise can create order; contagion-driven systems are prone to extreme cascades; early shocks change the rules (nonstationarity).

B covers all three threads, with the pandemic market only as an example. The other options reverse the claim about extremes, overstate a tentative point, or wrongly confine nonstationarity to biology.

Correct option: After a crash, extreme daily moves cluster for weeks, far above normal frequency.

Clustering of extremes after a first shock is exactly the claim. The earthquake option reports independent events with no aftershocks, which undercuts it.

Correct option: People's movements respond to observed infections and to one another, so small adjustments add up to large unintended patterns.

If people acted independently, their adjustments could not combine into a collective effect, so the argument needs B. Data precision or who stays enrolled is irrelevant to that mechanism.

Correct option: The point about overfilled fat cells bursting, which is about inflammation in general, not a cavefish trait.

The other statements describe cavefish traits or the pressures behind them, including heavy fat as a response to erratic food. The fat-cell remark only sets up the inflammation discussion.

Correct option: Early eye and brain development are intertwined, so building and then losing the eye disrupts the least.

D explains the constraint: skipping eye formation would disturb the brain. The scarce-food option explains why wasted tissue is costly, not why the step is unavoidable.

Correct option: Yellow fat appearing only in eyeless offspring.

That would tie carotenoids to eye loss, contradicting the conclusion. Fish with eyes also showing yellow fat would support the conclusion instead.

Correct option: Controlling inflammation, important because cavefish gorge when food arrives.

The researcher proposes an anti-inflammatory role, linked to the earlier point about overfilled fat cells. The eye-substitute idea was rejected by the cross-breeding results.

Correct option: The chatbot describing its own trust-building tone, while the others show distorted outputs.

B, C and D each show a concrete biased or altered output (spelling, an image skewed toward men, a flattering CEO portrait). A is the chatbot explaining its style, not a faulty output.

Correct option: The author's hedged guess that the chatbot might favour big tech.

The other statements show promised neutrality producing biased or false output, or promised benefits flowing elsewhere. A self-admitted guess offers no evidence of a gap.

Correct option: Blaming training data for biases, a point about how chatbots respond to criticism, not about tone.

The comparison is about generic, safe, professional-sounding language, which the other options describe. The training-data remark appears in the passage, but in a different context.

Correct option: That AI's neutral tone encourages critical thinking.

The author argues that the polished, neutral tone lulls users into accepting biased or false answers, the opposite of A. On the other claims she is cautious or sceptical, not opposed.

Correct option: That mathematics is only now developing a scientific culture.

The passage holds that every science has its own culture, with only the instrument-based trend being new for mathematics. The microscopy option seems to clash, but the passage never limits microscopes to visible light.

Correct option: Astronomy is mostly receptive in its use of instruments, biology mostly interventional.

The passage presents exactly this contrast. The option about Newton fails because the "new astronomy" begins with radio astronomy, not with improved optical telescopes.

Correct option: A milestone: a fixed marker that neither receives information nor acts on anything.

The passage treats instruments as active, either receiving (telescopes) or intervening (biotech tools); an oven, a scalpel or a saxophone all act on something through skilled use. A milestone does neither.

Correct option: Progress in both astronomy and microbiology depends on better instruments.

C applies the claim directly to the passage's two examples. The other options add a moral demand or bring in "scientific constants", which the passage never discusses.

Correct option: Merging the two is the best route to a fuller grasp of the human condition.

C restates the link the claim makes. The other options swap means and ends, reverse the relationship, or turn it into a call for disciplined study.

Correct option: That the emotional sense of a place replaces the surveyor's map (it only adds to it).

The paragraph says literature adds an emotional layer that records lack, which complements the physical record rather than replacing it. The paragraph does call that layer as real as a map, so the option saying so is true, not the exception.

Correct option: To show that people of different race and class experience the same place differently.

The example traces how social position shapes experience of one location. The author calls science and literature complementary and does not rank one as more accurate.

Correct option: The claim that people relate to places without emotion or subjectivity.

The passage insists that places carry emotional meaning, so this claim is already against the passage, and its being false agrees with the passage. The falsity of each other option would contradict a point the passage makes.

Correct option: Tribal imagination lets the boundaries between beings, time and space dissolve.

Stars, seas and animals sharing human feeling only makes sense if categories of being are porous in tribal storytelling. The option calling these stories self-consciously creative contradicts the passage's contrast with secular art.

Correct option: Imagination makes sense of space; memory makes sense of time.

The passage ties imagination to images that give meaning to space, and memory to linking moments across time. The option saying imagination must be cultivated contradicts the passage's view that it is an innate gift.

Correct option: To gain mastery over time, having given up on dominating territory.

The passage links communion with ancestors to a drive to control time. The other options describe the objects used in worship, or reverse the point about territory.

Correct option: Tribal stories including rituals for talking to the dead.

Such rituals fit the passage's account of trance-like, time-defying imagination, so they support it. The other options deny features the passage claims (everyday reality mixed into art, freedom from sequence, dream-like logic).

Correct option: Prioritising the worst-off over total welfare.

Utilitarianism judges by total wellbeing, and favouring the least advantaged deliberately departs from that. The option labelled "deontological" still picks the highest total benefit, so it is utilitarian in effect.

Correct option: It weighs the appeal of an impartial AI moral judge against doubts that machines can grasp morality, using physics to show many formal theories coexisting.

C keeps both sides of the passage. The tempting option predicts convergence and preserved nuance, while the passage expects plurality and warns that codifying ethics loses nuance.

Correct option: There must be a principled way to choose which ethical framework applies to a case.

Physics matches theories to domains, so an AI would likewise need a rule for picking its starting framework. The passage stresses that ethical theories diverge, so the option assuming they agree fails.

Correct option: That formal reasoning will converge on one ethical system and make contextual judgement unnecessary.

The author treats ethical theories as plural and context as central, so D reverses the passage. The other statements follow from the physics–ethics parallel and the warnings about formalising ethics.

Correct option: The draft echoed the colonial 1878 Act, so critics turned on the whole framework of forest policy.

Because the draft repeated the old control-and-revenue approach, opposition to it became a critique of the system. The option naming a specific grievance explains why people opposed the act, not why the debate grew.

Correct option: That foreign forestry experts disregarded indigenous rights.

That fact reinforces the author's point that colonial forestry sidelined forest dwellers. The other options shift blame to tribes, deny the novelty of colonial control, or remove the railway demand behind it.

Correct option: Association with large-scale deforestation: true only of the colonial era.

Heavy forest loss is tied to railway demand before 1878, while the 1982 draft was defended as a way to curb deforestation. State control over forest land, by contrast, runs through both.

Correct option: Handing degraded forest land to local communities for afforestation.

The passage says the state still keeps its monopoly over such land. Ecological steps, such as stopping clear-felling, have already been taken.

Correct option: Symbol of control → human and ecological costs → justification → continued building.

C follows the passage's sequence from dams as emblems of mastery to their "sacrifice zone" costs, their modernising justification and their continued spread. The other sets lean on minor details.

Correct option: The urge to dominate nature shows up both in famous dams and in countless small ones.

The famous dams make the mindset visible, before the passage turns to the many smaller barriers. The options about messianic employers or builders' charisma invent a focus the passage lacks.

