CAT 2021 Slot 2 - VARC

The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to eachquestion.
It has been said that knowledge, or the problem of knowledge, is the scandal of philosophy. The scandal is philosophy’s apparent inability to show how, when and why we can be surethat we know something or, indeed, that we know anything. Philosopher Michael Williams writes: ‘Is it possible to obtain knowledge at all? This problem is pressing because there are powerful arguments, some very ancient, for the conclusion that it is not . . . Scepticism is the skeleton in Western rationalism’s closet’. While it is not clear that the scandal matters toanyone but philosophers, philosophers point out that it should matter to everyone, at least given a certain conception of knowledge. For, they explain, unless we can ground our claims to knowledge as such, which is to say, distinguish it from mere opinion, superstition, fantasy, wishful thinking, ideology, illusion or delusion, then the actions we take on the basis of presumed knowledge – boarding an airplane, swallowing a pill, finding someone guilty of acrime – will be irrational and unjustifiable.

That is all quite serious-sounding but so also are the rattlings of the skeleton: that is, the sceptic’s contention that we cannot be sure that we know anything – at least not if we think of knowledge as something like having a correct mental representation of reality, and not if we think of reality as something like things-as-they-are-in-themselves, independent of our perceptions, ideas or descriptions. For, the sceptic will note, since reality, under that conception of it, is outside our ken (we cannot catch a glimpse of things-in-themselves around the corner of our own eyes; we cannot form an idea of reality that floats above the processesof our conceiving it), we have no way to compare our mental representations with things-as-they-are-in-themselves and therefore no way to determine whether they are correct orincorrect. Thus the sceptic may repeat (rattling loudly), you cannot be sure you ‘know’ something or anything at all – at least not, he may add (rattling softly before disappearing), ifthat is the way you conceive ‘knowledge’.
There are a number of ways to handle this situation. The most common is to ignore it. Most people outside the academy – and, indeed, most of us inside it – are unaware of or unperturbed by the philosophical scandal of knowledge and go about our lives without toomany epistemic anxieties. We hold our beliefs and presumptive knowledges more or less confidently, usually depending on how we acquired them (I saw it with my own eyes; I heard it on Fox News; a guy at the office told me) and how broadly and strenuously they seem to beshared or endorsed by various relevant people: experts and authorities, friends and familymembers, colleagues and associates. And we examine our convictions more or less closely, explain them more or less extensively, and defend them more or less vigorously, usuallydepending on what seems to be at stake for ourselves and/or other people and whatresources are available for reassuring ourselves or making our beliefs credible to others (look,it’s right here on the page; add up the figures yourself; I happen to be a heart specialist).

Q.1 The author discusses all of the following arguments in the passage, EXCEPT:

Q.2 According to the last paragraph of the passage, “We hold our beliefs and presumptive knowledges more or less confidently, usually depending on something. Which one ofthe following most broadly captures what we depend on?

Q.3 “. . . we cannot catch a glimpse of things-in-themselves around the corner of our owneyes; we cannot form an idea of reality that floats above the processes of ourconceiving it . . .” Which one of the following statements best reflects the argumentbeing made in this sentence?

Q.4 The author of the passage is most likely to support which one of the following statements?

The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to eachquestion.
Many people believe that truth conveys power. . . . Hence sticking with the truth is the beststrategy for gaining power. Unfortunately, this is just a comforting myth. In fact, truth andpower have a far more complicated relationship, because in human society, power means twovery different things.
 
On the one hand, power means having the ability to manipulate objective realities: to huntanimals, to construct bridges, to cure diseases, to build atom bombs. This kind of power isclosely tied to truth. If you believe a false physical theory, you won’t be able to build an atombomb. On the other hand, power also means having the ability to manipulate human beliefs,thereby getting lots of people to cooperate effectively. Building atom bombs requires not just agood understanding of physics, but also the coordinated labor of millions of humans. PlanetEarth was conquered by Homo sapiens rather than by chimpanzees or elephants, becausewe are the only mammals that can cooperate in very large numbers. And large-scalecooperation depends on believing common stories. But these stories need not be true. Youcan unite millions of people by making them believe in completely fictional stories about God,about race or about economics. The dual nature of power and truth results in the curious factthat we humans know many more truths than any other animal, but we also believe in muchmore nonsense. . . .

