Test Level 3: Structure, Attitude and Tone - CAT MCQ

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

Sub-passage – I
The announcement of the birth of the cloned ewe, Dolly, in 1997 by scientists at the Roslyn Institute, was a shock for the entire world. Up until that point, the issue of the morality and ethics of cloning had been relegated to discussions of purely theoretical nature. Because of the conceptual simplicity of the process used, in which an enucleated egg is implanted with the genetic material from a somatic cell, many people immediately saw that the actual instantiation of cloning a human being was a distinct possibility and a potential moral and ethical danger zone. We had not, as a species, ever truly considered the likelihood that human reproduction would fall so fully under the hand of technology. Though there are many detractors to the application of cloning technology to humans, human cloning technology can be used with responsibility to achieve a number of improvements to human experience. Consequently, I oppose the proposal to ban research into the cloning of human beings because the arguments used to support such a ban do not bear the weight of critical inspection, though the arguments themselves are also important to human advancement.
The arguments in support of a ban on human cloning are numerous and varied. There are a number of arguments that appear with relative frequency and can be grouped under general headings that seem to express natural fears and misgivings about human cloning and humanity’s relationship to the process of cloning in a moral sense. The general summation of these arguments seems to present itself in a single statement that Cloning should be banned because it fosters the treatment of people as means, not ends, provides no clear benefits in exchange for risks, fosters the further ambiguities of kinship structures, and compromises the dignity and uniqueness of individuals.

Sub-passage – II
Part of being a human being is to be unique. It makes one wonder what kind of people would really like to have a clone. Whoever they are, they will not succeed. We are not facing the crisis in the continuity of human kind. Cloning of a human being is not, and never will be possible because one significant component - the mind - can not be cloned.
The only thing that can be cloned is the body. But, human being is not only the body. It is also the mind. The mind-body interaction seems to be unquestionable these days.
That interaction is only a part of the whole network of interactions called "The Web of Interactions."
This new and constantly developing conceptual framework suggests that each human being is a tripartite entity constituted of three: the material, social and personal being. All these beings are interconnected by interactions. Their constituents such as: mind, perception, beliefs, judgments and actions can all be defined in terms of interactions.
On that account the mind is a result of an interaction between the brain and the world.
The world is not a stable entity. That means that the state of the world that created the mind of person X can not be repeated. If that is the case then the mind of the person X' will not be the clone of person X. If the mind can not be a clone, there is no chance to clone a person.

Q. Author of passage I would have the following attitude towards passage II.

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

Sub-passage – I
The announcement of the birth of the cloned ewe, Dolly, in 1997 by scientists at the Roslyn Institute, was a shock for the entire world. Up until that point, the issue of the morality and ethics of cloning had been relegated to discussions of purely theoretical nature. Because of the conceptual simplicity of the process used, in which an enucleated egg is implanted with the genetic material from a somatic cell, many people immediately saw that the actual instantiation of cloning a human being was a distinct possibility and a potential moral and ethical danger zone. We had not, as a species, ever truly considered the likelihood that human reproduction would fall so fully under the hand of technology. Though there are many detractors to the application of cloning technology to humans, human cloning technology can be used with responsibility to achieve a number of improvements to human experience. Consequently, I oppose the proposal to ban research into the cloning of human beings because the arguments used to support such a ban do not bear the weight of critical inspection, though the arguments themselves are also important to human advancement.
The arguments in support of a ban on human cloning are numerous and varied. There are a number of arguments that appear with relative frequency and can be grouped under general headings that seem to express natural fears and misgivings about human cloning and humanity’s relationship to the process of cloning in a moral sense. The general summation of these arguments seems to present itself in a single statement that Cloning should be banned because it fosters the treatment of people as means, not ends, provides no clear benefits in exchange for risks, fosters the further ambiguities of kinship structures, and compromises the dignity and uniqueness of individuals.

Sub-passage – II
Part of being a human being is to be unique. It makes one wonder what kind of people would really like to have a clone. Whoever they are, they will not succeed. We are not facing the crisis in the continuity of human kind. Cloning of a human being is not, and never will be possible because one significant component - the mind - can not be cloned.
The only thing that can be cloned is the body. But, human being is not only the body. It is also the mind. The mind-body interaction seems to be unquestionable these days.
That interaction is only a part of the whole network of interactions called "The Web of Interactions."
This new and constantly developing conceptual framework suggests that each human being is a tripartite entity constituted of three: the material, social and personal being. All these beings are interconnected by interactions. Their constituents such as: mind, perception, beliefs, judgments and actions can all be defined in terms of interactions.
On that account the mind is a result of an interaction between the brain and the world.
The world is not a stable entity. That means that the state of the world that created the mind of person X can not be repeated. If that is the case then the mind of the person X' will not be the clone of person X. If the mind can not be a clone, there is no chance to clone a person.

