SNAP 2015 Question Paper

In the following questions parts have been underlined. If any rule of correct English is violated then it could be only in the UNDERLINED part, marked as 1, 2, 3 or 4. Choose the option, which violates usage of correct English.

Read the following passage and answer the questions:

"There are several factors that contribute to wisdom. Of these I should put first a sense of proportion; the capacity to take account of all the important factors in a problem and to attach to each its due weight. This has become more difficult than it used to be owing to the extent and complexity of the specialized knowledge required of various kinds of technicians. Suppose, for example, that you are engaged in research in scientific medicine. The work is difficult and is likely to absorb the whole of your intellectual energy. You have no time to consider the effect which your discoveries or invention may have outside the field of medicine. You succeed (let us say), as modern medicine has succeeded, in enormously lowering the infant death-rate, not only in Europe and America, but also in Asia and Africa. This has the entirely unintended result of making the food supply inadequate and lowering the standard of life in the most populous parts of the world. To take aneven more spectacular example, which is in everybody's mind at the present time- you study the composition of the atom from a disinterested desire for
knowledge and incidentally place in the hands of powerful lunatics the means of destroying the human race. In such ways the pursuit of knowledge may become harmful unless it is combined with wisdom; and wisdom in the sense of comprehensive vision is not necessarily present in specialists in the pursuit of knowledge. Comprehensiveness alone, however, is not enough to constitute wisdom. There must be, also, certain awareness of ends of human life. This may be illustrated by the study of history. Many eminent historians have done more harm than good because they viewed facts through the distorting medium of their own passions. Hegel had a philosophy of history which did not suffer from any lack of comprehensiveness, since it started from earliest time and continued into an indefinite future. But the chief lesson of history which he sought to inculcate was that from the year A.D. 400 down to his own time, Germany had been the most important nation and the standard bearer of progress in the world. Perhaps one could stretch the comprehensiveness that constitutes wisdom to include not only intellect but also feeling. It is by no means uncommon to find men/ women whose knowledge is wide but those feelings are narrow. Such men / women lack what I am calling wisdom. I think the essence of wisdom is emancipation, as far as possible, from the tyranny of the here and the now. We cannot help the egoism of our senses. Sight, sound and touch are bound up with our own bodies and cannot be made impersonal. Our emotions start similarly from ourselves. An infant feels hunger or discomfort; gradually with the years his horizon widens, and, in proportion as his thoughts and feelings
become less personal and less concerned with his own physical states, he achieves growing wisdom. This is of course a matter of degree. No one can view the world with complete impartiality; however, it is possible to make a continual approach towards impartiality, on the one hand, by knowing things somewhat remote in time or space, and, on the other hand, by giving to such things their due weight in our feelings. It is this approach towards impartiality that constitutes growth in wisdom. Perhaps in this sense the wisdom can be taught. I think that this teaching should have a larger intellectual element than has been customary in what has been thought of as moral instruction. I think that the
disastrous result of hatred and narrow mindedness to those who fed them can be pointed out incidentally in the course of giving knowledge. Knowledge and morals ought not to be too much separated. It is true that the kind of specialized knowledge which is required for various kinds of skills has very little to do with wisdom. But it should be supplemented in education by wider surveys calculated to put it in its place in the totality of human activities. Even the best technicians should also be good citizens, i.e. citizens of the world and not of any one nation.
With every increase of knowledge and skill, wisdom becomes more necessary for every such increase augments our capacity of realizing our purposes, and therefore augments our capacity for evil, if our purposes are unwise. The world needs wisdom as it has never needed it before; and if knowledge continues to increase, the world will need wisdom in the future even more than it does now.

Read each of the components of the given sentences and mark the component with grammatical error.

Choose the correct word which best fits for the sentence to be complete and grammatically correct.