Verbal Question-Bank for GMAT Winners
An exhaustive 500+ Page Question Bank with over 600 fully solved word problems
covering ALL areas of GMAT Verbal
An exhaustive 500+ Page Question Bank with over 600 fully solved word problems
covering ALL areas of GMAT Verbal
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Sample Reading Comprehension Questions
There are 36 Passages in the Reading Comprehension Part of the Verbal Question Bank for GMAT
Winners. Here is are Passages 2 & 3 with answers.
PASSAGE-2
I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has passed
beyond
our knowledge and control, to bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things like
empires
and their wars to more familiar little things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use
a pin
when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins as
being
for some reason especially important to women.
There was a time when pin makers would buy the material; shape it; make the head and the point; ornament
it; and
take it to the market, and sell it. The making required skill in several operations. They not only knew how the
thing
was done from beginning to end, but could do it all by themselves. But they could not afford to sell you a
paper of
pins for a farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman’s dress allowance was called pin money.
By the end of the 18th century Adam Smith boasted that it took 18 men to make a pin, each man doing a little
bit of
the job and passing the pin on the next, and none of the them being able to make a whole pin or to buy the
materials or to sell it when it was made. The most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea
of
how it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they were clearly less capable and
knowledgeable men than the old pin-makers, you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of
civilization
when its effect had so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each man to do just one little
bit of
the work and nothing but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it. The men, it is said, could turn
out
nearly 5000 pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be
richer
because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without
intelligence and being fed by the spare food of the capitalist just as an engine is fed with coal and oil. That
was why
the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well as a poet, complained that ‘wealth accumulates,
and
men decay’.
Now-a-days Adam Smith’s 18 men are as extinct as the diplodocus. The 18 flesh-and-blood men have been
replaced by machines of steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them into pink
papers is
done by machinery. The result is that with the exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody
knows
how to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker in pin manufacture need not be one-
tenth so intelligent, skilful and accomplished as the old pin maker; and the only compensation we have for this
deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit
stuck
on the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so recklessly thrown away and wasted that
verses
have to be written to persuade children ( though without success) that it is a sin to steal, if even it’s a pin.
Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been greatly troubled by this, just as
Goldsmith
was, and have asked whether we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and degrade our
workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider
the
Distribution Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old free for higher work than pin-making or
the
like. But in the meantime the fact remains that the workers are now not able to make anything themselves
even in
little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their day’s work until it has all
been
arranged for them by their employers who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply
pay
other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker’s directions.
The same is true for clothes. Earlier the whole work of making clothes, from the shearing of the sheep to the
turning
out of the finished and washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the men and
women of
the household, especially the women; so that to this day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Now-a-days
nothing is left of all these but the sheep shearing; and even that, like the milking of cows, is being done by
machinery as the sewing is. Give a woman a sheep today and ask her to produce a woolen dress for you; and
not
only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are likely to find that she is not even aware of any connection
between
sheep and clothes. When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at the shop, she knows that
there is
a difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet
and
other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or how the came to be in the shop ready
for
her to buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The people
engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them are too poor to have much choice of
materials
when they buy their own clothes.
Thus, the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done
whilst at
the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and
encyclopedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the books are written by people who are not
doing
it, and who get their information from other books, what they tell us is twenty to fifty years out-of-date
knowledge
and almost impractical today. Of course most of us are too tired of our work when we come home to want to
read
about it; what we need is cinema to take our minds off it and feel our imagination.
It is a funny place, this word of capitalism, with its astonishing spread of education and enlightenment. There
stand
the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything,
none of
them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is made
that they
find people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel they are
surprised to
find that savages and Eskimo villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more intelligent and
resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our
mental
faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels and play
and
films. Such stuff keeps us alive, but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or less
dangerous lunatics in the real world.
Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and play myself, I know the folly and peril of it better
then
you do. And when I see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has
been
stumbled on by the blind forces of capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise
women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said to have
any
political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realize that I had better stop writing plays for a while to
discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.
1. A suitable title to the passage would be:
(a) you can’t hear a pin-drop now-a-days.
(b) capitalism and labor disintegration: Pinning the Blame.
(c) the Saga of the Non Safety Pins.
(d) reaching the Pinnacle of Capitalistic Success.
(e) the making of a pin
2. Why do you think that the author gives the example of Adam Smith?
(a) Because he thinks that Adam Smith was a boaster without any facts to back his utterance.
(b) Because he wants to give us an example of something undesirable that Adam Smith was proud of.
(c) Because he is proud to be a believer in a tenet of production that even a great man like Adam Smith
boasted about.
(d) Because he feels that Adam Smith was right when he said that it took 18 men to make a
pin.
(e) Because Adam Smith was a great economist.
3. Which of the following is true as far as pins are concerned?
(a) The cost of pins is more now-a-days to produce.
(b) Earlier, workmen made pin with a lot of love and care.
(c) Pinball machines are the standard pin producing gadgets now-a-days.
(d) The pins produced no-a-days are cheaper but useless.
