English ECAT Pre Engineering Chapter 8 Comprehension Online Test MCQs With Answers

First introduced in 1927, The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories are a series of books about the adventures of brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, teenaged detectives who solve one baffling mystery after another. The Hardy Boys were so popular among young boys that in 1930 a similar series was created for girls featuring a sixteen-year-old detective named Nancy Drew. The cover of each volume of The Hardy Boys states that he author of the series is Franklin W. Dixon; the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories are supposedly written by Carolyn Keene. Over the years, though, many fans of both series have been surprised to find out that Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene are not real people. If Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene never existed, then who wrote The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries?

The Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew books were written through a process called ghostwriting. A ghostwriter writes a book according to a specific formula. While ghostwriters are paid for writing the books, their authorship is not acknowledged, and their names do not appear on the published books. Ghostwriters can write books for children or adults, the content of which is unspecific. Sometimes they work on book series with a lot of individual titles, such as The Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew series.

The initial idea for both The Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew series was developed by a man named Edward Stratemeyer, who owned a publishing company that specialized in children’s book.

Stratemeyer noticed the increasing popularity of mysteries among adult, and surmised that children would enjoy reading mysteries about younger detectives with whom they could identify. Stratemeyer first developed each book with an outline describing the plot and setting. Once he completed the outline, Stratemeyer then hired a ghostwriter to convert it into a book of slightly over 200 pages. After the ghostwriter had written a draft of a book, he or she would send it back to Stratemeyer, who would make a list of corrections and mail it back to the ghostwriter. The ghostwriter would revise the book according to Stratemeyer’s instructions and then return it to him. Once Stratemeyer approved the book, it was ready for publication.

Because each series ran for so many years, Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys both had a number of different ghostwriters producing books; however, the first ghostwrites for each series proved to be the most influential. The initial ghostwriter for The Hardy Boys was a Canadian journalist named Leslie McFarlane. A few years later, Mildred A. Wirt, a young writer from lowa, began writing the Nancy Drew books. Although they were using prepared outlines as guides, both McFarlane and Wirt developed the characters themselves. The personalities of Frank and Joe Hardy and Nancy arose directly from McFarlane’s and wirt’s imaginations. For example, Mildred Wirt had been a star college athelete and gave Nancy similar athletic abilities. The ghostwriters were also responsible for numerous plot and setting details. Leslie McFarlane used elements of his small C fictional hometown.

Although The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books were very popular with children, not everyone approved of them. Critics thought their plots were unrealistic and even far-fetched, since most teenagers did not experience the adventures Frank and Joe Hardy or Nancy Drew did. The way the books were written also attracted criticism. Many teachers and librarians objected to the ghostwriting process, claiming it was designed to produce books quickly rather than create quality literature. Some libraries – including the New York Public Library – even refused to include the books in their children’s collections. Ironically, this decision actually helped sales of his books, because children simply purchased them when they were unavailable in local libraries.

Regardless of the debates about their literary merit, each series of books has exerted an undeniable influence on American and even global culture. Most Americans have never heard of Edward Stratemeyer, Leslie McFarlane, or Mildred wirt, but people throughout the world are familiar with Nancy Drew and Frank and Joe Hardy.

According to the passage, the Nancy Drew mystery series was introduced in

The history of literature really began was the earliest of the arts. Man danced for joy round his primitive camp fire after the defeat and slaughter of his enemy. He yelled and shouted as he danced and gradually the yells and shouts became coherent and caught the measure of the coherent and caught the measure of the dance and thus the first war song was sung. As the idea of God developed prayers were framed. The songs and prayers became traditional and were repeated from one generation to another, each generation adding something of its own. As man slowly grew more civilized, he was compelled to invent some method of writing by three urgent necessities. There were certain things that it was dangerous to forget and which, therefore, had to be recorded. It was often necessary to communicate with person who were some distance away and it was necessary to protect one’s property by making tools, cattle and so on, in some distinctive manner. So man taught himself to write and having learned to write purely for utilitarian reasons he used this new method for preserving his war songs and his prayers. Of course, among these ancient peoples, There were only a very few individuals who learned to write, and only a few could read what was written.

The first war-song

Paul’s wife knows Paul loves to read cookbooks. She decides to get him one for his birthday. Paul tells her he will try to make a new recipe for three days in a row. On Monday, Paul makes blueberry pancakes for breakfast. He gets the blueberries from the farmers’ market. On Tuesday, Paul makes beef soup for dinner. He puts in cubes of beef, carrots, and onions. The recipe calls for cream, but Paul does not cream. He uses water instead. On Wednesday, Paul makes a tomato salad with cucumbers and onions. He picks the cucumbers and tomatoes from his garden. He likes this dish best. It was also the easiest for him to make.

Why doesn’t Paul use cream?

Many people like to eat pizza, but not everyone knows knows how to make it. Making the perfect pizza can be complicated, but there are lots of ways for you to make basic version at home.

When you make pizza, you must begin with the crust. The crust can be hard to make. If you want to make the crust yourself, you will have to make dough using flour, water, and yeast. You will have to knead the dough with your hands. If you do not have enough time to do this, you can use a prepared crust that you buy from the store.

After you have chosen your crust, you must then add the sauce. Making your own sauce from scratch can take a long time. You have to buy tomatoes, peel them, and then cook them with spices. If this sounds like too much work, you can also purchase jarred sauce from the store. Many jarred sauces taste almost as good as the kind you make at home.

Now that you have your crust and your sauce, you need to add the cheese. Cheese comes from milk, which comes from cows. Do you have a cow in your backyard? Do you how to milk the cow? Do you know how to turn that milk into cheese? If not, you might want to buy cheese from the grocery store instead of making it yourself. When you have the crust, sauce, and cheese ready, you can add other toppings. Some people like to put meat on their pizza, while other people like to add vegetables. Some people even like to add pineapple! The best part of making a pizza at home is that you can customize it by adding your own favorite ingredients

In paragraph 3, the author writes, “Many jarred sauce taste almost as good as the kind you make at home.” The purpose of this statement is to

Educational planning should aim at meeting the educational needs of the entire population of all age group. While the traditional structure of education as a three layer hierarchy from the primary stage to the university represents the core, we should not overlook the periphery which is equally important. Under modern conditions, workers need to rewind, or renew their enthusiasm, or strike out in a new direction, or improve their skills as much as any university professor. The retired and the age have their needs as well. Educational planning, in their words, should take care of the needs of everyone.

Our structures of education have been built up on the assumption that there is a terminal point to education. This basic defect has become all the more harmful today. A UNESCO report entitled ‘learning to Be’ prepared by Edgar Faure and others in 1973 asserts that the education of children must prepare the future adult for various forms of self – learning. A viable education system of the future should consist of modules with different kinds of functions serving a diversity of constituents. And performance, not the period of study, should be the basis for credentials. The writing is already on the wall.

In view of the fact that the significance of a commitment of lifelong learning and lifetime education is being discussed only in recent years even in educationally advanced countries, the possibility of the idea becoming an integral part of educational thinking seems to be a far cry. For, to move in that direction means such more than some simple rearrangement of the present organization of education. But a good beginning can be made by developing Open University programs for older learners of different categories and introducing extension services in the conventional colleges and schools. Also these institutions should learn to cooperate with the numerous community organizations such as libraries. Museums, municipal recreational programs, health services etc.

What should be the major characteristic of the futureeducational system?

Right now, I am looking at a shelf full or relics, a collection of has-beens, old-timers, antiques, fossils. Right now I am lolling at a shelf full of books. Yes that’s right. If you have some spare cash (the doing rate is about $89) and are looking to enhance your reading experience, then I highly suggest you consider purchasing an e-reader. E-readers are replacing the books of old, and I welcome them with open arms (as you should).

If you haven’t heard of an e-reader and don’t know what it is, then please permit the following explanation. An e-reader is a device that allows you to read e-books. An e-book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital. The Oxford Dictionary or English defines the e-book as “an electronic version of a printed book, “but e-book can and do exist without any printed equivalent.

So now you know what an e-reader is. But you still may be wondering why they put printed books to shame. E-readers are superior to printed books because they save space, are environmentally friendly, and provide helpful reading tips and tools that printed books do not.

E-readers are superior to printed books because they save space. The average e-reader can store thousands of digital book, providing a veritable library at your fingertips. What is more, being the size and weight of a thin hardback, the e-reader itself is relatively petite. It is easy to hold and can fit in a pocketbook or briefcase easily. This makes handling ponderous behemoths such as War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Les Miserables a breeze. Perhaps the only drawback to the space-saving aspect of an e-reader is that it requires you to find new things to put on your shelves.

In addition, e-readers are superior to books because they are environmentally friendly. The average novel is about 300 pages long. So, if a novel is printed 1000 times, it will use 300,000 pieces of paper. That’s a lot of paper! If there are about 80,000 pieces of paper in a tree, this means it takes almost 4 trees to make these 1000 books. Now, we know that the average bestseller sells about 20,000 copies per week. That means that it takes over 300 trees each month to sustain this rate. And for the super bestsellers, these figures increase dramatically. For example, the Harry Potter book series has sold over 450 million copies. That’s about 2 million trees! Upon viewing these figures, it is not hard to grasp the severe impact of printed books on the environment. Since e-reader use no trees, they represent a significant amount of preservation in terms of the environment and its resources.

Finally, e-reader are superior to books because they provide helpful reading tips and tolls that printed books do not. The typical e-reader allows its user to customize letter size, font, and line spacing. It also allows highlighting and electronic bookmarking. Furthermore, it grants users the ability to get an overview of a book and then jump to a specific electronic bookmarking. Furthermore, it grants users the ability to get an overview of a book and then jump to a specific location based on that overview. While these are all nice features, perhaps the most helpful of all is the ability to get dictionary definitions at the touch of a finger. On even the most basic e-reader, users can conjure instant definitions without having to hunt through a physical dictionary.

It can be seen that e-readers are superior to printed books. They save space, are environmentally friendly, and provide helpful reading tips and tools that printed books do not. So what good are printed books? Well, they certainly make nice decorations.

Based on its use in paragraph 4, It can be inferred that petite belongs to which of the following word families?

On January 3, 1961, nine days after Christmas, Richard Legg, John Byrnes, and Richard McKinley were killed in a remote desert in eastern Idaho. Their deaths occurred when a nuclear reactor exploded at a top-secret base in the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS). Official reports state that the explosion and subsequent reactor meltdown resulted from the improper retraction of the control rod. When questioned about the events that occurred there, officials were very reticent. The whole affair, in fact, was discussed much, and seemed to disappear with time.

In order to grasp the mysterious nature of the NRTS catastrophe, it help to know a bit about how nuclear reactors work. After all, the generation of nuclear energy may strike many as an esoteric process. However, given its relative simplicity, the way in which the NRTS reactor functions is widely comprehensible. In this particular kind of reactor, a cluster of nine-ton uranium fuel rods are positioned lengthwise around a central control rod. The reaction begins with the slow removal of the control ro, which starts a controlled nuclear reaction and begins to heat the water in the reactor. This heat generates steam, which builds pressure inside the tank. As pressure builds, the steam looks for a place to escape. The only place this steam is able to escape is through the turbine. As it passes through the turbine on its way out of the tank, it turns the giant fan blades and produces energy.

On the morning of January 3, after the machine had been shut down for the holidays, the three men arrived at the station to restart the reactor. The control rod needed to be pulled out only four inches to be reconnected to the automated driver. However, records indicate that Byrnes yanked it out 23 inches, over five times the distance necessary. In milliseconds the reactor exploded. Legg was impaled on the ceiling; he would be discovered last. It took one week and a lead-shielded crane to remove his body. Even in full protective gear, workers were only able to work a minute at a time. The three men are buried in lead-lined coffins under concrete in New York, Michigan, and Arlington Cemetery, Virginia.

The investigation took nearly two years to complete. Did Byrnes have a dark motive? Or was it simply an accident? Did he know how precarious the procedure was? Other operators were questioned as to whether they knew the consequences of pulling the control rod out so far. They responded “Of course! We often talked about what we would do if we were at a radar station and the Russians came.

“We’d yank it out.”

Official reports are oddly ambiguous, but what they do not explain, gossip does. Rumors had it that there was tension between the men because Byrnes suspected the other two of being involved with his young wife. There is little doubt than he, like the other operators, knew exactly what would happen when he yanked the control rod.

As used in paragraph 5, which is the best synonym for ambiguous?

It is easy to make delicious-looking hamburger at home. But would this hamburger still look delicious after it sat on your kitchen table under very bright lights for six or seven hours? if someone took a picture or made a video of this hamburger after the seventh hour, would anyone want to eat it? More importantly, do you think you could get millions of people to pay money for this hamburger? These are the questions that fast food companies worry about when they produce commercials or print ads for their products. Video and photo shoots often last many hours. The lights that the photographers use can be extremely hot. These conditions can cause the food to look quite unappealing to potential consumers. Because of this, the menu items that you see in fast food commercials are probably not actually edible.Let's use the hamburger as an example. The first step towards building the commercial hamburger is the bun. The food stylist--a person employed by the company to make sure the products look perfect--sorts through hundreds of buns until he or she finds one with no wrinkles. Next, the stylist carefully rearranges the sesame seeds on the bun using glue and tweezers for maximum visual appeal. The bun is then sprayed with a waterproofing solution so that it will no get soggy from contact with other ingredients, the lights, or the humidity in the room.Next, the food stylist shapes a meat patty into a perfect circle. Only the outside of the meat gets cooked-the inside is left raw so that the meat remains moist. The food stylist then paints the outside of the meat patty with a mixture of oil, molasses, and brown food coloring. Grill marks are either painted on or seared into the meat using hot metal skewers.Finally, the food stylist searches through dozens of tomatoes and heads of lettuce to find the best-looking produce.One leaf of the crispest lettuce and one center slice of the reddest tomato are selected and then sprayed with glycerin to keep them looking fresh. So the next time you see a delectable hamburger in a fast food commercial, remember: you are actually looking at glue, paint, raw meat , and glycerin. Are you still hungry?

