Essence of Passages (Mock)
Practice quiz testing ability to identify the essence and summary of various passages across different topics including art, business, philosophy, and literature.
Questions
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.
All art is the expression of experience in some medium. The experience is clothed in forms which appeal through the senses. Sculpture has for its medium stone and marble, painting colors, music sounds and poetry words. The relation between the experience and the medium is closer in some than in others, in poetry than in music, in painting than in sculpture. By means of the work of art, the experience is released afresh, in the spectator or the auditor. The enjoyer becomes a secret sharer of the creator’s mind.
- Medium galore in umpteen forms that connect the spectator’s or auditor’s mind to that of the creator.
- Expressions and experiences are harboured in forms that get shared by all.
- Diffusion of experiences is possible through forms that manifest in medium.
- The enjoyer vicariously partakes the same joy as that of the creator.
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.
Most often today, the difference between a company and its competitor is the ability to execute. If your competitors are executing better than you are, they are beating you here and now, and the financial markets won’t wait to see if your elaborate strategy plays out. So, leaders who can’t execute don’t get free runs anymore. Execution is the great unaddressed issue in the business world today. Its absence is the single biggest obstacle to success and the cause of most of the disappointments that are mistakenly attributed to other causes.
- A proper execution of a strategy even in parts can turn the financial markets in a business’s favour.
- Execution has the power to offer a competitive advantage, the fact, though, remains obscured by more recognisable causes.
- The changed business scenario has placed new demands before the leaders of today – execution of the entire strategy.
- The increased importance of execution is reflected in the fact that the lack of it is widely acknowledged for a business’s failure.
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.
Helvetius, amongst many false positions and licentious reveries, observes with much justice, that the education of man begins at his birth, and is carried on during the whole course of his life. The lowest mechanic, though he may not have distinct and accurate science, has yet such a store of geography, of natural history, of mechanics, and other parts of knowledge, that were his mind to be emptied of it, the wretched vacancy would amaze us.
- Helvetius fairly discerns education to be part of the knowledge the human mind amasses while living.
- Education is an evolving subject and begins at birth.
- Workers with lowly jobs would have gained more knowledge from their work than by studying accurate science.
- Helvetius rightly places education on the pedestal of experience.
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.
In the past, businesses got away with poor execution by pleading for patience. “The business environment is tough right now” is one typical excuse; or “Our strategy will take time to produce results”. But the business environment is always tough, and success is no longer measured over years. A company can win or lose serious market share before even it realises what has hit it.
- Business environment today has evolved dramatically warranting prompt execution.
- Business environment today hard presses employees to get positive results.
- Time had never in the past been as important and determinant in the business environment as it is today.
- The excuses of the past have lost both their relevance and significance in today’s tough business environment.
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.
A dream pictures earthly beauty to our eyes in a truly heavenly splendour and clothes dignity with the highest majesty. It shows us everyday fears in the ghastliest shape and turns our amusement into jokes of indescribable pungency. And sometimes when we are awake and still under the full impact of an experience like one of these, we cannot but feel that never in our life has the real world offered us its equal.
- Dreams help envision the good and bad of life in their weirdest forms.
- A dream often enhances the effects of everything corporal through a somewhat strangely idealistic interpretation.
- Life’s experiences in their utmost manifestation nearest to reality can only be sensed in one’s dreams.
- A dream tends to have a deep understanding of real-life experiences, thereby pushing the limits of a sane and sober mind.
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.
To exist is to be something, to possess a specific identity. This is the Law of Identity: A is A. Facts are facts, independent of any consciousness. No amount of passionate wishing, desperate longing or hopeful pleading can alter the facts. Nor will ignoring or evading the facts erase them: the facts remain, immutable. Reality — that which exists — has no alternatives, no competitors, nothing “transcending” it. To embrace existence is to reject all notions of the supernatural and the mystical, including God.
- To exist is to discount all notions of worldly and unworldly interventions that tend to change a fact.
- To exist is to become a fact that acknowledges itself in nothing more or less than being itself.
- All reality is fact and is far removed from everything unworldly.
- That which exists cannot change despite importunities to God.
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.
- Ambitions and passions naturally orient man’s life towards self-indulgence.
- Happiness is a function of power that cannot be achieved if one is an altruist.
- Envy, avarice, ambition and passions are innate and help man navigate through life.
- The pursuit of power that elicits from self–love is paradoxical in that it only makes man more vulnerable.
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.
With two hands, how can you receive the abundance which God can bestow on you with His infinite hands? And why do you cling to petty things? If He starts drawing everything from you with His infinite hands, how much can you grab? He will suck everything if He wants. So there is no use clinging to small things, and also no use craving too much as if we are poverty-stricken, uncared for. Nothing of the kind. We have become poverty-stricken due to our own making.
- Greed has no bounds and so does the feeling of self-pity induced by deprivation.
- The notions of greed and privation contrived by us are delusional.
- God has his own ways to make us experience richness and poverty.
- We deserve to feel rich and impoverished as long as we long for material things.
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.
It is, however, necessary for the idea of perfection to be proposed, that we may have some object to which our endeavours are to be directed; and he that is most deficient in the duties of life makes some atonement for his faults if he warns others against his own failings, and hinders, by the salubrity of his admonitions, the contagion of his example.
- The best and the worst can be calibrated on the yardstick of perfection.
- Perfection as an idea is worthwhile to conceive both as a coveted goal and a cause to be protected and professed.
- Perfection is indispensable to the direction of human efforts either on the positive side to gain success or on the negative side causing utter failure.
- The ones conscious of one’s duties and those deficient in the same could have never compared their endeavours in absence of the notion of perfection.
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.
In popular culture, the tale of the emperor’s new clothes raises to the level of common wisdom the alliance of power and error. Duped by flattery into believing that he has purchased an exquisite new outfit, which appears invisible and is indeed non-existent, the emperor proudly parades it in front of his admiring subjects who submissively refrain from calling attention to the conspicuous point that he is wearing no clothes at all. Although he does not allude directly to this story, Helvetius seems to have its message frequently in mind as he writes about despotic power. This power keeps people from thinking and serves only the pleasure of the present moment for one person or possibly a small group of people as in the case of priests or clergy and not the future of all.
- Absolute power engenders self-ruination.
- Despots make a mockery of themselves before the public as they wield absolute power.
- Power gets abused when it becomes the sole preserve of the potentate.
- Thinking does get compromised when the elite only use power to seek momentary pleasure.