CAT 2018 Question Paper Slot 2

Instructions

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions

NOT everything looks lovelier the longer and closer its inspection. But Saturn does. It is gorgeous through Earthly telescopes. However, the 13 years of close observation provided by Cassini, an American spacecraft, showed the planet, its moons and its remarkable rings off better and better, revealing finer structures, striking novelties and greater drama. . . .

By and large the big things in the solar systemā€”planets and moonsā€”are thought of as having been around since the beginning. The suggestion that rings and moons are new is, though, made even more interesting by the fact that one of those moons, Enceladus, is widely considered the most promising site in the solar system on which to look for alien life. If Enceladus is both young and bears life, that life must have come into being quickly. This is also believed to have been the case on Earth. Were it true on Enceladus, that would encourage the idea that life evolves easily when conditions are right.

One reason for thinking Saturnā€™s rings are young is that they are bright. The solar system is suffused with comet dust, and comet dust is dark. Leaving Saturnā€™s ring system (which Cassini has shown to be more than 90% water ice) out in such a mist is like leaving laundry hanging on a line downwind from a smokestack: it will get dirty. The lighter the rings are, the faster this will happen, for the less mass they contain, the less celestial pollution they can absorb before they start to discolour. . . . Jeff Cuzzi, a scientist at Americaā€™s space agency, NASA, who helped run Cassini, told the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston that combining the mass estimates with Cassiniā€™s measurements of the density of comet-dust near Saturn suggests the rings are no older than the first dinosaurs, nor younger than the last of themā€”that is, they are somewhere between 200m and 70m years old.

That timing fits well with a theory put forward in 2016, by Matija Cuk of the SETI Institute, in California and his colleagues. They suggest that at around the same time as the rings came into being an old set of moons orbiting Saturn destroyed themselves, and from their remains emerged not only the rings but also the planetā€™s current suite of inner moonsā€”Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus and Mimas. . . .

Dr Cuk and his colleagues used computer simulations of Saturnā€™s moonsā€™ orbits as a sort of time machine. Looking at the rate at which tidal friction is causing these orbits to lengthen they extrapolated backwards to find out what those orbits would have looked like in the past. They discovered that about 100m years ago the orbits of two of them, Tethys and Dione, would have interacted in a way that left the planes in which they orbit markedly tilted. But their orbits are untitled. The obvious, if unsettling, conclusion was that this interaction never happenedā€”and thus that at the time when it should have happened, Dione and Tethys were simply not there. They must have come into being later. . . .

Question 1

Based on information provided in the passage, we can infer that, in addition to water ice, Saturnā€™s rings might also have small amounts of:

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Question 2

Based on information provided in the passage, we can conclude all of the following EXCEPT:

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Question 3

The phrase ā€œleaving laundry hanging on a line downwind from a smokestackā€ is used to explain how the ringed planet's:

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Question 4

Data provided by Cassini challenged the assumption that:

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Question 5

The main objective of the passage is to:

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Instructions

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions given

More and more companies, government agencies, educational institutions and philanthropic organisations are today in the grip of a new phenomenon: ā€˜metric fixationā€™. The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is possible - and desirable - to replace professional judgment (acquired through personal experience and talent) with numerical indicators of comparative performance based upon standardised data (metrics); and that the best way to motivate people within these organisations is by attaching rewards and penalties to their measured performance.

The rewards can be monetary, in the form of pay for performance, say, or reputational, in the form of college rankings, hospital ratings, surgical report cards and so on. But the most dramatic negative effect of metric fixation is its propensity to incentivise gaming: that is, encouraging professionals to maximise the metrics in ways that are at odds with the larger purpose of the organisation. If the rate of major crimes in a district becomes the metric according to which police officers are promoted, then some officers will respond by simply not recording crimes or downgrading them from major offences to misdemeanours. Or take the case of surgeons. When the metrics of success and failure are made public - affecting their reputation and income - some surgeons will improve their metric scores by refusing to operate on patients with more complex problems, whose surgical outcomes are more likely to be negative. Who suffers? The patients who donā€™t get operated upon.

When reward is tied to measured performance, metric fixation invites just this sort of gaming. But metric fixation also leads to a variety of more subtle unintended negative consequences. These include goal displacement, which comes in many varieties: when performance is judged by a few measures, and the stakes are high (keeping oneā€™s job, getting a pay rise or raising the stock price at the time that stock options are vested), people focus on satisfying those measures - often at the expense of other, more important organisational goals that are not measured. The best-known example is ā€˜teaching to the testā€™, a widespread phenomenon that has distorted primary and secondary education in the United States since the adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Short-termism is another negative. Measured performance encourages what the US sociologist Robert K Merton in 1936 called ā€˜the imperious immediacy of interests ā€¦ where the actorā€™s paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes consideration of further or other consequencesā€™. In short, advancing short-term goals at the expense of long-range considerations. This problem is endemic to publicly traded corporations that sacrifice long-term research and development, and the development of their staff, to the perceived imperatives of the quarterly report.

Question 6

All of the following can be a possible feature of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, EXCEPT:

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Question 7

What main point does the author want to convey through the examples of the police officer and the surgeon?

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Question 8

Which of the following is NOT a consequence of the 'metric fixation' phenomenon mentioned in the passage?

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Question 9

Of the following, which would have added the least depth to the authorā€™s argument?

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Question 10

What is the main idea that the author is trying to highlight in the passage?

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