CAT

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

 

The italicised numbered words given below are be correctly represented by which of the following parts Of Speach?

I grew up on expeditions (1) — my first was when I was seven. It’s such a different world. It’s a place of magic and (2) mystery and beauty and danger. There’s always something new (3), every dive. So it’s more that it would be very difficult (4) to find a career that would trump that. I tried! I went (5) to school for environmental economics, and I went into international business and marketing afterwards (6). I did stints in different (7) places —I worked in graphic design, I worked in interior design. All those were very (8) short-lived careers for me, because at the end of the day, my mind and my soul kept driving me back to the ocean. To the thing that (9) really attracted me to this life — which is the adventure, the discovery.

Analyse the following caselet and answer the questions that follow:

Geetha Gawde can cultivate up to 6 crops a year. Crop A and B arc ready for harvest in 2 months; crop C and D in 3 months, and crop E and F in 4 months. Crop A can be cultivated from January to June; crop B can be cultivated from April1 to September; crop C can be cultivated from May to December; crops D as well as E can be cultivated from August to December, and crop F from November to Mgy. If Geetha plans a change of crop the soil should be left fallow for one month; however, if the same crop is sown no fallow time is needed. Sowing takes place only at the beginning of a month. Geetha can only harvest a maximum of 1000 units of any crop at any point in time. The production cost per unit (incurred at the time of sowing) andpriceper unit of crop are as follows:

For Geetha soil preparation does not incur any cost. If a crop is abandoned before the scheduled harvesting, she gets no money. Geetha is preparing a cropping schedule to maximize her annual profits (i.e., price- cost). She plans to replicate the schedule in the coming years.

Analyse the following caselet and answer the questions that follow:

Purushottam Bhatnagar owns and operates a sweetshop Puru and Sons. He is about 60 years old and is eager to hand over the business to his sons Ratan and Pramod. He however, fears that his sons, fresh from college may not understand the tricks of the trade.

Purushottam's younger son Pramod discovered that 10% of their customers whom Purushottam called privileged customers purchased sweets at prices fixed 10 years ago (which is significantly lower than the current prices). Purushottam told him, "This 10% are my core and loyal customers with whom I have personal connect and therefore they deserve this privilege". Pramod refuted his father's argument citing the following information.

1. These customers form the top 20% of the income bracket of the city.

2. These customers frequently purchase from other sweetshops at market prices.

3. None of them recognises and greets Purushottam at the shop or at anywhere else.

4. None of them was present at Pramod's marriage.

5. These customers actually buy sweets at Puru and Sons for others not part of the core and loyal customer group.

Analyse the following caselet and answer the questions that follow:

Indian Institute of Research is a Government-established body to promote research. In addition to helping in policy making, it also provides free online access to all the articles to the public. It has a mission of publishing high quality research articles. Till 2010, the publication of articles was very slow because there was no incentive for researchers to publish. Researchers stuck to the mandatory one article a year. Most of the researchers engaged in offering consultancy and earned extra income. Since its inception, the institute was considered the best place for cutting edge research. The new director of the institute was not happy with the work done by researchers in silo and came out with a new research policy in 2013 to increase research output and improve collaboration among researchers. It was decided that extra benefits would be offered to researchers with new publications. As a result, the number of research articles increased fourfold in 2014. At the 2015 annual audit, an objection was raised against the new benefits scheme. Auditors' were not happy with increased expenses towards remuneration for researchers. Further, the Government opined that the publication was itself a reward and hence researchers need be paid nothing extra. The director tried to defend his policy but the response from the government was not encouraging.

The director still wanted to persuade the government to review its stand. He had framed the following arguments:

1. Most famous researchers in the world are also the highest paid.

2. American institute of research gives extra benefits to its scientists.

3. This year's highest paid researcher had won the Nobel Prize last year.

Analyse the following caselet and answer the questions that follow:

The City of Yashmund is served by licensed taxis operating on officially sanctioned metered rates and driven by licensed drivers who do not own the taxis hut pay a monthly rent to the taxi-owners. Shaliesh Nair, the mayor ofYashmund, perceived that most of these taxis do not offer sufficient comfort and safety to passengers.

The mayor wants to involve the car owners in finding a solution to the problem of comfort and safety. He is concerned that the customers may not be willing to pay more for safety.

Do animals have free will? Probably, the answer to that question would be agreed by most people to be a fairly obvious “no.” The concept of free will is traditionally bound up with such things as our capacity to choose our own values, the sorts of lives we want to lead, the sorts of people we want to be, etc. and it seems obvious that no non-human animal lives the kind of life which could make sense of the attribution to it of such powers as these. But in thinking about free will, it is essential, nevertheless, to consider the capacities of animals. Even if animals cannot be said to have full-blown free will, animal powers of various sorts provide a kind of essential underpinning for free will which philosophers who focus too exclusively on the human phenomenon are forever in danger of ignoring. And these simpler capacities are interesting enough to raise many philosophical issues all by themselves; indeed, I would argue that they raise the most discussed problem in this area of philosophy all by themselves. For they are, in my view, hard to accommodate within certain conceptions of the universe in which we live – what might be called mechanistic or deterministic conceptions of that universe. This makes it very useful and important to think about the simpler capacities from a philosophical perspective. Instead of asking, as philosophers constantly do, whether free will is compatible with determinism, we should first ask ourselves whether even the simpler powers which constitute what I call animal agency are consistent with it.

Let us consider a very simple example. Some earth-moving job has to be done in an area of high unemployment. There is a wide choice of technologies, ranging from the most modern earth- moving equipment to purely manual work without tools of any kind. The 'output' is fixed by the nature of the job, and it is quite clear that the capital / output ratio will be highest, if the input of 'capital' is kept lowest. If the job were done without any tools, the capital/output ratio would be infinitely large, but the productivity per man would be exceedingly low. If the job were done at the highest level of modern technology, the capital/output ratio would be low and the productivity per man very high.

Neither of these extremes is desirable, and a middle way has to be found. Assume some of the unemployed men were first set to work to make a variety of tools, including wheel-barrows and the like, while others were made to produce various 'wages goods'. Each of these lines of production in turn could be based on a wide range of different technologies, from the simplest to the most sophisticated. The task in every case would be to find an intermediate technology which obtains a fair level of productivity without having to resort to the purchase of expensive and sophisticated equipment. The outcome of the whole venture would be an economic development going far beyond the completion of the initial earth-moving Project. With a total input of 'capital' from outside which might be much smaller than would have been involved in the acquisition of the most modern earth-moving equipment, and an input of (previously unemployed) labour much greater than the 'modern' method would have demanded, not only a given project would have been completed, but a whole community would have been set on the path of development.

I say, therefore, that the dynamic approach to development, which treats the choice of appropriate, intermediate technologies as the central issue, opens up avenues of constructive action, which the static, econometric approach totally fails to recognise. This leads to the next objection which has been raised against the idea of intermediate technology. It is argued that all this might be quite promising if it were not for a notorious shortage of entrepreneurial ability in the under-developed countries. This scarce resource should therefore be utilised in the most concentrated way, in places where it has the best chances of success and should be endowed with the finest capital equipment the world can offer. Industry, it is thus argued, should be established in or near the big cities, in large integrated units, and on the highest possible level of capitalisation per workplace.

The argument hinges on the assumption that 'entrepreneurial ability' is a fixed and given quantity, and thus again betrays a purely static point of view. It is, of course, neither fixed nor given, being largely a function of the technology to be employed. Men, quite incapable of acting as entrepreneurs on the level of modern technology, may nonetheless be fully capable of making a success of a small-scale enterprise set up on the basis of intermediate technology - for reasons already explained above. In fact, it seems to me, that the apparent shortage of entrepreneurs in many developing countries today is precisely the result of the 'negative demonstration effect' of a sophisticated technology infiltrated into an unsophisticated environment. The introduction of an appropriate, intermediate technology would not be likely to founder on any shortage of entrepreneurial ability. Nor would it diminish the supply of entrepreneurs for enterprises in the modem sector; on the contrary, by spreading familiarity with systematic, technical modes of production over the entire population it would undoubtedly help to increase the supply of the required talent.

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

Let us consider a very simple example. Some earth-moving job has to be done in an area of high unemployment. There is a wide choice of technologies, ranging from the most modern earth- moving equipment to purely manual work without tools of any kind. The 'output' is fixed by the nature of the job, and it is quite clear that the capital / output ratio will be highest, if the input of 'capital' is kept lowest. If the job were done without any tools, the capital/output ratio would be infinitely large, but the productivity per man would be exceedingly low. If the job were done at the highest level of modern technology, the capital/output ratio would be low and the productivity per man very high.

Neither of these extremes is desirable, and a middle way has to be found. Assume some of the unemployed men were first set to work to make a variety of tools, including wheel-barrows and the like, while others were made to produce various 'wages goods'. Each of these lines of production in turn could be based on a wide range of different technologies, from the simplest to the most sophisticated. The task in every case would be to find an intermediate technology which obtains a fair level of productivity without having to resort to the purchase of expensive and sophisticated equipment. The outcome of the whole venture would be an economic development going far beyond the completion of the initial earth-moving Project. With a total input of 'capital' from outside which might be much smaller than would have been involved in the acquisition of the most modern earth-moving equipment, and an input of (previously unemployed) labour much greater than the 'modern' method would have demanded, not only a given project would have been completed, but a whole community would have been set on the path of development.

I say, therefore, that the dynamic approach to development, which treats the choice of appropriate, intermediate technologies as the central issue, opens up avenues of constructive action, which the static, econometric approach totally fails to recognise. This leads to the next objection which has been raised against the idea of intermediate technology. It is argued that all this might be quite promising if it were not for a notorious shortage of entrepreneurial ability in the under-developed countries. This scarce resource should therefore be utilised in the most concentrated way, in places where it has the best chances of success and should be endowed with the finest capital equipment the world can offer. Industry, it is thus argued, should be established in or near the big cities, in large integrated units, and on the highest possible level of capitalisation per workplace.

The argument hinges on the assumption that 'entrepreneurial ability' is a fixed and given quantity, and thus again betrays a purely static point of view. It is, of course, neither fixed nor given, being largely a function of the technology to be employed. Men, quite incapable of acting as entrepreneurs on the level of modern technology, may nonetheless be fully capable of making a success of a small-scale enterprise set up on the basis of intermediate technology - for reasons already explained above. In fact, it seems to me, that the apparent shortage of entrepreneurs in many developing countries today is precisely the result of the 'negative demonstration effect' of a sophisticated technology infiltrated into an unsophisticated environment. The introduction of an appropriate, intermediate technology would not be likely to founder on any shortage of entrepreneurial ability. Nor would it diminish the supply of entrepreneurs for enterprises in the modem sector; on the contrary, by spreading familiarity with systematic, technical modes of production over the entire population it would undoubtedly help to increase the supply of the required talent.

Q. ‘Wages goods’, as used in the second paragraph, refer to consumer goods. Which of the following would be an example of wages goods?

A. Wheel barrow
B. Grinding machine
C. Gear shaper
D. Dining Table

Last fall, Toby Young did something ironic. Toby is the son of Michael Young, the British sociologist and Labour life peer whose 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy has been credited with coining the term. In September, he published an 8,000-word reconsideration of his father's signature concept in an Australian monthly. The old man was right that meritocracy would gradually create a stratified and immobile society, he wrote, but wrong that abolishing selective education was the cure. Unlike my father, I'm not an egalitarian, Young wrote. If meritocracy creates a new caste system, the answer is more meritocracy. To restore equality of opportunity, he suggested subsidies for intelligence-maximizing embryo selection for poor parents,with below-average IQs. The irony lay in the implication that Young, because of who his father was, has special insight into the ideology that holds that it shouldn't matter who your father is.

His outlandish resort to eugenics suggests that Toby Young found himself at a loss for solutions, as all modern critics of meritocracy seem to do. The problems they describe are fundamental, but none of their remedies are more than tweaks to make the system more efficient or less prejudicial to the poor. For instance, in Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz accuses the Ivy League of imposing a malignant ruling class on the country, then meekly suggests that elite universities might solve the problem by giving greater weight in admissions to socioeconomic disadvantage and less to resum-stuffing. In The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, Lani Guinier belies the harsh terms of her title by advising that we simply learn to reward "democratic rather than testocratic merit". Christopher Hayes subtitled his debut book Twilight of the Elites "America after Meritocracy", but the remedies he prescribes are all meant to preserve meritocracy by making it more effective. In his latest book, Our Kids, Robert Putnam proves that American social mobility is in crisis, then reposes his hopes in such predictable nostrums as housing vouchers and universal pre-kindergarten.

When an author caps two hundred pages of rhetorical fire with fifteen pages of platitudes or utopian fantasy, that is called "the last chapter problem". When every author who takes up a question finds himself equally at a loss, that is something else. In this case, our authors fail as critics of meritocracy because they cannot get their heads outside of it. They are incapable of imagining what it would be like not to believe in it. They assume the validity of the very thing they should be questioning.

Meritocracy began by destroying an aristocracy; it has ended in creating a new one. Nearly every book in the American anti-meritocracy literature makes this charge, in what is usually its most empirically reinforced chapter.  But the solutions on offer never rise to the scale of the problem. Authors attack the meritocratic machine with screwdrivers, not sledgehammers, and differ only in which valve they want to adjust. Some think the solution is to tip more disadvantaged kids over the lip of the intake funnel, which would probably make things worse. If more people start competing for a finite number of slots, slim advantages like those that come from having grown up with two meritocrats for parents will only loom larger.  Others favor the slightly more radical solution of redefining our idea of merit, usually in a way that downplays what Guinier calls "pseudoscientific measures of excellence". She even has a replacement in mind, the Bial-Dale College Adaptability Index, the testing of which involves Legos. (Why are you laughing? It is backed by a study.)

My solution is quite different. The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy"so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label. By all means this caste should admit as many worthy newcomers as is compatible with their sense of continuity. New brains, like new money, have been necessary to every ruling class, meritocratic or not. If ethnic balance is important to meritocrats, they should engineer it into the system. If geographic diversity strikes them as important, they should ensure that it exists, ideally while keeping an eye on the danger of hoovering up all of the native talent from regional America. But they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside. They are separate, parochial in their values, unique in their responsibilities. That is what makes them aristocratic.

Q. According to the author of the passage:

I. the solutions to the problems of meritocracy primarily suggest tinkering with the system rather than abolishing it.
II. the solutions for the problems posed by meritocracy are not just not strong enough to question the very validity of the system and break its very foundations.
III. solutions for meritocracy, such as the one that involve re-defining merit, miss the mark by making suggestions that are laughable in themselves.

Last fall, Toby Young did something ironic. Toby is the son of Michael Young, the British sociologist and Labour life peer whose 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy has been credited with coining the term. In September, he published an 8,000-word reconsideration of his father's signature concept in an Australian monthly. The old man was right that meritocracy would gradually create a stratified and immobile society, he wrote, but wrong that abolishing selective education was the cure. Unlike my father, I'm not an egalitarian, Young wrote. If meritocracy creates a new caste system, the answer is more meritocracy. To restore equality of opportunity, he suggested subsidies for intelligence-maximizing embryo selection for poor parents,with below-average IQs. The irony lay in the implication that Young, because of who his father was, has special insight into the ideology that holds that it shouldn't matter who your father is.

His outlandish resort to eugenics suggests that Toby Young found himself at a loss for solutions, as all modern critics of meritocracy seem to do. The problems they describe are fundamental, but none of their remedies are more than tweaks to make the system more efficient or less prejudicial to the poor. For instance, in Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz accuses the Ivy League of imposing a malignant ruling class on the country, then meekly suggests that elite universities might solve the problem by giving greater weight in admissions to socioeconomic disadvantage and less to resum-stuffing. In The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, Lani Guinier belies the harsh terms of her title by advising that we simply learn to reward "democratic rather than testocratic merit". Christopher Hayes subtitled his debut book Twilight of the Elites "America after Meritocracy", but the remedies he prescribes are all meant to preserve meritocracy by making it more effective. In his latest book, Our Kids, Robert Putnam proves that American social mobility is in crisis, then reposes his hopes in such predictable nostrums as housing vouchers and universal pre-kindergarten.

When an author caps two hundred pages of rhetorical fire with fifteen pages of platitudes or utopian fantasy, that is called "the last chapter problem". When every author who takes up a question finds himself equally at a loss, that is something else. In this case, our authors fail as critics of meritocracy because they cannot get their heads outside of it. They are incapable of imagining what it would be like not to believe in it. They assume the validity of the very thing they should be questioning.

Meritocracy began by destroying an aristocracy; it has ended in creating a new one. Nearly every book in the American anti-meritocracy literature makes this charge, in what is usually its most empirically reinforced chapter.  But the solutions on offer never rise to the scale of the problem. Authors attack the meritocratic machine with screwdrivers, not sledgehammers, and differ only in which valve they want to adjust. Some think the solution is to tip more disadvantaged kids over the lip of the intake funnel, which would probably make things worse. If more people start competing for a finite number of slots, slim advantages like those that come from having grown up with two meritocrats for parents will only loom larger.  Others favor the slightly more radical solution of redefining our idea of merit, usually in a way that downplays what Guinier calls "pseudoscientific measures of excellence". She even has a replacement in mind, the Bial-Dale College Adaptability Index, the testing of which involves Legos. (Why are you laughing? It is backed by a study.)

My solution is quite different. The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy"so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label. By all means this caste should admit as many worthy newcomers as is compatible with their sense of continuity. New brains, like new money, have been necessary to every ruling class, meritocratic or not. If ethnic balance is important to meritocrats, they should engineer it into the system. If geographic diversity strikes them as important, they should ensure that it exists, ideally while keeping an eye on the danger of hoovering up all of the native talent from regional America. But they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside. They are separate, parochial in their values, unique in their responsibilities. That is what makes them aristocratic.

Q. What is ironic in Toby Young's solution for meritocracy?

Last fall, Toby Young did something ironic. Toby is the son of Michael Young, the British sociologist and Labour life peer whose 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy has been credited with coining the term. In September, he published an 8,000-word reconsideration of his father's signature concept in an Australian monthly. The old man was right that meritocracy would gradually create a stratified and immobile society, he wrote, but wrong that abolishing selective education was the cure. Unlike my father, I'm not an egalitarian, Young wrote. If meritocracy creates a new caste system, the answer is more meritocracy. To restore equality of opportunity, he suggested subsidies for intelligence-maximizing embryo selection for poor parents,with below-average IQs. The irony lay in the implication that Young, because of who his father was, has special insight into the ideology that holds that it shouldn't matter who your father is.

His outlandish resort to eugenics suggests that Toby Young found himself at a loss for solutions, as all modern critics of meritocracy seem to do. The problems they describe are fundamental, but none of their remedies are more than tweaks to make the system more efficient or less prejudicial to the poor. For instance, in Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz accuses the Ivy League of imposing a malignant ruling class on the country, then meekly suggests that elite universities might solve the problem by giving greater weight in admissions to socioeconomic disadvantage and less to resum-stuffing. In The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, Lani Guinier belies the harsh terms of her title by advising that we simply learn to reward "democratic rather than testocratic merit". Christopher Hayes subtitled his debut book Twilight of the Elites "America after Meritocracy", but the remedies he prescribes are all meant to preserve meritocracy by making it more effective. In his latest book, Our Kids, Robert Putnam proves that American social mobility is in crisis, then reposes his hopes in such predictable nostrums as housing vouchers and universal pre-kindergarten.

When an author caps two hundred pages of rhetorical fire with fifteen pages of platitudes or utopian fantasy, that is called "the last chapter problem". When every author who takes up a question finds himself equally at a loss, that is something else. In this case, our authors fail as critics of meritocracy because they cannot get their heads outside of it. They are incapable of imagining what it would be like not to believe in it. They assume the validity of the very thing they should be questioning.

Meritocracy began by destroying an aristocracy; it has ended in creating a new one. Nearly every book in the American anti-meritocracy literature makes this charge, in what is usually its most empirically reinforced chapter.  But the solutions on offer never rise to the scale of the problem. Authors attack the meritocratic machine with screwdrivers, not sledgehammers, and differ only in which valve they want to adjust. Some think the solution is to tip more disadvantaged kids over the lip of the intake funnel, which would probably make things worse. If more people start competing for a finite number of slots, slim advantages like those that come from having grown up with two meritocrats for parents will only loom larger.  Others favor the slightly more radical solution of redefining our idea of merit, usually in a way that downplays what Guinier calls "pseudoscientific measures of excellence". She even has a replacement in mind, the Bial-Dale College Adaptability Index, the testing of which involves Legos. (Why are you laughing? It is backed by a study.)

My solution is quite different. The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy"so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label. By all means this caste should admit as many worthy newcomers as is compatible with their sense of continuity. New brains, like new money, have been necessary to every ruling class, meritocratic or not. If ethnic balance is important to meritocrats, they should engineer it into the system. If geographic diversity strikes them as important, they should ensure that it exists, ideally while keeping an eye on the danger of hoovering up all of the native talent from regional America. But they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside. They are separate, parochial in their values, unique in their responsibilities. That is what makes them aristocratic.

Q. From the context of the passage, the meaning of the word 'meritocracy' can be derived to be:

A man is hiking in the countryside when he suddenly sees a toddler about to fall into an abandoned well. What will he do? Many people will instinctively run toward the toddler to save him. However, some people will simply panic, freezing in the moment of crisis. A handful of people might start to move toward the child, but then stop, because they realise that the crumbling old well could collapse under their weight. Their initial impulse to save the child competes with their desire for self-preservation.

This thought experiment was formulated by the ancient Confucian Mengzi, who uses it to argue that, contrary to egoists, and to those who believe that human psychology is a tabula rasa, human nature is hard-wired with an incipient tendency toward compassion for the suffering of others.

Mengzi also argues that humans have a sense of shame that can at least compete with our self-interested motivations. He does not naively assume that all humans are fully virtuous. He acknowledges that our innate compassion and sense of shame are only incipient. We often fail to have compassion for those we should, or fail to be ashamed of what is genuinely despicable. Menzi compares our innate dispositions toward virtue as ‘sprouts’. The sprout of a peach tree cannot bear fruit, but it has an active tendency to develop into a mature, fruit-bearing tree if given good soil, the right amounts of sun and rain, and the weeding of a prudent gardener. Similarly, the ‘sprout of benevolence’ – manifested in our spontaneous feeling of alarm and compassion for the child about to fall into a well – and the ‘sprout of righteousness’ – manifested in a beggar’s disdain to accept a handout given with contempt – are not fully formed, but can develop into genuine virtues given the right environment and cultivation.

How do we make sure that our moral sprouts bloom into actual virtues? Aristotle said that human nature is neither good nor evil, but it allows us to be habituated to virtue. However, Aristotle emphasised that virtue requires doing the right thing out of the right motivation. In contrast, Plato argued that our souls innately love the good, and retain a dim knowledge of the transcendent truths they were exposed to before they were embodied. The way to purify the soul and recover the knowledge of these truths, Plato claimed, is by the study of pure mathematics and philosophy. This theory of cultivation as recollection explains how we can act with the right motivations from the very beginning of moral cultivation. But Platonic ethical cultivation involves giving up our ordinary attachments to our family and an almost ascetic indifference to our physical bodies. In contrast, Mengzi’s suggestion that the path of ethical cultivation is through rich commitments to family, friends and other individuals in our community provides a much more appealing view of the goal of human life.

Mengzi recognised that humans are partly responsible for their own ethical development, but (like Plato and Aristotle) he held that society should create an environment conducive to virtue. He advised rulers that their first task is to make sure that the common people’s physical needs are met. To punish the people when they steal out of hunger is no different from setting traps for them.  He asked one ruler what he would do if one of his subordinates was bad at his job. The ruler replied: ‘Discharge him.’ Mengzi then asked what should be done if his own kingdom were in disorder. The ruler, clearly seeing what this implied, abruptly changed the topic. Once the people’s basic needs were met, Mengzi suggested that they should be ethically educated.

Mengzi claimed that humans are endowed with ‘four hearts’ of benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety, and wisdom. Mengzi emphasises Wisdom because it is crucial for any virtuous person to be able to engage in deliberation about the best means to achieve the ends provided by the other ‘hearts’.
Excerpt from the article “The second sage” by Bryan W Van Norden

Q. Which of the following is not mentioned by Mengzi as one of the four hearts?

A man is hiking in the countryside when he suddenly sees a toddler about to fall into an abandoned well. What will he do? Many people will instinctively run toward the toddler to save him. However, some people will simply panic, freezing in the moment of crisis. A handful of people might start to move toward the child, but then stop, because they realise that the crumbling old well could collapse under their weight. Their initial impulse to save the child competes with their desire for self-preservation.

This thought experiment was formulated by the ancient Confucian Mengzi, who uses it to argue that, contrary to egoists, and to those who believe that human psychology is a tabula rasa, human nature is hard-wired with an incipient tendency toward compassion for the suffering of others.

Mengzi also argues that humans have a sense of shame that can at least compete with our self-interested motivations. He does not naively assume that all humans are fully virtuous. He acknowledges that our innate compassion and sense of shame are only incipient. We often fail to have compassion for those we should, or fail to be ashamed of what is genuinely despicable. Menzi compares our innate dispositions toward virtue as ‘sprouts’. The sprout of a peach tree cannot bear fruit, but it has an active tendency to develop into a mature, fruit-bearing tree if given good soil, the right amounts of sun and rain, and the weeding of a prudent gardener. Similarly, the ‘sprout of benevolence’ – manifested in our spontaneous feeling of alarm and compassion for the child about to fall into a well – and the ‘sprout of righteousness’ – manifested in a beggar’s disdain to accept a handout given with contempt – are not fully formed, but can develop into genuine virtues given the right environment and cultivation.

How do we make sure that our moral sprouts bloom into actual virtues? Aristotle said that human nature is neither good nor evil, but it allows us to be habituated to virtue. However, Aristotle emphasised that virtue requires doing the right thing out of the right motivation. In contrast, Plato argued that our souls innately love the good, and retain a dim knowledge of the transcendent truths they were exposed to before they were embodied. The way to purify the soul and recover the knowledge of these truths, Plato claimed, is by the study of pure mathematics and philosophy. This theory of cultivation as recollection explains how we can act with the right motivations from the very beginning of moral cultivation. But Platonic ethical cultivation involves giving up our ordinary attachments to our family and an almost ascetic indifference to our physical bodies. In contrast, Mengzi’s suggestion that the path of ethical cultivation is through rich commitments to family, friends and other individuals in our community provides a much more appealing view of the goal of human life.

Mengzi recognised that humans are partly responsible for their own ethical development, but (like Plato and Aristotle) he held that society should create an environment conducive to virtue. He advised rulers that their first task is to make sure that the common people’s physical needs are met. To punish the people when they steal out of hunger is no different from setting traps for them.  He asked one ruler what he would do if one of his subordinates was bad at his job. The ruler replied: ‘Discharge him.’ Mengzi then asked what should be done if his own kingdom were in disorder. The ruler, clearly seeing what this implied, abruptly changed the topic. Once the people’s basic needs were met, Mengzi suggested that they should be ethically educated.

Mengzi claimed that humans are endowed with ‘four hearts’ of benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety, and wisdom. Mengzi emphasises Wisdom because it is crucial for any virtuous person to be able to engage in deliberation about the best means to achieve the ends provided by the other ‘hearts’.
Excerpt from the article “The second sage” by Bryan W Van Norden

Q. Which of the following can be inferred from the story of the Child-at-the well?

A new source of methane – a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than carbon dioxide – has been identified by scientists flying over areas in the Arctic where the sea ice has melted.

The researchers found significant amounts of methane being released from the ocean into the atmosphere through cracks in the melting sea ice. They said the quantities could be large enough to affect the global climate. Previous observations have pointed to large methane plumes being released from the seabed in the relatively shallow sea off the northern coast of Siberia but the latest findings were made far away from land in the deep, open ocean where the surface is usually capped by ice.

Eric Kort of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that he and his colleagues were surprised to see methane levels rise so dramatically each time their research aircraft flew over cracks in the sea ice.
"When we flew over completely solid sea ice, we didn't see anything in terms of methane. But when we flew over areas were the sea ice had melted, or where there were cracks in the ice, we saw the methane levels increase," Dr Kort said. "We were surprised to see these enhanced methane levels at these high latitudes. Our observations really point to the ocean surface as the source, which was not what we had expected," he said.

"Other scientists had seen high concentrations of methane in the sea surface but nobody had expected to see it being released into the atmosphere in this way," he added.

Methane is about 70 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat. However, because methane is broken down more quickly in the atmosphere, scientists calculate that it is 20 times more powerful over a 100-year cycle. The latest methane measurements were made from the American HIPPO research programme where a research aircraft loaded with scientific instruments flies for long distances at varying altitudes, measuring and recording gas levels at different heights.

The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, covered several flights into the Arctic at different times of the year. They covered an area about 950 miles north of the coast of Alaska and about 350 miles south of the North Pole. Dr Kort said that the levels of methane coming off this region were about the same as the quantities measured by other scientists monitoring methane levels above the shallow sea of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

"We suggest that the surface waters of the Arctic Ocean represent a potentially important source of methane, which could prove sensitive to changes in sea ice cover," the researchers write. "The association with sea ice makes this methane source likely to be sensitive to changing Arctic ice cover and dynamics, providing an unrecognised feedback process in the global atmosphere-climate system," they say.

Climate scientists are concerned that rising temperatures in the Arctic could trigger climate-feedbacks, where melting ice results in the release of methane which in turn results in a further increase in temperatures.

I don’t know how to write. Which is unfortunate, as I do it for a living. Mind you, I don’t know how to live either. Writers are asked, particularly when we’ve got a book coming out, to write about writing. To give interviews and explain how we did this thing that we appear to have done. We even teach, as I have recently, students who want to know how to approach the peculiar occupation of fiction writing. I tell them at the beginning—I’ve got nothing for you. I don’t know. Don’t look at me.

I’ve written six books now, but instead of making it easier, it has complicated matters to the point of absurdity. I have no idea what I’m doing. All the decisions I appear to have made—about plots and characters and where to start and when to stop—are not decisions at all. They are compromises. A book is whittled down from hope, and when I start to cut my fingers I push it away from me to see what others make of it. And I wait in terror for the judgements of those others—judgements that seem, whether positive or negative, unjust, because they are about something that I didn’t really do. They are about something that happened to me. It’s a little like crawling from a car crash to be greeted by a panel of strangers holding up score cards.

Something, obviously, is going on. I manage, every few years, to generate a book. And of course, there are things that I know. I know how to wait until the last minute before putting anything on paper. I mean the last minute before the thought leaves me forever. I know how to leave out anything that looks to me—after a while—forced, deliberate, or fake. I know that I need to put myself in the story. I don’t mean literally. I mean emotionally. I need to care about what I’m writing—whether about the characters, or about what they’re getting up to, or about the way they feel or experience their world. I know that my job is to create a perspective. And to impose it on the reader. And I know that in order to do that with any success at all I must in some mysterious way risk everything. If I don’t break my own heart in the writing of a book then I know I’ve done it wrong. I’m not entirely sure what that means. But I know what it feels like.

I do no research. Given that I’ve just written a book that revolves around two London Met police detectives, this might seem a little foolhardy. I have no real idea what detectives do with their days. So I made some guesses. I suppose that they must investigate things. I tried to imagine what that might be like. I’ve seen the same films and TV shows that you have. I’ve read the same sorts of cheap thrillers. And I know that everything is fiction. Absolutely everything. Research is its own slow fiction, a process of reassurance for the author. I don’t want reassurance. I like writing out of confusion, panic, a sense of everything being perilously close to collapse. So I try to embrace the fiction of all things.

And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

So I love hearing from people who have no time for fiction. Who read only biographies and popular science. I love hearing about the death of the novel. I love getting lectures about the triviality of fiction, the triviality of making things up. As if that wasn’t what all of us do, all day long, all life long. Fiction gives us everything. It gives us our memories, our understanding, our insight, our lives. We use it to invent ourselves and others. We use it to feel change and sadness and hope and love and to tell each other about ourselves. And we all, it turns out, know how to do it.

I don’t know how to write. Which is unfortunate, as I do it for a living. Mind you, I don’t know how to live either. Writers are asked, particularly when we’ve got a book coming out, to write about writing. To give interviews and explain how we did this thing that we appear to have done. We even teach, as I have recently, students who want to know how to approach the peculiar occupation of fiction writing. I tell them at the beginning—I’ve got nothing for you. I don’t know. Don’t look at me.

I’ve written six books now, but instead of making it easier, it has complicated matters to the point of absurdity. I have no idea what I’m doing. All the decisions I appear to have made—about plots and characters and where to start and when to stop—are not decisions at all. They are compromises. A book is whittled down from hope, and when I start to cut my fingers I push it away from me to see what others make of it. And I wait in terror for the judgements of those others—judgements that seem, whether positive or negative, unjust, because they are about something that I didn’t really do. They are about something that happened to me. It’s a little like crawling from a car crash to be greeted by a panel of strangers holding up score cards.

Something, obviously, is going on. I manage, every few years, to generate a book. And of course, there are things that I know. I know how to wait until the last minute before putting anything on paper. I mean the last minute before the thought leaves me forever. I know how to leave out anything that looks to me—after a while—forced, deliberate, or fake. I know that I need to put myself in the story. I don’t mean literally. I mean emotionally. I need to care about what I’m writing—whether about the characters, or about what they’re getting up to, or about the way they feel or experience their world. I know that my job is to create a perspective. And to impose it on the reader. And I know that in order to do that with any success at all I must in some mysterious way risk everything. If I don’t break my own heart in the writing of a book then I know I’ve done it wrong. I’m not entirely sure what that means. But I know what it feels like.

I do no research. Given that I’ve just written a book that revolves around two London Met police detectives, this might seem a little foolhardy. I have no real idea what detectives do with their days. So I made some guesses. I suppose that they must investigate things. I tried to imagine what that might be like. I’ve seen the same films and TV shows that you have. I’ve read the same sorts of cheap thrillers. And I know that everything is fiction. Absolutely everything. Research is its own slow fiction, a process of reassurance for the author. I don’t want reassurance. I like writing out of confusion, panic, a sense of everything being perilously close to collapse. So I try to embrace the fiction of all things.

And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

So I love hearing from people who have no time for fiction. Who read only biographies and popular science. I love hearing about the death of the novel. I love getting lectures about the triviality of fiction, the triviality of making things up. As if that wasn’t what all of us do, all day long, all life long. Fiction gives us everything. It gives us our memories, our understanding, our insight, our lives. We use it to invent ourselves and others. We use it to feel change and sadness and hope and love and to tell each other about ourselves. And we all, it turns out, know how to do it.

Until I was 35 years old I thought talking about the weather was for losers. A waste of time, insulting even. No one can do anything about the weather anyway. I believed that any comment  that does not offer new insight or otherwise advance the cause of humanity is just so much hot air. I might make an exception for intimate friends, but I sure did not want that kind of intimacy with the man on the street, or the one in my office.

Then something happened. Alone for the first time in a long time, living in challenging circumstances, experiencing a cold winter in New England, I noticed the weather. It affected me deeply and directly, every single day. Slowly it dawned on me that the weather affected everyone else, too. Maybe talking about it wasn't totally vacuous after all.

I started with the cashier at a gas station. I figured I'd never see her again, so it was pretty safe. She has no clue that I was a smart person with a lot of potential. Years of cynicism made me almost laugh as I said. 'Sure got a lot of snow this year so far. Yep, was her reply. Then she said, I could barely get my car out of the lot, be careful driving. Talking about the weather was easy, even effortless. An entree to at least one person on the planet who apparently cared about me, at least enough to share her small challenge and want me safe on the road.

Next time I tried it at work. It turned out to be even more effective with people I already knew. Talking about the weather acted as a little bridge, sometimes to further conversation and sometimes just to the mutual acknowledgment of shared experience. Whether it was rainy or snowy or sunny or damp for everyone, each had their own relationship with the weather. They might be achy, delighted, burdened, grumpy, relieved or simply cold or hot. Like anything of personal importance, most were grateful for the opportunity to talk about it.

Then something else happened. As talking about the weather became more natural, I found myself talking about a whole lot more. I found out about people's families, their frustrations at work, their plans and aspirations. Plus, I found out that the weather is not the same for everyone! And it's only one of many factors dependent on location that you'll never know about without engaging in casual conversation.

For a businessperson, there may be no better way to make a connection, continue a thread, or open a deeper dialogue. Honoring the simple reality of another person's experience is an instant link to the bigger world outside one's self. It's the seed of empathy, and it's free.

Until I was 35 years old I thought talking about the weather was for losers. A waste of time, insulting even. No one can do anything about the weather anyway. I believed that any comment  that does not offer new insight or otherwise advance the cause of humanity is just so much hot air. I might make an exception for intimate friends, but I sure did not want that kind of intimacy with the man on the street, or the one in my office.

Then something happened. Alone for the first time in a long time, living in challenging circumstances, experiencing a cold winter in New England, I noticed the weather. It affected me deeply and directly, every single day. Slowly it dawned on me that the weather affected everyone else, too. Maybe talking about it wasn't totally vacuous after all.

I started with the cashier at a gas station. I figured I'd never see her again, so it was pretty safe. She has no clue that I was a smart person with a lot of potential. Years of cynicism made me almost laugh as I said. 'Sure got a lot of snow this year so far. Yep, was her reply. Then she said, I could barely get my car out of the lot, be careful driving. Talking about the weather was easy, even effortless. An entree to at least one person on the planet who apparently cared about me, at least enough to share her small challenge and want me safe on the road.

Next time I tried it at work. It turned out to be even more effective with people I already knew. Talking about the weather acted as a little bridge, sometimes to further conversation and sometimes just to the mutual acknowledgment of shared experience. Whether it was rainy or snowy or sunny or damp for everyone, each had their own relationship with the weather. They might be achy, delighted, burdened, grumpy, relieved or simply cold or hot. Like anything of personal importance, most were grateful for the opportunity to talk about it.

Then something else happened. As talking about the weather became more natural, I found myself talking about a whole lot more. I found out about people's families, their frustrations at work, their plans and aspirations. Plus, I found out that the weather is not the same for everyone! And it's only one of many factors dependent on location that you'll never know about without engaging in casual conversation.

For a businessperson, there may be no better way to make a connection, continue a thread, or open a deeper dialogue. Honoring the simple reality of another person's experience is an instant link to the bigger world outside one's self. It's the seed of empathy, and it's free.

WHEN Otto von Bismarck introduced the first pension for workers over 70 in 1889, the life expectancy of a Prussian was 45. In 1908, when Lloyd George bullied through a payment of five shillings a week for poor men who had reached 70, Britons, especially poor ones, were lucky to survive much past 50. By 1935, when America set up its Social Security system, the official pension age was 65—three years beyond the lifespan of the typical American. State-sponsored retirement was designed to be a brief sunset to life, for a few hardy souls.

Now retirement is for everyone, and often as long as whole lives once were. In some European countries the average retirement lasts more than a quarter of a century. In America the official pension age is 66, but the average American retires at 64 and can then expect to live for another 16 years.

Although the idea that “we are all getting older” is a truism, few governments, employers or individuals have yet come to terms with where longer retirement is heading. Whether we like it or not, we are going back to the pre-Bismarckian world, where work had no formal stopping point. That reversion will not happen overnight, but preparations should start now—to ensure that when the inevitable happens it is a change for the better.

It should be for the better because it is being partly driven by a wonderful thing: people are living ever longer. This imminent greying of society is compounded by two other demographic shifts. First, in most rich countries women no longer have enough babies to keep up the numbers; and the huge baby-boom generation, born after the second world war, has begun to retire. In 1950 the OECD countries had seven people aged 20-64 for every one of 65 and over. Now it is four to one—and on course to be two to one by 2050. That will ruin the pay-as-you-go state pension schemes that provide the bulk of retirement income in rich countries.

It is tempting to think that some of the gaps in the rich countries’ labour forces could be filled by immigrants from poorer countries. They already account for much of what little population growth there is in the developed world. But once ageing gets properly under way, the shortfalls will become so large that the flow of immigrants would have to increase to many times what it is now.

Individuals, companies and governments in rich countries will have to adapt. Many employers remain prejudiced against older workers, and not always without reason: performance in manual jobs does drop off in middle age, and older people are often slower on the uptake and less comfortable with new technology. But people past retirement age would not necessarily carry on in the same jobs as before.

Retailers such as Wal-Mart or Britain’s B&Q, and caterers such as McDonald’s, have started hiring pensioners because their customers find them friendlier and more helpful. And skills shortages are already creating opportunities: in the past year or two a dearth of German engineers has caused companies to bring back older workers. Once labour forces start declining, from about 2020, employers will no longer have much choice.

As for the older workers themselves, many of them seem keen enough to carry on beyond retirement. A recent Financial Times/Harris poll showed most Americans, Britons and Italians would work for longer in return for a larger pension. This surely makes sense: as long as the job is not too onerous, many people benefit in mind and body from having something to get them out of the house.

