XAT 2014 Question Paper

Read the definitions below and select the best match between the numbered sentences and the
definitions.
Premise: A proposition from which another statement is inferred or follows a conclusion.
Assumption: Something, which is accepted as true.Facts: Something, which can be checked.
Reason: A cause, explanation or justification for an action or event.
Conclusion: An end, finish or summarization of process or argument.
Proposition: A statement that expresses judgment or opinion.
Question: A sentence worded or expressed so as to elicit opinion.
Inductive inference: An end, finish or summarization reached for “the whole”, based on “a particular” real incidence.
Deductive Inference: An end, finish or summarization reached based on the combining and recombining two or more than two assumptions

Read the following sentences and choose the option that best arranges them in a logical order.

Analyze the following passage and provide appropriate answers for the questions that follow.
The assumption of rationality puts an economist in a position to “explain” some features of market behavior, such as the dispersion of prices of psychophysically identical goods such as beer according to the amount spent on advertising them (no doubt, the fact that most beer is bought by individuals rather than as raw material by firms, which could be expected to be more rational than individuals, is part of the explanation.) Clearly something is wrong somewhere with the usual model of a competitive market with perfect information, for the virtually content less advertising cannot be considered as increasing the utility of beer in an obvious way. But if one can keep the assumption of rational actors, one need not get into the intellectual swamp of sentiment nor of preferences that depend on price. If one agrees, for example, that consumers use advertising as an index of the effort a producer will put into protecting its reputation and so as a predictor of quality control efforts, one can combine it with the standard mechanism and derive testable consequences from it.

But why, logically speaking, does it not matter that any of us, with a few years’ training, could disprove the assumptions? It is for the same reason that the statistical mechanics of gases is not undermined when Rutherford teaches a lot of only moderately bright physicists to use X-ray diffraction to disprove the assumption that molecules are little hard elastic balls. The point is, departures that Rutherford teaches us to find from the mechanism built into statistical mechanics are small and hardly ever systematic at level of gases. Ignorance and error about the quality of beer is also, unlikely to be systematic at the level of the consumers’ beer market, though it would become systematic if buyers imposed quality control procedures on sellers in contracts of sale (as corporations very often do in their contracts with suppliers). So when we find beers that advertising can make the ignorance and error systematic at the level of markets, just as lasers with wavelengths resonant with the internal structures and sizes of molecules can make molecular motions in gases systematic. The interesting one is that virtually content-less advertising is nevertheless information to a rational actor.

Analyze the following passage and provide appreciate answers for the questions that follow.

Ideas involving the theory probability play a decisive part in modern physics. Yet we will still lack a satisfactory, consistence definition of probability; or, what amounts to much the same, we still lack a satisfactory axiomatic system for the calculus of probability. The relations between probability and experience are also still in need of clarification. In investigating this problem we shall discover what will at first seem an almost insuperable objection to my methodological views. For although probability statements play such a vitally important role in empirical science, they turn out to be in principle impervious to strict falsification. Yet this very stumbling block will become a touchstone upon which to test my theory, in order to find out what it is worth. Thus, we are confronted with two tasks. The first is to provide new foundations for the calculus of probability. This I shall try to do by developing the theory of probability as a frequency theory, along the lines followed by Richard von Mises, But without the use of what he calls the ‘axiom of convergence’ (or ‘limit axiom’) and with a somewhat weakened ‘axiom of randomness’ The second task is to elucidate the relations between probability and experience. This means solving what I call the problem of decidability statements. My hope is that the investigations will help to relieve the present unsatisfactory situation in which physicists make much use of probabilities without being able to say, consistently, what they mean by ‘probability’.

Analyze the following passage and provide appropriate answers for the questions that follow.

The ways by which you may get money almost exception lead downwards. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been trulyidle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job.” but to perform well a certain work; and even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pays him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed. God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God’s coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen. I did not know that mankind was suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.