CAT RC ( MISCELLANEOUS )

: MISCELLANEOUS

PASSAGE I

The persistent patterns in the way nations fight reflect their cultural and historical traditions and deeply rooted attitudes that collectively make up their strategic culture. These patterns provide insights that go beyond what can be learnt just by comparing armaments and divisions. In the Vietnam War, the strategic tradition of the United States called for forcing the enemy to fight a massed battle in an open area, where superior American weapons would prevail. The United States was trying to re-fight World War II in the jungles of Southeast Asia, against an enemy with no intention of doing so.

Some British military historians describe the Asian way of war as one of indirect attacks, avoiding frontal attacks meant to overpower an opponent. This traces back to Asian history and geography: the great distances and harsh terrain have often made it difficult to execute the sort of open field clashes allowed by the flat terrain and relatively compact size of Europe. A very different strategic tradition arose in Asia.

The bow and arrow were metaphors for an Eastern way of war. By its nature, the arrow is an indirect weapon. Fired from a distance of hundreds of yards, it does not necessitate physical contact with the enemy. Thus, it can be fired from hidden positions. When fired from behind a ridge, the barrage seems to come out of nowhere, taking the enemy by surprise. The tradition of this kind of fighting is captured in the classical strategic writings of the East. The 2,000 years’ worth of Chinese writings on war constitutes the most subtle writings on the subject in any language. Not until Clausewitz, did the West produce a strategic theorist to match the sophistication of Sun-tzu, whose Art of War was written 2,300 years earlier.

In Sun-tzu and other Chinese writings, the highest achievement of arms is to defeat an adversary without fighting. He wrote: “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence.” Actual combat is just one among many means towards the goal of subduing an adversary. War contains too many surprises to be a first resort. It can lead to ruinous losses, as has been seen time and again. It can have the unwanted effect of inspiring heroic efforts in an enemy, as the United States learned in Vietnam, and as the Japanese found out after Pearl Harbor.

Aware of the uncertainties of a military campaign, Sun-tzu advocated war only after most thorough preparations. Even then it should be quick and clean. Ideally, the army is just an instrument to deal the final blow to an enemy already weakened by isolation, poor morale, and disunity. Ever since Sun-tzu, the Chinese have been seen as masters of subtlety who take measured actions to manipulate an adversary without his knowledge. The dividing line between war and peace can be obscure. Low level violence often is the backdrop to a larger strategic campaign. The unwitting victim, focused on the day-to-day events, never realizes what’s happening to him until it’s too late. History holds many examples. The Viet Cong lured French and U.S. infantry deep into the jungle, weakening their morale over several years. The mobile army of the United States was designed to fight on the plains of Europe, where it could quickly move unhindered from one spot to the next. The jungle did more than make quick movement impossible; broken down smaller units and scattered in isolated bases, US forces were deprived of the feeling of support and protection that ordinarily comes from being part of a big army.

The isolation of U.S. troops in Vietnam was not just a logistical detail, something that could be overcome by, for instance, bringing in reinforcements by helicopter. In a big army reinforcements are readily available. It was Napoleon who realized the extraordinary effects on morale that come from being part of a larger formation. Just the knowledge of it lowers the soldier’s fear and increases his aggressiveness. In the jungle and on isolated bases, this feeling was removed. The thick vegetation slowed down the reinforcements and made it difficult to find stranded units. Soldiers felt they were on their own.

More important, by altering the way the war was fought, the Viet Cong stripped the United States of its belief in the inevitability of victory, as it had done to the French before them. Morale was high when these armies first went to Vietnam. Only after many years of debilitating and demoralizing fighting did Hanoi launch its decisive attacks, at Dienbienphu in 1954 and against Saigon in 1975. It should be recalled that in the final push to victory the North Vietnamese abandoned their jungle guerrilla tactics completely, committing their entire army of twenty divisions to pushing the South Vietnamese into collapse. This final battle, with the enemy’s army all in one place, was the one that the United States had desperately wanted to fight in 1965. When it did come out into the open in 1975, Washington had already withdrawn its forces and there was no possibility of re-intervention.

The Japanese early in World War II used a modern form of the indirect attack, one that relied on stealth and surprise for its effect. At Pearl Harbor, in the Philippines, and in Southeast Asia, stealth and surprise were attained by sailing under radio silence so that the navy’s movements could not be tracked. Moving troops aboard ships into Southeast Asia made it appear that the Japanese army was also “invisible.” Attacks against Hawaii and Singapore seemed, to the American and British defenders, to come from nowhere. In Indonesia and the Philippines the Japanese attack was even faster than the German blitz against France in the West.

