The passages given below are followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.
I do not pretend that the development of trust in leadership is a science or something that may be perfected " far from it. And I am not suggesting that the development of genuine humility, and finally trust, in leadership is by any means easy. It is the hardest thing the human creature called man can do. Anyone suggesting that he is, in fact, a person or leader of humility, moves farther from it.
Warren Bennis argues that leaders rarely fail because of technical incompetence. Instead, where leaders predominantly fail is weakness on the softer issues such as people skills, taste, judgment, and above all, character.
The most compelling leaders lead and keep their trust when they start with a proper view of themselves. By embracing this essential humility, leaders will not only influence and lead but will transform the lives of those around them, reproducing leadership in others. This essence is what Professor Lewis would have referred to as 'mereness'.
Applied to leadership, this mereness occurs, first, when leaders develop a core understanding of their humanity; second, when they understand their depraved nature; and third, when leaders finally grasp that the purpose of leadership is not leadership itself. When this mereness is revealed in leaders, they build trust. This, in turn, properly allows them to serve others.
Whether you hold a materialistic view of the universe (that matter and space have always existed and nobody knows why) or the theistic view (that there is something behind the universe that has a mind and a conscious purpose) we are in fact alike. Nothing like stating the obvious, but it must be stated in leadership. It is the foundation.
Even Sigmund Freud, who rejected an atheistic view of the universe in favour of a materialistic or scientific one, still seemed to acknowledge some kind of unexplainable force in the universe. Freud experienced 'strange, secret longings' that he described as Sehnsucht. C.S. Lewis characterized his Sehnsucht as an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.
Whether we are born in poverty or into wealth; whether we are born in Beverly Hills or in Calcutta; whether we are born with disabilities or not; whether we are born white, yellow, brown, or black; we are, in terms of these longings, and our human nature, intrinsically alike.
In terms of pain " regardless of our backgrounds, lifestyles, and worldviews " we all have, like the apostle Paul, a thorn somewhere in our flesh. While some acknowledge those thorns, others bury them deep within their souls not only to conceal them from others but also to pretend that they do not exist. Do not deny for a minute that they are not real. We are creatures called man.
Moreover, there are certain decent moral behaviours to which we all adhere. There are, in fact, laws of decent behaviour that without formal moral or religious instruction ought to naturally govern our behaviour.
Men have differed as regards what people who ought to be unselfish to "whether it was your family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone, wrote Lewis. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired.
Look at the corporate life: one of the common business practices over the last decade has been to manipulate accounting rules in order to maximize the earnings of public companies. Enron's former treasurer Jeffrey McMahon declared that Enron decided to obey only the accounting rules that got them the results they wanted. Inherent in his argument is the insinuation that rules may have been broken, but until he is caught or told otherwise, he will continue to practice.
While other energy companies also practiced such accounting, it didn't make Enron's use of the mark to market, and other creative accounting gimmicks (such as hiding debt in special-purpose entities), any more correct. Some of the blame for the corporate fraud of the 90s must be placed at the feet of regulators who made changes in the method of accounting standards, the culture of Wall Street that demanded aggressive earnings growth, and executives whose compensation targets were tied to the price of their own personal options.
Blame could be spread far and wide, but the fact remains that at some point some leaders (not accounting rule) had to make a conscious decision to inflate earnings. Whether other competitors were doing it or not or whether the accounting standards were loose enough to enable them, most leaders knew such actions were questionable, if not outright wrong.
Excerpted from: 'Trust' by Les T. Csorba.
Q. The primary focus of the passage is on:
The passages given below are followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.
I do not pretend that the development of trust in leadership is a science or something that may be perfected " far from it. And I am not suggesting that the development of genuine humility, and finally trust, in leadership is by any means easy. It is the hardest thing the human creature called man can do. Anyone suggesting that he is, in fact, a person or leader of humility, moves farther from it.
Warren Bennis argues that leaders rarely fail because of technical incompetence. Instead, where leaders predominantly fail is weakness on the softer issues such as people skills, taste, judgment, and above all, character.
The most compelling leaders lead and keep their trust when they start with a proper view of themselves. By embracing this essential humility, leaders will not only influence and lead but will transform the lives of those around them, reproducing leadership in others. This essence is what Professor Lewis would have referred to as 'mereness'.
Applied to leadership, this mereness occurs, first, when leaders develop a core understanding of their humanity; second, when they understand their depraved nature; and third, when leaders finally grasp that the purpose of leadership is not leadership itself. When this mereness is revealed in leaders, they build trust. This, in turn, properly allows them to serve others.
Whether you hold a materialistic view of the universe (that matter and space have always existed and nobody knows why) or the theistic view (that there is something behind the universe that has a mind and a conscious purpose) we are in fact alike. Nothing like stating the obvious, but it must be stated in leadership. It is the foundation.
Even Sigmund Freud, who rejected an atheistic view of the universe in favour of a materialistic or scientific one, still seemed to acknowledge some kind of unexplainable force in the universe. Freud experienced 'strange, secret longings' that he described as Sehnsucht. C.S. Lewis characterized his Sehnsucht as an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.
Whether we are born in poverty or into wealth; whether we are born in Beverly Hills or in Calcutta; whether we are born with disabilities or not; whether we are born white, yellow, brown, or black; we are, in terms of these longings, and our human nature, intrinsically alike.
In terms of pain " regardless of our backgrounds, lifestyles, and worldviews " we all have, like the apostle Paul, a thorn somewhere in our flesh. While some acknowledge those thorns, others bury them deep within their souls not only to conceal them from others but also to pretend that they do not exist. Do not deny for a minute that they are not real. We are creatures called man.
Moreover, there are certain decent moral behaviours to which we all adhere. There are, in fact, laws of decent behaviour that without formal moral or religious instruction ought to naturally govern our behaviour.
Men have differed as regards what people who ought to be unselfish to "whether it was your family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone, wrote Lewis. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired.
Look at the corporate life: one of the common business practices over the last decade has been to manipulate accounting rules in order to maximize the earnings of public companies. Enron's former treasurer Jeffrey McMahon declared that Enron decided to obey only the accounting rules that got them the results they wanted. Inherent in his argument is the insinuation that rules may have been broken, but until he is caught or told otherwise, he will continue to practice.
While other energy companies also practiced such accounting, it didn't make Enron's use of the mark to market, and other creative accounting gimmicks (such as hiding debt in special-purpose entities), any more correct. Some of the blame for the corporate fraud of the 90s must be placed at the feet of regulators who made changes in the method of accounting standards, the culture of Wall Street that demanded aggressive earnings growth, and executives whose compensation targets were tied to the price of their own personal options.
Blame could be spread far and wide, but the fact remains that at some point some leaders (not accounting rule) had to make a conscious decision to inflate earnings. Whether other competitors were doing it or not or whether the accounting standards were loose enough to enable them, most leaders knew such actions were questionable, if not outright wrong.
Excerpted from: 'Trust' by Les T. Csorba.
Q. By giving example of Enron's Jeffrey McMahon, the author wants to highlight the fact that:
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The passages given below are followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.
I do not pretend that the development of trust in leadership is a science or something that may be perfected " far from it. And I am not suggesting that the development of genuine humility, and finally trust, in leadership is by any means easy. It is the hardest thing the human creature called man can do. Anyone suggesting that he is, in fact, a person or leader of humility, moves farther from it.
Warren Bennis argues that leaders rarely fail because of technical incompetence. Instead, where leaders predominantly fail is weakness on the softer issues such as people skills, taste, judgment, and above all, character.