Correct option: Exemplification and manifestation: an abstract idea given concrete form.

Dams are presented as the physical embodiment of a drive to master nature. "Viability" (feasibility) and "durability" (lastingness) miss that sense.

Correct option: That smaller dams are safer than large ones.

The passage stresses the cumulative harm of small dams, never their safety. Continued building despite opposition, and the link to dispossession, are both supported.

Correct option: Neither necessarily promoted creativity.

Guilds' rigid entry rules and long apprenticeships could stifle innovation, just as mass production's focus on efficiency can. The passage never links mass production to entry restrictions, and the other options are not discussed.

Correct option: Artisan markets that become over-organised could dampen craft creativity.

The passage says crafts thrive only when they avoid excessive organisation, pointing to the rigid guilds. The other options overstate the case, reverse the history of the Arts and Crafts movement, or wrongly equate agile working with the guilds.

Correct option: Regulatory requirements favour large firms, making it hard for small craft businesses to scale.

The author notes that big companies hold the edge where products must clear regulations. Resistance to newcomers belongs to the medieval guilds, not to today's obstacle.

Correct option: A preference for one-off handmade goods over factory-made ones.

The passage names premium buyers, environmental concern and a taste for buying local as drivers. It praises the human touch, but never gives it as a cause of the revival.

Correct option: Digital distribution makes access to art more fragile, because platforms and technology can remove it.

Films vanishing from services, files decaying and regional rights limiting access all point to fragile access. The cultural-commons option overstates the case into a demand that art stay available forever.

Correct option: Guaranteed, permanent, platform-independent access to digital purchases.

The argument rests on owners losing access through rights changes or platform decisions, and B removes that risk. The option about the durability of physical discs misses the passage's focus on control of access.

Correct option: Today's audiences expect films to remain available after their theatrical run.

The contrast with an era when films disappeared after release implies that viewers now expect lasting access. The option about past attitudes claims more than the remark supports.

Correct option: To back the worry that streaming platforms can't be trusted to preserve cultural works.

A platform altering a released work supports the concern about platform control. Claiming that all digital art is now open to change overreaches from one example.

Correct option: A rational agent whose choices reveal pre-existing personal preferences.

The passage presents a person whose interests come before action and show up in choices, such as food versus warmth on a tight budget. The options saying preferences are shaped by others, or that the concept borrowed from other disciplines, contradict the passage.

Correct option: Gentle mockery of economics' former self-importance, now that it reaches out to other fields.

The contrast between the old imperial style and today's economists who seek out historians and psychologists supports a mildly ironic reading. The author welcomes the change, so a critical reading fails.

Correct option: It links perceptions straight to behaviour and outcomes, leaving out the institutions that once mediated them.

The author notes that parties, lobby groups and media, which shaped how perceptions became outcomes, are missing from the account. The complaint is that institutions are omitted, not that they are belittled.

Correct option: They applied economic tools to non-market life, such as crime and family, without drawing on other disciplines.

The paragraph says this approach expanded economics' reach but borrowed nothing from anthropology or history. The option claiming they borrowed from other fields reverses it.

Correct option: Its digging traps moisture and helps seeds sprout, restoring degraded desert.

The nickname is tied to how the animal reshapes its habitat. Population growth is mentioned separately and is not the reason for the name.

Correct option: That the animal itself uses camouflage (only its shelters are camouflaged).

The passage says it digs camouflaged shelters, not that it camouflages itself. The digging, long snout, striped back and backward-facing pouch are all described.

Correct option: The fenced areas keep invasive animals out.

The areas were cleared of rabbits and feral cats and fenced to bar them, the reverse of an enclosure. The option tying the term to islands confuses it with the separate island population.

Correct option: Introduced predators nearly wiped out the species, and conservationists are reviving it from a surviving island population.

D covers both the near-extinction and the recovery effort. The tempting option says the species went fully extinct, but a small population survived on predator-free islands.

Correct option: Helping journals pick suitably qualified reviewers.

The passage cites catching fake reviews, exposing under-representation of some reviewers, and curbing fraud and inefficiency. It never mentions choosing reviewers.

Correct option: Gaining influence in the academic community.

Staying current with the field, earning credit for reviews and a sense of duty to the discipline are all mentioned. Influence is not.

Correct option: More openness throughout peer review, with confidentiality kept only where truly needed.

The author argues that sharing review data exposes fraud, inefficiency and bias, and wants secrecy limited to necessary cases. The option making data-sharing a substitute for publishing reviews misreads it as the author's goal rather than a fallback.

Correct option: Shielding reviewers from unfair criticism.

The objections given are that reviewers may soften critiques, be deterred from reviewing, or take longer. Protecting reviewers from unjust criticism is never raised.

Correct option: Relying on human food erodes their natural wariness.

Animals that feed at campsites or bins lose their caution, making encounters more dangerous. Natural aggression and climate change are discussed, but not as causes of lost fear.

Correct option: Mixed rural landscapes, where farmland adjoins carnivore habitat, raise the chance of encounters.

The passage links patchwork working landscapes to more opportunities for contact. Options claiming that diversity lowers risk, or that conflict is rarer in poorer rural areas, reverse it.

Correct option: That carnivores relying on human food lose their fear of people.

The passage asserts exactly this habituation, so denying it clashes with the text. Negating the other options either agrees with the passage or touches points it doesn't make.

Correct option: Letting pet dogs roam off-leash where large carnivores are common.

The passage links loose dogs to many attacks, because they chase carnivores or draw them into confrontations. The option about reducing food scarcity would lower risk, not raise it.

Correct option: Air-conditioning cooling and drying factories: its intended purpose.

Carrier built air-conditioning for exactly that use. CFC build-up, the phonograph's music market and the loom's link to programming all went beyond what the inventors intended.

Correct option: Major inventions have hard-to-predict ripple effects that reach well beyond their original purpose.

The printing-press example stresses unforeseen consequences. The option calling the side effects beneficial misreads the emphasis on unpredictability.

Correct option: Their inventions had far-reaching effects they could not have foreseen.

Each invention ended up reshaping life or industry beyond its creator's aims. The option about varied uses captures only part of the point and misses the limits of foresight.

Correct option: That past technologies had harmless or helpful effects while only newer ones threaten the world.

The passage's own examples, leaded fuel and CFCs, show older technologies causing serious harm, so the author doesn't see past innovation as benign. His point is that innovation is now open to many small actors, not that new inventions are inherently more dangerous.

Correct option: Greater availability of spices.

Refrigeration, changing medical ideas and new cooking habits all reduced the need for spices. The passage never names a larger supply as a cause, and it ties spices' value to their perceived scarcity.

Correct option: That the story explains why pepper tastes hot.

The myth explains the danger of the harvest and the look of the peppercorns, not their flavour. A dangerous harvest naturally suggests a high cost and a scarce supply, so those conclusions are likely.

Correct option: That India was colonised for its spices and gold.

The passage ties spice demand to colonial networks and contrasts spices with the lasting value of gold, but it never links colonising India to gold. The passage does say spice demand helped drive empire, so that option is supported.

Correct option: Europeans would start doubting the burnt-tree harvesting story.

