CAT PYQ 2017: Reading Comprehension - 2 | Topic-wise Past Year Questions for CAT PDF Download

Directions: Read the passage carefully and answer the  questions following this within the context.
‘‘A way to deal with frozen feelings’’ Every child experiences all that  happens around him with total awareness. In the first seven years  the child’s brain is like a sponge, taking in all sensory inputs and  building his idea of his surroundings. As long as the environment is  safe, the child learns with incredible speed. However, when the  environment is scary or stressful, the child unlearns past learning  just as rapidly. In the early years of every child’s life, whenever there  is shock, violence, fear or pain, these intense emotions are imprinted  deeply into memory. Whenever the same activity or situation is  repeated, the nervous system and body subconsciously re experience the memory of that trauma. Any emotional situation that  takes us out of the present and into the past means that whenever  the same kind of emotion crops up later in our life we return to the  past for our reference point. If that point was at age three, we find  ourselves behaving like a three-year-old. We feel childish and we  behave childishly. Our feelings are the cause of this ‘glitch’ in our  learning process. We know we should be able to make a positive  change, but that doesn’t change anything. The process of change  need not be traumatic. We couldn’t have done any better because  we didn’t know how to. But we should realise that was then and this  is now! We can choose to choose again. It’s up to us. It’s our movie!

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions:

‘‘There are several factors that contribute to wisdom. Of these I  should put first a sense of proportion; the capacity to take accounts  of all the important factors in a problem and to attach to each its due  weight. This has become more difficult than it used to be owing to  the extent and complexity of the specialised knowledge required of  various kinds of technicians. Suppose, for example, that you are  engaged in research in scientific medicine. The work is difficult and is  likely to absorb the whole of your intellectual energy. You have no  time to consider the effect which your discoveries or invention may  have outside the field of medicine. You succeed (let us say), as  modern medicine has succeeded, in enormously lowering the infant  death-rate, not only in Europe and America, but also in Asia and  Africa. This has the entirely unintended result of making the food  supply inadequate and lowering the standard of life in the most  populous parts of the world. To take an even more spectacular  example, which is in everybody’s mind at the present time- you  study the composition of the atom from a disinterested desire for  knowledge and incidentally place in the hands of powerful lunatics  the means of destroying the human race. In such ways the pursuit of  knowledge may become harmful unless it is combined with wisdom;  and wisdom in the sense of comprehensive vision is not necessarily  present in specialists in the pursuit of knowledge. Comprehensiveness alone, however, is not enough to constitute  wisdom. There must be, also, certain awareness of ends of human  life. This may be illustrated by the study of history. Many eminent  historians have done more harm than good because they viewed  facts through the distorting medium of their own passions. Hegel had a philosophy of history which did not suffer from any lack of  comprehensiveness, since it started from earliest time and  continued into an indefinite future. But the chief lesson of history  which he sought to inculcate was that from the year A.D. 400 down  to his own time, Germany had been the most important nation and  the standard bearer of progress in the world. Perhaps one could  stretch the comprehensiveness that constitutes wisdom to include  not only intellect but also feeling. It is by no means uncommon to  find men/women whose knowledge is wide but those feelings are  narrow. Such men/ women lack what I am calling wisdom. I think  the essence of wisdom is emancipation, as far as possible, from the  tyranny of the here and the now. We cannot help the egoism of our  senses. Sight, sound and touch are bound up with our own bodies  and cannot be made impersonal. Our emotions start similarly from  ourselves. An infant feels hunger or discomfort; gradually with the  years his horizon widens, and, in proportion as his thoughts and  feelings become less personal and less concerned with his own  physical states, he achieves growing wisdom. This is of course a  matter of degree. No one can view the world with complete  impartiality; however, it is possible to make a continual approach  towards impartiality, on the one hand, by knowing things somewhat  remote in time or space, and, on the other hand, by giving to such  things their due weight in our feelings. It is this approach towards  impartiality that constitutes growth in wisdom. Perhaps in this sense  the wisdom can be taught. I think that this teaching should have a  larger intellectual element than has been customary in what has  been thought of as moral instruction. I think that the disastrous  result of hatred and narrow mindedness to those who fed them can  be pointed out incidentally in the course of giving knowledge. Knowledge and morals ought not to be too much separated. It is  true that the kind of specialised knowledge which is required for  various kinds of skills has very little to do with wisdom. But it should  be supplemented in education by wider surveys calculated to put it  in its place in the totality of human activities. Even the best  technicians should also be good citizens, i.e. citizens of the world  and not of any one nation. With every increase of knowledge and  skill, wisdom becomes more necessary for every such increase  augments our capacity of realising our purposes, and therefore  augments our capacity for evil, if our purposes are unwise. The  world needs wisdom as it has never needed it before; and if  knowledge continues to increase, the world will need wisdom in the  future even more than it does now.