|
The primary purpose of the passage is to
|
|
A construction project has been tasked with building a four-lane road from a remote mountain fortress to a major expressway lying at the base of the mountain. The slope leading to the mountain fortress is so precipitous that the only conceivable way to carry out the project is by building the road downhill, since construction equipment is able to move down, but not up, the steep terrain. The foreman has devised the following solution: dismantle each construction vehicle and tie a part upon the back of a donkey, an animal capable of making the steep ascent. The foreman has at his disposal more than 100 donkeys, each of which is capable of making multiple trips up the mountain.
|
|
In order for the foreman`s plan to be successful, which of the following pieces of information is most important?
|
|
A company that invests the necessary infrastructure in a large untapped diamond mine can reap as much as 700% profit in the first year.?Some of the largest untapped diamond mines in the world are in the nation of Shagoca.?Therefore, the American company that brokers a deal in the capital Conkin that allows it to put the necessary infrastructure in place at those mines stands to reap tremendous profits.
|
|
Which of the following, if true, most helps to explain why American companies are not eager to invest in infrastructure necessary for diamond mining in Shagoca?
|
|
The Green Peas Grocery Store in the remote wealthy enclave of Luxville charges more than the Green Peas Grocery Store in Oak City charges for the same items. Clearly, on any given item, the Green Peas grocery franchise is taking advantage of its location in Luxville to reap higher profits on that item.
|
|
In evaluating the argument, it would be most useful to compare
|
|
Scientists have created double-blind studies so that neither the subjects of the experiment nor scientists know whether a patient is receiving an actual drug or a placebo, which is nothing more than a sugar pill. Essentially, if one knows that one is receiving an actual pill, such knowledge can affect the outcome of a study. A recent study on the effectiveness of the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) Freloxamine on depression found that those subjects administered the drug were 15% more likely to have a decrease in symptoms than the control group, which was comprised of those who received a placebo. Since neither group knew which they were receiving, the placebo or the SSRI inhibitor, the observed drop in depression can only be attributed to Freloxamine.
|
|
Which of the following, if true, best calls into question the conclusion of the argument?
|
Galileo's drawings show that he first observed Neptune in 1612, and again in 1613. On both occasions, Galileo mistook Neptune for a fixed star when it appeared very close-in conjunction-to Jupiter in the night sky; hence, he is not credited with Neptune's discovery.
During the period of his first observation, Neptune was stationary in the sky because it had just turned retrograde that very day (retrograde refers to the apparent backward motion created when the orbit of the Earth takes it past an outer planet). Since Neptune was only beginning its yearly retrograde cycle, the motion of the planet was far too slight to be detected with Galileo`s small telescope.
|
|
According to the passage, all of the following can account for Galileo`s inability to identify Neptune as a planet EXCEPT?
|
As to when the first people populated the American subcontinent is hotly debated. Until recently, the Clovis people, based on evidence found in New Mexico, were thought to have been the first to have arrived, some 13,000 years ago. Yet evidence gathered from other sites suggest the Americas had been settled at least 1,000 years prior to the Clovis. The "Clovis first"idea, nonetheless, was treated as gospel, backed by supporters who, at least initially, outright discounted any claims that suggested precedence by non-Clovis people. While such a stance smacked of fanaticism, proponents did have a solid claim: if the Clovis peoples crossed the Bering Strait 13,000 years ago, only after it had become ice-free, how would a people have been able to make a similar trip but over ice?
A recent school of thought, backed by Weber, provides the following answer: pre-Clovis people reached the Americas by relying on a sophisticated maritime culture, which allowed them to take advantage of refugia, or small areas in which aquatic life flourished. Thus they were able to make the long journey by hugging the coast as far south as to what is today British Columbia. Additionally, they were believed to have fashioned a primitive form of crampon so that they would be able to dock in these refugia and avail themselves of the microfauna. Still, such a theory begs the question as to how such a culture developed.
The Solutrean theory has been influential in answering this question, a fact that may seem paradoxical--and startling--to those familiar with its line of reasoning: the Clovis people were actually Solutreans, an ancient seafaring culture along the Iberian peninsula, who had--astoundingly given the time period--crossed into the Americas via the Atlantic ocean. Could not a similar Siberian culture, if not the pre-Clovis themselves, have displayed equal nautical sophistication?
Even if one subscribes to this line of reasoning, the"Clovis first"school still have an objection: proponents of a pre-Clovis people rely solely on the Monte Verde site in Chile, a site so far south that its location begs yet another question: What of the 6,000 miles of coastline between the ice corridor and Monte Verde? Besides remains found in network of caves in Oregon, there has been scant evidence of a pre-Clovis peoples. Nonetheless, Meade and Pizinsky claim that a propitious geologic accident could account for this discrepancy: Monte Verde was located near a peat bog that essentially fossilized the village. Archaeologists uncovered two wooden stakes, which, at one time, were used in twelve huts. Furthermore plant species associated with areas 150 miles away were found, suggesting a trade network. These findings indicate that the Clovis may not have been the first to people the Americas, yet more excavation, both in Monte Verde and along the coast, must be conducted in order to determine the extent of pre-Clovis settlements in the Americas.
|
|
If it is true that a trade network between pre-Clovis people had been established, then which of the following could be expected to be found at settlements near Monte Verde?
|
One reason we are able to recognize speech, despite all the acoustic variation in the signal, and even in very difficult listening conditions, is that the speech situation contains a great deal of redundancy-more information than is strictly necessary to decode the message. There is, firstly, our general ability to make predictions about the nature of speech, based on our previous linguistic experience-our knowledge of the speakers, subject matter, language, and so on. But in addition, the wide range of frequencies found in every signal presents us with far more information than we need in order to recognize what is being said. As a result, we are able to focus our auditory attention on just the relevant distinguishing features of the signal-features that have come to be known as acoustic cues.
