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Read the passage and answer the following questions:
Psychopaths are sick, deranged, lacking in moral conscience. In other words, they’re nothing like you or me. This picture of psychopathy has dominated the thinking of both laypeople and researchers. It’s at once sensational and reassuring. But this is false. There’s no major ability that psychopaths lack altogether, and their deficits are often small and circumscribed. They certainly aren’t incapable of telling right from wrong, making good decisions or experiencing empathy for other people. Instead, they suffer from a host of more mundane problems - such as being overly goal-fixated, fearless and selfish. What’s more, perhaps ‘our’ reactions are closer to ‘theirs’ than we realise. Like psychopaths, we can dial our empathy up and down; and for all the praise we heap on empathy, a closer look at this emotion suggests that it’s nearer to a kind of self-preservation instinct than any ‘warm and fuzzy’ fellow-feeling.
When debating what’s wrong with psychopaths, researchers typically pitch two competing moral theories against one another. One approach, known as rationalism, holds that judging right and wrong is a matter of reason, rather than feeling. The claim that psychopaths don't show rationalism is plain wrong. Psychopaths are as logical as you and me - in fact, they outsmart us all the time, hence their everyday depiction as connivers and con artists. So the fact that they’re rational but still capable of inhuman acts shows that moral sensibility can’t be grounded in reason alone.
Psychopaths struggle with what philosophers call ‘reasons for actions’: considerations that underlie our decisions to act, such as the likelihood that what we’ll do will satisfy our goals and won’t come into conflict with other projects or aims. Psychopaths appear to be poor at integrating all the various factors that go into making good choices, and often have poor reasons for their actions. They usually attend almost exclusively to the task at hand, and ignore relevant contextual information - although when context doesn’t play a role, they do very well. Other studies have found that psychopaths have problems reversing their responses: when actions that were previously rewarded are now punished - or actions that were previously punished are rewarded - they have problems adjusting. Most people desist and find other ways to navigate their way through, psychopaths tend not to. This insensitivity extends to social threats, such as angry faces. If you show a person pictures that they find threatening, they startle much more easily in response to loud sounds. Psychopaths respond normally to direct threats, such as an image of the gaping jaw of a shark or a striking snake, but not to social threats, such as people in pain or distress.
These findings support the rationalist idea that psychopathic immorality comes down to some inability to reason well. But you might have noticed that psychopaths don’t experience fear as often, and in the same situations, as do ordinary people. Last time I looked, fear was an emotion. This brings us back into the camp of people who think that emotion, not reason, is central to ethics. Typically they focus on empathy.
Q. Which of the following CANNOT be inferred from the the passage?
Read the passage and answer the following questions:
Psychopaths are sick, deranged, lacking in moral conscience. In other words, they’re nothing like you or me. This picture of psychopathy has dominated the thinking of both laypeople and researchers. It’s at once sensational and reassuring. But this is false. There’s no major ability that psychopaths lack altogether, and their deficits are often small and circumscribed. They certainly aren’t incapable of telling right from wrong, making good decisions or experiencing empathy for other people. Instead, they suffer from a host of more mundane problems - such as being overly goal-fixated, fearless and selfish. What’s more, perhaps ‘our’ reactions are closer to ‘theirs’ than we realise. Like psychopaths, we can dial our empathy up and down; and for all the praise we heap on empathy, a closer look at this emotion suggests that it’s nearer to a kind of self-preservation instinct than any ‘warm and fuzzy’ fellow-feeling.
When debating what’s wrong with psychopaths, researchers typically pitch two competing moral theories against one another. One approach, known as rationalism, holds that judging right and wrong is a matter of reason, rather than feeling. The claim that psychopaths don't show rationalism is plain wrong. Psychopaths are as logical as you and me - in fact, they outsmart us all the time, hence their everyday depiction as connivers and con artists. So the fact that they’re rational but still capable of inhuman acts shows that moral sensibility can’t be grounded in reason alone.
Psychopaths struggle with what philosophers call ‘reasons for actions’: considerations that underlie our decisions to act, such as the likelihood that what we’ll do will satisfy our goals and won’t come into conflict with other projects or aims. Psychopaths appear to be poor at integrating all the various factors that go into making good choices, and often have poor reasons for their actions. They usually attend almost exclusively to the task at hand, and ignore relevant contextual information - although when context doesn’t play a role, they do very well. Other studies have found that psychopaths have problems reversing their responses: when actions that were previously rewarded are now punished - or actions that were previously punished are rewarded - they have problems adjusting. Most people desist and find other ways to navigate their way through, psychopaths tend not to. This insensitivity extends to social threats, such as angry faces. If you show a person pictures that they find threatening, they startle much more easily in response to loud sounds. Psychopaths respond normally to direct threats, such as an image of the gaping jaw of a shark or a striking snake, but not to social threats, such as people in pain or distress.
These findings support the rationalist idea that psychopathic immorality comes down to some inability to reason well. But you might have noticed that psychopaths don’t experience fear as often, and in the same situations, as do ordinary people. Last time I looked, fear was an emotion. This brings us back into the camp of people who think that emotion, not reason, is central to ethics. Typically they focus on empathy.
