Practice Reading Comprehension Practice Questions with Detailed Solutions – Level 3

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

When a technology lets us do more with less, the instinctive conclusion is that we will end up using less. In 1865 the English economist William Stanley Jevons questioned this comfortable assumption. He observed that more efficient steam engines had made coal cheaper to use, and he argued that Britain's appetite for coal would grow rather than shrink, because every new saving opened fresh uses for the fuel. The idea, now known as the rebound effect, has lost none of its sting.

Consider a farmer who switches from flood irrigation to drip lines. Each acre now needs far less water, and policymakers naturally record the difference as water saved. Yet the farmer finds that the same well can now irrigate more land. He may extend cultivation to fallow plots or shift to a thirstier, more profitable crop. The aquifer beneath the village is then drawn down as quickly as before, perhaps faster. The efficiency was real; the conservation was imagined.

None of this means that efficiency is a mistake. A family that buys an LED bulb rarely leaves the lights burning all night simply because the bill has fallen. In many such cases the rebound is small and most of the saving holds. The point is subtler: efficiency changes the cost of using a resource, and people respond to costs. Whether total consumption falls depends on how strongly demand reacts, and that cannot be read off an engineering diagram.

The lesson for policy is therefore not to abandon efficiency but to stop treating it as a substitute for limits. Subsidising drip irrigation while leaving groundwater extraction unmeasured is like widening a road and expecting traffic to thin out. Where a resource is genuinely scarce, gains in efficiency need to be paired with a cap, a price or a shared rule that keeps the freed-up quantity from simply being consumed elsewhere. Such rules can be agreed upon by village communities themselves; they need not be dictated from distant capitals.

Efficiency, in short, is a tool and not a destination. It hands us a choice: to bank the saving or to spend it. Societies that forget they are making that choice tend to spend it without noticing.

In the context of the passage, the phrase "has lost none of its sting" most nearly means that the idea

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

When a technology lets us do more with less, the instinctive conclusion is that we will end up using less. In 1865 the English economist William Stanley Jevons questioned this comfortable assumption. He observed that more efficient steam engines had made coal cheaper to use, and he argued that Britain's appetite for coal would grow rather than shrink, because every new saving opened fresh uses for the fuel. The idea, now known as the rebound effect, has lost none of its sting.

Consider a farmer who switches from flood irrigation to drip lines. Each acre now needs far less water, and policymakers naturally record the difference as water saved. Yet the farmer finds that the same well can now irrigate more land. He may extend cultivation to fallow plots or shift to a thirstier, more profitable crop. The aquifer beneath the village is then drawn down as quickly as before, perhaps faster. The efficiency was real; the conservation was imagined.

None of this means that efficiency is a mistake. A family that buys an LED bulb rarely leaves the lights burning all night simply because the bill has fallen. In many such cases the rebound is small and most of the saving holds. The point is subtler: efficiency changes the cost of using a resource, and people respond to costs. Whether total consumption falls depends on how strongly demand reacts, and that cannot be read off an engineering diagram.

The lesson for policy is therefore not to abandon efficiency but to stop treating it as a substitute for limits. Subsidising drip irrigation while leaving groundwater extraction unmeasured is like widening a road and expecting traffic to thin out. Where a resource is genuinely scarce, gains in efficiency need to be paired with a cap, a price or a shared rule that keeps the freed-up quantity from simply being consumed elsewhere. Such rules can be agreed upon by village communities themselves; they need not be dictated from distant capitals.

Efficiency, in short, is a tool and not a destination. It hands us a choice: to bank the saving or to spend it. Societies that forget they are making that choice tend to spend it without noticing.

What can be inferred from the statement "The efficiency was real; the conservation was imagined"?

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

When a technology lets us do more with less, the instinctive conclusion is that we will end up using less. In 1865 the English economist William Stanley Jevons questioned this comfortable assumption. He observed that more efficient steam engines had made coal cheaper to use, and he argued that Britain's appetite for coal would grow rather than shrink, because every new saving opened fresh uses for the fuel. The idea, now known as the rebound effect, has lost none of its sting.

Consider a farmer who switches from flood irrigation to drip lines. Each acre now needs far less water, and policymakers naturally record the difference as water saved. Yet the farmer finds that the same well can now irrigate more land. He may extend cultivation to fallow plots or shift to a thirstier, more profitable crop. The aquifer beneath the village is then drawn down as quickly as before, perhaps faster. The efficiency was real; the conservation was imagined.

