CAT Mock Test- 2 - CAT

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Recognising our feelings of grief is important, not only because we cannot mourn our losses if we do not acknowledge them, but also because the literature and science of grief offer guidance for how to respond to this pandemic in ways that make psychological healing possible. In his 2008 book, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, the psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues that British society has lost a vital connection to grief, preferring to interpret the pain of unacknowledged or unresolved loss and separation medically, as depression, and opting for what he calls “mental hygiene” - the management of troublesome, superficial symptoms - over the deeper, harder work of mourning. We do not find it easy, in this culture of self-optimisation and life-hacks, to accept that grief is not something you can “get over”, that there is no cure for pain. The act of mourning is not to recover from loss, Leader argues, but rather to find a way to accommodate and live with it. And, if we put off or bypass the work of mourning, the pain of our losses will return to torment us, often in disruptive or unexpected ways.

The anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer argued that the mass deaths of the First World War so overwhelmed British communities that people began to abandon traditional mourning rituals, something that served to transform grief from a communal experience to a private emotion. The pandemic might be accelerating this process, as people are left to mourn alone in lockdown and to pay their final respects over Zoom. And yet, Darian Leader contends that we cannot properly mourn in isolation; mourning is a social task. “A loss, after all, always requires some kind of recognition, some sense that it has been witnessed and made real,” Leader writes. This is why we have such an elemental need to feel heard, why we make the effort to commemorate past conflicts, why post-conflict truth and reconciliation commissions are less about punishment than recognising the crimes. The demands for a public inquiry into the British government’s pandemic response speaks to this need, and to another dimension of pandemic grief. 

Leader argues that public displays of grief help facilitate individual mourning. In his view, it is through public ceremonies that people are able to access their own, personal grief. This is the function performed by traditions of hiring professional mourners to keen at funerals, and it helps explain why celebrity deaths sometimes unleash an outpouring of grief. The near-hysterical response to the death of Princess Diana in 1997 was not, as some newspapers contended, a mark of “mourning sickness” or “crocodile tears”. Rather, the public mood provided people with a way to access their grief over other, unrelated losses.

Those who study grief often point to the inevitability of pain. When people put off the business of mourning, the pain of loss and separation finds a way to reassert itself. Leader describes the phenomenon of “anniversary symptoms”, the findings that adult hospitalisation dates coincide remarkably with anniversaries of childhood losses, or that GP surgery records reveal that people often return to doctors in the same week or month as their previous visit. “Rather than access their memories, the body commemorates them,” Leader writes.

Q. The author cites the example of post-conflict truth and reconciliation commissions to drive home the point that

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Charles Darwin thought the mental capacities of animals and people differed only in degree, not kind—a natural conclusion to reach when armed with the radical new belief that the one evolved from the other. His last great book, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”, examined joy, love and grief in birds, domestic animals and primates as well as in various human races. But Darwin’s attitude to animals—easily shared by people in everyday contact with dogs, horses, even mice—ran contrary to a long tradition in European thought which held that animals had no minds at all. This way of thinking stemmed from the argument of René Descartes, a great 17th-century philosopher, that people were creatures of reason, linked to the mind of God, while animals were merely machines made of flesh—living robots which, in the words of Nicolas Malebranche, one of his followers, “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

For much of the 20th century biology cleaved closer to Descartes than to Darwin. Students of animal behaviour did not rule out the possibility that animals had minds but thought the question almost irrelevant since it was impossible to answer. One could study an organism’s inputs (such as food or the environment) or outputs (its behaviour). But the organism itself remained a black box: unobservable things such as emotions or thoughts were beyond the scope of objective inquiry.

In the past 40 years, however, a wide range of work both in the field and the lab has pushed the consensus away from strict behaviourism and towards that Darwin-friendly view. Progress has not been easy or quick; as the behaviourists warned, both sorts of evidence can be misleading. Laboratory tests can be rigorous, but are inevitably based on animals which may not behave as they do in the wild. Field observations can be dismissed as anecdotal. Running them for years or decades and on a large scale goes some way to guarding against that problem, but such studies are rare.

