The first passage (1-4) highlights the journey of a utility tool- ‘email’ and how it has gone through different stages from being unpopular to popular to becoming a nerve-racking part of our life. Author also underscores different psychological, mental as well as physical impact of excessive use of email, which may cause work-life imbalance. The level of difficulty of this passage was easy to moderate.The second passage (5-8) highlights how ants are quite unconventional in terms of lifespan, reproduction and redistribution of nutrition and metabolic resources among off springs. This leads the scientists to discover how queen ant produce anti-insulin protein, despite giving birth to so many offspring. This brings us to the conclusion that we can’t generalize all the similar kind of species to have same traits and characteristics. This passage was overall moderate in level difficulty. The third passage (10-13), author encapsulates the factors that influenced the life journey and works of artist, Andreas Gursky. He elaborates on how his father’s commercial photography studio and other advertising aesthetics in his surrounding shaped his photographic vision. This passage was easy to moderate in level. The fourth passage (13-16) is an intriguing writing from the subject area of Egyptian mythology. The passage highlights a particular chapter from “The Book of Dead” which gives an insight about the journey one must make in afterlife. The questions (13-16) were all moderate in difficulty level. Questions (17-19) were based on Para-jumbles and these questions were moderate to difficult on difficulty level. Questions (20-22) were based on Para-summary and the questions were a mix of easy and moderate level. Questions 23 and 24 were based on ‘fit the sentence appropriately’ in the paragraph. This included one easy and moderate question. Overall, the verbal section of this mock was more on moderate level of difficulty with an expected level of 85% of accuracy with 90+ percentile if a candidate attempts around 16 to 18 questions.
The overall feel of the paper was moderate to tough, though for the students who knew how to manage the time available to the best i.e., not wasting much time in lengthy and difficult questions, could easily manage an overall good attempt. Both Quant & Reasoning sections were difficult. However, Quant Section was slightly easier than reasoning section. Verbal section was moderate. Most of the questions in quant section were from Arithmetic, Algebra, Number system and Geometry. For verbal section, one should have good reading skills as there were 4 RC’s and also a few questions based on paragraph summary. One must focus on contextual vocabulary as well to understand and score well in RC passages. Questions such as sentence rearrangement and misfit require analysis and knowledge of tricks to answer the questions. It is not advisable to spend too much time on TITA questions especially in the verbal section.