The most compelling leaders lead and keep their trust when they start with a proper view of themselves. By embracing this essential humility, leaders will not only influence and lead but will transform the lives of those around them, reproducing leadership in others. This essence is what Professor Lewis would have referred to as 'mereness'.
Applied to leadership, this mereness occurs, first, when leaders develop a core understanding of their humanity; second, when they understand their depraved nature; and third, when leaders finally grasp that the purpose of leadership is not leadership itself. When this muteness is revealed in leaders, they build trust. This, in turn, properly allows them to serve others.
Whether you hold a materialistic view of the universe (that matter and space have always existed and nobody knows why) or the theistic view (that there is something behind the universe that has a mind and a conscious purpose) we are in fact alike. Nothing like stating the obvious, but it must be stated in leadership. It is the foundation.
Even Sigmund Freud, who rejected an atheistic view of the universe in favour of a materialistic or scientific one, still seemed to acknowledge some kind of unexplainable force in the universe. Freud experienced 'strange, secret longings' that he described as Sehnsucht. C.S. Lewis characterized his Sehnsucht as an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.
Whether we are born in poverty or into wealth; whether we are born in Beverly Hills or in Calcutta; whether we are born with disabilities or not; whether we are born white, yellow, brown, or black; we are, in terms of these longings, and our human nature, intrinsically alike.
In terms of pain " regardless of our backgrounds, lifestyles, and worldviews " we all have, like the apostle Paul, a thorn somewhere in our flesh. While some acknowledge those thorns, others bury them deep within their souls not only to conceal them from others but also to pretend that they do not exist. Do not deny for a minute that they are not real. We are creatures called man.
Moreover, there are certain decent moral behaviours to which we all adhere. There are, in fact, laws of decent behaviour that without formal moral or religious instruction ought to naturally govern our behaviour.
Men have differed as regards what people who ought to be unselfish to "whether it was your family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone, wrote Lewis. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired.
Look at the corporate life: one of the common business practices over the last decade has been to manipulate accounting rules in order to maximize the earnings of public companies. Enron's former treasurer Jeffrey McMahon declared that Enron decided to obey only the accounting rules that got them the results they wanted. Inherent in his argument is the insinuation that rules may have been broken, but until he is caught or told otherwise, he will continue to practice.
While other energy companies also practiced such accounting, it didn't make Enron's use of the mark to market, and other creative accounting gimmicks (such as hiding debt in special-purpose entities), any more correct. Some of the blame for the corporate fraud of the 90s must be placed at the feet of regulators who made changes in the method of accounting standards, the culture of Wall Street that demanded aggressive earnings growth, and executives whose compensation targets were tied to the price of their own personal options.
Blame could be spread far and wide, but the fact remains that at some point some leaders (not accounting rule) had to make a conscious decision to inflate earnings. Whether other competitors were doing it or not or whether the accounting standards were loose enough to enable them, most leaders knew such actions were questionable, if not outright wrong.
Excerpted from: 'Trust' by Les T. Csorba.
Q. According the passage we can infer all of the following, except:
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced. Space may sound a vague, poetic metaphor until we realize that it describes experiences of everyday life. We know what it means to be in a green and open field; we know what it means to be on a crowded rush-hour bus. These experiences of physical space have parallels in our relations with others. On our jobs we know what it is to be pressed and crowded, our working space diminished by the urgency of deadlines and competitiveness of colleagues. But then there are times when deadlines disappear and colleagues cooperate when everyone has a space to move, invent and produce with energy and enthusiasm. With family and friends, we know how it feels to have unreasonable demands placed upon us, to be boxed in by the expectations of those nearest to us. But then there are times when we feel accepted for who we are (or forgiven for who we are not), times when a spouse or a child or a friend gives us space, both to be and to become.
Similar experiences of crowding and space are found in education. To sit in a class where the teacher stuffs our minds with information, organizes it with finality, insists on having the answers while being utterly uninterested in our views, and focus us into a grim competition for grades - to sit in such a class is to experience a lack of space for learning. But to study with a teacher, who not only speaks but also listens, who not only answers but asks questions and welcomes our insights, who provides information and theories that do not close doors but open new ones, who encourages students to help each other learn - to study with such a teacher is to know the power of a learning space.
A learning space has three essential dimensions: openness, boundaries, and an air of hospitality. To create an open learning space is to remove the impediments to learning that we find around and within us; we often create them ourselves to evade the challenge of truth and transformation. One source of such impediments is our fear of appearing ignorant to others or to ourselves. The oneness of a space is created by the firmness of its boundaries. A learning space cannot extend indefinitely; if it did, it would not be a structure for learning but an invitation for confusion and chaos. When space boundaries are violated, the quality of space suffers. The teacher who wants to create an open learning space must define and defend its boundaries with care. Because the pursuit of truth can be painful and discomforting, the learning space must be hospitable. Hospitable means receiving each other, our struggles, our newborn ideas with openness and care. It means creating an ethos in which the community of truth can form and the pain of its transformation be borne. A learning space needs to be hospitable not to make learning painless, but to make painful things possible, things without which no learning can occur, things like exposing ignorance, testing tentative hypotheses, challenging false or partial information, and mutual criticism of thought.
The task of creating learning space with qualities of openness, boundaries, and hospitality can be approached at several levels. The most basic level is the physical arrangement of the classroom, Consider the traditional classroom setting with rows of chairs facing the lectern where the learning space is confined to the narrow alley of attention between each student and teacher. In this space, there is no community of truth, the hospitality of room for students to relate to the thoughts of each other. Contrast it with the chairs placed in a circular arrangement creating an open space within which learners can interconnect. At another level, the teacher can create conceptual space-space with words in two ways. One is through assigned reading; the other is through lecturing, assigned reading, not in the form of speed reading several hundred pages but contemplative reading which opens, not fills, our learning space. A teacher can also create a learning space by means of lectures. By providing critical information and a framework of interpretation, a lecturer can lay down boundaries within which learning occurs.
We also create learning space through the kind of speech we utter and the silence from which true speech emanates. Speech is a precious gift and a vital tool, but too often our speaking is an evasion of truth, a way of buttressing our self-serving reconstructions of reality. Silence must therefore be an integral part of the learning space. In silence, more than in arguments, our mind-made world falls away and we are open to the truth that seeks us. Words often divide us, but silence can unite. Finally, teachers must also create emotional space in the classroom, a space that allows feelings to arise and be dealt with because submerged feelings can undermine learning. In an emotionally honest learning space, one created by a teacher who does not fear dealing with feelings, the community of truth can flourish between us and we can flourish in it.
Q. According to the author, silence must be an integral part of learning space because:
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced. Space may sound a vague, poetic metaphor until we realize that it describes experiences of everyday life. We know what it means to be in a green and open field; we know what it means to be on a crowded rush-hour bus. These experiences of physical space have parallels in our relations with others. On our jobs we know what it is to be pressed and crowded, our working space diminished by the urgency of deadlines and competitiveness of colleagues. But then there are times when deadlines disappear and colleagues cooperate when everyone has a space to move, invent and produce with energy and enthusiasm. With family and friends, we know how it feels to have unreasonable demands placed upon us, to be boxed in by the expectations of those nearest to us. But then there are times when we feel accepted for who we are (or forgiven for who we are not), times when a spouse or a child or a friend gives us space, both to be and to become.
Similar experiences of crowding and space are found in education. To sit in a class where the teacher stuffs our minds with information, organizes it with finality, insists on having the answers while being utterly uninterested in our views, and focus us into a grim competition for grades - to sit in such a class is to experience a lack of space for learning. But to study with a teacher, who not only speaks but also listens, who not only answers but asks questions and welcomes our insights, who provides information and theories that do not close doors but open new ones, who encourages students to help each other learn - to study with such a teacher is to know the power of a learning space.
