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Previous Year Questions

TLS Online TPP Program

QUESTION ID:1

If I were you, I __________ that laptop. It’s much too expensive.

QUESTION ID:2

He turned a deaf ear to my request.
What does the underlined phrasal verb mean?

QUESTION ID:3

Choose the most appropriate set of words from the options given below to complete the following
sentence.
_________ ___________ is a will, _________ is a way.

QUESTION ID:4

(x % of y) + (y % of x) is equivalent to .

QUESTION ID:5

The sum of the digits of a two digit number is 12. If the new number formed by reversing the digits
is greater than the original number by 54, find the original number.

QUESTION ID:6

Two finance companies, P and Q, declared fixed annual rates of interest on the amounts invested with them. The rates of interest offered by these companies may differ from year to year. Year-wise annual rates of interest offered by these companies are shown by the line graph provided below.
If the amounts invested in the companies, P and Q, in 2006 are in the ratio 8:9, then the amounts received after one year as interests from companies P and Q would be in the ratio:

QUESTION ID:7

Today, we consider Ashoka as a great ruler because of the copious evidence he left behind in the form of stone carved edicts. Historians tend to correlate greatness of a king at his time with the availability of evidence today.
Which of the following can be logically inferred from the above sentences?

QUESTION ID:8

Fact 1: Humans are mammals.
Fact 2: Some humans are engineers.
Fact 3: Engineers build houses.
If the above statements are facts, which of the following can be logically inferred?
I. All mammals build houses.
II. Engineers are mammals.
III. Some humans are not engineers.

QUESTION ID:9

A square pyramid has a base perimeter x, and the slant height is half of the perimeter. What is the lateral surface area of the pyramid?

QUESTION ID:10

Ananth takes 6 hours and Bharath takes 4 hours to read a book. Both started reading copies of the book at the same time. After how many hours is the number of pages to be read by Ananth, twice that to be read by Bharath? Assume Ananth and Bharath read all the pages with constant pace.

QUESTION ID:11

Different kinds of limbs, such as the wings of birds and bats, and the flippers of turtles, whales and dolphins, have the same underlying skeletal structure. This is an example of:

QUESTION ID:12

Forests with a high density of native conifer trees are found in:

QUESTION ID:13

Ozone layer depletion, since the 1970s, is primarily attributed to:

QUESTION ID:14

The evolution of the amniotic egg in reptiles allowed them to:

QUESTION ID:15

Which of the following phyla are most closely related to chordates ?

QUESTION ID:16

Limb lengths were measured for 50 individuals from a population of lizards and the sample variance was calculated to be 64 cm2. The standard deviation for this sample is ______ cm.
(Use decimal notation, not fractions or percentage)

QUESTION ID:17

Most terrestrial ecosystems have a pyramidal structure of standing biomass across trophic levels
where biomass of producers > primary consumers > secondary consumers > tertiary consumers.
However, some aquatic ecosystems have an inverted pyramidal structure where the standing
biomass of producers < primary consumers. An explanation for this is:

QUESTION ID:18

In an experiment, a PhD student found that the traits, flower colour and seed size, did not follow Mendel’s Law of Independent Assortment. A possible explanation for this observation is:

QUESTION ID:19

Which of the following invertebrates has the lowest gut length :body length ratio?

QUESTION ID:20

Allopatric speciation occurs when two populations diverge because of geographical separation.
Rates of allopatric speciation are likely to be higher in:

QUESTION ID:21

For nearly 200 years, biogeographers have noted that the tropics have more terrestrial species than temperate regions. Which of the following is NOT a plausible explanation for this pattern?

QUESTION ID:22

If the rate of non-synonymous substitution at a locus exceeds that of synonymous substitution, then:

QUESTION ID:23

There are N individuals in a haploid population. At a given locus, there are 2 alleles, AL1 and AL2. The number of copies of allele AL1 is Z1, and the number of copies of allele AL2 is Z2 in the population. What is the frequency of allele AL2?

QUESTION ID:24

According to Hamilton’s Rule, an altruistic act will spread in a population due to kin selection, when B/C > 1/r , where B is the benefit to the recipient, C is the cost to the actor and r is the genetic relatedness of the recipient to the actor. Given this relationship, a human may forego producing one of her own offspring to help her full sibling raise offspring, only if it results in at least ______ or more extra offspring produced by her sibling.

QUESTION ID:25

Which of the following is NOT a plant hormone?