Q.3 Democratic societies from the earliest times have expected their governments to protect the weak against the strong No era of good feeling can justify discharging the police force or giving up the idea of public control over concentrated private wealth On the other hand it is obvious that a spirit of self denial and moderation on the part of those who hold economic power will greatly soften the demand for absolute equality Men are more interested in freedom and security than in an equal distribution of wealth the extent to which Government must interfere with business therefore is not exactly measured by the extent to which economic power is concentrated into few hands The required degree of government interference depends mainly on whether economic powers are oppressively used and on the necessity of keeping economic factors in a tolerable state of balance However with the necessity of meeting all these dangers and threats to liberty the powers of government are unavoidably increased whichever political party may be in office The growth of government is a necessary result of the growth of technology and of the problems that go with the use of machines and science since the Government in our nation must take on more powers to meet its problems there is no way to preserve freedom except by making democracy more powerful.

Lilly loves her town. She loves the mall. She loves the parks. She also loves her school. Most of all, though, Lilly loves the seasons. In her old town, it was hot all of the time.

Sometimes it is cold in Lilly’s new town. The cold season is in winter. Once in a while it snows. Lilly has never seen snow before. So far her, the snow is exciting as well as very beautiful. Lilly has to wear gloves to keep her hands warm. She also wear a scarf around her neck.

In spring, flowers bloom and the trees turn green with new leaves. Pollen falls on the cars and windowsills and makes Lilly sneeze. People work in their yards and mow their grass.

In summer, Lilly wears her old shorts and sandals- the same ones she used to wear in her old town. It is hot outside, and dogs lie in the shade. Lilly and her friends go to a pool or play in the water sprinkler. Her father cooks hamburgers on the grill for dinner.

Lilly’s favorite season is autumn. In autumn, the leaves on the trees turn yellow, gold, red, and orange. Halloween comes in autumn, and this Lilly’s favorite holiday. Every Halloween, Lilly wears a costume. Last year she wore a mouse costume. This year she will wear a fish costume.

One evening in autumn, Lilly and her mom are on sitting together on the porch. Mom tells Lilly that autumn is also called “fall”. This is a good idea, Lilly thinks, because in the fall all of the leaves fall down from the trees.

Based on information in paragraph 5, which of the following costumes is Lilly most likely to wear next year?

Elephants on the coast of Thailand are acting strange. They stamp their feet and motion toward the hulls. The sea draws back from the beaches. Fish flop in the mud. Suddenly, a huge wave appears. This is no ordinary wave. It is a tsunamiTsunami (pronounced "soo-nah-mee") waves are larger and faster than normal surface waves. A tsunami wave can travel as fast as a jet plane and can be as tall as a ten-story building. Imagine dropping a stone into a pond. The water on the surface ripples. A tsunami is like a very powerful ripple. Tsumais begin when the ocean rises or falls very suddenly. Large amounts of seawater are displaced. This movement causes huge waves.For a tsunami to occur, there must be some kind of force that causes the ocean water to become displaced. Most trunamis are caused by underwater earthquakes. however,volcanoes, landslides, large,icebergs, and even meteorites are capable of causing one of these mighty waves.Trunamis are extremely powerful. Ordinary waves lose power when they break. Tsunami waves can remain powerful for several days. Because tsunami waves are so strong, they can kill people, damage property , and completely ruin an ecosystem in just one hour.Scientist have no way of predicting when a tsunami will hit. However, if a powerful enough earthquake occurs,scientists can issue a warning or a watch. A warning means that a tsunami will very likely hit soon. A watch means that conditions are favorable for a tsunami. When people are notified about a watch or a warning, they have more time to prepare. It is best not to get caught unaware when a tsunami is on the way. Tsunami cause so much destruction because they