Multiple choice

Directions: The passage given below is followed by four alternative summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Key in the number of the option you choose as your answer.

One principle of life drives man. This principle is physical sensibility. What produces in him this sensibility? A feeling of love for pleasure, and of hatred for pain? It is from both these feelings joined together in man and always present in his mind that is formed what one calls in him the feeling of self-love. This self-love engenders the desire for happiness; the desire for happiness that for power; and it is this latter that in turn brings forth envy, avarice, ambition and generally all the artificial passions, which, under different names, are only a disguised love of power in us and applied to the various means of obtaining it.

  1. Ambitions and passions naturally orient man’s life towards self-indulgence.

  2. Happiness is a function of power that cannot be achieved if one is an altruist.

  3. Envy, avarice, ambition and passions are innate and help man navigate through life.

  4. The pursuit of power that elicits from self–love is paradoxical in that it only makes man more vulnerable.
Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
D Correct answer
Explanation
  1. Not true. Ambitions or passions do not direct man’s life.
    1. Not true. It is not explained in the paragraph that an altruist cannot be happy.
    2. True; however, the essence is that every man is driven by self-love and self-love excites all artificial passions.
    3. True and best captures the essence. The pursuit of power is paradoxical as this yearning for power makes one more vulnerable to one's passions.

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