Directions for questions (1to 5): Choose the best answer to each question.
Humans like to think we are rational. Some of us are more rational than others. But, essentially, we are all slaves to our feelings and emotions. Often, the feelings and emotions that form the basis of our important views aren’t so very fine. Sometimes humans understand and control their emotions so little that they sooner or later coagulate into a roiling soup of anxiety, fear, sadness, self-loathing, resentment and anger which expresses itself however it can, finding objects to project its hurt and confusion on to. Like immigrants. Or transsexuals.Or liberals.OrTories.Or women.Or men.
Even if the desire to find living, breathing scapegoats is resisted, untrammelled emotion can result in unwise and self-defeating decisions, devoid of any rationality. Rationality is a tool we have created to govern our emotions. That’s why education, knowledge, information is the cornerstone of democracy. And that’s why despots love ignorance.
Sometimes we can identify and harness the emotions we need to get us through the thing we know,rationally, that we have to do. It’s great when you’re in the zone. Even negative emotions can be used rationally. I, for example, use anger a lot in my work. I’m writing on it at this moment. I’ll stop in a moment. I’ll reach for facts to calm myself. I’ll reach for facts to make my emotions seem rational. Or maybe that just me. Whatever that means!
It’s a fact that I can find some facts to back up my feelings about people. Just writing that down helps me to feel secure and in control. The irrationality of humans has been considered a fact since the 1970s, when two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, showed that human decisions were often completely irrational, not at all in their own interests and based on “cognitive biases”.
More recent research – or more recent theory, to be precise – has rendered even Tversky and Kahneman’sideas about the unreliability of the human mind overly rational. Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-ConsciousNature of Being, a research paper by David Oakley and Peter Halligan, argues “that ‘consciousness’ contains no top-down control processes and that ‘consciousness’ involves no executive, causal, or controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it”
Which can only mean that even when we think we’re being rational, we’re not even really thinking. That thing we call thinking – we don’t even know what it really is.
When I started out in journalism, opinion columns weren’t a big thing. Using the word “I’ in journalism was frowned upon. The dispassionate dissemination of facts was the goal to be reached for.
Now so much opinion is published, in print and online, and so many people offer their opinions about the opinions, that people in our government feel comfortable in declaring that experts are overrated, and powerful people in governments can deride anything they don’t like as being “fake news”.
So, people. They’re a problem. That’s what I’ve decided. I’m part of a big problem. All I can do now is get my message out there.
Why, as per the author, do despots love ignorance?
b) They exploit the ignorant governed who lack any emotion about their surroundings.
c) The ignorance of the governed allows the despots to make unwise, self-defeating decisions.
d) They exploit the ignorant governed who are unable to think rationally.
D
Why, as per the author, do despots love ignorance?
a) People’s minds have become so entrenched with emotions that they have forgotten to think by employing the attributes of rational thinking and psychological processes.
b) Even when we think we are being rational, we are acting irrationally.
c) Thinking is an unknown process as people’s minds do not follow the processes ascribed to them.
d) The random nature of consciousness makes thinking an unknowable process.
C
What is the purpose of the author behind writing the passage?
a) To assert that people often make irrational decisions and even when they think they are being rational, they don’t know what that is
b) To assert that people base their views on their feelings often resulting in their hating, criticising, or suppressing other’s opinions
c) To assert that human beings are mostly irrational and their views and decisions are based on their emotions
d) To argue that people cannot be trusted to think as they do not know what thinking is
A
According to the passage, all of the following are true EXCEPT:
a) Our emotions can be harnessed to achieve our goals.
b) Powerful people in governments label journalistic opinions “fake news”.
c) Tories and liberals are amongst the groups that become victims of people’s uncontrolled emotions.
d) Education and knowledge help us in becoming more rational.
B
According to the passage, all of the following are true EXCEPT:
a) Our emotions can be harnessed to achieve our goals.
b) Powerful people in governments label journalistic opinions “fake news”.
c) Tories and liberals are amongst the groups that become victims of people’s uncontrolled emotions.
d) Education and knowledge help us in becoming more rational.
B
Which of the following options is the paradox brought out by the last two paragraphs?
a) The author is expressing her opinion even though there is a risk of its being labelled “fake news”.
b) The author is expressing her opinion on something that has already been researched and discussed a lot.
c) The assertion that opinions have lost their credibility because of their glut is the author’s opinion.
d) The author calls people a problem, yet doesn’t shy away from including herself in it.
C
Anthropology comes from the Greek, literally “the study of the human.” As such, we overlap with history, sociology, psychology, political science, literature, documentary studies, and other fields. What distinguishes anthropology is less what anthropologists study, than how they do it, and in particular the investigative techniques of participant observation. Researchers live with and share the daily experiences of the people they are studying, often for years at a time. They also conduct formal and informal interviews; carry out surveys; gather oral histories, myths, and genealogies; and take notes, film, and record. Things that seem irrational, scary, and downright weird on the first arrival become second nature, and things that seemed natural and unquestionable at home can start to seem rather odd. Anthropologists believe that this position of being betwixt and between, or liminal, is a powerful place for understanding.
a) The investigative methods in Anthropology lead to a lot of confusion and this, in turn, provides Anthropology with a special meaning
b)Meaning in Anthropology is derived from the dilemmatic states of the researchers who study many subjects and undergo repeated changes of opinion
c)Anthropology is a global discipline that builds upon knowledge from natural sciences, including the discoveries about the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens
d)Anthropology derives its meaning more from its research methodology than its subject matter
D