1. Read the passage and answer the following question.

Traditional research has confronted only Mexican and United States interpretations of Mexican-American culture. Now we must also examine the culture as we Mexican Americans have experienced it, passing from a sovereign people to compatriots with newly arriving settlers to, finally, a conquered people—a charter minority on our own land.

When the Spanish first came to Mexico, they intermarried with and absorbed the culture of the indigenous Indians. This policy of colonization through acculturation was continued when Mexico acquired Texas in the early 1800’s and brought the indigenous Indians into Mexican life and government. In the 1820’s, United States citizens migrated to Texas, attracted by land suitable for cotton. As their numbers became more substantial, their policy of acquiring land by subduing native populations began to dominate. The two ideologies clashed repeatedly, culminating in a military conflict that led to victory for the United States. Thus, suddenly deprived of our parent culture, we had to evolve uniquely Mexican-American modes of thought and action in order to survive.

Ques 1. The author’s purpose in writing this passage is primarily to

2. In linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) is a large and structured set of texts (now usually electronically stored and processed). A corpus may be used to help linguists to analyse a language, or for the purpose of dictionary writing or language teaching. The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late twentieth century from a wide variety of genres with the intention that it be a representative sample of spoken and written British English of that time.

What is a corpus according to text?

3. The social sciences are less likely than other intellectual enterprises to get credit for their accomplishments. Arguably, this is so because the theories and conceptual constructs of the social sciences are especially accessible: human intelligence apprehends truths about human affairs with a particular facility. And the discoveries of the social sciences, once isolated and labeled, are quickly absorbed into conventional wisdom, whereupon they lose their distinctiveness as scientific advances.

This under-appreciation of the social sciences contrasts oddly with what many see as their over-utilization. Game theory is pressed into service in studies of shifting international alliances. Evaluation research is called upon to demonstrate successes or failures of social programs. Models from economics and demography become the definitive tools for examining the financial base of social security. Yet this rush into practical applications is itself quite understandable: public policy must continually be made, and policymakers rightly feel that even tentative findings and untested theories are better guides to decision-making than no findings and no theories at all.

The author is primarily concerned with

4. A new survey reveals that a family sit-down at dinnertime may reduce a teenager’s risk of trying or using alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. The study surveyed more than 1,000 teens and found that those who dined with their families five to seven times a week were four times less likely to use alcohol, tobacco or marijuana than those who ate with their families fewer than three times a week.

A recent UK survey also found that dining together as a family is a key ingredient in ensuring a child’s happiness. Children in the survey reported higher levels of happiness when they dined together with their families at least three times a week. “Contrary to the popular belief that children only want to spend time playing video games or watching TV,” said researcher Dr. Maris Iacovou of the University of Essex, “we found that they were most happy when interacting with their parents or siblings.”

what would be the best title for the given text?

5. For the first time, dictionary publishers are incorporating real, spoken English into their data. It gives lexicographers (people who write dictionaries) access to a more vibrant, up-to-date vernacular language which has never really been studied before. In one project, 150 volunteers each agreed to discreetly tie a Walkman recorder to their waist and leave it running for anything up to two weeks. Every conversation they had was recorded. When the data was collected, the length of tapes was 35 times the depth of the Atlantic Ocean. Teams of audio typists transcribed the tapes to produce a computerised database of ten million words.

Which would be most suitable heading for the paragraph?