The greatest military surprises in American history have all been in Asia. Surely there is something going on here beyond the purely technical difficulties of detecting enemy movements. Pearl Harbor, the Chinese intervention in Korea, the Tet offensive in Vietnam all came out of a tradition of surprise and stealth. U.S. technical intelligence—the location of enemy units and their movements—was greatly improved after each surprise, but with no noticeable improvement in the American ability to foresee or prepare what would happen next. There is a cultural divide here, not a technical one. Even when it was possible to track an army with intelligence satellites, as when Iraq invaded Kuwait or when Syria and Egypt attacked Israel, surprise was achieved. The United States was stunned by Iraq’s attack on Kuwait even though it had satellite pictures of Iraqi troops massing at the border.

The exception that proves the point that cultural differences obscure the West’s understanding of Asian behavior was the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. This was fully anticipated and understood in advance. There was no surprise because the United States understood Moscow’s world view and thinking. It could anticipate Soviet action almost as well as the Soviets themselves, because the Soviet Union was really a Western country.

The difference between the Eastern and the Western way of war is striking. The west’s great strategic writer, Clausewitz, linked war with politics, as did Sun-tzu. Both were opponents of militarism, of turning war over to the generals. But there all similarity ends. Clausewitz wrote that the way to achieve a larger political purpose is through destruction of the enemy’s army. After observing Napoleon conquer Europe by smashing enemy armies to bits, Clausewitz made his famous remark in On War (1932) that combat is the continuation of politics by violent means. Morale and unity are important, but they should be harnessed for the ultimate battle. If the Eastern way of war is embodied by the stealthy archer, the metaphorical Western counterpart is the swordsman charging forward, seeking a decisive showdown, eager to administer the blow that will obliterate the enemy once and for all. In this view, war proceeds along a fixed course and occupies a finite extent of time, like a play in three acts with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The end, the final scene, decides the issue for good.

When things don’t work out quite this way, the Western military mind feels tremendous frustration. Sun-tzu’s great disciples, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, are respected in Asia for their clever use of indirection and deception to achieve an advantage over stronger adversaries. But in the West their approach is seen as underhand and devious. To the American strategic mind, the Viet Cong guerrilla did not fight fairly. He should have come out into the open and fought like a man, instead of hiding in the jungle and sneaking around like a cat in the night.

1.       According to the author, the main reason for the U.S. losing the Vietnam war was

1.   the Vietnamese understood the local terrain better.

2.   the lack of support for the war from the American people.

3.   the failure of the U.S. to mobilize its military strength.

4.   their inability to fight a war on terms other than those they understood well.

2.       Which of the following statements does not describe the ‘Asian’ way of war?

1.       Indirect attacks without frontal attacks.

2.       The swordsman charging forward to obliterate the enemy once and for all.

3.       Manipulation of an adversary without his knowledge.

4.       Subduing an enemy without fighting.

3.       Which of the following is not one of Sun-tzu’s ideas?

1.       Actual combat is the principal means of subduing an adversary.

2.       War should be undertaken only after thorough preparation.

3.       War is linked to politics.

4.       War should not be left to the generals alone.

4.       The difference in the concepts of war of Clausewitz and Sun-tzu is best characterized by

1.       Clausewitz’s support for militarism as against Sun-tzu’s opposition to it.

2.       their relative degrees of sophistication.

3.       their attitude to guerrilla warfare.

4.       their differing conceptions of the structure, time and sequence of a war.

5.       To the Americans, the approach of the Viet Cong seemed devious because

1.       the Viet Cong did not fight like men out in the open.

2.       the Viet Cong allied with America’s enemies.

3.       the Viet Cong took strategic advice from Mao Zedong.

4.       the Viet Cong used bows and arrows rather than conventional weapons.

6.       According to the author, the greatest military surprises in American history have been in Asia because

1.       The Americans failed to implement their military strategies many miles away from their own country.

2.       The Americans were unable to use their technologies like intelligence satellites effectively to detect enemy movements.

3.       The Americans failed to understand the Asian culture of war that was based on stealth and surprise.

4.       Clausewitz is inferior to Sun-tzu.

PASSAGE II

Studies of the factors governing reading development in young children have achieved a remarkable degree of consensus over the past two decades. This consensus concerns the causal role of phonological skills in young children’s reading progress. Children, who have good phonological skills or good ‘phonological awareness’, become good readers and good spellers. Children with poor phonological skills progress more poorly. In particular, those who have a specific phonological deficit are likely to be classified as dyslexic by the time that they are 9 or 10 years old.

Phonological skills in young children can be measured at a number of different levels. The term phonological awareness is a global one, and refers to a deficit in recognising smaller units of sound within spoken words. Developmental work has shown that this deficit can be at the level of syllables, of onsets and rimes, or of phonemes. For example, a 4-year old child might have difficulty in recognising that a word like valentine has three syllables, suggesting a lack of syllabic awareness. A 5-year old might have difficulty in recognising that the odd word out in the set of words fan, cat, hat, mat is fan. This task requires an awareness of the sub-syllabic units of the onset and the rime. The onset corresponds to any initial consonants in a syllable, and the rime corresponds to the vowel and to any following consonants. Rimes correspond to rhyme in single-syllable words, and so the rime in fan differs from the rime in cat, hat, and mat. In longer words, rime and rhyme may differ. The onsets in val:en:tine are /v/ and /t/, and the rimes correspond to the spelling patterns ‘al’, ‘en’, and ‘ine’.

