Here is a passage for you to consider!
U.K. unemployment rose by 48,000 to 2.67 million in the three months to the end of December 2011, according to official figures published today. The unemployment rate was 8.4%, the Office for National Statistics said, the highest for 16 years. The number of young people without a job rose 22,000 to 1.04m, taking the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds to 22.2%. The number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance in January increased by 6,900 to 1.6 million. While the unemployment rate is now at its highest since 1995, the number of job vacancies rose to 476,000 in the three months to January. A government minister stated that there are signs of stability. An opposition spokesman, however, suggested that today’s figures make for grim reading for the millions of squeezed families desperate for good news on the economy.
This passage would be reasonable simply as a test of verbal reasoning skills by some test providers. It does not contain overly complicated English, and has a total sentence length of 137 words. It possibly wouldn’t be used in a real assessment as it is on a political subject, and online verbal reasoning tests tend to avoid political topics. I would like it to explain the reasoning behind how a passage might be used to test verbal reasoning, however.
Have a go at getting inside the mindset of the world of verbal reasoning! Read each of the sentences, and make up your mind about one of three alternatives.
True means the statement follows logically given the information contained within the passage.?False means the statement cannot logically follow given the information contained within the passage.? Cannot Say means you are not given enough information in the passage to decide.
The key to all of these is you must consider ONLY the information given in the passage. In answering the test, you are advised not to take anything for granted, and do not make unjustified assumptions. This is critically important, especially if you do have background knowledge and/or experience of the subject matter in hand.
More than 3 million were unemployed in the UK on 31 December 2011, according to official figures published today.
FALSE. This is a direct contradiction of the sentence in the first sentence.
The total number of people currently unemployed is the highest it has been for 16 years.
CANNOT SAY. Whilst it is stated that the rate is the highest for 16 years, this does not necessarily mean that the total number of unemployed is the highest it has been for 16 years. This is a classic trap used by designers of online verbal reasoning tests, to see whether you’ve picked up on the word ‘rate’ in the passage. Furthermore, the information given in the passage is given according to the official Office for National Statistics figure, but this is not necessarily the actual figure. You should not do these tests using ‘outside knowledge’ at all. As an aside, there has been a rampant debate in the media about whether the official statistics underestimate the true level of unemployment in recent days.
