Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, was one of motor racing’s most influential

engineers. He summed up his philosophy as “simplify, then add lightness”. A stripped-down,

featherweight car might be slower on the straights than a beefy muscle-machine, he reasoned.
But it would be faster everywhere else. Between 1962 and 1978 Lotus won seven Formula One
constructors championships.

It appears to be an uncommon insight. A paper published in Nature suggests that humans

struggle with subtractive thinking. When asked to improve something, they tend to suggest
adding new things rather than stripping back what is already there, even when additions lead
to sub-par results.

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The research was motivated by everyday observation, says Gabrielle Adams, who cites folk
wisdom such as “less is more” and “keep it simple”. Along with colleagues at the University of
Virginia, Dr Adams conducted a series of observational studies. In one, participants were asked
to alter a pattern on a grid of coloured squares to make it symmetrical. Although that could be
done equally well by adding new squares or by deleting existing ones, 78% chose the additive
option. Other tasks gave similar results….

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Nor was this tendency confined to the lab. Of 827 suggestions received by the new boss of an
American university for how the institution could be improved, 581 involved adding new things,
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such as more grants for studying abroad. Just 70 suggested removing something, such as
preferential admissions for children of alumni.

Having established that addition does indeed seem to be more popular than subtraction, the
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next step was to work out why. One possibility was that people were considering subtractive
options, but deliberately choosing not to pursue them. Another was that they were not even
thinking of them in the first place.

Attempts to tilt the pitch in favour of subtraction made people more willing to try it, but only to
a point. One experiment asked participants to redesign a lopsided Lego structure so that it
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could support a house-brick. Participants could earn a dollar for fixing the problem, but each
piece of Lego they added cut that reward by ten cents. Even then, only 41% worked out that
simplifying the structure by removing a single block, rather than fortifying it by adding more,
was the way to maximise the payout.

Practice improved people’s chances of spotting subtractive solutions, suggesting that many
were simply not thinking of the possibility, at least at first. That conclusion was buttressed by
results showing that people were less likely to try subtraction when they were under “cognitive
load”—in other words, having to perform a second, unrelated task at the same time.

What all this amounts to, says Benjamin Converse, is evidence for a new entry in the list of
“cognitive biases” that skew how humans think. The 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic
Sciences was awarded for demonstrating that humans are not “rational” in the way economists had
used the word. Instead of thinking a problem through and coming up with an ideal solution, they
tend to use cognitive shortcuts that are fast and—mostly—“good enough”.

Q 1 Which of the following can be inferred from Paragraph 1?

1.Lotus used the least number of parts in its sportscars.

2.Colin Chapman defined the rules for Formula One constructors.
3.Lotus sports cars had the most power and the least weight.

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4.Lotus cars remained undefeated in F1 from 1962 to 1978.
Q 2 This passage is most likely an extract from …
1.Sports Magazine
2.Journal of Psychology
3.Research Paper
4.Social Magazine

Gabriel Adams?

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Q 3 Which of the following, if true, would be INCONSISTENT with the observational studies of

1.Asked to improve the city’s transport system, most people suggested building overpasses.
2.Asked to write an essay, most people kept to the stipulated word limit.
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3.In some European cities urban planners did away with traffic lights to make streets safer.
4.Asked to improve the marketing strategy, the team devised a new tagline for the product.
Q4 Which of the following would the author DISAGREE with?
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1.It is natural to most people to choose the additive option.

2.People generally believe in the ‘less is more, keep it simple’ principle.
3.Context-switching can affect one’s rational judgement.
4.People think that additive options maximise the payout

Though scientists have tried for decades to design pain relievers that are both more effective
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and less addictive than opiates, most efforts have run aground. At the heart of these failures
lies a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of pain, says Clifford Woolf, one of the
world’s foremost pain scientists. It is not a single phenomenon that can be addressed with a
universal analgesic, but consists of distinct types that demand targeted therapeutic
approaches. Woolf and colleagues at Harvard Medical School are convinced they are finally just
a few years away from identifying powerful precision painkillers that could not only safely
replace opiates, but effectively target distinct pain types. Their end game is to eliminate
chronic pain all together.

All neurons express multiple types of sodium, potassium, and calcium ion channels that together
regulate their ability to translate stimuli from the external world to the rest of the nervous system.
But Woolf, Bean, and Binshtok knew that pain-sensing neurons, called nociceptors, feature unique
large-pore ion channels not found on other types of neurons — a Nobel Prize winning discovery
made in the late 1990s. Woolf, Bean, and Binshtok soon identified a way to exploit these unique ion
channels to shut down signaling on activated mouse nociceptors, while leaving all other neurons
untouched.

The implications were vast. Because these compounds worked exclusively on nociceptors that
were sensing painful stimuli, they could squelch pain at the source without disabling neurons

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engaged in other functions. By comparison, most clinically used analgesics tend to hit diverse
targets in the central and peripheral nervous systems. Opioids, for example, act not just on
nociceptors, but the brain, spinal cord, and the nervous system in the gut, which can lead to
sedation, physical dependence, respiratory depression, and death.

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The scientists knew that making the leap from animal models and basic science—the research
at the heart of human knowledge—to clinical drug development would be challenging, but they
also understood that their discovery opened a major new avenue for the treatment of pain. A
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decade and a half later, their finding remains a big deal to the field of pain science.

Despite the risks of addiction and overdose, opioids have been used to treat pain for millennia.
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Egyptian medical papyri from 1550 BC show that healers used poppy plants to cure breast
abscesses and to calm crying children, and that tinctures of opium were mixed into eye drops
and ointments. But over the long term, opioids aren’t an effective treatment for pain, not just
because of the potential for deadly side effects, but because the brain demands higher and
higher doses to produce the same effect. A recent review published in the Journal of the
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American Medical Association found that, across a variety of chronic conditions, opioids
reduced pain by an average of less than one point on a 10-point scale.

Less ancient options for pain mitigation—NSAIDs, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, corticosteroids,

and anticonvulsant drugs that are prescribed to suppress nerve pain—are clinically effective in
only a minority of patients with chronic pain and are also known to have deleterious effects on
cells that are unrelated to their pain targets, including cardiovascular tissue.
Q 1 According to the passage, most efforts to find a pain reliever to replace opiates have run
aground because:

1.Pain is multifaceted, various, and a rarely understood phenomenon.

2.Opiates have been successfully used as a pain reliever for thousands of years.
3.Nociceptors as the primary pain sensing neurons were a recent discovery.
4.Pain is subjective to the individual and there is no objective test to measure it.
Q 2 It can be inferred from the passage that scientists are looking for a ‘more effective’ pain
reliever than opiates most likely because:
1.Opiate pain relievers are found to cause unpredictable side-effects.
2.Opiates are used out of a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of pain.
3.Opiates are simply not effective when it comes to chronic pain.
4.Opiates while being marginally useful in relieving pain carry serious risks.
Q 3 Which of the following best describes the discovery of Woolf, Bean, and Binshtok?

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1.They discovered an analgesic that can replace opiates.
2.They discovered that nociceptors were the primary pain sensing neurons.
3.They discovered the possibility of selectively blocking nociceptors.
4.They discovered compounds that could block the excitability of neurons.
Q 4 All of the following statements can be inferred from the passage EXCEPT:
1.The discovery of nociceptors was of critical significance in pain science.
2.Woolf, Bean and Binshtok’s goal is to eliminate the need for opioids for pain relief.

