Logical Reasoning Set 5
Critical Reasoning Questions based SBI PO, IBPS PO, NICL, RBI Grade B, Dena Bank PO PGDBF, BOI, Bank of Baroda and other competitive exams
- Chaos Inc., a company in the fast moving consumer goods sector had sales output rising by nearly 12% per year. A new partner, Kim, joined the company and introduced many innovations such as Kaizen groups to solve manufacturing problems, and e-business applications involving vendors and distributors. But after Kim’s advent, sales output increased by only 6% per year. It appears that the innovations implemented by Kim caused the reduction in the annual sales growth rate.
Which of the following if true would weaken the above conclusion?
A) Kim’s innovations were focused on long-term improvement and ignored short-term profitability and growth.
B) Chaos Inc. does not price its products based upon the actual cost of production.
C) General demand for the company’s product has declined over time.
D) Managers of the company were busy in creating innovations, rather than focusing on sales promotions.
E) None of these
- The extent to which a society is really free can be gauged by its attitude toward artistic expression. Freedom of expression can easily be violated in even the most outwardly democratic of societies. When a government arts council withholds funding from a dance performance that its members deem “obscene,” the voices of a few bureaucrats have in fact censored the work of the choreographer, thereby committing the real obscenity of repression.
Which of the following, if true, would most seriously weaken the argument above?
A) Members of government arts councils are screened to ensure that their beliefs reflect those of the majority
B) The term obscenity has several different definitions that should not be used interchangeably for rhetorical effect
C) Failing to provide financial support for a performance is not the same as actively preventing or inhibiting it
D) The council’s decision could be reversed if the performance were altered to conform to public standards of appropriateness.
E) The definition of obscenity is something on which most members of society can agree.
- It is unfortunate for a country, specially for the poor and women, that whenever any kind of disincentive – even of the mildest nature such as debarring a person with more than two children from contesting any local body election – is introduced to promote family planning, there are always some activists and organizations who unnecessarily oppose the measures without realizing that the voluntary family planning programmes area miserable flop as clearly highlighted by the national family health surveys.
Which of the following if true would strengthen the author’s contention?
A) Percentage of rural women voluntarily seeking family planning services in government health centre facilities has drastically come down over the last decade.
B) One child policy on China, where employees with more than one child are discriminated against, has been very effective in controlling their population.
C) Activists and organization which seem to advocate civil rights issues typically have their own vested interests and hidden agendas.
D) Punitive measures are the best deterrents for refraining people from committing deeds which adversely affect the society at large.
E) None of these
- In recent study published in The Journal of Family Practice, no significant benefit over a placebo was found from using the antibiotic Amoxicillin among 135 patients with typical indications of a sinus infection. All the patients complained of sinusitis, with pus in the nasal cavity, facial pressure of nasal discharge lasting longer than seven days. A small subgroup of patients receiving the antibiotic became better faster than the others. But the researchers were unable to discern anything about those patients prior to administering Amoxicillin that indicated a bacterial infection, as opposed to a viral one.
From the above passage it may be inferred that
A) Use of an antibiotic is beneficial for sinusitis patients.
B) Antibiotics should be administered to only those sinusitis patients, who have been diagnosed to have a bacterial infection.
C) Antibiotics do not have any effect on sinusitis patients.
D) Use of an antibiotic may be beneficial for a small percentage of sinusitis patients with bacterial infection, but in general antibiotics are useless for sinusitis patients.
E) None of these
- Governments have only one response to public criticism of socially necessary services: regulation of the activity of providing those services. But governments inevitably make the activity more expensive by regulating it, and that is particularly troublesome in these times of strained financial resources. However, since public criticism of child-care services has undermined all confidence in such services, and since such services are socially necessary, the government is certain to respond.
Which one of the following statements can be inferred from the passage?
A) The quality of child care will improve.
B) The cost of providing child-care services will increase.
C) The government will use funding to foster advances in child care.
D) If public criticism of policy is strongly voiced, the government is certain to respond.
E) If child-care services are not regulated, the cost of providing child care will not increase.
- A survey recently revealed a high correlation between a household’s level of education and its library. Specifically, the more years of college and graduate school education received by the household’s members, the more books in the household’s library. The survey also indicated that the higher the education level of the household, the greater the percentage of books that are not works of fiction in its library.
Which of the following can be properly inferred from the survey results cited above?
A) People with a higher level of education prefer reading nonfiction to works of fiction.
B) Households with low education levels generally own more works of fiction than do households with high education levels.
C) Households with lower levels of education generally own more works of fiction than nonfiction.
D) The higher the education level of a household, the fewer works of fiction owned by the household.
E) Households with high education levels generally own more nonfiction books than do households with low education levels.
- Columnist: The winner of this year’s national spelling bee won by correctly spelling the spoken word Ursprache, which means “fame” in German. Given the richness of our language, why must we resort to words taken from modern foreign languages to challenge our best spellers? Ursprache is listed in our dictionary, as are words from many other foreign languages, but future spelling bees should limit themselves to words in our dictionary that have been anglicized in all aspects because spelling English words, not knowledge of linguistics and international phonetics, is the point of these contests.
Which of the following can most reasonably be inferred from the argument above?
A) The spelling contest winner knew how to spell most of the anglicized words in the dictionary.
B) Foreign words are more difficult than anglicized words for all contestants to spell.
C) Spelling contestant winners should be determined by their facility with all aspects of language.
D) To spell foreign words, contestants must recognize the language and know its pronunciation.
E) The English language contains more borrowed words than most other languages.
- Recent studies show that people between the ages of 13 and 55 produce 65 pounds more garbage per year than they did in 1995. This increase has led to a higher percentage of the total garbage produced by all the age groups. This age group constitutes a growing percentage of the population, so it partially explains this rise.
Which of the following can be concluded from passage?
A) People over the age of 55 produce more garbage than people less than the age of 13.
B) Population has risen since 1995.
C) People between the age of 13 and 55 are more than half of current population.
D) Before 1995, people below age 13 and above age 55 produced higher percentage of total garbage than they do now.
E) People between the age of 13 and 55 produce more garbage than those below 13 or older than 55. - Ten years after graduation, men and women who had participated in the Thompson High School basketball program were surveyed with regard to their individual playing records for their teams. Some of the results of the survey were curious. Seventy-five percent of those responding reported that they had started for their respective boys’ or girls’ teams, when the actual number of boys and girls who had started for their teams was only 50%.
Which one of the following provides the most helpful explanation for the apparent contradiction in these survey results?
A) A very small number of those responding were incorrect in reporting that they held starting positions.
B) A disproportionately high number of players who started for their teams responded to the survey.
C) Not all starting players responded to the survey.
D) Almost all men and women who played basketball for Thompson High School ten years earlier responded to the survey.
E) Not all good basketball players started for their teams; some good players were deliberately held out to play later in the game.
- Left-handed persons suffer more frequently than do right-handed persons from certain immune disorders, such as allergies. Left-handers tend to have an advantage over the right-handed majority, however, on tasks controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, and mathematical reasoning is strongly under the influence of the right hemisphere in most people.
If the information above is true, it best supports which of the following hypotheses?
A) Most people who suffer from allergies or other such immune disorders are left-handed rather than right-handed.
B) Most left-handed mathematicians suffer from some kind of allergy.
C) There are proportionally more left-handers among people whose ability to reason mathematically is above average than there are among people with poor mathematical reasoning ability.
D) If a left-handed person suffers from an allergy, that person will probably be good at mathematics.
E) There are proportionally more people who suffer from immune disorders such as allergies than there are people who are left-handed or people whose mathematical reasoning ability is unusually good.