A learning space has three essential dimensions: openness, boundaries, and an air of hospitality. To create an open learning space is to remove the impediments to learning that we find around and within us; we often create them ourselves to evade the challenge of truth and transformation. One source of such impediments is our fear of appearing ignorant to others or to ourselves. The oneness of a space is created by the firmness of its boundaries. A learning space cannot extend indefinitely; if it did, it would not be a structure for learning but an invitation for confusion and chaos. When space boundaries are violated, the quality of space suffers. The teacher who wants to create an open learning space must define and defend its boundaries with care. Because the pursuit of truth can be painful and discomforting, the learning space must be hospitable. Hospitable means receiving each other, our struggles, our newborn ideas with openness and care. It means creating an ethos in which the community of truth can form and the pain of its transformation be borne. A learning space needs to be hospitable not to make learning painless, but to make painful things possible, things without which no learning can occur, things like exposing ignorance, testing tentative hypotheses, challenging false or partial information, and mutual criticism of thought.
The task of creating learning space with qualities of openness, boundaries, and hospitality can be approached at several levels. The most basic level is the physical arrangement of the classroom, Consider the traditional classroom setting with rows of chairs facing the lectern where the learning space is confined to the narrow alley of attention between each student and teacher. In this space, there is no community of truth, hospitality, or room for students to relate to the thoughts of each other. Contrast it with the chairs placed in a circular arrangement creating an open space within which learners can interconnect. At another level, the teacher can create conceptual space-space with words in two ways. One is through assigned reading; the other is through lecturing, assigned reading, not in the form of speed reading several hundred pages but contemplative reading which opens, not fills, our learning space. A teacher can also create a learning space by means of lectures. By providing critical information and a framework of interpretation, a lecturer can lay down boundaries within which learning occurs.
We also create learning space through the kind of speech we utter and the silence from which true speech emanates. Speech is a precious gift and a vital tool, but too often our speaking is an evasion of truth, a way of buttressing our self-serving reconstructions of reality. Silence must therefore be an integral part of the learning space. In silence, more than in arguments, our mind-made world falls away and we are open to the truth that seeks us. Words often divide us, but silence can unite. Finally, teachers must also create emotional space in the classroom, a space that allows feelings to arise and be dealt with because submerged feelings can undermine learning. In an emotionally honest learning space, one created by a teacher who does not fear dealing with feelings, the community of truth can flourish between us and we can flourish in it.
Q. Another way of describing the author’s notion of learning space can be summarized in the following manner:
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced. Space may sound a vague, poetic metaphor until we realize that it describes experiences of everyday life. We know what it means to be in a green and open field; we know what it means to be on a crowded rush-hour bus. These experiences of physical space have parallels in our relations with others. On our jobs we know what it is to be pressed and crowded, our working space diminished by the urgency of deadlines and competitiveness of colleagues. But then there are times when deadlines disappear and colleagues cooperate when everyone has a space to move, invent and produce with energy and enthusiasm. With family and friends, we know how it feels to have unreasonable demands placed upon us, to be boxed in by the expectations of those nearest to us. But then there are times when we feel accepted for who we are (or forgiven for who we are not), times when a spouse or a child or a friend gives us space, both to be and to become.
Similar experiences of crowding and space are found in education. To sit in a class where the teacher stuffs our minds with information, organizes it with finality, insists on having the answers while being utterly uninterested in our views, and focus us into a grim competition for grades - to sit in such a class is to experience a lack of space for learning. But to study with a teacher, who not only speaks but also listens, who not only answers but asks questions and welcomes our insights, who provides information and theories that do not close doors but open new ones, who encourages students to help each other learn - to study with such a teacher is to know the power of a learning space.
A learning space has three essential dimensions: openness, boundaries, and an air of hospitality. To create an open learning space is to remove the impediments to learning that we find around and within us; we often create them ourselves to evade the challenge of truth and transformation. One source of such impediments is our fear of appearing ignorant to others or to ourselves. The oneness of a space is created by the firmness of its boundaries. A learning space cannot extend indefinitely; if it did, it would not be a structure for learning but an invitation for confusion and chaos. When space boundaries are violated, the quality of space suffers. The teacher who wants to create an open learning space must define and defend its boundaries with care. Because the pursuit of truth can be painful and discomforting, the learning space must be hospitable. Hospitable means receiving each other, our struggles, our newborn ideas with openness and care. It means creating an ethos in which the community of truth can form and the pain of its transformation be borne. A learning space needs to be hospitable not to make learning painless, but to make painful things possible, things without which no learning can occur, things like exposing ignorance, testing tentative hypotheses, challenging false or partial information, and mutual criticism of thought.
The task of creating learning space with qualities of openness, boundaries, and hospitality can be approached at several levels. The most basic level is the physical arrangement of the classroom, Consider the traditional classroom setting with rows of chairs facing the lectern where the learning space is confined to the narrow alley of attention between each student and teacher. In this space, there is no community of truth, the hospitality of room for students to relate to the thoughts of each other. Contrast it with the chairs placed in a circular arrangement creating an open space within which learners can interconnect. At another level, the teacher can create conceptual space-space with words in two ways. One is through assigned reading; the other is through lecturing, assigned reading, not in the form of speed reading several hundred pages but contemplative reading which opens, not fills, our learning space. A teacher can also create a learning space by means of lectures. By providing critical information and a framework of interpretation, a lecturer can lay down boundaries within which learning occurs.
We also create learning space through the kind of speech we utter and the silence from which true speech emanates. Speech is a precious gift and a vital tool, but too often our speaking is an evasion of truth, a way of buttressing our self-serving reconstructions of reality. Silence must therefore be an integral part of the learning space. In silence, more than in arguments, our mind-made world falls away and we are open to the truth that seeks us. Words often divide us, but silence can unite. Finally, teachers must also create emotional space in the classroom, a space that allows feelings to arise and be dealt with because submerged feelings can undermine learning. In an emotionally honest learning space, one created by a teacher who does not fear dealing with feelings, the community of truth can flourish between us and we can flourish in it.
Q. According to the author, an effective teacher does not allow:
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced. Space may sound a vague, poetic metaphor until we realize that it describes experiences of everyday life. We know what it means to be in a green and open field; we know what it means to be on a crowded rush hour bus. These experiences of physical space have parallels in our relations with others. On our jobs we know what it is to be pressed and crowded, our working space diminished by the urgency of deadlines and competitiveness of colleagues. But then there are times when deadlines disappear and colleagues cooperate, when everyone has a space to move, invent and produce with energy and enthusiasm. With family and friends, we know how it feels to have unreasonable demands placed upon us, to be boxed in by the expectations of those nearest to us. But then there are times when we feel accepted for who we are (or forgiven for who we are not), times when a spouse or a child or a friend gives us the space, both to be and to become.
Similar experiences of crowding and space are found in education. To sit in a class where the teacher stuffs our minds with information, organizes it with finality, insists on having the answers while being utterly uninterested in our views, and focus us into a grim competition for grades - to sit in such a class is to experience a lack of space for learning. But to study with a teacher, who not only speaks but also listens, who not only answers but asks questions and welcomes our insights, who provides information and theories that do not close doors but open new ones, who encourages students to help each other learn - to study with such a teacher is to know the power of a learning space.
