Essence of Passages - 2
Practice reading comprehension by selecting the option that best captures the essence of each passage
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.
Many addictions aim to increase arousal. This is the all-powerful feeling that might come from cocaine, amphetamines, the first few drinks of alcohol, shoplifting, sexual acting out, videogames, or gambling. This omnipotent feeling, however, is eventually undermined when the addict realizes that a dependency has been formed. A feeling of fear replaces the feeling of being all powerful – fear of losing the source of addiction and fear that others will find out how powerless the person actually is. Negative experiences always accompany the positive feelings the addict is seeking.
- An addict’s intention is only stimulation and not dependency.
- The falseness in the potency of some substances and activities reflects on an addict.
- An addict’s dependency is derived from his misunderstanding of the hidden potential of an addictive substance.
- The potentate is eventually enfeebled by indulgence in addictive substances or activities.
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.
There is no escaping this basic truth. Indeed, challenges help us to grow. The normal process is to perceive a problem and then bring our emotional and thinking abilities into play in order to solve the problem. We can draw on our own legacy of experiences, and we can find support from our life partners, friends, the community, society’s body of knowledge, and spiritual sources. Faced with a problem, we experience some anxiety – and this uncomfortable feeling motivates us to solve the problem in order to find our balance again. In the process, we become more flexible and more adept at dealing with problems in the future. As we mature, we discover that problems are not insurmountable – and we get better at problem-solving.
- Man’s vast resource of his abilities, experiences and relationships is often drawn on as problems become more daunting.
- Challenges form the fabric of man’s life; an escape from them is a delusion.
- Problems get less challenging in that they themselves condition man in dealing with them better.
- Problem solving is a process that is best learnt.
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 notion of consequences, the Utilitarian includes all of the good and bad produced by the act, whether arising after the act has been performed or during its performance. If the difference in the consequences of alternative acts is not great, some Utilitarians do not regard the choice between them as a moral issue. According to Mill, acts should be classified as morally right or wrong only if the consequences are of such significance that a person would wish to see the agent compelled, not merely persuaded and exhorted, to act in the preferred manner.
- Acts that produce consequences of no significant difference tend to have minimal moral repercussions.
- Mill tried to distinguish “moral” acts through the outcomes of performance or during the process of performance.
- An urge to force an agent to toe a particular line causes his actions to fall in the realm of moral appraisal.
- It is the consequences ensuing from an action that determine the moral basis of the agent.
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.
There will always be produced native talent, vast power of influencing mankind, united with restless, aspiring and insatiate ambition. And this talent will be unfolded in greater proportion as common education is more generally diffused. The question then, is not whether such talent shall or shall not exist. The only practical question is, whether these rare endowments shall be cultivated and disciplined and cautioned and directed by the lessons of past wisdom, or whether they shall be allowed to grow up in reckless and headstrong arrogance. It is merely a question whether the extraordinary talent bestowed upon society by our Creator, shall be a blessing or a curse to us and to our children.
- Talent left rudderless and unguided by experience is potentially portentous.
- Diffusion of extraordinary talent can instil arrogance in a society that summarily forgets its humble beginnings.
- Proliferation of native talent in a society can prove to be both advantageous and disadvantageous to society and progeny.
- Native talent is like a child; it needs proper grooming, cultivation with discipline.
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’s a good thing that almost all of us worry. Think of worry as a built-in alarm device. When it is used wisely, it alerts us to danger and prompts us to navigate our way through a maze of solutions to life’s various problems. We need to think through our options when we are faced with problems, weighing the benefits and pitfalls of each alternative, and then come up with the best solution. From there we take action which, we hope, solves the problem. Worry is helpful when it is used at the right time and at the right level for resolving our difficulties. Like many things in life, however, too little worry, or too much of it, can be harmful.
- Excess worry is as harmful to man as any other thing in life.
- A beacon that timely alerts and directs one’s path towards right action is worry.
- Problems in life always get exaggerated by worrywarts.
- Optimal worry helps generate optimal solutions to life’s problems.