(e) It took much longer to make a pin earlier.
4. The reason that children have to be taught that stealing a pin is wrong is that
(a) they have an amazing proclivity to steal them right from childhood.
(b) stealing a pin will lead to the cops being called.
(c) stealing a pin would lead to stealing bigger and bigger things in the future.
(d) stealing an insignificant thing like a pin smacks of kleptomania.
(e) pins are so common and cheap that one would not even be considered stealing by them.
5. It may be inferred from the passage that the author:
(a) is a supporter of the craftsmanship over bulk mechanized production.
(b) is a supporter of assembly line production.
(c) is a supporter of all women learning how to shear a sheep.
(d) is a supporter of men learning how to milk a cow.
(e) None of the above.
6. Which of the following is not against the modern capitalistic system of mass production?
(a) John Ruskin. (b) Goldsmith.
(c) Adam Smith. (d) William Morris (e) Silverman
7. Goldsmith’s dictum, “wealth accumulates, and men decay, “in the context of the passage, probably
means
(a) the more wealthy people get, they become more and more corrupt.
(b) the more rich people get, the more they forget the nuances of individual ability.
(c) people may have a lot of money, but they have to die and decay someday.
(d) the more a company gets wealthy, the less they take care of people.
(e) money brings in decay and disease.
8. When the author says that a woman now is likely to not know about any connection between sheep
and clothes, he is probably being:
(a) vindictive. (b) chauvinistic. (c) satirical. (d) demeaning
(e) extremely critical
9. Which of the following can be a suitable first line to introduce the hypothetical next paragraph at the
end of passage?
(a) The distribution of leisure is not a term that can be explained in a few words.
(b) If people wear clothes they hardly seem to think about the method of production.
(c) Machines are the gods of our age and there seems to be no atheists.
(d) Machines are the demigods of our age.
(e) None of the above.
PASSAGE-3
Now let us turn back to inquire whether sending our capital abroad, and consenting to be taxed to pay
emigration
fares to get rid of the women and men who are left without employment in consequence, is all that capitalism
can do
when our employers, who act for our capitalists in industrial affairs, and are more or less capitalists
themselves in
the earlier stages of capitalistic development, find that they can sell no more of their goods at a profit, or
indeed at
all, in their own country. Clearly they cannot send abroad the capital they have already invested, because it
has all
been eaten up by the workers leaving in its place factories and railways and mines and the like; and these
cannot
be packed into a ship’s hold and sent to Africa. It is only the freshly saved capital that can be sent out of the
country. This, as we have seen, does go abroad in heaps of finished products. But the British land held by
him on
long lease, must, when once he has sold all the goods at home that his British customers can afford to buy,
either
shut up his works until the customers have worn out their stock of what they have bought, which would
bankrupt him
(for the landlord will not wait), or else sell his superfluous goods somewhere else; that is, he must send them
abroad. Now it is not easy to send them to civilized countries, because they practice protection, which means
that
they impose heavy taxes on foreign goods. Uncivilized countries, without protection, and inhabited by natives
to
whom gaudy calicoes and cheap showy brassware are dazzling and delightful novelties, are the best places to
make for at first.
But a trader requires a settled government to put down the habit of plundering strangers. This is not a habit of
simple tribes, who are often friendly and honest. It is what civilized men do where there is no law to restrain
them.
Until quite recent times it was extremely dangerous to he wrecked on our coasts, as wrecking, which meant
plundering wrecked ships and refraining from any officious efforts to save the lives of their crews was a well-
established business in many places on our shores. The Chinese still remember some astonishing outbursts of
looting perpetrated by English ladies of high position, at moments when laws were suspended and priceless
works
of art were to be had for the grabbing. When trading with aborigines begins with the visit of a single ship, the
cannons and cutlasses carried may be quite sufficient to overawe the natives if they are troublesome. The real
difficulty begins when so many ships come that a little trading station of white men grows up and attracts the
white
never-do-wells and violent roughs who are always being squeezed out of civilization by the pressure of law and
order. It is these riff–raff who turn the place into a sort of hell in which sooner or later missionaries are
murdered
and traders plundered. Their home governments are appealed to put a stop to this. A gunboat is sent out and
inquiry made. The report after the inquiry is that their is nothing to be done but set up a civilized government,
with a
post office, police, troops and the navy in the offing. In short, the place is added to some civilized empire. And
the
civilized taxpayer pays the bill without getting a farthing of the profits. Of course the business does not stop
there.