A learning space has three essential dimensions: openness, boundaries and an air of hospitality. To create open learning space is to remove the impediments to learning that we find around and within us; we often create them ourselves to evade the challenge of truth and transformation. One source of such impediments is our fear of appearing ignorant to others or to ourselves. The oneness of a space is created by the firmness of its boundaries. A learning space cannot extend indefinitely; if it did, it would not be a structure for learning but an invitation for confusion and chaos. When space boundaries are violated, the quality of space suffers. The teacher who wants to create an open learning space must define and defend its boundaries with care. Because the pursuit of truth can be painful and discomforting, the learning space must be hospitable.Hospitable means receiving each other, our struggles, our new-born ideas with openness and care. It means creating an ethos in which the community of truth can form and the pain of its transformation be borne. A learning space needs to be hospitable not to make learning painless, but to make painful things possible, things without which no learning can occur, things like exposing ignorance, testing tentative hypotheses, challenging false or partial information, and mutual criticism of thought.
The task of creating learning space with qualities of openness, boundaries and hospitality can be approached at several levels. The most basic level is the physical arrangement of the classroom, Consider the traditional classroom setting with row of chairs facing the lectern where learning space is confined to the narrow alley of attention between each student and teacher. In this space, there is no community of truth, hospitality of room for students to relate to the thoughts of each other. Contrast it with the chairs placed in a circular arrangement creating an open space within which learners can interconnect. At another level, the teacher can create conceptual space-space with words in two ways. One is through assigned reading; the other is through lecturing, assigned reading, not in the form of speed reading several hundred pages but contemplative reading which opens, not fills, our learning space. A teacher can also create a learning space by means of lectures. By providing critical information and a framework of interpretation, a lecturer can lay down boundaries within which learning occurs.
We also create learning space through the kind of speech we utter and the silence from which true speech emanates. Speech is a precious gift and a vital tool, but too often our speaking is an evasion of truth, a way of buttressing our self-serving reconstructions of reality. Silence must therefore be an integral part of learning space. In silence, more than in arguments, our mind made world falls away and we are open to the truth that seeks us. Words often divide us, but silence can unite. Finally teachers must also create emotional space in the class-room, space that allows feelings to arise and be dealt with because submerged feelings can undermine learning. In an emotionally honest learning space, one created by a teacher who does not fear dealing with feelings, the community of truth can flourish between us and we can flourish in it.
Q. An emotionally honest learning space can only be created by
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced. Space may sound a vague, poetic metaphor until we realize that it describes experiences of everyday life. We know what it means to be in a green and open field; we know what it means to be on a crowded rush hour bus. These experiences of physical space have parallels in our relations with others. On our jobs we know what it is to be pressed and crowded, our working space diminished by the urgency of deadlines and competitiveness of colleagues. But then there are times when deadlines disappear and colleagues cooperate, when everyone has a space to move, invent and produce with energy and enthusiasm. With family and friends, we know how it feels to have unreasonable demands placed upon us, to be boxed in by the expectations of those nearest to us. But then there are times when we feel accepted for who we are (or forgiven for who we are not), times when a spouse or a child or a friend gives us the space, both to be and to become.
Similar experiences of crowding and space are found in education. To sit in a class where the teacher stuffs our minds with information, organizes it with finality, insists on having the answers while being utterly uninterested in our views, and focus us into a grim competition for grades - to sit in such a class is to experience a lack of space for learning. But to study with a teacher, who not only speaks but also listens, who not only answers but asks questions and welcomes our insights, who provides information and theories that do not close doors but open new ones, who encourages students to help each other learn - to study with such a teacher is to know the power of a learning space.
A learning space has three essential dimensions: openness, boundaries and an air of hospitality. To create open learning space is to remove the impediments to learning that we find around and within us; we often create them ourselves to evade the challenge of truth and transformation. One source of such impediments is our fear of appearing ignorant to others or to ourselves. The oneness of a space is created by the firmness of its boundaries. A learning space cannot extend indefinitely; if it did, it would not be a structure for learning but an invitation for confusion and chaos. When space boundaries are violated, the quality of space suffers. The teacher who wants to create an open learning space must define and defend its boundaries with care. Because the pursuit of truth can be painful and discomforting, the learning space must be hospitable.Hospitable means receiving each other, our struggles, our new-born ideas with openness and care. It means creating an ethos in which the community of truth can form and the pain of its transformation be borne. A learning space needs to be hospitable not to make learning painless, but to make painful things possible, things without which no learning can occur, things like exposing ignorance, testing tentative hypotheses, challenging false or partial information, and mutual criticism of thought.
The task of creating learning space with qualities of openness, boundaries and hospitality can be approached at several levels. The most basic level is the physical arrangement of the classroom, Consider the traditional classroom setting with row of chairs facing the lectern where learning space is confined to the narrow alley of attention between each student and teacher. In this space, there is no community of truth, hospitality of room for students to relate to the thoughts of each other. Contrast it with the chairs placed in a circular arrangement creating an open space within which learners can interconnect. At another level, the teacher can create conceptual space-space with words in two ways. One is through assigned reading; the other is through lecturing, assigned reading, not in the form of speed reading several hundred pages but contemplative reading which opens, not fills, our learning space. A teacher can also create a learning space by means of lectures. By providing critical information and a framework of interpretation, a lecturer can lay down boundaries within which learning occurs.
We also create learning space through the kind of speech we utter and the silence from which true speech emanates. Speech is a precious gift and a vital tool, but too often our speaking is an evasion of truth, a way of buttressing our self-serving reconstructions of reality. Silence must therefore be an integral part of learning space. In silence, more than in arguments, our mind made world falls away and we are open to the truth that seeks us. Words often divide us, but silence can unite. Finally teachers must also create emotional space in the class-room, space that allows feelings to arise and be dealt with because submerged feelings can undermine learning. In an emotionally honest learning space, one created by a teacher who does not fear dealing with feelings, the community of truth can flourish between us and we can flourish in it.
Q. Conceptual space with words can be created by
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control. To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things like empires and their wars to more familiar little things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important to women.
There was a time when pinmakers would buy the material; shape it; make the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to the market, and sell it and the making required skill in several operations. They not only knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could do it all by themselves. But they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for the farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman's dress allowance was calling pin money.
By the end of the 18th century Adam Smith boasted that it took 18 men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pin-makers, you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilisation when its effect had so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it. The men, it is said, could turn out nearly 5000 pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be richer because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without intelligence and being fed by the spare food of the capitalist just as an engine is fed with coals and oil. That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well as a poet, complained that 'wealth accumulates, and men decay'.
Nowadays Adam Smith's 18 men are as extinct as the diplodocus. The 18 flesh-and-blood men have been replaced by machines of steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them into pink papers is done by machinery. The result is that with the exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody knows how to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent, skilful and accomplished as the old pin-maker; and the only compensation we have for this deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal, even if it’s a pin.
Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and degrade our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the Distribution of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old free for higher work than pin-making or the like. But in the meantime the fact remains that the workers are now not able to make anything themselves even in little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their day's work until it has all been arranged for them by their employer's who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply pay other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker's directions.
The same is true for clothes. Earlier the whole work of making clothes, from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the men and women of the household, especially the women; so that to this day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left of all this but the sheep shearing; and even that, like the milking of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a sheep today and ask her to produce a woolen dress for you; and not only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are likely to find that she is not even aware of any connection between sheep and clothes. When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at the shop, she knows that there is a difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet and other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or how they came to be in the shop ready for her to buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own clothes.
Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and encyclopedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the books are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their information from other books, what they tell us is twenty to fifty years out of date knowledge and almost impractical today. And of course most of us are too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about it; what we need is cinema to take our minds off it and feel our imagination.