The myth explained only the shrivelled black peppercorns, so white ones would expose it. A drop in price doesn't follow, since the passage implies spices stayed rare and costly.

Correct option: A tribe merely dropping off a government list.

The passage counts lost environmental knowledge, emotional concepts and cultural expression as the costs of extinction, which the other options describe. An administrative listing change involves no such loss.

Correct option: Requiring liberal-arts students to become fluent in English and two of the world's biggest languages.

The passage pins its hopes on liberal-arts education fostering support for linguistic diversity. Steering that education toward dominant languages, the very forces that kill minority tongues, undercuts this. The other options only limit the benefits (few students go into linguistics, gains last a generation, recording freezes a language) without denying them.

Correct option: Giving locals jobs in the colonial administration.

Administrative jobs would push people toward the colonisers' language, the very pressure that drives extinction. The other options would plausibly help native languages survive, mirroring the contrast with child removals and killings in the north.

Correct option: Students setting up schools to save dying languages.

The passage credits communities, not students, with founding the schools. Better cross-cultural communication, learning other languages and insight into one's own biases are all claimed.

Correct option: Keeping contamination to a minimum until life elsewhere is ruled out.

The author calls Martian microbes speculative and puts human exploration first, so this precautionary stance is the one he rejects. He backs zoning as a compromise, sees little lasting harm from past missions and worries about sterilisation costs.

Correct option: That probes on the moon have had little environmental effect.

The author cites the lack of evidence of life on Mars, rivals ignoring the rules and earlier missions already contaminating. On the moon he only says it is too hostile for life, a different point.

Correct option: Sceptical of excessive sterilisation efforts for life that hasn't been shown to exist.

The paragraph frames planetary protection as costly and overdone. The author takes a clear critical position, so options suggesting ambivalence or admiration fail.

Correct option: Scientific communities differ in how much they care about biological contamination of other worlds.

One case drew little protest while the other caused an uproar, pointing to differing sensitivities. The passage neither ranks animal contamination as worse nor alleges bias against any country.

Correct option: Figuratively: it stresses how significant the claim would be, not that it is a real invention.

The conditional wording marks it as hypothetical emphasis. Reading it literally, or as an equation of the two, misses the hedge.

Correct option: Its appeal to older drinkers, while younger people's changing habits erode the drinking culture behind demand.

Older and middle-aged buyers power the market today, but millennials' lifestyles threaten the banquet culture that sustains it. The other options are presented as strengths only, not as double-edged.

Correct option: They defy conventional Western marketing wisdom.

Nationalism, elitism and appeal to older buyers break the standard playbook, which is the sense of "unholy". The option naming one factor ignores the other two.

Correct option: That marketing to the middle class brings easy profits.

The passage implies the middle-class segment is fiercely competitive, which is why Moutai targeted the very rich, so A is unsupported. The intense competition for middle-class buyers is itself a real consideration.

Correct option: Using emotional bonds to deepen political polarisation.

The author warns that AI could form intimate bonds and shift people's views, but never ties this to polarisation. That consequence is added by the option.

Correct option: That AI tools are what make language important.

Language shaping opinion, carrying values and culture, and creating laws, myths and stories are the author's reasons. AI is the threat to that system, not the reason language matters.

Correct option: Unregulated AI could erode language-based public conversation, making democracy a major casualty.

The author argues that democracy runs on conversation, which AI's manipulation of language could destroy. He calls worries about student essays minor, not unfounded, and shifts focus from physical harms rather than dismissing them.

Correct option: Cautionary.

The author builds a reasoned warning about AI's effects and calls for prompt regulation. "Alarmist" overstates a measured argument, and "prescient" misses that the point is warning and remedy.

Correct option: That the networks linked the global south to the global north.

The passage describes links among East Africa, the Arabian coast and South and East Asia, all within the south. The counter-intuitive claim that distant ports were easier to reach than nearby inland towns is actually supported.

Correct option: "Postcolonial novels – border-crossing": the passage assigns border-crossing to Indian Ocean novels instead.

The other pairs each match a literary tradition with a trait the passage gives it. The Indian Ocean novel and outward-looking pair is correct as stated, so it is not the odd one.

Correct option: That mainstream English novels typically centre white, Christian, male travellers.

D confirms that mainstream fiction comes from a different, Euro-centred viewpoint, so it strengthens the contrast. The other options cast doubt on it.

Correct option: That cosmopolitanism started in the West and spread east.

The passage presents the Indian Ocean as an early, southern hub of connection, so a West-first story cuts against it. The claim that globalisation first appeared in the Indian Ocean directly supports the remapping.

Correct option: To hold up a mirror to an acquisitive society, using peoples who chose non-materialist lives.

The essay rests on foragers who preferred leisure to accumulation, which critiques materialist economics. Inequality is a side point, and Galbraith is a reference, not a target.

Correct option: Their foraging life was a choice: they knew of farming and rejected it.

Living alongside farmers yet keeping their own way shows the choice was deliberate. The passage doesn't discuss their survival techniques or their influence on neighbours.

Correct option: Its critique of consumerism and inequality complements Sahlins's essay.

The passage pairs the two as kindred critiques. Nothing suggests that Galbraith refutes Sahlins.

Correct option: Its thin treatment of colonialism and racism by today's standards.

The author notes that the essay doesn't foreground these themes as we would now. The point about treating foragers as stand-ins for ancient humans is a separate observation.

Correct option: Simply dismissing geographic explanations, which is the behaviour itself, not a reason for it.

The passage gives three reasons: a racist past of geographic arguments, historians' focus on chance and individual choice, and scholars' lack of geographic training. D restates the very disregard being explained.

Correct option: That they hold outdated views of past events.

The author faults them for brushing aside biogeographic factors, over-weighting individual decisions and chance, and branding geographic explanations as "determinism". Outdated views of history are never mentioned.

Correct option: That most human phenomena stem from culture and choice, with only some rooted in geography.

The passage says both kinds of factors matter but never ranks their overall weight. The Inuit example (fur clothing reflecting geography, not a leader's choice) supports the other options.

Correct option: To show physical conditions directly shaping behaviour and culture.

Warm clothing in the Arctic and the absence of farming in Australia are traced to environment, not culture or chance. The option framing them as a comparison of development paths misses that purpose.

Correct option: The closing of the old wolf-hunters' office.

Depopulation, spreading forests and legal protection all gave wolves room to recover. The hunters' office had finished its work decades earlier, so its closure cannot explain the later comeback.

Correct option: A falling number of hunting licences.

Mayors complain of closed schools and poor connectivity, and farmers lose livestock to wolves. The decline in hunting appears only as a cause of wolf recovery, not as a local hardship.

Correct option: Rising wolf attacks on tourists.

The author presents wolf tourism as an economic benefit, which attacks on visitors would undercut. The other options support the author, concern unemployment generally, or are irrelevant.

Correct option: Farmers who lose livestock and environmentalists who welcome the wolves.

Wolf-themed tourism would bring income to offset farmers' losses while keeping the predators that environmentalists celebrate. Politicians and tourists are not sides in the conflict.

Correct option: It is one of the auxiliary sciences that help establish basic facts accurately.