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3.The discovery of compounds that work exclusively on nociceptors was accidental.
4.Painkillers that are used to treat chronic pain affect multiple parts of the body.
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Primitive oddities. Lesser beasts. Strange creatures in an evolutionary backwater. Since the
18th century, Australia’s mammals – including koalas, kangaroos, wombats, echidnas,
possums and platypuses – have often been viewed unkindly by English observers.
…
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When Europeans first arrived in Australia, the wildlife quickly became central to how the wider
world came to see the country. It is well known that the colonial machine sought to undermine
Australia’s First Nations people through racist descriptions, but animals also became a key part
of the nation’s reputation at this time. It served the colonial political narrative to paint
Australia’s fauna as primitive and inferior, because this rendered the continent and its forms of
life as inferior – something that could be used to strengthen the justification for invasion. It
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was all part of the notion of terra nullius, the racial legal argument for claiming sovereignty
based on the assertion that Australia was ‘nobody’s land’. Despite at least 60,000 years of
precise land-management, Aboriginal people were too ‘uncivilised’ to hold ownership. The
ways in which the animals and people were regarded became thoroughly entwined as the
imperial establishment, through their denigrative written descriptions, created a hierarchy in
which Europe was artificially made to look superior to Australia in every respect: its people, its
climate and its animals.

Even today, I believe we have subconsciously inherited the colonial framings of yesterdays’
naturalists. The words that continue to be used to describe these wonderful species carry
heavy colonial baggage.

I would forgive you for asking whether this really matters. ‘Platypuses are weird,’ you might say, ‘get
over it.’ I think it comes down to how life is valued. Australia has the worst recent extinction rate of
mammals on Earth. More than 30 species have disappeared since European invasion. Of all the
world’s recent mammal extinctions, 35 per cent happened in this one country. And reputations
matter: we protect what we value. In some cases, uniqueness can make species more valuable, but
if we dismiss Australia’s fauna as being nothing but strange and primitive outliers … it becomes so
much harder to argue for their protection. Conservation is already extremely hard in Australia.
Threats include the climate crisis, habitat destruction … an army of introduced species, and
pollution, to name just a few. The work conservationists are doing to protect environments is
astonishing, but this work happens against a backdrop of limited federal support. Australia has no
legislation on its statute books that obliges the government to actively protect its threatened
species. This leaves species extremely vulnerable when their value is stacked against pressure
from developers and industry.

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In the face of all those challenges, describing species differently may sound like a small thing.
But we should take the time to consider how we have inherited the reputations we give to
certain animals, and where these assumptions have come from. Australia has powerful
industrial lobbies for mining and farming. These special interests have far more political power
than marsupials and platypuses. Neither politics nor extinction is simple. It’s not easy to show
that a species became extinct because of how the world thinks about it. Nonetheless, an unfair,

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socially ingrained reputation for weirdness and inferiority really can’t help.

Q 1 Which of the following best captures the central idea of the passage?
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1.The perception that Australian people and fauna are inferior to European ones can be traced
back to the country's colonial history.
2.A narrative that painted that Australian fauna as primitive oddities which served the colonial
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and vested interests has put the Australian wildlife at risk.

3.Racist colonial descriptions of Indigenous Australians and mammals has created a
perception that they are more primitive than Europe’s.
4.A narrative that described the Australian continent as terra nullius termed indigenous people
as ‘uncivilised’ and its fauna as ‘primitive.’
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Q 2 According to the passage, the narrative used by the British establishment to colonise
Australia was that:
1.Australian people and animals belonged to a different evolutionary age.
2.European civilization at that time was the final product of the evolutionary process.
3.The indigenous people of Australia had no legal claim to the land they inhabited.
4.The aborigines did not know land management even after 60,000 years of habitation.
Q 3 The author is likely to DISAGREE with all of the following EXCEPT:
1.There were no differences between the mammals in Europe and kangaroos in Australia.
2.Compared to European culture, Australia was primitive and inferior.
3.Australian fauna was as fully evolved as was the European fauna.
4.Our relationships with species hardly influence their ability to survive and thrive.
Q 4 According to the author which of the following is the most damaging effect of the
denigrative descriptions of Australian fauna?

It led to the lack of federal support for conservation.

