Who said: “Superstition is the religion of feeble minds”? ?->(Show Answer!)

1. Who said: “Superstition is the religion of feeble minds”?

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MCQ-> I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control. To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things like empires and their wars to more familiar little things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important to women.There was a time when pinmakers would buy the material; shape it; make the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to the market, and sell it and the making required skill in several operations. They not only knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could do it all by themselves. But they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for the farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman's dress allowance was calling pin money.By the end of the 18th century Adam Smith boasted that it took 18 men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pin-makers, you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilisation when its effect had so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it. The men, it is said, could turn out nearly 5000 pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be richer because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without intelligence and being fed by the spare food of the capitalist just as an engine is fed with coals and oil. That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well as a poet, complained that 'wealth accumulates, and men decay'.Nowadays Adam Smith's 18 men are as extinct as the diplodocus. The 18 flesh-and-blood men have been replaced by machines of steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them into pink papers is done by machinery. The result is that with the exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody knows how to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent, skilful and accomplished as the old pinmaker; and the only compensation we have for this deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal, if even it’s a pin.Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and degrade our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the Distribution of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old free for higher work than pin-making or the like. But in the meantime the fact remains that the workers are now not able to make anything themselves even in little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their day's work until it has all been arranged for them by their employer's who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply pay other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker's directions.The same is true for clothes. Earlier the whole work of making clothes, from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the men and women of the household, especially the women; so that to this day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left of all this but the sheep shearing; and even that, like the milking of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a sheep today and ask her to produce a woollen dress for you; and not only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are likely to find that she is not even aware of any connection between sheep and clothes. When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at the shop, she knows that there is a difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet and other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or how they came to be in the shop ready for her to buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own clothes.Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and encyclopaedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the books are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their information from other books, what they tell us is twenty to fifty years out of date knowledge and almost impractical today. And of course most of us are too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about it; what we need is cinema to take our minds off it and feel our imagination.It is a funny place, this word of capitalism, with its astonishing spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is made that they find people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive, but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or less dangerous lunatics in the real world.Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realise that I had better stop writing plays for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.A suitable title to the passage would be
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MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the question given below it.Certain words/phrases have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.Once upon a time a dishonest King had a man call the Valuer in his court. The Valuer set the price which ought to be paid for horses and elephants and the other animals.He also set the price on jewellery and gold.and things of that kind.This man was honest and just and set the proper price to be paid to the owners of the goods.The King however was not pleased with this Valuer because he was honest ‘If I had another sort of a man as Valuer I might gain more riches, he thought One day the King saw a stupid miserly peasant come into the place yard.The King sent for the fellow and asked him if he would like to be Valuer.The peasant said he would like the position.So the King had him made Valuer He sent the honest Valuer away from the place.Then the peasant began to set the prices on horses and elephants upon gold and jewels.He did not know their value so he would say anything he chose.As the King had made him Valuer the People had to sell their goods for the price he set. By and by a horse-dealer brought five hundred horses to the court of this King.The Valuer came and said they were worth a mere measure of rice and the horses to be put in the palace stables. The horse-dealer went then to see the honest man who had been the Valuer and told him what had happened.’What shall I do ?’ asked the horses-dealer “I think you can give a present to the Valuer which will make him “Go to him and give him a fine present then say to him You said the horses are worth a measure of rice,but now tell what a measure of rice is worth ! Can you value that standing in your place by the King ?’ If he says he can go with him to the King and I will be there too” The horses-dealer thought this was a good idea.So he took a fine present to the Valuer and said what the other man had told him to say.The stupid Valuer took the present,and said,”Yes, I can go before the King with you and tell what a measure of rice is worth.I can go before the King with you and tell what a measure of rice is worth. I can value now. Well let us go at once” said the horses-dealer.So they went before the king and his ministers in the palace.The horses-dealer bowed down before the King and said “O King I have learned that a measure of rice is the value of my five hundred horses.But will the King be pleased to ask the Valuer what had happened asked,How now Valuer what are five hundred horses worth ? “A measure of rice O King !” said he “very good then ! If five hundred horses are worth a measure of rice what is the measure of rice worth ?” The measure of rice is worth your whole city” replied the foolish fellow The minister clapped their hands laughing and saying “What a foolish Valuer! How can such a man hold that office ? We used to think this great city was beyond price but this man says it is worth only a measure of rice.Then the King was ashamed and drove out the foolish fellow “I tried to please the King by setting a low price on the horses and now see what has happened to me !’ said the Valuer as he ran away from the laughing crowd.Who did the King appoint as the new Valuer ?
