Passage 1:

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand

years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth.

In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometers of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy.

Wheat demanded a lot from them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water, and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was defenseless against other organisms that liked to eat it, from rabbits to locust swarms, so the farmers had to guard and protect it. Wheat was thirsty, so humans lugged water from springs and streams to water it. Its hunger even impelled Sapiens to collect animal feces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks, and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped disks, arthritis, and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word “domesticate” comes from the Latin domus, which means “house.” Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari]

1. What is the meaning of the word ubiquitous?

(a) Abundant

(b) Scarce

(c) Appropriately distributed

(d) Extinct

2. Why does the author say that wheat manipulated homo sapiens?

(a) Wheat started growing everywhere, leading to increase in its consumption globally

(b) Because wheat demanded a lot of attention and care, and homo sapiens were doing all of it

(c) Because humans were dim-witted

(d) Wheat was the easiest growing plant

3. How did wheat domesticate homo sapiens?

(a) Wheat was so delicious and nutritive that humans thought of leaving their nomadic lifestyle

(b) Wheat was able to bring a lot of people together because it offered a lot of food and humans thought that it is advantageous for them to stay in one place

(c) Human beings, who were hunter-gatherers before, had to find permanent settlement to take care of their wheat plantations

(d) Wheat was the one who was being taken care of, not humans

4. “This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting...” What does the author mean by this ape?

(a) Homo sapiens

(b) Chimpanzee specie which was also domesticated around the same time

(c) The early humans who looked like apes

(d) None of these

5. How did the human body pay the price for wheat cultivation?

(a) Humans began having sedentary lifestyles which resulted in many ailments

(b) Wheat consumption ended up damaging digestive tracts of humans

(c) The physical effort required to grow wheat brought about many ailments

(d) All of the above

Passage 2:

The scene, if I may ask you to follow me, was now changed. The leaves were still falling, but in

London now, not Oxbridge; and I must ask you to imagine a room, like many thousands, with a window looking across people's hats and vans and motor-cars to other windows, and on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper on which was written in large letters WOMEN AND FICTION, but no more. The inevitable sequel to lunching and dining at Oxbridge seemed, unfortunately, to be a visit to the British Museum. One must strain off what was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth. For my visit to Oxbridge and the luncheon and the dinner had started a swarm of questions. Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?—a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; and an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who have removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued the result of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth? Thus provided, thus confident and enquiring, I set out in the pursuit of truth.

Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook.

But I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this. I should need claws of steel and beak of brass even to penetrate the husk. How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper? I asked myself, and in despair began running my eye up and down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex —woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. Some of these books were, on the face of it, frivolous and facetious; but many, on the other hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory.

Merely to read the titles suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable clergymen mounting their platforms and pulpits and holding forth with loquacity which far exceeded the hour usually alloted to such discourse on this one subject. It was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently—here I consulted the letter M—one confined to the male sex. Women do not write books about men—a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief, for if I had first to read all that men have written about women, then all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper. So, making a perfectly arbitrary choice of a dozen volumes or so, I sent my slips of paper to lie in the wire tray, and waited in my stall, among the other seekers for the essential oil of truth.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from "A room of one's own" by Virginia Woolf]

6. Why, according to the passage, was the author in the British library?

(a) She had always been fascinated by books

(b) She had come as a tourist and believed that it was necessary to visit the library once you’re in London

(c) She had heard about the amount of books that were in there and wanted to see for herself

(d) Her visit to Oxbridge before had left her with questions and she was looking for answers in the library

7. What does the author say men write most about?

(a) Women

(b) Sex

(c) Philosophical truths

(d) Science

8. What was the author’s response to the fact that women do not write books about men?

(a) She felt a sense of relief

(b) She felt that that was unfair and should be changed

(c) She felt indifferent

(d) She found it quite exciting to know this

9. But I should need to be a herd of elephants. Why does the author write so?

(a) Because she believed that elephants lived very long and she would need to be a herd of elephants to read a significant amount of books in this library

(b) Because she found elephants to be really smart animals and wanted to grasp as much knowledge as them

(c) Because elephants died early and that is what she wanted to do upon seeing so many books together in one place

(d) Because she found them really cute and wanted to be reincarnated as an elephant

10. What does the word arbitrary mean as used in the passage?

(a) Particularly chosen

(b) Dumb

(c) Random

(d) Smartly thought-out