Reading Comprehension Questions for CAT

Read the given passage carefully and answer the following questions: Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self. A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories. Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness. John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness. Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments - involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters - to explore the psychological approach. Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms. (Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions. All these approaches reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences. On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity. Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.

The psychological approach varies from the animalistic approach in that

Study the following information and answer the questions that follow:

In 1879, the German botanist Anton de Bary coined the term symbiosis. People usually think of symbiosis in terms of mutually beneficial relationships, but scientifically it’s a catch-all for any relationship-harmonious or antagonistic, parasitic or neighborly-between two different organisms. The details are left unclear.

Just two years later, while studying marine creatures under a microscope, de Bary’s compatriot Karl Andreas Heinrich Brandt realized that the small amber orbs lining their digestive tissues were not part of them, but a type of symbiotic algae. Brandt gave the cells the name “zooxanthellae,” which roughly means “little yellow cell in an animal.” Among the creatures in whom zooxanthellae live are coral, and in the ensuing century scientists discovered that those little yellow cells donate a whopping 90 percent of the sugar they make from photosynthesis to their coral hosts. That energy is why coral colonies-which themselves are aggregations of pencil-eraser-sized polyps-can build reefs so immense they can be seen from outer space.

…Because zooxanthellae lack physical characteristics that distinguish them from one another, there was no visible way to tell if they were different species, even at high magnification. Rowan realized that their DNA had the power to reveal what microscopes could not…. Experiments showed that juvenile coral hosting Durusdinium grew two to three times slower than their siblings hosting other symbionts. Subsequent work found that corals receive only about half as much sugar from Durusdinium as from other species of zooxanthellae.

Some researchers suggested that Durusdinium were, as one paper put it, “selfish opportunists” taking advantage of compromised coral to replace their more-beneficial competitors. Yet Andrew Baker, a coral biologist at the University of Miami, believes that “people have been maybe too willing to label Durusdinium as being selfish. There are many competing ideas. One hypothesis suggests that because Durusdinium abundance is comparatively low-a coral hosting them may contain several hundred, whereas thousands of Breviolum or Cladocopium dwell within each of their coral hosts-they give the impression of selfishness, but on a per-cell basis supply just as much sugar. “It could be that Durusdinium are doing the best they can, you know?” Baker says.

Then there’s the so-called Tenacious D hypothesis, which proposes that Durusdinium isn’t necessarily heat-tolerant. Rather, they evade notice by coral immune systems, which play a role in the bleaching process and may become more reactive during periods of heat-induced stress.

If Durusdinium were selfish, they would act like parasites, feeding their host just barely enough to keep it alive. There’s some evidence for this: Baker and his colleagues followed the fates of more than 100 corals around the central Pacific island of Kiribati during a severe, 10-month-long heat wave. As expected, corals already hosting Durusdinium didn’t bleach-but few survived. Perhaps they were too weakened by Durusdinium’s sparse rations to withstand the stress. However, the study also followed colonies that hosted Cladocopium before the heatwave. As expected, they bleached, but then shifted to Durusdinium and more of these colonies survived. Selfishness is a complicated thing; it depends a lot on context.

Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow: Neorealism is one of the more straightforward and simple theoretical approaches to anarchy. It had been thought of by Kenneth Waltz in 1979, emerging from the IR (International Relations) theory, classical realism. The two theories shared a multitude of key points concerning anarchy, including the three fundamental assumptions that allow anarchy to function which are; firstly, that the world is composed of sovereign states; secondly, there is no higher authority to govern the international system; and thirdly, the absence of a higher authority then means that the international system is anarchic. In this system of anarchy, “security is the highest end”, and states will do all they can to ensure their own survival. But as opposed to classical realism, where human nature is the core catalyst as to why states want to acquire power to inevitably survive, it is instead the “structure or architecture of the international system that forces states to pursue power”. With no higher authority ruling over the multiple states in the international system, it leaves these states in the dilemma of the need to acquire power to protect them from potential threats ... Due to this, neorealists argue that anarchy is the primary cause of international conflict and other international dilemmas because there is no government above states which can attempt to prevent them, and states are at the most basic argument, fighting for survival. However, constructivists challenge this claim that the international system is inherently anarchic, most famously by Alexander Wendt who claimed that “anarchy is what states make of it” and instead of the international system being inherently anarchic, claims that “people act towards objects, including other actors, on the basis of the meanings that the objects have for them”. This can be interpreted as states having different national interests which have emerged from a range of influences such as from history and society. From this, constructivists would argue that the international system is “imbued with social values, norms and assumptions” and thus, socially constructed. The belief that the international system is influenced by things such as norms, emphasizes “the social aspect of human existence” and further differentiates constructivism from neorealism, which is heavily state-centric.

According to neorealists, anarchy is considered the primary cause of international conflict because

Evgeny Morozov, a former denizen of the technology world, gained notoriety as a skeptic of that world with his 2010 book The Net Delusion, in which he argued that technology enthusiasts or “cyber-utopians” had oversold the liberatory potential of the Internet. His latest book, the much-reviewed To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, continues in this vein, presenting a polemical critique of those who too readily embrace digital technology as a tool for freedom and democracy...

In your book you write against what you call “technological solutionism”—an endemic ideology that recasts complex social phenomena like politics, public health, education, and law enforcement as “neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized—if only the right algorithms are in place!” How did you come to choose the phrase “technological solutionism” to describe the approach you’re criticizing?

The analysis was there all along, but the idea of solutionism didn’t occur to me until the very end. I wrote most of the book in Belarus last summer, and when I was flying back to the States, reading about urban planning and architecture on the plane, I stumbled upon this word. I had been using the phrase “silicon mentality” but it didn’t have the same zing as “technological solutionism.” Solutionism travels very well—you see people taking it up and applying it in their own fields.

Aren’t human beings solutionist, technological creatures by nature? Do you really think it’s a historically specific, contemporary phenomenon?

It’s a good point—that solutionism is part of our normal problem-solving apparatus. But clearly something has changed. I open the book by talking about the proliferation of sensors anywhere and everywhere, the portability of smart phones, the ubiquity of social networks, et cetera. A new problem-solving infrastructure is here; new types of solutions become possible that weren’t possible 15 years ago. The way in which we have redefined things like inefficiency or ambiguity or opacity as problematic has nothing to do with deep ideas about political philosophy (in the case of politics) or criminal justice (in the case of crime) but has to do instead with this wonderful new infrastructure for problem-solving: Why not introduce it to solve all these problems we can suddenly see? And so citizens are being asked to do things they previously didn’t have to do or didn’t have to worry about. So in that sense, I understand the current state of solutionism through the prism of the kind of problem-solving approaches that overtake governance...

The problem that I see is not just the fact that we have a lot of new technologies that suddenly have become much more powerful than they were 10, 15, even 100 years ago; the problem that I see is how those technologies are brought together under the umbrella of the “Internet” and are assumed to have a uniform, autonomous dynamic by which they ought to be understood and governed. My book is mostly a study of the discourse of Internet-centrism created by pundits and technology bloggers and cyberlawyers...

A set of questions accompanies the passage below. Choose the best answer to each question. Because living is different from telling, and one event in a story can only be understood in relation to the rest, the way things appear to be at first glance never quite aligns with what they ultimately mean. Friction, we might say, animates fiction. Tragedy, especially, reveals this discrepancy in memorable and powerful ways: Oedipus finds out, much too late, that things are not what they appear to be. This paradoxical element of narrative applies to readers of stories as well as the characters in them. Brooks identifies the “master trope” of the “strange logic” of narrative: “Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative…we read in a spirit of confidence, and also a state of dependence, that what remains to be read will restructure the provisional meanings of the already read.” In fiction and in life, the significance of the present is always “provisional,” dependent on the end that is to come. Brooks’s “anticipation of retrospection” ought to make us think critically about narrative advertisements. For what is using a story to sell a product but a kind of misappropriation of narrative itself? To frame a story to achieve a certain result (and this by no means happens only in commercials), its denouement/ending must be clipped in such a way as to minimize retrospection, to prevent our re-examining of the impulse to purchase. What happens when those new parents reflect, months or years later, on the wild emotions of that first ride home from the hospital? Sure, it was comforting to drive the baby home in a brand-new car, but maybe now the couple wish they hadn’t sold their old one, which was perfectly safe and reliable, if a bit dinged up, and paid off, as they are reminded each month when the car loan bill arrives in the mail. The example is trite, but even the most ordinary of human decisions relies on the structure of the stories we use to make sense of things. Stories used for the purpose of marketing warp that structure, rejecting its all-encompassing nature to achieve a different outcome—not one of understanding, but of profit.