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MCQ-> Read the following passage and answer the questions. Passage: An old man with steel rimmed spectacles and very dusty clothes sat by the side of the road. There was a pontoon bridge across the river and carts, trucks, and men, women and children were crossing it. The mule-drawn carts staggered up the steep bank from the bridge with soldiers helping to push against the spokes of the wheels. The trucks ground up and away heading out of it all and the peasants plodded along in the ankle deep dust. But the old man sat there without moving. He was too tired to go any farther. It was my business to cross the bridge, explore the bridgehead beyond and find out to what point the enemy had advanced. I did this and returned over the bridge. There were not so many carts now and very few people on foot, but the old man was still there. "Where do you come from?" I asked him. "From San Carlos," he said, and smiled. That was his native town and so it gave him pleasure to mention it and he smiled. "I was taking care of animals." he explained. "Oh," I said, not quite understanding. "Yes," he said, "I stayed. you see, taking care of animals. I was the last one to leave the town of San Carlos." He did not look like a shepherd nor a herdsman and I looked at his black dusty clothes and his gray dusty face and his steel rimmed spectacles and said. "What animals were they?" "Various animals." he said. and shook his head. "I had to leave them." I was watching the bridge and the African looking country of the Ebro Delta wondering how long now it would be before we would see the enemy.. "What animals were they?" I asked. "There were three animals altogether," he explained. "There were two goats and a cat and then there were four pairs of pigeons." "And you had to leave them?" I asked. "Yes. Because of the artillery. The captain told me to go because of the artillery." "And you have no family?" I asked, watching the far end of the bridge where a few last carts were hurrying down the slope of the bank. "No," he said, "only the animals I stated. The cat, of course, will be all right. A cat can look out for itself. but I cannot think what will become of the others." "What politics have you?" I asked. "I am without politics," he said. "I am seventy-six years old. I have come twelve kilometers now and I think now I can go no further." "This is not a good place to stop," I said. "If you can make it, there are trucks up the road where it forks for Tortosa." "I will wait a while," he said, "and then I will go. Where do the trucks go?" "Towards Barcelona," I told him.Where was the old man coming from?
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MCQ-> A passage is given with five questions following it. Read the passage carefully and select the best answer to each question out of the given four alternatives.Superstitions are a universal phenomena having their own peculiar place in the cultural ethos and milieu of a people. They epitomize man's fear of the unknown, fear of evil, blind faith in omens and portents. Superstitions are inter-woven with myth, legend, unnatural phenomena and disaster, customs and traditions, and are mainly the outcome of ignorance. They are unreasoned and irrational beliefs that gradually become matters of faith. When certain things and happenings are rationally inexplicable people tend to assign mysterious and supernatural reasons for their operation. Thus a natural disaster is explained in terms of God's wrath and the failure of one's project is assigned to the black cat which crossed the path just as one set out on the errand. The primitive human beings were mainly governed by superstitions. Superstitions were widespread before the dawn of civilization when science had not advanced. Thus, ignorance of the primitive people and the resultant growth of superstitions were the direct outcome of the lack of scientific advancement. Unenlightened people always tend to be superstitious. The belief in the sanctity of time and old traditions of the ancestors bind the people into knots of superstitious thought. Besides, the unscrupulous priests and religious officials exercise a dominating, unhealthy effect upon the people believing in religious orthodoxy. They encourage superstitions for their own ulterior motives. Superstitions are not only universally prevalent but even have strikingly common features whether believed in India or in as far off a place as Canada. There are some common superstitions which are shared by people all over the world. Beliefs in spirits, ghosts and witches and reincarnation are quite common among all the peoples of the world. Belief in witches still prevails in India, France, Scotland, England and many other countries. In countries of the East, especially in India, belief in ghosts and spirits still exists. The cries of certain birds like owls and ravens and the howl of cats are regarded with superstition as portents of evil throughout the world. Then there is a very common belief that the sighting of comets portends the death of kings or great men or some unforeseen catastrophe. Shakespeare refers to such a superstition in his Julius Ceaser, Halley's Comet in the twentieth century evoked a similar response in many a mind.What is the main reason behind once superstitions?
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