After successfully completing the CAT 2016 sprint series and the SNAP 2016 sprint series, we are back with the XAT 2017 – Critical Reasoning, Decision Making Marathon – 4 to boost your prep. This series will consist of 15 sets of questions that will test your reasoning skills and will enable you to do well in the crucial Decision Making section of XAT 2017.
You may check out the entire series here: XAT 2017 – Critical Reasoning, Decision Making Marathon
XAT 2017 – Critical Reasoning, Decision Making Marathon – 4
Directions: The questions in this section are based on the reasoning contained in brief statements or passages. For some questions, more than one of the choices could conceivably answer the question. However, you are to choose the best answer; that is, the response that most accurately and completely answers the question. You should not make assumptions that are by commonsense standards implausible, superfluous, or incompatible with the passage. After you have chosen the best answer, blacken the corresponding space on your answer sheet.
1. Talbert: Chess is beneficial for school-age children. It is enjoyable, encourages foresight and logical thinking, and discourages carelessness, inattention, and impulsiveness. In short, it promotes mental maturity.
Sklar: My objection to teaching chess to children is that it diverts mental activity from something with societal value, such as science, into something that has no societal value.
Talbert’s and Sklar’s statements provide the strongest support for holding that they disagree with each other over whether
(A) chess promotes mental maturity
(B) many activities promote mental maturity just as well as chess does
(C) chess is socially valuable and science is not
(D) children should be taught to play chess
(E) children who neither play chess nor study science are mentally immature
2. Marcia: Not all vegetarian diets lead to nutritional deficiencies. Research shows that vegetarians can obtain a full complement of proteins and minerals from nonanimal foods.
Theodora: You are wrong in claiming that vegetarianism cannot lead to nutritional deficiencies. If most people became vegetarians, some of those losing jobs due to the collapse of many meat-based industries would fall into poverty and hence be unable to afford a nutritionally adequate diet.
Theodora’s reply to Marcia’s argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that her reply
(A) is directed toward disproving a claim that Marcia did not make
(B) ignores the results of the research cited by Marcia
(C) takes for granted that no meat-based industries will collapse unless most people become vegetarians
(D) uses the word “diet” in a nontechnical sense whereas Marcia’s argument uses this term in a medical sense
(E) takes for granted that people losing jobs in meat‑based industries would become vegetarians
3. Musicologist: Classification of a musical instrument depends on the mechanical action through which it produces music. So the piano is properly called
a percussion instrument, not a stringed instrument. Even though the vibration of the piano’s strings is what makes its sound, the strings are caused to vibrate by the impact of hammers.
Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main conclusion of the musicologist’s argument?
(A) Musical instruments should be classified according to the mechanical actions through which they produce sound.
(B) Musical instruments should not be classified based on the way musicians interact with them.
(C) Some people classify the piano as a stringed instrument because of the way the piano produces sound.
(D) The piano should be classified as a stringed instrument rather than as a percussion instrument.
(E) It is correct to classify the piano as a percussion instrument rather than as a stringed instrument.
4. In a vast ocean region, phosphorus levels have doubled in the past few decades due to agricultural runoff pouring out of a large river nearby. The phosphorus stimulates the growth of plankton near the ocean surface. Decaying plankton fall to the ocean floor, where bacteria devour them, consuming oxygen in the process. Due to the resulting oxygen depletion, few fish can survive in this region.
Which one of the following can be properly inferred from the information above?
(A) The agricultural runoff pouring out of the river contributes to the growth of plankton near the ocean surface.
(B) Before phosphorus levels doubled in the ocean region, most fish were able to survive in that region.
(C) If agricultural runoff ceased pouring out of the river, there would be no bacteria on the ocean floor devouring decaying plankton.
(D) The quantity of agricultural runoff pouring out of the river has doubled in the past few decades.
(E) The amount of oxygen in a body of water is in general inversely proportional to the level of phosphorus in that body of water.
5. Psychologists observing a shopping mall parking lot found that, on average, drivers spent 39 seconds leaving a parking space when another car was quietly waiting to enter it, 51 seconds if the driver of the waiting car honked impatiently, but only 32 seconds leaving a space when no one was waiting. This suggests that drivers feel possessive of their parking spaces even when leaving them, and that this possessiveness increases in reaction to indications that another driver wants the space.
Which one of the following, if true, most weakens the reasoning?
(A) The more pressure most drivers feel because others are waiting for them to perform maneuvers with their cars, the less quickly they are able to perform them.
(B) The amount of time drivers spend entering a parking space is not noticeably affected by whether other drivers are waiting for them to do so, nor by whether those other drivers are honking impatiently.
