XAT Verbal And Logical Ability MCQ Quiz - 1 - CAT MCQ

The Gaia hypothesis is an__________hypothesis proposing that the biosphere and the_________ components of the Earth are closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth in a ________ homeostasis.

Select the odd man out from the given alternatives. 

Answer the question based on the passage given below.

Japan has long practised a form of familial capitalism. In good times industrial collusion, overseen by bureaucrats, is practically official policy. The so-called “convoy system” lets corporate stragglers retain a small market share as bigger and better firms steam ahead. It certainly smoothed out the occasional ups and downs during the country’s stunning post-war economic development, as it rapidly caught up with the West. As Japan struggles with its deepest recession since the war, the government has established a mechanism to give financial help to poorly performing firms, companies are being encouraged to provide support to their weaker suppliers, and banks are being asked to do their bit, too. There is nothing unusual about any of this. Financial institutions and carmakers have been bailed out in both America and Europe. Governments around the world are racing to protect their cherished, if dented, national champions.

Which of the following, if true, most seriously undermines the credibility of the argument?

While they were very aggressive in their repudiation of the American offer, the Mehtas didn’t seem very convinced about taking up the London offer during their press release last Monday.

Which of these following is exactly opposite to the word 'repudiation' as used in this sentence?

Group Question

A passage is followed by questions pertaining to the passage. Read the passage and answer the questions. Choose the most appropriate answer.

One of the most important issues in biomedical ethics is the controversy surrounding abortion. This controversy has a long history and is still heavily discussed among researchers and the public- both in terms of morality and in terms of legality. There are three main views: first, the extreme conservative view- held by the Catholic Church; second, the extreme liberal view- held by Singer; and third, moderate views which lie between both extremes. Some opponents- anti-abortionists, pro-life activists- holding the extreme view, argue that human personhood begins from the unicellular zygote and thus- according to the religious stance- one should not have an abortion by virtue of the imago dei of the human being. To have an abortion would be, by definition, homicide. The extreme liberal view is held by proponents. They claim that human personhood begins immediately after birth or a bit later. Thus, they consider the relevant date is at birth or a short time later- say, one month. The proponents of the moderate views argue that there is a morally relevant break in the biological process of  development- from the unicellular zygote to birth- which determines the justifiability and non-justifiability of having an abortion.
According to them, there is a gradual process from being a fetus to being an infant where the fetus is not a human being but a human offspring with a different moral status. The advantage of the extreme conservative view is the fact that it defines human personhood from the beginning of life -the unicellular zygote; there is no slippery slope. The advantage of the extreme liberal view is that its main claim is supported by a common philosophical usage of the notion “personhood” and thus seems more sound than the extreme conservative view because the offspring is far more developed; as the unicellular zygote. This view also faces severe problems; for example, it is not at all clear where the morally relevant difference is between the fetus five minutes before birth and a just born offspring. Some moderate views have commonsense plausibility especially when it is argued that there are significant differences between the developmental stages. The fact that they also claim for a break in the biological process, which is morally relevant, seems to be a relapse into old and unjustified habits. As Gillespie stresses in his article “Abortion and Human Rights” there is no morally relevant break in the biological process of development. But, in fact, there are differences, which make a comparative basis possible without having to solve the problem of drawing a line.

The standard argument is the following practical syllogism: 1. The killing of human beings is prohibited. 2. A fetus is a human being. 3. The killing of fetuses is prohibited. Hence, abortion is not allowed since homicide is prohibited. However, there are possible situations where the first premise could be questioned by noting, for example that killing in self-defense is not prohibited. The second premise could also be questioned since it is not at all clear whether fetuses are human beings in the sense of being persons, although they are of course human beings in the sense of being members of the species of homo sapiens. Consecutively, one would deny that fetuses are persons but admit that a young two year old child may be a person. Although, in the end, it may be difficult to claim that every human being is a person. For example, people with severe mental handicaps or disorders seem not to have personhood. That is, if personhood is defined with regard to specific criteria like the capacity to reason, or to have consciousness, self-consciousness, or rationality, some people might be excluded. But, in fact, this does not mean that people with severe mental handicaps who lack personhood can be killed. Even when rights are tied to the notion of personhood, it is clearly prohibited to kill disabled people. Norbert Hoerster, a well-known German philosopher, claims that fetuses with severe handicaps can be- like all other fetuses- aborted, as born human beings with severe handicaps have to be protected and respected like all other human beings, too.

However, it seems appropriate to modify the standard argument and to use a more sophisticated version. Replace the notion “human being” with “human life form.” The new practical syllogism is: I.The killing of human life forms is prohibited. 2. A fetus is a human life form. 3.The killing of fetuses is prohibited. The objection against the first premise of the standard argument still holds for the new more sophisticated version. But, the second modified premise is much stronger than the previous one because one has to determine what a human life form really is. The fetus may be a human life form but it hardly seems to be a person and thus has no corresponding basic right to live. However, this kind of talk seems to go astray because the criteria for personhood may be suitable for just-borns but not appropriate for fetuses, embryos, or unicellular zygotes, like some biological, psychological, rational, social, or legal criteria may indicate. 