Q. The author of the passage is least likely to agree with which of the following?
Read the passage and answer the following questions:
Psychopaths are sick, deranged, lacking in moral conscience. In other words, they’re nothing like you or me. This picture of psychopathy has dominated the thinking of both laypeople and researchers. It’s at once sensational and reassuring. But this is false. There’s no major ability that psychopaths lack altogether, and their deficits are often small and circumscribed. They certainly aren’t incapable of telling right from wrong, making good decisions or experiencing empathy for other people. Instead, they suffer from a host of more mundane problems - such as being overly goal-fixated, fearless and selfish. What’s more, perhaps ‘our’ reactions are closer to ‘theirs’ than we realise. Like psychopaths, we can dial our empathy up and down; and for all the praise we heap on empathy, a closer look at this emotion suggests that it’s nearer to a kind of self-preservation instinct than any ‘warm and fuzzy’ fellow-feeling.
When debating what’s wrong with psychopaths, researchers typically pitch two competing moral theories against one another. One approach, known as rationalism, holds that judging right and wrong is a matter of reason, rather than feeling. The claim that psychopaths don't show rationalism is plain wrong. Psychopaths are as logical as you and me - in fact, they outsmart us all the time, hence their everyday depiction as connivers and con artists. So the fact that they’re rational but still capable of inhuman acts shows that moral sensibility can’t be grounded in reason alone.
Psychopaths struggle with what philosophers call ‘reasons for actions’: considerations that underlie our decisions to act, such as the likelihood that what we’ll do will satisfy our goals and won’t come into conflict with other projects or aims. Psychopaths appear to be poor at integrating all the various factors that go into making good choices, and often have poor reasons for their actions. They usually attend almost exclusively to the task at hand, and ignore relevant contextual information - although when context doesn’t play a role, they do very well. Other studies have found that psychopaths have problems reversing their responses: when actions that were previously rewarded are now punished - or actions that were previously punished are rewarded - they have problems adjusting. Most people desist and find other ways to navigate their way through, psychopaths tend not to. This insensitivity extends to social threats, such as angry faces. If you show a person pictures that they find threatening, they startle much more easily in response to loud sounds. Psychopaths respond normally to direct threats, such as an image of the gaping jaw of a shark or a striking snake, but not to social threats, such as people in pain or distress.
These findings support the rationalist idea that psychopathic immorality comes down to some inability to reason well. But you might have noticed that psychopaths don’t experience fear as often, and in the same situations, as do ordinary people. Last time I looked, fear was an emotion. This brings us back into the camp of people who think that emotion, not reason, is central to ethics. Typically they focus on empathy.
Q. Which of the following could be the next line of discussion?
Read the passage and answer the following questions:
Psychopaths are sick, deranged, lacking in moral conscience. In other words, they’re nothing like you or me. This picture of psychopathy has dominated the thinking of both laypeople and researchers. It’s at once sensational and reassuring. But this is false. There’s no major ability that psychopaths lack altogether, and their deficits are often small and circumscribed. They certainly aren’t incapable of telling right from wrong, making good decisions or experiencing empathy for other people. Instead, they suffer from a host of more mundane problems - such as being overly goal-fixated, fearless and selfish. What’s more, perhaps ‘our’ reactions are closer to ‘theirs’ than we realise. Like psychopaths, we can dial our empathy up and down; and for all the praise we heap on empathy, a closer look at this emotion suggests that it’s nearer to a kind of self-preservation instinct than any ‘warm and fuzzy’ fellow-feeling.
When debating what’s wrong with psychopaths, researchers typically pitch two competing moral theories against one another. One approach, known as rationalism, holds that judging right and wrong is a matter of reason, rather than feeling. The claim that psychopaths don't show rationalism is plain wrong. Psychopaths are as logical as you and me - in fact, they outsmart us all the time, hence their everyday depiction as connivers and con artists. So the fact that they’re rational but still capable of inhuman acts shows that moral sensibility can’t be grounded in reason alone.
Psychopaths struggle with what philosophers call ‘reasons for actions’: considerations that underlie our decisions to act, such as the likelihood that what we’ll do will satisfy our goals and won’t come into conflict with other projects or aims. Psychopaths appear to be poor at integrating all the various factors that go into making good choices, and often have poor reasons for their actions. They usually attend almost exclusively to the task at hand, and ignore relevant contextual information - although when context doesn’t play a role, they do very well. Other studies have found that psychopaths have problems reversing their responses: when actions that were previously rewarded are now punished - or actions that were previously punished are rewarded - they have problems adjusting. Most people desist and find other ways to navigate their way through, psychopaths tend not to. This insensitivity extends to social threats, such as angry faces. If you show a person pictures that they find threatening, they startle much more easily in response to loud sounds. Psychopaths respond normally to direct threats, such as an image of the gaping jaw of a shark or a striking snake, but not to social threats, such as people in pain or distress.