Q. The author`s final verdict on the issue of human cloning is: (passage I)

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears:
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault;
And grievously hath Caesar answered it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
For Brutus is an honourable man;
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambitious?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious:
And, sure he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once – not without cause:
What cause withholds you, then, to mourn for him?
O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts.
And men have lost their reason! – Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it came back to me.
But yesterday the word of Caesar might
Have stood against the world: now lies he there,
And none so poor to do him reverence.
O masters, if I were disposed to stir
Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage,
I should do Brutus wrong; and Cassius wrong,
Who, you all know, are honourable men:
I will not do them wrong; I rather choose
To wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you,
Than I will wrong such honourable men.
But here’s a parchment with the seal of Caesar,
I found it in his closet, –‘ tis his will:
Let but the commons hear this treatment,
Which, pardon me, I do not mean to read,
And they would go and kiss dead Caesar’s wounds,
And dip their napkins in his sacred blood;
Yea, beg a hair of him for memory.
And, dying, mention it within their will.

Q. The poet thinks that Brutus is an honourable man.

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

Central and South America have some of the world’s most unique species of wildlife. Perhaps, some are more familiar than others. Central and South America has many different groups of species, which include: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and insects. These groups of animals need to live in specific types of climates and habitats in order to ensure their survivorship.
The tropical South America is the home to some of the strangest, some of the loveliest and some of the most horrifying animals in the world. There can be few creatures more improbable than the sloth which spends its life in a permanent state of mute slow motion, hanging upside down in the tall forest trees: few more bizarre than the giant ant eater of the Savannahs, its tail enlarged into a shaggy banner and its jaws elongated into a curved and toothless tube. On the other hand, beautiful birds are so common as to become almost unremarkable. Gaudy macaws flap through the forest, their splendid plumage contrasting incongruously with their harsh cries; and humming–birds, like tiny jewels, flit from flower to flower sipping nectar, their iridescent feathers flashing the colors of the rainbow as they fly.
The Amazonian rain forest, in Brazil alone, is the largest rain forest in the world. Many species of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and birds occupy the canopy of this magnificent rain forest. The iguana lives in the trees high above from the ground. It has flattened sides and a long, strong tail, which gives it balance and stability when it leaps. It also has clawed feet, which allows the iguana to grip branches.
The poison dart frog is a tree frog that secretes poison when it gets attacked. Even a small amount of the toxin can be lethal to humans. Today, South American Indians use the poison to tip their arrowheads before hunting.
Many of the South American animals inspire the fascination which comes from revulsion.  Shoals of cannibal fish infest the rivers waiting to rip the flesh from any animal which tumbles among them, and vampire bats, a legend in Europe but a grim reality in South America, fly out at night from their roosts in the forests to suck blood from cows and men.

Q. The second paragraph of the passage opens with a striking first sentence. What method does the author employ to achieve his effect?

Directions: The passages below are followed by question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.
Attempts to explain prophecy must make suppositions about the future. The most fundamental supposition is that events in the future do not yet exist and cannot, therefore, produce effects in the present. The path of explanation that stems from this view leads, of necessary, to various ideas of the future as a potential that somehow exists in the present.

In their simplest form these ideas follow the analogy of the seed and flower. A gardener can examine a seed and predict what flower it will produce. Some premonitions may indeed stem from clues scarcely noticed in a conscious way. An unfamiliar noise in a car, for example, may give rise to an accurate premonition of danger. The weakness of the theory, in this form, is that it requires of the precognizer an uncanny ability to analyze signs and indications that are not only imperceptible to the ordinary eye but impossible to deduce theoretically. What clues in a dreamer's environment could prompt an accurate precognition of a disaster six months and 3,000 miles away?  Some extraordinary suggestions have been made to explain how the future may be unrealized but cognizable in the present.

One such suggestion, by Gerhard Dietrich Wasserman, a mathematical physicist at the University of Durham in England, is that all events exist as timeless mental patterns, with which every living and nonliving particle in the universe is associated.

This idea owes something to the ancient belief that the universe - the macrocosm - contains innumerable microcosms, each recapitulating the features and order of the large whole. Thus man was seen as a microcosm of the earth, his veins and arteries corresponding to streams and rivers, and so on.

