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Read the following passage and answer the question. "The history of science is replete with instances in which a dominant paradigm, long accepted as settled truth, was overturned not by gradual accretion of evidence but by a sudden, convulsive reorientation of thought. Thomas Kuhn called these episodes 'paradigm shifts,' arguing that normal science proceeds incrementally within an accepted framework until anomalies accumulate to a breaking point. At that juncture, the old framework collapses and a new one rushes in to replace it — not always because it is more 'true,' but because it is more useful or generative of further inquiry." The author's primary purpose in this passage is to:

Reading Comprehension

Question · Easy

Question

Read the following passage and answer the question. "The history of science is replete with instances in which a dominant paradigm, long accepted as settled truth, was overturned not by gradual accretion of evidence but by a sudden, convulsive reorientation of thought. Thomas Kuhn called these episodes 'paradigm shifts,' arguing that normal science proceeds incrementally within an accepted framework until anomalies accumulate to a breaking point. At that juncture, the old framework collapses and a new one rushes in to replace it — not always because it is more 'true,' but because it is more useful or generative of further inquiry." Which of the following can be most directly inferred from the passage?

Reading Comprehension

Question · Medium

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Read the following passage and answer the question. "Moral philosophers have long debated whether the rightness of an action depends solely on its consequences or also on the nature of the act itself. Consequentialists hold that an act is right if and only if it produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Deontologists, by contrast, insist that certain acts are inherently right or wrong regardless of outcome — that duties and rights impose constraints on what we may do even in pursuit of good ends. Neither camp has achieved a decisive victory in this debate, and many contemporary ethicists have sought to find common ground between the two frameworks." The passage most strongly suggests that the debate between consequentialism and deontology is:

Reading Comprehension

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Read the following passage and answer the question. "For centuries, historians treated the Black Death of 1347–1353 as an unambiguous catastrophe. Recent scholarship, however, has complicated this narrative. Some economic historians argue that the plague, by drastically reducing Europe's labor supply, inadvertently empowered surviving peasants to negotiate better wages and eventually loosened the bonds of serfdom. This revisionist view does not deny the appalling human cost — perhaps one-third of Europe's population perished — but insists that the long-run social consequences were not uniformly negative." The author's attitude toward the revisionist view of the Black Death can best be described as:

Reading Comprehension

Question · Medium

Question

Read the following passage and answer the question. "For centuries, historians treated the Black Death of 1347–1353 as an unambiguous catastrophe. Recent scholarship, however, has complicated this narrative. Some economic historians argue that the plague, by drastically reducing Europe's labor supply, inadvertently empowered surviving peasants to negotiate better wages and eventually loosened the bonds of serfdom. This revisionist view does not deny the appalling human cost — perhaps one-third of Europe's population perished — but insists that the long-run social consequences were not uniformly negative." Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the revisionist argument described in the passage?

Reading Comprehension

Question · Hard

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Read the following short passage and select the sentence that best states the main claim. "The rise of social media has transformed the landscape of political communication in ways both celebrated and condemned. Proponents point to enhanced citizen participation, the rapid dissemination of information, and the ability of marginalized voices to reach global audiences. Critics, however, highlight the spread of misinformation, the formation of ideological echo chambers, and the exploitation of personal data for targeted political advertising. Any balanced assessment must grapple with both sets of consequences, resisting the temptation to render a simple verdict." Which sentence best expresses the author's central argument?

Reading Comprehension

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Read the following passage and answer the question. "Urban heat islands — metropolitan areas significantly warmer than surrounding rural zones — arise primarily from the replacement of vegetation with heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt, reduced evapotranspiration, and the direct emission of waste heat from vehicles and buildings. The phenomenon has well-documented public health consequences, including elevated mortality during heat waves. City planners have proposed multiple mitigation strategies, ranging from 'cool roofs' coated with reflective materials to expanded urban forestry. Critics of these measures argue that they are palliative at best and that meaningful relief requires addressing the root causes: energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions." The critics' argument, as described in the passage, implies which of the following?

Reading Comprehension

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Read the following passage and answer the question. "The Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century reacted against what they perceived as the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment. Where Enlightenment thinkers celebrated reason, system, and progress, the Romantics exalted feeling, imagination, and nature. Yet to characterize the Romantic movement as simply anti-rational is to oversimplify. Many Romantic writers engaged deeply with philosophy and political theory; Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley were as much thinkers as they were poets. What the Romantics rejected was not reason per se but a narrow, reductive conception of reason that crowded out imagination and emotion." The passage's claim about the Romantics primarily serves to:

Reading Comprehension

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Read the following passage and answer the question. "The concept of 'wilderness' as unspoiled nature untouched by humanity is, historians of the environment have argued, a cultural construct rather than an ecological description. Pre-Columbian North America was not pristine wilderness but a landscape actively shaped by millennia of indigenous burning, planting, and hunting. The very forests that European settlers called 'virgin' were, in many cases, orchards and meadows maintained by peoples who had since been decimated by Old World diseases. Recognizing this history does not diminish the value of conservation but does require us to reconceive what we are conserving: not a pre-human Eden, but a humanized landscape worthy of care." The author's primary purpose is to:

Reading Comprehension

Question · Medium

Question

Read the following passage and answer the question. "The concept of 'wilderness' as unspoiled nature untouched by humanity is, historians of the environment have argued, a cultural construct rather than an ecological description. Pre-Columbian North America was not pristine wilderness but a landscape actively shaped by millennia of indigenous burning, planting, and hunting. The very forests that European settlers called 'virgin' were, in many cases, orchards and meadows maintained by peoples who had since been decimated by Old World diseases. Recognizing this history does not diminish the value of conservation but does require us to reconceive what we are conserving: not a pre-human Eden, but a humanized landscape worthy of care." The phrase 'a pre-human Eden' in the final sentence is used to:

Reading Comprehension

Question · Hard

Question

Read the following passage and answer the question. "Economists have long debated whether minimum wage increases cause unemployment. The classical argument holds that a wage floor set above the market-clearing wage will reduce labor demand, as employers substitute capital for labor or simply hire fewer workers. Empirical research, however, has been more equivocal. Card and Krueger's landmark 1994 study found no significant job losses following New Jersey's minimum wage increase, using neighboring Pennsylvania as a control. Critics challenged their data and methods, but subsequent studies using similar 'natural experiment' designs have on balance supported the conclusion that moderate minimum wage increases have small or negligible employment effects." The passage suggests that the classical economic argument predicting unemployment from minimum wage increases is:

Reading Comprehension

Question · Hard

Question

Read the following passage and answer the question. "Economists have long debated whether minimum wage increases cause unemployment. The classical argument holds that a wage floor set above the market-clearing wage will reduce labor demand, as employers substitute capital for labor or simply hire fewer workers. Empirical research, however, has been more equivocal. Card and Krueger's landmark 1994 study found no significant job losses following New Jersey's minimum wage increase, using neighboring Pennsylvania as a control. Critics challenged their data and methods, but subsequent studies using similar 'natural experiment' designs have on balance supported the conclusion that moderate minimum wage increases have small or negligible employment effects." According to the passage, Card and Krueger's study is significant primarily because it:

Reading Comprehension

Question · Medium

Question

Read the following passage and answer the question. "Photography, when it emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, was greeted by painters with a mixture of anxiety and curiosity. Some feared that the camera would render the painter's craft obsolete; others embraced photography as a new tool for capturing fleeting effects of light and movement that the hand could never match. The Impressionists, in particular, absorbed photographic influence in their interest in snapshot-like cropping, asymmetrical composition, and the rendering of transient light. Yet the relationship was never one-directional: photographers, in turn, sought to emulate the painterly qualities of soft focus, tonal richness, and staged composition that distinguished fine art from mere documentation." The author's description of the relationship between painting and photography is best characterized as:

Reading Comprehension

Question · Easy

Question

Read the following passage and answer the question. "Photography, when it emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, was greeted by painters with a mixture of anxiety and curiosity. Some feared that the camera would render the painter's craft obsolete; others embraced photography as a new tool for capturing fleeting effects of light and movement that the hand could never match. The Impressionists, in particular, absorbed photographic influence in their interest in snapshot-like cropping, asymmetrical composition, and the rendering of transient light. Yet the relationship was never one-directional: photographers, in turn, sought to emulate the painterly qualities of soft focus, tonal richness, and staged composition that distinguished fine art from mere documentation." The phrase 'mere documentation' at the end of the passage implies that photographers who sought painterly qualities were motivated by a desire to:

Reading Comprehension

Question · Medium

Question

Read the following passage and answer the question. "Behavioral economics has challenged the classical model of the rational agent by demonstrating that human decision-making is systematically distorted by cognitive biases. Loss aversion — the tendency to weight losses more heavily than equivalent gains — leads investors to hold losing stocks too long. The availability heuristic causes people to overestimate the likelihood of vivid, easily recalled events, such as plane crashes, while underestimating more prosaic risks, such as falls in the home. Anchoring bias leads negotiators to make insufficient adjustments from an initial number, even when that number was chosen arbitrarily." Based on the passage, which of the following scenarios best illustrates the availability heuristic?

Reading Comprehension

Question · Medium

Question

Read the following passage and answer the question. "In her controversial monograph, the historian argued that the causes of World War I were less contingent than most scholarship acknowledges. While traditional accounts emphasize the role of miscalculation, personality, and the accidental triggering of alliance commitments in the summer of 1914, she insists that the structural conditions — imperial competition, the instability of multinational empires, and the logic of offensive military planning — made a major European war virtually inevitable, with 1914 simply the occasion rather than the cause." The historian's argument, as described in the passage, is best characterized as emphasizing:

Reading Comprehension

Question · Medium

Question

Read the following passage and answer the question. "The long-running debate over whether language shapes thought, or thought shapes language, has been revived by recent work in cognitive science. The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — linguistic determinism — holds that language entirely determines thought, making it impossible to think concepts that one's language cannot express. This extreme position has been largely abandoned. The weaker 'linguistic relativity' hypothesis, however, retains adherents: it argues not that language determines thought but that the categories encoded in a language influence habitual patterns of perception and cognition. Experiments on color perception and spatial reasoning across speakers of different languages have provided modest support for this weaker version." The passage indicates that which position on language and thought has been 'largely abandoned'?

Reading Comprehension

Question · Easy

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