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Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:
Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography. 
And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus. 
His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. Though his factory never materialized exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardized way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realization that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.
Q. The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:
  • a)
    The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political object
  • b)
    The role of computational capacity in Richardson's forecast factory and the Anthropocene era
  • c)
    The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather prediction
  • d)
    The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution.
Correct answer is option 'A'. Can you explain this answer?
Most Upvoted Answer
Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that f...
Option A: The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political object. This option relates to the passage's discussion of Richardson's forecast factory and how the modern understanding of the planet has changed, resulting in a new political object. It captures the central theme of the passage, making it a strong contender.
Option B: The role of computational capacity in Richardson's forecast factory and the Anthropocene era. While this option touches on some aspects of the passage, such as the importance of computational capacity in Richardson's ideas and the Anthropocene era, it doesn't encompass the full theme, making it a weaker choice.
Option C: The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather prediction. This option focuses only on one aspect of the passage, the evolution of computation technology, and ignores the broader themes related to the planet and its changing role as a political object. This option can be easily eliminated.
Option D: The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution. This option introduces the Copernican revolution, which is not directly related to the passage's central theme. It can be eliminated as it does not fully capture the central theme of the passage.
After analyzing the options, we can conclude that Option A, "The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political object," best represents the central theme of the passage. It captures the progression of weather forecasting from Richardson's forecast factory to the modern understanding of the planet and the political implications arising from this new perspective.
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Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography.And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus.His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. Though his factory never materialized exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardized way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realization that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.Q. The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:a)The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political objectb)The role of computational capacity in Richardsons forecast factory and the Anthropocene erac)The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather predictiond)The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution.Correct answer is option 'A'. Can you explain this answer?
Question Description
Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography.And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus.His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. Though his factory never materialized exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardized way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realization that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.Q. The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:a)The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political objectb)The role of computational capacity in Richardsons forecast factory and the Anthropocene erac)The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather predictiond)The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution.Correct answer is option 'A'. Can you explain this answer? for CAT 2024 is part of CAT preparation. The Question and answers have been prepared according to the CAT exam syllabus. Information about Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography.And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus.His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. Though his factory never materialized exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardized way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realization that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.Q. The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:a)The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political objectb)The role of computational capacity in Richardsons forecast factory and the Anthropocene erac)The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather predictiond)The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution.Correct answer is option 'A'. Can you explain this answer? covers all topics & solutions for CAT 2024 Exam. Find important definitions, questions, meanings, examples, exercises and tests below for Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography.And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus.His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. Though his factory never materialized exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardized way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realization that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.Q. The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:a)The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political objectb)The role of computational capacity in Richardsons forecast factory and the Anthropocene erac)The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather predictiond)The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution.Correct answer is option 'A'. Can you explain this answer?.
Solutions for Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography.And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus.His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. Though his factory never materialized exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardized way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realization that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.Q. The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:a)The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political objectb)The role of computational capacity in Richardsons forecast factory and the Anthropocene erac)The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather predictiond)The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution.Correct answer is option 'A'. 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: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography.And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus.His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. Though his factory never materialized exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardized way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realization that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.Q. The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:a)The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political objectb)The role of computational capacity in Richardsons forecast factory and the Anthropocene erac)The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather predictiond)The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution.Correct answer is option 'A'. Can you explain this answer? defined & explained in the simplest way possible. Besides giving the explanation of Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography.And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus.His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. Though his factory never materialized exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardized way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realization that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.Q. The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:a)The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political objectb)The role of computational capacity in Richardsons forecast factory and the Anthropocene erac)The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather predictiond)The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution.Correct answer is option 'A'. Can you explain this answer?, a detailed solution for Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography.And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus.His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. Though his factory never materialized exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardized way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realization that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.Q. The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:a)The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political objectb)The role of computational capacity in Richardsons forecast factory and the Anthropocene erac)The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather predictiond)The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution.Correct answer is option 'A'. Can you explain this answer? has been provided alongside types of Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography.And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus.His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. Though his factory never materialized exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardized way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realization that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.Q. The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:a)The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political objectb)The role of computational capacity in Richardsons forecast factory and the Anthropocene erac)The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather predictiond)The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution.Correct answer is option 'A'. Can you explain this answer? theory, EduRev gives you an ample number of questions to practice Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography.And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus.His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. Though his factory never materialized exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardized way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realization that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.Q. The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:a)The evolution of weather forecasting and the emergence of a new political objectb)The role of computational capacity in Richardsons forecast factory and the Anthropocene erac)The transition from human computers to electronic computers in weather predictiond)The challenges of weather prediction and the Copernican revolution.Correct answer is option 'A'. Can you explain this answer? tests, examples and also practice CAT tests.
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