According to the great philosopher and mathematician Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, the various orders of beings, animate and inanimate, so gradually approximate each other in their attributes and properties that they form a single chain, "so closely linked one to another that it is impossible...to determine precisely the point at which one ends and the next begins." In this concept of a "chain of being" then, the animate, and therefore the spiritual of psychic, are connected with the inanimate by a gradation of shared attributes. For Leibniz the implication was that someone with enough insight "would see the future in the present as in a mirror."

Another version of the idea that the future lies hidden in the present was advanced by Adrian Dobbs, a mathematician and physicist at the University of Cambridge, in 1965. As events unfold, he proposed, they actualize a relatively small number of the possibilities for change that exist at a subatomic level. In the process disturbances are caused that create, in another dimension of time, what Dobbs calls a positronic wavefront. This wave front can be registered by the brain's neurons, at least in certain especially sensitive people, and interpreted. A metaphor may help to clarify the process.

Imagine a pond, at one side of which a toy ship is launched. At the other side of the pond is a very small person. He is unable to see the ship, but as the ship travels forward, the waves it makes reach the shore on which he stands. As they travel across the pond, these waves pass around certain objects - weeds, leaves, a log - that are fixed or slowly drifting on its surface. The objects thus create disturbances in the wavefront, which the small person, who has a lifetime's experience in these things, is able to note in fine detail. From what he learns of the wavefronts he not only obtains an image of the objects that produced them but calculates how long it will be before they drift to the shore.

In this metaphor the toy ship represents an event unfolding in time. Its course across the pond represents one of many paths it might have taken and the dimension of time it occurs in. The pond itself represents Dobbs's "positronic wavefront," and the small person is, of course, the neuronal apparatus that receives the wavefront and converts it to a prediction, Granting that Dobbs’ theory is purely hypothetical and that no positronic wave has been discovered, the difficulty is in suggesting a neuronal mechanism by which the observer distinguishes the wavefront of a particular event from the presumable maelstrom of wavefronts produced by simultaneously unfolding events. Again the farther away the event is in the future, the more numerous the wavefronts and the more complex the problem.

Such, in general, are some of the theories that regard the future as being, in some way, a potential implicitly accessible in the present, and such are the difficulties and limitations attending them.

Q. Any attempt to explain prophecy must make assumptions about future. Which of the following is a feature of this necessity?

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

Parents in the U.K. with children suffering from some potentially fatal genetic disease can heave a sigh of relief. Thanks to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the last hurdle to creating babies specifically to save older siblings suffering from an incurable genetic disease has been cleared. The issue was mired in controversy with pro–life people opposing permission tooth and nail. But what makes the technology controversial in the first place? Pre–implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) allows the removal of a cell from an embryo created through in–vitro fertilization. The cell so removed is studied for any genetic disorders. This technique combined with tissue typing allows the parents to choose the embryo that has a perfect (tissue) match with the sibling suffering from the genetic disorder. Once convinced of a match, the embryo is implanted into the mother's womb and the mother allowed to proceed to full pregnancy. The stem cells are removed from the newborn's umbilical cord at the time of birth and transplanted to the older sibling suffering from the disease. Once transplanted, the older sibling's ailment is thus cured.
But what makes the issue contentious is the destruction of all embryos that lack the match. Add to this the view held by the pro–life people that producing a baby with the express intention of using its stem cells to save an older sibling is commodification of life. Spare parts, transplant source, potential life savers are some of the labels that such babies get. To quote David King, Director of the pressure group Human Genetics Alert, "it is wrong to create a child simply as a means to an end, however good that end might be, because to do so turns the child into an object." The opposition stems from a basic tenet that pro–life people hold that any embryo destroyed wantonly is a person killed. In other words, embryo destroyed is a murder committed. If this is accepted as correct, the technique becomes morally and ethically wrong. But HFEA thought otherwise. In reality, couples choose to have babies for various compelling reasons — to save a marriage, to beget a baby of a particular sex, companionship for the older sibling, to name a few. Going in for more children in utter desperation to find perfect (tissue) match, is one of them. Science and technology have only helped such couples increase their chances of success.
Even as the pro–life groups are up in arms, the double standards that were practiced until HFEA came out with this notification come out clearly. For instance, it was considered morally and ethically right to do pre–implantation genetic diagnosis and tissue typing to ensure that the embryo was free from a particular genetic disorder that its parents suffer from. According to a report published in the New Scientist, some 300 healthy babies have been born in Europe in the last three years after being subjected to such screening. The number of embryos that were summarily destroyed in the process is anybody's guess. But pro–life people claim that it is ethically right to indulge in such a practice if it is for the baby's good and not otherwise. But the biggest hypocrisy till date was that permission was granted to parents to use the technology to create a life–saving sibling when the parents suffered from a genetic disorder but were denied permission when the older sibling suffered from a genetic disease that came about through sporadic mutation that was not passed on by parents.
Neither did the pro–life groups' opposition that the procedure harms the embryo stand scrutiny as HFEA was finally convinced of its safety. "We could not possibly approve the procedure if the child concerned was going to be put through any pain and distress," said Dr. Vivienne Nathanson, head of ethics and policy at the British Medical Association (BMA). The British Medical Association staunchly supports the technique to save an older sibling. The very fact that it is permitted in embryos when the parents suffer from a genetic disorder themselves is proof enough. The green signal to pre–implantation genetic diagnosis comes with a catch though. It will be permitted only when the disease is very serious and life threatening, and when there is no other way to treat the child. `Designer babies' chosen for eye colour, intelligence, skin texture or any other parental whim, a fear so often voiced by pro–life groups, should be stuff befitting an engrossing fiction rather than reality. Tough regulation is the solution.