The passage lists archaeology among the aids historians use to get the facts right. Accuracy is a precondition, not the historian's main duty, and interpretation is the historian's own work.

Correct option: That facts are relative to the person handling them.

This fits the passage's stress on the historian's selection and interpretation, so it supports the claim. The other options restore objectivity or deny that selection matters, which weakens it.

Correct option: An interpretive account of the battle's causes and context, built on the facts the historian selects as significant.

For the author, getting basic facts right is necessary but not the historian's real job. The option centred on the auxiliary sciences describes only that precondition.

Correct option: History as a selective system, like science.

The common-sense view treats history as a body of established facts found in records, approached facts-first and objectively. Selection and framing describe the author's own position.

Correct option: Second-hand stores selling only high-quality clothing.

The author's worry is that cheap second-hand clothes shed microfibres and soon end up as waste, which durable stock would largely remove. Less landfill waste would support the passage, not undermine it.

Correct option: That Britons don't buy second-hand clothes.

The passage cites recycling costs, luxury brands guarding their image, and their reluctance to sell stock cheaply. It even notes that thrifting is fashionable in London.

Correct option: High-quality, durable clothing that lasts.

The author recommends well-made items that shed fewer fibres and stay out of landfill, the reverse of fast fashion's disposability. Cheap, trend-driven, quickly discarded clothing describes fast fashion itself.

Correct option: It's meant to be green, yet it can cause environmental harm.

Older garments shed more microfibres in the wash, polluting rivers and seas. Retail costs, luxury pricing and anti-consumerism are not what makes it ironic.

Correct option: That Netflix has fully become a European company.

The passage notes Netflix's European offices but says key decisions are still taken by American executives. European hits travelling, the falling share of American originals and broadcasters' dominance of viewing hours are all supported.

Correct option: As a unifying force that gives Europeans a shared cultural experience.

The author argues that shared shows across borders build the common culture European integration needs. The worry about cultural threat belongs to European politicians and executives, which the author dismisses.

Correct option: A murder-mystery drama.

The passage says whodunits and conflict-driven stories travel well, while comedy often doesn't. Science fiction is never discussed.

Correct option: That Netflix viewing differs widely from one EU country to another.

Shared viewing across borders is the premise, and big national differences would undercut it. Differences by age or gender don't bear on cross-border unity.

Correct option: As wealthy people who preach liberal ideals while hoarding wealth and privilege.

The passage contrasts talk of a shared future with the private jets that carried attendees there. The author blames liberalism's decline on its contradictions and hubris; the example isn't about insulation from hardship.

Correct option: That technology is turning more work into drudgery.

The other options describe failures of liberal ideals: a new aristocracy, a malfunctioning democracy, broken promises. The technology point is a challenge liberalism could take on, not proof of its decline.

Correct option: Liberalism succeeded because it could reform itself.

The author points to liberalism reinventing itself in the late nineteenth century. He rejects reducing liberalism to a single idea, since it holds many traditions.

Correct option: Its appeal to older ideas of liberty, which the author actually values.

The author criticises the book for overstating the decline, ignoring liberalism's self-correction and defining it too narrowly. He credits the premodern ideas of liberty as worth considering.

Correct option: The term has no single, unified referent, so its boundaries are unclear.

The passage presents the objection that "romanticism" names no one real thing as the core obstacle. The option about defining aesthetics in general is a different challenge the passage mentions.

Correct option: It runs through all of life, ordinary as well as philosophical.

The romantics saw art and beauty shaping everyone's life. Keeping aesthetics in a separate sphere is the conventional view they rejected.

Correct option: That recent studies try to refute the differences among national romanticisms.

Recent studies characterise romanticism while respecting national differences, not denying them. That characterisation is possible, that views appear in fragments and aphorisms, and that aesthetics isn't a separate domain are all supported.

Correct option: They frame it through shared philosophical questions instead.

The passage says these studies focus on the concerns that unite romantic thought. The option calling a general characterisation impossible contradicts the passage.

Correct option: Laws meant to protect cultural heritage ended up reducing new archaeological discoveries.

A survey in the passage shows discoveries falling sharply after such laws pass. The other options bring in auctioneers, neglected sites or withheld treasures, none of which the passage discusses.

Correct option: New finds boost tourism and national pride.

The passage says discoveries draw visitors and build cultural pride. Strict laws are presented as a drawback that discourages discovery, not as a reason the sites matter.

Correct option: An international body funds digs in poor, artefact-rich countries.

The claim is that strict laws cut off the foreign investment that drives discovery. Outside funding would break that link. Local museums displaying finds don't restore the foreign incentive.

Correct option: Leave foreign institutes to fund and run digs instead of funding their own.

The author suggests source countries can pay for their own excavations, as China's collaborative turn shows, so A goes against that advice. Collaboration on the Chinese model is something the author would endorse.

Correct option: That conscious, step-by-step reasoning is the main source of great human achievements.

The author argues that many breakthroughs come from sudden insight, intuition or dreams, so C contradicts the passage. Knowing the limits of one's knowledge, a moral dimension and judging arguments on their merits are all linked to rationality.

Correct option: It equips people to deal with hard practical problems.

Sequential reasoning helps with real decisions under uncertainty. The author says Pinker under-explores moral education, so logic isn't presented as an ethical guide.

Correct option: Great breakthroughs in science and art often come from sudden insight rather than step-by-step logic.

Both examples show insight arriving through intuition or dreams. Options that confine the point to science, or separate science from other fields, miss the contrast with logical reasoning.

Correct option: To show the moral side of rationality that Pinker's book leaves underdeveloped.

The Greeks are cited for linking moral character to rational behaviour, the gap the author sees. That one of them anticipates Pinker is a side remark, not the purpose.

Correct option: Decentralised renewable power.

Fossil-fuel interests, oil geopolitics and the sidelining of non-European views of nature are blamed. Decentralised solar appears only as a victim of utility companies' obstruction.

Correct option: Non-European societies seeing the Earth as a lifeless resource.

The personification rests on non-European traditions that treat the Earth as alive, so evidence that they see it as inert removes the basis. Western science's view doesn't bear on those traditions.

Correct option: That academic discourse has always promoted environmental awareness.

The review says Euro-centred scholarship has largely drowned out challenges to colonial views of nature. Tying climate history to colonialism and valuing non-European perspectives are both supported.

Correct option: To show how colonialism produced and carried forward the mindset behind today's climate crisis.

The episode illustrates treating people and nature as things to exploit, an attitude that feeds the present crisis. It is one example in a longer history, not the first instance, and is about more than crops.

Correct option: An exact, identical reproduction.

The passage says the Chinese treat precise reproductions as equal in value to originals. A signed imitation, or a copy in a different medium or scale, isn't an exact reproduction.

Correct option: A seventeenth-century restorer bound to strict fidelity to the original.

The passage says restorers of that era altered ancient works heavily rather than preserving them faithfully. The scenario of heavy intervention fits the passage, so it isn't the answer.

Correct option: That the shrine is continuously restored in the same way as the cathedral.

The passage's parallel is periodic renewal: the shrine is rebuilt every twenty years, and the cathedral's stones are gradually replaced. It gives no evidence of ongoing, cathedral-style restoration at the shrine.

