The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
[CAT 2024 Slot 1]
Landing in Australia, the British colonists weren’t much impressed with the small-bodied, slender-snooted marsupials called bandicoots. “Their muzzle, which is much too long, gives them an air exceedingly stupid,” one naturalist noted in 1805. They nicknamed one type the “zebra rat” because of its black-striped rump.
Silly-looking or not, though, the zebra rat—the smallest bandicoot, more commonly known today as the western barred bandicoot—exhibited a genius for survival in the harsh outback, where its ancestors had persisted for some 26 million years. Its births were triggered by rainfall in the bone-dry desert. It carried its breath-mint-size babies in a backward-facing pouch so mothers could forage for food and dig shallow, camouflaged shelters.
Still, these adaptations did not prepare the western barred bandicoot for the colonial-era transformation of its ecosystem, particularly the onslaught of imported British animals, from cattle and rabbits that damaged delicate desert vegetation to ravenous house cats that soon developed a taste for bandicoots. Several of the dozen-odd bandicoot species went extinct, and by the 1940s the western barred bandicoot, whose original range stretched across much of the continent, persisted only on two predator-free islands in Shark Bay, off Australia’s western coast.
“Our isolated fauna had simply not been exposed to these predators,” says Reece Pedler, an ecologist with the Wild Deserts conservation program.
Now Wild Deserts is using descendants of those few thousand island survivors, called Shark Bay bandicoots, in a new effort to seed a mainland bandicoot revival. They’ve imported 20 bandicoots to a preserve on the edge of the Strzelecki Desert, in the remote interior of New South Wales. This sanctuary is a challenging place, desolate much of the year, with one of the world’s most mercurial rainfall patterns—relentless droughts followed by sudden drenching floods.
The imported bandicoots occupy two fenced “exclosures,” cleared of invasive rabbits (courtesy of Pedler’s sheepdog) and of feral cats (which slunk off once the rabbits disappeared). A third fenced area contains the program’s Wild Training Zone, where two other rare marsupials (bilbies, a larger type of bandicoot, and mulgaras, a somewhat fearsome fuzzball known for sucking the brains out of prey) currently share terrain with controlled numbers of cats, learning to evade them. It’s unclear whether the Shark Bay bandicoots, which are perhaps even more predator-naive than their now-extinct mainland bandicoot kin, will be able to make that kind of breakthrough.
For now, though, a recent surge of rainfall has led to a bandicoot joey boom, raising the Wild Deserts population to about 100, with other sanctuaries adding to that number. There are also signs of rebirth in the landscape itself. With their constant digging, the bandicoots trap moisture and allow for seed germination so the cattle-damaged desert can restore itself.
They have a new nickname—a flattering one, this time. “We call them ecosystem engineers,” Pedler says.
1) According to the text, the western barred bandicoots now have a flattering name because they have
1. grown fivefold in terms of population.
2. led a revival in preserving the species.
3. aided in altering an arid environment.
4. led to a surge and increase of rainfall.
2) The text uses the word ‘exclosures’ because Wild Deserts has adopted a measure of
1. barring the entry of invasive species.
2. restoring cattle damaged deserts to green landscapes.
3. ridding the main desert of feral cats and large bilbies.
4. excluding animals to make the islands predator-free.
3) Which one of the following statements provides a gist of this passage?
1. The negligent attitude of the British colonists towards these bandicoots evidenced by the names given to them led to their annihilation.
2. A type of bandicoots was nearly wiped out by invasive species but rescuers now pin hopes on a remnant island population.
3. Marsupials are going extinct due to the colonial era transformation of the ecosystem which also destroyed natural vegetation.
4. The onslaught of animals, such as cattle, rabbits and housecats, brought in by the British led to the extinction of the western barred bandicoot.
4) Which one of the following options does NOT represent the characteristics of the western barred bandicoot?