QUESTION ID:26

Among foraging shore birds, feeding rates (F, number of prey items consumed in 5 minutes) decrease as the number of neighbours (N) increases as follows: F = 10 – 0.9N. The maximum feeding rate is ________________. (Use decimal notation, not fractions or percentage)

QUESTION ID:27

Which of the following is NOT an adaptation to reduce the risk of predation?

QUESTION ID:28

Which of the following is NOT an example of an evolutionary arms race?

QUESTION ID:29

The Weber-Fechner law states that the magnitude of a perceived sensation increases as log10 of stimulus intensity. Let us assume a background stimulus level of 1 unit, which increases to 10 units in situation P and to 100 units in situation Q. The perceived sensation in situation Q is stronger than the sensation perceived in situation P by a factor of ______. (Use decimal notation, not fractions or percentage)

QUESTION ID:30

Monotremes are unique among mammals because they:

QUESTION ID:31

The most important reason for a neuron to be myelinated is to:

QUESTION ID:32

A small isolated population is more likely to undergo speciation than a large population because, compared to the large population, the small population:

QUESTION ID:33

To which of the following families do the important timber species, sal and teak, belong?
(i) Dipterocarpaceae; (ii) Poaceae; (iii) Solanaceae; (iv) Verbenaceae

QUESTION ID:34

The yields of which of these crops are most likely to be reduced by ongoing declines in bee populations?

QUESTION ID:35

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane is related to the phenomenon of:

QUESTION ID:36

Here is a data set on wing lengths in cm: 8, 9, 10, 10, 12, 13, 13, 14, 15, 15, 15, 19, 22, 25, 25. For this sample data set, the mean, median and mode are __________________, _________________, and _____________________ respectively.

QUESTION ID:37

Dragonflies eat plant pollinators. Fish eat dragonfly larvae. A study compared the fitness of plants growing near ponds with and without fish. Given the above set of trophic interactions in a community, this study will likely find that:

QUESTION ID:38

Which of the following statements CANNOT be inferred from the following phylogenetic tree?


QUESTION ID:39

Assume that the abundance of a species in a community is proportional to the size of its niche. As each new species colonises this community, an existing niche is split. The resultant relative abundances of species in this community will be most uneven if:

QUESTION ID:40

To study colour preference in bees, a student uses artificial flowers with a sugar reward. She gives bees a choice between blue round flowers and yellow square flowers of the same size. She finds that bees choose the blue flowers significantly more often than the yellow flowers and concludes that bees have a colour preference for blue flowers. However, her friend disagrees and suggests that she should have done the experiment differently. Which of the following would have been more appropriate to test for colour preference in bees?

QUESTION ID:41

Which of the following does NOT form a component of phytohormone action?

QUESTION ID:42

The following three panels show the change in population size over time for two species when they are found alone and when they are found together. Which kind of interaction best describes the relationship between the two species?

QUESTION ID:43

Fresh water fish belonging to the family Galaxoidae are found exclusively in the southern parts of the continents of South America, Africa and Australia. This pattern is explained by the theory proposed by: 

QUESTION ID:44

Ant species X preys upon ant species Y. A researcher has the following set of observations regarding the behaviour of species X where aggression signifies a predatory response.

Which of the following statement(s) are correct regarding the behaviour of Species X?
(i) A glass bead is sufficient to elicit the predatory response.
(ii) Both chemical and non-chemical cues are involved in the predatory response.
(iii) Chemical cues are necessary to elicit the predatory response.
(iv) Chemical cues are sufficient to elicit the predatory response

QUESTION ID:45

In the schematic below, the left panel represents climatic zones occupied by two different biomes, X and Y, along gradients of temperature and precipitation. The right panel depicts the expected species-area relationships of these two biomes. From the figures below, which of the following are most likely to be true?
(i) Biome X will show pattern W
(ii) Biome Y will show pattern Z
(iii) Biome X will show pattern Z
(iv) Biome Y will show pattern W

QUESTION ID:46

In many plant and animal communities that are found on islands, the number of species (S) changes with the area (A) of the island as follows: S = cAz, where 0 <z < 1 and c>0. Which of the following graphs best represents such a species-area relationship?

QUESTION ID:47

Males in a population differ in the time they spend displaying to females. A researcher hypothesizes that predators are responsible for these differences. Males display for longer durations when there are no predators in the vicinity and for shorter durations when there is a predator nearby. Which of the following study designs is the most appropriate test of this hypothesis?