Q. Which of the following questions is the most fundamental with the (extreme) conservative view on abortion? 

One of the most important issues in biomedical ethics is the controversy surrounding abortion. This controversy has a long history and is still heavily discussed among researchers and the public- both in terms of morality and in terms of legality. There are three main views: first, the extreme conservative view- held by the Catholic Church; second, the extreme liberal view- held by Singer; and third, moderate views which lie between both extremes. Some opponents- anti-abortionists, pro-life activists- holding the extreme view, argue that human personhood begins from the unicellular zygote and thus- according to the religious stance- one should not have an abortion by virtue of the imago dei of the human being. To have an abortion would be, by definition, homicide. The extreme liberal view is held by proponents. They claim that human personhood begins immediately after birth or a bit later. Thus, they consider the relevant date is at birth or a short time later- say, one month. The proponents of the moderate views argue that there is a morally relevant break in the biological process of  development- from the unicellular zygote to birth- which determines the justifiability and non-justifiability of having an abortion.
According to them, there is a gradual process from being a fetus to being an infant where the fetus is not a human being but a human offspring with a different moral status. The advantage of the extreme conservative view is the fact that it defines human personhood from the beginning of life -the unicellular zygote; there is no slippery slope. The advantage of the extreme liberal view is that its main claim is supported by a common philosophical usage of the notion “personhood” and thus seems more sound than the extreme conservative view because the offspring is far more developed; as the unicellular zygote. This view also faces severe problems; for example, it is not at all clear where the morally relevant difference is between the fetus five minutes before birth and a just born offspring. Some moderate views have commonsense plausibility especially when it is argued that there are significant differences between the developmental stages. The fact that they also claim for a break in the biological process, which is morally relevant, seems to be a relapse into old and unjustified habits. As Gillespie stresses in his article “Abortion and Human Rights” there is no morally relevant break in the biological process of development. But, in fact, there are differences, which make a comparative basis possible without having to solve the problem of drawing a line.

The standard argument is the following practical syllogism: 1. The killing of human beings is prohibited. 2. A fetus is a human being. 3. The killing of fetuses is prohibited. Hence, abortion is not allowed since homicide is prohibited. However, there are possible situations where the first premise could be questioned by noting, for example that killing in self-defense is not prohibited. The second premise could also be questioned since it is not at all clear whether fetuses are human beings in the sense of being persons, although they are of course human beings in the sense of being members of the species of homo sapiens. Consecutively, one would deny that fetuses are persons but admit that a young two year old child may be a person. Although, in the end, it may be difficult to claim that every human being is a person. For example, people with severe mental handicaps or disorders seem not to have personhood. That is, if personhood is defined with regard to specific criteria like the capacity to reason, or to have consciousness, self-consciousness, or rationality, some people might be excluded. But, in fact, this does not mean that people with severe mental handicaps who lack personhood can be killed. Even when rights are tied to the notion of personhood, it is clearly prohibited to kill disabled people. Norbert Hoerster, a well-known German philosopher, claims that fetuses with severe handicaps can be- like all other fetuses- aborted, as born human beings with severe handicaps have to be protected and respected like all other human beings, too.

However, it seems appropriate to modify the standard argument and to use a more sophisticated version. Replace the notion “human being” with “human life form.” The new practical syllogism is: I.The killing of human life forms is prohibited. 2. A fetus is a human life form. 3.The killing of fetuses is prohibited. The objection against the first premise of the standard argument still holds for the new more sophisticated version. But, the second modified premise is much stronger than the previous one because one has to determine what a human life form really is. The fetus may be a human life form but it hardly seems to be a person and thus has no corresponding basic right to live. However, this kind of talk seems to go astray because the criteria for personhood may be suitable for just-borns but not appropriate for fetuses, embryos, or unicellular zygotes, like some biological, psychological, rational, social, or legal criteria may indicate. 

Q. It can be inferred from the passage that those who hold the extreme liberal view on abortion are likely to admit that: 

One of the most important issues in biomedical ethics is the controversy surrounding abortion. This controversy has a long history and is still heavily discussed among researchers and the public- both in terms of morality and in terms of legality. There are three main views: first, the extreme conservative view- held by the Catholic Church; second, the extreme liberal view- held by Singer; and third, moderate views which lie between both extremes. Some opponents- anti-abortionists, pro-life activists- holding the extreme view, argue that human personhood begins from the unicellular zygote and thus- according to the religious stance- one should not have an abortion by virtue of the imago dei of the human being. To have an abortion would be, by definition, homicide. The extreme liberal view is held by proponents. They claim that human personhood begins immediately after birth or a bit later. Thus, they consider the relevant date is at birth or a short time later- say, one month. The proponents of the moderate views argue that there is a morally relevant break in the biological process of  development- from the unicellular zygote to birth- which determines the justifiability and non-justifiability of having an abortion.
According to them, there is a gradual process from being a fetus to being an infant where the fetus is not a human being but a human offspring with a different moral status. The advantage of the extreme conservative view is the fact that it defines human personhood from the beginning of life -the unicellular zygote; there is no slippery slope. The advantage of the extreme liberal view is that its main claim is supported by a common philosophical usage of the notion “personhood” and thus seems more sound than the extreme conservative view because the offspring is far more developed; as the unicellular zygote. This view also faces severe problems; for example, it is not at all clear where the morally relevant difference is between the fetus five minutes before birth and a just born offspring. Some moderate views have commonsense plausibility especially when it is argued that there are significant differences between the developmental stages. The fact that they also claim for a break in the biological process, which is morally relevant, seems to be a relapse into old and unjustified habits. As Gillespie stresses in his article “Abortion and Human Rights” there is no morally relevant break in the biological process of development. But, in fact, there are differences, which make a comparative basis possible without having to solve the problem of drawing a line.

