Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.Bertrand Russell in The Conquest of Happiness has said that the sole reason of unhappiness finding refuge in the heart of man is the unhindered grow ?->(Show Answer!)

1. Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.Bertrand Russell in The Conquest of Happiness has said that the sole reason of unhappiness finding refuge in the heart of man is the unhindered growth of “self- centred passions”. These passions are more often materialistic. And in the pursuit of materialistic passions, man becomes alienated from the society. Failure in his pursuit often leads him to discontentment and dejection and he finds himself a misfit in this world. In the modern world, none is unaffected by stress. The stress to outdo the other in this mad rat race of consumerism often leads to depression.Even children are not spared from this. They are supposed to fare better than their classmates in examinations and other co-curricular activities. So man, right from childhood, has to face the brunt of being born in this fast changing society. A section of the youth, unable to cope with the expectations of their loved ones, either end their lives or experiment with drugs, for seeking temporary mental relaxation provided by the initial intake, encourages people to indulge in them more often. The body then becomes totally dependent on drugs and cannot survive without the daily dose. With regular intake the amount required to produce the effect also increases. This physical and mental dependence on drugs is called drug addiction. Drug addiction is a psychiatric, psychological and social problem. While persons of all ages and at all places are open to drug use the most susceptible among them are the youth. It has attained the proportions of almost an epidemic among the youth. It is mostly introduced to an unsuspecting person by his friends and is usually observed that once addicted to drugs, they initiate others to drugs. Some youngsters take to drugs because they are poked fun as if they do not use drugs. And some take drugs just to seek company or break boredom. In addition to these, other factors that lead to drug addiction are — lack of parental care and supervision, lack of moral and religious education, media and pop culture, broken homes, hatred for any authority, etc. Seeking refuge in drugs relieves tensions, eases depressions and removes inhibitions, although the period of ecstasy is apparently short-lived. Which of the following statements is true ?

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MCQ-> Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.Bertrand Russell in The Conquest of Happiness has said that the sole reason of unhappiness finding refuge in the heart of man is the unhindered growth of “self- centred passions”. These passions are more often materialistic. And in the pursuit of materialistic passions, man becomes alienated from the society. Failure in his pursuit often leads him to discontentment and dejection and he finds himself a misfit in this world. In the modern world, none is unaffected by stress. The stress to outdo the other in this mad rat race of consumerism often leads to depression.Even children are not spared from this. They are supposed to fare better than their classmates in examinations and other co-curricular activities. So man, right from childhood, has to face the brunt of being born in this fast changing society. A section of the youth, unable to cope with the expectations of their loved ones, either end their lives or experiment with drugs, for seeking temporary mental relaxation provided by the initial intake, encourages people to indulge in them more often. The body then becomes totally dependent on drugs and cannot survive without the daily dose. With regular intake the amount required to produce the effect also increases. This physical and mental dependence on drugs is called drug addiction. Drug addiction is a psychiatric, psychological and social problem. While persons of all ages and at all places are open to drug use the most susceptible among them are the youth. It has attained the proportions of almost an epidemic among the youth. It is mostly introduced to an unsuspecting person by his friends and is usually observed that once addicted to drugs, they initiate others to drugs. Some youngsters take to drugs because they are poked fun as if they do not use drugs. And some take drugs just to seek company or break boredom. In addition to these, other factors that lead to drug addiction are — lack of parental care and supervision, lack of moral and religious education, media and pop culture, broken homes, hatred for any authority, etc. Seeking refuge in drugs relieves tensions, eases depressions and removes inhibitions, although the period of ecstasy is apparently short-lived. Which of the following statements is true ?
