MAT 2008 Question Paper

Answer these Question ns based on the passages.

Passage III
All men by nature, desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses: for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others, the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things. by nature, animals are born with the faculty of sensation, and from sensation, memory is produced in some of them, though not in others. And therefore, the former are more intelligent and apt at learning than those which cannot remember; those which are incapable of hearing sounds are intelligent though they cannot be taught, e.g. the bee and any other race of animals that may be like it; and those which, besides memory, have this sense of hearing can be taught. The animals other than man live by appearances and memories, and have but little of connected experience; but the human race lives also by art and reasonings. Now from memory, experience is produced in men; for the several memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience. And experience seems pretty much like science and art, but really, science and art come to men through experience; for ‘experience made art’, as Polus says, ‘but inexperience luck.’ Now art arises, when from many notions gained by experience, one universal judgement about a class of objects is produced. For to have a judgement that when Callias was ill of this disease that did him good, and similarly, in the case of Socrates and in many individual cases, is a matter of experience; but to judge that it has done good to all persons of a certain constitution, marked off in one class, when they were ill of this disease, e.g. to phlegmatic or bilious people when burning with fevers - this is a matter of art.

With a view to action, experience seems in no respect inferior to art, and men of experience succeed even better than those who have theory without experience. (The reason is that experience is knowledge of individuals, art of universals, and actions and productions are all concerned with the individual; for the physician does not cure man, except in an incidental way, but Callias or Socrates or some other, called by some such individual name, who happens to be a man. If, then, a man has the theory without the experience, and recognizes the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail to cure; for it is the individual that is to be cured.) but yet we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience (which implies that wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge); and this because the former know the cause, but the latter do not. For men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why, while the others know the ‘why’ and the cause. Hence we think also that the master workers in each craft are more honourable and know in a truer sense and are wiser than the manual workers, because they know the causes ofthe things that are done (we think the manual workers are like certain lifeless things which act indeed, but act without knowing what they do, as fire bums, but while the lifeless things perform each of their functions by a natural tendency, the labourers perform them through habit); thus we view them as being wiser not in virtue of being able to act, but of having the theory for themselves and knowing the causes. And in general, it is a sign ofthe man who knows and ofthe man who does not know, that the former can teach, and therefore, we think art is more truly knowledge than experience is; for artists can teach, and men of mere experience cannot.

Again, we do not regard any of the senses as Wisdom; yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. but they do not tell us the ‘why’ of anything, e.g. why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot. At first, he who invented any art whatever, that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wiser and superior to the rest. but as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility.

Hence, when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure. This why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure. We have said in the Ethics what the difference is between art and science and the other kindred faculties; but the point of our present discussion is this, that all men suppose what is called Wisdom to deal with the first causes and the principles of things; so that, as has been said before, the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any sense-perception what ever, the artist wiser than the men of experience, the masterworker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of Wisdom than the productive. Clearly then, wisdom is knowledge about certain principles
and causes.

Answer these Question ns based on the passages.

Passage IV
There are a few instances of diseases that have laid waste huge tracts of forests throughout India. Caused mainly by pathogens and pests, these diseases are deadly and are capable of wiping out entire forests and plantations, causing immense economic as well as ecological loss.

Meanwhile, forest pathologists and entomologists are grappling with new maladies that are surfacing almost every year. but with meagre resources and just a few experts working on the issue, things are heading virtually towards a culde-sac.

Moreover, no assessment has been made so far to quantify the devastation. While large chunks of forests fall prey to maladies, it is also an opportunity for some politician and timber merchants to cash in on it. Research and documentation on forest disease, particularly on forest pathology, began in India way back in 1929, by pioneering pathologists KD bagchi and bK bagchi. Although it has been eight decades since then, not much headway has been made in this; direction. The forestry sector today is ailing due to its misplaced priorities, resource crunch, and mismanagement. “Forest management lacks scientific approach,” says Surendra Kumar, director of the Himalayan Forest Research Institute (HFRI), Shimla.

The scientific community involved with forest diseases is today a dispirited lot. With only a few stalwarts left in this field, forest disease is a neglected area of research. Moreover, bureaucracy is increasingly taking over the scientific institutions and scientists in most of these institute arc a marginalised group.

To top it all, there are no institutions dedicated to forest diseases. Although the ministry of environment and forests is the facilitator for such research, it is not paying enough attention to promote scientific research of forest diseases;. In fact, the government’s lackadaisical approach came to the fore with the Sal borer epidemic in Madhya Pradesh in 1998. While forest bureaucracy slept, the beetles merrily continued to wipe out entire tracts of precious Sal forests. Eventually, with no solution in sight, thousands of valuable trees were hacked. There were also allegations that the Sal tragedy was a chance for the timber mafia in the state to cash in on timber through the legal loophole, with the nexus of politicians.

Today, things haven’t changed one bit. India’, forest department and research institutes have yet to formulate contingency plans to face any assault of similar dimensions.

Forest diseases are elusive. Although experts claim that they know quite a lot about forest diseases, there are still aspects of the maladies that are not completely understood. Says RS bhandari, entomologist in the Forest Research Institute (FRI), Dehradun, “We know about all the important pests and insects, their life cycles and their development. but there are a few diseases which remain an enigma.” According to Jamaluddin, head of the pathology department in the Tropical Forest Research Institute (TERI), Jabalpur, “Due to micro climatic changes, we are discovering new aspects of the same disease every year. Diseases have also increased manifold.” Another FRI scientist points out that although forest diseases are increasing, there is no study to estimate the economic and ecological damage caused by these pests and pathogens.

Varying with different geophysical regions and climatic conditions, pathogens and pests are essentially responsible for the tree maladies and their mortality. When the pristine, natural and mixed forests existed, forest diseases acted as a natural control measure to check the proliferation of a particular species that could threaten the balance of the ecosystem.Perhaps, this is why forest diseases paled into insignificance in the past. but today, with shrinking forests and increasing monoculture plantations, any outbreak of disease takes on a virulent form.

To top this, changed climatic and forest patterns and environmental pollution have given rise to newer forms of forest diseases. While trees are forced to take an additional load of human-induced environmental changes, the introduction of mono culture has substantially increased the problems. Whatever little we know about forest diseases today comes primarily through mycology, the study of forest pathogens. Mycology explains that the prime pathological reasons for forest disease are fungi, bacteria and viruses. “Among these, fungi playa major role, while the other two are relatively less significant. There are 150 to 200 major pathological infections in central India. Out of these, only five per cent are bacterial. The rest are fungal,” says Jamaluddin.

Most of these pathogens stay close to a tree, waiting for a chance to infiltrate. Their entry points are small openings or wounds in the tree. However, invasion is not always easy. Like human beings, trees also have antibodies that fight anything alien. In case of invasion from the trunk of a tree, the sapwood acts as a shield and secretes enzymes to fight pathogens. but when attacked and conquered, there are tell-tale signs in the form of knotty growths of fruit bodies that are extensions of the fungi in the tree.

Answer these Question ns based on the passages.

Passage V
For years, the contents of a child’s sandbox have confounded some of the nation’s top physicists. Sand and other granular materials, such as powders, seeds, nuts, soils, and detergent, behave in ways that seem to undermine natural laws and cost industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to agribusiness and mining, billions of dollars.

Just shaking a can of mixed nuts can show you how problematic granular material can be. The nuts do not ‘mix’; they ‘unmix’ and sort themselves out, with the larger brazil nuts on top and the smaller peanuts at the bottom. In this activity and others, granular matter’s behaviour apparently goes counter to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, or disorder, tends to increase in any natural system.

Mimicking the mixed-nut conundrum with a jar containing many small beads and one large bead, one group of physicists claimed that vibrations causing the beads to percolate open up small gaps rather than larger ones. Thus, when a brazil nut becomes slightly airborne, the peanuts rush in underneath and gradually nudge it to the top. Another group of physicists colour coded layers of beads to track their circulation in a container and achieved a different result. Vibrations, they found, drive the beads in circles up the centre and down the sides of the container. Yet downward currents, similar to convection currents in air or water, are too narrow to accommodate the larger bead, stranding it on top.

One industrial engineer who has studied the problem says that both the ‘percolation’ and ‘convection current’ theories can be right, depending upon the material, and that percolation is the major factor with nuts. Given the inability of scientists to come up with a single equation explaining unmixing, you can see why industrial engineers who must manage granular materials go a little, well, ‘nuts’! Take Pharmaceuticals, for instance. There may be six types of powders with differentsized grains in a single medicine tablet. Mixing them at some speeds might sort them, while mixing at other speeds will make them thoroughly amalgamated. One aspirin company still relies on an experienced employee wearing a latex glove who pinches some powder in the giant mixing drum to see if it ‘feels right’.

Granular material at rest can be equally frustrating to physicists and engineers. Take a tall cylinder of sand. Unlike a liquid, in which pressure exerted at the bottom increases in direct proportion to the liquid’s height, pressure at the base of the sand cylinder doesn’t increase indefinitely. Instead, it reaches a maximum value and stays there. This “quality allows sand to trickle at a nearly constant rate through the narrow opening separating the two glass bulbs of an hourglass, thus measuring the passage of time.

Physicists have also found that forces are not distributed evenly throughout granular material. It is this characteristic that may account for the frequent rupturing of silos in which grain is stored. In a silo, for instance, the column’s weight is carried from grain to grain along jagged chains. As a result the container’s walls carry more of the weight than its base, and the force is significantly larger at some points of contact than at others. Coming up with equations to explain, much loss, predict the distribution of these force chains” is extremely difficult.

Again, using beads, physicists developed a simple theoretical model in which they assume that a given bead transmits the load it bears unequally and randomly onto the three beads on which it rests. While the model agrees well with experimental results, it does not take into account all of the mechanisms of force transmission between grains of sand or wheat.

In the struggle to understand granular materials, sand-studying physicists have at least one thing in their favour. Unlike particle physicists who must secure billions of dollars in government funding for the building of super-colliders in which to accelerate and view infinitesimal particles, they can conduct experiments using such low-cost, low-tech materials as sand, beads, marbles, and seeds. It is hoped that more low-tech experiments and computer simulations will lead to equations that explain the unwieldy stuff and reduce some of the wastage, guesswork, and accidents that occur in the various industries that handle it.