A 6-year old might have difficulty in recognising that plea and pray begin with the same initial sound. This is a phonemic judgement. Although the initial phoneme /p/ is shared between the two words, in plea it is part of the onset ‘pl’, and in pray it is part of the onset ‘pr’. Until children can segment the onset (or the rime), such phonemic judgements are difficult for them to make. In fact, a recent survey of different developmental studies has shown that the different levels of phonological awareness appear to emerge sequentially. The awareness of syllables, onsets, and rimes appears to emerge at around the ages of 3 and 4, long before most children go to school. The awareness of phonemes, on the other hand, usually emerges at around the age of 5 or 6, when children have been taught to read for about a year. An awareness of onsets and rimes thus appears to be a precursor of reading, whereas an awareness of phonemes at every serial position in a word only appears to develop as reading is taught. The onset-rime and phonemic levels of phonological structure, however, are not distinct. Many onsets in English are single phonemes, and so are some rimes (e.g., sea, go, zoo).

The early awareness of onsets and rimes is supported by studies that have compared the development of phonological awareness of onsets, rimes, and phonemes in the same subjects using the same phonological awareness tasks. For example, a study by Treiman and Zudowski used a same/different judgement task based on the beginning or the end sounds of words. In the beginning sound task, the words either began with the same onset, as in plea and plank, or shared only the initial phoneme, as in plea and pray. In the end-sound task, the words either shared the entire rime, as in spit and wit, or shared only the final phoneme, as in rat and wit. Treiman and Zudowski showed that 4-year and 5-year old children found the onset-rime version of the same/different task significantly easier than the version based on phonemes. Only the 6-year-olds, who had been learning to read for about a year, were able to perform both versions of the tasks with an equal level of success.

7.   From the following statements, pick out the true statement according to the passage:

1.   A mono-syllabic word can have only one onset.

2.   A mono-syllabic word can have only one rhyme but more than one rime.

3.   A mono-syllabic word can have only one phoneme.

4.   All of the above.

8.   Which one of the following is likely to emerge last in the cognitive development of a child?

1.   Rhyme.

2.   Rime.

3.   Onset.

4.   Phoneme.

9.   A phonological deficit in which of the following is likely to be classified as dyslexia?

1.   Phonemic judgement.

2.   Onset judgement.

3.   Rime judgement.

4.   Any one or more of the above.

10. The Treiman and Zudowski experiment found evidence to support the following:

1.   at age 6, reading instruction helps children perform, both, the same-different judgement task.

2.   the development of onset-rime awareness precedes the development of an awareness of phonemes.

3.   at age 4-5, children find the onset-rime version of the same/different task significantly easier.

4.   the development of onset-rime awareness is a necessary and sufficient condition for the development of an awareness of phonemes.

11. The single-syllable words Rhyme and Rime are constituted by the exact same set of:

      A.   rime(s).                         B.   onset(s).                   C.   rhyme(s).                  D.   phoneme(s).

1. A, B
2. A, C
3. A, B, C
4. B, C, D

PASSAGE III

If translated into English, most of the ways economists talk among themselves would sound plausible enough to poets, journalists, businesspeople, and other thoughtful though noneconomical folk. Like serious talk anywhere—among boat designers and baseball fans, say—the talk is hard to follow when one has not made a habit of listening to it for a while. The culture of the conversation makes the words arcane. But the people in the unfamiliar conversation are not Martians. Underneath it all (the economist’s favorite phrase) conversational habits are similar. Economics uses mathematical models and statistical tests and market arguments, all of which look alien to the literary eye. But looked at closely they are not so alien. They may be seen as figures of speech—metaphors, analogies, and appeals to authority.

Figures of speech are not mere frills. They think for us. Someone who thinks of a market as an “invisible hand” and the organization of work as a “production function” and his coefficients as being “significant,” as an economist does, is giving the language a lot of responsibility. It seems a good idea to look hard at his language.

If the economic conversation were found to depend a lot on its verbal forms, this would not mean that economics would be not a science, or just a matter of opinion, or some sort of confidence game. Good poets, though not scientists, are serious thinkers about symbols; good historians, though not scientists, are serious thinkers about data. Good scientists also use language. What is more (though it remains to be shown) they use the cunning of language, without particularly meaning to. The language used is a social object, and using language is a social act. It requires cunning (or, if you prefer, consideration), attention to the other minds present when one speaks.