Nevertheless, most scientists...say with confidence that some animals process information and express emotions in ways that are accompanied by conscious mental experience. They agree that animals...have complex mental capacities; that a few species have attributes once thought to be unique to people, such as the ability to give objects names and use tools; and that a handful of animals—primates, corvids (the crow family) and cetaceans (whales and dolphins)— have something close to what in humans is seen as culture, in that they develop distinctive ways of doing things which are passed down by imitation and example. Dolphins have been found to imitate the behaviour of other dolphins, in their group. No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other.

 Brain mapping reveals that the neurological processes underlying what look like emotions in rats are similar to those behind what clearly are emotions in humans. As a group of neuroscientists seeking to sum the field up put it in 2012, “Humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures...also possess these neurological substrates.”

Q. Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage?

I. There is now a consensus among most scientists that some animals exhibit most of the attributes characteristic of human minds.

II. Some animals are self-aware and are also conscious of their social milieu.

III. Some animal minds are capable of imitative behaviour.

IV. People who rarely came in contact with animals disregarded Darwin's views on animal minds. 

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Charles Darwin thought the mental capacities of animals and people differed only in degree, not kind—a natural conclusion to reach when armed with the radical new belief that the one evolved from the other. His last great book, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”, examined joy, love and grief in birds, domestic animals and primates as well as in various human races. But Darwin’s attitude to animals—easily shared by people in everyday contact with dogs, horses, even mice—ran contrary to a long tradition in European thought which held that animals had no minds at all. This way of thinking stemmed from the argument of René Descartes, a great 17th-century philosopher, that people were creatures of reason, linked to the mind of God, while animals were merely machines made of flesh—living robots which, in the words of Nicolas Malebranche, one of his followers, “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

For much of the 20th century biology cleaved closer to Descartes than to Darwin. Students of animal behaviour did not rule out the possibility that animals had minds but thought the question almost irrelevant since it was impossible to answer. One could study an organism’s inputs (such as food or the environment) or outputs (its behaviour). But the organism itself remained a black box: unobservable things such as emotions or thoughts were beyond the scope of objective inquiry.

In the past 40 years, however, a wide range of work both in the field and the lab has pushed the consensus away from strict behaviourism and towards that Darwin-friendly view. Progress has not been easy or quick; as the behaviourists warned, both sorts of evidence can be misleading. Laboratory tests can be rigorous, but are inevitably based on animals which may not behave as they do in the wild. Field observations can be dismissed as anecdotal. Running them for years or decades and on a large scale goes some way to guarding against that problem, but such studies are rare.

Nevertheless, most scientists...say with confidence that some animals process information and express emotions in ways that are accompanied by conscious mental experience. They agree that animals...have complex mental capacities; that a few species have attributes once thought to be unique to people, such as the ability to give objects names and use tools; and that a handful of animals—primates, corvids (the crow family) and cetaceans (whales and dolphins)— have something close to what in humans is seen as culture, in that they develop distinctive ways of doing things which are passed down by imitation and example. Dolphins have been found to imitate the behaviour of other dolphins, in their group. No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other.

 Brain mapping reveals that the neurological processes underlying what look like emotions in rats are similar to those behind what clearly are emotions in humans. As a group of neuroscientists seeking to sum the field up put it in 2012, “Humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures...also possess these neurological substrates.”

Q. Which of the following views of Descartes and/or his followers cannot be inferred from the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Charles Darwin thought the mental capacities of animals and people differed only in degree, not kind—a natural conclusion to reach when armed with the radical new belief that the one evolved from the other. His last great book, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”, examined joy, love and grief in birds, domestic animals and primates as well as in various human races. But Darwin’s attitude to animals—easily shared by people in everyday contact with dogs, horses, even mice—ran contrary to a long tradition in European thought which held that animals had no minds at all. This way of thinking stemmed from the argument of René Descartes, a great 17th-century philosopher, that people were creatures of reason, linked to the mind of God, while animals were merely machines made of flesh—living robots which, in the words of Nicolas Malebranche, one of his followers, “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

For much of the 20th century biology cleaved closer to Descartes than to Darwin. Students of animal behaviour did not rule out the possibility that animals had minds but thought the question almost irrelevant since it was impossible to answer. One could study an organism’s inputs (such as food or the environment) or outputs (its behaviour). But the organism itself remained a black box: unobservable things such as emotions or thoughts were beyond the scope of objective inquiry.