It led to the extinction of more than 30 species unique to Australia.
The unique species of Australia came to be thought of as expendable.
The narratives came to be endorsed by the current establishment.

When polarization reaches a state of equilibrium, with a society divided into binary, mutually

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distrustful political camps where neither side has an incentive to pursue a depolarizing
strategy, it has pernicious consequences for democracy: parties become unwilling to
compromise, voters lose confidence in public institutions, and normative support for
democracy may decline. In extreme cases, each camp begins to view the opposing camp and
its policies as an existential threat to its own way of life or the nation as a whole. They come to

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perceive the “Other” in such negative terms that a normal political adversary competing for
power is transformed into an enemy to be vanquished.
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1.In a completely polarised society, the mutually distrustful camps give up on efforts to
depolarise and treat rivals as enemies to be vanquished in their quest for power.
2.Democracy is seriously undermined in a society where political polarisation has created
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binary, distrustful camps and they become enemies in their quest for power.
3.Democracy is seriously eroded in a society where political polarisation has created two
hostile and distrustful groups that compete for power without any incentive to depolarise.
4.When political polarisation in a society is complete with binary, distrustful camps, it has
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dangerous consequences for democracy as each group treats the other as mere enemies.

In recent years serious concerns emerged over the state of democracy. Many democracy
indices are reporting a year-on-year drift towards less liberal politics. The coronavirus
pandemic has intensified these fears. There is another side of the democratic equation,
however. Experts argue that governments, institutions, political parties, citizens, and civil
society organizations have gradually begun to push back in defense of democracy and have
developed responses to the democratic malaise at multiple levels. While the democracy
problems have been grave and far-reaching, a spirit of democratic resistance has slowly taken
shape.
1.Despite serious concerns over the state of democracy which were intensified by the
pandemic, a spirit of democratic resistance has turned the tide in favour of democracy.
2.Experts argue that while the decline in the state of democracy has been severe, and was
aggravated by the pandemic, democratic resistance is gradually emerging to set things right.
3.In response to the recent shift in the global democratic balance, stakeholders including
political parties and citizens have begun to work towards its restoration.
4.Experts argue that despite fears over the current state of democracy and decline of liberal
politics, there is significant democratic resistance and a push back in defence of democracy.

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Nature has become as rare as a magic unicorn for most of us, as we have had a fundamental
shift in our society. For tens of thousands of years, human beings essentially lived either
agrarian or hunter-gatherer lifestyles—both nature-based methods of survival. Even up until
the early 1900s, 90 percent of the population of North America lived in rural areas. Now more

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than 90 percent of our society lives in urban areas flooded by the white noise and sensory
overload of the information age. As a result, our technology has outrun our biology. While our
society has undergone a seismic shift in the blink of an eye, our biology simply has not been
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able to evolve and adapt quickly enough.
1.Our biology has not been able to evolve and catch up with the urban lifestyle and
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advancement in technology of the last 100 years, as for thousands of years we have had a
hunter-gatherer or agrarian lifestyle.
2.Thousands of years of agrarian or hunter-gatherer lifestyle has made us biologically
unsuitable for urban lifestyles of the information age which happened in the last few hundred
years.
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3.Our biology has not evolved fast enough to adapt to our current urban lifestyle overwhelming
us with its sensory overload because for centuries our life was based on hunter-gatherer or
agrarian methods of survival.
4.The sudden change in our lifestyle that happened in the last 100 years to an urban lifestyle
with the sensory overload of the information age has resulted in technology overtaking the
pace of our biological evolution.

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) below, when properly sequenced would yield a
coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and
key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. There is no objection to the name, so long as it does not lead to the idea that they have a
different action from other narcotics, or more precisely, narcotico-irritants.
2. There are no such medicines as pure narcotics.
3. This and some other agents which have been inhaled for the prevention of pain are often
called anaesthetics.
4. Chloroform belongs to the large class of medicines known as narcotico-irritants.

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