The standard argument is the following practical syllogism: 1. The killing of human beings is prohibited. 2. A fetus is a human being. 3. The killing of fetuses is prohibited. Hence, abortion is not allowed since homicide is prohibited. However, there are possible situations where the first premise could be questioned by noting, for example that killing in self-defense is not prohibited. The second premise could also be questioned since it is not at all clear whether fetuses are human beings in the sense of being persons, although they are of course human beings in the sense of being members of the species of homo sapiens. Consecutively, one would deny that fetuses are persons but admit that a young two year old child may be a person. Although, in the end, it may be difficult to claim that every human being is a person. For example, people with severe mental handicaps or disorders seem not to have personhood. That is, if personhood is defined with regard to specific criteria like the capacity to reason, or to have consciousness, self-consciousness, or rationality, some people might be excluded. But, in fact, this does not mean that people with severe mental handicaps who lack personhood can be killed. Even when rights are tied to the notion of personhood, it is clearly prohibited to kill disabled people. Norbert Hoerster, a well-known German philosopher, claims that fetuses with severe handicaps can be- like all other fetuses- aborted, as born human beings with severe handicaps have to be protected and respected like all other human beings, too.

However, it seems appropriate to modify the standard argument and to use a more sophisticated version. Replace the notion “human being” with “human life form.” The new practical syllogism is: I.The killing of human life forms is prohibited. 2. A fetus is a human life form. 3.The killing of fetuses is prohibited. The objection against the first premise of the standard argument still holds for the new more sophisticated version. But, the second modified premise is much stronger than the previous one because one has to determine what a human life form really is. The fetus may be a human life form but it hardly seems to be a person and thus has no corresponding basic right to live. However, this kind of talk seems to go astray because the criteria for personhood may be suitable for just-borns but not appropriate for fetuses, embryos, or unicellular zygotes, like some biological, psychological, rational, social, or legal criteria may indicate. 

Q. The advantage of the extreme conservative view cited in the passage would be most seriously undermined if:

One of the most important issues in biomedical ethics is the controversy surrounding abortion. This controversy has a long history and is still heavily discussed among researchers and the public- both in terms of morality and in terms of legality. There are three main views: first, the extreme conservative view- held by the Catholic Church; second, the extreme liberal view- held by Singer; and third, moderate views which lie between both extremes. Some opponents- anti-abortionists, pro-life activists- holding the extreme view, argue that human personhood begins from the unicellular zygote and thus- according to the religious stance- one should not have an abortion by virtue of the imago dei of the human being. To have an abortion would be, by definition, homicide. The extreme liberal view is held by proponents. They claim that human personhood begins immediately after birth or a bit later. Thus, they consider the relevant date is at birth or a short time later- say, one month. The proponents of the moderate views argue that there is a morally relevant break in the biological process of  development- from the unicellular zygote to birth- which determines the justifiability and non-justifiability of having an abortion.
According to them, there is a gradual process from being a fetus to being an infant where the fetus is not a human being but a human offspring with a different moral status. The advantage of the extreme conservative view is the fact that it defines human personhood from the beginning of life -the unicellular zygote; there is no slippery slope. The advantage of the extreme liberal view is that its main claim is supported by a common philosophical usage of the notion “personhood” and thus seems more sound than the extreme conservative view because the offspring is far more developed; as the unicellular zygote. This view also faces severe problems; for example, it is not at all clear where the morally relevant difference is between the fetus five minutes before birth and a just born offspring. Some moderate views have commonsense plausibility especially when it is argued that there are significant differences between the developmental stages. The fact that they also claim for a break in the biological process, which is morally relevant, seems to be a relapse into old and unjustified habits. As Gillespie stresses in his article “Abortion and Human Rights” there is no morally relevant break in the biological process of development. But, in fact, there are differences, which make a comparative basis possible without having to solve the problem of drawing a line.

The standard argument is the following practical syllogism: 1. The killing of human beings is prohibited. 2. A fetus is a human being. 3. The killing of fetuses is prohibited. Hence, abortion is not allowed since homicide is prohibited. However, there are possible situations where the first premise could be questioned by noting, for example that killing in self-defense is not prohibited. The second premise could also be questioned since it is not at all clear whether fetuses are human beings in the sense of being persons, although they are of course human beings in the sense of being members of the species of homo sapiens. Consecutively, one would deny that fetuses are persons but admit that a young two year old child may be a person. Although, in the end, it may be difficult to claim that every human being is a person. For example, people with severe mental handicaps or disorders seem not to have personhood. That is, if personhood is defined with regard to specific criteria like the capacity to reason, or to have consciousness, self-consciousness, or rationality, some people might be excluded. But, in fact, this does not mean that people with severe mental handicaps who lack personhood can be killed. Even when rights are tied to the notion of personhood, it is clearly prohibited to kill disabled people. Norbert Hoerster, a well-known German philosopher, claims that fetuses with severe handicaps can be- like all other fetuses- aborted, as born human beings with severe handicaps have to be protected and respected like all other human beings, too.

However, it seems appropriate to modify the standard argument and to use a more sophisticated version. Replace the notion “human being” with “human life form.” The new practical syllogism is: I.The killing of human life forms is prohibited. 2. A fetus is a human life form. 3.The killing of fetuses is prohibited. The objection against the first premise of the standard argument still holds for the new more sophisticated version. But, the second modified premise is much stronger than the previous one because one has to determine what a human life form really is. The fetus may be a human life form but it hardly seems to be a person and thus has no corresponding basic right to live. However, this kind of talk seems to go astray because the criteria for personhood may be suitable for just-borns but not appropriate for fetuses, embryos, or unicellular zygotes, like some biological, psychological, rational, social, or legal criteria may indicate. 

Q. According to the passage, the most serious problem with the practical syllogism in the standard argument against abortions is:

One of the most important issues in biomedical ethics is the controversy surrounding abortion. This controversy has a long history and is still heavily discussed among researchers and the public- both in terms of morality and in terms of legality. There are three main views: first, the extreme conservative view- held by the Catholic Church; second, the extreme liberal view- held by Singer; and third, moderate views which lie between both extremes. Some opponents- anti-abortionists, pro-life activists- holding the extreme view, argue that human personhood begins from the unicellular zygote and thus- according to the religious stance- one should not have an abortion by virtue of the imago dei of the human being. To have an abortion would be, by definition, homicide. The extreme liberal view is held by proponents. They claim that human personhood begins immediately after birth or a bit later. Thus, they consider the relevant date is at birth or a short time later- say, one month. The proponents of the moderate views argue that there is a morally relevant break in the biological process of  development- from the unicellular zygote to birth- which determines the justifiability and non-justifiability of having an abortion.
According to them, there is a gradual process from being a fetus to being an infant where the fetus is not a human being but a human offspring with a different moral status. The advantage of the extreme conservative view is the fact that it defines human personhood from the beginning of life -the unicellular zygote; there is no slippery slope. The advantage of the extreme liberal view is that its main claim is supported by a common philosophical usage of the notion “personhood” and thus seems more sound than the extreme conservative view because the offspring is far more developed; as the unicellular zygote. This view also faces severe problems; for example, it is not at all clear where the morally relevant difference is between the fetus five minutes before birth and a just born offspring. Some moderate views have commonsense plausibility especially when it is argued that there are significant differences between the developmental stages. The fact that they also claim for a break in the biological process, which is morally relevant, seems to be a relapse into old and unjustified habits. As Gillespie stresses in his article “Abortion and Human Rights” there is no morally relevant break in the biological process of development. But, in fact, there are differences, which make a comparative basis possible without having to solve the problem of drawing a line.

The standard argument is the following practical syllogism: 1. The killing of human beings is prohibited. 2. A fetus is a human being. 3. The killing of fetuses is prohibited. Hence, abortion is not allowed since homicide is prohibited. However, there are possible situations where the first premise could be questioned by noting, for example that killing in self-defense is not prohibited. The second premise could also be questioned since it is not at all clear whether fetuses are human beings in the sense of being persons, although they are of course human beings in the sense of being members of the species of homo sapiens. Consecutively, one would deny that fetuses are persons but admit that a young two year old child may be a person. Although, in the end, it may be difficult to claim that every human being is a person. For example, people with severe mental handicaps or disorders seem not to have personhood. That is, if personhood is defined with regard to specific criteria like the capacity to reason, or to have consciousness, self-consciousness, or rationality, some people might be excluded. But, in fact, this does not mean that people with severe mental handicaps who lack personhood can be killed. Even when rights are tied to the notion of personhood, it is clearly prohibited to kill disabled people. Norbert Hoerster, a well-known German philosopher, claims that fetuses with severe handicaps can be- like all other fetuses- aborted, as born human beings with severe handicaps have to be protected and respected like all other human beings, too.

However, it seems appropriate to modify the standard argument and to use a more sophisticated version. Replace the notion “human being” with “human life form.” The new practical syllogism is: I.The killing of human life forms is prohibited. 2. A fetus is a human life form. 3.The killing of fetuses is prohibited. The objection against the first premise of the standard argument still holds for the new more sophisticated version. But, the second modified premise is much stronger than the previous one because one has to determine what a human life form really is. The fetus may be a human life form but it hardly seems to be a person and thus has no corresponding basic right to live. However, this kind of talk seems to go astray because the criteria for personhood may be suitable for just-borns but not appropriate for fetuses, embryos, or unicellular zygotes, like some biological, psychological, rational, social, or legal criteria may indicate. 