Correct option: A shaping of Western attitudes to human cloning, as the option frames it.

The passage connects the original-versus-copy outlook to a contrast between East Asian and Western attitudes to cloning, not in the way D states. The craftsmen-restorers point is directly supported by the cathedral example.

Correct option: People attribute unusual traits to the Undead, and those traits mark them as abnormal.

A restates the point that the powers serve to establish abnormality. The passage never mentions divine status, and the option about natural traits becoming abnormal reverses the logic.

Correct option: Early humans believed in beings that were neither fully alive nor fully dead.

The line describes people hearing of such beings, which implies belief in them. The options in which the creatures speak for themselves, or that claim we can understand their lives, go beyond it.

Correct option: How ideas about the Undead evolved from vague primitive fears into more defined, named figures.

B covers the full arc from early folklore to later centuries. The link with magic is only one part of that evolution.

Correct option: That theories of the Undead kept developing from the Middle Ages into the Enlightenment.

The passage says such theories grew through that period, so denying it contradicts the text. The other statements are either consistent in reverse or simply not mentioned, so their being false raises no contradiction.

Correct option: That meditation produces out-of-body experiences that create distance.

The passage attributes the distance to observing feelings without acting, not to any out-of-body state. Passive first reactions, a controlled second response and emotions clouding judgement all follow.

Correct option: He was a leader in the Roman army.

The scenario places him among his officers, leading the Romans. Revenge is only one hypothetical response the passage lists, not something it says he did.

Correct option: That the Epicureans saw overindulgence in simple pleasures as undesirable.

The passage says the Epicureans enjoyed simple pleasures without indulging in them, so denying C clashes with the text. (Some readers argue for the option about controlling emotions; the key gives C.)

Correct option: Stoic ideas of cultivating virtue helped lay the ground for the monotheistic religions.

The passage says this directly. The Stoics sought to shed desires for money and power, and the Epicureans enjoyed simple pleasures, so the other options misstate them.

Correct option: Technologies, like laws and customs, shape people by favouring certain sides of human nature, so they are alike in that respect.

The paragraph compares technologies to laws and customs as institutions that serve their inhabitants' interests. The option adding that they do so "as effectively" claims a degree the paragraph never states.

Correct option: Technologies act as an environment that shapes human society.

The passage treats technologies as surroundings that shape their inhabitants, as laws and customs do. The option about laws reflecting human culture reverses a detail of the claim.

Correct option: That prisons and the public sphere are the sources of the pattern.

The passage says the pattern prevails wherever masses are organised, so these are examples of it, not its origin. The passage explicitly includes socialist systems, so that option is consistent.

Correct option: That technologies favouring certain traits exact a heavy price from lived nature.

The passage says lived nature resists full absorption by society, but never speaks of a cost or damage. The point about parental authority reflecting a socially sanctioned human nature is supported.

Correct option: Moving toward "technical–social dualism".

The author criticises that very dualism for separating social from technical concerns. Sustainability, responsibility over speed and community-based local knowledge all fit the author's call.

Correct option: Faulty drug treatment blamed on assigning the wrong sex at birth.

Neglected diseases of marginalised groups, race-based device corrections and under-representation in trials causing wrong dosing are all in the passage. D misstates the cause.

Correct option: To pursue supposedly objective technical outcomes while ignoring the social side of their work.

The passage says students learn to see their decisions as purely objective and to dismiss social and political factors. Technical–social dualism is the problem the author wants to fix, not a method for including social concerns.

Correct option: Sustainability and medical waste, a separate concern.

The author's reasons concern dominant cultures shaping technical ideals and biased correction factors. Environmental waste is raised as its own issue, not as a cause of discrimination.

Correct option: Formal and informal institutions can coexist in the same domain.

The pair illustrates the passage's point that institutions come in formal and informal kinds, often mixed. The example isn't about what is traded, or about one depending on the other.

Correct option: Natural languages arise from human activity without anyone designing them.

The passage describes languages as products of human action but not of human design. It says institutions like the family and the military are consciously shaped, so the option denying that is false.

Correct option: Academic disciplines and institutions.

The opening describes the social sciences both as fields of thought and as social institutions, with disciplines given as a kind of institution, so the two overlap without being identical. (This key is debated: some solvers prefer the option naming the field-of-thought versus institution framing directly.)

Correct option: Institutions are structures that coordinate individuals' actions.

The passage builds on this definition through formal and informal kinds, culture as a subset and language as an institutional tool. One option describes only the conventional view the author rejects, and another overstates language as the sole fundamental institution.

Correct option: Sea snails.

Squid, cuttlefish and even polar bears are tied to camouflage methods resembling the octopus's (texture change, light scattering). Sea snails are linked to none of them.

Correct option: Being eaten by humans and other animals.

Lacking a shell, greater intelligence and many arms set octopuses apart from other molluscs. Being preyed upon is shared with relatives, not a difference.

Correct option: That they copy their predators' colours.

The passage explains colour matching through pigment and reflective cells and also describes texture changes. It never says they mimic predators.

Correct option: A particular ratio of pigment cells to reflector cells.

Pigment cells are one of several independent colour mechanisms, so their proportion alone doesn't impair blending in. Blocking the muscles that open pigment sacs would weaken camouflage.

Correct option: Humans, musicking, linguistic capacities, symbol-making, modern humanity.

C covers music-making as a shared human trait, its links to language and symbolic thought, and its place in modernity. The other sets lean on incidental words or leave out musicking or language.

Correct option: The caveats may have some merit, but the core claim stands: everyone who perceives music takes part in making it.

The author sets the caveats aside without rejecting them entirely and keeps the central claim. Reading the caveats as the author's own emphasis gets it backwards.

Correct option: People 20,000 years ago probably had musical abilities much like ours.

The passage says going back that far reaches people whose musical capacities were little different from ours. The option on who counts as a music-maker doesn't address emergence.

Correct option: That musical capacities are mainly shaped by culture and vary widely.

If the capacity were mainly cultural, it would not be a shared human trait. Whether dispositions are conscious or not leaves their universality untouched.

Correct option: Chicago School, social organisation, migration, crime.

The passage argues that mass migration disrupted urban social organisation and raised crime. The set with heavy industry and segregation treats background as central and omits social disorganisation.

Correct option: Rapid population growth with diverse in-migration causes social disorganisation, which drives crime up.

D follows the passage's causal chain. The other options narrow it to race or treat segregation as a crime-control tool.

Correct option: That African American migrants integrated slowly because they were less organised.

The passage blames residential segregation, crowding, poverty and illness, not any lack of organisation. Links between poverty, disorganisation and crime are supported.

Correct option: Large-scale out-migration from rural areas.

Rural-to-urban movement fits the shift. A mid-century census showing more rural residents would contradict it.

Correct option: Complex systems, bio-logic, bioengineering, techno-logic, convergence.

The passage moves from why complex systems need life's logic, through engineering life and lifelike machines, to their convergence. Sets built on its examples (crops, livestock) are weaker.

Correct option: The meanings of "machine" and "life" are widening until they overlap.

The author says complex things now count as machines and self-sustaining machines as alive. Options treating the two logics as opposed, or bringing in AI, misread the argument.

Correct option: Technological advances make it ever harder to tell natural things from man-made ones.

The final paragraph describes made things becoming lifelike and life becoming engineered, so the line blurs. (Some keys print D, but the reasoning on the same page supports C, and D's claim that only apparent reality is manufactured has no basis in the passage.)

Correct option: Genetic engineers and bioengineers both drive evolution artificially, the latter with finer control.

The passage describes both fields directing artificial evolution. The other options overstate what philosophers merely suspected or add claims (timing, "pinnacle of expertise") that aren't there.

Correct option: Building an East-versus-West oppositional framework.

The passage criticises the neat split between a spiritual East and a material West as an oversimplification. Examining one's biases, reading widely and engaging with social reality all match its critique.

Correct option: That India was colonised even though its technical knowledge matched the West's.

The passage treats Europe's technical edge as what let it colonise Asia, so parity contradicts it. The author faults Orientalists for ignoring the material side of Indian life, so he would accept that Indian culture recognised it.

Correct option: That the idea of Indian spirituality consoled the European colonisers.

The passage says that consolation belonged to the colonised Indian intelligentsia. Orientalists working through selected texts, and later Indian opinion adopting the spiritual-material framing, are both supported.

Correct option: Generalising about a whole nation from a narrow, hand-picked body of material.

The Orientalists built a picture of a civilisation from selected classical texts. The option about outsiders' views misses that selective generalisation.

Correct option: The digital templates shaped what they recorded and focused on, narrowing their thinking.

The passage says the templates probably helped induce tunnel vision. "Forced" overstates this, and the problem was too narrow a focus, not too little data.

Correct option: Email auto-complete that acts without the user's direction.

Optional medical feedback, a thermostat following the resident's settings and on-request interpretations all keep the human in charge. Auto-complete takes over instead.

Correct option: That computers could replace people altogether.

The author raises software blunting learning, templates misleading diagnosis and users ceasing to think. He treats software as a partner to experts, not a replacement.

Correct option: They expected the software to do the hard thinking for them.

The passage ties the aimless clicking to dependence on the software. It never questions the users' underlying skill.

Correct option: That the personhood of objects like an incense burner depended on their usefulness to humans.

The example argues that non-human personhood doesn't come from a link to humans, so a usefulness-based personhood contradicts it. The fact that many Maya objects "communicated" is already in the passage and doesn't touch that point.

Correct option: A third category (tree) relating to the others in the same porous way.

The burner is a person and also a tree, adding a layer with the same porous boundaries. It adds complexity rather than being an exception, and the new relation is similar, not dissimilar.

Correct option: A tribe that sees plants as persons because they have needs and roles in an ecosystem.

B matches the passage's two marks of personhood, bodily needs and community roles, with no dependence on human use. A functionality-based view ties personhood to usefulness.

Correct option: Healers being depicted with features of medicinal plants.

This concerns only how humans are shown and leaves the framework of personhood intact. The tempting option would undercut the idea that objects can be persons while staying themselves.

Correct option: Sustainably farmed food: good for the buyer and the world.

The passage's pattern is a product that serves the buyer while advancing a moral cause. Health supplements promise only a personal benefit.

Correct option: That tea was Britain's leading drink in the nineteenth century.

The review supports tea becoming a social ritual, fostering community and being promoted as patriotic in wartime. The claim about its rank in the nineteenth century is never addressed.

Correct option: Consumers lobbying for a wider range of products.

Industrialists arguing for free trade, the temperance movement and factory owners wanting sober workers are all mentioned. Consumer lobbying is not.

Correct option: Its moral claims had real, beneficial effects on social life.

The review says tea's promoters arguably advanced civilisation and community, not just a feeling of virtue. Being widely marketed is true of other moral products too.

Correct option: Institutions monitoring every individual for security and welfare.

Utopian conduct is enforced through institutions and customs, and security comes at the cost of privacy. Rewarding merit with power contradicts the passage's point that utopias curb the desire for public power.

Correct option: That the restraints were unnecessary in More's time.

The author says only that the restraints would have seemed reasonable to many then, which is different. The points about voluntary communities, suppressing wickedness and required homogeneity are all made.

Correct option: Utopia → security → homogeneity → intentional community.

The passage moves from utopia, to the security it offers at the cost of privacy and diversity, to the homogeneity of utopian tradition, ending with voluntary communities that aren't dystopian. The option ending on dystopia and coercion treats the contrast as the conclusion.

Correct option: That utopias and dystopias are definitely twins.

The passage only suggests the two may resemble each other, so A overstates it. That uniformity shaped early utopian thinking is supported.

Correct option: A link between self-control and survival advantage.

Children versus cuttlefish, symbol-based training and long-term follow-up of children are all described. The passage never mentions survival advantages.

Correct option: Cuttlefish live in large, sociable groups.

The passage notes that self-controlled species tend to have social lives, so sociable cuttlefish would fit. The options about food preference and shape recognition would undermine the experiment, and the waiting time is already reported.

Correct option: That intelligence is impossible without sociability.

The passage notes that the traits often occur together, not that one requires the other. The cuttlefish turning away to distract themselves is described.

Correct option: Its favourite live food is behind a delayed symbol while lesser foods are available at once.

It must pass up immediate lower-ranked food to wait for its favourite, which is the restraint tested. Choosing a top-ranked food that is already available shows preference, not restraint.

Correct option: That ignoring scepticism is the best way to handle it.

The author calls ignoring it the most common response, not the best. The sceptic's view, the link between knowledge and justified action, and its relevance to everyone are discussed.

Correct option: If reality is independent of our perception, we cannot perceive that reality as it is.

D restates the conditional reasoning. Presenting the sceptic's claim as established fact, or narrowing perception to eyesight, misreads it.

Correct option: How we acquired a belief and how widely trusted people around us endorse it.

The final paragraph names exactly these two factors. Another option describes what governs how closely we scrutinise beliefs, not our confidence in them.

Correct option: If reality is independent of our perceptions, we can't check our representations against it, so knowledge of it may be out of reach.

The sceptical argument in the passage leads to this conclusion. Social endorsement is presented as a source of confidence, not as a justification for rational action.

Correct option: The internet concentrating attention on a few languages.

The passage presents the internet as a help to endangered languages. Catastrophe, state pressure or neglect, and speakers switching for economic gain are all named causes.

Correct option: That their vocabulary and grammar have been hard to document.

They carry cultural and environmental knowledge, are vulnerable when only spoken, and communities work to protect them. Unusual words and grammar are mentioned as a feature, never as a documentation problem.

Correct option: In favour of a world where more people speak several languages.

The author argues that multilingualism suits an interdependent world and that monolingualism is the real concern. State coercion appears only as a cause of decline, not as a remedy.

Correct option: To show that a language can revive even after people abandoned it for another.

The Welsh example follows the discussion of language shift as a hopeful case. The passage doesn't credit state effort or globalisation for its revival.

Correct option: Social cohesion versus objective truth.

The passage ends by framing scholars' dilemma: unite people through shared fictions, or tell the truth at the cost of division. Power is background; the other options are narrower details.

Correct option: Leaders keep power by departing from the truth, because people find bare reality hard to accept.

The author argues that uncompromising truth is a poor political strategy. The option saying myth-only leaders lose power contradicts the claim that fictions often win.

Correct option: They know how to balance truth against keeping people united.

The passage presents the scholars' choice between truth and harmony, and leaders face the same balance. It never says leaders need both kinds of power to stay in office.

Correct option: The scholars' dilemma, where unity through shared fiction is weighed as a serious rival to truth.

This line puts fiction at the centre of a major choice, which is where overstatement can be argued. The other quotes describe truth-based power without inflating fiction.

Correct option: It resisted colonial rule yet had to borrow the coloniser's material techniques.

The passage says nationalists had to learn the West's material methods while protecting their spiritual core. The option placing the borrowing in the spiritual sphere reverses this.

Correct option: That it simply carried forward older divisions in Indian culture.

The passage says the colonial encounter gave the divide new meaning. Its feeding into the home/world framework and preserving identity are supported.

Correct option: Colonial contact changed every sphere of Indian culture, including the spiritual one.

The argument rests on a protected spiritual core, so showing that it was altered breaks the premise. The options about rejecting women's education, or modernity shaping the material side, fit the passage.

Correct option: As reinforcing conservative, traditional gender roles.

The passage says liberals were troubled by the social conservatism of nationalist practice. One option describes the nationalist framework itself, and another is the author's own claim.

Correct option: Quantum computers, which demand very accurate clocks, will likely produce more heat and entropy.

The study found that raising a clock's accuracy raised the entropy it produced. Whether the arrow of time has been tested on atomic clocks isn't stated, and one option reverses cause and effect in the experiment.

Correct option: That heat is the price paid for accuracy.

The passage ties the cost of accuracy to entropy (ordered energy becoming disorder), not explicitly to heat. Remarks on untested clock types and on clocks for quantum computers are in the passage.

Correct option: Using more of an input doesn't guarantee a better result, so more entropy doesn't guarantee more accuracy.

The analogy separates input from outcome. The other options misread it as being about speed, time or distance.

Correct option: Measuring time, accuracy, entropy.

These run through the whole passage. The membrane is an experimental detail and the arrow of time a side point.

Correct option: Favourable: by showing all languages share an underlying grammar, it answers charges of racism and stresses human unity.

The author praises the book and closes on humanity's unity. Calling the book racist is the opposite of the author's view.

Correct option: That all intelligent primates have it.

The passage says chimpanzee brains can't produce or use grammar. Neuroscientific support and the instinct's reproductive advantage are stated.

Correct option: On a Darwinian explanation of language.

The passage says Pinker places the brain's wiring for language within natural selection, unlike Chomsky. Both endorse a universal grammar.

Correct option: That it draws on behavioural psychology.

The passage names cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology and speech therapy. It contrasts Chomsky's dense prose with Pinker's accessible style.

Correct option: The comic-book heroes who fought giant robots now face tiny robots that can invade the body.

D follows the paragraph's sequence. The other options swap who the heroes, the robots and the victims are.

Correct option: That such tiny robots will be used to take over people's bodies.

The passage says real nano-robots won't invade bodies in that way, so the claim's falsity agrees with it. The other options describe features the passage reports, so disproving them would contradict it.

Correct option: Tiny robots will hunt down disease deep inside the body.

The passage is hopeful about robots moving through the bloodstream to heal. Messaging is never mentioned, so that option is unrelated.

Correct option: Nano-robots, once science fiction, now feature in cutting-edge research.

The passage moves from a comic storyline to real research on molecular and soft robots. The options about sticky feet or water-reactive molecules are details.

Correct option: How scattered ideas and practices came together under the single term "unconscious".

The central point is that the term's adoption in the late nineteenth century unified many loosely related threads. Describing the unconscious as a part of the mind, or focusing on vocabulary or psychical research, misses this.

Correct option: Changes in literary and intellectual language altered how old expressions were understood.

D keeps the direction: new language changed the meaning of traditional expressions. The other options reverse cause and effect.

Correct option: Language, the unconscious, psychoanalysis.

The passage traces how the concept formed through shifting language and was fixed in psychoanalytic terms. Insanity is only one minor example.

Correct option: That new nineteenth-century ideas yielded knowledge because new specialised fields were founded.

The passage credits new concepts linking unrelated practices and the growth of language, not the founding of fields. The other statements are supported.

Correct option: That complete sentences don't need nouns and verbs.

The passage holds that a sentence needs a noun and a verb, so this claim being false supports it. Denying the link between grammar and judging one's writing would undermine the passage.

Correct option: Vegetables combined with spices make a dish.

A pairs two basic elements into a larger whole, mirroring noun plus verb. The others place a single item in a setting, line up items of one kind, or describe a group defined by what it shares.

Correct option: Grammar's rules make clear communication possible.

The passage argues that shared rules prevent confusion. Nouns and verbs are an illustration of that point, not the point itself.

Correct option: That grammar's main goal is to keep sentences simple.

The passage presents grammar as organising communication, never as a push for simplicity. That sentences needn't always be complete, and that they pair subject and predicate, are supported.

Correct option: Software that standardises grammar rules to help writers.

The author says knowing grammar lets writers judge their work. Bending rules is allowed only for writers who already master them, not as a general licence.

Correct option: Cutting an eighth off a new bolt.

The passage says cutting textiles greatly reduces their value. A faded bolt of matching value is a workable payment.

Correct option: Reliability in transport.

Steadiness refers to standard bolt sizes, a full bolt keeping its value, and dependable supply compared with coins. Transport is never mentioned.

Correct option: Like the Tang system, modern money mixes forms: cash for small payments, other instruments for larger ones.

The closing paragraph draws this parallel. Grain was still used for taxes and salaries, so the option dismissing it fails.

Correct option: Being in the midst of transformation.

Physical materials, several currencies for different payments and shifting values all appear in the Tang account too. Only the modern system is described as changing now.

Correct option: That the public sees anarchism as lawless because of mainstream distrust of collectivism.

The passage covers revolutions being betrayed, the state as the enemy and strands of individualist anarchism. It offers no causal account of public perception.

Correct option: It used the masses' revolutionary anger to seize power, then oppressed them.

The passage describes terror, secret police and a standing army imposed after ordinary people paid for the uprising. A power-sharing deal with the old elite is never mentioned.

Correct option: Both prize individual autonomy, but the anarchists also stress mutual dependence.

The passage says the anarchists add mutualism to autonomy. Views on the state, capitalist morality or altruism are not discussed in this comparison.

Correct option: Anarchism, state, individual, freedom.

These capture opposition to the state and the value of individual autonomy. Betrayal and power support the argument, and strikes and egoism are peripheral.

Correct option: Opposition to concentrated state power.

The passage says anarchists see the state itself as the enemy. The primacy of the individual belongs to the individualist strand only.

Correct option: That immigrants would soon push the colony's call rate above the founder colony's.

The passage says immigration pulls call rates toward the founder colony's average, not past it. That individual males keep their call signature for life is supported.

Correct option: Immigrant males adjusting their call tempo to the resident average.

Immigrants normally pull local averages toward the founder colony, erasing differences. Residents shifting toward immigrants would speed that convergence instead.

