AP ICET 17th September 2021 Shift-2

Read the passage below and choose the correct answer 131-135

"Since wars begin in the minds of men", so runs the historic UNESCO Preamble. "It is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed". Wars erupt out when the minds of men are inflamed, when the human mind is blinded and wounded, succumbs to frustration and self-negation. War is the transference of this self-negation into the other-negation. The three Indo-Pak wars and the persisting will to terrorize have emanated from this savage instinct of other-negation that is the legacy of the partition carnage and its still-bleeding and unhealed wound. Truncated from its eastern wing in 1971, Pakistan ever since has suffered from a sense of total existential self-negation. Plus the scars left the two previously lost wars to India and Kargil fill the Army and Pakistan psyche with a seething urge to revenge: that India has to be negated, destroyed - in a deep psychological sense, another Hiroshima in the subcontinent is imaginable and possible. Terrorism in Kashmir springs from such deep negating existential grounds. Like the former Soviet Union, Pakistan came into being as a result of a grand delusion and massive perversion of reality - the so called two-nation theory. Like the former Soviet Union, it stands in danger of crumbling unless it modifies its reality perception and comes to terms with its post-Bangladesh identity within the prevailing sub-continental equation. Failing this, Pakistan is bound to break up, nudging the region to a nuclear nightmare, including possible South Asian Hiroshima. With 'hot pursuits' and 'surgical operations' freely making rounds among the policy elite and the public at large, the national atmosphere looks ominously charged. "On the brink", headlines "The week" adding. "As men and machines are quickly positioned by India and Pakistan, the threat of war looms real". To which Gen. Musharraf counters, "If any war is thrust on Pakistan, Pakistan's armed forces and the 140 million people of Pakistan are fully prepared to face all consequences with all their might". According to Indian Express, "Pakistan has deployed medium range ballistic missile batteries (MRBBs) along the line of control (LOC) near Jummu and Poonch sectors in an action that will further escalate the tension between the two coutries". And India's Defence Minister ups the ante, "We could take a (nuclear) strike, survive and then hit back, Pakistan would be finished". (Hindustan Times, December 30, 2001) Mr. Fernandes's formulation is certainly a tactical super shot, even a strategically super hit in as much as this is the very logic of India's 'No-first-strike' doctrine. The Defence Minister obviously has no idea of the ethical, phenomenological implications of abandoning chunks of the Indian population to ransom for potential Hiroshimas and then 'finishing' the neighbouring conuntry of 140 million in what could be nothing short of an Armageddon. Forget these horrendous scenarios. But does this not repudiate the grain of truth for which India's civilization stood for and vindicated across the untold millennia of its history? Yet, Mr. Fernandes, the pacifist and Gandhian, is no warmonger. As Defence Minister he had to react at a level with the Pakistan, with their proclivity to drop the nuclear speak whenever that suited them, could have registered the message.

Read the passage below and choose the correct answer 136-140

The pioneers of the teaching of science imagined that its introduction into education would remove the conventionality, artificiality, and backward-looking which were characteristic of classical studies, but they were gravely disappointed. So, too, in their time had the humanists thought that the study of the classical authors in the original would banish at once the dull pedantry and superstition of mediaeval scholasticism. The professional schoolmaster was a match for both of them, and has almost managed to make the understanding of chemical reactions as dull and as dogmatic an affair as the reading of Virgil's "Aeneid".

The chief claim for the use of science in education is that it teaches a child something about the actual universe in which he is living, in making him acquainted with the results of scientific discovery, and at the same time teaches him how to think logically and inductively by studying scientific method. A certain limited success has been reached in the first of these aims, but practically none at all in the second. Those privileged members of the community who have been through a secondary or public school education may be expected to know something about the elementary physics and chemistry of a hundred years ago, but they probably know hardly more than any bright boy can pick up from an interest in wireless or scientific hobbies out of school hours.

As to the learning of scientific method, the whole thing is palpably a farce. Actually, for the convenience of teachers and requirements of the examination system, it is necessary that the pupils not only do not learn scientific method but learn precisely the reverse, that is, to believe exactly what they are told and to reproduce it when asked, whether it seems nonsense to them or not. The way in which educated people respond to such quackeries as spiritualism of astrology, not to say more dangerous ones such as racial theories or currency myths. shows that fifty years of education in the method of science in Britain or Germany has produced no visible effect whatever. The only way of learning the method of science is the long and bitter way of personal experience, and, until the educational or social systems are altered to make this possible, the best we can expect is the production of a minority of people who are able to acquire some of the techniques of science and a still smaller minority who are able to use and develop them.