What are these cues, and how can we prove their role in the perception of speech? It is not possible to obtain this information simply by carrying out an acoustic analysis of natural speech: this would tell us what acoustic information is present but not what features of the signal are actually used by listeners in order to identify speech sounds. The best an acoustic description can do is give us a rough idea as to what a cue might be. But to learn about listener`s perception, we need a different approach.
|
|
The main reason that the author of the passage discounts using a purely acoustic analysis to understand the way in which humans are able to recognize sounds is that
|
|
Linguist:?Each language has a word that captures a concept or emotional state in a way that no other language does. To capture such a breadth of expression, an artificial language should be created that contains words corresponding to all the different concepts and emotional states captured by the world`s languages. That is not to say that such a language would contain as many words as there are in all the world`s languages. Rather, only for those words that have no corresponding word in another language. While such a plan is hugely ambitious, the resulting language would be more thorough than any existing language.
|
|
The conclusion drawn above depends on which of the following assumptions?
|
The US Constitution established both gold and silver as the basis of US currency: that is to say, it established a bimetallic standard for currency. This remained in place for about a century, until the Coinage Act of 1873, which embraced a "gold only" standard, a monometallic standard, effectively dropping silver as the basis of currency. Over the next several decades, advocates of bimetallism and advocates of the "gold only" standard fiercely debated.
The "gold only" advocates, such as William McKinley, argued that shifts in the relative value of the two precious metals could lead to wild fluctuations in the values of currency in a bimetallic system. Early in the United States history, Alexander Hamilton had tried to fix the gold-silver exchange rate by fiat, but of course, such restraints only inhibit the natural development of a free market.
Unemployment was high in the depression caused by the Panic of 1893, and many argued that these economic challenges had been triggered by abandoning bimetallism. One of the more prominent advocates of bimetallism was William Jennings Bryant: indeed, bimetallism was the very center of his presidential campaigns in 1896 and 1900, both of which he lost to McKinley. Bryant articulated the popular view that a "gold only" standard limited the money supply, and thus favored those who were already quite wealthy, against the interests of working people of all professions. He famously expressed this argument in his "Cross of Gold" speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, in which he argued that continuing the "gold only" standard would "crucify" the honest laboring classes on a "cross of gold."
Despite the eloquence of Bryant's arguments, history strongly favored the "gold-only" standard. The argument that increasing the money supply would lead to greater prosperity strikes us now as na?ve: of course, we now understand that increasing the monetary supply can lead to runaway inflation, which hurts everyone. Furthermore, gold did not remain as limited as the advocates of bimetallism imagined. In the 1890s, scientists discovered a cyanide process that allowed workers to extract pure gold from much lower grade ore, thus significantly increasing domestic gold production. Additionally, the discovery of two immense gold deposits in South Africa substantially increased world gold supply. Thus, the "gold only" standard allowed for ample currency, and even robust prosperity in the 1920s, so bimetallism died a quiet death.
|
|
The author of the passage believes that William Jennings Bryant`s argument that a gold standard favors the rich to be
|
Originally, scientists predicted small asteroids to be hard and rocky, as any loose surface material (called regolith) generated by impacts was expected to escape their weak gravity. Aggregate small bodies were not thought to exist, because the slightest sustained relative motion would cause them to separate. But observations and computer modeling are proving otherwise. Most asteroids larger than a kilometer are now believed to be composites of smaller pieces. Those imaged at high-resolution show evidence for copious regolith despite the weak gravity. Most of them have one or more extraordinarily large craters, some of which are wider than the mean radius of the whole body. Such colossal impacts would not just gouge out a crater-they would break any monolithic body into pieces. In short, asteroids larger than a kilometer across may look like nuggets of hard rock but are more likely to be aggregate assemblages-or even piles of loose rubble so pervasively fragmented that no solid bedrock is left.
The rubble hypothesis, proposed decades ago by scientists, lacked evidence, until the planetologist Shoemaker realized that the huge craters on the asteroid Mathilde and its very low density could only make sense together: a porous body such as a rubble pile can withstand a battering much better than an integral object. It will absorb and dissipate a large fraction of the energy of an impact; the far side might hardly feel a thing. At first, the rubble hypothesis may appear conceptually troublesome. The material strength of an asteroid is nearly zero, and the gravity is so low one is tempted to neglect that too. The truth is neither strength nor gravity can be ignored. Paltry though it may be, gravity binds a rubble pile together. And anybody who builds sandcastles knows that even loose debris can cohere. Oft-ignored details of motion begin to matter: sliding friction, chemical bonding, damping of kinetic energy, etc. We are just beginning to fathom the subtle interplay of these minuscule forces.
The size of an asteroid should determine which force dominates. One indication is the observed pattern of asteroidal rotation rates. Some collisions cause an asteroid to spin faster; others slow it down. If asteroids are monolithic rocks undergoing random collisions, a graph of their rotation rates should show a bell-shaped distribution with a statistical "tail" of very fast rotators. If nearly all asteroids are rubble piles, however, this tail would be missing, because any rubble pile spinning faster than once every two or three hours would fly apart. Recently, several astronomers discovered that all but five observed asteroids obey a strict rotation limit. The exceptions are all smaller than about 150 meters in diameter, with an abrupt cutoff for asteroids larger than 200 meters. The evident conclusion-that asteroids larger than 200 meters across are rubble piles-agrees with recent computer modeling of collisions. A collision can blast a large asteroid to bits, but those bits will usually be moving slower than their mutual escape velocity (the lowest velocity that a body must have in order to escape the orbit of a planet). Over several hours, gravity will reassemble all but the fastest pieces into a rubble pile.
|
