Test Level 1: Odd Sentence Out - CAT MCQ

Destiny and spirituality are the two sides of the same coin.

Yet, there is huge difference of quality between the two.

Destiny is commonly regarded as fate; a fixed timeline of events.

The two, therefore, cannot exist together at the same time.

One is unconsciousness and the other is consciousness.

Colonialists, for example, used beaver pelts and dried corn as currency for transactions.

Two individuals, each possessing a commodity the other wanted or needed, would enter into an agreement to trade their goods.

The lack of transferability of bartering for goods is tiring, confusing and inefficient.

If you have cows but need bananas, you must find someone who not only has bananas but also the desire for meat.

Barter system, however, does not provide the transferability and divisibility that makes trading efficient.

We are very much ingrained in thinking that time goes from past to future; that there is something important about the world that past-to-future descriptions get right and future-to-past descriptions get wrong.

We think that the way things are now depends on how they were in the past, but not on how they are in the future; we think of the laws of nature as telling the Universe how to evolve from earlier to later, and not later to earlier.

Even though the Universe is expanding relative to the past-to-future direction, and contracting relative to the future-to-past direction, we nonetheless take it for granted that 'really' the Universe expands and does not contract.

It is very simple to explain this by holding that time really does pass, and that your birthday really does go through a process of becoming present and then past.

This idea of time going from past to future underlies much of our wider philosophical thinking about the nature of reality: we think of the past history of the world as fixed but of the future as undecided and open to a wealth of possibilities.

He is obviously an efficient and hard working manager with high ethical standards, but he had a strong irrational streak.

It is indicative of a large blind spot that had already brought him agony and would continue to do so unless he was able to separate himself emotionally from it.

But I would rate the situation portrayed in this case as extremely unlikely.

I can understand certain doggedness and a desire to hang on to childhood beliefs.

None of these

Love your work is an old proverb, and it has a pointed message.

The outcome of hard work with love gets great results.

Getting to know new people at work will likely provide you with valuable inside information from other departments.

The purpose of life gets a fresh boost of fulfillment if you enjoy working.

You not only get satisfaction in your work, even your existence gets a meaning that makes you feel proud of yourself.

One of the main ways that virtues function is by silencing a whole range of unethical possibilities.

But a hugely significant part of ethics concerns what is unthinkable.

It's easy to underappreciate the importance of the morally unthinkable.

Discussions of ethics tend to focus on matters of conscious choice: which moral rules to follow, or advice on how to approach moral dilemmas.

And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.

Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison's phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.

Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings.

Sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world's first recording artists.

The Rolfses, long-time collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls' backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder.

But both men had a depth and acuteness of vision that their contemporaries lacked, and that enabled them to see through their facades of 'sanity'.

The Laingian concept of hypersanity, though modern, has ancient roots.

Jung and Diogenes came across as insane by the standards of their day.

Both states attract a heady mixture of fear and fascination but whereas mental disorder is distressing and disabling, hypersanity is liberating and empowering.

This concept of hypersanity challenges the conventional definitions of mental health and illness.

Margaret Mead is thought to have said something like that, which chimes with Keynes, who wrote that the self-styled practical men running the world were unwittingly guided by forgotten academic scribblers.

These reflections on the power of thought are worth unearthing because these are anti-intellectual times - and not only because of the proud ignoramus in the White House.

For Victor Hugo, meanwhile, the one thing stronger than all the armies in the world was 'an idea whose time had come.'

Never doubt that thoughtful minds can change the world; they are the only things that ever do.

The urge to rank and measure might itself seem anti-intellectual - more Top Trumps than top scholarship.

For de Beauvoir in particular, philosophy was to be lived vivaciously, and partying was bound up with her urge to live fully and freely, not to hold herself back from all that life had to offer.

De Beauvoir tripped on psychedelics but, no matter how hard she inhaled, she remained firmly planted to the ground.

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre spent a lot of time partying: talking, drinking, dancing, laughing, loving and listening to music with friends, and this was an aspect of their philosophical stance on life.

Existentialism has a reputation for being angst-ridden and gloomy mostly because of its emphasis on pondering the meaninglessness of existence, but two of the best-known existentialists knew how to have fun in the face of absurdity.

None of These