None of this means that efficiency is a mistake. A family that buys an LED bulb rarely leaves the lights burning all night simply because the bill has fallen. In many such cases the rebound is small and most of the saving holds. The point is subtler: efficiency changes the cost of using a resource, and people respond to costs. Whether total consumption falls depends on how strongly demand reacts, and that cannot be read off an engineering diagram.

The lesson for policy is therefore not to abandon efficiency but to stop treating it as a substitute for limits. Subsidising drip irrigation while leaving groundwater extraction unmeasured is like widening a road and expecting traffic to thin out. Where a resource is genuinely scarce, gains in efficiency need to be paired with a cap, a price or a shared rule that keeps the freed-up quantity from simply being consumed elsewhere. Such rules can be agreed upon by village communities themselves; they need not be dictated from distant capitals.

Efficiency, in short, is a tool and not a destination. It hands us a choice: to bank the saving or to spend it. Societies that forget they are making that choice tend to spend it without noticing.

The author mentions the family buying an LED bulb primarily in order to

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

When a technology lets us do more with less, the instinctive conclusion is that we will end up using less. In 1865 the English economist William Stanley Jevons questioned this comfortable assumption. He observed that more efficient steam engines had made coal cheaper to use, and he argued that Britain's appetite for coal would grow rather than shrink, because every new saving opened fresh uses for the fuel. The idea, now known as the rebound effect, has lost none of its sting.

Consider a farmer who switches from flood irrigation to drip lines. Each acre now needs far less water, and policymakers naturally record the difference as water saved. Yet the farmer finds that the same well can now irrigate more land. He may extend cultivation to fallow plots or shift to a thirstier, more profitable crop. The aquifer beneath the village is then drawn down as quickly as before, perhaps faster. The efficiency was real; the conservation was imagined.

None of this means that efficiency is a mistake. A family that buys an LED bulb rarely leaves the lights burning all night simply because the bill has fallen. In many such cases the rebound is small and most of the saving holds. The point is subtler: efficiency changes the cost of using a resource, and people respond to costs. Whether total consumption falls depends on how strongly demand reacts, and that cannot be read off an engineering diagram.

The lesson for policy is therefore not to abandon efficiency but to stop treating it as a substitute for limits. Subsidising drip irrigation while leaving groundwater extraction unmeasured is like widening a road and expecting traffic to thin out. Where a resource is genuinely scarce, gains in efficiency need to be paired with a cap, a price or a shared rule that keeps the freed-up quantity from simply being consumed elsewhere. Such rules can be agreed upon by village communities themselves; they need not be dictated from distant capitals.

Efficiency, in short, is a tool and not a destination. It hands us a choice: to bank the saving or to spend it. Societies that forget they are making that choice tend to spend it without noticing.

The tone of the author throughout the passage can best be described as

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

Few administrative instincts are as respectable as the urge to measure. A district that cannot count its out-of-school children cannot hope to enrol them, and a hospital that does not record its infection rates has no way of knowing whether its wards are getting safer. Numbers discipline vague intentions; they let a citizen in Bhopal compare her school with one in Coimbatore, and they let a finance ministry ask what each rupee has bought. To argue against measurement, then, is usually to argue for complacency.

The difficulty begins not when we measure but when we reward the measurement itself. An indicator is valuable precisely because it is a by-product of the activity it tracks: pass rates rise because children learn more, and waiting times fall because clinics work better. Once salaries, promotions or funding are tied to the number, however, people discover that it can be moved without moving the reality beneath it. Teachers drill pupils in the format of the test rather than the subject; a police station records fewer crimes by registering fewer complaints; a hospital shortens its waiting list by delaying the moment a patient is formally placed on it. None of this requires villainy. It requires only ordinary people responding sensibly to the incentives placed before them. The economist Charles Goodhart's observation that a measure pressed into service as a target soon loses its value as a measure is less a cynical claim about human nature than a sober claim about information.

The usual remedy is to add more indicators, on the theory that gaming one will show up in another. This helps, but only up to a point. Each new metric adds to the paperwork of those being measured, and a dashboard of forty figures can be as opaque to a minister as no dashboard at all. More fundamentally, the most important outcomes of schooling or policing, such as curiosity or public trust, resist neat quantification, and a system that rewards only what it can count will gradually starve what it cannot.

The sensible conclusion is not to abandon numbers but to hold them more loosely: to treat them as prompts for questions rather than verdicts, to pair them with the judgement of people who visit the classroom or the ward, and to rotate them before they harden into goals that everyone has learned to satisfy.

Which of the following best captures the central argument of the passage?

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

Few administrative instincts are as respectable as the urge to measure. A district that cannot count its out-of-school children cannot hope to enrol them, and a hospital that does not record its infection rates has no way of knowing whether its wards are getting safer. Numbers discipline vague intentions; they let a citizen in Bhopal compare her school with one in Coimbatore, and they let a finance ministry ask what each rupee has bought. To argue against measurement, then, is usually to argue for complacency.

The difficulty begins not when we measure but when we reward the measurement itself. An indicator is valuable precisely because it is a by-product of the activity it tracks: pass rates rise because children learn more, and waiting times fall because clinics work better. Once salaries, promotions or funding are tied to the number, however, people discover that it can be moved without moving the reality beneath it. Teachers drill pupils in the format of the test rather than the subject; a police station records fewer crimes by registering fewer complaints; a hospital shortens its waiting list by delaying the moment a patient is formally placed on it. None of this requires villainy. It requires only ordinary people responding sensibly to the incentives placed before them. The economist Charles Goodhart's observation that a measure pressed into service as a target soon loses its value as a measure is less a cynical claim about human nature than a sober claim about information.

The usual remedy is to add more indicators, on the theory that gaming one will show up in another. This helps, but only up to a point. Each new metric adds to the paperwork of those being measured, and a dashboard of forty figures can be as opaque to a minister as no dashboard at all. More fundamentally, the most important outcomes of schooling or policing, such as curiosity or public trust, resist neat quantification, and a system that rewards only what it can count will gradually starve what it cannot.

The sensible conclusion is not to abandon numbers but to hold them more loosely: to treat them as prompts for questions rather than verdicts, to pair them with the judgement of people who visit the classroom or the ward, and to rotate them before they harden into goals that everyone has learned to satisfy.

With which of the following statements would the author most likely agree?

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

Few administrative instincts are as respectable as the urge to measure. A district that cannot count its out-of-school children cannot hope to enrol them, and a hospital that does not record its infection rates has no way of knowing whether its wards are getting safer. Numbers discipline vague intentions; they let a citizen in Bhopal compare her school with one in Coimbatore, and they let a finance ministry ask what each rupee has bought. To argue against measurement, then, is usually to argue for complacency.

The difficulty begins not when we measure but when we reward the measurement itself. An indicator is valuable precisely because it is a by-product of the activity it tracks: pass rates rise because children learn more, and waiting times fall because clinics work better. Once salaries, promotions or funding are tied to the number, however, people discover that it can be moved without moving the reality beneath it. Teachers drill pupils in the format of the test rather than the subject; a police station records fewer crimes by registering fewer complaints; a hospital shortens its waiting list by delaying the moment a patient is formally placed on it. None of this requires villainy. It requires only ordinary people responding sensibly to the incentives placed before them. The economist Charles Goodhart's observation that a measure pressed into service as a target soon loses its value as a measure is less a cynical claim about human nature than a sober claim about information.

The usual remedy is to add more indicators, on the theory that gaming one will show up in another. This helps, but only up to a point. Each new metric adds to the paperwork of those being measured, and a dashboard of forty figures can be as opaque to a minister as no dashboard at all. More fundamentally, the most important outcomes of schooling or policing, such as curiosity or public trust, resist neat quantification, and a system that rewards only what it can count will gradually starve what it cannot.

The sensible conclusion is not to abandon numbers but to hold them more loosely: to treat them as prompts for questions rather than verdicts, to pair them with the judgement of people who visit the classroom or the ward, and to rotate them before they harden into goals that everyone has learned to satisfy.

As used in the passage, the word 'opaque' (in 'as opaque to a minister as no dashboard at all') most nearly means

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

Few administrative instincts are as respectable as the urge to measure. A district that cannot count its out-of-school children cannot hope to enrol them, and a hospital that does not record its infection rates has no way of knowing whether its wards are getting safer. Numbers discipline vague intentions; they let a citizen in Bhopal compare her school with one in Coimbatore, and they let a finance ministry ask what each rupee has bought. To argue against measurement, then, is usually to argue for complacency.

The difficulty begins not when we measure but when we reward the measurement itself. An indicator is valuable precisely because it is a by-product of the activity it tracks: pass rates rise because children learn more, and waiting times fall because clinics work better. Once salaries, promotions or funding are tied to the number, however, people discover that it can be moved without moving the reality beneath it. Teachers drill pupils in the format of the test rather than the subject; a police station records fewer crimes by registering fewer complaints; a hospital shortens its waiting list by delaying the moment a patient is formally placed on it. None of this requires villainy. It requires only ordinary people responding sensibly to the incentives placed before them. The economist Charles Goodhart's observation that a measure pressed into service as a target soon loses its value as a measure is less a cynical claim about human nature than a sober claim about information.

The usual remedy is to add more indicators, on the theory that gaming one will show up in another. This helps, but only up to a point. Each new metric adds to the paperwork of those being measured, and a dashboard of forty figures can be as opaque to a minister as no dashboard at all. More fundamentally, the most important outcomes of schooling or policing, such as curiosity or public trust, resist neat quantification, and a system that rewards only what it can count will gradually starve what it cannot.

The sensible conclusion is not to abandon numbers but to hold them more loosely: to treat them as prompts for questions rather than verdicts, to pair them with the judgement of people who visit the classroom or the ward, and to rotate them before they harden into goals that everyone has learned to satisfy.

According to the passage, why does an indicator lose its usefulness once it is made a target?

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

Few administrative instincts are as respectable as the urge to measure. A district that cannot count its out-of-school children cannot hope to enrol them, and a hospital that does not record its infection rates has no way of knowing whether its wards are getting safer. Numbers discipline vague intentions; they let a citizen in Bhopal compare her school with one in Coimbatore, and they let a finance ministry ask what each rupee has bought. To argue against measurement, then, is usually to argue for complacency.

The difficulty begins not when we measure but when we reward the measurement itself. An indicator is valuable precisely because it is a by-product of the activity it tracks: pass rates rise because children learn more, and waiting times fall because clinics work better. Once salaries, promotions or funding are tied to the number, however, people discover that it can be moved without moving the reality beneath it. Teachers drill pupils in the format of the test rather than the subject; a police station records fewer crimes by registering fewer complaints; a hospital shortens its waiting list by delaying the moment a patient is formally placed on it. None of this requires villainy. It requires only ordinary people responding sensibly to the incentives placed before them. The economist Charles Goodhart's observation that a measure pressed into service as a target soon loses its value as a measure is less a cynical claim about human nature than a sober claim about information.

The usual remedy is to add more indicators, on the theory that gaming one will show up in another. This helps, but only up to a point. Each new metric adds to the paperwork of those being measured, and a dashboard of forty figures can be as opaque to a minister as no dashboard at all. More fundamentally, the most important outcomes of schooling or policing, such as curiosity or public trust, resist neat quantification, and a system that rewards only what it can count will gradually starve what it cannot.

The sensible conclusion is not to abandon numbers but to hold them more loosely: to treat them as prompts for questions rather than verdicts, to pair them with the judgement of people who visit the classroom or the ward, and to rotate them before they harden into goals that everyone has learned to satisfy.

The tone of the author in the passage is best described as

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

Every generation inherits a world and quietly treats it as normal. A fisherman who began work thirty years ago judges a good catch against the hauls of his first season. His son started when stocks had already thinned, so he measures decline from a lower starting point. Neither is careless. Each simply anchors his sense of what is natural to what he first saw. In the mid-1990s a fisheries scientist gave this tendency a name, the shifting baseline. He warned that it allows ecological loss to accumulate almost invisibly, because each cohort registers only the change within its own lifetime.

The danger is not ignorance but a peculiar kind of contentment. Suppose the living remember a once-clear river only as murky. Restoring it to an "acceptable" state may then mean little more than preventing further murk. Targets set in such conditions are modest not because planners lack ambition but because impoverished reference points have shaped their imagination. A town that celebrates the return of a few sparrows may be applauding the recovery of a fraction of what its grandparents took for granted.

Some argue that the remedy is simply more data: long-term records, old photographs and museum specimens. These help, but they are not sufficient. Numbers in an archive rarely carry the emotional weight of personal memory, and people defend what they have felt rather than what they have read. A chart showing that a lake once held ten times as many fish is easily filed away. A grandmother's description of children swimming among those fish is harder to dismiss.

The deeper challenge, then, is cultural. Some societies keep their older members' recollections in circulation through oral histories, local chronicles and conversations across generations. In doing so, they stretch the baseline backwards and make loss visible again. This is not nostalgia, which romanticises the past indiscriminately, but calibration: a way of correcting the instrument with which we measure the present. Without it, each generation may sincerely believe it is protecting nature while presiding over its steady erosion.

Which of the following best expresses the central argument of the passage?