In the past 40 years, however, a wide range of work both in the field and the lab has pushed the consensus away from strict behaviourism and towards that Darwin-friendly view. Progress has not been easy or quick; as the behaviourists warned, both sorts of evidence can be misleading. Laboratory tests can be rigorous, but are inevitably based on animals which may not behave as they do in the wild. Field observations can be dismissed as anecdotal. Running them for years or decades and on a large scale goes some way to guarding against that problem, but such studies are rare.

Nevertheless, most scientists...say with confidence that some animals process information and express emotions in ways that are accompanied by conscious mental experience. They agree that animals...have complex mental capacities; that a few species have attributes once thought to be unique to people, such as the ability to give objects names and use tools; and that a handful of animals—primates, corvids (the crow family) and cetaceans (whales and dolphins)— have something close to what in humans is seen as culture, in that they develop distinctive ways of doing things which are passed down by imitation and example. Dolphins have been found to imitate the behaviour of other dolphins, in their group. No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other.

 Brain mapping reveals that the neurological processes underlying what look like emotions in rats are similar to those behind what clearly are emotions in humans. As a group of neuroscientists seeking to sum the field up put it in 2012, “Humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures...also possess these neurological substrates.”

Q. For much of the 20th century, students of animal behaviour opined that

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Charles Darwin thought the mental capacities of animals and people differed only in degree, not kind—a natural conclusion to reach when armed with the radical new belief that the one evolved from the other. His last great book, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”, examined joy, love and grief in birds, domestic animals and primates as well as in various human races. But Darwin’s attitude to animals—easily shared by people in everyday contact with dogs, horses, even mice—ran contrary to a long tradition in European thought which held that animals had no minds at all. This way of thinking stemmed from the argument of René Descartes, a great 17th-century philosopher, that people were creatures of reason, linked to the mind of God, while animals were merely machines made of flesh—living robots which, in the words of Nicolas Malebranche, one of his followers, “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

For much of the 20th century biology cleaved closer to Descartes than to Darwin. Students of animal behaviour did not rule out the possibility that animals had minds but thought the question almost irrelevant since it was impossible to answer. One could study an organism’s inputs (such as food or the environment) or outputs (its behaviour). But the organism itself remained a black box: unobservable things such as emotions or thoughts were beyond the scope of objective inquiry.

In the past 40 years, however, a wide range of work both in the field and the lab has pushed the consensus away from strict behaviourism and towards that Darwin-friendly view. Progress has not been easy or quick; as the behaviourists warned, both sorts of evidence can be misleading. Laboratory tests can be rigorous, but are inevitably based on animals which may not behave as they do in the wild. Field observations can be dismissed as anecdotal. Running them for years or decades and on a large scale goes some way to guarding against that problem, but such studies are rare.

Nevertheless, most scientists...say with confidence that some animals process information and express emotions in ways that are accompanied by conscious mental experience. They agree that animals...have complex mental capacities; that a few species have attributes once thought to be unique to people, such as the ability to give objects names and use tools; and that a handful of animals—primates, corvids (the crow family) and cetaceans (whales and dolphins)— have something close to what in humans is seen as culture, in that they develop distinctive ways of doing things which are passed down by imitation and example. Dolphins have been found to imitate the behaviour of other dolphins, in their group. No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other.

 Brain mapping reveals that the neurological processes underlying what look like emotions in rats are similar to those behind what clearly are emotions in humans. As a group of neuroscientists seeking to sum the field up put it in 2012, “Humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures...also possess these neurological substrates.”