The paying of attention to one’s audience is called “rhetoric,” a word that I later exercise hard. One uses rhetoric, of course, to warn of a fire in a theatre or to arouse the xenophobia of the electorate. This sort of yelling is the vulgar meaning of the word, like the president’s “heated rhetoric” in a press conference or the “mere rhetoric” to which our enemies stoop. Since the Greek flame was lit, though, the word has been used also in a broader and more amiable sense, to mean the study of all the ways of accomplishing things with language: inciting a mob to lynch the accused, to be sure, but also persuading readers of a novel that its characters breathe, or bringing scholars to accept the better argument and reject the worse.

The question is whether the scholar—who usually fancies himself an announcer of “results” or a stater of “conclusions” free of rhetoric—speaks rhetorically. Does he try to persuade? It would seem so. Language, I just said, is not a solitary accomplishment. The scholar doesn’t speak into the void, or to himself. He speaks to a community of voices. He desires to be heeded, praised, published, imitated, honored, en-Nobeled. These are the desires. The devices of language are the means.

Rhetoric is the proportioning of means to desires in speech. Rhetoric is an economics of language, the study of how scarce means are allocated to the insatiable desires of people to be heard. It seems on the face of it a reasonable hypothesis that economists are like other people in being talkers, who desire listeners when they go to the library or the laboratory as much as when they go to the office on the polls. The purpose here is to see if this is true, and to see if it is useful to study the rhetoric of economic scholarship.

The subject is scholarship. It is not economy, or the adequacy of economic theory as a description of the economy, or even mainly the economist’s role in the economy. The subject is the conversation economists have among themselves, for purposes of persuading each other that the interest elasticity of demand for investment is zero or that the money supply is controlled by the Federal Reserve.

Unfortunately, though, the conclusions are of more than academic interest. The conversations of classicists or of astronomers rarely affect the lives of other people. Those of economists do so on a large scale. A well known joke describes a May Day parade through Red Square with the usual mass of soldiers, guided missiles, and rocket launchers. At last come rank upon rank of people in gray business suits. A bystander asks, “Who are those?” “Aha!” comes the reply, “those are economists: you have no idea what damage they can do!” Their conversations do it.

12.    According to the passage, which of the following is the best set of reasons for which one needs  to “look hard” at the economist’s language?

a.       Economists accomplish a great deal through their language.

b.       Economics is an opinion-based subject.

c.        Economics has a great impact on other’s lives.

d.       Economics is damaging.

1.     a and b                    2.     c and d                    3.     a and c                    4.     b and d

13.      In the light of the definition of rhetoric given in the passage, which of the following will have the least element of rhetoric?

1.       An election speech.

2.       An advertisement jingle.

3.       Dialogues in a play.

4.       Commands given by army officers.

14.    As used in the passage, which of the following is the closest meaning to the statement “The culture of the conversation makes the words arcane”?

1.       Economists belong to a different culture.

2.       Only mathematicians can understand economists.

3.       Economists tend to use terms unfamiliar to the lay person, but depend on familiar linguistic forms.

4.       Economists use similes and adjectives in their analysis.

15.      As used in the passage, which of the following is the closest alternative to the word ‘arcane’?

1.   Mysterious                2.   Secret                       3.   Covert                       4.   Perfidious

16.      Based on your understanding of the passage, which of the following conclusions would you agree with?

1.       The geocentric and the heliocentric views of the solar system are equally tenable.   

2.       The heliocentric view is superior because of better rhetoric.

3.       Both views use rhetoric to persuade.

4.       Scientists should not use rhetoric.  

PASSAGE IV

At the heart of the enormous boom in wine consumption that has taken place in the English-speaking world over the last two decades or so is a fascinating, happy paradox. In the days when wine was exclusively the preserve of a narrow cultural elite, bought either at auctions or from gentlemen wine merchants in wing collars and bow-ties, to be stored in rambling cellars and decanted to order by one’s butler, the ordinary drinker didn’t get a look-in. Wine was considered a highly technical subject, in which anybody without the necessary ability could only fall flat on his or her face in embarrassment. It wasn’t just that you needed a refined aesthetic sensibility for the stuff if it wasn’t to be hopelessly wasted on you. It required an intimate knowledge of what came from where, and what it was supposed to taste like.

Those were times, however, when wine appreciation essentially meant a familiarity with the great French classics, with perhaps a smattering of other wines—like sherry and port. That was what the wine trade dealt in. These days, wine is bought daily in supermarkets and high-street chains to be consumed that evening, hardly anybody has a cellar to store it in and most don’t even possess a decanter. Above all, the wines of literally dozens of countries are available on the market. When a supermarket offers its customers a couple of fruity little numbers from Brazil, we scarcely raise an eyebrow.