Which of the following statements would be at odds with the discussion in the passage?

Study the following information and answer the questions that follow:

In a lab in London, new born chicks took the first steps of their life and unwittingly became part of solving one of the brain’s bigger mysteries. In a simple test, researchers placed the downy animals, hatched after less than a day in complete darkness, one at a time into a special box. Two screens on opposite sides of the box played videos of moving orange balls, one moving upward, the other downward. By design, the videos were the first things these chicks saw in their lives—and, thanks to their sideways-facing eyes, they saw both at once. Computer software tracked the chick’s movements, and the results were clear. Over the course of 20 minutes, most of the chicks hesitantly toddled over to the end of the box with the upward-moving ball, confirming what scientists suspected: Even without any previous visual experiences, chicks are attracted to objects moving against gravity. The discovery is the latest development in the scientific investigation of how the minds of animals and humans prepare them for life. The preference for upward-moving objects represents the first time a stimulus this simple has been shown to trigger attention in chicks before they have any life experience.

Biologists call the mechanisms that assist animals in their earliest moments “evolutionary predispositions” or “priors.” These impulses are built into the brain from birth and guide an animal’s decisions before it has any lived experiences. Elisa Raffaella Ferrè, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Birkbeck and co-author of the new study, arrived at the chick experiment from her research on how the human brain adapts to gravity. Studying how predispositions work in humans is difficult, says Ferrè, as babies take time to develop complex skills. By the time human infants are able to easily move and respond to stimuli, they have already spent significant time learning. Chicks, however, can perform relatively complex actions very soon after birth. That makes them prime candidates for exploring how predispositions function.

In the experiment the chick has no experience whatsoever—never seen any object, anything moving around, zero. When the chicks observed the balls, they not only investigated the ball that appeared to work against the pull of gravity, but also approached it first and faster, in addition to spending more time exploring it. The behavior not only shows an innate predisposition for objects that move against gravity, but it also shows that the chicks have some understanding—whether conscious or unconscious—of how gravity works. Why this preference for objects that move against gravity exists at all remains unclear. The researchers of this study speculate that it could be because the ability to self-propel against the force of gravity is more likely to be associated with living animals. Going against gravity in a consistent way is associated with animate objects in the ecological world because usually you see that water flows down or a rock falls down. Inanimate objects, on the other hand, are unlikely to move consistently against gravity.

Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow. My colleagues argue that criteria of beauty are experience-based. The most fundamental theories we currently have - the standard model of particle physics and Albert Einstein’s general relativity - are beautiful in specific ways. I agree it was worth a try to assume that more fundamental theories are beautiful in similar ways. But, well, we tried, and it didn’t work. Nevertheless, physicists continue to select theories based on the same three criteria of beauty: simplicity, naturalness, and elegance. With simplicity I don’t mean Occam’s razor, which demands that among two theories that achieve the same thing, you pick the one that’s simpler. No, I mean absolute simplicity: a theory should be simple, period. When theories are not simple enough for my colleagues’ tastes, they try to make them simpler - by unifying several forces or by postulating new symmetries that combine particles in orderly sets. The second criterion is naturalness. Naturalness is an attempt to get rid of the human element by requiring that a theory should not use assumptions that appear hand-picked. This criterion is most often applied to the values of constants without units, such as the ratios of elementary particles’ masses. Naturalness demands that such numbers should be close to one or, if that’s not the case, the theory explains why that isn’t so. Then there’s elegance, the third and most elusive aspect of beauty. It’s often described as a combination of simplicity and surprise that, taken together, reveals new connections. We find elegance in the ‘Aha effect’, the moment of insight when things fall into place. How far can you push this programme before it becomes absurd? Well, if you make a theory simpler and simpler it will eventually become unpredictive, because the theory no longer contains enough information to even carry through calculations. What you get then is what theorists now call a ‘multiverse’ - an infinite collection of universes with different laws of nature.

Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the given questions. Does anybody else see the irony in the great technologists of Silicon Valley railing against the Trump Administration for hampering the economic prosperity of our youth, restricting immigration and diversity, and fostering income inequality. Their own companies employ sophisticated technologies to ensure that they can employ as few as possible, which allows them to pay their employees outlandish sums of money. The products and services they sell allow other companies to do the same. Over the decades those companies have done their best to reduce or even eliminate the world's "blue collar jobs" and are now with their so-called Artificial Intelligence attempting to do the same to global "white collar" jobs. In fact, it is likely that the Trump administration will be unable to keep its promise to return the millions of manufacturing jobs that have moved offshore during the past 40 years, because many of those jobs have been replaced by computer operated machines. How does any of that help today's youth make their economic way in the world, or help middle class incomes keep pace with inflation or help immigrants assimilate into American culture? Additionally, if Silicon Valley gets its way, all jobs paying a living wage will require employees to possess sophisticated skills in some aspect of building and/or operating computer systems. That also hampers economic diversity if not ethnic diversity in today's workforce. That may be progress, but it is not very "progressive." No one is arguing that improving technology is not a boon for the global economy or humanity at large; a favourite example is how Microsoft Windows transformed tasks that took me weeks to perform down to days and sometimes mere hours. And companies like Google, Amazon and many others continue to enhance and improve our lives daily. But many of the recent additions, like the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, one can easily argue, have not only made our lives less productive and less secure, but have in some ways contributed to the "dumbing down" and social ineptitude, if not delinquency, of our children and young adults. The constant preoccupation with the internet, mobile gadgets, and "virtual reality" is leading many among us to opt out of "real world" reality. This "ear bud generation" seems less interested and aware of the mounting challenges of the increasingly dangerous world in which we live. Today's technologists would be well advised to reflect on their own complicity with what's wrong with our world and think about "high tech" solutions for addressing those problems before opting for "low brow" criticism and cheap shots for those currently charged with meeting and overcoming the challenges that await us.

Is the author a supporter of Donald Trump?

Throughout our long history, people have always experienced panic, probably even panic attacks. Today, we have sophisticated medications - especially benzodiazepines - that people can use to help them with this panic. Benzodiazepines act fast, and can induce a calming or even euphoric high, which increases the risk of both psychological and physical dependence. But while benzodiazepines are relatively new, panic is very old. So what did humans in other times, civilisations and settings do when they panicked?

Some people who experienced panic attacks got burned as witches or accused of being possessed by demons or evil spirits. But it's also true that the beginnings of a more clinical understanding of panic weren't as far off as you might think. Greek physicians, such as Hippocrates in the 5th century BCE, described symptoms resembling modern panic attacks - such as heart palpitations, dizziness, and fainting - but classified them under a broader condition known as 'hysteria'.

Later, in The Canon of Medicine (1025) - yes, 1025 - Avicenna (Ibn Sina), described forms of sudden fear and anxiety as part of neuropsychological disorders. Though his explanations still blended physical and spiritual reasoning, his work laid the foundation for a more nuanced understanding of mental health. He wrote: 'The movements of the soul begin in the heart and manifest in the body,' suggesting a deep interconnection between mind and physiology. Ibn Sina also discussed what we would now call psychosomatic illness, noting that 'strong emotions may alter the pulse and colour of the face.' His holistic view - that emotional and spiritual states directly influence physical health - anticipated principles of modern psychosomatic medicine by nearly a millennium.

When it comes to panic attacks, though, force has never really been the answer. Across many cultures, the most effective approach has been to help the mind - or, as Islamic psychology often refers to it, the heart - relax. And for most people, that meant simply cheering up.

Many peoples and societies have understood that 'cheering up' is intimately tied to the senses - especially the ears and eyes. Listening to something soothing often brings comfort. Seeing calming or familiar patterns can promote relaxation. In some cases, an intense or activating sensory pattern might be used to snap someone out of their panicked state.

For example, for many centuries, across the Horn of Africa and in parts of the Middle East such as Egypt and Yemen, the Z'ar ritual has been a communal healing ceremony practised primarily by women. It addresses symptoms that closely resemble modern diagnoses of panic and anxiety disorders: shortness of breath, chest tightness, trembling, and dissociative episodes. But, instead of labelling these experiences as purely psychological, the Z'ar tradition interprets them as signs of possession by a restless spirit.