Q. Which of the following is a reason why the behaviourists are concerned about the evidence supporting the Darwin-friendly view?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

For traditional Darwinian natural selection to work, the entities in question must display some property or ability that can be inherited, and that results in their having more offspring than the competition. For instance, the first creatures with vision, however fuzzy, were presumably better at avoiding predators and finding mates than the sightless members of their population, and had more surviving progeny for that reason. In technical terms, then, selected entities must exist in populations showing heritable variation in fitness, greater fitness resulting in these entities’ differential reproduction.

Even if inherited properties are the result of undirected or ‘random’ mutation, repeating the selection process over generations will incrementally improve on them. This produces complex adaptations such as the vertebrate eye, with its highly sophisticated function. Lightsensitive areas acquired lenses for focusing and means for distinguishing colours step by advantageous step, ultimately producing modern eyes that are clearly for seeing. So even without an overall purpose, evolution, through selection,  creates something that behaves as if it has a goal.

Back in 1979, when Lovelock’s first popular book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, came out, the wider field of evolutionary biology was becoming a very reductionist discipline. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene had been published three years earlier, and it promoted a hardcore gene-centrism insisting that we look at genes as the fundamental units of selection - that is, the thing upon which natural selection operates. His claim was that genes were the reproducing entities par excellence, because they are the only things that always replicate and produce enduring lineages. Replication here means making fairly exact one-to-one copies, as genes (and asexual organisms such as bacteria) do. Reproduction, though, is a more inclusive and forgiving term - it’s what we humans and other sexual species do, when we make offspring that resemble both parents, but each only imperfectly. Still, this sloppy process exhibits heritable variation in fitness, and so supports evolution by natural selection.

In recent decades, many theorists have come to understand that there can be reproducing or even replicating entities evolving by natural selection at several levels of the biological hierarchy - not just in the domains of replicating genes and bacteria, or even sexual creatures such as ourselves. They have come to embrace something called multilevel selection theory: the idea that life can be represented as a hierarchy of entities nested together in larger entities, like Russian dolls. As the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘genes, cells, social groups and species can all, in principle, enter into change of this kind’.

But to qualify as a thing on which natural selection can operate - a unit of selection - ‘they must be connected by parent-offspring relations; they must have the capacity to reproduce,’ Godfrey-Smith continues. It’s the requirement for reproduction and leaving parent-offspring lineages (lines of descent) we need to focus on here, because they remain essential in traditional formulations. Without reproduction, fitness is undefined, and heritability seems to make no sense. And without lines of descent, at some level, how can we even conceive of natural selection?

Q. All of the following statements can be inferred from the passage, EXCEPT;

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

For traditional Darwinian natural selection to work, the entities in question must display some property or ability that can be inherited, and that results in their having more offspring than the competition. For instance, the first creatures with vision, however fuzzy, were presumably better at avoiding predators and finding mates than the sightless members of their population, and had more surviving progeny for that reason. In technical terms, then, selected entities must exist in populations showing heritable variation in fitness, greater fitness resulting in these entities’ differential reproduction.

Even if inherited properties are the result of undirected or ‘random’ mutation, repeating the selection process over generations will incrementally improve on them. This produces complex adaptations such as the vertebrate eye, with its highly sophisticated function. Lightsensitive areas acquired lenses for focusing and means for distinguishing colours step by advantageous step, ultimately producing modern eyes that are clearly for seeing. So even without an overall purpose, evolution, through selection,  creates something that behaves as if it has a goal.

Back in 1979, when Lovelock’s first popular book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, came out, the wider field of evolutionary biology was becoming a very reductionist discipline. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene had been published three years earlier, and it promoted a hardcore gene-centrism insisting that we look at genes as the fundamental units of selection - that is, the thing upon which natural selection operates. His claim was that genes were the reproducing entities par excellence, because they are the only things that always replicate and produce enduring lineages. Replication here means making fairly exact one-to-one copies, as genes (and asexual organisms such as bacteria) do. Reproduction, though, is a more inclusive and forgiving term - it’s what we humans and other sexual species do, when we make offspring that resemble both parents, but each only imperfectly. Still, this sloppy process exhibits heritable variation in fitness, and so supports evolution by natural selection.