Q. The passage supports the inference that: 

A. Gillespie is anti-abortionist and pro-life.
B. The philosopher Norbert Hoerster is an egalitarian.
C. The modified standard argument resolves the controversy surrounding abortion.
D. The extreme conservative view on abortion forces an unmarried rape victim to give birth to ‘her’ child.

Given below is a passage followed by several statements that can be drawn from the facts stated in the passage. Examine each statement separately in the context of the passage and decide whether they are implied from the passage.

Scientific realism is the view that we ought to believe in the unobservable entities posited by our most successful scientific theories. It is widely held that the most powerful argument in favour of scientific realism is the no-miracles argument, according to which the success of science would be miraculous if scientific theories were not at least approximately true descriptions of the world. While the underdetermination argument is often cited as giving grounds for scepticism about theories of unobservable entities, arguably the most powerful arguments against scientific realism are based on the history of radical theory change in science. The best-known of these arguments, although not necessarily the most compelling of them, is the notorious pessimistic meta-induction, according to which reflection on the abandonment of theories in the history of science motivates the expectation that our best current scientific theories will themselves be abandoned, and hence that we ought not to assent to them.

Q. Which of the following statements can be implied from the passage?

A. Abandonment of scientific theories provides the basis for pessimistic meta-induction.
B. The understanding of the human race is at the root of all criticisms by the underdetermination argument.
C. Scientific realism is reconstruction of reality through scientific theories.
D. Events or phenomena conform to scientific theories because science is not miraculous.

Answer the following question based on the information given  below.

“Verily, all too well do I understand the dream’s portent and monition: my doctrine is in danger; tares want to be called wheat” - Friedrich Nietzsche.

What is the meaning of the word ‘monition’ used in this sentence?

Group Question

The passage given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.

You cannot be surprised that under the conditions of continued disappearance of functions, the unfortunate student asks: "What becomes of the mind itself? If you suppress all the functions, what is left?" In the Indian way of teaching, when you come to a difficulty, someone jumps up and asks a question. And in the commentaries, the question which raises the difficulty is always put. The answer of Patanjali is: "Then the spectator remains in his own form." Theosophy answers: "The Monad remains." It is the end of the human pilgrimage. That is the highest point to which humanity may climb: to suppress all the reflections in the fivefold universe through which the Monad has manifested his powers, and then for the Monad to realize himself, enriched by the experiences through which his manifested aspects have passed. But to the Samkhyan the difficulty is very great, for when he has only his spectator left, when spectacle ceases, the spectator himself almost vanishes. His only function was to look on at the play of mind. When the play of mind is gone, what is left? He can no longer be a spectator, since there is nothing to see. The only answer is: "He remains in his own form." He is now out of manifestation, the duality is transcended, and so the Spirit sinks back into latency, no longer capable of manifestation. There you come to a very serious difference with the Theosophical view of the universe, for according to that view of the universe, when all these functions have been suppressed, then the Monad is ruler over matter and is prepared for a new cycle of activity, no longer slave but master.

All analogy shows us that as the Self withdraws from sheath after sheath, he does not lose but gains in Self- realization. Self- realization becomes more and more vivid with each successive withdrawal; so that as the Self puts aside one veil of matter after another, recognises in regular succession that each body in turn is not himself, by that process of withdrawal his sense of Self-reality becomes keener, not less keen. It is important to remember that, because often Western readers, dealing with Eastern ideas, in consequence of misunderstanding the meaning of the state of liberation, or the condition of Nirvana, identify it with nothingness or unconsciousness—an entirely mistaken idea which is apt to colour the whole of their thought when dealing with Yogic processes. Imagine the condition of a man who identifies himself completely with the body, so that he cannot, even in thought, separate himself from it—the state of the early undeveloped man—and compare that with the strength, vigour and lucidity of your own mental consciousness. 

The consciousness of the early man limited to the physical body, with occasional touches of dream consciousness, is very restricted in its range. He has no idea of the sweep of your consciousness, of your abstract thinking. But is that consciousness of the early man more vivid, or less vivid, than yours? Certainly you will say, it is less vivid. You have largely transcended his powers of consciousness. Your consciousness is astral rather than physical, but has thereby increased its vividness. As the Self withdraws himself from sheath after sheath, he realizes himself more and more, not less and less; Self-realization becomes more intense, as sheath after sheath is cast aside. The centre grows more powerful as the circumference becomes more permeable, and at last a stage is reached when the centre knows itself at every point of the circumference. When that is accomplished the circumference vanishes, but not so the centre. The centre still remains. Just as you are more vividly conscious than the early man, just as your consciousness is more alive, not less, than that of an undeveloped man, so it is as we climb up the stairway of life and cast away garment after garment. We become more conscious of existence, more conscious of knowledge, more conscious of Self-determined power. The faculties of the Self shine out more strongly, as veil after veil falls away. By analogy, then, when we touch the Monad, our consciousness should be mightier, more vivid, and more perfect. As you learn to truly live, your powers and feelings grow in strength. 