It seems, in other words, that the commercial jungle that wine has now become has not in the slightest deterred people from plunging adventurously into the thickets in order to taste and see. Consumers are no longer intimidated by the thought of needing to know their Pouilly-Fuisse, just at the very moment when there is more to know than ever before.

The reason for this new mood of confidence is not hard to find. It is on every wine label from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States: the name of the grape from which the wine is made. At one time that might have sounded like a fairly technical approach in itself. Why should native English-speakers know what Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay were? The answer lies in the popularity that wines made from those grape varieties now enjoy. Consumers effectively recognize them as brand names, and have acquired a basic lexicon of wine that can serve them even when confronted with those Brazilian upstarts.

In the wine heartlands of France, they are scared to death of that trend—not because they think their wine isn’t as good as the best from California or South Australia (What French winemaker will ever admit that?) but because they don’t traditionally call their wines Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay. They call them Chateau Ducru-Beaucaillou or Corton-Charlemagne, and they aren’t about to change. Some areas, in the middle of southern France, have now produced a generation of growers using the varietal names on their labels and are tempting consumers back to French wine. It will be an uphill struggle, but there is probably no other way if France is to avoid simply becoming a specialty source of old-fashioned wines for old-fashioned connoisseurs.

Wine consumption was also given a significant boost in the early 1990s by the work of Dr. Serge Renaud, who has spent many years investigating the reasons for the uncannily low incidence of coronary heart disease in the south of France. One of his major findings is that the fat-derived cholesterol that builds up in the arteries and can eventually lead to heart trouble can be dispersed by the tannins in wine. Tannin is derived from the skins of grapes, and is therefore present in higher levels in red wines, because they have to be infused with their skins to attain the red colour. That news caused a huge upsurge in red wine consumption in the United States. It has not been accorded the prominence it deserves in the UK, largely because the medical profession still sees all alcohol as a menace to health, and is constantly calling for it to be made prohibitively expensive. Certainly the manufacturers of anticoagulant drugs might have something to lose if we all got the message that we would do just as well by our hearts by taking half a bottle of red wine every day!

17.     Which one of the following, if true, would provide most support for Dr. Renaud’s findings about the effect of tannins?

1.       A survey showed that film celebrities based in France have a low incidence of coronary heart disease.

2.       Measurements carried out in southern France showed red wine drinkers had significantly higher levels of coronary heart incidence than white wine drinkers did.

3.       Data showed a positive association between sales of red wine and incidence of coronary heart disease.

4.       Long-term surveys in southern France showed that the incidence of coronary heart disease was significantly lower in red wine drinkers than in those who did not drink red wine.

18.     Which one of the following CANNOT be reasonably attributed to the labelling strategy followed by wine producers in English-speaking countries?

1.   Consumers buy wines on the basis of their familiarity with a grape variety’s name.

2.   Even ordinary customers now have more access to technical knowledge about wine.

3.   Consumers are able to appreciate better quality wines.

4.   Some non-English speaking countries like Brazil indicate grape variety names on their labels.

19.    The tone that the author uses while asking “What French winemaker will ever admit that?” is best described as

1.   caustic.              2.   satirical.            3.   critical.              4.   hypocritical.

20.    The development which has created fear among winemakers in the wine heartlands of France is the

1.   tendency not to name wines after the grape varieties that are used in the wines.

2.   ‘education’ that consumers have derived from wine labels from English-speaking countries.

3.   new generation of local winegrowers who use labels that show names of grape varieties.

4.   ability of consumers to understand a wine’s qualities when confronted with “Brazilian upstarts”.

21.    What according to the author should the French do to avoid becoming a producer of merely old-fashioned wines?

1.   Follow the labelling strategy of the English-speaking countries.

2.   Give their wines English names.

3.   Introduce fruity wines as Brazil has done.

4.   Produce the wines that have become popular in the English-speaking world.

PASSAGE V

Pure love of learning, of course, was a less compelling motive for those who became educated for careers other than teaching. Students of law in particular had a reputation for being materialistic careerists in an age when law was becoming known as “the lucrative science” and its successful practice the best means for rapid advancement in the government of both church and state. Medicine too had its profit-making attractions. Those who did not go on to law or medicine could, if they had been well trained in the arts, gain positions at royal courts or rise in the clergy. Eloquent testimony to the profit motive behind much of twelfth-century education was the lament of a student of Abelard around 1150 that “Christians educate their sons...for gain, in order that the one brother, if he be a clerk, may help his father and mother and his other brothers, saying that a clerk will have no heir and whatever he has will be ours and the other brothers’.” With the opening of positions in law, government, and the church, education became a means for advancement not only in income but also in status. Most who were educated were wealthy, but in the twelfth century, more often than before, many were not and were able to rise through the ranks by means of their education. The most familiar examples are Thomas Becket, who rose from a humble background to become chancellor of England and archbishop of Canterbury, and John of Salisbury, who was born a “plebian” but because of his reputation for learning died as bishop of Chartres.