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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 passage carefully. Answer the questions by selecting the most appropriate option (with reference to the passage). PASSAGE 1We use the word culture quite casually when referring to a variety of thoughts and actions. I would like to begin my attempt to define cultures by a focus on three of its dictionary meanings that I think are significant to our understanding of the general term-culture. We often forget that it's more essential usage is as a verb rather than as a noun, since the noun follows froth the activities involved in the verb. Thus the verb, to culture, means to cultivate. This can include at least three activities: to artificially grow microscopic organisms; to improve and refine the customs, manners and activities of one's life; to give attention to the mind as part of what goes into the making of what we call civilization, or what was thought to be the highest culture. In short, one might argue that culture is the intervention of human effort in refining and redefining that which is natural, but that it gradually takes on other dimensions in the life of the individual, and even more in the interface between the individual and society. When speaking of society, this word also requires defining. Society, it has been said, is what emerges from a network of interactions between people that follow certain agreed upon and perceptible patterns. These arc determined by ideas of status, hierarchy and a sense of community governing the network. They are often, but not invariably, given a direction by those who control the essentials in how a society functions, as for instance, its economic resources, its technology and its value systems. The explanation and justification for who controls these aspects of a society introduces the question of its ideology and often its form. The resulting patterns that can be differentiated from segment to segment of the society are frequently called its cultures. Most early societies register inequalities, The access of their members to wealth and status varies. The idea of equality therefore has many dimensions. All men and women may be said to be equal in the eyes of god, but may at the same time be extremely differentiated in terms of income and social standing, and therefore differentiated in the eyes of men and women. This would not apply to the entire society. There may be times when societies conform to a greater degree of equality, but such times may be temporary. It has been argued that on a pilgrimage, the status of every pilgrim is relatively similar but at the end returns to inequalities. Societies are not static and change their forms and their rules of functioning. Cultures are reflections of these social patterns, so they also change. My attempt in this introduction is to explain how the meaning of a concept such as culture has changed in recent times and has come to include many more facets than it did earlier. What we understand as the markers of culture have gone way beyond what we took them to be a century or two ago. Apart from items of culture, which is the way in which culture as heritage was popularly viewed, there is also the question of the institutions and social codes that determine the pattern of living, and upon which pattern a culture is constructed. Finally, there is the process of socialization into society and culture through education. There is a historical dimension to each of these as culture and history are deeply intertwined. There is also an implicit dialogue between the present and the past reflected in the way in which the readings of the past changed over historical periods. Every. society has its cultures, namely, the patterns of how the people of that society live. In varying degrees this would refer to broad categories that shape life, such as the environment that determines the relationship with the natural world, technology that enables a control over the natural world, political-economy that organizes the larger vision of a society as a community or even as a state, structures of social relations that ensure its networks of functioning, religion that appeals to aspirations and belief, mythology that may get transmuted into literature and philosophy that teases the mind and the imagination with questions. The process of growth is never static therefore there are mutations and changes within the society. There is communication and interaction with other societies through which cultures evolve and mutate. There is also the emergence of subcultures that sometimes take the form of independent and dominant cultures or amoeba-like breakaway to form new cultures. Although cultures coincide with history and historical change, the consciousness of a category such as culture, in the emphatic sense in which the term is popularly used these days, emerges in the eighteenth century in Europe. The ideal was the culture of elite groups, therefore sometimes a distinction is made between what carne to be called 'high culture' that of the elite, and low culture' that of those regarded as not being of the elite, and sometimes described as 'popular'. Historical records of elite cultures in forms such as texts and monuments for instance, received larger patronage and symbolized the patterns of life of dominant groups. They were and are more readily available as heritage than the objects of the socially lower groups in society whose less durable cultural manifestations often do not survive. This also predisposed people to associate culture as essentially that of the elite.What is the central idea of the passage?
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MCQ-> Social life is an outflow and meeting of personality, which means that its end is the meeting of character, temperament, and sensibility, in which our thoughts and feelings, and sense perceptions are brought into play at their lightest and yet keenest.This aspect, to my thinking, is realized as much in large parties composed of casual acquaintances or even strangers, as in intimate meetings of old friends. I am not one of those superior persons who hold cocktail parties in contempt, looking upon them as barren or at best as very tryingly kaleidoscopic places for gathering, because of the strangers one has to meet in them; which is no argument, for even our most intimate friends must at one time have been strangers to us. These large gatherings will be only what we make of them if not anything better, they can be as good places to collect new friends from as the slavemarkets of Istanbul were for beautiful slaves or New Market for race horses.But they do offer more immediate enjoyment. For one thing, in them one can see the external expression of social life in appearance and behaviour at its widest and most varied where one can admire beauty of body or air, hear voices remarkable either for sweetness of refinement, look on elegance of clothes or deportment. What is more, these parties are schools for training in sociability, for in them we have to treat strangers as friends. So, in them we see social sympathy in widest commonalty spread, or at least should. We show an atrophy of the natural human instinct of getting pleasure and happiness out of other human beings if we cannot treat strangers as friends