XAT 2014 Question Paper

Instructions

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.

Question 21

Which of the following could be a good title for the above passage?

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Question 22

The author of the passage went on to say: “We are provincial, because we do not find at home our
standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and
narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”
Which of the following, as per author, could have been the end (last words in the lines above)?

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Instructions

I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe--“That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of governments which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most government are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objection which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rules in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment or in the least degree, resign his conscience to legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents on injustice.

Question 23

According to the author of the paragraph, army is _____________ ?

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Question 24

In general, when would government of majority be good for minorities?

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Question 25

Which of the following statements would the author agree the most with?

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Instructions

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

Either explicitly or implicitly, our informants suggest that the objects that transfix them are hoped to be conduits to, rather than surrogates for, love, respect, recognition, status, security, escape, or attractiveness. These are the social relations we desire, consciously or subconsciously, beneath the objects that we find so compelling. The value of the objects that we focus our longing upon inheres less in the object or in a Lacanian search for childhood love than in the culture. The hope for the hope that an altered state of being may result keeps the cycle of desire moving. Desires are nurtured by self-embellished fantasies of a wholly different self, and they may be stimulated by external sources, including advertising, retail displays, films, television programs, stories told by other people, and the consumption behavior of real or imaginary others. But we find that the person who feels strong desire has almost always actively stimulated this desire by attending, seeking out, entertaining, and embellishing such images. The desires that occupy us are vivid and riveting fantasies that we participate in nurturing, growing, and pursuing, through self-seduction.

The social nature of desire implies that preferences of consumers are far from being independent. Yet, choice models assume that preferences of consumers act as individuals. The mimetic aspect of desire creates difficulties for using individual attitude or intention measures to predict adoption of new products whose use will be visible. The notion of desire we have derived suggests that the appeal of the desired object is not inherent in the object itself. Models that begin with preferences for product attributes or benefits are therefore problematic. The consumer, individually and jointly, has a role in constructing the object of desire, within a social context. What makes consumer desire attach to a particular object is not so much the object’s particular characteristics as the consumer’s own hopes for an altered state of being,involving an altered set of social relationships.

Question 26

Consider the statement given below as true:
“The failure of men to transition from being shoppers and consumers to producers and creators has implications about their manliness.”
Which of the following statements would concur with the above idea and the theme of the main paragraph?

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Question 27

Consider the statement given below as true:
“Men use the plasticity of consumer identity construction to forge atavistic masculine identities
based upon an imagined life of self-reliant, pre-modern men who lived outside the confines of
cities, families, and work bureaucracies.” Which of the following statements would concur with the above idea and the theme of the main paragraph?

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Question 28

Consider the statement given below as true:
“By appropriating fashion discourse, consumers generate personalized fashion narratives and metaphoric and metonymic references that negotiate key existential tensions and that often express resistance to dominant fashion norms in their social milieu or consumer culture at large.”
Which of the following statements would concur with the above idea and the theme of the main paragraph?

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Instructions

Answer questions based on information that is provided.

Question 29

The main issues of interpretation arising from the work of professionally trained anthropologists are that they are late in colonial/post - colonial trajectories, because professional training shapes their interpretations. However, within field of interest and training, their works are most thorough and systematic
The best conclusion drawn from the above paragraph is analogous to:

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Question 30

Consider merit pay for teachers. Schools face constant pressure to change their management approaches to improve performance, which is usually assessed by standardized reading, math, and science scores. In most school teacher’s pay is determined by seniority, years of total teaching experience, and credentials. Pay is rarely based on performance, which is contrary to the belief among parents and private sector. Parents and business leaders lament that there are no carrots/sticks used to motivate teachers.
Consequently, there has been greater push to implement some form of merit pay to improve
the motivation. Which of the following statements will disapprove the claim of the parents and business leaders?

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