The riff-raff who have created the emergency move out just beyond the boundary of the annexed territory,
and are
as great a nuisance as ever to the traders when they have exhausted the purchasing power of the included
natives
and push on after fresh customers. Again they call on their home government to civilize a further area; and so
bit
by bit the civilized empire grows at the expense of the home taxpayers, without any intention or approval on
their
part, until at last although all their real patriotism is centered on their own people and confined to their own
country,
their own rulers, and their own religious faith; they find that the centre of their beloved realm has shifted to the
other hemisphere. That is how we in the British Islands have found our centre moved from London to the Suez
Canal, and are now in the position that out of every hundred of our fellow – subjects, in whose defense we are
expected to shed the last drop of our blood, only 11 are whites or even Christians, In our bewilderment some
of us
declare that the Empire is a burden and a blunder, whilst others glory in it as triumph. You and I need not
argue
with them just now, our point for the moment being that, whether blunder or glory the British Empire was quite
unintentional. What should have been undertaken only as a most carefully considered political effort has been
a
series of commercial adventures thrust on us by capitalists forced by their own system to cater to foreign
customers
before their own country’s need were one-tenth satisfied.
10. It may be inferred that the passage was written
(a) when Britain was still a colonial power.
(b) when the author was in a bad mood.
(c) when the author was working in the foreign service of Britain.
(d) when the author’s country was overrun by the British.
(e) after Britain no longer remained a colonial power.
11. According to the author, the habit of plundering the strangers
(a) is usually found in tribes of civilized nations.
(b) is usually found in the barbaric tribes of the uncivilized nations.
(c) is a habit limited only to English ladies of high position.
(d) is a usual habit with all white-skinned people.
(e) is usually not found in simple tribes but civilized people.
12. Which of the following does not come under the aegis of capital already invested?
(a) Construction of factories. (b) Development of a mine.
(c) Trade of finished products. (d) All of the above.
(e) None of the above
13. Which of the following may be called the main complaint of the author?
(a) The race of people he belongs to is looters and plunderers.
(b) The capitalists are taking over the entire world.
(c) It is a way of life for English ladies to loot and plunder.
(d) The English taxpayer has to pay for the upkeep of territories he did not want.
(e) Build post offices in colonies
14. Why do capitalistic traders prefer the uncivilized countries to the civilized ones?
(a) Because they find it easier to rule them.
(b) Because civilized countries would make them pay protection duties.
(c) Because civilized countries would make their own goods.
(d) Because uncivilized countries like the cheap and gaudy goods of bad quality all capitalists produce.
(e) Because uncivilized countries welcome them.
15. The word ‘officious’, in the context of the passage, means
(a) officialdom (b) official (c) rude (d) oafish
(e) self-important
16. According to the author, the main reason why capitalist go abroad to sell their goods is
(a) that they want to civilize the underdeveloped countries of the world by giving them their goods.
(b) that they have to have new places to sell their surplus goods some where in new markets.
(c) that they actually want to rule new lands and selling goods is an excuse.
(d) none of the above.
(e) they want huge profits.
Answers PASSAGE -2
1. (b) The passage explains that how capitalism has led to disintegration of
Labor. Other options are not relevant.
2. (b) The passage describes that author feels that Adam Smith boasted about
something that was undesirable. Options A and C are not supported by the passage. Option D is not
supported by the tone of the passage.
3. (e) The passage describes that there was a time when pin makers would buy the material ; shape it;
make the head and the point ; ornament it ; and take it to the market ; sell it .They knew each and every
process from beginning to end but they couldn’t afford to sell anybody a piper of pins for the farthing .
Option A and C are not true and Option C only partially true.
4. (e) It can be understood that pins are so cheap that it a child steals it, it would not be considered as
stealing .Option A and D are not true and Option C is not supported by passage.
5. (a) The author is clearly against machines taking the place of men.
Option B, C and E not supported by the passage.
6. (c) The passage explains that Adam smith was the supporter of mass
production. Options A, B and D are not supported by the passage.
7. (b) The passage explains that as people become richer they lose out on
individual abilities .This option fully explains the statement. Other options
are not relevant or only partially true.
8. (c) He is attacking the fact by making fun of it. Other options are not true .
9. (e) None of the given statements continue with what the author has said in
the last paragraph.
Answers PASSAGE -3
10. (a) The passage refers to the British Government as the Empire and talks about the way it takes over
the foreign territories.
11. (e) The passage stipulates that habit of plundering strangers is not the habit of simple tribes who are
friendly and honest instead, it is the habit of civilized men where there is no law to restrain their activities.
Options B, C and D are not supported by the passage.
12. (c) The passage explains that capital invested can’t be sent abroad as it has been eaten up by the
workers. Moreover, it is the freshly saved capital that can be sent out of the country and it goes abroad in the
heaps of finished products. Option A, B are examples of capital already invested and thus not correct.
13. (d) It can be understood from the passage that civilized empire grows at the expenses of home tax
payers, without any intention or approval on their part until real patriotism is centered on their own people and
confined on their own country , rulers and their religious faith.
Options A, B, C and E are not supported by the passage.
14. (b) End of first paragraph of the passage says that civilized countries practice protection which means
they impose heavy taxes on foreign goods. This makes the goods costlier. Options A, C, D and E are only
partially true.
15. (e) The passage states officious means self important according to the passage
16. (c) The passage explains that though the capital seem to come with intention of trade , but soon the
gun boats follows to make inquiry and the result after inquiry is that the government is set up in the new land .
Option A is not supported by the passage. Option B and E deal with making profits and are therefore only
partially true.
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