It is a funny place, this word of capitalism, with its astonishing spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is made that they find people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive, but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or less dangerous lunatics in the real world.
Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realise that I had better stop writing plays for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.
Excerpted from 'An Intelligent Women’s Guide to Capitalism and Sovietism' by George Bernard Shaw
Q. Which of the following is not against the modern capitalistic system of mass production?
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control. To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things like empires and their wars to more familiar little things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important to women.
There was a time when pinmakers would buy the material; shape it; make the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to the market, and sell it and the making required skill in several operations. They not only knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could do it all by themselves. But they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for the farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman's dress allowance was calling pin money.
By the end of the 18th century Adam Smith boasted that it took 18 men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pin-makers, you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilisation when its effect had so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it. The men, it is said, could turn out nearly 5000 pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be richer because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without intelligence and being fed by the spare food of the capitalist just as an engine is fed with coals and oil. That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well as a poet, complained that 'wealth accumulates, and men decay'.
Nowadays Adam Smith's 18 men are as extinct as the diplodocus. The 18 flesh-and-blood men have been replaced by machines of steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them into pink papers is done by machinery. The result is that with the exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody knows how to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent, skilful and accomplished as the old pin-maker; and the only compensation we have for this deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal, even if it’s a pin.
Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and degrade our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the Distribution of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old free for higher work than pin-making or the like. But in the meantime the fact remains that the workers are now not able to make anything themselves even in little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their day's work until it has all been arranged for them by their employer's who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply pay other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker's directions.
The same is true for clothes. Earlier the whole work of making clothes, from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the men and women of the household, especially the women; so that to this day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left of all this but the sheep shearing; and even that, like the milking of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a sheep today and ask her to produce a woolen dress for you; and not only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are likely to find that she is not even aware of any connection between sheep and clothes. When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at the shop, she knows that there is a difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet and other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or how they came to be in the shop ready for her to buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own clothes.
Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and encyclopedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the books are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their information from other books, what they tell us is twenty to fifty years out of date knowledge and almost impractical today. And of course most of us are too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about it; what we need is cinema to take our minds off it and feel our imagination.
It is a funny place, this word of capitalism, with its astonishing spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is made that they find people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive, but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or less dangerous lunatics in the real world.
Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realise that I had better stop writing plays for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.
Excerpted from 'An Intelligent Women’s Guide to Capitalism and Sovietism' by George Bernard Shaw
Q. Goldsmith's dictum, "wealth accumulates, and men decay," in the context of the passage, probably means
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control. To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things like empires and their wars to more familiar little things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important to women.
There was a time when pinmakers would buy the material; shape it; make the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to the market, and sell it and the making required skill in several operations. They not only knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could do it all by themselves. But they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for the farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman's dress allowance was calling pin money.
By the end of the 18th century Adam Smith boasted that it took 18 men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pin-makers, you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilisation when its effect had so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it. The men, it is said, could turn out nearly 5000 pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be richer because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without intelligence and being fed by the spare food of the capitalist just as an engine is fed with coals and oil. That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well as a poet, complained that 'wealth accumulates, and men decay'.
Nowadays Adam Smith's 18 men are as extinct as the diplodocus. The 18 flesh-and-blood men have been replaced by machines of steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them into pink papers is done by machinery. The result is that with the exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody knows how to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent, skilful and accomplished as the old pin-maker; and the only compensation we have for this deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal, even if it’s a pin.
Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and degrade our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the Distribution of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old free for higher work than pin-making or the like. But in the meantime the fact remains that the workers are now not able to make anything themselves even in little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their day's work until it has all been arranged for them by their employer's who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply pay other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker's directions.
The same is true for clothes. Earlier the whole work of making clothes, from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the men and women of the household, especially the women; so that to this day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left of all this but the sheep shearing; and even that, like the milking of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a sheep today and ask her to produce a woolen dress for you; and not only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are likely to find that she is not even aware of any connection between sheep and clothes. When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at the shop, she knows that there is a difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet and other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or how they came to be in the shop ready for her to buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own clothes.
Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and encyclopedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the books are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their information from other books, what they tell us is twenty to fifty years out of date knowledge and almost impractical today. And of course most of us are too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about it; what we need is cinema to take our minds off it and feel our imagination.
It is a funny place, this word of capitalism, with its astonishing spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is made that they find people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive, but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or less dangerous lunatics in the real world.
Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realise that I had better stop writing plays for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.
Excerpted from 'An Intelligent Women’s Guide to Capitalism and Sovietism' by George Bernard Shaw
Q. When the author says that a woman now is likely to know about any connection between sheep and clothes, he is probably being
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
What is more likely to be the cause of death in the U.S.: being killed by a shark or by pieces falling from an airplane? Most people will answer that shark attacks are more probable. Shark attacks receive far more publicity that deaths from falling plane parts, and they are certainly far more graphic to imagine, especially if you've seen JAWS. Yet dying from falling airplane parts is thirty times more likely than being killed by a shark attack.
This is an example of availability, a heuristic which causes major investor errors. As with most heuristic, or mental shortcuts, availability usually works quite well. By relying on availability to estimate the frequency or probability of an event, decision-makers are able to simplify what might otherwise be very difficult judgments.
This judgmental shortcut is accurate most of the time because we normally recall events more easily that have occurred frequently. Unfortunately our recall is influenced by other factors besides frequency, such as how recently the events have occurred, or how salient or emotionally charged they are. The chances of being mauled by a grizzly bear at a national park are only one or two per million visitors and the death rate is lower. Casualties from shark attacks are probably an even smaller percentage of swimmers in coastal waters. But because of the emotionally charged nature of the dangers, we think such attacks happen much oftener that they really do.
It is the occurrence of disaster, rather than their probabilities of happening, that has an important impact on our buying of casualty insurance. The purchase of earthquake and airline insurance goes up sharply after a calamity, as does flood insurance. As a result, the availability rule of thumb breaks down, leading to systematic biases. The bottom line is that availability, like most heuristics, causes us to frequently misread probabilities, and get into investment difficulties as a result.
Recently, saliency, and emotionally charged events often dominate decision-making in the stock market. Statements by experts, crowd participation, and recent experience strongly incline the investor to follow the prevailing trend. In the 1990's small-capitalization growth stocks rocketed ahead of other equities. By early July 1996 this was almost the only game in town. The experience is repeated and salient to the investor, while the disastrous aftermath of the earlier speculation in aggressive growth issues in the sixties, seventies, and eighties has receded far back into memory.
The tendency of recent and salient events to move people away from the base-rate or long-term probabilities cannot be exaggerated. Time and again, we toss aside our long-term valuation guidelines because of the spectacular performance of seemingly sure winners. As psychologists have pointed out, this bias is tenacious. A moment's reflection shows that this judgmental bias reinforces the others. Recent and salient events, whether positive or negative, strongly influence judgments of the future. People, it appears, become prisoners of such experience and view the future as an extension of the immediate past. The more memorable the circumstances, the more they are expected to persist, no matter how out-of-line with prior norms.
Excerpted from “Heuristics in Investor Decision Making” by David Dreman.
Q. All of the following are Availability Heuristic examples, except
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
What is more likely to be the cause of death in the U.S.: being killed by a shark or by pieces falling from an airplane? Most people will answer that shark attacks are more probable. Shark attacks receive far more publicity that deaths from falling plane parts, and they are certainly far more graphic to imagine, especially if you've seen JAWS. Yet dying from falling airplane parts is thirty times more likely than being killed by a shark attack.
This is an example of availability, a heuristic which causes major investor errors. As with most heuristic, or mental shortcuts, availability usually works quite well. By relying on availability to estimate the frequency or probability of an event, decision-makers are able to simplify what might otherwise be very difficult judgments.