In recent decades, many theorists have come to understand that there can be reproducing or even replicating entities evolving by natural selection at several levels of the biological hierarchy - not just in the domains of replicating genes and bacteria, or even sexual creatures such as ourselves. They have come to embrace something called multilevel selection theory: the idea that life can be represented as a hierarchy of entities nested together in larger entities, like Russian dolls. As the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘genes, cells, social groups and species can all, in principle, enter into change of this kind’.

But to qualify as a thing on which natural selection can operate - a unit of selection - ‘they must be connected by parent-offspring relations; they must have the capacity to reproduce,’ Godfrey-Smith continues. It’s the requirement for reproduction and leaving parent-offspring lineages (lines of descent) we need to focus on here, because they remain essential in traditional formulations. Without reproduction, fitness is undefined, and heritability seems to make no sense. And without lines of descent, at some level, how can we even conceive of natural selection?

Q. Which of the following could be the reason why the author discusses the example of the vertebrate eye in the second paragraph?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

For traditional Darwinian natural selection to work, the entities in question must display some property or ability that can be inherited, and that results in their having more offspring than the competition. For instance, the first creatures with vision, however fuzzy, were presumably better at avoiding predators and finding mates than the sightless members of their population, and had more surviving progeny for that reason. In technical terms, then, selected entities must exist in populations showing heritable variation in fitness, greater fitness resulting in these entities’ differential reproduction.

Even if inherited properties are the result of undirected or ‘random’ mutation, repeating the selection process over generations will incrementally improve on them. This produces complex adaptations such as the vertebrate eye, with its highly sophisticated function. Lightsensitive areas acquired lenses for focusing and means for distinguishing colours step by advantageous step, ultimately producing modern eyes that are clearly for seeing. So even without an overall purpose, evolution, through selection,  creates something that behaves as if it has a goal.

Back in 1979, when Lovelock’s first popular book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, came out, the wider field of evolutionary biology was becoming a very reductionist discipline. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene had been published three years earlier, and it promoted a hardcore gene-centrism insisting that we look at genes as the fundamental units of selection - that is, the thing upon which natural selection operates. His claim was that genes were the reproducing entities par excellence, because they are the only things that always replicate and produce enduring lineages. Replication here means making fairly exact one-to-one copies, as genes (and asexual organisms such as bacteria) do. Reproduction, though, is a more inclusive and forgiving term - it’s what we humans and other sexual species do, when we make offspring that resemble both parents, but each only imperfectly. Still, this sloppy process exhibits heritable variation in fitness, and so supports evolution by natural selection.

In recent decades, many theorists have come to understand that there can be reproducing or even replicating entities evolving by natural selection at several levels of the biological hierarchy - not just in the domains of replicating genes and bacteria, or even sexual creatures such as ourselves. They have come to embrace something called multilevel selection theory: the idea that life can be represented as a hierarchy of entities nested together in larger entities, like Russian dolls. As the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘genes, cells, social groups and species can all, in principle, enter into change of this kind’.

But to qualify as a thing on which natural selection can operate - a unit of selection - ‘they must be connected by parent-offspring relations; they must have the capacity to reproduce,’ Godfrey-Smith continues. It’s the requirement for reproduction and leaving parent-offspring lineages (lines of descent) we need to focus on here, because they remain essential in traditional formulations. Without reproduction, fitness is undefined, and heritability seems to make no sense. And without lines of descent, at some level, how can we even conceive of natural selection?

Q. Which of the following, if true, would strongly counter Peter Godfrey-Smith’s observations on natural selection?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

For traditional Darwinian natural selection to work, the entities in question must display some property or ability that can be inherited, and that results in their having more offspring than the competition. For instance, the first creatures with vision, however fuzzy, were presumably better at avoiding predators and finding mates than the sightless members of their population, and had more surviving progeny for that reason. In technical terms, then, selected entities must exist in populations showing heritable variation in fitness, greater fitness resulting in these entities’ differential reproduction.

