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For the following questions answer them individually
Read the following paragraph and answer the question that follows.
The fundamental laws that govern the smallest constituents of matter and energy, when applied to the Universe over long enough cosmic timescales, can explain everything that will ever emerge. This means that the formation of literally everything in our Universe, from atomic nuclei to atoms to simple molecules to complex molecules to life to intelligence to consciousness and beyond, can all be understood as something that emerges directly from the fundamental laws underpinning reality, with no additional laws and forces.
Which of the following can be BEST inferred from the paragraph above?
Read the following passage and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Interpretation in our own time, however, is even more complex. For the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud’s phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning—the latent content beneath. For Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual lives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a dream or a work of art)—all are treated as occasions for interpretation. According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.
Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly and stifling.
What does the author mean by “Thus, interpretation is not…a gesture of
mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities?”
Socrates believed that akrasia (meaning procrastination) was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right. Loewenstein, similarly, is inclined to see the procrastinator as led astray by the “visceral” rewards of the present. As the nineteenthcentury Scottish economist John Rae put it, “The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp.” Loewenstein also suggests that our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.
Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls “the planning fallacy.” Elster thinks that people underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.”
According to the passage, in regard to time, which of the following statements gives the BEST reason for procrastination?
Which of the following statements can be BEST inferred from the passage about procrastination?
Which of the following is the meaning that comes CLOSEST to “our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient” as suggested by Loewenstein?
Read the poem and answer the TWO questions that follow.
The slow person you left behind when, finally,
you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command,
where is he while you
walked around the shaved lawn in your plus fours,
organizing with an electric clipboard
your big push to tomorrow?
Oh, I have come across him, yes, I have, more than once,
coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian,
Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished
not just in themselves but by the stories
we put in with beginnings, ends, surprises:
the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet
or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother
flailing in the millpond beyond the weir,
dragged down by her woolen skirt.
He doesn’t see you as a story, though.
He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines,
he chorteles. When your barometric pressure drops
and the thunder heads gather,
he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with
the study little pencil he steals from the public library.
He asks me to look out for you.
Which of the following statements BEST interprets the lines “He doesn’t see you as a story, though/He feels you as his atmosphere”?
