Vmware Sample Verbal Questions

DIRECTIONS for the question 1 to 4: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.

Passage 1

Dr. Reid began by calling a local school district and asking if anyone had records tracking, say, reading comprehension. The district experts actually had 20 years of data. Better still, they had conducted studies that were quite informative—and tragic. Based only on the first year’s testing, researchers could predict how well students would do in the third year, the seventh, and so on.

“The model is highly predictive,” explained the voice on the other end of the phone. Reid was thunderstruck. With cold, scientific precision, the researcher explained to her that the current education system essentially set kids on a course of success or failure beginning in the first grade—independent of what anyone did afterward.

Stunned and indignant, Reid was determined to find out if there was something teachers could do to make a difference. Weren’t there teachers out there who started with children the model predicted would lag behind, but who helped the students beat the model? And, if so, what was the difference between those who were successful and everyone else? Reid pored over the data until she found teachers whose students did better in later years than before being taught by those teachers. For whatever reason, their students beat the model. Reid was also able to find teachers whose students did far worse than predicted after spending a year under their tutelage.

She gathered a dozen teachers whose students were achieving better results than the model predicted and asked them what methods they used to cause their students to read at a higher level than expected. They didn’t know what had led to success. Later she gathered teachers whose students had done worse than predicted and bluntly asked: ‘What are you doing that prevents the children from learning?” They confessed that they didn’t know.

For the next five years Reid watched both top and bottom performers in action in order to divine the vital behaviors that separated the best teachers from the rest. She codified, gathered, and studied data on virtually every type of teaching behavior she and a team of doctoral students could identify. They had found certain behaviors that separate top performers from everyone else. They’ve proven to be the same behaviors across ages, gender, geography, topic, and anything else the researchers could imagine.

One of the vital behaviors consists of the use of praise versus the use of punishment. Top performers reward positive performance far more frequently than their counterparts. Bottom performers quickly become discouraged and mutter things such as, “Didn’t I just teach you that two minutes ago?” The best consistently reinforce even moderately good performance, and learning flourishes.

1. If the model’s prediction accuracy is so good, what’s the use of teachers?
2. Knowing that there is going to be a problem, the system still did not do anything about it
3. The raison de etre for a school is improvement. Every student must learn to get better
4. Most teachers were unaware of this model; had they been aware they could have gone about planning their jobs better

1. The government of India has passed a legislation which ensures that all students are promoted through to 8th standard without failing them
2. Failing students in class 9, so that the school can boast of a 100% result in class 10
3. Segregating students by grades into different classes – and allocating teachers accordingly
4. Most teachers teach the same subjects with the same syllabus – in the same boring way, year after year

A) Second paragraph      B) Third paragraph           C) Fourth paragraph       D) Last paragraph

1. Explain things to a student, irrespective of the number of times the question gets asked
2. Do not motivate a student to work hard on weaknesses so that they can become strengths
3. Use an optimal mix of reward and punishment in order to develop a disciplined child
4. Help guide a student to set her goals based on her individual strengths

DIRECTIONS for the question 5 & 6: Out of the four options given choose the word or phrase that is most nearly opposite in meaning to the word in capital letters.

A) stable              B) expository     C) contemplative             D) unpersuasive

A) distraction     B) prevention    C) indifference  D) aggravation

DIRECTIONS for the question 7 & 8: In the following question, a group of three interrelated word is given. Choose a word from the given alternatives that belongs to the same group.

A) downpour     B) Damage          C) Accident         D) Earthquake

A) confidence : insecurity             B) horror : fear  C) anger : forgiveness    D) misfortune : pity

DIRECTIONS for the question 9 & 10: The question consists of five statements labelled A, B, C, D and E which when logically ordered form a coherent passage. Choose the option that represents the most logical order.

1. With technology offering all kinds of options, from spell-checks and predictive text to simply erasing or changing errant lines, writers have been lulled into complacency bordering on laziness.
2. The very inflexibility of a typewriter's construction and functioning imposed a certain order to thought and communication that the advent of new, more accommodating writing machines has ended up destroying.
3. Caution is however in-built when using manual typewriters as even 'whiting out' liquid offers limited opportunities to alter what has once been committed to paper.
4. The downside, of course, is that everything 'unsaved' can also vanish at the press of a wrong button, but that has not deterred the onward march of computers.
5. The comforting cadence typewriters clack-clacking in unison was once also the background music in countless offices and their replacement by the far softer tap-tap of keyboards has considerably diminished the air of busyness, though it may be business as usual.

A) ECBAD             B) BEADC             C) EBADC             D) BDECA

1. Having the vision to design what we call a rudimentary weapon today would have taken tremendous intelligence by the standards of those times, given that others around that prehistoric inventor would have been content with whatever their current skills brought to the hearth.
2. Our forebears had invented and used stone-tipped spears - a revolutionary leap comparable to the intercontinental ballistic missile as it allowed the user to kill accurately from a distance - over half a million years ago, or two lakh years earlier than previously estimated.
3. Scientific research constantly reveals that there was more to them than their bad dress sense, lack of sophisticated manners and inadequate personal hygiene.
4. He - or maybe it was a 'she' who got tired of the inefficiency of the male hunter-gatherers and decided to do something about it - was the Steve Jobs of prehistory, creating something so simple and yet irresistibly user-friendly.
5. We really tend to underestimate our prehistoric ancestors, using the term Neanderthal in a none-too-complimentary way.

A) ECBAD             B) DBACE             C) EBCDA             D) BDECA