Even if inherited properties are the result of undirected or ‘random’ mutation, repeating the selection process over generations will incrementally improve on them. This produces complex adaptations such as the vertebrate eye, with its highly sophisticated function. Lightsensitive areas acquired lenses for focusing and means for distinguishing colours step by advantageous step, ultimately producing modern eyes that are clearly for seeing. So even without an overall purpose, evolution, through selection,  creates something that behaves as if it has a goal.

Back in 1979, when Lovelock’s first popular book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, came out, the wider field of evolutionary biology was becoming a very reductionist discipline. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene had been published three years earlier, and it promoted a hardcore gene-centrism insisting that we look at genes as the fundamental units of selection - that is, the thing upon which natural selection operates. His claim was that genes were the reproducing entities par excellence, because they are the only things that always replicate and produce enduring lineages. Replication here means making fairly exact one-to-one copies, as genes (and asexual organisms such as bacteria) do. Reproduction, though, is a more inclusive and forgiving term - it’s what we humans and other sexual species do, when we make offspring that resemble both parents, but each only imperfectly. Still, this sloppy process exhibits heritable variation in fitness, and so supports evolution by natural selection.

In recent decades, many theorists have come to understand that there can be reproducing or even replicating entities evolving by natural selection at several levels of the biological hierarchy - not just in the domains of replicating genes and bacteria, or even sexual creatures such as ourselves. They have come to embrace something called multilevel selection theory: the idea that life can be represented as a hierarchy of entities nested together in larger entities, like Russian dolls. As the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘genes, cells, social groups and species can all, in principle, enter into change of this kind’.

But to qualify as a thing on which natural selection can operate - a unit of selection - ‘they must be connected by parent-offspring relations; they must have the capacity to reproduce,’ Godfrey-Smith continues. It’s the requirement for reproduction and leaving parent-offspring lineages (lines of descent) we need to focus on here, because they remain essential in traditional formulations. Without reproduction, fitness is undefined, and heritability seems to make no sense. And without lines of descent, at some level, how can we even conceive of natural selection?

Q. Which of the following is definitely true according to the multi-level selection theory?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Mythology remains important in Western culture. Take, for instance, the role model of the hero, of contemporary revolutionaries, martyrs and dictators. These ideal figures exemplify models of human achievement. Similarly, notions of salvation, progress and ethics are so constitutive of our notions of reality that they’re often communicated through the format of mythology. There’s a surfeit of cultural products that fulfil the function of myth whereby characters and stories give us the means to understand the world we live in. Through superhero comic books, to the obscure immanence of modern art, from visions of paradisiacal vacations, to computer games and the self-mythologising of social media production, we seek a higher ground beyond the banal and the profane. We’ve even replaced the effervescent experience of sacred rites...in our engagement with art, drugs, cinema, rock music and all-night dance parties. Lastly, individuals have developed their own ways to create self-narratives that include mythical transitions in pilgrimages or personal quests to their ancestral lands. Likewise, some seek inner spaces wherein faith and meaning can be transformed into experience.

To prepare for our exploration of contemporary mythology, we can look back at civilisations and consider the function of the stories they told. The story of the flood, for example, recurs in early urban societies, marking a crisis in human-divine relations and man’s experience of gradual self-reliance and separation from nature. Whereas during the Axial Age (800-200 BCE), faith developed in an environment of early trade economies, at which time we observe a concern with individual conscience, morality, compassion and a tendency to look within. According to Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2005), these Axial myths of interiority indicate that people felt they no longer shared the same nature as the gods, and that the supreme reality had become impossibly difficult to access. These myths were a response to the loss of previous notions of social order, cosmology and human good, and represented ways to portray these social transformations in macrocosmic stories, and were reflections of how people tried to make sense of their rapidly changing world.

What constitutes a mythology? It’s an organised canon of beliefs that explains the state of the world. It also delivers an origin story - such as the Hindu Laws of Manu or the Biblical creation story - that creates a setting for how we experience the world. In fact, for Eliade, all myths provided an explanation of the world by virtue of giving an account of where things came from. If all mythologies are origin stories in this sense, what are the origin stories suggested by psychology? Two original elements of human nature are explained in its lore: the story of personhood - that is, what it means to be an individual and have an identity - and, secondly, the story of our physical constitution in the brain. 

Contemporary psychology is a form of mythology insofar as it is an attempt to succor our need to believe in stories that provide a sense of value and signification in the context of secular modernity. The ways in which psychology is used - for example in experiments or self-help literature or personality tests or brain scans - are means of providing rituals to enact the myths of personhood and materialism.

Q. Which of the following statements about mythology cannot be inferred from the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Mythology remains important in Western culture. Take, for instance, the role model of the hero, of contemporary revolutionaries, martyrs and dictators. These ideal figures exemplify models of human achievement. Similarly, notions of salvation, progress and ethics are so constitutive of our notions of reality that they’re often communicated through the format of mythology. There’s a surfeit of cultural products that fulfil the function of myth whereby characters and stories give us the means to understand the world we live in. Through superhero comic books, to the obscure immanence of modern art, from visions of paradisiacal vacations, to computer games and the self-mythologising of social media production, we seek a higher ground beyond the banal and the profane. We’ve even replaced the effervescent experience of sacred rites...in our engagement with art, drugs, cinema, rock music and all-night dance parties. Lastly, individuals have developed their own ways to create self-narratives that include mythical transitions in pilgrimages or personal quests to their ancestral lands. Likewise, some seek inner spaces wherein faith and meaning can be transformed into experience.

To prepare for our exploration of contemporary mythology, we can look back at civilisations and consider the function of the stories they told. The story of the flood, for example, recurs in early urban societies, marking a crisis in human-divine relations and man’s experience of gradual self-reliance and separation from nature. Whereas during the Axial Age (800-200 BCE), faith developed in an environment of early trade economies, at which time we observe a concern with individual conscience, morality, compassion and a tendency to look within. According to Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2005), these Axial myths of interiority indicate that people felt they no longer shared the same nature as the gods, and that the supreme reality had become impossibly difficult to access. These myths were a response to the loss of previous notions of social order, cosmology and human good, and represented ways to portray these social transformations in macrocosmic stories, and were reflections of how people tried to make sense of their rapidly changing world.

What constitutes a mythology? It’s an organised canon of beliefs that explains the state of the world. It also delivers an origin story - such as the Hindu Laws of Manu or the Biblical creation story - that creates a setting for how we experience the world. In fact, for Eliade, all myths provided an explanation of the world by virtue of giving an account of where things came from. If all mythologies are origin stories in this sense, what are the origin stories suggested by psychology? Two original elements of human nature are explained in its lore: the story of personhood - that is, what it means to be an individual and have an identity - and, secondly, the story of our physical constitution in the brain. 

Contemporary psychology is a form of mythology insofar as it is an attempt to succor our need to believe in stories that provide a sense of value and signification in the context of secular modernity. The ways in which psychology is used - for example in experiments or self-help literature or personality tests or brain scans - are means of providing rituals to enact the myths of personhood and materialism.

Q. The author cites the examples of the story of the flood and myth of interiority to drive home the point that

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Mythology remains important in Western culture. Take, for instance, the role model of the hero, of contemporary revolutionaries, martyrs and dictators. These ideal figures exemplify models of human achievement. Similarly, notions of salvation, progress and ethics are so constitutive of our notions of reality that they’re often communicated through the format of mythology. There’s a surfeit of cultural products that fulfil the function of myth whereby characters and stories give us the means to understand the world we live in. Through superhero comic books, to the obscure immanence of modern art, from visions of paradisiacal vacations, to computer games and the self-mythologising of social media production, we seek a higher ground beyond the banal and the profane. We’ve even replaced the effervescent experience of sacred rites...in our engagement with art, drugs, cinema, rock music and all-night dance parties. Lastly, individuals have developed their own ways to create self-narratives that include mythical transitions in pilgrimages or personal quests to their ancestral lands. Likewise, some seek inner spaces wherein faith and meaning can be transformed into experience.