The instances of Becket and John of Salisbury bring us to the most difficult question concerning twelfth-century education: To what degree was it still a clerical preserve? Despite the fact that throughout the twelfth century the clergy had a monopoly of instruction, one of the outstanding medievalists of our day, R.W. Southern, refers with good reason to the institutions staffed by the clergy as “secular schools.” How can we make sense out of the paradox that twelfth-century schools were clerical and yet “secular”?

Let us look at the clerical side first. Not only were all twelfth-century teachers except professionals and craftsmen in church orders, but in northern Europe students in schools had clerical status and looked like priests. Not that all really were priests, but by virtue of being students all were awarded the legal privileges accorded to the clergy. Furthermore, the large majority of twelfth-century students, outside of the possible exception of Italy, if not already priests became so after studies were finished. For these reasons, the term “cleric” was often used to denote a man who was literate and the term “layman” one who was illiterate. The English word for cleric, clerk, continued for a long time to be a synonym for student or for a man who could write, while the French word clerc even today has the connotation of intellectual.

Despite all this, twelfth-century education was taking on many secular qualities in its environment, goals, and curriculum. Student life obviously became more secular when it moved from the monasteries into the bustling towns. Most students wandered from town to town in search not only of good masters but also of worldly excitement, and as the twelfth century progressed they found the best of each in Paris. More important than environment was the fact that most students, even though they entered the clergy, had secular goals. Theology was recognized as the “queen of the sciences,” but very few went on to it. Instead they used their study of the liberal arts as a preparation for law, medicine, government service, or advancement in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This being so, the curriculum of the liberal arts became more sophisticated and more divorced from religion. Teaching was still almost exclusively in Latin, and the first book most often read was the Psalter, but further education was no longer similar to that of a choir school. In particular, the discipline of rhetoric was transformed from a linguistic study into instruction in how to compose letters and documents; there was a new stress on logic; and in all the liberal arts and philosophy texts more advanced than those known in the early Middle Ages were introduced.

Along with the rise of logic came the translation of Greek and Arabic philosophical and scientific works. Most important was the translation of almost all the writings of Aristotle, as well as his sophisticated Arabic commentators, which helped to bring about an intellectual revolution based on Greek rationalism. On a more prosaic level, contact with Arabs resulted in the introduction in the twelfth century of the Arabic numeral system and the concept of zero. Though most westerners first resisted this and made crude jokes about the zero as an ambitious number “that counts for nothing and yet wants to be counted,” the system steadily made its inroads first in Italy and then throughout Europe, thereby vastly simplifying the arts of computation and record keeping.

22.      According to the passage, what led to the secularization of the curriculum of the liberal arts in the twelfth century?

1.   It was divorced from religion and its influences.

2.   Students used it mainly as a base for studying law and medicine.

3.   Teaching could no longer be conducted exclusively in Latin.

4.   Arabic was introduced into the curriculum.

23.      According to the author, in the twelfth century, individuals were motivated to get higher education because it:

1.   was a means for material advancement and higher status.

2.   gave people with wealth an opportunity to learn.

3.   offered a coveted place for those with a love of learning.

4.   directly added to the income levels of people.

24.      According to the passage, twelfth century schools were clerical and yet secular because:

1.   many teachers were craftsmen and professionals who did not form part of the church.

2.   while the students had the legal privileges accorded to the clergy and looked like priests, not all were really priests.

3.   the term “cleric” denoted a literate individual rather than a strict association with the church.

4.  though the clergy had a monopoly in education, the environment, objectives and curriculum in the schools were becoming secular.

25.     What does the sentence “Christians educate their sons...will be ours and the other brothers’ ” imply?

1.   The Christian family was a close-knit unit in the twelfth century.

2.   Christians educated their sons not so much for the love of learning as for material gain.

3.   Christians believed very strongly in educating their sons in the Church.

4.  The relationship between Christian parents and their sons was exploitative in the twelfth century.

26.      According to the passage, which of the following is the most noteworthy trend in education in twelfth-century Europe?

1.   Secularization of education.

2.   Flowering of theology as the queen of the sciences.

3.   Wealthy people increasingly turning to education.

4.   Rise of the clergy’s influence on the curriculum.

PASSAGE VI

Fifty feet away three male lions lay by the road. They didn’t appear to have a hair on their heads. Noting the color of their noses (leonine noses darken as they age, from pink to black), Craig estimated that they were six years old—young adults. “This is wonderful!’ he said, after staring at them for several moments. “This is what we came to see. They really are maneless.” Craig, a professor at the University of Minnesota, is arguably the leading expert on the majestic Serengeti lion, whose head is mantled in long, thick hair. He and Peyton West, a doctoral student who has been working with him in Tanzania, had never seen the Tsavo lions that live some 200 miles east of the Serengeti. The scientists had partly suspected that the maneless males were adolescents mistaken for adults by amateur observers. Now they knew better.