QUESTION ID:48

In Batesian mimicry, a harmless species mimics a harmful or toxic model species. Increasing the relative abundance of the mimic will:

QUESTION ID:49

There are two alleles at a locus in a population in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. If the proportion of the dominant phenotype is 0.99, what proportion of the population is heterozygous? (Use decimal notation, not fractions or percentage)

QUESTION ID:50

Haemophilia is a condition resulting from a sex-linked recessive gene in which individuals can suffer from excessive bleeding due to a blood-clotting disorder. In a human family with three children, the two sons are afflicted with haemophilia while the parents are normal. The probability that the daughter has inherited the gene for haemophilia is ______, and the probability that she is afflicted by haemophilia is ________.

QUESTION ID:51

Which of the graphs below represents the relationship between population size (N) and population growth rate (dN/dt) for a population showing exponential growth?

QUESTION ID:52

Two islands, P and Q, are similar in habitat and other features. They are 100 and 200 km2 in size respectively, but have the same number of species. Which of the following statements can independently explain this observation?
(i) P is closer to the mainland than Q
(ii) P is further away from the mainland than Q
(iii) P has higher speciation rates than Q
(iv) P has lower speciation rates than Q

QUESTION ID:53

In reverse sexual selection, variance in mating success is higher in females than in males. In such species, which of the following is most expected?

QUESTION ID:54

According to the Hamilton-Zuk hypothesis, females prefer males with the most elaborate ornaments because those ornaments signal parasite resistance. Which of the following is NOT an assumption of this hypothesis?

QUESTION ID:55

A plant produces flowers that are open through the day and the night. An experimenter places pollen on the stigmas of freshly opened flowers and covers them after pollination to prevent natural pollinators from having access to the flowers. When experimental pollination was carried out during the day, 40% of the flowers yielded fruit. When experimental pollination was carried out during the night, 80% of the flowers yielded fruit. However, when flowers were kept open to natural pollination during the day (covered at night), 35% of flowers produced fruit. 20% of flowers exposed to natural pollination during the night (covered during the day) produced fruit. Which of the following statements is NOT a plausible explanation of these results ?

QUESTION ID:56

Sex is determined by temperature in many reptiles, including crocodiles and turtles. While lower temperatures produce males in turtles, the pattern is the opposite in crocodiles. Due to climate change, there is an increase in temperatures which results in a change in sex ratios. In small populations, this change in demography is likely to negatively impact the population growth of:

QUESTION ID:57

An unbiased coin is tossed four times. What is the probability of getting at least three "heads" in a row? (Use decimal notation, not fractions or percentage)

QUESTION ID:58

In a study of interactions between plants, ants and caterpillars, the following experimental treatments were imposed: i) Control (both ants and caterpillars are present); ii) Ant removal; iii) Caterpillar removal; iv) Ant and caterpillar removal. Plus (+) indicates presence and minus (-) indicates absence on plants. The results for plant performance (growth) from this experiment are shown in the figure below. Plant performance in all treatments were significantly different from each other. Based on these results, which of the following inferences is correct?

QUESTION ID:59

Both males and females of a fish species show variation in colour. A population of this species consists of 40% blue females, 20% red females, 20% blue males and 20% red males. A researcher catches one fish at random from this population. Given that a male fish is caught, the probability that it is blue is _______. (Use decimal notation, not fractions or percentage)

QUESTION ID:60

Assume that an asexually propagating fungus has three colors of colonies, white, black and red. Such variability in color may have originated due to:

QUESTION ID:61

Shannon's index of diversity is calculated using the equation below, where pi is the proportion of the ith species and ln is natural logarithm. For a community with a given number of species, which of the following statements is true?

QUESTION ID:62

The schematic below shows the relationship between survivorship with age (relative to maximum lifespan) in Species 1 (dashed line) and Species 2 (solid line). Which of the following inferences is compatible with this figure?

QUESTION ID:63

A team of conservation biologists, surveying a population of frogs on an island, captured and marked 312 individuals in the first sample. In a second sampling, 3 days later, the team caught 140 individuals of which 26 were previously marked. The total number of frogs on the island is estimated to be ________. (Use decimal notation, not fractions or percentage)

QUESTION ID:64

The following equation represents a hypothetical relationship between fitness (w) and shoot:root ratio (r) in individuals of a plant species: w = 10r-10r2. At what value of shoot:root ratio (r), do these plants achieve maximum fitness? (Use decimal notation, not fractions or percentage)

QUESTION ID:65

The relative abundance of C3 relative to C4 plant species increases with latitude because of the associated temperature gradient. A study in North America found that at 42° North, C3 plants become more abundant than C4 plants. Given an increase in mean global temperatures by 10°C and no other changes in environmental conditions, the latitude at which C3 plants become more abundant: