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DIRECTIONS for the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The stylization underlying all existing writing systems is at the root of orthography, which literally means "drawing right" As long as writing was based on drawing a recognizable picture, its exact shape could vary. Once written symbols became a matter of convention, there was only a single way to spell them properly, or a single "orthography".A second factor that drew writing away from pictography was the problem of drawing pictures of abstract ideas. No picture could possibly depict freedom, master and slave, victory, or god. Frequently, an association of ideas did the trick. In cuneiform writing, a divinity was a star; the profile of a face with the mouth touching a bowl meant a ration of food. Unfortunately, clever as they were, these conventions only meant anything to the trained eye --the direct connection from picture to meaning was lost.Another trick consisted of exploiting the similarity between certain sounds to draw what were essentially visual puns. This is known by historians as the rebus principle. It involves the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound. This procedure converts pictograms into phonograms. This kind of transcription of meaning progressively gave way to writing sounds. With the rebus principle, the Sumerians and the Egyptians gradually created an array of symbols that could transcribe any speech sound in their languages.The Egyptians and the Sumerians thus came very close to the alphabetic principle, but neither managed to extract this gem from their overblown writing systems. The rebus strategy would have allowed them to write a word or sentence with a compact set of phonetic signs, but they continued to sup­plement them with a vast array of pictograms. This unfortunate mixture of two systems, one primarily based on sound, the other on meaning, created considerable ambiguity.With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the scribes could have simplified their system vastly by choosing to stick to speech sounds alone. Unfortunately, cultural evolution suffers from inertia and does not make rational decisions. Consequently, both the Egyptians and the Sumerians simply followed the natural slope of increasing complexity. Cuneiform notation added "determinative" ideograms to clarify the concept of the accompanying signs. Each marked the semantic categories of words: city, man, stone, wood, God, and so on. For instance, the character for "plow: accompanied by the deter­minative "wood; meant the agricultural tool. Determinatives also helped specify the meanings of words written in syllabic notation -a useful trick since any given syllable often corresponded to several homophone words (much like "one" and "won").Why do mixed writing systems appear to constitute such a stable attractor for societies throughout the world? The reason for this probably lies at the crossroads of multiple constraints: the way our memory is structured, how language is organized, and the availability of certain brain connections. Our memory is poorly equipped for purely pic­tographic or logographic script, where each word has its own symbol. The mere notation of sounds would be equally unsatisfactory. Reading would be comparable to decoding a rebus-it wood bee two in knee fish hunt. A mixed system using fragments of both sound and meaning appears to be the best solution.Excerpted from ‘Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Page 184-193Q. From its inception in Mesopotamia, the "virus" of writing spread quickly to the surrounding cultures. The epidemic, however, remained confined, in all societies, to a small group of specialists. The complexity of this invention curbed its capacity to spread. Even in present-day China, scholars must learn several thousand signs. As recently as the 1950s, the rate of illiteracy in the adult Chinese population was close to 80 percent-before _________ and massive investment in education brought this figure down to about 10 percent.a)Cultural revolutionb)Simplification of writingc)Banning many dialectsd)Mandatory learningCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? for CAT 2025 is part of CAT preparation. The Question and answers have been prepared according to the CAT exam syllabus. Information about DIRECTIONS for the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The stylization underlying all existing writing systems is at the root of orthography, which literally means "drawing right" As long as writing was based on drawing a recognizable picture, its exact shape could vary. Once written symbols became a matter of convention, there was only a single way to spell them properly, or a single "orthography".A second factor that drew writing away from pictography was the problem of drawing pictures of abstract ideas. No picture could possibly depict freedom, master and slave, victory, or god. Frequently, an association of ideas did the trick. In cuneiform writing, a divinity was a star; the profile of a face with the mouth touching a bowl meant a ration of food. Unfortunately, clever as they were, these conventions only meant anything to the trained eye --the direct connection from picture to meaning was lost.Another trick consisted of exploiting the similarity between certain sounds to draw what were essentially visual puns. This is known by historians as the rebus principle. It involves the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound. This procedure converts pictograms into phonograms. This kind of transcription of meaning progressively gave way to writing sounds. With the rebus principle, the Sumerians and the Egyptians gradually created an array of symbols that could transcribe any speech sound in their languages.The Egyptians and the Sumerians thus came very close to the alphabetic principle, but neither managed to extract this gem from their overblown writing systems. The rebus strategy would have allowed them to write a word or sentence with a compact set of phonetic signs, but they continued to sup­plement them with a vast array of pictograms. This unfortunate mixture of two systems, one primarily based on sound, the other on meaning, created considerable ambiguity.With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the scribes could have simplified their system vastly by choosing to stick to speech sounds alone. Unfortunately, cultural evolution suffers from inertia and does not make rational decisions. Consequently, both the Egyptians and the Sumerians simply followed the natural slope of increasing complexity. Cuneiform notation added "determinative" ideograms to clarify the concept of the accompanying signs. Each marked the semantic categories of words: city, man, stone, wood, God, and so on. For instance, the character for "plow: accompanied by the deter­minative "wood; meant the agricultural tool. Determinatives also helped specify the meanings of words written in syllabic notation -a useful trick since any given syllable often corresponded to several homophone words (much like "one" and "won").Why do mixed writing systems appear to constitute such a stable attractor for societies throughout the world? The reason for this probably lies at the crossroads of multiple constraints: the way our memory is structured, how language is organized, and the availability of certain brain connections. Our memory is poorly equipped for purely pic­tographic or logographic script, where each word has its own symbol. The mere notation of sounds would be equally unsatisfactory. Reading would be comparable to decoding a rebus-it wood bee two in knee fish hunt. A mixed system using fragments of both sound and meaning appears to be the best solution.Excerpted from ‘Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Page 184-193Q. From its inception in Mesopotamia, the "virus" of writing spread quickly to the surrounding cultures. The epidemic, however, remained confined, in all societies, to a small group of specialists. The complexity of this invention curbed its capacity to spread. Even in present-day China, scholars must learn several thousand signs. As recently as the 1950s, the rate of illiteracy in the adult Chinese population was close to 80 percent-before _________ and massive investment in education brought this figure down to about 10 percent.a)Cultural revolutionb)Simplification of writingc)Banning many dialectsd)Mandatory learningCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? covers all topics & solutions for CAT 2025 Exam. Find important definitions, questions, meanings, examples, exercises and tests below for DIRECTIONS for the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The stylization underlying all existing writing systems is at the root of orthography, which literally means "drawing right" As long as writing was based on drawing a recognizable picture, its exact shape could vary. Once written symbols became a matter of convention, there was only a single way to spell them properly, or a single "orthography".A second factor that drew writing away from pictography was the problem of drawing pictures of abstract ideas. No picture could possibly depict freedom, master and slave, victory, or god. Frequently, an association of ideas did the trick. In cuneiform writing, a divinity was a star; the profile of a face with the mouth touching a bowl meant a ration of food. Unfortunately, clever as they were, these conventions only meant anything to the trained eye --the direct connection from picture to meaning was lost.Another trick consisted of exploiting the similarity between certain sounds to draw what were essentially visual puns. This is known by historians as the rebus principle. It involves the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound. This procedure converts pictograms into phonograms. This kind of transcription of meaning progressively gave way to writing sounds. With the rebus principle, the Sumerians and the Egyptians gradually created an array of symbols that could transcribe any speech sound in their languages.The Egyptians and the Sumerians thus came very close to the alphabetic principle, but neither managed to extract this gem from their overblown writing systems. The rebus strategy would have allowed them to write a word or sentence with a compact set of phonetic signs, but they continued to sup­plement them with a vast array of pictograms. This unfortunate mixture of two systems, one primarily based on sound, the other on meaning, created considerable ambiguity.With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the scribes could have simplified their system vastly by choosing to stick to speech sounds alone. Unfortunately, cultural evolution suffers from inertia and does not make rational decisions. Consequently, both the Egyptians and the Sumerians simply followed the natural slope of increasing complexity. Cuneiform notation added "determinative" ideograms to clarify the concept of the accompanying signs. Each marked the semantic categories of words: city, man, stone, wood, God, and so on. For instance, the character for "plow: accompanied by the deter­minative "wood; meant the agricultural tool. Determinatives also helped specify the meanings of words written in syllabic notation -a useful trick since any given syllable often corresponded to several homophone words (much like "one" and "won").Why do mixed writing systems appear to constitute such a stable attractor for societies throughout the world? The reason for this probably lies at the crossroads of multiple constraints: the way our memory is structured, how language is organized, and the availability of certain brain connections. Our memory is poorly equipped for purely pic­tographic or logographic script, where each word has its own symbol. The mere notation of sounds would be equally unsatisfactory. Reading would be comparable to decoding a rebus-it wood bee two in knee fish hunt. A mixed system using fragments of both sound and meaning appears to be the best solution.Excerpted from ‘Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Page 184-193Q. From its inception in Mesopotamia, the "virus" of writing spread quickly to the surrounding cultures. The epidemic, however, remained confined, in all societies, to a small group of specialists. The complexity of this invention curbed its capacity to spread. Even in present-day China, scholars must learn several thousand signs. As recently as the 1950s, the rate of illiteracy in the adult Chinese population was close to 80 percent-before _________ and massive investment in education brought this figure down to about 10 percent.a)Cultural revolutionb)Simplification of writingc)Banning many dialectsd)Mandatory learningCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer?.

Solutions for DIRECTIONS for the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The stylization underlying all existing writing systems is at the root of orthography, which literally means "drawing right" As long as writing was based on drawing a recognizable picture, its exact shape could vary. Once written symbols became a matter of convention, there was only a single way to spell them properly, or a single "orthography".A second factor that drew writing away from pictography was the problem of drawing pictures of abstract ideas. No picture could possibly depict freedom, master and slave, victory, or god. Frequently, an association of ideas did the trick. In cuneiform writing, a divinity was a star; the profile of a face with the mouth touching a bowl meant a ration of food. Unfortunately, clever as they were, these conventions only meant anything to the trained eye --the direct connection from picture to meaning was lost.Another trick consisted of exploiting the similarity between certain sounds to draw what were essentially visual puns. This is known by historians as the rebus principle. It involves the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound. This procedure converts pictograms into phonograms. This kind of transcription of meaning progressively gave way to writing sounds. With the rebus principle, the Sumerians and the Egyptians gradually created an array of symbols that could transcribe any speech sound in their languages.The Egyptians and the Sumerians thus came very close to the alphabetic principle, but neither managed to extract this gem from their overblown writing systems. The rebus strategy would have allowed them to write a word or sentence with a compact set of phonetic signs, but they continued to sup­plement them with a vast array of pictograms. This unfortunate mixture of two systems, one primarily based on sound, the other on meaning, created considerable ambiguity.With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the scribes could have simplified their system vastly by choosing to stick to speech sounds alone. Unfortunately, cultural evolution suffers from inertia and does not make rational decisions. Consequently, both the Egyptians and the Sumerians simply followed the natural slope of increasing complexity. Cuneiform notation added "determinative" ideograms to clarify the concept of the accompanying signs. Each marked the semantic categories of words: city, man, stone, wood, God, and so on. For instance, the character for "plow: accompanied by the deter­minative "wood; meant the agricultural tool. Determinatives also helped specify the meanings of words written in syllabic notation -a useful trick since any given syllable often corresponded to several homophone words (much like "one" and "won").Why do mixed writing systems appear to constitute such a stable attractor for societies throughout the world? The reason for this probably lies at the crossroads of multiple constraints: the way our memory is structured, how language is organized, and the availability of certain brain connections. Our memory is poorly equipped for purely pic­tographic or logographic script, where each word has its own symbol. The mere notation of sounds would be equally unsatisfactory. Reading would be comparable to decoding a rebus-it wood bee two in knee fish hunt. A mixed system using fragments of both sound and meaning appears to be the best solution.Excerpted from ‘Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Page 184-193Q. From its inception in Mesopotamia, the "virus" of writing spread quickly to the surrounding cultures. The epidemic, however, remained confined, in all societies, to a small group of specialists. The complexity of this invention curbed its capacity to spread. Even in present-day China, scholars must learn several thousand signs. As recently as the 1950s, the rate of illiteracy in the adult Chinese population was close to 80 percent-before _________ and massive investment in education brought this figure down to about 10 percent.a)Cultural revolutionb)Simplification of writingc)Banning many dialectsd)Mandatory learningCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? in English & in Hindi are available as part of our courses for CAT. Download more important topics, notes, lectures and mock test series for CAT Exam by signing up for free.

Here you can find the meaning of DIRECTIONS for the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The stylization underlying all existing writing systems is at the root of orthography, which literally means "drawing right" As long as writing was based on drawing a recognizable picture, its exact shape could vary. Once written symbols became a matter of convention, there was only a single way to spell them properly, or a single "orthography".A second factor that drew writing away from pictography was the problem of drawing pictures of abstract ideas. No picture could possibly depict freedom, master and slave, victory, or god. Frequently, an association of ideas did the trick. In cuneiform writing, a divinity was a star; the profile of a face with the mouth touching a bowl meant a ration of food. Unfortunately, clever as they were, these conventions only meant anything to the trained eye --the direct connection from picture to meaning was lost.Another trick consisted of exploiting the similarity between certain sounds to draw what were essentially visual puns. This is known by historians as the rebus principle. It involves the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound. This procedure converts pictograms into phonograms. This kind of transcription of meaning progressively gave way to writing sounds. With the rebus principle, the Sumerians and the Egyptians gradually created an array of symbols that could transcribe any speech sound in their languages.The Egyptians and the Sumerians thus came very close to the alphabetic principle, but neither managed to extract this gem from their overblown writing systems. The rebus strategy would have allowed them to write a word or sentence with a compact set of phonetic signs, but they continued to sup­plement them with a vast array of pictograms. This unfortunate mixture of two systems, one primarily based on sound, the other on meaning, created considerable ambiguity.With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the scribes could have simplified their system vastly by choosing to stick to speech sounds alone. Unfortunately, cultural evolution suffers from inertia and does not make rational decisions. Consequently, both the Egyptians and the Sumerians simply followed the natural slope of increasing complexity. Cuneiform notation added "determinative" ideograms to clarify the concept of the accompanying signs. Each marked the semantic categories of words: city, man, stone, wood, God, and so on. For instance, the character for "plow: accompanied by the deter­minative "wood; meant the agricultural tool. Determinatives also helped specify the meanings of words written in syllabic notation -a useful trick since any given syllable often corresponded to several homophone words (much like "one" and "won").Why do mixed writing systems appear to constitute such a stable attractor for societies throughout the world? The reason for this probably lies at the crossroads of multiple constraints: the way our memory is structured, how language is organized, and the availability of certain brain connections. Our memory is poorly equipped for purely pic­tographic or logographic script, where each word has its own symbol. The mere notation of sounds would be equally unsatisfactory. Reading would be comparable to decoding a rebus-it wood bee two in knee fish hunt. A mixed system using fragments of both sound and meaning appears to be the best solution.Excerpted from ‘Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Page 184-193Q. From its inception in Mesopotamia, the "virus" of writing spread quickly to the surrounding cultures. The epidemic, however, remained confined, in all societies, to a small group of specialists. The complexity of this invention curbed its capacity to spread. Even in present-day China, scholars must learn several thousand signs. As recently as the 1950s, the rate of illiteracy in the adult Chinese population was close to 80 percent-before _________ and massive investment in education brought this figure down to about 10 percent.a)Cultural revolutionb)Simplification of writingc)Banning many dialectsd)Mandatory learningCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? defined & explained in the simplest way possible. Besides giving the explanation of DIRECTIONS for the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The stylization underlying all existing writing systems is at the root of orthography, which literally means "drawing right" As long as writing was based on drawing a recognizable picture, its exact shape could vary. Once written symbols became a matter of convention, there was only a single way to spell them properly, or a single "orthography".A second factor that drew writing away from pictography was the problem of drawing pictures of abstract ideas. No picture could possibly depict freedom, master and slave, victory, or god. Frequently, an association of ideas did the trick. In cuneiform writing, a divinity was a star; the profile of a face with the mouth touching a bowl meant a ration of food. Unfortunately, clever as they were, these conventions only meant anything to the trained eye --the direct connection from picture to meaning was lost.Another trick consisted of exploiting the similarity between certain sounds to draw what were essentially visual puns. This is known by historians as the rebus principle. It involves the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound. This procedure converts pictograms into phonograms. This kind of transcription of meaning progressively gave way to writing sounds. With the rebus principle, the Sumerians and the Egyptians gradually created an array of symbols that could transcribe any speech sound in their languages.The Egyptians and the Sumerians thus came very close to the alphabetic principle, but neither managed to extract this gem from their overblown writing systems. The rebus strategy would have allowed them to write a word or sentence with a compact set of phonetic signs, but they continued to sup­plement them with a vast array of pictograms. This unfortunate mixture of two systems, one primarily based on sound, the other on meaning, created considerable ambiguity.With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the scribes could have simplified their system vastly by choosing to stick to speech sounds alone. Unfortunately, cultural evolution suffers from inertia and does not make rational decisions. Consequently, both the Egyptians and the Sumerians simply followed the natural slope of increasing complexity. Cuneiform notation added "determinative" ideograms to clarify the concept of the accompanying signs. Each marked the semantic categories of words: city, man, stone, wood, God, and so on. For instance, the character for "plow: accompanied by the deter­minative "wood; meant the agricultural tool. Determinatives also helped specify the meanings of words written in syllabic notation -a useful trick since any given syllable often corresponded to several homophone words (much like "one" and "won").Why do mixed writing systems appear to constitute such a stable attractor for societies throughout the world? The reason for this probably lies at the crossroads of multiple constraints: the way our memory is structured, how language is organized, and the availability of certain brain connections. Our memory is poorly equipped for purely pic­tographic or logographic script, where each word has its own symbol. The mere notation of sounds would be equally unsatisfactory. Reading would be comparable to decoding a rebus-it wood bee two in knee fish hunt. A mixed system using fragments of both sound and meaning appears to be the best solution.Excerpted from ‘Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Page 184-193Q. From its inception in Mesopotamia, the "virus" of writing spread quickly to the surrounding cultures. The epidemic, however, remained confined, in all societies, to a small group of specialists. The complexity of this invention curbed its capacity to spread. Even in present-day China, scholars must learn several thousand signs. As recently as the 1950s, the rate of illiteracy in the adult Chinese population was close to 80 percent-before _________ and massive investment in education brought this figure down to about 10 percent.a)Cultural revolutionb)Simplification of writingc)Banning many dialectsd)Mandatory learningCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer?, a detailed solution for DIRECTIONS for the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The stylization underlying all existing writing systems is at the root of orthography, which literally means "drawing right" As long as writing was based on drawing a recognizable picture, its exact shape could vary. Once written symbols became a matter of convention, there was only a single way to spell them properly, or a single "orthography".A second factor that drew writing away from pictography was the problem of drawing pictures of abstract ideas. No picture could possibly depict freedom, master and slave, victory, or god. Frequently, an association of ideas did the trick. In cuneiform writing, a divinity was a star; the profile of a face with the mouth touching a bowl meant a ration of food. Unfortunately, clever as they were, these conventions only meant anything to the trained eye --the direct connection from picture to meaning was lost.Another trick consisted of exploiting the similarity between certain sounds to draw what were essentially visual puns. This is known by historians as the rebus principle. It involves the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound. This procedure converts pictograms into phonograms. This kind of transcription of meaning progressively gave way to writing sounds. With the rebus principle, the Sumerians and the Egyptians gradually created an array of symbols that could transcribe any speech sound in their languages.The Egyptians and the Sumerians thus came very close to the alphabetic principle, but neither managed to extract this gem from their overblown writing systems. The rebus strategy would have allowed them to write a word or sentence with a compact set of phonetic signs, but they continued to sup­plement them with a vast array of pictograms. This unfortunate mixture of two systems, one primarily based on sound, the other on meaning, created considerable ambiguity.With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the scribes could have simplified their system vastly by choosing to stick to speech sounds alone. Unfortunately, cultural evolution suffers from inertia and does not make rational decisions. Consequently, both the Egyptians and the Sumerians simply followed the natural slope of increasing complexity. Cuneiform notation added "determinative" ideograms to clarify the concept of the accompanying signs. Each marked the semantic categories of words: city, man, stone, wood, God, and so on. For instance, the character for "plow: accompanied by the deter­minative "wood; meant the agricultural tool. Determinatives also helped specify the meanings of words written in syllabic notation -a useful trick since any given syllable often corresponded to several homophone words (much like "one" and "won").Why do mixed writing systems appear to constitute such a stable attractor for societies throughout the world? The reason for this probably lies at the crossroads of multiple constraints: the way our memory is structured, how language is organized, and the availability of certain brain connections. Our memory is poorly equipped for purely pic­tographic or logographic script, where each word has its own symbol. The mere notation of sounds would be equally unsatisfactory. Reading would be comparable to decoding a rebus-it wood bee two in knee fish hunt. A mixed system using fragments of both sound and meaning appears to be the best solution.Excerpted from ‘Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Page 184-193Q. From its inception in Mesopotamia, the "virus" of writing spread quickly to the surrounding cultures. The epidemic, however, remained confined, in all societies, to a small group of specialists. The complexity of this invention curbed its capacity to spread. Even in present-day China, scholars must learn several thousand signs. As recently as the 1950s, the rate of illiteracy in the adult Chinese population was close to 80 percent-before _________ and massive investment in education brought this figure down to about 10 percent.a)Cultural revolutionb)Simplification of writingc)Banning many dialectsd)Mandatory learningCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? has been provided alongside types of DIRECTIONS for the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The stylization underlying all existing writing systems is at the root of orthography, which literally means "drawing right" As long as writing was based on drawing a recognizable picture, its exact shape could vary. Once written symbols became a matter of convention, there was only a single way to spell them properly, or a single "orthography".A second factor that drew writing away from pictography was the problem of drawing pictures of abstract ideas. No picture could possibly depict freedom, master and slave, victory, or god. Frequently, an association of ideas did the trick. In cuneiform writing, a divinity was a star; the profile of a face with the mouth touching a bowl meant a ration of food. Unfortunately, clever as they were, these conventions only meant anything to the trained eye --the direct connection from picture to meaning was lost.Another trick consisted of exploiting the similarity between certain sounds to draw what were essentially visual puns. This is known by historians as the rebus principle. It involves the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound. This procedure converts pictograms into phonograms. This kind of transcription of meaning progressively gave way to writing sounds. With the rebus principle, the Sumerians and the Egyptians gradually created an array of symbols that could transcribe any speech sound in their languages.The Egyptians and the Sumerians thus came very close to the alphabetic principle, but neither managed to extract this gem from their overblown writing systems. The rebus strategy would have allowed them to write a word or sentence with a compact set of phonetic signs, but they continued to sup­plement them with a vast array of pictograms. This unfortunate mixture of two systems, one primarily based on sound, the other on meaning, created considerable ambiguity.With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the scribes could have simplified their system vastly by choosing to stick to speech sounds alone. Unfortunately, cultural evolution suffers from inertia and does not make rational decisions. Consequently, both the Egyptians and the Sumerians simply followed the natural slope of increasing complexity. Cuneiform notation added "determinative" ideograms to clarify the concept of the accompanying signs. Each marked the semantic categories of words: city, man, stone, wood, God, and so on. For instance, the character for "plow: accompanied by the deter­minative "wood; meant the agricultural tool. Determinatives also helped specify the meanings of words written in syllabic notation -a useful trick since any given syllable often corresponded to several homophone words (much like "one" and "won").Why do mixed writing systems appear to constitute such a stable attractor for societies throughout the world? The reason for this probably lies at the crossroads of multiple constraints: the way our memory is structured, how language is organized, and the availability of certain brain connections. Our memory is poorly equipped for purely pic­tographic or logographic script, where each word has its own symbol. The mere notation of sounds would be equally unsatisfactory. Reading would be comparable to decoding a rebus-it wood bee two in knee fish hunt. A mixed system using fragments of both sound and meaning appears to be the best solution.Excerpted from ‘Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Page 184-193Q. From its inception in Mesopotamia, the "virus" of writing spread quickly to the surrounding cultures. The epidemic, however, remained confined, in all societies, to a small group of specialists. The complexity of this invention curbed its capacity to spread. Even in present-day China, scholars must learn several thousand signs. As recently as the 1950s, the rate of illiteracy in the adult Chinese population was close to 80 percent-before _________ and massive investment in education brought this figure down to about 10 percent.a)Cultural revolutionb)Simplification of writingc)Banning many dialectsd)Mandatory learningCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? theory, EduRev gives you an ample number of questions to practice DIRECTIONS for the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The stylization underlying all existing writing systems is at the root of orthography, which literally means "drawing right" As long as writing was based on drawing a recognizable picture, its exact shape could vary. Once written symbols became a matter of convention, there was only a single way to spell them properly, or a single "orthography".A second factor that drew writing away from pictography was the problem of drawing pictures of abstract ideas. No picture could possibly depict freedom, master and slave, victory, or god. Frequently, an association of ideas did the trick. In cuneiform writing, a divinity was a star; the profile of a face with the mouth touching a bowl meant a ration of food. Unfortunately, clever as they were, these conventions only meant anything to the trained eye --the direct connection from picture to meaning was lost.Another trick consisted of exploiting the similarity between certain sounds to draw what were essentially visual puns. This is known by historians as the rebus principle. It involves the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound. This procedure converts pictograms into phonograms. This kind of transcription of meaning progressively gave way to writing sounds. With the rebus principle, the Sumerians and the Egyptians gradually created an array of symbols that could transcribe any speech sound in their languages.The Egyptians and the Sumerians thus came very close to the alphabetic principle, but neither managed to extract this gem from their overblown writing systems. The rebus strategy would have allowed them to write a word or sentence with a compact set of phonetic signs, but they continued to sup­plement them with a vast array of pictograms. This unfortunate mixture of two systems, one primarily based on sound, the other on meaning, created considerable ambiguity.With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the scribes could have simplified their system vastly by choosing to stick to speech sounds alone. Unfortunately, cultural evolution suffers from inertia and does not make rational decisions. Consequently, both the Egyptians and the Sumerians simply followed the natural slope of increasing complexity. Cuneiform notation added "determinative" ideograms to clarify the concept of the accompanying signs. Each marked the semantic categories of words: city, man, stone, wood, God, and so on. For instance, the character for "plow: accompanied by the deter­minative "wood; meant the agricultural tool. Determinatives also helped specify the meanings of words written in syllabic notation -a useful trick since any given syllable often corresponded to several homophone words (much like "one" and "won").Why do mixed writing systems appear to constitute such a stable attractor for societies throughout the world? The reason for this probably lies at the crossroads of multiple constraints: the way our memory is structured, how language is organized, and the availability of certain brain connections. Our memory is poorly equipped for purely pic­tographic or logographic script, where each word has its own symbol. The mere notation of sounds would be equally unsatisfactory. Reading would be comparable to decoding a rebus-it wood bee two in knee fish hunt. A mixed system using fragments of both sound and meaning appears to be the best solution.Excerpted from ‘Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Page 184-193Q. From its inception in Mesopotamia, the "virus" of writing spread quickly to the surrounding cultures. The epidemic, however, remained confined, in all societies, to a small group of specialists. The complexity of this invention curbed its capacity to spread. Even in present-day China, scholars must learn several thousand signs. As recently as the 1950s, the rate of illiteracy in the adult Chinese population was close to 80 percent-before _________ and massive investment in education brought this figure down to about 10 percent.a)Cultural revolutionb)Simplification of writingc)Banning many dialectsd)Mandatory learningCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? tests, examples and also practice CAT tests.