Free STAT Practice Test

Question 1 to 2 refer to the following bar graph. It shows the monthly cumulative sales (progressively added) over the last three years of a business called ‘Star’.

Question 1: A ‘steady trend’ is when the sales over three consecutive years steadily increases or steadily decreases. The only months in which an increasing steady trend is observed for Star sales are?

In the year 2000, the ratio of actual sales to budgeted sales was highest in which month?

Questions 3- 6 use the following extracts from Toxic Sludge is Good For You – Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, by John C. Stauder and Sheldon Rampton.

Passage 1

“In 1836 legendary showman P.T. Barnum began his career by buying an old Negro slave woman named Joice Heth and exhibiting her to the public as “George Washington’s childhood nursemaid.”

Joice Heth claimed to be 160 years old. Was she for real? The man who coined the phrase, “there’s a sucker born every minute,” kept the public guessing through a clever series of forged letters to the editors of New York newspapers. Written by Barnum himself and signed by various fake names, some of the letters denounced Barnum as a fraud. In other letters, also written by Barnum, he praised himself as a great man who was performing a service by giving the public a chance to see George Washington’s “mammy.” The letters succeeded in stirring up controversy. Joice Heth was discussed in news reports and editorial columns, and the public turned out in droves to see for themselves. Barnum collected as much as $1500 per week from New Yorkers who came to see the pipe-smoking old Negro Woman.

When Joice Heth died, doctors performed an autopsy and estimated her true age at around eighty. Barnum handled the situation like the PR pro that he was. He said he was shocked, deeply shocked, at the way this woman had deceived him.

Barnum knew that in his publicity for “the greatest show on earth,” it didn’t matter whether people called him a scoundrel or a saint. The important thing was that the newspapers spelled his name right, and that they mentioned him often. He was one of the first people to manipulate the news for fun and profit.”

Question 3: In this extract P.T. Barnum is portrayed as?

The suggestion that Barnum was performing a public service is ironic because?

Passage 2

“Born in Vienna, Bernays was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, the “father of psychoanalysis”, and his public relations efforts helped popularize Freud’s theories in the United States. Bernays also pioneered the PR industry’s use of psychology and other social sciences to design its public persuasion campaigns. “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their opinion molding the “engineering of consent.”

One of Bernay’s favourite techniques for manipulating public opinion was the indirect use of “third party authorities” to plead for his clients’ causes. “If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway,” he said. In order to promote sales of bacon, for example, he conducted a survey of physicians and reported their recommendation that people eat hearty breakfasts. He sent the results of the survey to 5,000 physicians along with publicity touting bacon and eggs as a hearty breakfast. His clients included President Calvin Coolidge, Procter & Gamble, CBS, General Electric and Dodge Motors. Beyond his contributions to these famous and powerful clients, Bernays revolutionized public relations by combining traditional press agentry with the techniques of psychology and sociology to create what one author called “the science of ballyhoo.”

Question 5: An example of a “third party authority” used in the promotion of a car would be?

Passages 1 & 2 suggest that Burnam and Bernays are primarily concerned with?

Question 7  refers to the following cartoon:

In this cartoon the humour is primarily derived from?

Questions 8 – 9 refer to the following information and graph:

Question 8: What is the approximate ratio of expenditure on agriculture to that on dairy?

Haryana spent 11% of all its expenses on Roads in 1999. Did Haryana spend more on Roads expenditure in 1999 than in 2000? To answer the question, we..?

Question 10 refers to the following table:

How many times did the outlay on Transport & communication increase over a preceding year?

Questions 11 – 12 refer to the following table:

For which year did the total number of workers equal total number of workers the factory had in the year 2007?

Which department had the total employees equal to 228 during the years 2003 to 2008?

Question 13 refers to the following cartoon:

In the above illustration which of the following elements could be removed without effecting the main message?

Questions 14 – 15 refer to the following information and graph:

The number of candidates (Girls & Boys) ‘appeared’ & ‘qualified’ over the years:

Question 14: Which two consecutive years had the same number of qualified girls?

What was the difference between the total number of boys & girls qualified in 1990 and 1995?

The comment below was recently made by philosopher, Slavoj Zizek:

“…When you buy an organic apple, you’re doing it for ideological reasons, it makes you feel good: ‘I’m doing something for Mother Earth,’ and so on. But in what sense are we engaged? It’s a false engagement. Paradoxically, we do these things to avoid really doing things. It makes you feel good. You recycle, you send $5 a month to some Somali orphan, and you did your duty.”

Which of the following best summarises Zizek’s main point?

The following are a series of letters to the editor of www.guardian.co.uk concerning various aspects of the London 2012 Olympic Games. (questions 17 – 20).

Letter 1

“My four children would have been thrilled to see even one event in the Olympic village. Yet after bidding online for numerous tickets we did not get any. Having the Games in London is like having a party in your house, being asked to pay for it and then not being allowed to attend. I went to the Munich Olympics which had none of the restrictions on attendance with tickets available during the games. 2012 seems a jamboree for sponsors, providing unhealthy food with a large proportion of the tickets reserved for corporate use. I’m now booking a holiday abroad during the Olympics. We’ve all had enough of watching sport on TV. I just hope my children will get a chance to see the Olympics live when they take place in another country.”

Question 17: “Having the Games in London is like having a party in your house, being asked to pay for it and then not being allowed to attend.” Why is this metaphor flawed?

Letter 2

“The Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing is an icon one that could only have been built by a totalitarian regime. We’ll never know its true cost or how many workers died building it. It used 10 times more steel than its London counterpart, whose roof is almost entirely recycled steel. Since the 2008 Games the Bird’s Nest has barely been used for sport and earns its keep mainly as a tourist attraction. The real disappointment about the London stadium is that, instead of sticking with the original plan of reducing it, post 2012, to a basic, 25,000-seater, community-based athletics stadium, a facility London badly needs to replace Crystal Palace and that would fully suit its parkland setting, the Olympic Park Legacy Company fell into the old trap of seeing it as a commercial opportunity. When Wembley was being built, Chris Smith, the then culture minister, tried to make it into an athletics venue. Now his successors seem to be trying to turn the Olympic stadium into a football venue, for which it was never designed. There was nothing wrong with the original, modest plans.”

Question 18: The word ‘modest’ in the final line of Letter 2, is closest in meaning to?

Letter 3

“I’m a little under-whelmed that the Olympic torch does most of its journey in a car. It goes through larger towns on foot, with people cheering the fit runners, but for the long boring bits it is being driven. So we are effectively cheering a car and a fire. The idea that this is some ultra-marathon slog is a con: watch the coverage to see how often the car crops up with David Beckham sitting in first class holding the torch. I suspect never.”

Question 19: Letter 3 suggests that which of the following aspects of the Olympics has been compromised?