100 RCs for Practice Questions- 1 Notes | Study 100 RCs for Practice - CAT

The passage given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.
The greatest challenge in understanding the role of randomness in life is that although the basic principles of randomness arise from everyday logic, many of the consequences that follow from those principles prove counterintuitive.
In the mid-1960s, Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, was lecturing a group of Israeli air force flight instructors on the conventional wisdom of behaviour modification and its application to the psychology of flight training. He drove home the point that rewarding positive behaviour works, but punishing mistakes does not. One of his students interrupted, saying ‘I’ve often praised people warmly for beautifully executed manoeuvres, and the next time they always do worse. And I’ve screamed at people for badly executed manoeuvres, and by and large the next time they improve. Don’t tell me that reward works and punishment doesn’t.’ The other flight instructors agreed. To Kahneman, the flight instructors’ experiences rang true. On the other hand, he believed in the animal experiments that demonstrated that reward works better than punishment. He ruminated on this apparent paradox.
The answer lies in a phenomenon called regression towards the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, purely due to chance, by a more ordinary one. Here is how it works: The student pilots all had a certain personal ability to fly fighter planes. Raising their skill level involved many factors and required extensive practise, so although their skill was slowly improving through flight training, the change wouldn’t be noticeable from one manoeuvre to the next. Any especially good or especially poor performance was thus mostly a matter of luck. So if a pilot made an exceptionally good landing – one far above his normal level of performance – then the odds would be good that he would perform closer to his norm – that is, worse – the next day. And if his instructor had praised him, it would appear that the praise had done no good. But if a pilot made an exceptionally bad landing, then the odds would be good that the next day he would perform closer to his norm – that is, better. And if his instructor had a habit of screaming ‘you clumsy ape’ when a student performed poorly, it would appear that his criticism did some good. In reality, it made no difference at all.
This error in intuition spurred Kahneman’s thinking. How widespread, he wondered, was this misunderstanding of uncertainty? Do we make other misjudgements when faced with uncertainty? And what are its implications for human decision making? Kahneman found that even among sophisticated subjects when it came to random processes, people’s beliefs and intuition very often let them down.
Suppose four publishers have rejected the manuscript for your novel. Your intuition might say that the rejections by all those publishing experts mean that your manuscript is no good. But is your intuition correct? Is your novel unsellable? We all know from experience that if several tosses of a coin come up heads, it doesn’t mean we are tossing a two-headed coin. Could it be that publishing success is so unpredictable that even if our novel is destined for the best-seller list, numerous publishers could miss the point and reject it? One book in the 1950s was initially rejected by publishers with such comments as ‘very dull’ and ‘a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions. Today, that book, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, has sold 30 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books in history.