Answer the following question based on the information given below.
India ranks 4th in carbon emission among nations worldwide. For a developing nation like India, it seems impossible to bring a significant reduction in carbon emissions in near future. The Environment Protection Act, 1986, was one of the first legislations brought about by the legislature to protect the environment from degradation caused by the ever-increasing pollution. The next decade was a witness to economic liberalisation which in turn resulted in industrialisation and a revolutionary increase in automobiles on the road.

The Delhi government recently applied the odd and even plan for automobiles. The odd and even scheme of the Delhi government is laudable for the sheer fact that it takes courage to take such an antipopulist measure. The scheme may not have had a drastic impact on the pollution, but it has indeed resulted in a reduction in both the traffic and the resultant pollution. There are certain sections of society who are still miffed with the government, but then constructive criticism is a sign of a healthy democracy.

Taking a lesson from the successful implementation of odd and even rule, governments across the country should board the reform bandwagon. These days we see many advertisements making people aware of the ill-impact of various particulate matters from vehicles as well as from industry. The government should continue with them and should spread awareness among the masses.

Every developing township is getting clogged with the ever increasing traffic on their roads. Cities which have already acquired a shape can be restructured through implementing metro rail-based mass rapid transit systems (MRTS). It has been observed that road- based MRTS is less effective in the urban centres in India. Most of the Indian cities have developed in a haphazard manner and there is no or little scope for implementation of road-based MRTS.
The use of CNG vehicles should be increased and people should be encouraged to use more and more of it. It could be fuelled further by asking auto manufacturers to assign CNG fitting stations from where people can install CNG kits in their cars without losing their warranty. Conversion percentage of vehicles into CNG will get a shot in the arm with this initiative.
However, it seems impossible for governments to act on their own because unlike the Delhi government, very few governments in the states enjoy such absolute majority. The reason for judicial intervention is the avaricious attitude of the people. The court should reassume its role and put its act together to save them from the self-destructive ways and should pave a way in which pollution could be curbed in India.

From the passage, which of the following can be inferred?

Answer the following question based on the information given below.
India ranks 4th in carbon emission among nations worldwide. For a developing nation like India, it seems impossible to bring a significant reduction in carbon emissions in near future. The Environment Protection Act, 1986, was one of the first legislations brought about by the legislature to protect the environment from degradation caused by the ever-increasing pollution. The next decade was a witness to economic liberalisation which in turn resulted in industrialisation and a revolutionary increase in automobiles on the road.

The Delhi government recently applied the odd and even plan for automobiles. The odd and even scheme of the Delhi government is laudable for the sheer fact that it takes courage to take such an antipopulist measure. The scheme may not have had a drastic impact on the pollution, but it has indeed resulted in a reduction in both the traffic and the resultant pollution. There are certain sections of society who are still miffed with the government, but then constructive criticism is a sign of a healthy democracy.

Taking a lesson from the successful implementation of odd and even rule, governments across the country should board the reform bandwagon. These days we see many advertisements making people aware of the ill-impact of various particulate matters from vehicles as well as from industry. The government should continue with them and should spread awareness among the masses.

Every developing township is getting clogged with the ever increasing traffic on their roads. Cities which have already acquired a shape can be restructured through implementing metro rail-based mass rapid transit systems (MRTS). It has been observed that road- based MRTS is less effective in the urban centres in India. Most of the Indian cities have developed in a haphazard manner and there is no or little scope for implementation of road-based MRTS.
The use of CNG vehicles should be increased and people should be encouraged to use more and more of it. It could be fuelled further by asking auto manufacturers to assign CNG fitting stations from where people can install CNG kits in their cars without losing their warranty. Conversion percentage of vehicles into CNG will get a shot in the arm with this initiative.
However, it seems impossible for governments to act on their own because unlike the Delhi government, very few governments in the states enjoy such absolute majority. The reason for judicial intervention is the avaricious attitude of the people. The court should reassume its role and put its act together to save them from the self-destructive ways and should pave a way in which pollution could be curbed in India.

According to the passage, which of the following is true?

Answer the following question based on the information given below.

Parents have been raising children since the beginning of the human race. But raising children is not the same as 'parenting'. The word itself entered the dictionary only in the 1950s, and did not become a part of the popular vocabulary till the 1970s.

Initially, the word was used to refer to what parents did, but over the years, especially today, the word has become completely normative. "'To parent' is a goal-directed verb; it describes a job, a kind of work. The goal is to somehow turn your child into a better or happier or more successful adult," writes Dr Alison Gopnik in The Wall Street Journal.
The idea that 'parenting' involves tips, tricks and techniques that enable people to become better fathers and mothers has become widespread, not just in the US, but around the world. The idea is so ubiquitous that the very idea of questioning it seems heretical. But the whole concept of 'parenting' is fundamentally misguided, says Gopnik.

For millennia, raising a child did not just involve the parents. There were grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, siblings, friends and neighbours. "For most of human history, we lived in these extended family groups. This meant that we learned how to take care of children by practicing with our own little sisters and baby cousins and by watching many other people take care of children," writes Gopnik. But these groups no longer exist in large parts of the world. They've been scattered, dislocated, and communicate via the internet. "Today, most middle-class parents spend years taking classes and pursuing careers before they have children. It's not surprising, then, that going to school and working are modern parents' models for taking care of children: You go to school and work with a goal in mind, and you can be taught to do better at school and work," she writes.

Working to achieve a good outcome is a good idea for businessmen or writers, but making a child a 'product' or an 'outcome' does no justice to either the parent or the child, says Gopnik. In fact, there is no evidence to show that the small differences in 'parenting' techniques that many parents obsess over make any difference to the child's adulthood. "The most important rewards of being a parent aren't your children's grades and trophies--or even their graduations and weddings. They come from the moment-by- moment physical and psychological joy of being with this particular child, and in that child's moment-by-moment joy in being with you," writes Gopnik.

If that means valuing 'being a parent' over 'parenting', it sounds like a good advice.

According to the passage, ideally, focus of parenthood 3Marks should be oriented towards which of the following?