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Practice for online verbal reasoning questions from 'Legal Recruit': biology
Biology is a subject area in the brand new innovative, independent, platform for practising online verbal reasoning assessments called ‘Legal Recruit‘.
Hope you enjoy these questions.
1 Every day, we are bombarded with scientific and medical claims that are not based on good evidence: in advertising material, product websites, advice columns, campaign statements, celebrity health fads and policy announcements. Even where there is some regulation, in advertising or trading standards, such claims keep reappearing. “Sense About Science”, along with over 5,000 scientists, scientific bodies, research publishers and policy makers, don’t want people to continue getting away with making claims without supporting evidence. They want things to change, so that anyone making a claim expects to be challenged, and is made to stand by their words. The only way to do this is to get more people asking for evidence.
Q1 Campaign statements are never based on good evidence.
CANNOT SAY. ‘Campaign statements’ are given as examples of scientific and medical claims which are not based on good evidence.
Q2 “Sense About Science” wants people to continue getting away making claims without supporting evidence.
FALSE. The passage states the precise opposite.
2 We hear about bacteria for lots of different reasons, and it’s unusual for many of them to be ‘good’. Indeed, the last time most people probably remember seeing bacteria make headlines was the contamination of salad vegetables with a deadly Escherichia coli strain relatively recently. However, as any microbiologist will tell you, bacteria are an extremely diverse group of organisms, with equally diverse properties which make some of them indispensable for many aspects of our lives; including food production, digestion and water treatment. For example, Geobacter sulfurreducens is just one of many bacterial superheroes. In this case, its superpower is ‘bioremediation’; the use of its metabolism to remove pollutants from the environment.
Q3 There is a very narrow range of strains in the bacteria class.
FALSE. Bacteria are stated to be an extremely diverse group of organisms.
Q4 Bacteria are never used for water treatment.
FALSE. Bacteria are said to play an ‘indispensible’ role in many functions, including water treatment.
3 While some birds only migrate locally in response to extreme weather conditions, others undertake seasonal long-distance migration between land masses and sometimes hemispheres. The most impressive avian migrator is, by far, the Arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea). Weighing an average of 100g, with a average wingspan of 75 – 85 cm, the birds sometimes nest just once every three years, as so much of their 30 year life span is spent in flight. The bird has the longest seasonal movement than any other animal, and the birds move so consistently with the seasons that they only ever see long days; they experience more sunlight per year than any other creature.
Q5 80 cm is a reasonable estimate wingspan of the African tern.
CANNOT SAY. The information given only refers to the Artic tern.
Q6 It is rare for the Artic Tern to be exposed to sunlight, compared to other creatures.
FALSE. The passage states that the Artic Tern ‘experience more sunlight per year than any other creature’.
4 There’s actually 47 known species of ‘leafcutter ants’, endemic to South and Central America, which live in colonies of up to ten million individuals organised into a complex social structure. The leaf cutting ants don’t actually eat the leaves they harvest – this is part of an elaborate process of cultivating a mutualistic fungus, which in turn provides the ants with the nutrients on which they feed. Efficiency of fungal cultivation is dependent on roles played by distinct ‘castes’ of ants, based mostly on size. Large workers forage for leaves and defend the colony, while smaller workers farm the fungus and tend to the nest. There’s even a designated waste removal team.
Q7 There are currently over 50 species of ‘leafcutter ants’.
CANNOT SAY. The passage states that there are 47 ‘known species’ of ‘leafcutter ants’, but it is not known how many unknown species of ‘leafcutter ants’ there currently are.
Q8 Only the caste of ants determines the efficiency of fungal cultivation done by ants.
FALSE. The passage states that distinct ‘castes’ of ants determine the efficiency of fungal cultivation done by ants.
5 Obesity is a growing problem worldwide, but proper protein consumption can help keep it at bay. Researchers have found that, when subjects were fed a 10% protein diet, they consumed 12% more energy over four days than they did on a 15% protein diet. Moreover, 70% of the increased energy intake on the lower protein diet was attributed to snacking. When the protein content was further increased to 25%, however, the researchers observed no change in behaviour relative to the 15% protein diet. It had previously been suggested that protein content plays an important role in determining overall energy intake, and thus affects obesity, but until this study, experimental verification had been lacking.
Q9 Obesity is only a problem in the U.S.
FALSE. Obesity is said to be a ‘growing problem worldwide’.
Q10 Protein content plays an important role in determining overall energy intake.
CANNOT SAY. No definite conclusion can be drawn from this study. Despite the findings of this study, the statement could still be true.