And remember that all control is exercised over sheaths, over portions of the Not-Self. You do not control your Self; that is a misconception; you control your Not-Self. The Self is never controlled; He is the Inner Ruler Immortal. He is the controller, not the controlled. As sheath after sheath becomes subject to your Self, and body after body becomes the tool of your Self, then shall you realize the truth of the saying of the Upanishad, that you are the Self, the Inner Ruler, the immortal.

Q. Which of the statements below best describes the Theosophical view of the universe? 

You cannot be surprised that under the conditions of continued disappearance of functions, the unfortunate student asks: "What becomes of the mind itself? If you suppress all the functions, what is left?" In the Indian way of teaching, when you come to a difficulty, someone jumps up and asks a question. And in the commentaries, the question which raises the difficulty is always put. The answer of Patanjali is: "Then the spectator remains in his own form." Theosophy answers: "The Monad remains." It is the end of the human pilgrimage. That is the highest point to which humanity may climb: to suppress all the reflections in the fivefold universe through which the Monad has manifested his powers, and then for the Monad to realize himself, enriched by the experiences through which his manifested aspects have passed. But to the Samkhyan the difficulty is very great, for when he has only his spectator left, when spectacle ceases, the spectator himself almost vanishes. His only function was to look on at the play of mind. When the play of mind is gone, what is left? He can no longer be a spectator, since there is nothing to see. The only answer is: "He remains in his own form." He is now out of manifestation, the duality is transcended, and so the Spirit sinks back into latency, no longer capable of manifestation. There you come to a very serious difference with the Theosophical view of the universe, for according to that view of the universe, when all these functions have been suppressed, then the Monad is ruler over matter and is prepared for a new cycle of activity, no longer slave but master.

All analogy shows us that as the Self withdraws from sheath after sheath, he does not lose but gains in Self- realization. Self- realization becomes more and more vivid with each successive withdrawal; so that as the Self puts aside one veil of matter after another, recognises in regular succession that each body in turn is not himself, by that process of withdrawal his sense of Self-reality becomes keener, not less keen. It is important to remember that, because often Western readers, dealing with Eastern ideas, in consequence of misunderstanding the meaning of the state of liberation, or the condition of Nirvana, identify it with nothingness or unconsciousness—an entirely mistaken idea which is apt to colour the whole of their thought when dealing with Yogic processes. Imagine the condition of a man who identifies himself completely with the body, so that he cannot, even in thought, separate himself from it—the state of the early undeveloped man—and compare that with the strength, vigour and lucidity of your own mental consciousness. 

The consciousness of the early man limited to the physical body, with occasional touches of dream consciousness, is very restricted in its range. He has no idea of the sweep of your consciousness, of your abstract thinking. But is that consciousness of the early man more vivid, or less vivid, than yours? Certainly you will say, it is less vivid. You have largely transcended his powers of consciousness. Your consciousness is astral rather than physical, but has thereby increased its vividness. As the Self withdraws himself from sheath after sheath, he realizes himself more and more, not less and less; Self-realization becomes more intense, as sheath after sheath is cast aside. The centre grows more powerful as the circumference becomes more permeable, and at last a stage is reached when the centre knows itself at every point of the circumference. When that is accomplished the circumference vanishes, but not so the centre. The centre still remains. Just as you are more vividly conscious than the early man, just as your consciousness is more alive, not less, than that of an undeveloped man, so it is as we climb up the stairway of life and cast away garment after garment. We become more conscious of existence, more conscious of knowledge, more conscious of Self-determined power. The faculties of the Self shine out more strongly, as veil after veil falls away. By analogy, then, when we touch the Monad, our consciousness should be mightier, more vivid, and more perfect. As you learn to truly live, your powers and feelings grow in strength. 

And remember that all control is exercised over sheaths, over portions of the Not-Self. You do not control your Self; that is a misconception; you control your Not-Self. The Self is never controlled; He is the Inner Ruler Immortal. He is the controller, not the controlled. As sheath after sheath becomes subject to your Self, and body after body becomes the tool of your Self, then shall you realize the truth of the saying of the Upanishad, that you are the Self, the Inner Ruler, the immortal.

Q. With reference to the passage, the ‘Monad’ can best be described by which of the following?

You cannot be surprised that under the conditions of continued disappearance of functions, the unfortunate student asks: "What becomes of the mind itself? If you suppress all the functions, what is left?" In the Indian way of teaching, when you come to a difficulty, someone jumps up and asks a question. And in the commentaries, the question which raises the difficulty is always put. The answer of Patanjali is: "Then the spectator remains in his own form." Theosophy answers: "The Monad remains." It is the end of the human pilgrimage. That is the highest point to which humanity may climb: to suppress all the reflections in the fivefold universe through which the Monad has manifested his powers, and then for the Monad to realize himself, enriched by the experiences through which his manifested aspects have passed. But to the Samkhyan the difficulty is very great, for when he has only his spectator left, when spectacle ceases, the spectator himself almost vanishes. His only function was to look on at the play of mind. When the play of mind is gone, what is left? He can no longer be a spectator, since there is nothing to see. The only answer is: "He remains in his own form." He is now out of manifestation, the duality is transcended, and so the Spirit sinks back into latency, no longer capable of manifestation. There you come to a very serious difference with the Theosophical view of the universe, for according to that view of the universe, when all these functions have been suppressed, then the Monad is ruler over matter and is prepared for a new cycle of activity, no longer slave but master.