(C) It is considerably more difficult and time-consuming for a driver to maneuver a car out of a parking space if another car waiting to enter that space is nearby.
(D) Parking spaces in shopping mall parking lots are unrepresentative of parking spaces in general with respect to the likelihood that other cars will be waiting to enter them.
(E) Almost any driver leaving a parking space will feel angry at another driver who honks impatiently, and this anger will influence the amount of time spent leaving the space.
6. Shark teeth are among the most common vertebrate fossils; yet fossilized shark skeletons are much less common—indeed, comparatively rare among fossilized vertebrate skeletons.
Which one of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the apparent paradox described above?
(A) Unlike the bony skeletons of other vertebrates, shark skeletons are composed of cartilage, and teeth and bone are much more likely to fossilize than cartilage is.
(B) The rare fossilized skeletons of sharks that are found are often found in areas other than those in which fossils of shark teeth are plentiful.
(C) Fossils of sharks’ teeth are quite difficult to distinguish from fossils of other kinds of teeth.
(D) Some species of sharks alive today grow and lose many sets of teeth during their lifetimes.
(E) The physical and chemical processes involved in the fossilization of sharks’ teeth are as common as those involved in the fossilization of shark skeletons.
7. Critic: Photographers, by deciding which subjects to depict and how to depict them, express their own worldviews in their photographs, however realistically those photographs may represent reality. Thus, photographs are interpretations of reality.
The argument’s conclusion is properly drawn if which one of the following is assumed?
(A) Even representing a subject realistically can involve interpreting that subject.
(B) To express a worldview is to interpret reality.
(C) All visual art expresses the artist’s worldview.
(D) Any interpretation of reality involves the expression of a worldview.
(E) Nonrealistic photographs, like realistic photographs, express the worldviews of the photographers who take them.
8. Geologists recently discovered marks that closely resemble worm tracks in a piece of sandstone. These marks were made more than half a billion years earlier than the earliest known traces of multicellular animal life. Therefore, the marks are probably the traces of geological processes rather than of worms.
Which one of the following, if true, most weakens the argument?
(A) It is sometimes difficult to estimate the precise age of a piece of sandstone.
(B) Geological processes left a substantial variety of marks in sandstone more than half a billion years before the earliest known multicellular animal life existed.
(C) There were some early life forms other than worms that are known to have left marks that are hard to distinguish from those found in the piece of sandstone.
(D) At the place where the sandstone was found, the only geological processes that are likely to mark sandstone in ways that resemble worm tracks could not have occurred at the time the marks were made.
(E) Most scientists knowledgeable about early animal life believe that worms are likely to have been among the earliest forms of multicellular animal life on Earth, but evidence of their earliest existence is scarce because they are composed solely of soft tissue.
9. Often a type of organ or body structure is the only physically feasible means of accomplishing a given task, so it should be unsurprising if, like eyes or wings, that type of organ or body structure evolves at different times in a number of completely unrelated species. After all, whatever the difference of heritage and habitat, as organisms animals have fundamentally similar needs and so _______.
Which one of the following most logically completes the last sentence of the passage?
(A) will often live in the same environment as other species quite different from themselves
(B) will in many instances evolve similar adaptations enabling them to satisfy these needs
(C) will develop adaptations allowing them to satisfy these needs
(D) will resemble other species having different biological needs
(E) will all develop eyes or wings as adaptations
10. Engineer: Thermophotovoltaic generators are devices that convert heat into electricity. The process of manufacturing steel produces huge amounts of heat that currently go to waste. So if steel-manufacturing plants could feed the heat they produce into thermophotovoltaic generators, they would greatly reduce their electric bills, thereby saving money.
Which one of the following is an assumption on which the engineer’s argument depends?
(A) There is no other means of utilizing the heat produced by the steel-manufacturing process that would be more cost effective than installing thermophotovoltaic generators.
(B) Using current technology, it would be possible for steel-manufacturing plants to feed the heat they produce into thermophotovoltaic generators in such a way that those generators could convert at least some of that heat into electricity.
(C) The amount steel-manufacturing plants would save on their electric bills by feeding heat into thermophotovoltaic generators would be sufficient to cover the cost of purchasing and installing those generators.
(D) At least some steel-manufacturing plants rely on electricity as their primary source of energy in the steel-manufacturing process.
(E) There are at least some steel-manufacturing plants that could greatly reduce their electricity bills only if they used some method of converting wasted heat or other energy from the steel-manufacturing process into electricity.
Answer key:
1. D
2. A
3. E
4. A
5. A
6. A
7. B
8. D
9. B
10. C
Meanwhile, for those who want to solve quality questions from past year XAT papers, you may check out our ongoing XAT 2017 Sprint Preparation Series.
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