This judgmental shortcut is accurate most of the time because we normally recall events more easily that have occurred frequently. Unfortunately our recall is influenced by other factors besides frequency, such as how recently the events have occurred, or how salient or emotionally charged they are. The chances of being mauled by a grizzly bear at a national park are only one or two per million visitors and the death rate is lower. Casualties from shark attacks are probably an even smaller percentage of swimmers in coastal waters. But because of the emotionally charged nature of the dangers, we think such attacks happen much oftener that they really do.
It is the occurrence of disaster, rather than their probabilities of happening, that has an important impact on our buying of casualty insurance. The purchase of earthquake and airline insurance goes up sharply after a calamity, as does flood insurance. As a result, the availability rule of thumb breaks down, leading to systematic biases. The bottom line is that availability, like most heuristics, causes us to frequently misread probabilities, and get into investment difficulties as a result.
Recently, saliency, and emotionally charged events often dominate decision-making in the stock market. Statements by experts, crowd participation, and recent experience strongly incline the investor to follow the prevailing trend. In the 1990's small-capitalization growth stocks rocketed ahead of other equities. By early July 1996 this was almost the only game in town. The experience is repeated and salient to the investor, while the disastrous aftermath of the earlier speculation in aggressive growth issues in the sixties, seventies, and eighties has receded far back into memory.
The tendency of recent and salient events to move people away from the base-rate or long-term probabilities cannot be exaggerated. Time and again, we toss aside our long-term valuation guidelines because of the spectacular performance of seemingly sure winners. As psychologists have pointed out, this bias is tenacious. A moment's reflection shows that this judgmental bias reinforces the others. Recent and salient events, whether positive or negative, strongly influence judgments of the future. People, it appears, become prisoners of such experience and view the future as an extension of the immediate past. The more memorable the circumstances, the more they are expected to persist, no matter how out-of-line with prior norms.
Excerpted from “Heuristics in Investor Decision Making” by David Dreman.
Q. According to the passage which of the following best describes the “Availability” heuristic?
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
What is more likely to be the cause of death in the U.S.: being killed by a shark or by pieces falling from an airplane? Most people will answer that shark attacks are more probable. Shark attacks receive far more publicity that deaths from falling plane parts, and they are certainly far more graphic to imagine, especially if you've seen JAWS. Yet dying from falling airplane parts is thirty times more likely than being killed by a shark attack.
This is an example of availability, a heuristic which causes major investor errors. As with most heuristic, or mental shortcuts, availability usually works quite well. By relying on availability to estimate the frequency or probability of an event, decision-makers are able to simplify what might otherwise be very difficult judgments.
This judgmental shortcut is accurate most of the time because we normally recall events more easily that have occurred frequently. Unfortunately our recall is influenced by other factors besides frequency, such as how recently the events have occurred, or how salient or emotionally charged they are. The chances of being mauled by a grizzly bear at a national park are only one or two per million visitors and the death rate is lower. Casualties from shark attacks are probably an even smaller percentage of swimmers in coastal waters. But because of the emotionally charged nature of the dangers, we think such attacks happen much oftener that they really do.
It is the occurrence of disaster, rather than their probabilities of happening, that has an important impact on our buying of casualty insurance. The purchase of earthquake and airline insurance goes up sharply after a calamity, as does flood insurance. As a result, the availability rule of thumb breaks down, leading to systematic biases. The bottom line is that availability, like most heuristics, causes us to frequently misread probabilities, and get into investment difficulties as a result.
Recently, saliency, and emotionally charged events often dominate decision-making in the stock market. Statements by experts, crowd participation, and recent experience strongly incline the investor to follow the prevailing trend. In the 1990's small-capitalization growth stocks rocketed ahead of other equities. By early July 1996 this was almost the only game in town. The experience is repeated and salient to the investor, while the disastrous aftermath of the earlier speculation in aggressive growth issues in the sixties, seventies, and eighties has receded far back into memory.
The tendency of recent and salient events to move people away from the base-rate or long-term probabilities cannot be exaggerated. Time and again, we toss aside our long-term valuation guidelines because of the spectacular performance of seemingly sure winners. As psychologists have pointed out, this bias is tenacious. A moment's reflection shows that this judgmental bias reinforces the others. Recent and salient events, whether positive or negative, strongly influence judgments of the future. People, it appears, become prisoners of such experience and view the future as an extension of the immediate past. The more memorable the circumstances, the more they are expected to persist, no matter how out-of-line with prior norms.
Excerpted from “Heuristics in Investor Decision Making” by David Dreman.
Q. According to the passage which of the following is /are true?
I. People tend to use others’ experiences to predict future events.
II. People recall good or bad events out of proportion to their actual frequency.
III. Immediacy and Saliency are more important than frequency in judging the probability of occurrence of an event.
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
Back in the 19th century, the great American psychologist William James proposed that our facial expressions and other bodily changes are not the consequence of our emotional feelings, but the cause. Something positive happens, you smile, and this — that is, the act of smiling rather than the event itself — causes you to feel joy. Modern science has partially backed this up – there’s evidence that smiling can lift your mood, and in one study, women who had botox treatment, stiffening their facial muscles, show less emotional activity in their brains.
There’s also evidence that our facial expressions change the way we perceive the world. In the 1980s, for example, researchers showed that people found cartoons funnier when they bit a pen in a way that exercised the facial muscles that are involved in smiling (and found the cartoons less funny when they pouted). More recently, psychologists at the University of Sussex in England reported that when we smile, we see other people’s frowns as less severe, and that when we frown we see their smiling faces as less happy.
Now, in a new paper in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, a research team based in London and Madrid has further explored the possibility that when we smile it actually changes the way our brains process other people’s emotions. To do this, they used a technique called EEG (electroencephalography) to record the brainwaves of 25 participants as they looked at photographs of faces that were either smiling or showing a neutral expression.
Specifically, the researchers, led by Dr. Tina Forster at the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit at City University London, focused on two spikes of electrical activity in the brain that typically occur between 150 and 170 milliseconds after looking at a face, known as the VPP and N170, respectively. These particular spikes are unique to the processing of faces, and are more pronounced when the faces in question have emotional expressions, as compared to neutral ones.
When the participants adopted a neutral facial expression themselves, Sel’s team found that these signatures were enhanced after looking at happy faces compared with neutral faces – just as we’d expect. But what’s especially intriguing is that when the participants smiled, their neural activity was enhanced just the same whether they looked at neutral faces or smiley faces. In other words, when the participant smiled, their brain processed, or partially processed, a neutral face as if it were smiling.
The researchers say their results provide “novel evidence for a fundamental role of one’s own facial expressions in the visual processing of the observed facial expressions of other people and provides support for the colloquial phrase that ‘if you smile, the world will smile back to you.’” It's just the latest finding in a fascinating field of research. A German study from 2000, for example, showed when people were instructed to frown, they rated celebrities (depicted in photos) as less famous. The idea is that frowning simulates the experience of effort, which tricks the brain into thinking the celebrity is not so familiar.
Taken together, these studies show how our own emotions can lead to spiraling effects. Imagine arriving nervously at a party with a frown on your face and how that could negatively affect your feelings of familiarity when mixing with the other guests. Conversely, arrive with a smile and you’re likely to view other people’s facial expressions through a positive lens. And just think: If you can make other guests at the party smile, you might actually be changing how they see the world.