1. Smallest black striped marsupial that uses camouflage and dig.
2. Shallow diggers having an elongated muzzle.
3. Long thin nose, black striped back, pouch for joeys.
4. Look of a rat but with a baby pouch and a slender snout.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
[CAT 2024 Slot 2]
The job of a peer reviewer is thankless. Collectively, academics spend around 70 million hours every year evaluating each other’s manuscripts on the behalf of scholarly journals — and they usually receive no monetary compensation and little if any recognition for their effort. Some do it as a way to keep abreast with developments in their field; some simply see it as a duty to the discipline. Either way, academic publishing would likely crumble without them.
In recent years, some scientists have begun posting their reviews online, mainly to claim credit for their work. Sites like Publons allow researchers to either share entire referee reports or simply list the journals for whom they’ve carried out a review….
The rise of Publons suggests that academics are increasingly placing value on the work of peer review and asking others, such as grant funders, to do the same. While that’s vital in the publish-or-perish culture of academia, there’s also immense value in the data underlying peer review. Sharing peer review data could help journals stamp out fraud, inefficiency, and systemic bias in academic publishing.….
Peer review data could also help root out bias. Last year, a study based on peer review data for nearly 24,000 submissions to the biomedical journal eLife found that women and non-Westerners were vastly underrepresented among peer reviewers. Only around one in every five reviewers was female, and less than two percent of reviewers were based in developing countries…. Openly publishing peer review data could perhaps also help journals address another problem in academic publishing: fraudulent peer reviews. For instance, a minority of authors have been known to use phony email addresses to pose as an outside expert and review their own manuscripts.…
Opponents of open peer review commonly argue that confidentiality is vital to the integrity of the review process; referees may be less critical of manuscripts if their reports are published, especially if they are revealing their identities by signing them. Some also hold concerns that open reviewing may deter referees from agreeing to judge manuscripts in the first place, or that they’ll take longer to do so out of fear of scrutiny….
Even when the content of reviews and the identity of reviewers can’t be shared publicly, perhaps journals could share the data with outside researchers for study. Or they could release other figures that wouldn’t compromise the anonymity of reviews but that might answer important questions about how long the reviewing process takes, how many researchers editors have to reach out to on average to find one who will carry out the work, and the geographic distribution of peer reviewers.
Of course, opening up data underlying the reviewing process will not fix peer review entirely, and there may be instances in which there are valid reasons to keep the content of peer reviews hidden and the identity of the referees confidential. But the norm should shift from opacity in all cases to opacity only when necessary.
1) According to the passage, some are opposed to making peer reviews public for all the following reasons EXCEPT that it
1. delays the manuscript evaluation process as reviewers would take longer to write their reviews.
2. deters reviewers from producing honest, if critical, reviews that are vital to the sound publishing process.
3. leaves the reviewers unexposed to unwarranted and unjustified criticism or comments from others.
4. makes reviewers reluctant to review manuscripts, especially if these are critical of the submitted work.
2) According to the passage, which of the following is the only reason NOT given in favour of making peer review data public?
1. It can tackle the problem of selecting appropriately qualified reviewers for academic writing.
2. It could address various inefficiencies and fraudulent practices that continue in academic publishing process.
3. It would highlight the gender and race biases currently existing in the selection of reviewers.
4. It will deal with peer review fraud such as authors publishing bogus reviews of their work.
3) All of the following are listed as reasons why academics choose to review other scholars’ work EXCEPT:
1. It is seen as an opportunity to expand their influence in the academic community.
2. It helps them keep current with cutting-edge ideas in their academic disciplines.
3. It is seen as a form of service to the academic community.
4. Some use this as an opportunity to publicise their own review work.
4) Based on the passage we can infer that the author would most probably support
1. publicising peer review data rather than the publication of actual reviews.
2. greater transparency across the peer review process in academic publishing.
3. preserving the anonymity of reviewers to protect them from criticism.
4. more careful screening to ensure the recruitment of content-familiar peer reviewers.
Solution:
1) 3
2) 1
3) 2
4) 1
1) 3
2) 1
3) 1
4) 2
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