Year
CAT 2022
Section
Verbal
Topic
Critical Thinking in RC
Difficulty
Medium
Question
Slot-2
Read the passage and answer the questions below.
Read the passage and answer the questions below.
Passage:
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
Humans today make music. Think beyond all the qualifications that might trail after this bald statement: that only certain humans make music, that extensive training is involved, that many societies distinguish musical specialists from nonmusicians, that in today's societies most listen to music rather than making it, and so forth. These qualifications, whatever their local merit, are moot in the face of the overarching truth that making music, considered from a cognitive and psychological vantage, is...
The set of capacities that enables musicking is a principal marker of modern humanity. There is nothing polemical in this assertion except a certain insistence, which will figure often in what follows, that musicking be included in our thinking about fundamental human commonalities. Capacities involved in musicking are many and take shape in complicated ways, arising from innate dispositions . . . Most of these capacities overlap with nonmusical ones, though a few may be distinct and dedicated to mus...
Humans are symbol-makers too, a feature tightly bound up with language, not so tightly with music. The species Cassirer dubbed Homo symbolicus cannot help but tangle musicking in webs of symbolic thought and expression, habitually making it a component of behavioral complexes that form such expression. But in fundamental features musicking is neither language-like nor symbol-like, and from these differences come many clues to its ancient emergence.
If musicking is a primary, shared trait of modern humans, then to describe its emergence must be to detail the coalescing of that modernity. This took place, archaeologists are clear, over a very long durée: at least 50,000 years or so, more likely something closer to 200,000, depending in part on what that coalescence is taken to comprise.
Question 1
Which one of the following sets of terms best serves as keywords to the passage?
Musicking; Cognitive psychology; Antique; Symbol-makers; Modernity.
Humans; Capacities; Language; Symbols; Modernity.
Humans; Musicking; Linguistic capacities; Symbol-making; Modern humanity.
Humans; Psychological vantage; Musicking; Cassirer; Emergence of music.
Question 2
"Think beyond all the qualifications that might trail after this bald statement . . ." In the context of the passage, what is the author trying to communicate in this quoted extract?
A bald statement is one that is trailed by a series of qualifying clarifications and caveats.
A bald statement is one that requires no qualifications to infer its meaning.
Although there may be many caveats and other considerations, the statement is essentially true.
Thinking beyond qualifications allows us to give free reign to musical expressions.
Question 3
Based on the passage, which one of the following statements is a valid argument about the emergence of music/musicking?
Anyone who can perceive and experience music must be considered capable of musicking.
Although musicking is not language-like, it shares the quality of being a form of expression.
20,000 years ago, human musical capacities were not very different from what they are today.
All musical work is located in the overlap between linguistic capacity and music production.
Question 4
Which one of the following statements, if true, would weaken the author's claim that humans are musicking creatures?
Nonmusical capacities are of far greater consequence to human survival than the capacity for music.
From a cognitive and psychological vantage, musicking arises from unconscious dispositions, not conscious ones.
As musicking is neither language-like nor symbol-like, it is a much older form of expression.
Musical capacities are primarily socio-cultural, which explains the wide diversity of musical forms.
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