Q. The author of the passage adopts a style which can be labeled as:
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
Back in the 19th century, the great American psychologist William James proposed that our facial expressions and other bodily changes are not the consequence of our emotional feelings, but the cause. Something positive happens, you smile, and this — that is, the act of smiling rather than the event itself — causes you to feel joy. Modern science has partially backed this up – there’s evidence that smiling can lift your mood, and in one study, women who had botox treatment, stiffening their facial muscles, show less emotional activity in their brains.
There’s also evidence that our facial expressions change the way we perceive the world. In the 1980s, for example, researchers showed that people found cartoons funnier when they bit a pen in a way that exercised the facial muscles that are involved in smiling (and found the cartoons less funny when they pouted). More recently, psychologists at the University of Sussex in England reported that when we smile, we see other people’s frowns as less severe, and that when we frown we see their smiling faces as less happy.
Now, in a new paper in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, a research team based in London and Madrid has further explored the possibility that when we smile it actually changes the way our brains process other people’s emotions. To do this, they used a technique called EEG (electroencephalography) to record the brainwaves of 25 participants as they looked at photographs of faces that were either smiling or showing a neutral expression.
Specifically, the researchers, led by Dr. Tina Forster at the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit at City University London, focused on two spikes of electrical activity in the brain that typically occur between 150 and 170 milliseconds after looking at a face, known as the VPP and N170, respectively. These particular spikes are unique to the processing of faces, and are more pronounced when the faces in question have emotional expressions, as compared to neutral ones.
When the participants adopted a neutral facial expression themselves, Sel’s team found that these signatures were enhanced after looking at happy faces compared with neutral faces – just as we’d expect. But what’s especially intriguing is that when the participants smiled, their neural activity was enhanced just the same whether they looked at neutral faces or smiley faces. In other words, when the participant smiled, their brain processed, or partially processed, a neutral face as if it were smiling.
The researchers say their results provide “novel evidence for a fundamental role of one’s own facial expressions in the visual processing of the observed facial expressions of other people and provides support for the colloquial phrase that ‘if you smile, the world will smile back to you.’” It's just the latest finding in a fascinating field of research. A German study from 2000, for example, showed when people were instructed to frown, they rated celebrities (depicted in photos) as less famous. The idea is that frowning simulates the experience of effort, which tricks the brain into thinking the celebrity is not so familiar.
Taken together, these studies show how our own emotions can lead to spiraling effects. Imagine arriving nervously at a party with a frown on your face and how that could negatively affect your feelings of familiarity when mixing with the other guests. Conversely, arrive with a smile and you’re likely to view other people’s facial expressions through a positive lens. And just think: If you can make other guests at the party smile, you might actually be changing how they see the world.
Q. As per the information given in the passage:
Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
Back in the 19th century, the great American psychologist William James proposed that our facial expressions and other bodily changes are not the consequence of our emotional feelings, but the cause. Something positive happens, you smile, and this — that is, the act of smiling rather than the event itself — causes you to feel joy. Modern science has partially backed this up – there’s evidence that smiling can lift your mood, and in one study, women who had botox treatment, stiffening their facial muscles, show less emotional activity in their brains.
There’s also evidence that our facial expressions change the way we perceive the world. In the 1980s, for example, researchers showed that people found cartoons funnier when they bit a pen in a way that exercised the facial muscles that are involved in smiling (and found the cartoons less funny when they pouted). More recently, psychologists at the University of Sussex in England reported that when we smile, we see other people’s frowns as less severe, and that when we frown we see their smiling faces as less happy.
Now, in a new paper in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, a research team based in London and Madrid has further explored the possibility that when we smile it actually changes the way our brains process other people’s emotions. To do this, they used a technique called EEG (electroencephalography) to record the brainwaves of 25 participants as they looked at photographs of faces that were either smiling or showing a neutral expression.
Specifically, the researchers, led by Dr. Tina Forster at the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit at City University London, focused on two spikes of electrical activity in the brain that typically occur between 150 and 170 milliseconds after looking at a face, known as the VPP and N170, respectively. These particular spikes are unique to the processing of faces, and are more pronounced when the faces in question have emotional expressions, as compared to neutral ones.
When the participants adopted a neutral facial expression themselves, Sel’s team found that these signatures were enhanced after looking at happy faces compared with neutral faces – just as we’d expect. But what’s especially intriguing is that when the participants smiled, their neural activity was enhanced just the same whether they looked at neutral faces or smiley faces. In other words, when the participant smiled, their brain processed, or partially processed, a neutral face as if it were smiling.
The researchers say their results provide “novel evidence for a fundamental role of one’s own facial expressions in the visual processing of the observed facial expressions of other people and provides support for the colloquial phrase that ‘if you smile, the world will smile back to you.’” It's just the latest finding in a fascinating field of research. A German study from 2000, for example, showed when people were instructed to frown, they rated celebrities (depicted in photos) as less famous. The idea is that frowning simulates the experience of effort, which tricks the brain into thinking the celebrity is not so familiar.
Taken together, these studies show how our own emotions can lead to spiraling effects. Imagine arriving nervously at a party with a frown on your face and how that could negatively affect your feelings of familiarity when mixing with the other guests. Conversely, arrive with a smile and you’re likely to view other people’s facial expressions through a positive lens. And just think: If you can make other guests at the party smile, you might actually be changing how they see the world.
Q. If the information given in the passage is correct, which one of the following will be a valid inference?
The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4 and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, from a coherent paragraph. Arrange them in the correct order.
1. The Arab Spring exhilarated many human rights activists and made many others very nervous that the bug could spread.
2. So the Internet has transformed politics, society, religion, culture and tradition, and is increasingly becoming the medium of choice through which people work, socialize, get involved, associate, act, and express themselves globally.
3. While the Arab Spring was not an Internet or twitter revolution, it was probably the first historical example of the incredibly crucial role that information technology can play in liberating people's voices, spreading them around the world, and empowering others to take action.
4. These transformations have come with a range of problems and challenges not only for governments around the world, but also for private and civil society actors.
5. The Internet knows few boundaries but exists of course in an international system, dominated by nation- states and their corollary: national sovereignty.
Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph.
The fact is, Naipaul provides powerful ammunition for all sides of the debate. Were Naipaul simply a monster, he (and his writing) would not be so compelling. Revealing himself to be a monster in one instance, he will use that very quality to his own advantage in the next. This protean quality makes Naipaul larger, as a character, a novelist, and a thinker, than any of the categories meant to encompass him. Those, for instance, who want to dismiss Naipaul for what Wood calls his “conservatism”, find themselves, more often than not, moved by his “radical eyesight.” And vice versa. Inevitably, to read Naipaul is to experience a rather exciting push/pull of attraction and repulsion. You can see this even in the short quote from Packer’s review of the French biography above. Naipaul describes extremely ugly behavior. Further, he seems to take narcissistic pleasure (the word ‘narcissism’ comes up often in discussions of Naipaul) in doing so. But he ends with a thought that is sensitive and vulnerable. “I was utterly helpless. I have enormous sympathy for people who do strange things out of passion.” By turning his sympathy around, he elicits it from us.
Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer.
1. Life on the rebel side"the only side I had access to"was perilous and miserable.
2. At the time, Aleppo was divided roughly in half, one side held by the rebels, the other by the regime.
3. There was a river that snaked through Aleppo from the regime side to the rebel side, and occasionally bodies dumped in the former would wash up in the latter.
4. In the spring of 2013, I spent a month in the Syrian city of Aleppo, reporting an article about the protests that had become an uprising that had become a war.
5. Almost every day, regime jets and mortars and missiles randomly obliterated civilian targets: homes, markets, hospitals, and schools.
Four sentences related to a topic are given below. Three of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer.
