Read the passage and choose the option that best answer the question.

1. It has been suggested that long-term prisoners, on release from jail, be given a reasonable state pension to reduce the likelihood of their resorting to crime. Most people instinctively reject the suggestion as they feel it would be like rewarding criminal activity.

The supporters of the prisoners? pension scheme have criticized those who reject this possibility, by claiming that for the critics......

Which of the following is the most logical completion of the sentence above?

2.

Early data on seat-belt use showed that seat-belt wearers were less likely to be killed in road accidents. Hence, it was initially believed that wearing a seat-belt increased survival chances in an accident. But what the early analysts had failed to see was that cautious drivers were more likely to wear the belts and were also less likely to cause ?big accidents?, while reckless drivers were more likely to be involved in ?big? accidents and were less likely to wear the belts.

Which of the following, if true, could an opponent of the view presented above best cite as a reason for recommending continued use of seat-belts?

3. The city council will certainly vote to approve the new downtown redevelopment plan, despite the objections of environmentalists. After all, most of the campaign contributions received by members of the city council come from real estate development firms, which stand to benefit from the plan. Which of the following statements, if true, would most weaken the argument above?

4. Television programming experts maintain that with each 1% increase in the prime-time ratings of a television station there is a 3.5% increase in the number of people who watch its evening news program. However, in the last ten years at Channel NTR, there was only one year of extremely high prime-time ratings and during that year, fewer people than ever watched Channel NTR's evening news program. Which of the following conclusions can properly be drawn from the statements above?

5. Whenever a major airplane accident occurs, there is a dramatic increase in the number of airplane mishaps reported, a phenomenon that may last for as long as a few months after the accident. Airline officials assert that the publicity given the gruesomeness of major airplane accidents focuses media attention on the airline industry and the increase in the number of reported accidents is caused by an increase in the number of news sources covering airline accident, not by an increase in the number of accidents. Which of the following, if true, would seriously weaken the assertions of the airline officials?

6. In Millington, a city of 50,000 people, Mercedes Pedrosa , a realtor, calculated that a family with Millington's median family income, $28,000 a year, could afford to buy Millington's median-priced $77,000 house. This calculation was based on an 11.2 percent mortgage interest rate and on the realtor's assumption that a family could only afford to pay up to 25 percent of its income for housing. Which of the following corrections of a figure appearing in the passage above, if it were the only correction that needed to be made, would yield a new calculation showing that even incomes below the median family income would enable families in Millington to afford Millington's median-priced house?

7. Most archaeologists have held that people first reached the Americas less than 20,000 years ago by crossing a land bridge into North America. But recent discoveries of human shelters in South America dating from 32,000 years ago have led researchers to speculate that people arrived in South America first, after voyaging across the Pacific, and then spread northward. Which of the following, if it were discovered, would be pertinent evidence against the speculation above?

8. In 1990 all of the people who applied for a job at Evco also applied for a job at Radeco , and Evco and Radeco each offered jobs to half of these applicants. Therefore, every one of these applicants must have been offered a job in 1990. The argument above is based on which of the following assumptions about these job applicants?

9. Some anthropologists study modern-day societies of foragers in an effort to learn about our ancient ancestors who were also foragers. A flaw in this strategy is that forager societies are extremely varied. Indeed, any forager society with which anthropologists are familiar has had considerable contact with modern nonforager societies. Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the criticism made above of the anthropologists' strategy?

10. In the United States , vacationers account for more than half of all visitors to what are technically called ?pure aquariums? but for fewer than one quarter of all visitors to zoos, which usually include a ?zoo aquarium? of relatively modest scope. Which of the following, if true, most helps to account for the difference described above between visitors to zoos and visitors to pure aquariums?