Balveer Singh

Read the following passage and answer the questions.

In the event that we find proof that aliens exist, Stephen Hawking says we should not attempt to contact them. ‘We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine the aliens might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become

nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.’ Given the history of encounters between earthly civilizations in which the more advanced enslave or destroy the less developed, Hawking concluded: ‘If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Europeans first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.’

Which of the following, if true, would strengthen Hawking’s argument the most?

Answer the following question based on the information given below.Animals can habituate to environmental disturbances. What’s more, they can get very good at telling the difference between stimuli that are relevant to them, and those that aren’t. Tree frogs can tell the difference between vibration caused by a predator and vibration caused by rain, even though these cues are extremely similar. Similarly, caterpillars living on leaves can tell the difference between vibrations caused by other caterpillars, predators, wind and rain.Spiders build webs on human-built structures such as pipelines, fences, road signs and wire rods, all of which are made out of materials not present in their evolutionary history. This means that they will absorb vibrations from the environment differently to a more natural place a spider might build its web, for example a plant. If these human-built objects are anywhere near humans (which they are likely to be) they are also probably affected by human noise. For example, a spider that has built a web near a road will be subject to the vibration caused by cars driving by. This matters particularly to spiders because they use vibration so much in guiding their behaviour. Indeed, you can even imagine the web to be an extension of the spider itself, such that the vibrations on the very outside of the web travel down to the spider situated in the centre and tell it whether it’s being ‘touched’ by prey, a mate, wind or rain.

 Select the odd man out from the given alternatives.

Group Question

A passage is followed by questions pertaining to the passage. Read the passage and answer the questions. Choose the most appropriate answer.

Plutarch, a Theban by birth, once composed a "great collection of slanders" against Herodotus, titled On the Malignity of Herodotus, including the allegation that the historian was prejudiced against Thebes because the authorities there had denied him permission to set up a school. Dio Chrysostom similarly attributed prejudice against Corinth to the historian's bitterness over financial disappointments, an account supported by Marcellinus in his Life of Thucydides. In fact Herodotus was in the habit of seeking out information from empowered sources within communities, such as aristocrats and priests, and this also occurred at an international level, with Periclean Athens becoming his principal source of information about events in Greece. As a result, his reports about Greek events are often coloured by Athenian bias against rival states - Thebes and Corinth in particular. Thus the accounts given by Plutarch and Chrysostom may be regarded as 'pay-back'. Herodotus wrote his Histories in the Ionian dialect yet he was born in Halicarnassus, originally a Dorian settlement. According to the Suda (an 11th-century encyclopaedia of Byzantium which likely took its information from traditional accounts), Herodotus learned the Ionian dialect as a boy living on the island of Samos, whither he had fled with his family from the oppressions of Lygdamis, tyrant of Halicarnassus and grandson of Artemisia I of Caria. The Suda also informs us that Herodotus later returned home to lead the revolt that eventually overthrew the tyrant. However, thanks to recent discoveries of some inscriptions on Halicarnassus, dated to about that time, we now know that the Ionic dialect was used there even in official documents, so there was no need to assume like the Suda that he must have learned the dialect elsewhere. Moreover, the fact that the Suda is the only source we have for the heroic role played by Herodotus, as liberator of his birthplace, is itself a good reason to doubt such a romantic account.
It was conventional in Herodotus’ day for authors to 'publish' their works by reciting them at popular festivals. According to Lucian, Herodotus took his finished work straight from Asia Minor to the Olympic Games and read the entire Histories to the assembled spectators in one sitting, receiving rapturous applause at the end of it.. According to a very different account by an ancient grammarian, Herodotus refused to begin reading his work at the festival of Olympia until some clouds offered him a bit of shade, by which time however the assembly had dispersed - thus the proverbial expression "Herodotus and his shade". Herodotus’ recitation at Olympia was a favourite theme among ancient writers and there is another interesting variation on the story to be found in the Suda, Photius and Tzetzes, in which a young Thucydides happened to be in the assembly with his father and burst into tears during the recital, whereupon Herodotus observed prophetically to the boy's father: "Thy son's soul yearns for knowledge".

 

Read the passage below and answer the questions that follow.

For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of people into bondage. Scholars estimate that around 1.5 million people perished in the brutal middle passage across the Atlantic.

The slave trade linked Africa, Europe and the Americas in a horrific enterprise of death and torture and profit. Yet, in the middle of the 18th century, as the slave trade boomed like never before, some notable European observers saw it as a model of free enterprise and indeed of ‘liberty’ itself. They were not slave traders or slave- ship captains but economic thinkers, and very influential ones. They were a pioneering group of economic thinkers committed to the principle of laissez-faire: a term they themselves coined. United around the French official Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759), they were among the first European intellectuals to argue for limitations on government intervention in the economy. They organised campaigns for the deregulation of domestic and international trade, and they made the slave trade a key piece of evidence in their arguments.

For a generation, the relationship between slavery and capitalism has preoccupied historians. The publication of several major pieces of scholarship on the matter has won attention from the media. Scholars demonstrate that the Industrial Revolution, centred on the mass production of cotton textiles in the factories of England and New England, depended on raw cotton grown by slaves on plantations in the American South. Capitalists often touted the superiority of the industrial economies and their supposedly ‘free labour’. ‘Free labour’ means the system in which workers are not enslaved but free to contract with any manufacturer they chose, free to sell their labour. It means that there is a labour market, not a slave market.

But because ‘free labour’ was working with and dependent on raw materials produced by slaves, the simple distinction between an industrial economy of free labour on the one hand and a slave- based plantation system on the other falls apart. So too does the 1

 oundary between the southern ‘slave states’ and northern ‘free states’ in Ame rica. While the South grew rich from plantation agriculture that depended on slave labour, New England also grew rich off the slave trade, investing in the shipping and maritime insurance that made the transport of slaves from Africa to the United States possible and profitable. The sale of enslaved Africans brought together agriculture and industry, north and south, forming a global commercial network from which the modern world emerged.

It is only in the past few decades that scholars have come to grips with how slavery and capitalism intertwined. But for the 18th-century French thinkers who laid the foundations of laissez-faire capitalism, it made perfect sense to associate the slave trade with free enterprise. Their writings, which inspired the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), aimed to convince the French monarchy to deregulate key businesses such as the sale of grain and trade with Asia. Only a few specialists read them today.

Yet these pamphlets, letters and manuscripts clearly proclaim a powerful message: the birth of modern capitalism depended not only on the labour of enslaved people and the profits of the slave trade, but also on the example of slavery as a deregulated global enterprise.

Which of the following could be a possible definition of 3 Marks “|ajssez_fajre” with respect to the above passage?