Q. Which of the following can be concluded from the passage?

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

Parents in the U.K. with children suffering from some potentially fatal genetic disease can heave a sigh of relief. Thanks to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the last hurdle to creating babies specifically to save older siblings suffering from an incurable genetic disease has been cleared. The issue was mired in controversy with pro–life people opposing permission tooth and nail. But what makes the technology controversial in the first place? Pre–implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) allows the removal of a cell from an embryo created through in–vitro fertilization. The cell so removed is studied for any genetic disorders. This technique combined with tissue typing allows the parents to choose the embryo that has a perfect (tissue) match with the sibling suffering from the genetic disorder. Once convinced of a match, the embryo is implanted into the mother's womb and the mother allowed to proceed to full pregnancy. The stem cells are removed from the newborn's umbilical cord at the time of birth and transplanted to the older sibling suffering from the disease. Once transplanted, the older sibling's ailment is thus cured.
But what makes the issue contentious is the destruction of all embryos that lack the match. Add to this the view held by the pro–life people that producing a baby with the express intention of using its stem cells to save an older sibling is commodification of life. Spare parts, transplant source, potential life savers are some of the labels that such babies get. To quote David King, Director of the pressure group Human Genetics Alert, "it is wrong to create a child simply as a means to an end, however good that end might be, because to do so turns the child into an object." The opposition stems from a basic tenet that pro–life people hold that any embryo destroyed wantonly is a person killed. In other words, embryo destroyed is a murder committed. If this is accepted as correct, the technique becomes morally and ethically wrong. But HFEA thought otherwise. In reality, couples choose to have babies for various compelling reasons — to save a marriage, to beget a baby of a particular sex, companionship for the older sibling, to name a few. Going in for more children in utter desperation to find perfect (tissue) match, is one of them. Science and technology have only helped such couples increase their chances of success.
Even as the pro–life groups are up in arms, the double standards that were practiced until HFEA came out with this notification come out clearly. For instance, it was considered morally and ethically right to do pre–implantation genetic diagnosis and tissue typing to ensure that the embryo was free from a particular genetic disorder that its parents suffer from. According to a report published in the New Scientist, some 300 healthy babies have been born in Europe in the last three years after being subjected to such screening. The number of embryos that were summarily destroyed in the process is anybody's guess. But pro–life people claim that it is ethically right to indulge in such a practice if it is for the baby's good and not otherwise. But the biggest hypocrisy till date was that permission was granted to parents to use the technology to create a life–saving sibling when the parents suffered from a genetic disorder but were denied permission when the older sibling suffered from a genetic disease that came about through sporadic mutation that was not passed on by parents.
Neither did the pro–life groups' opposition that the procedure harms the embryo stand scrutiny as HFEA was finally convinced of its safety. "We could not possibly approve the procedure if the child concerned was going to be put through any pain and distress," said Dr. Vivienne Nathanson, head of ethics and policy at the British Medical Association (BMA). The British Medical Association staunchly supports the technique to save an older sibling. The very fact that it is permitted in embryos when the parents suffer from a genetic disorder themselves is proof enough. The green signal to pre–implantation genetic diagnosis comes with a catch though. It will be permitted only when the disease is very serious and life threatening, and when there is no other way to treat the child. `Designer babies' chosen for eye colour, intelligence, skin texture or any other parental whim, a fear so often voiced by pro–life groups, should be stuff befitting an engrossing fiction rather than reality. Tough regulation is the solution.

Q. The author would agree with none of the following, except that