When it comes to uniting people around a common story, fiction actually enjoys three inherentadvantages over the truth. First, whereas the truth is universal, fictions tend to be local.Consequently if we want to distinguish our tribe from foreigners, a fictional story will serve asa far better identity marker than a true story. . . . The second huge advantage of fiction overtruth has to do with the handicap principle, which says that reliable signals must be costly tothe signaler. Otherwise, they can easily be faked by cheaters. . . . If political loyalty is signaledby believing a true story, anyone can fake it. But believing ridiculous and outlandish storiesexacts greater cost, and is therefore a better signal of loyalty. . . . Third, and most important,the truth is often painful and disturbing. Hence if you stick to unalloyed reality, few people willfollow you. An American presidential candidate who tells the American public the truth, thewhole truth and nothing but the truth about American history has a 100 percent guarantee oflosing the elections. . . . An uncompromising adherence to the truth is an admirable spiritualpractice, but it is not a winning political strategy. . . .
Even if we need to pay some price for deactivating our rational faculties, the advantages ofincreased social cohesion are often so big that fictional stories routinely triumph over the truthin human history. Scholars have known this for thousands of years, which is why scholarsoften had to decide whether they served the truth or social harmony. Should they aim to unitepeople by making sure everyone believes in the same fiction, or should they let people knowthe truth even at the price of disunity?

Q.5 The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:

Q.6 The author implies that, like scholars, successful leaders:

Q.7 Regarding which one of the following quotes could we argue that the author over emphasises the importance of fiction?

Q.8 The author would support none of the following statements about political power EXCEPT that:

I have elaborated . . . a framework for analyzing the contradictory pulls on [Indian] nationalist ideology in its struggle against the dominance of colonialism and the resolution it offered tothose contradictions. Briefly, this resolution was built around a separation of the domain of culture into two spheres—the material and the spiritual. It was in the material sphere that theclaims of Western civilization were the most powerful. Science, technology, rational forms of economic organization, modern methods of statecraft—these had given the Europeancountries the strength to subjugate the non-European people . . . To overcome thisdomination, the colonized people had to learn those superior techniques of organizingmaterial life and incorporate them within their own cultures. . . . But this could not mean theimitation of the West in every aspect of life, for then the very distinction between the West andthe East would vanish—the self-identity of national culture would itself be threatened. . . .
The discourse of nationalism shows that the material/spiritual distinction was condensed intoan analogous, but ideologically far more powerful, dichotomy: that between the outer and theinner. . . . Applying the inner/outer distinction to the matter of concrete day-to-day livingseparates the social space into ghar and b?hir, the home and the world. The world is theexternal, the domain of the material; the home represents one’s inner spiritual self, one’s trueidentity. The world is a treacherous terrain of the pursuit of material interests, where practicalconsiderations reign supreme. It is also typically the domain of the male. The home in itsessence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world—and womanis its representation. And so one gets an identification of social roles by gender to correspondwith the separation of the social space into ghar and b?hir. . . .

The colonial situation, and the ideological response of nationalism to the critique of Indiantradition, introduced an entirely new substance to [these dichotomies] and effected theirtransformation. The material/spiritual dichotomy, to which the terms world and homecorresponded, had acquired . . . a very special significance in the nationalist mind. The worldwas where the European power had challenged the non-European peoples and, by virtue ofits superior material culture, had subjugated them. But, the nationalists asserted, it had failedto colonize the inner, essential, identity of the East which lay in its distinctive, and superior,spiritual culture. . . . [I]n the entire phase of the national struggle, the crucial need was toprotect, preserve and strengthen the inner core of the national culture, its spiritual essence. . ..
Once we match this new meaning of the home/world dichotomy with the identification of socialroles by gender, we get the ideological framework within which nationalism answered thewomen’s question. It would be a grave error to see in this, as liberals are apt to in theirdespair at the many marks of social conservatism in nationalist practice, a total rejection ofthe West. Quite the contrary: the nationalist paradigm in fact supplied an ideological principleof selection.

