Lightning-Fast Doubt Resolution

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

These days hardly anyone thinks every actor is eligible for absolutely any part. The practice of white actors donning make-up for black roles is now unconscionable, not least because of its roots in the ignoble tradition of blackface minstrelsy ... Similar forms of racial mimicry are no-nos, too. Today’s strife tends to involve other strictures, which are proliferating. Some in showbiz and beyond think depictions of many marginalised groups should be reserved for members of them. Straight performers should not take gay parts; only trans actors should play trans roles, and only deaf actors deaf ones. Artists with dwarfism have decried Hugh Grant’s appearance as an Oompa-Loompa in a forthcoming Willy Wonka film. Brendan Fraser’s recent turn as the obese protagonist of “The Whale”, for which he wore a “fat suit” (and won an Oscar), irked some plus-size observers.

Part of the grievance is that deaf actors, say, or those with dwarfism, are routinely overlooked by casting directors and resent missing out on the rare work that mirrors their experience. But the objections involve justice as well as jobs. As with blackface, runs the argument, casting non-disabled actors as disabled characters can lead to caricature and distortion. And those can cause misconceptions and prejudice, which seep from stage and screen into the real world.

Orthodoxies, however, can calcify into dogma, and pendulums swing too far. Dissenting voices worry—rightly—that the promise and privileges of art are being wilfully renounced. Always and only viewing roles in terms of groups and categories is impractical. In the case of a gay Irish part, for instance, which is more essential, a gay actor or an Irish one? It is simplistic, as the movie “Golda” shows: the crux of Ms Mirren’s character is that she must make decisions over soldiers’ lives and deaths, a burden few people of any race or nation have carried, none of them actors. Above all, rigid identity-matching is soulless. Rounded characters, like people, are more than the sum of their labels. Acting can illuminate prejudices and difference, yet at its finest it surmounts them in leaps of imagination and empathy.

Film-makers have the right to cast whomever they like. Still, a fair and politic approach is for roles to go to the best-qualified performers—on criteria that include background alongside other factors. Those from underrepresented groups should be considered and get a better shot than in the past; but if there are sound artistic reasons, such as talent or screen chemistry, someone else may be cast. The lame king in “Richard III” need not always be played by a disabled actor. But disabled actors should get a crack at him. In other words, judge the output not the inputs—and judge it, first, as art. This bargain over casting has a final condition for actors and directors: do your research on unfamiliar lives, do your best, then be prepared for criticism. Activists should not have an audition-room veto. But, like everyone, they are entitled to an opinion.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions given below:

There is a homely proverb, which speaks a shrewd truth, that whoever the devil finds idle he will employ. And what but habitual idleness can hereditary wealth and titles produce? For man is so constituted that he can only attain a proper use of his faculties by exercising them, and will not exercise them unless necessity, of some kind, first set the wheels in motion. Virtue likewise can only be acquired by the discharge of relative duties; but the importance of these sacred duties will scarcely be felt by the being who is cajoled out of his humanity by the flattery of sycophants. There must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground, and this virtuous equality will not rest firmly even when founded on a rock, if one half of mankind are chained to its bottom by fate, for they will be continually undermining it through ignorance or pride. It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection, which would make them good wives and good mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands, they will be cunning, mean, and selfish, and the men who can be gratified by the fawning fondness, of spaniel-like affection, have not much delicacy, for love is not to be bought, in any sense of the word, its silken wings are instantly shriveled up when any thing beside a return in kind is sought. 

Yet whilst wealth enervates men; and women live, as it were, by their personal charms, how, can we expect them to discharge those ennobling duties which equally require exertion and self-denial. Hereditary property sophisticates the mind, and the unfortunate victims to it, if I may so express myself, swathed from their birth, seldom exert the locomotive faculty of body or mind; and, thus viewing every thing through one medium, and that a false one, they are unable to discern in what true merit and happiness consist. False, indeed, must be the light when the drapery of situation hides the man, and makes him stalk in masquerade, dragging from one scene of dissipation to another the nerveless limbs that hang with stupid listlessness, and rolling round the vacant eye which plainly tells us that there is no mind at home.

I mean, therefore, to infer, that the society is not properly organized which does not compel men and women to discharge their respective duties, by making it the only way to acquire that countenance from their fellow creatures, which every human being wishes some way to attain. The respect, consequently, which is paid to wealth and mere personal charms, is a true north-east blast, that blights the tender blossoms of affection and virtue. Nature has wisely attached affections to duties, to sweeten toil, and to give that vigour to the exertions of reason which only the heart can give. But, the affection which is put on merely because it is the appropriated insignia of a certain character, when its duties are not fulfilled is one of the empty compliments which vice and folly are obliged to pay to virtue and the real nature of things.