Correct option: From simple calls with strong regional dialects and little individual variation, to complex calls with wide individual variation and weaker dialects.

B matches the passage's account. The other options reverse part or all of the trend.

Correct option: Faster-calling seals from the founder island may have happened to settle them first.

The passage attributes local averages to the chance order of arrival. The option about modern calls' complexity concerns a different change.

Correct option: Seeing becomes meaningful through agreed understandings between viewer and image.

A restates the dependence on shared conventions. The option turning it into a vague possibility located inside the images misreads it.

Correct option: That institutional structures must exist before perception can be analysed.

The passage ties vision to the body and to a culture's interpretive devices, and never makes institutions a precondition. That studying the structures of perception teaches a lot is supported.

Correct option: Secondary by-products, supplemental to the real evidence.

The passage contrasts treating images as evidence with treating them as mere side-effects. "Amenable to analysis" describes what scholars want images to be, not the rejected view.

Correct option: Social explanations can't fully capture such artists' genius.

B restates the limit on social analysis. The options saying they can't be analysed at all, or that no analyses exist, overstate it.

Correct option: Imagery, visual practices, lifeworlds, perceptual structures.

These cover images, how they are used, how they shape social life, and how vision is structured. Aesthetic value and genius are side points.

Correct option: Small-scale renewables promise local, democratic energy, but weak returns push the sector toward concentrated control.

A keeps both sides. The other options are too narrow, too absolute, or bring in an efficiency comparison the paragraph never makes.

Correct option: The author has doubts about the consequences of renewable energy.

The paragraph says renewables need closer scrutiny for their social and environmental costs. Non-renewables aren't discussed, and the concern goes beyond profitability.

Correct option: That renewable energy has little or no environmental impact.

If this claim is false, renewables do have a substantial environmental impact, which is exactly what the passage argues through land and water use, mining and electronic waste. The equal-cost and profitability claims aren't the passage's concern, and denying that small-scale renewables are unsustainable would work against its point about investor returns.

Correct option: That renewables' possible harms must be studied before they are offered as investments.

The passage calls for examining impacts but never links this to investment appeal. Concentrated control in agricultural finance, toxic waste feeding injustice and marginalised communities bearing mining costs all back its points.

Correct option: Stricter global rules for fairer toxic-waste disposal.

The passage shows waste flowing to the Global South and marginalised communities. The author doubts small local systems can attract the returns needed, so that option fails.

Correct option: Ironic, pointing to why so many turned to piracy.

The question highlights the absurdity of honest labour paying far less than one raid. The author isn't mocking peasants or offering an analytical contrast.

Correct option: Colonialism was organised piracy on a grand scale.

The anecdote that emperors and pirates differ only in scale casts empire-builders as the biggest pirates. The author describes rather than blames, and makes no past-versus-present comparison.

Correct option: Eliminating poverty and income disparities in affected regions.

The passage ties piracy to poverty in places globalisation has bypassed. Welfare spending once worked elsewhere only because money reached the poor despite corruption, so that option is weaker.

Correct option: Reduced surveillance of the seas.

The passage says patrols are costly and can't cover everything, not that they have declined. High ransoms, more shipping and colonialism's legacy are cited.

Correct option: That aggression comes from abnormally low neural regulation of testosterone.

The biological theory in the passage concerns weak neural inhibition of aggressive impulses, not testosterone regulation. The definition requiring an unwilling victim and suicide as self-directed aggression both follow.

Correct option: The aggressor, the situation, and the target.

The passage sorts theories by who acts, the setting and who is targeted. Hostile, instrumental and hormonal are types and causes, not the grouping variables.

Correct option: Some aggression aims at a goal other than harm, using pain only as a means.

Torturers can inflict pain dispassionately to extract intelligence. The reliability of extracted information is never discussed.

Correct option: That societies control aggression by moderating the death instinct.

The death instinct appears only as a proposed biological source of aggression. Testosterone and male aggression, biological perspectives, and hostile versus instrumental aggression are all discussed.

Correct option: That screens increase human contact.

The author argues that screens displace face-to-face contact, making it rare. Screens filling a social void describes a need they try to meet, not more real contact.

Correct option: The line making comfort with human engagement a new class marker.

It ties offline interaction to class status. The line about the wealthy using ad-supported platforms less concerns platforms, not the cost of avoiding screens.

Correct option: They push screens into public schools while keeping their own children largely screen-free.

The passage contrasts one-laptop-per-child campaigns with how tech workers raise their own kids. Hiring psychologists is to keep users engaged, not to hide findings.

Correct option: Cheaper streaming.

Falling prices and streaming are never mentioned. Screens filling the void left by vanished gathering places is supported.

Correct option: His preoccupation with the crisis is at least two years old.

The opening says he has followed it for more than two years. The other options invent reasons or claims about the crisis's length or his travels.

Correct option: Individualism must be set aside, because the crisis shows we are all connected and must act together.

The paragraph says the crisis exposed individualist ideology. The option saying the crisis strengthens individualism reverses it.

Correct option: Building financial literacy among the general public.

The author wants finance to be understood by outsiders, not to stay a closed field. Science education and economic research are side points.

Correct option: That failed economic systems don't necessarily mean their ideologies have failed.

The passage argues that the individualist ideology behind the crisis needs rethinking, so A cuts against it. Changing dominant beliefs to avert crises fits the author's view.

Correct option: That the crisis was not a failure of collective action.

If this is false, the crisis was a collective failure, matching the author's view that everyone shares the consequences. The falsity of the claim that most people don't understand finance would contradict the author.

Correct option: Their grasp of class conflicts in the period.

The passage links the scholars' reading to their own research perspective, to gender inequality and to how identity was negotiated at home and abroad. Class is mentioned only in passing and is never presented as shaping the scholars' understanding.

Correct option: The freedom of road travel.

The passage says road narratives stressed independence on the road. The option borrowing "independence" misstates what the protagonists discover.

Correct option: Away from home, their gendered identities could be negotiated differently.

The passage ties self-development to identities being reshaped abroad. Fragmented identities are what later studies describe, not the cause.

Correct option: Showed how cultural imperialism in travel texts helped legitimise colonial rule.

The passage says Said showed how political dominance relied on legitimating discourses in travel writing. Ranking culture above colonial rule, or judging Westerners' character, misreads it.

Correct option: Autobiography.

Travel writing recounts the writer's own experiences and perspective. Feminist criticism is a lens applied to travel writing, not a genre it resembles.

Correct option: Most people hold a pessimistic, Hobbes-like view that others are selfish and dangerous.

The opening describes this pessimism. The two philosophers are presented as opposites, not as sharing a belief in a strong state.

Correct option: As a chance for change, such as freedom for the enslaved and cultural flourishing.

He presents collapse as a reprieve, not decline. The "dark ages" view is the traditional one he contrasts with his own.

Correct option: To argue that people are basically decent but progress can make them selfish.

He idealises the nomadic past and blames farming for property, greed and conflict. Population growth is raised by the reviewer as a critique, not as the purpose.

Correct option: The reviewer rejects the view that civilised society is inherently coercive; human nature has both good and bad.

The closing calls the either/or framing a false choice. The reviewer doesn't dispute that pathogens spread disease or that farming aided knowledge.