These findings support the rationalist idea that psychopathic immorality comes down to some inability to reason well. But you might have noticed that psychopaths don’t experience fear as often, and in the same situations, as do ordinary people. Last time I looked, fear was an emotion. This brings us back into the camp of people who think that emotion, not reason, is central to ethics. Typically they focus on empathy.
Q. Which of the following statements about empathy can be inferred from the first paragraph?
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The history of sport is full of suffering. In 1973, the boxer Muhammad Ali fought with a broken jaw for at least four rounds during his first historic bout with Ken Norton. In 1993, the American footballer Emmitt Smith played the entire second half of an NFL game with a first-degree separated shoulder, his arm hanging limply at his side as he ran for a heroic 168 yards. And in 1997, the basketball player Michael Jordan was delirious with fever when he scored 38 points in Game 5 of the NBA Finals; after the final buzzer, Scottie Pippen had to carry Jordan off the court because he no longer seemed able to support his own body weight.
Why such a drive to suffer and endure? A study by the medical researcher Jonas Tesarz and colleagues at the University of Heidelberg in 2012 found that athletes had significantly higher pain tolerance than normally active people. And yet both groups had similar pain thresholds, the point at which a sensation is recognisable as pain. Training can’t make athletes numb to pain, but it can condition them to tolerate it. And that kind of self-overcoming seems somehow integral to sport itself. And of course, if you’re suffering, the chances are that your opponent is, too. Indifference to pain confers a tactical advantage.
‘I remember the best race I ever had where the pain was almost enjoyable because you see other people hurt more than you,’ one Olympic athlete admitted during a study of pain tolerance. ‘If nothing is going wrong and there are no mechanical problems during the race then sometimes you can just turn the volume up a little higher and then a little higher and other people suffer and you almost enjoy it, even though you are in pain.’
Japanese trainers have gone so far as to enshrine this marriage of pain and athletic discipline in the concept of taibatsu, which translates roughly as ‘corporal punishment’. In his piece on Japanese baseball for The Japan Times last year, Robert Whiting traces the concept to one Suishu Tobita, head coach of the fabled Waseda University team in the 1920s. Tobita advocated ‘a baseball of savage pain and a baseball practice of savage treatment’. Players nicknamed his practice sessions ‘death training’: ‘If the players do not try so hard as to vomit blood in practice,’ he said, ‘then they cannot hope to win games. One must suffer to be good.’ This ethos has survived into the present day. The Japanese-born New York Yankees pitcher Hiroki Kuroda, has admitted that there were times in elementary school when his buttocks were beaten with a baseball bat until he couldn’t sit down.
In one sense, then, it appears that sport is largely about ignoring pain. And yet pain returns to assert itself in a strange and striking way when we look at the broader category of competitive play. In a way, pain is one of the first games we learn. We live in an inverse relation to it, claiming as ideal any form of civilisation in which the possibility of experiencing pain is minimised. It is the first and most fundamental rule we learn to follow through free will, something that roots our lives in an inescapable game-like quality. We are always ruled by pain, and those capable of breaking its hold for a few moments become our heroes, role models, and victors.
Q. Why does the author cite the examples of several sportspersons in the first paragraph?
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The history of sport is full of suffering. In 1973, the boxer Muhammad Ali fought with a broken jaw for at least four rounds during his first historic bout with Ken Norton. In 1993, the American footballer Emmitt Smith played the entire second half of an NFL game with a first-degree separated shoulder, his arm hanging limply at his side as he ran for a heroic 168 yards. And in 1997, the basketball player Michael Jordan was delirious with fever when he scored 38 points in Game 5 of the NBA Finals; after the final buzzer, Scottie Pippen had to carry Jordan off the court because he no longer seemed able to support his own body weight.
Why such a drive to suffer and endure? A study by the medical researcher Jonas Tesarz and colleagues at the University of Heidelberg in 2012 found that athletes had significantly higher pain tolerance than normally active people. And yet both groups had similar pain thresholds, the point at which a sensation is recognisable as pain. Training can’t make athletes numb to pain, but it can condition them to tolerate it. And that kind of self-overcoming seems somehow integral to sport itself. And of course, if you’re suffering, the chances are that your opponent is, too. Indifference to pain confers a tactical advantage.
‘I remember the best race I ever had where the pain was almost enjoyable because you see other people hurt more than you,’ one Olympic athlete admitted during a study of pain tolerance. ‘If nothing is going wrong and there are no mechanical problems during the race then sometimes you can just turn the volume up a little higher and then a little higher and other people suffer and you almost enjoy it, even though you are in pain.’
Japanese trainers have gone so far as to enshrine this marriage of pain and athletic discipline in the concept of taibatsu, which translates roughly as ‘corporal punishment’. In his piece on Japanese baseball for The Japan Times last year, Robert Whiting traces the concept to one Suishu Tobita, head coach of the fabled Waseda University team in the 1920s. Tobita advocated ‘a baseball of savage pain and a baseball practice of savage treatment’. Players nicknamed his practice sessions ‘death training’: ‘If the players do not try so hard as to vomit blood in practice,’ he said, ‘then they cannot hope to win games. One must suffer to be good.’ This ethos has survived into the present day. The Japanese-born New York Yankees pitcher Hiroki Kuroda, has admitted that there were times in elementary school when his buttocks were beaten with a baseball bat until he couldn’t sit down.
In one sense, then, it appears that sport is largely about ignoring pain. And yet pain returns to assert itself in a strange and striking way when we look at the broader category of competitive play. In a way, pain is one of the first games we learn. We live in an inverse relation to it, claiming as ideal any form of civilisation in which the possibility of experiencing pain is minimised. It is the first and most fundamental rule we learn to follow through free will, something that roots our lives in an inescapable game-like quality. We are always ruled by pain, and those capable of breaking its hold for a few moments become our heroes, role models, and victors.
Q. Which of the following is NOT a valid inference based on the passage?
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The history of sport is full of suffering. In 1973, the boxer Muhammad Ali fought with a broken jaw for at least four rounds during his first historic bout with Ken Norton. In 1993, the American footballer Emmitt Smith played the entire second half of an NFL game with a first-degree separated shoulder, his arm hanging limply at his side as he ran for a heroic 168 yards. And in 1997, the basketball player Michael Jordan was delirious with fever when he scored 38 points in Game 5 of the NBA Finals; after the final buzzer, Scottie Pippen had to carry Jordan off the court because he no longer seemed able to support his own body weight.
Why such a drive to suffer and endure? A study by the medical researcher Jonas Tesarz and colleagues at the University of Heidelberg in 2012 found that athletes had significantly higher pain tolerance than normally active people. And yet both groups had similar pain thresholds, the point at which a sensation is recognisable as pain. Training can’t make athletes numb to pain, but it can condition them to tolerate it. And that kind of self-overcoming seems somehow integral to sport itself. And of course, if you’re suffering, the chances are that your opponent is, too. Indifference to pain confers a tactical advantage.
‘I remember the best race I ever had where the pain was almost enjoyable because you see other people hurt more than you,’ one Olympic athlete admitted during a study of pain tolerance. ‘If nothing is going wrong and there are no mechanical problems during the race then sometimes you can just turn the volume up a little higher and then a little higher and other people suffer and you almost enjoy it, even though you are in pain.’
Japanese trainers have gone so far as to enshrine this marriage of pain and athletic discipline in the concept of taibatsu, which translates roughly as ‘corporal punishment’. In his piece on Japanese baseball for The Japan Times last year, Robert Whiting traces the concept to one Suishu Tobita, head coach of the fabled Waseda University team in the 1920s. Tobita advocated ‘a baseball of savage pain and a baseball practice of savage treatment’. Players nicknamed his practice sessions ‘death training’: ‘If the players do not try so hard as to vomit blood in practice,’ he said, ‘then they cannot hope to win games. One must suffer to be good.’ This ethos has survived into the present day. The Japanese-born New York Yankees pitcher Hiroki Kuroda, has admitted that there were times in elementary school when his buttocks were beaten with a baseball bat until he couldn’t sit down.
In one sense, then, it appears that sport is largely about ignoring pain. And yet pain returns to assert itself in a strange and striking way when we look at the broader category of competitive play. In a way, pain is one of the first games we learn. We live in an inverse relation to it, claiming as ideal any form of civilisation in which the possibility of experiencing pain is minimised. It is the first and most fundamental rule we learn to follow through free will, something that roots our lives in an inescapable game-like quality. We are always ruled by pain, and those capable of breaking its hold for a few moments become our heroes, role models, and victors.
Q. The author mentions Japanese-born New York Yankees pitcher Hiroki Kuroda to
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The history of sport is full of suffering. In 1973, the boxer Muhammad Ali fought with a broken jaw for at least four rounds during his first historic bout with Ken Norton. In 1993, the American footballer Emmitt Smith played the entire second half of an NFL game with a first-degree separated shoulder, his arm hanging limply at his side as he ran for a heroic 168 yards. And in 1997, the basketball player Michael Jordan was delirious with fever when he scored 38 points in Game 5 of the NBA Finals; after the final buzzer, Scottie Pippen had to carry Jordan off the court because he no longer seemed able to support his own body weight.
Why such a drive to suffer and endure? A study by the medical researcher Jonas Tesarz and colleagues at the University of Heidelberg in 2012 found that athletes had significantly higher pain tolerance than normally active people. And yet both groups had similar pain thresholds, the point at which a sensation is recognisable as pain. Training can’t make athletes numb to pain, but it can condition them to tolerate it. And that kind of self-overcoming seems somehow integral to sport itself. And of course, if you’re suffering, the chances are that your opponent is, too. Indifference to pain confers a tactical advantage.
‘I remember the best race I ever had where the pain was almost enjoyable because you see other people hurt more than you,’ one Olympic athlete admitted during a study of pain tolerance. ‘If nothing is going wrong and there are no mechanical problems during the race then sometimes you can just turn the volume up a little higher and then a little higher and other people suffer and you almost enjoy it, even though you are in pain.’
Japanese trainers have gone so far as to enshrine this marriage of pain and athletic discipline in the concept of taibatsu, which translates roughly as ‘corporal punishment’. In his piece on Japanese baseball for The Japan Times last year, Robert Whiting traces the concept to one Suishu Tobita, head coach of the fabled Waseda University team in the 1920s. Tobita advocated ‘a baseball of savage pain and a baseball practice of savage treatment’. Players nicknamed his practice sessions ‘death training’: ‘If the players do not try so hard as to vomit blood in practice,’ he said, ‘then they cannot hope to win games. One must suffer to be good.’ This ethos has survived into the present day. The Japanese-born New York Yankees pitcher Hiroki Kuroda, has admitted that there were times in elementary school when his buttocks were beaten with a baseball bat until he couldn’t sit down.
In one sense, then, it appears that sport is largely about ignoring pain. And yet pain returns to assert itself in a strange and striking way when we look at the broader category of competitive play. In a way, pain is one of the first games we learn. We live in an inverse relation to it, claiming as ideal any form of civilisation in which the possibility of experiencing pain is minimised. It is the first and most fundamental rule we learn to follow through free will, something that roots our lives in an inescapable game-like quality. We are always ruled by pain, and those capable of breaking its hold for a few moments become our heroes, role models, and victors.
Q. The central idea of the passage is that
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
Fantasy politics starts from the expectation that wishes should come true, that the best outcome imaginable is not just possible but overwhelmingly likely. The great appeal of fantasy politics is that it puts you in complete control. Using the power of your imagination, you get to control not only what you will do but also how everyone else will react. Everyone recognises your awesomeness and competes to serve your interests, whether motivated by admiration or fear.
Why is fantasy politics so popular these days? One reason is that it is so much easier than real politics. In real politics, we try to address multiple, intersecting, complicated collective action problems - like the high cost of housing or sexism in the labour market - while at the same time grappling with the deep diversity of beliefs, values, and interests within and between societies. Real politics is a difficult and time-consuming activity that usually requires dissatisfactory compromise with reality and what other people want. It is much easier to make-believe our way to our favoured outcomes.
Fantasy politics is also much more inherently satisfying than real politics. It gives us the opportunity to express our political values and loyalties and this is something that feels good in itself and has an immediate psychic payoff, regardless of whether anything we are doing is actually contributing to bringing about the outcome we claim to want. Raising the stakes in our imagination, for example by elevating a mundane legislative election to a decisive battle between good and evil, immediately makes us feel more vital and significant. Conspiracy theorising similarly raises the stakes, casting us in the role of a band of heroes, such as QAnon followers, fighting to bring to light and bring down depraved evil. All this contrasts with the meagre psychic rewards of participating in real politics, as merely one voice among millions of equals no more special than anyone else.
The psychic benefits of fantasy politics seem especially attractive to those who feel neglected and unheard by the political system, such as the white working class in towns left behind by the modern economy. For these losers, animated by grievance, fantasy politics offers their only way to feel politically significant. Moreover, like the victim’s dreams of revenge against their bully, these resentment driven fantasies are not kind. In the mid-term, the failure of populist fantasies like Brexit (a classic example of fantasy politics) will no doubt reinforce their followers' cynicism and alienation.
It should also be mentioned that fantasy politics is everywhere these days because fantasy itself is so popular. The kookiness of America’s gun rights movement, for example, has a lot to do with its animating hero fantasy of the regular guy standing up against the bad guys or evil government. In these movie screenplays that they write themselves, the good guy never misses and the bad guys never manage to shoot straight; and when the police arrive they can immediately tell who the good guys are.
Finally, demand creates its own supply. Political entrepreneurs like Trump or Farage or Boris come out of the woodwork and start pitching more fantasy products for voters to buy- so long as large numbers of our fellow citizens are disinterested in outcomes and prefer wallowing in fantasy, populist politicians will make hay.
Q. The author ascribes the pervasiveness of fantasy politics today to all of the following factors EXCEPT:
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
Fantasy politics starts from the expectation that wishes should come true, that the best outcome imaginable is not just possible but overwhelmingly likely. The great appeal of fantasy politics is that it puts you in complete control. Using the power of your imagination, you get to control not only what you will do but also how everyone else will react. Everyone recognises your awesomeness and competes to serve your interests, whether motivated by admiration or fear.
Why is fantasy politics so popular these days? One reason is that it is so much easier than real politics. In real politics, we try to address multiple, intersecting, complicated collective action problems - like the high cost of housing or sexism in the labour market - while at the same time grappling with the deep diversity of beliefs, values, and interests within and between societies. Real politics is a difficult and time-consuming activity that usually requires dissatisfactory compromise with reality and what other people want. It is much easier to make-believe our way to our favoured outcomes.
Fantasy politics is also much more inherently satisfying than real politics. It gives us the opportunity to express our political values and loyalties and this is something that feels good in itself and has an immediate psychic payoff, regardless of whether anything we are doing is actually contributing to bringing about the outcome we claim to want. Raising the stakes in our imagination, for example by elevating a mundane legislative election to a decisive battle between good and evil, immediately makes us feel more vital and significant. Conspiracy theorising similarly raises the stakes, casting us in the role of a band of heroes, such as QAnon followers, fighting to bring to light and bring down depraved evil. All this contrasts with the meagre psychic rewards of participating in real politics, as merely one voice among millions of equals no more special than anyone else.
The psychic benefits of fantasy politics seem especially attractive to those who feel neglected and unheard by the political system, such as the white working class in towns left behind by the modern economy. For these losers, animated by grievance, fantasy politics offers their only way to feel politically significant. Moreover, like the victim’s dreams of revenge against their bully, these resentment driven fantasies are not kind. In the mid-term, the failure of populist fantasies like Brexit (a classic example of fantasy politics) will no doubt reinforce their followers' cynicism and alienation.
It should also be mentioned that fantasy politics is everywhere these days because fantasy itself is so popular. The kookiness of America’s gun rights movement, for example, has a lot to do with its animating hero fantasy of the regular guy standing up against the bad guys or evil government. In these movie screenplays that they write themselves, the good guy never misses and the bad guys never manage to shoot straight; and when the police arrive they can immediately tell who the good guys are.
Finally, demand creates its own supply. Political entrepreneurs like Trump or Farage or Boris come out of the woodwork and start pitching more fantasy products for voters to buy- so long as large numbers of our fellow citizens are disinterested in outcomes and prefer wallowing in fantasy, populist politicians will make hay.
Q. The author is likely to agree with all of the following statements, EXCEPT
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
Fantasy politics starts from the expectation that wishes should come true, that the best outcome imaginable is not just possible but overwhelmingly likely. The great appeal of fantasy politics is that it puts you in complete control. Using the power of your imagination, you get to control not only what you will do but also how everyone else will react. Everyone recognises your awesomeness and competes to serve your interests, whether motivated by admiration or fear.
Why is fantasy politics so popular these days? One reason is that it is so much easier than real politics. In real politics, we try to address multiple, intersecting, complicated collective action problems - like the high cost of housing or sexism in the labour market - while at the same time grappling with the deep diversity of beliefs, values, and interests within and between societies. Real politics is a difficult and time-consuming activity that usually requires dissatisfactory compromise with reality and what other people want. It is much easier to make-believe our way to our favoured outcomes.
Fantasy politics is also much more inherently satisfying than real politics. It gives us the opportunity to express our political values and loyalties and this is something that feels good in itself and has an immediate psychic payoff, regardless of whether anything we are doing is actually contributing to bringing about the outcome we claim to want. Raising the stakes in our imagination, for example by elevating a mundane legislative election to a decisive battle between good and evil, immediately makes us feel more vital and significant. Conspiracy theorising similarly raises the stakes, casting us in the role of a band of heroes, such as QAnon followers, fighting to bring to light and bring down depraved evil. All this contrasts with the meagre psychic rewards of participating in real politics, as merely one voice among millions of equals no more special than anyone else.
The psychic benefits of fantasy politics seem especially attractive to those who feel neglected and unheard by the political system, such as the white working class in towns left behind by the modern economy. For these losers, animated by grievance, fantasy politics offers their only way to feel politically significant. Moreover, like the victim’s dreams of revenge against their bully, these resentment driven fantasies are not kind. In the mid-term, the failure of populist fantasies like Brexit (a classic example of fantasy politics) will no doubt reinforce their followers' cynicism and alienation.
It should also be mentioned that fantasy politics is everywhere these days because fantasy itself is so popular. The kookiness of America’s gun rights movement, for example, has a lot to do with its animating hero fantasy of the regular guy standing up against the bad guys or evil government. In these movie screenplays that they write themselves, the good guy never misses and the bad guys never manage to shoot straight; and when the police arrive they can immediately tell who the good guys are.
Finally, demand creates its own supply. Political entrepreneurs like Trump or Farage or Boris come out of the woodwork and start pitching more fantasy products for voters to buy- so long as large numbers of our fellow citizens are disinterested in outcomes and prefer wallowing in fantasy, populist politicians will make hay.
Q. Which of the following is a valid inference from the passage?
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
Fantasy politics starts from the expectation that wishes should come true, that the best outcome imaginable is not just possible but overwhelmingly likely. The great appeal of fantasy politics is that it puts you in complete control. Using the power of your imagination, you get to control not only what you will do but also how everyone else will react. Everyone recognises your awesomeness and competes to serve your interests, whether motivated by admiration or fear.
Why is fantasy politics so popular these days? One reason is that it is so much easier than real politics. In real politics, we try to address multiple, intersecting, complicated collective action problems - like the high cost of housing or sexism in the labour market - while at the same time grappling with the deep diversity of beliefs, values, and interests within and between societies. Real politics is a difficult and time-consuming activity that usually requires dissatisfactory compromise with reality and what other people want. It is much easier to make-believe our way to our favoured outcomes.
Fantasy politics is also much more inherently satisfying than real politics. It gives us the opportunity to express our political values and loyalties and this is something that feels good in itself and has an immediate psychic payoff, regardless of whether anything we are doing is actually contributing to bringing about the outcome we claim to want. Raising the stakes in our imagination, for example by elevating a mundane legislative election to a decisive battle between good and evil, immediately makes us feel more vital and significant. Conspiracy theorising similarly raises the stakes, casting us in the role of a band of heroes, such as QAnon followers, fighting to bring to light and bring down depraved evil. All this contrasts with the meagre psychic rewards of participating in real politics, as merely one voice among millions of equals no more special than anyone else.
The psychic benefits of fantasy politics seem especially attractive to those who feel neglected and unheard by the political system, such as the white working class in towns left behind by the modern economy. For these losers, animated by grievance, fantasy politics offers their only way to feel politically significant. Moreover, like the victim’s dreams of revenge against their bully, these resentment driven fantasies are not kind. In the mid-term, the failure of populist fantasies like Brexit (a classic example of fantasy politics) will no doubt reinforce their followers' cynicism and alienation.
It should also be mentioned that fantasy politics is everywhere these days because fantasy itself is so popular. The kookiness of America’s gun rights movement, for example, has a lot to do with its animating hero fantasy of the regular guy standing up against the bad guys or evil government. In these movie screenplays that they write themselves, the good guy never misses and the bad guys never manage to shoot straight; and when the police arrive they can immediately tell who the good guys are.
Finally, demand creates its own supply. Political entrepreneurs like Trump or Farage or Boris come out of the woodwork and start pitching more fantasy products for voters to buy- so long as large numbers of our fellow citizens are disinterested in outcomes and prefer wallowing in fantasy, populist politicians will make hay.
Q. The author’s tone towards followers of fantasy politics can best be described as being:
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The most well-understood dimension of racism involves taking actions that people of colour view as overtly prejudiced—policing black citizens much differently than whites, calling the police on a black bird-watcher in Central Park who is asking you to obey the law, calling somebody the N-word to show them who is boss. This is racism in the first degree. If officers anticipated that they would be held fully accountable for bad policing, they would do more good policing and we could begin healing the wounds they’ve inflicted on black people for centuries.
Then there is opposing or turning one’s back on anti-racism efforts, often justified by the demonization of the people courageously tackling racist behaviour. I call this racism in the second degree, akin to aiding and abetting.
The final, most pernicious category undergirds the everyday black experience. When employers, educational institutions, and governmental entities do not unwind practices that disadvantage people of colour in the competition with whites for economic and career mobility, that is fundamentally racist—not to mention cancerous to our economy and inconsistent with the American dream. For example, the majority of white executives operate as if there is a tension between increasing racial diversity and maintaining the excellence-based “meritocracies” that have made their organizations successful. After all, who in their right mind would argue against the concept of meritocracy?
Employers whose efforts to increase diversity lack the same analytical and executional rigour that is taken for granted in every other part of their business engage in practices that disadvantage black people in the competition for economic opportunity. By default, this behaviour protects white people’s positions of power.
We can increase the cost of this behaviour by calling on major employers to sign on to basic practices that demonstrate that black lives matter to them. Companies that sign on will be recognized and celebrated. Senior management teams that decline to take these basic steps will no longer be able to hide, and they will struggle to recruit and retain top talent of all colours who will prefer firms that have signed on. Then more people of colour will become economically mobile, organizations will become more diverse and competitive, and there will be a critical mass of black leaders whose institutional influence leads to more racially equitable behaviour. These leaders will also have the economic power to further elevate the cost of all other types of racist behaviour, in policing, criminal justice, housing, K-12 education, and health care—systems that for decades have been putting knees on the necks of our most vulnerable citizens and communities.
Third-degree racism can be deadly. For at least the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mandated that in order to get tested, you had to go to a primary care doctor to get a prescription and then, in some areas, also get a referral to a specialist who could approve a test, because they were in limited supply. That process made it much harder for minorities to access tests because they are much less likely to have primary-care physicians. If the people who designed that process knew upfront that they would be exposed as racist, fired, and ostracized if their approach put minorities at a greater health risk than white people, they would have designed it differently and saved black lives. Just having a critical mass of minorities in decision-making roles regarding that test-qualification process would have also saved many lives.
Q. Which of the following is an example of second-degree racism?
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The most well-understood dimension of racism involves taking actions that people of colour view as overtly prejudiced—policing black citizens much differently than whites, calling the police on a black bird-watcher in Central Park who is asking you to obey the law, calling somebody the N-word to show them who is boss. This is racism in the first degree. If officers anticipated that they would be held fully accountable for bad policing, they would do more good policing and we could begin healing the wounds they’ve inflicted on black people for centuries.
Then there is opposing or turning one’s back on anti-racism efforts, often justified by the demonization of the people courageously tackling racist behaviour. I call this racism in the second degree, akin to aiding and abetting.