Q.9 Which one of the following best describes the liberal perception of Indian nationalism?

Q.10 Which one of the following explains the “contradictory pulls” on Indian nationalism?

Q.11 Which one of the following, if true, would weaken the author’s claims in the passage?

Q.12 On the basis of the information in the passage, all of the following are true about thespiritual/material dichotomy of Indian nationalism EXCEPT that it:

It’s easy to forget that most of the world’s languages are still transmitted orally with no widelyestablished written form. While speech communities are increasingly involved in projects toprotect their languages – in print, on air and online – orality is fragile and contributes tolinguistic vulnerability. But indigenous languages are about much more than unusual wordsand intriguing grammar: They function as vehicles for the transmission of cultural traditions,environmental understandings and knowledge about medicinal plants, all at risk when eldersdie and livelihoods are disrupted.
Both push and pull factors lead to the decline of languages. Through war, famine and naturaldisasters, whole communities can be destroyed, taking their language with them to the grave,such as the indigenous populations of Tasmania who were wiped out by colonists. Morecommonly, speakers live on but abandon their language in favor of another vernacular, awidespread process that linguists refer to as “language shift” from which few languages areimmune. Such trading up and out of a speech form occurs for complex political, cultural andeconomic reasons – sometimes voluntary for economic and educational reasons, althoughoften amplified by state coercion or neglect. Welsh, long stigmatized and disparaged by theBritish state, has rebounded with vigor.

Many speakers of endangered, poorly documented languages have embraced new digitalmedia with excitement. Speakers of previously exclusively oral tongues are turning to the webas a virtual space for languages to live on. Internet technology offers powerful ways for oraltraditions and cultural practices to survive, even thrive, among increasingly mobilecommunities. I have watched as videos of traditional wedding ceremonies and songs arerecorded on smartphones in London by Nepali migrants, then uploaded to YouTube andwatched an hour later by relatives in remote Himalayan villages . . .
Globalization is regularly, and often uncritically, pilloried as a major threat to linguistic diversity.But in fact, globalization is as much process as it is ideology, certainly when it comes tolanguage. The real forces behind cultural homogenization are unbending beliefs, exchangedthrough a globalized delivery system, reinforced by the historical monolingualism prevalent inmuch of the West.
Monolingualism – the condition of being able to speak only one language – is regularlyaccompanied by a deep-seated conviction in the value of that language over all others.Across the largest economies that make up the G8, being monolingual is still often the norm,with multilingualism appearing unusual and even somewhat exotic. The monolingual mindsetstands in sharp contrast to the lived reality of most the world, which throughout its history hasbeen more multilingual than unilingual. Monolingualism, then, not globalization, should be ourprimary concern.
Multilingualism can help us live in a more connected and more interdependent world. Bywidening access to technology, globalization can support indigenous and scholarlycommunities engaged in documenting and protecting our shared linguistic heritage. For thelast 5,000 years, the rise and fall of languages was intimately tied to the plow, sword andbook. In our digital age, the keyboard, screen and web will play a decisive role in shaping thefuture linguistic diversity of our species.

Q.13 The author mentions the Welsh language to show that:

Q.14 The author lists all of the following as reasons for the decline or disappearance of alanguage EXCEPT:

Q.15 From the passage, we can infer that the author is in favour of:

Q.16 We can infer all of the following about indigenous languages from the passage EXCEPT that:

Q.17 The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the optionthat best captures the essence of the passage.
Biologists who publish their research directly to the Web have been labelled as“rogue”, but physicists have been routinely publishing research digitally (“preprints”),prior to submitting in a peer-reviewed journal. Advocates of preprints argue that quickand open dissemination of research speeds up scientific progress and allows forwider access to knowledge. But some journals still don’t accept research previouslypublished as a preprint. Even if the idea of preprints is gaining ground, one of thebiggest barriers for biologists is how they would be viewed by members of theirconservative research community.