All analogy shows us that as the Self withdraws from sheath after sheath, he does not lose but gains in Self- realization. Self- realization becomes more and more vivid with each successive withdrawal; so that as the Self puts aside one veil of matter after another, recognises in regular succession that each body in turn is not himself, by that process of withdrawal his sense of Self-reality becomes keener, not less keen. It is important to remember that, because often Western readers, dealing with Eastern ideas, in consequence of misunderstanding the meaning of the state of liberation, or the condition of Nirvana, identify it with nothingness or unconsciousness—an entirely mistaken idea which is apt to colour the whole of their thought when dealing with Yogic processes. Imagine the condition of a man who identifies himself completely with the body, so that he cannot, even in thought, separate himself from it—the state of the early undeveloped man—and compare that with the strength, vigour and lucidity of your own mental consciousness. 

The consciousness of the early man limited to the physical body, with occasional touches of dream consciousness, is very restricted in its range. He has no idea of the sweep of your consciousness, of your abstract thinking. But is that consciousness of the early man more vivid, or less vivid, than yours? Certainly you will say, it is less vivid. You have largely transcended his powers of consciousness. Your consciousness is astral rather than physical, but has thereby increased its vividness. As the Self withdraws himself from sheath after sheath, he realizes himself more and more, not less and less; Self-realization becomes more intense, as sheath after sheath is cast aside. The centre grows more powerful as the circumference becomes more permeable, and at last a stage is reached when the centre knows itself at every point of the circumference. When that is accomplished the circumference vanishes, but not so the centre. The centre still remains. Just as you are more vividly conscious than the early man, just as your consciousness is more alive, not less, than that of an undeveloped man, so it is as we climb up the stairway of life and cast away garment after garment. We become more conscious of existence, more conscious of knowledge, more conscious of Self-determined power. The faculties of the Self shine out more strongly, as veil after veil falls away. By analogy, then, when we touch the Monad, our consciousness should be mightier, more vivid, and more perfect. As you learn to truly live, your powers and feelings grow in strength. 

And remember that all control is exercised over sheaths, over portions of the Not-Self. You do not control your Self; that is a misconception; you control your Not-Self. The Self is never controlled; He is the Inner Ruler Immortal. He is the controller, not the controlled. As sheath after sheath becomes subject to your Self, and body after body becomes the tool of your Self, then shall you realize the truth of the saying of the Upanishad, that you are the Self, the Inner Ruler, the immortal.

Q. What does self-realization help us to achieve?

You cannot be surprised that under the conditions of continued disappearance of functions, the unfortunate student asks: "What becomes of the mind itself? If you suppress all the functions, what is left?" In the Indian way of teaching, when you come to a difficulty, someone jumps up and asks a question. And in the commentaries, the question which raises the difficulty is always put. The answer of Patanjali is: "Then the spectator remains in his own form." Theosophy answers: "The Monad remains." It is the end of the human pilgrimage. That is the highest point to which humanity may climb: to suppress all the reflections in the fivefold universe through which the Monad has manifested his powers, and then for the Monad to realize himself, enriched by the experiences through which his manifested aspects have passed. But to the Samkhyan the difficulty is very great, for when he has only his spectator left, when spectacle ceases, the spectator himself almost vanishes. His only function was to look on at the play of mind. When the play of mind is gone, what is left? He can no longer be a spectator, since there is nothing to see. The only answer is: "He remains in his own form." He is now out of manifestation, the duality is transcended, and so the Spirit sinks back into latency, no longer capable of manifestation. There you come to a very serious difference with the Theosophical view of the universe, for according to that view of the universe, when all these functions have been suppressed, then the Monad is ruler over matter and is prepared for a new cycle of activity, no longer slave but master.

All analogy shows us that as the Self withdraws from sheath after sheath, he does not lose but gains in Self- realization. Self- realization becomes more and more vivid with each successive withdrawal; so that as the Self puts aside one veil of matter after another, recognises in regular succession that each body in turn is not himself, by that process of withdrawal his sense of Self-reality becomes keener, not less keen. It is important to remember that, because often Western readers, dealing with Eastern ideas, in consequence of misunderstanding the meaning of the state of liberation, or the condition of Nirvana, identify it with nothingness or unconsciousness—an entirely mistaken idea which is apt to colour the whole of their thought when dealing with Yogic processes. Imagine the condition of a man who identifies himself completely with the body, so that he cannot, even in thought, separate himself from it—the state of the early undeveloped man—and compare that with the strength, vigour and lucidity of your own mental consciousness. 