1. The first method to attack the issue is to crunch numbers, and reduce the statistics of hungry people
2. While hasty techno-fixes to deal with the crisis in the farming community are afoot, malnutrition and genuine problems in the agricultural sector in the country fail to be seriously addressed
3. Increasing production is not the only solution to hunger in an unequal society
4. Farmers committing suicide are linked to the commercial pressures of tech dependent agriculture, along with the controls of companies, the market, and credit agencies
The five sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4, and 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentence and write this sequence of five numbers as your answer.
1. If it is to appeal to practical men and civic workers, it is important that the methods for the systematic study of cities be not only the product of the study, but also be those which may be acquired through local observation and practical effort.
2. This point of view has next to be correlated with the corresponding practical experience.
3. My problem is thus to outline such ideas as may crystallize from the experience of any moderately-travelled observer, so that his panoramic observations should gradually develop towards an orderly Regional Survey.
4. Practical experience may be acquired through varied experiences of citizenship, which rise towards a larger, more orderly conception of civic action as Regional Service.
5. This department of sociological studies should evidently be, as far as possible, concrete in treatment.
(in numerical value)
Identify the most appropriate summary for the paragraph.
According to a 2006 poll conducted by Newsweek, a whopping 43% of Americans believe that dreams reveal unconscious desires and wishes. Famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud described dreams as the royal road to the unconscious and suggested that by studying the obvious content of dreams, we could then bring to light the hidden and unconscious desires that lead to neurosis. Analyzing dream symbols and ascribing meaning has become a popular source of both entertainment and self-reflection in popular culture. Do dreams really have hidden meanings? Can you learn your unconscious wishes and desires by interpreting your dreams? While most modern theories of dreams would suggest that the answer is no, this hasn't stopped interpreters and analysts from publishing a whole host of dream dictionaries that purport to identify what these common dream themes and symbols really mean.
Four sentences related to a topic are given below. Three of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in.
1. International inspectors have unprecedented access to Iranian facilities.
2. American diplomats know all too well the danger Iran poses to American security and our allies around the world, and they have been working tirelessly to keep nuclear weapons far out of Iran’s reach.
3. This tough diplomacy has already made us safer: Iran’s nuclear program has been frozen for more than a year.
4. The political stunt that occurred last week threatens to undo all that we have achieved, and genuinely puts American security at risk.
The four sentences (labelled 1,2,3 and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, from a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentence and write this sequence of four numbers as your answer.
1. It is all too easy to underestimate the role played by the humble index, and its more elaborate variants, in the history of human knowledge.
2. There is a terrific book to be written on the history of alphabetical order, for example, which is sketched out here by Lynch in an all too tantalizing three pages.
3. In his delightful new history, subtitled The reference shelf from ancient Babylon to Wikipedia, Jack Lynch neatly defines the reference work as a text designed for users rather than readers: plenty of people read Herodotus straight through (and so should you), but no one has ever read Powell's Lexicon from cover to cover.
4. Concordances are among the simplest life forms in the rich and complex phylum of reference works " dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases and so forth.
Read the information given below and answer the question that follows.
Mr. Pyare Lal has to schedule six different seminars, one each on a different subject among Management Applications, Qualitative Research, Entrepreneurship, Strategic Marketing, Change Management and Cashless Transactions. Each of these seminars is organized on a different day from Monday to Saturday in a week and each of these seminars is handled by a different professor among Govind Rajan, Amit Shukla, Bharat Jain, Prakash Jha, Sravan Murthy and Gokul Roy.
The following information is also known.
(i) Amit Shukla handled the seminar on Entrepreneurship but not before the seminar handled by Bharat Jain.
(ii) The seminar on Change Management is held either on the first day or on the last day of the week
(iii) Gokul Roy handled the seminar on Thursday.
(iv) The seminars on Strategic Marketing and Qualitative Research are to be organized on two consecutive days and neither of them is organized on Wednesday.
(v) Govind Rajan will handle his seminar on exactly the 3rd day after the day on which Sravan Murthy handles his seminar,
(vi) The seminar on Strategic Marketing is to be held on the immediately next day after Bharat Jain handles his seminar and Bharat Jain will not handle his seminar on the first day.
Q. Who handled the seminar on Qualitative Research?
Read the information given below and answer the question that follows.
Mr. Pyare Lal has to schedule six different seminars, one each on a different subject among Management Applications, Qualitative Research, Entrepreneurship, Strategic Marketing, Change Management and Cashless Transactions. Each of these seminars is organized on a different day from Monday to Saturday in a week and each of these seminars is handled by a different professor among Govind Rajan, Amit Shukla, Bharat Jain, Prakash Jha, Sravan Murthy and Gokul Roy.
The following information is also known.
(i) Amit Shukla handled the seminar on Entrepreneurship but not before the seminar handled by Bharat Jain.
(ii) The seminar on Change Management is held either on the first day or on the last day of the week
(iii) Gokul Roy handled the seminar on Thursday.
(iv) The seminars on Strategic Marketing and Qualitative Research are to be organized on two consecutive days and neither of them is organized on Wednesday.
(v) Govind Rajan will handle his seminar on exactly the 3rd day after the day on which Sravan Murthy handles his seminar,
(vi) The seminar on Strategic Marketing is to be held on the immediately next day after Bharat Jain handles his seminar and Bharat Jain will not handle his seminar on the first day.
Q. On which day is the seminar on Entrepreneurship organized?
Read the information given below and answer the question that follows.
Mr. Pyare Lal has to schedule six different seminars, one each on a different subject among Management Applications, Qualitative Research, Entrepreneurship, Strategic Marketing, Change Management and Cashless Transactions. Each of these seminars is organized on a different day from Monday to Saturday in a week and each of these seminars is handled by a different professor among Govind Rajan, Amit Shukla, Bharat Jain, Prakash Jha, Sravan Murthy and Gokul Roy.
The following information is also known.
(i) Amit Shukla handled the seminar on Entrepreneurship but not before the seminar handled by Bharat Jain.
(ii) The seminar on Change Management is held either on the first day or on the last day of the week
(iii) Gokul Roy handled the seminar on Thursday.
(iv) The seminars on Strategic Marketing and Qualitative Research are to be organized on two consecutive days and neither of them is organized on Wednesday.
(v) Govind Rajan will handle his seminar on exactly the 3rd day after the day on which Sravan Murthy handles his seminar,
(vi) The seminar on Strategic Marketing is to be held on the immediately next day after Bharat Jain handles his seminar and Bharat Jain will not handle his seminar on the first day.
Q. If Bharat Jain handled the seminar on Cashless Transactions, then who handled the seminar on Management Applications?
Read the information given below and answer the question that follows.
During the Up To 60% Off sale at the Furniture Store, each of the five salespeople - Bill, Cynthia, Fred, Jenna and Rick - sold one item off the floor - coffee table, loveseat, nightstand, painting and sideboard - with each piece of furniture selling for a different price and the five sales totalling $10,000. The last names of the five salespeople are Broyhill, Drexel, Harris, Moore and Stickley, not necessarily in the same order.
Q. Which of the following statements is true?
Read the information given below and answer the question that follows.
During the Up To 60% Off sale at the Furniture Store, each of the five salespeople - Bill, Cynthia, Fred, Jenna and Rick - sold one item off the floor - coffee table, loveseat, nightstand, painting and sideboard - with each piece of furniture selling for a different price and the five sales totalling $10,000. The last names of the five salespeople are Broyhill, Drexel, Harris, Moore and Stickley, not necessarily in the same order.
Q. Who sold the least expensive item of furniture?
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1 videos|75 docs|469 tests
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