To prepare for our exploration of contemporary mythology, we can look back at civilisations and consider the function of the stories they told. The story of the flood, for example, recurs in early urban societies, marking a crisis in human-divine relations and man’s experience of gradual self-reliance and separation from nature. Whereas during the Axial Age (800-200 BCE), faith developed in an environment of early trade economies, at which time we observe a concern with individual conscience, morality, compassion and a tendency to look within. According to Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2005), these Axial myths of interiority indicate that people felt they no longer shared the same nature as the gods, and that the supreme reality had become impossibly difficult to access. These myths were a response to the loss of previous notions of social order, cosmology and human good, and represented ways to portray these social transformations in macrocosmic stories, and were reflections of how people tried to make sense of their rapidly changing world.

What constitutes a mythology? It’s an organised canon of beliefs that explains the state of the world. It also delivers an origin story - such as the Hindu Laws of Manu or the Biblical creation story - that creates a setting for how we experience the world. In fact, for Eliade, all myths provided an explanation of the world by virtue of giving an account of where things came from. If all mythologies are origin stories in this sense, what are the origin stories suggested by psychology? Two original elements of human nature are explained in its lore: the story of personhood - that is, what it means to be an individual and have an identity - and, secondly, the story of our physical constitution in the brain. 

Contemporary psychology is a form of mythology insofar as it is an attempt to succor our need to believe in stories that provide a sense of value and signification in the context of secular modernity. The ways in which psychology is used - for example in experiments or self-help literature or personality tests or brain scans - are means of providing rituals to enact the myths of personhood and materialism.

Q. Why does the author refer to contemporary psychology as a form of mythology?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:

Mythology remains important in Western culture. Take, for instance, the role model of the hero, of contemporary revolutionaries, martyrs and dictators. These ideal figures exemplify models of human achievement. Similarly, notions of salvation, progress and ethics are so constitutive of our notions of reality that they’re often communicated through the format of mythology. There’s a surfeit of cultural products that fulfil the function of myth whereby characters and stories give us the means to understand the world we live in. Through superhero comic books, to the obscure immanence of modern art, from visions of paradisiacal vacations, to computer games and the self-mythologising of social media production, we seek a higher ground beyond the banal and the profane. We’ve even replaced the effervescent experience of sacred rites...in our engagement with art, drugs, cinema, rock music and all-night dance parties. Lastly, individuals have developed their own ways to create self-narratives that include mythical transitions in pilgrimages or personal quests to their ancestral lands. Likewise, some seek inner spaces wherein faith and meaning can be transformed into experience.

To prepare for our exploration of contemporary mythology, we can look back at civilisations and consider the function of the stories they told. The story of the flood, for example, recurs in early urban societies, marking a crisis in human-divine relations and man’s experience of gradual self-reliance and separation from nature. Whereas during the Axial Age (800-200 BCE), faith developed in an environment of early trade economies, at which time we observe a concern with individual conscience, morality, compassion and a tendency to look within. According to Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2005), these Axial myths of interiority indicate that people felt they no longer shared the same nature as the gods, and that the supreme reality had become impossibly difficult to access. These myths were a response to the loss of previous notions of social order, cosmology and human good, and represented ways to portray these social transformations in macrocosmic stories, and were reflections of how people tried to make sense of their rapidly changing world.

What constitutes a mythology? It’s an organised canon of beliefs that explains the state of the world. It also delivers an origin story - such as the Hindu Laws of Manu or the Biblical creation story - that creates a setting for how we experience the world. In fact, for Eliade, all myths provided an explanation of the world by virtue of giving an account of where things came from. If all mythologies are origin stories in this sense, what are the origin stories suggested by psychology? Two original elements of human nature are explained in its lore: the story of personhood - that is, what it means to be an individual and have an identity - and, secondly, the story of our physical constitution in the brain. 

Contemporary psychology is a form of mythology insofar as it is an attempt to succor our need to believe in stories that provide a sense of value and signification in the context of secular modernity. The ways in which psychology is used - for example in experiments or self-help literature or personality tests or brain scans - are means of providing rituals to enact the myths of personhood and materialism.

Q. Which of the following statements about human behaviour cannot be inferred from the first paragraph?