Passage D

Practice Tests
Diagnostic Pre-Test for Effective Reader
Passage D

Read the passage below and answer the questions that follow.

31. Which sentence best states the central point of this passage?

A. Newborns are almost entirely helpless at birth.

B. Newborns are programmed to recognize their mothers' faces shortly after birth.

C. Newborns display remarkable abilities at birth that help them survive.

D. Newborns have the amazing ability to hear before birth.

32. Based on this passage, newborns respond to their mothers after birth because

A. their mothers are the first people that they see.

B. they have heard their mothers' voices and have learned to recognize them before they were born.

C. their mothers were the first people to speak to them after they were born.

D. their fathers' voices were filtered out and they could not hear them before they were born.

33. One inference that can be drawn from the second paragraph is that

A. infants don't have enough experience hearing their fathers' voices before birth in order to recognize them after birth.

B. fathers don't participate enough in the care of their infants.

C. infants can't hear their fathers' voices before birth because their voices can't penetrate through the mothers' bodies.

D. since infants can't recognize their fathers' voices, fathers aren't important in the early care of infants.

34. Using the information in the fourth paragraph, which inference is the most logical?

A. Newborns cannot discriminate between flat objects and objects that are three-dimensional.

B. Newborns prefer to look at colorful pictures rather than at people.

C. Newborns must wait several weeks for their eyes to develop before they can actually see and recognize their mothers.

D. After one week, newborns can distinguish the difference between their mothers' faces and the faces of other women.

35. The word contours, as it is used in line 27, most nearly means

A. flat surfaces

B. outlines

C. curves

D. markings

36. Notice the word disarray in line 29. The prefix dis means "opposite of." As it is used in this sentence, features in disarray are probably

A. opposite of a face

B. half of a face

C. empty, or having no features

D. features that out of order or mixed up

37. Identify the relationship between the following two sentences from paragraph four.

"Visual acuity improves rapidly over the first six months of a baby's life. Even without perfect vision, however, children have visual preferences."

A. addition

B. comparison

C. contrast

D. cause and/or effect

38. "If that sounds right, you might be surprised to learn that, moments out of the womb, infants reveal remarkable abilities to obtain information through their senses and react to it."

The above sentence is a statement of

A. fact

B. opinion

C. fact and opinion

D. informed opinion

39. The primary purpose of this passage is to

A. convince the reader about the abilities that infants possess at birth which help them survive.

B. persuade the reader that infants cannot survive without their mothers.

C. provide evidence that fathers should participate more in the care of their infants.

D. tell amusing stories about some of the amazing abilities that infants have at birth.

40. Which statement is relevant to the claim that newborns are "prewired for survival?"

A. The human infant is "a lively, squirming bit of flesh, capable of making a few simple responses."

B. We are accustomed to thinking about newborns as entirely helpless.

C. The visual acuity of adults is roughly 40 times better than the visual acuity of newborns.

D. For example, infants can hear even before birth, so they are prepared to respond to certain sounds when they are born.