The final, most pernicious category undergirds the everyday black experience. When employers, educational institutions, and governmental entities do not unwind practices that disadvantage people of colour in the competition with whites for economic and career mobility, that is fundamentally racist—not to mention cancerous to our economy and inconsistent with the American dream. For example, the majority of white executives operate as if there is a tension between increasing racial diversity and maintaining the excellence-based “meritocracies” that have made their organizations successful. After all, who in their right mind would argue against the concept of meritocracy?
Employers whose efforts to increase diversity lack the same analytical and executional rigour that is taken for granted in every other part of their business engage in practices that disadvantage black people in the competition for economic opportunity. By default, this behaviour protects white people’s positions of power.
We can increase the cost of this behaviour by calling on major employers to sign on to basic practices that demonstrate that black lives matter to them. Companies that sign on will be recognized and celebrated. Senior management teams that decline to take these basic steps will no longer be able to hide, and they will struggle to recruit and retain top talent of all colours who will prefer firms that have signed on. Then more people of colour will become economically mobile, organizations will become more diverse and competitive, and there will be a critical mass of black leaders whose institutional influence leads to more racially equitable behaviour. These leaders will also have the economic power to further elevate the cost of all other types of racist behaviour, in policing, criminal justice, housing, K-12 education, and health care—systems that for decades have been putting knees on the necks of our most vulnerable citizens and communities.
Third-degree racism can be deadly. For at least the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mandated that in order to get tested, you had to go to a primary care doctor to get a prescription and then, in some areas, also get a referral to a specialist who could approve a test, because they were in limited supply. That process made it much harder for minorities to access tests because they are much less likely to have primary-care physicians. If the people who designed that process knew upfront that they would be exposed as racist, fired, and ostracized if their approach put minorities at a greater health risk than white people, they would have designed it differently and saved black lives. Just having a critical mass of minorities in decision-making roles regarding that test-qualification process would have also saved many lives.
Q. Why does the author cite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's COVID-19 pandemic response in the final paragraph?
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The most well-understood dimension of racism involves taking actions that people of colour view as overtly prejudiced—policing black citizens much differently than whites, calling the police on a black bird-watcher in Central Park who is asking you to obey the law, calling somebody the N-word to show them who is boss. This is racism in the first degree. If officers anticipated that they would be held fully accountable for bad policing, they would do more good policing and we could begin healing the wounds they’ve inflicted on black people for centuries.
Then there is opposing or turning one’s back on anti-racism efforts, often justified by the demonization of the people courageously tackling racist behaviour. I call this racism in the second degree, akin to aiding and abetting.
The final, most pernicious category undergirds the everyday black experience. When employers, educational institutions, and governmental entities do not unwind practices that disadvantage people of colour in the competition with whites for economic and career mobility, that is fundamentally racist—not to mention cancerous to our economy and inconsistent with the American dream. For example, the majority of white executives operate as if there is a tension between increasing racial diversity and maintaining the excellence-based “meritocracies” that have made their organizations successful. After all, who in their right mind would argue against the concept of meritocracy?
Employers whose efforts to increase diversity lack the same analytical and executional rigour that is taken for granted in every other part of their business engage in practices that disadvantage black people in the competition for economic opportunity. By default, this behaviour protects white people’s positions of power.
We can increase the cost of this behaviour by calling on major employers to sign on to basic practices that demonstrate that black lives matter to them. Companies that sign on will be recognized and celebrated. Senior management teams that decline to take these basic steps will no longer be able to hide, and they will struggle to recruit and retain top talent of all colours who will prefer firms that have signed on. Then more people of colour will become economically mobile, organizations will become more diverse and competitive, and there will be a critical mass of black leaders whose institutional influence leads to more racially equitable behaviour. These leaders will also have the economic power to further elevate the cost of all other types of racist behaviour, in policing, criminal justice, housing, K-12 education, and health care—systems that for decades have been putting knees on the necks of our most vulnerable citizens and communities.
Third-degree racism can be deadly. For at least the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mandated that in order to get tested, you had to go to a primary care doctor to get a prescription and then, in some areas, also get a referral to a specialist who could approve a test, because they were in limited supply. That process made it much harder for minorities to access tests because they are much less likely to have primary-care physicians. If the people who designed that process knew upfront that they would be exposed as racist, fired, and ostracized if their approach put minorities at a greater health risk than white people, they would have designed it differently and saved black lives. Just having a critical mass of minorities in decision-making roles regarding that test-qualification process would have also saved many lives.
Q. Which of the following is the author of the passage most likely to agree with?
Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The most well-understood dimension of racism involves taking actions that people of colour view as overtly prejudiced—policing black citizens much differently than whites, calling the police on a black bird-watcher in Central Park who is asking you to obey the law, calling somebody the N-word to show them who is boss. This is racism in the first degree. If officers anticipated that they would be held fully accountable for bad policing, they would do more good policing and we could begin healing the wounds they’ve inflicted on black people for centuries.
Then there is opposing or turning one’s back on anti-racism