The consciousness of the early man limited to the physical body, with occasional touches of dream consciousness, is very restricted in its range. He has no idea of the sweep of your consciousness, of your abstract thinking. But is that consciousness of the early man more vivid, or less vivid, than yours? Certainly you will say, it is less vivid. You have largely transcended his powers of consciousness. Your consciousness is astral rather than physical, but has thereby increased its vividness. As the Self withdraws himself from sheath after sheath, he realizes himself more and more, not less and less; Self-realization becomes more intense, as sheath after sheath is cast aside. The centre grows more powerful as the circumference becomes more permeable, and at last a stage is reached when the centre knows itself at every point of the circumference. When that is accomplished the circumference vanishes, but not so the centre. The centre still remains. Just as you are more vividly conscious than the early man, just as your consciousness is more alive, not less, than that of an undeveloped man, so it is as we climb up the stairway of life and cast away garment after garment. We become more conscious of existence, more conscious of knowledge, more conscious of Self-determined power. The faculties of the Self shine out more strongly, as veil after veil falls away. By analogy, then, when we touch the Monad, our consciousness should be mightier, more vivid, and more perfect. As you learn to truly live, your powers and feelings grow in strength. 

And remember that all control is exercised over sheaths, over portions of the Not-Self. You do not control your Self; that is a misconception; you control your Not-Self. The Self is never controlled; He is the Inner Ruler Immortal. He is the controller, not the controlled. As sheath after sheath becomes subject to your Self, and body after body becomes the tool of your Self, then shall you realize the truth of the saying of the Upanishad, that you are the Self, the Inner Ruler, the immortal.

Q. Which of the following is incorrect in the context of the passage?

Group Question

A passage is followed by questions pertaining to the passage. Read the passage and answer the questions. Choose the most appropriate answer.

The simplest approach and still one of the most common techniques is known as pump-probe spectroscopy. In this method, two or more optical pulses with variable time delay between them are used to investigate the processes happening during a chemical reaction. The first pulse (pump) initiates the reaction, by breaking a bond or exciting one of the reactants. The second pulse (probe) is then used to interrogate the progress of the reaction a certain period of time after initiation. As the reaction progresses, the response of the reacting system to the probe pulse will change. 

Q. What will happen if you take away the probe?

The simplest approach and still one of the most common techniques is known as pump-probe spectroscopy. In this method, two or more optical pulses with variable time delay between them are used to investigate the processes happening during a chemical reaction. The first pulse (pump) initiates the reaction, by breaking a bond or exciting one of the reactants. The second pulse (probe) is then used to interrogate the progress of the reaction a certain period of time after initiation. As the reaction progresses, the response of the reacting system to the probe pulse will change.

Q. Which of the following accurately summarises the mechanism of the experiment?

The simplest approach and still one of the most common techniques is known as pump-probe spectroscopy. In this method, two or more optical pulses with variable time delay between them are used to investigate the processes happening during a chemical reaction. The first pulse (pump) initiates the reaction, by breaking a bond or exciting one of the reactants. The second pulse (probe) is then used to interrogate the progress of the reaction a certain period of time after initiation. As the reaction progresses, the response of the reacting system to the probe pulse will change. 

A passage is followed by questions pertaining to the passage. Read the passage and answer the questions. Choose the most appropriate answer.

Death is inside the folding cots: it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses, in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out: it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets, and the beds go sailing toward a port where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.

Q. Which of the following is NOT true in the above verse?

Group Question

The passage given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.

Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute?

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City’ (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism. Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival’ (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such ‘anthropocentrism’ is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.

As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed ... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research.
In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction.

By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.

Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20).
More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”. Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute? 

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City' (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.
Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival' (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such 'anthropocentrism' is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of  animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.
As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research. In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction. 

By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.
Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20). More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”.

Q. Which of the following definitions of ecocriticism is not true? 

Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute?

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City’ (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism. Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival’ (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such ‘anthropocentrism’ is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.

As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed ... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research.
In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction.

By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.

Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20).
More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”. Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute? 

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City' (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.
Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival' (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such 'anthropocentrism' is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of  animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.
As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research. In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction. 

By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.
Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20). More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”.

Q. What does the word ‘anthropocentricism’ refer to in this passage?

Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute?

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City’ (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism. Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival’ (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such ‘anthropocentrism’ is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.

As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed ... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research.
In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction.

By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.

Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20).
More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”. Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute? 

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City' (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.
Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival' (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such 'anthropocentrism' is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of  animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.
As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research. In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction. 

By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.
Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20). More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”.

Q. Which of the following cannot be inferred from the passage?

Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute?

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City’ (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism. Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival’ (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such ‘anthropocentrism’ is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.

As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed ... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research.
In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction.

By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.

Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20).
More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”. Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute? 

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City' (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.
Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival' (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such 'anthropocentrism' is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of  animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.
As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research. In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction. 

By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.
Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20). More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”.

Q. Which of these assumptions are not central to the function of ecocriticism?

Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute?

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City’ (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism. Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival’ (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such ‘anthropocentrism’ is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.

As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed ... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research.
In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction.

By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.

Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20).
More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”. Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute? 

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City' (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.
Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival' (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such 'anthropocentrism' is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of  animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.
As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research. In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction. 

By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.
Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20). More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”.

Q. Based on the titles of the following studies, which would not be included for publication in the Western Literature Association’s journal?