Lightning-Fast Doubt Resolution

Read the following information carefully and answer the given questions.

In a quiz programme, five contestants P, Q, R, S and T were asked to name the winner of a badminton tournament in each of the years from 2012 to 2016. It is known that the winners of the five years were Puneet, Bhushan, Rakesh, Ajay and Govind, not necessarily in that order. The contestants gave their respective order of winners as follows.

If the contestant names the winners of ‘n’ years correctly, he will get a prize of Rs. ‘n’ lakhs. Additionally, it is known that each of the contestants won a different amount as prize money.

Read the following passage carefully and answer the given questions

In order to be successful, many people believe, one must be passionate. Passion makes challenges enjoyable. It bestows the stamina necessary to excel. However, there are telling counterexamples where passion doesn’t seem to be a necessary ingredient for success. One such case is academic success. You might think that successful students should be passionate about their schooling, and that this passion for school would account, at least partly, for why some students succeed and why some don’t. But this isn’t right. My research has found that there is in fact no relationship between how well students do academically and what their attitude toward schooling actually is. 

My research findings derive from the analysis of a large-scale international database called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) makes the dataset available every three years. It’s a treasure trove that gives researchers like myself an unparalleled view into what students across the world think about their education. In the most recent 2015 PISA assessment, 72 countries and economies contributed. Reading, mathematics and science tests, along with a questionnaire about attitudes, beliefs, learning habits and the like, are administered to nationally representative samples of 15-years-olds around the world. In previous surveys, four simple options were used to measure students’ attitude toward school:

(a) school has done little to prepare me for adult life when I leave school
(b) school has been a waste of time
(c) school helped give me confidence to make decisions
(d) school has taught me things that could be useful in a job

As it turned out, simple and direct correlations between students’ academic achievement and their attitudes toward school were near zero. This was far from an anomaly. The near-zero result was replicated in the PISA 2003, 2009, and 2012. There were no differences with respect to students’ socio-economic backgrounds. Gender did not affect the finding, and it holds for both developing and developed countries. Only about 2 per cent of the PISA mathematics performance was explained by students’ attitudes toward school in 62 countries. This means that in most countries, academically able students do not hold their schooling in high regard. Similarly, academically less able students do not necessarily have low opinions about their schooling. There’s simply no connection. This raises the intriguing question of motivation. If there is no real relationship between academic achievement and attitude, then what motivates bright students to achieve academic success? It certainly isn’t from an abundant passion for school.

The answer is that it comes from within. Other PISA-based research has suggested that what sets academically able and less able students apart is self-belief about their own strengths and weaknesses. Individual psychological variables such as self-efficacy, anxiety and enjoyment of learning in itself explain between 15 per cent and 25 per cent of the variation in students’ academic achievement. Collectively, research shows that students’ self-belief in their own problem-solving abilities is far more important than their perception of school itself.

This is a problem. Students’ attitude to school should matter for a number of reasons. If students find it difficult to see the direct benefits of their schooling, if they think that their school has failed to meet their expectations, and if they perceive that their academic skills are learned outside of school, it is possible that this will affect their views of formal institutions later in life. And indeed, many people have a pessimistic view of the role that formal institutions play - a view that very well could have stemmed from school experiences during formative years. Formal institutions shape the lives of a citizenry. They need to be upheld, bettered and strengthened - not discarded out of hand. So students should be taught to invest themselves in formal institutions, rather than to tear them down or fail to take part in them.

What can be done? Adults responsible for making decisions about schooling need to be more cognizant about the long-term influences that the school experience can exert on students’ attitudes and beliefs. A stronger emphasis must also be given to the inclusion of hands-on group activities that emulate what they may do in life once they graduate. Whether students are able to see the link between their present and future may have critical consequences for society.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

The story of Vachaknavi’s debate is from chapter three of the oldest of the Upanishads, the Bṛihadaraṇyaka, a diverse and complex Sanskrit text on metaphysics and ethics from about 700 BCE. Vachaknavi is one of the many ‘hidden figures’ of women in the history of philosophy in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America - what is often called the Global South. Philosophers today increasingly recognise the contributions that female philosophers have made to the history of European philosophy, such as Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway in the 17th century. But beyond Europe, female philosophers, in general, continue to get short shrift, and their contributions go largely unrecognised.

Vachaknavi is not the only female thinker that helped to shape the world’s oldest philosophy. Already in chapter two of the Upanishad, it is a woman, Maitreyi, who launches a discussion on the importance of one’s self (atman) to gain ‘the knowledge of this whole world’. She begins by asking Yajnavalkya (often described as her husband, but better thought of as her philosophical companion) a basic existential question of human beings: "If I were to possess the entire world filled with wealth, would it make me immortal?" When he denies this, Maitreyi asks rhetorically: "What is the point in getting something that will not make me immortal?" With that, the first foundation stone for the investigation of the relationship of knowledge to materialism is laid. And then there is Sulabha, an ascetic Yogic wanderer, who wins a lengthy philosophical debate against the philosopher king Janaka in the epic Mahabharata (4th-century BCE-4th century CE). The king goes quiet after Sulabha sets the record straight: "My body is different from yours. But my soul is not different from your soul."

Indian male philosophers relied on their female counterparts throughout the centuries. The most famous classical Indian philosopher is perhaps Adi Shankara (788-820 CE), who formed the monistic school of Advaita Vedanta, a vital part of Hinduism that bases its arguments on the Upanishads. In biographies of him, we read how Shankara engaged in a competitive philosophical debate with Mandana Mishra of the rival school of Mimamsa, which uses only the four early Vedas. The verdict of the debate came from Ubhaya Bharati, Mishra’s wife. She, perhaps surprisingly, judged Shankara to be the champion, which had the unusual consequence of compelling her husband to submit to Shankara’s philosophical school. But then Bharati addresses Shankara: "You cannot claim complete success over my husband until I, his better half, have been defeated by you. Though you are an embodiment of divinity, I have a desire to debate with you." Shankara obeys. They debated the Vedas and the different philosophical schools for 17 days. Bharati could not beat him, but then she struck on the idea of questioning him on the Kama Sutra, the science and art of love, knowing that Shankara had been a celibate from boyhood. 

Shankara accepted the challenge but requested a month-long break to the discussion so that he could study these corporeal matters to perfection. He was successful, Bharati concludes, in the manner of Vachaknavi from the Upanishads: "You took all the trouble to master the science of sex just to conform to the ways of the world. That we have met with defeat at your hands is not a matter of shame for us, just like moon and stars do not go into disrepute when the sun suppresses their light." After the debate, Ubhaya Bharati reportedly founded her influential school of thought.