The Tsavo research expedition was mostly Peyton’s show. She had spent several years in Tanzania, compiling the data she needed to answer a question that ought to have been answered long ago: Why do lions have manes? It’s the only cat, wild or domestic, that displays such ornamentation. In Tsavo she was attacking the riddle from the opposite angle. Why do its lions not have manes? (Some “maneless” lions in Tsavo East do have partial manes, but they rarely attain the regal glory of the Serengeti lions’.) Does environmental adaptation account for the trait? Are the lions of Tsavo, as some people believe, a distinct subspecies of their Serengeti cousins?

The Serengeti lions have been under continuous observation for more than 35 years, beginning with George Schaller’s pioneering work in the 1960s. But the lions in Tsavo, Kenya’s oldest and largest protected ecosystem, have hardly been studied. Consequently, legends have grown up around them. Not only do they look different, according to the myths, they behave differently, displaying greater cunning and aggressiveness. “Remember too,” Kenya: The Rough Guide warns, “Tsavo’s lions have a reputation of ferocity.” Their fearsome image became well-known in 1898, when two males stalled construction of what is now Kenya Railways by allegedly killing and eating 135 Indian and African laborers. A British Army officer in charge of building a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River, Lt. Col. J. H. Patterson, spent nine months pursuing the pair before he brought them to bay and killed them. Stuffed and mounted, they now glare at visitors to the Field Museum in Chicago. Patterson’s account of the leonine reign of terror, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, was an international best-seller when published in 1907. Still in print, the book has made Tsavo’s lions notorious. That annoys some scientists. “People don’t want to give up on mythology,” Dennis King told me one day. The zoologist has been working in Tsavo off and on for four years. “I am so sick of this man-eater business. Patterson made a helluva lot of money off that story, but Tsavo’s lions are no more likely to turn man-eater than lions from elsewhere.”

But tales of their savagery and wiliness don’t all come from sensationalist authors looking to make a buck. Tsavo lions are generally larger than lions elsewhere, enabling them to take down the predominant prey animal in Tsavo, the Cape buffalo, one of the strongest, most aggressive animals on Earth. The buffalo don’t give up easily: They often kill or severely injure an attacking lion, and a wounded lion might be more likely to turn to cattle and humans for food.

And other prey is less abundant in Tsavo than in other traditional lion haunts. A hungry lion is more likely to attack humans. Safari guides and Kenya Wildlife Service rangers tell of lions attacking Land Rovers, raiding camps, stalking tourists. Tsavo is a tough neighborhood, they say, and it breeds tougher lions.

But are they really tougher? And if so, is there any connection between their manelessness and their ferocity? An intriguing hypothesis was advanced two years ago by Gnoske and Peterhans: Tsavo lions may be similar to the nmanned cave lions of the Pleistocene. The Serengeti variety is among the most evolved of the species—the latest model, so to speak—while certain morphological differences in Tsavo lions (bigger bodies, smaller skulls, and maybe even lack of a mane) suggest that they are closer to the primitive ancestor of all lions. Craig and Peyton had serious doubts about the idea, but admitted that Tsavo lions pose a mystery to science.

27.     The book Man-Eaters of Tsavo annoys some scientists because

1.       it revealed that Tsavo lions are ferocious.

2.       Patterson made a helluva lot of money from the book by sensationalism.

3.       it perpetuated the bad name Tsavo lions had.

4.       it narrated how two male lions were killed.

28.      According to the passage, which of the following has NOT contributed to the popular image of Tsavo lions as savage creatures?

1.       Tsavo lions have been observed to bring down one of the strongest and most aggressive animals—

      the Cape buffalo.

2.       In contrast to the situation in traditional lion haunts, scarcity of non-buffalo prey in the Tsavo makes the Tsavo lions more aggressive.

3.       The Tsavo lion is considered to be less evolved than the Serengeti variety.

4.       Tsavo lions have been observed to attack vehicles as well as humans.

29.      The sentence which concludes the first paragraph, “Now they knew better”, implies that:

1.       The two scientists were struck by wonder on seeing maneless lions for the first time.

2.       Though Craig was an expert on the Serengeti lion, now he also knew about the Tsavo lions.

3.       Earlier, Craig and West thought that amateur observers had been mistaken.

4.       Craig was now able to confirm that darkening of the noses as lions aged applied to Tsavo lions as well.

30.     Which of the following, if true, would weaken the hypothesis advanced by Gnoske and Peterhans most?

           1.   Craig and Peyton develop even more serious doubts about the idea that Tsavo lions are primitive.

2.   The maneless Tsavo East lions are shown to be closer to the cave lions.

3.   Pleistocene cave lions are shown to be far less violent than believed.

4.   The morphological variations in body and skull size between the cave and Tsavo lions are found to be insignificant.

PASSAGE VII

A game of strategy, as currently conceived in game theory, is a situation in which two or more “players” make choices among available alternatives (moves). The totality of choices determines the outcomes of the game, and it is assumed that the rank order of preferences for the outcomes is different for different players. Thus the “interests” of the players are generally in conflict. Whether these interests are diametrically opposed or only partially opposed depends on the type of game.

Psychologically, most interesting situations arise when the interests of the players are partly coincident and partly opposed, because then one can postulate not only a conflict among the players but also inner conflicts within the players. Each is torn between a tendency to cooperate, so as to promote the common interests, and a tendency to compete, so as to enhance his own individual interests.

Internal conflicts are always psychologically interesting. What we vaguely call “interesting” psychology is in very great measure the psychology of inner conflict. Inner conflict is also held to be an important component of serious literature as distinguished from less serious genres. The classical tragedy, as well as the serious novel, reveals the inner conflict of central figures. The superficial adventure story, on the other hand, depicts only external conflict; that is, the threats to the person with whom the reader (or viewer) identifies stem in these stories exclusively from external obstacles and from the adversaries who create them. On the most primitive level this sort of external conflict is psychologically empty. In the fisticuffs between the protagonists of good and evil, no psychological problems are involved or, at any rate, none are depicted in juvenile representations of conflict.

The detective story, the “adult” analogue of a juvenile adventure tale, has at times been described as a glorification of intellectualized conflict. However, a great deal of the interest in the plots of these stories is sustained by withholding the unraveling of a solution to a problem. The effort of solving the problem is in itself not a conflict if the adversary (the unknown criminal) remains passive, like Nature, whose secrets the scientist supposedly unravels by deduction. If the adversary actively puts obstacles in the detective’s path toward the solution, there is genuine conflict. But the conflict is psychologically interesting only to the extent that it contains irrational components such as a tactical error on the criminal’s part or the detective’s insight into some psychological quirk of the criminal or something of this sort. Conflict conducted in a perfectly rational manner is psychologically no more interesting than a standard Western. For example, Tic-tac-toe, played perfectly by both players, is completely devoid of psychological interest. Chess may be psychologically interesting but only to the extent that it is played not quite rationally. Played completely rationally, chess would not be different from Tic-tac-toe.

In short, a pure conflict of interest (what is called a zero-sum game) although it offers a wealth of interesting conceptual problems, is not interesting psychologically, except to the extent that its conduct departs from rational norms.

31. According to the passage, which of the following options about the application of game theory to a conflict-of-interest situation is true?

1.    Assuming that the rank order of preferences for options is different for different players.

2.    Accepting that the interests of different players are often in conflict.

3.    Not assuming that the interests are in complete disagreement.

4.    All of the above.

32.  The problem solving process of a scientist is different from that of a detective because

1.    scientists study inanimate objects, while detectives deal with living criminals or law offenders.

2.    scientists study known objects, while detectives have to deal with unknown criminals or law offenders

3.   scientists study phenomena that are not actively altered, while detectives deal with phenomena that have been deliberately influenced to mislead.

4.   scientists study psychologically interesting phenomena, while detectives deal with “adult” analogues of juvenile adventure tales.

33.  According to the passage, internal conflicts are psychologically more interesting than external conflicts because

1.    internal conflicts, rather than external conflicts, form an important component of serious literature as distinguished from less serious genres.

2.   only juveniles or very few “adults” actually experience external conflict, while internal conflict is more widely prevalent in society.

3.    in situations of internal conflict, individuals experience a dilemma in resolving their own preferences for different outcomes.

4.    there are no threats to the reader (or viewer) in case of external conflicts. 

34.  Which, according to the author, would qualify as interesting psychology?

1.    A statistician’s dilemma over choosing the best method to solve an optimization problem.

2.    A chess player’s predicament over adopting a defensive strategy against an aggressive opponent.

3.    A mountaineer’s choice of the best path to Mt. Everest from the base camp.

4.    A finance manager’s quandary over the best way of raising money from the market.

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ANSWER KEY

1.     (4)                          2.    (2)                          3.    (1)     4.                           (4)       5.                           (1)

6.     (3)                           7.    (1)  8.                           (4)       9.                           (4)    10.                           (2)

      11.     (2)                          12.     (3)                          13.     (4)                          14.     (3)                          15.     (1)

      16.     (3)                          17.     (4)                          18.     (3)                          19.     (2)                          20.     (2)

      21.     (1)                          22.     (2)                          23.     (1)                          24.     (4)                          25.     (2)

      26.     (1)                          27.     (3)                          28.     (3)                          29.     (3)                          30.     (3)

      31.     (4)                          32.     (3)                          33.     (3)                          34.     (2)