6 The anti-obesity properties of resveratrol have been demonstrated for the first time in a primate. Researchers recently studied the compound, generated naturally by plants to ward off pathogens, which has received much interest as a dietary supplement for its supposed life-extending effects. A team of researchers from Paris have decided to investigate the effect of dietary supplementation with resveratrol on the weight, metabolism and energy intake of six mouse lemurs. The physiological benefits of resveratrol are currently under intensive investigation, with recent work suggesting that it could be a good candidate for the development of obesity therapies. The team found that lemurs eating a diet supplemented with the compound decreased their energy intake by 13% and increased their resting metabolic rate by 29%.
Q11 Based on research in the rat, resveratrol could be a good candidate for the development of anti-obesity therapies.
CANNOT SAY. The research described used a sample of lemurs (primates).
Q12 In this study, lemurs eating a diet supplemented with the compound increased their energy intake by an average of 13%.
TRUE. This is a finding from this study.
The new @Legal_Recruit verbal reasoning practice assessment for law students
The @Legal_Recruit system (which will be available here) is a very attractive easy-to-use cloud-based service which will allow @Legal_Recruit learners to complete sample tests, under real assessment conditions.
It will be available on Monday 3 October 2011 for the first time.
Current law students, who are doing the GDL, LPC, LLB(Hons) or LLM, especially those who are seeking training contracts or vacation placements for 2013/4/5 being made available in the next academic year may find this new service/product useful. It will be available on the internet via a secure website, and will cost £7.50 for unrestricted lifetime use. All Legal Recruit learners will have their own secure website username and password, and be invited to participate in the development of the huge bank of validated questions. These questions are set in a fair way, with due attention to equality, diversity and culture.
This product has been built because it is felt by many that law students, the staff of their colleagues/universities (including their academics and their career services) and corporate law recruiting managers that the pivotal importance of the verbal reasoning test is grossly underestimated. This is not sensible, given the intense effort needed to complete any qualification in law. However, if your performance in a verbal reasoning test, and you fail to meet the cut-off score, it is possible that you will not be invited for interview, despite having a II.1 or above. This is clearly a tragedy.
Such practice will be ideal for any law students needing to complete a SHL Direct assessment for their real training contract/vacation placement application. Candidates are strongly advised to look, as a top priority, the practice tests in the practice area of the SHL website. There you can take a full-length verbal reasoning test which has been made available from the main SHL Direct website and it’s well worth looking at the example questions. You’ll also most likely enjoy looking at the advice given about verbal reasoning tests on leading corporate law recruitment sites, such as Eversheds and Clifford Chance. Obviously, Legal_Recruit does not actively endorse any of the entities above, or vice versa.
There will be very clear instructions in the @Legal_Recruit practice assessments which are akin to the current SHL verbal reasoning instructions. In the practice test, you are allowed to go backwards, although in the real assessment you will not be given this option. You must complete the practice examples before you do the test, and you are told not to press any function keys or do any background jobs such as printing during the test itself.
The word count per passage will ideally vary from 70 to 150, with a mean length of 107. Passages will avoid as far as possible the use of semi-colons, and be of no shorter than 8-10 words. They will be written in plain English, with no spelling or grammar errors. The passages will therefore avoid American spelling or American English. The mean number of words in a sentence will be about 15-20.
Assessments will consist of 30 questions, containing 15 passages (2 questions per passage). The 15 passages will be selected at random by the Legal_Recruit system from a huge database consisting of an equal number of questions in the following 16 subject areas.
- Biology
- Business
- Economics
- Education
- Engineering
- Environment
- Geography
- Geology
- Health and Safety
- Human resources
- Medicine
- Modern Languages
- Physics
- Technology
- Transport
@Legal_Recruit follows the leading twitter accounts in the world which daily produce news stories, which make excellent narratives for the verbal reasoning assessment that Legal_Recruit will be offering.
Legal_Recruit learners will be able to choose a maximum time permitted from 19 to 39 minutes; this is to that it’s easy to do the assessments with reasonable adjustments for learners who will benefit from them to allow them to perform on a ‘level-playing field’.
It’s interesting that there is no subject bias at all in the exemplars. Interestingly the passages appears to avoid contentious branding, politics, or subjects which are generally controversial.
It is essential for our system to work for our questions to be carefully set in keeping with the real verbal reasoning tests which our Legal_Recruit learners will face in their real assessments set by SHL for their training contract/vacation placements. If you would like to participate for free, and receive immediate feedback, in our sample assessments, please direct message @legalaware or @legal_recruit, and if there are any problems in me following you, please do let me know immediately, and I will remedy. We benefit from obtaining a huge bank of normative data, which indicates to us that all the questions are of the same (correct) standard, and from being able to give you an accurate indication of where you sit on the normal distribution curve.
You may enjoy following up-to-date developments in online psychometric assessment on the @SHLGROUP twitter feed.