for the moment. And I would go further and paraphrase Pater to say that not to be able to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, even when we meet them casually, is on this short day of frost and sun which out life is, to sleep before evening.So, it will be seen that my conception of social life is modest, for it makes no demands on what we have, though it does make some on what we are. Interest, wonder, sympathy, and love, the first two leading to the last two, are the psychological prerequisites for social life; and the need for the first two must not be underrated. We cannot make the most even of our intimate social life unless we are able to make strangers of our oldest friends everyday by discovering unknown areas in their personality, and transform them into new friends. In sum, social life is a function of vitality.It is tragic, however, to observe that it is these very natural springs of social life which are drying up among us. It is becoming more and more difficult to come across fellow-feeling for human beings as such in our society and in all its strata. In the poor middle class, in the course of all my life. I have hardly seen any social life properly so-called. Not only has the grinding routine of making a living killed all desire for it in them, it has also generated a standing mood of peevish hostility to other human beings. Increasing economic distress in recent years has infinitely worsened this state of affairs, and has also brought a sinister addition class hatred. This has become the greatest collective emotional enjoyment of the poor middle class, and indeed they feel most social when they form a pack, and snarl or howl at people who are better off than they.Their most innocent exhibition of sociability is seen when they spill out from their intolerable homes into the streets and bazaars. I was astonished to see the milling crowds in the poor suburbs of Calcutta. But even there a group of flippant young loafers would put on a conspiratorial look if they saw a man in good clothes passing by them either on foot or in a car. I had borrowed a car from a relative to visit a friend in one of these suburbs, and he became very anxious when I had not returned before dusk. Acid and bombs, he said, were thrown at card almost every evening in that area. I was amazed. But I also know as a fact that my brother was blackmailed to pay five rupees on a trumped up charge when passing in a car through one such locality.The situation is differently inhuman, but not a whit more human, among the well-to-do. Kindliness for fellow human beings has been smothered in them, taken as a class, by the arrogance of worldly position, which among the Bengalis who show this snobbery is often only a third-class position.The word ‘they’ in the first sentence of the third paragraph refers to
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MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions 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, there lived a lion in a forest. A jackal, a crow and a wolf had developed friendship. They knew that the lion was the king of the forest and friendship with such a fierce creature would always help them. To meet their selfish ends, they started obeying and were always at the service of the lion. They didn’t have to make any efforts to search for their food, as the lion gave his leftover meals to them. Moreover, they became powerful as they were next to the king of the forest. One day, a camel, who came from some distant land, lost his way and entered the same forest where these friends lived. In the meantime, these three friends happened to pass the same way that the camel was wandering. When they saw the camel, they realized that he did not belong to their forest. The jackal suggested to his other two friends, “Let’s kill and eat him.” The wolf replied, “It is a big animal. We cannot kill him like this. I think, we should first inform our king about this camel.” The crow agreed with the wolf s idea. All of them went to meet the lion. On reaching the lion’s den, the jackal approached the lion and said, Your Majesty, an unknown camel has dared to enter your kingdom without your consent, Let’s kill him; he could make a nice meal.” The lion roared loudly on hearing this and said, ‘What are you saying ? The camel has come for refuge in ray kingdom. It is unethical to kill him. We should provide him the best shelter. Go and bring him to me,” All of them were dispirited to hear these words from the king. They unwillingly went to the camel and told him about the lion’s desire to meet him, The camel was scared about the strange offer. He thought that his end had come and in a little while he would become the lion’s meal. As he couldn’t even escape, he decided to meet the lion. The selfish friends escorted the camel to the lion’s den. The lion welcomed the camel warmly and assured him of a safe stay in the forest. The camel was totally amazed to hear the lion’s words. He happily started living with the jackal, the crow and the wolf. One day, when the lion was hunting for food, he had a struggle with a mighty elephant. The lion was badly injured in the struggle and became incapable of hunting for his food. Thus the lion had to sustain without food for days. Due to this, his friends too had to go hungry for days as they totally depended on the lion’s kill for their food. But the camel was satisfied grazing around in the forest. All the three friends were worried and discussed the matter among them, As the jackal, the crow and the wolf had set their evil eyes on the camel, they met once again and devised a plan to kill the camel. They went to the camel and said, “Dear Friend, you know our king has not eaten anything for many days now. He is unable to hunt due to his wounds and sickness. Under such circumstances, it becomes our duty to sacrifice ourselves to save the life of our king. Come with us, we will offer our bodies as food for him.” The camel didn’t understand their plan, but innocently nodded in favour of it. All of them approached the lion’s den. First of all, the crow came forward and said, “Your Majesty, I can’t see you like this. So please eat me.” The lion replied, “I would prefer to die than to perform such a sinful deed.” Then, the jackal came forward and said, “Your Majesty, crow’s body is too small for your appetite. I offer myself to you, as it is my duty to save your life.” The lion politely rejected the offer. As per the plan, now it was the wolf’s turn to offer himself to the king. So, the wolf came forward and said, “Your Majesty, jackal is quite small to gratify your hunger. I offer myself for this kind job, Please, kill me and appease your hunger.” But the Lion didn’t kill any of them. The camel, who was watching the whole scene felt reassured of his safety and also decided to go forward and complete the formality. He marched forward and said, “Your Majesty, why don’t you kill me ? You are my friend. Please allow me to offer you my body.” The lion found the offer quite appropriate as the camel himself had offered his body for food. The lion attacked the camel at once, ripped open his body and lore him into pieces. The lion and his friends feasted on the poor camel for days together.‘Why could the lion not hunt anymore ?
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