Q.18 Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can beput together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in thenumber of the sentence as your answer:
1. It has taken on a warm, fuzzy glow in the advertising world, where its potential isbeing widely discussed, and it is being claimed as the undeniable wave of thefuture.
2. There is little enthusiasm for this in the scientific arena; for them marketing is nota science, and only a handful of studies have been published in scientific journals.
3. The new, growing field of neuromarketing attempts to reveal the inner workingsof consumer behaviour and is an extension of the study of how choices anddecisions are made.
4. Some see neuromarketing as an attempt to make the "art" of advertising into ascience, being used by marketing experts to back up their proposals with someform of real data.
5. The marketing gurus have already started drawing on psychology in developingtests and theories, and advertising people have borrowed the idea of the focusgroup from social scientists.

Q.19 The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the optionthat best captures the essence of the passage.
The unlikely alliance of the incumbent industrialist and the distressed unemployedworker is especially powerful amid the debris of corporate bankruptcies and layoffs. Inan economic downturn, the capitalist is more likely to focus on costs of thecompetition emanating from free markets than on the opportunities they create. Andthe unemployed worker will find many others in a similar condition and with anxietiessimilar to his, which will make it easier for them to organize together. Using the coverand the political organization provided by the distressed, the capitalist captures thepolitical agenda.

Q.20 The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) below, when properly sequenced wouldyield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of thesentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer:
1. Look forward a few decades to an invention which can end the energy crisis,change the global economy and curb climate change at a stroke: commercial fusionpower.
2. To gain meaningful insights, logic has to be accompanied by asking probingquestions of nature through controlled tests, precise observations and cleveranalysis.
3. The greatest of all inventions is the über-invention that has provided the insightson which others depend: the modern scientific method.
4. This invention is inconceivable without the scientific method; it will rest on theapplication of a diverse range of scientific insights, such as the processtransforming hydrogen into helium to release huge amounts of energy.

Q.21 Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can beput together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in thenumber of the sentence as your answer:
1. The care with which philosophers examine arguments for and against forms ofbiotechnology makes this an excellent primer on formulating and assessing moralarguments.
2. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineeringdisquieting, it is not easy to articulate why: what is wrong with re-engineering ournature?
3. Breakthroughs in genetics present us with the promise that we will soon be ableto prevent a host of debilitating diseases, and the predicament that our newfoundgenetic knowledge may enable us to enhance our genetic traits.
4. To grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions thatverge on theology, which is why modern philosophers and political theorists tend toshrink from them.
5. One argument is that the drive for human perfection through genetics isobjectionable as it represents a bid for mastery that fails to appreciate the gifts ofhuman powers and achievements.

Q.22 The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) below, when properly sequenced would yielda coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of thesentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer:
1. But today there is an epochal challenge to rethink and reconstitute the vision andpractice of development as a shared responsibility – a sharing which binds both theagent and the audience, the developed world and the developing, in a bond ofshared destiny.
2. We are at a crossroads now in our vision and practice of development.
3. This calls for the cultivation of an appropriate ethical mode of being in our liveswhich enables us to realize this global and planetary situation of shared living andresponsibility.
4. Half a century ago, development began as a hope for a better human possibility,but in the last fifty years, this hope has lost itself in the dreary desert of variouskinds of hegemonic applications.

Q.23 The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) below, when properly sequenced wouldyield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of thesentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer:
1. The US has long maintained that the Northwest Passage is an international straitthrough which its commercial and military vessels have the right to pass withoutseeking Canada’s permission.
2. Canada, which officially acquired the group of islands forming the NorthwestPassage in 1880, claims sovereignty over all the shipping routes through thePassage.
3. The dispute could be transitory, however, as scientists speculate that the entireArctic Ocean will soon be ice-free in summer, so ship owners will not have to askfor permission to sail through any of the Northwest Passage routes.
4. The US and Canada have never legally settled the question of access through thePassage, but have an agreement whereby the US needs to seek Canada’s consentfor any transit.

Q.24 The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the optionthat best captures the essence of the passage.
Creativity is now viewed as the engine of economic progress. Various organizationsare devoted to its study and promotion; there are encyclopedias and handbookssurveying creativity research. But this proliferating success has tended to erodecreativity’s stable identity: it has become so invested with value that it has becomeimpossible to police its meaning and the practices that supposedly identify andencourage it. Many people and organizations committed to producing originalthoughts now feel that undue obsession with the idea of creativity gets in the way ofreal creativity.