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.
As far as superior knowledge and talent confer on their possessor a natural charter of privilege to control his associates and exert an influence on the direction of the general affairs of the community, the free and natural action of that privilege is best secured by a perfectly free democratic system, which will abolish all artificial distinctions, and, preventing the accumulation of any social obstacles to advancement, will permit the free development of every germ of talent, wherever it may chance to exist.
- Superior knowledge engenders their possessors superior authority and control over others.
- Obstacles of an undemocratic society suppress talent and breed systems of knowledge that are inferior and conservative.
- Society can only advance when liberties are unbridled and privileges unencumbered as in a democracy.
- Superior abilities anywhere manifest themselves organically in an uninhibited 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.
Consider this question – if the harm we have experienced leads us to a life dominated by unresolved anger, a negative image of ourselves, and an inability to trust, are we not allowing the perpetrator to continue to have power over us? When we have sleepless nights cycling and recycling thoughts about old hurts, when we seethe with anger, when we ask questions repetitively that seem to have no answers, we continue to suffer the consequences of being hurt. Perhaps our goal should be to find a way to free ourselves from the damage and to reclaim our lives for ourselves.
- Victims continue to despair unless they engage in creative pursuits.
- Damage by the perpetrator is perpetual unless the victim seeks vengeance.
- The victim alone can remove himself from the miasmic influence of his perpetrator.
- A victim is condemned to endure the demeaning influence of damage for good.
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.
While the workman concentrates his faculties more and more upon the study of a single detail, the master surveys an extensive whole, and the mind of the latter is enlarged in proportion as that of the former is narrowed. In a short time, the one will require nothing but physical strength without intelligence; the other stands in need of science, and almost of genius to ensure success. This man resembles more and more the administrator of a vast empire; that man, a brute.
The master and the workman have then here no similarity, and their differences increase every day. Each of them fills the station which is made for him, and which he does not leave; the one is continually, closely and necessarily dependent upon the other and seems as much born to obey as that other is to command. What is this but aristocracy?
- A supervisor–subordinate relationship can best be delineated as an instantiation of an aristocratism.
- The aristocratic master is by nature more intelligent, responsible and exploitative than those he supervises.
- Aristocracy is automatically bred by one’s exposure to a work environment and its demands that promote discrimination, dissimilarity and segregation.
- Aristocracy gets spontaneously established by the perpetuation of the expansiveness of the master’s mind and the provinciality of his subordinates.
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.
Yes, but someone will say to me that this design of making use of oneself as a subject to write about would be excusable in great and famous men, who by their reputation had aroused some desire to know them. That is certain, I confess it, and know very well that an artisan will scarcely lift his eyes from his work to see a man of the common sort, whereas men forsake workshops and stores to see a great and prominent person arrive in a city. It will become any other to make himself known except him who has qualities worthy of imitation and whose life and opinions may serve as a model.
- People tend to emulate famous men and thus are eager to read about them.
- Great and famous men inspire others through their writings.
- A man of ordinary bearings holds little privilege to publicity.
- All famous men have a social obligation to share their life stories.
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 a world where social place was still determined largely by birth, the idea that political leadership and social pre-eminence should derive from an individual’s talents and virtues was in many ways revolutionary. Nevertheless, demands to create a thoroughly egalitarian society or democratic government, perhaps by eliminating private property or selecting rulers by law, were few. Instead, eighteenth century debate about civil society, and political governance focussed principally on balancing the claims of rights and privileges of merit, and thus, the competing pulls of equality and difference. It was this debate that pushed questions concerning the nature of virtues and talents to centre stage.
- The revolutionary ideas of the eighteenth century could gather but little appeal in face of a clear bias for inherited privileges.
- The eighteenth century was a significant evolving phase that led to a total disconnect of merit with privileges of birth.
- An egalitarian society can be said to have been founded in the eighteenth century in the backdrop of debates about balancing claims of rights and privileges of merit.
- Eighteen century was no less revolutionary in encouraging shift of focus on merit.