To illustrate my opinion, I need only observe, that when a woman is admired for her beauty, and suffers herself to be so far intoxicated by the admiration she receives, as to neglect to discharge the indispensable duty of a mother, she sins against herself by neglecting to cultivate an affection that would equally tend to make her useful and happy. True happiness, I mean all the contentment, and virtuous satisfaction that can be snatched in this imperfect state, must arise from well regulated affections; and an affection includes a duty. Men are not aware of the misery they cause, and the vicious weakness they cherish, by only inciting women to render themselves pleasing; they do not consider, that they thus make natural and artificial duties clash, by sacrificing the comfort and respectability of a woman's life to voluptuous notions of beauty, when in nature they all harmonize.

Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:

In the Assuming trade three separate and independent cults are transacting business. Two of these cults are known as the Shakespearites and the Baconians, and I am the other one—the Brontosaurian.

The Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's Works; the Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the Brontosaurian doesn't really know which of them did it, but is quite composedly and contentedly sure that Shakespeare didn't, and strongly suspects that Bacon did. We all have to do a good deal of assuming, but I am fairly certain that in every case I can call to mind the Baconian assumers have come out ahead of the Shakespearites. Both parties handle the same materials, but the Baconians seem to me to get much more reasonable and rational and persuasive results out of them than is the case with the Shakespearites.

Let me try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and homely way calculated to bring the idea within the grasp of the ignorant and unintelligent. We will suppose a case: take a lap-bred, house-fed, uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged old Tom that's scarred from stem to rudder-post with the memorials of strenuous experience, and is so cultured, so educated, so limitlessly erudite that one may say of him "all cat-knowledge is his province"; also, take a mouse. Lock the three up in a holeless, crackless, exitless prison-cell. Wait half an hour, then open the cell, introduce a Shakespearite and a Baconian, and let them cipher and assume. The mouse is missing: the question to be decided is, where is it? You can guess both verdicts beforehand. One verdict will say the kitten contains the mouse; the other will as certainly say the mouse is in the tom-cat.

The Shakespearite will Reason like this—(that is not my word, it is his). He will say the kitten may have been attending school when nobody was noticing; therefore we are warranted in assuming that it did so; also, it could have been training in a court-clerk's office when no one was noticing; since that could have happened, we are justified in assuming that it did happen; it could have studied catology in a garret when no one was noticing—therefore it did; it could have attended cat-assizes on the shed-roof nights, for recreation, when no one was noticing, and have harvested a knowledge of cat court-forms and cat lawyer-talk in that way: it could have done it, therefore without a doubt it did; it could have gone soldiering with a war-tribe when no one was noticing, and learned soldier-wiles and soldier-ways, and what to do with a mouse when opportunity offers; the plain inference, therefore, is that that is what it did. Since all these manifold things could have occurred, we have every right to believe they did occur. These patiently and painstakingly accumulated vast acquirements and competences needed but one thing more—opportunity—to convert themselves into triumphant action. The opportunity came, we have the result; beyond shadow of question the mouse is in the kitten.

It is proper to remark that when we of the three cults plant a "we think we may assume," we expect it, under careful watering and fertilizing and tending, to grow up into a strong and hardy and weather-defying "there isn't a shadow of a doubt" at last—and it usually happens.

We know what the Baconian's verdict would be: "There is not a rag of evidence that the kitten has had any training, any education, any experience qualifying it for the present occasion, or is indeed equipped for any achievement above lifting such unclaimed milk as comes its way; but there is abundant evidence—unassailable proof, in fact—that the other animal is equipped, to the last detail, with every qualification necessary for the event. without shadow of doubt the tom-cat contains the mouse."

The 3x3 box given below contains nine consecutive natural numbers.

a) The average of the nine numbers is in the middle cell of the box.

b) The sum of the five numbers in the shaded cells is equal to the sum of the numbers in the unshaded cells.

c) There is exactly one prime number each in both the shaded and unshaded cells. The shaded prime number is in a corner while the unshaded prime number is not in a corner.

d) There is one perfect square in the box which is beside a prime number.

e) There is only one perfect cube in the box and it is also beside a prime number.

f) The sum of the first column is a prime number.

g) The sum of the second row is also a prime number.