English Comprehension and Language - 2
English Comprehension & Language - 2
Questions
Directions: Choose the option that best expresses the meaning of the idiom which is underlined.
It's the responsibility of journalists to zero in on the key issues of society.
- focus on
- ignore
- nullify
- show
Directions: Choose the option that best expresses the meaning of the idiom which is underlined.
He is a plain, simple and sincere man. He will always call a spade a spade.
- Say something to be taken seriously
- Truthful and straightforward
- Avoid controversial situations
- Avoid being outspoken
Directions: Pick out the synonym of the given word.
WANDERLUST
- Longing to travel
- Love
- Bitterness
- Passion
Directions: Pick out the antonym.
SHALLOW
- arbitrary
- painstaking
- profound
- restive
Directions: Pick out the antonym.
SIDESTEP
- confront directly
- detain temporarily
- comprehend accurately
- judge hastily
Directions: Choose the option that best expresses the meaning of the idiom which is underlined.
Let our deals be fair and square.
- real
- transparent
- just
- risky
Directions: Pick out the antonym.
SHUN
- seek actively
- perform occasionally
- understand intuitively
- answer correctly
Directions: Pick out the synonym.
VAUNT
- to jump
- to boast of
- to conquer
- to envy
Directions: Choose the option that best expresses the meaning of the idiom which is underlined.
Police should prevent the burglary as someone has already tipped them off.
- given a call
- given an advance warning
- called for help
- bribed them
Directions: Pick out the synonym.
VIS-À-VIS
- sharp of sight
- upside down
- face to face
- confused
Directions: Pick out the synonym.
WONT
- need
- wish
- habit
- refusal
Directions: Pick out the synonym.
WREST
- to grapple with an opponent
- to twist into a distorted shape
- to conquer
- to snatch forcibly
Directions: Choose the option that best expresses the meaning of the idiom which is underlined.
The arrest of the political leader touched off a riot.
- exploded into
- caused
- supported
- increased
Directions: The sentence given below is divided into four parts (A), (B), (C) and (D). One of these parts may contain an error. You have to indicate that part as your answer. If there is no error, mark (E) as your answer.
(A) Such goods (B) are made for export and are seldom (C) or ever used in this country (D) for it has a limited utilisation. (E) No error
- (A)
- (B)
- (C)
- (D)
- (E)
Directions: Pick out the antonym.
SINEWY
- new
- weak
- corrupt
- subtle
Directions: The sentence given below is divided into four parts (A), (B), (C) and (D). One of these parts may contain an error. You have to indicate that part as your answer. If there is no error, mark (E) as your answer.
(A) The first two chapters (B) of the novel (C) are (D) rather dull and my interest was not captured. (E) No error
- (A)
- (B)
- (C)
- (D)
- (E)
Directions: The sentence given below is divided into four parts (A), (B), (C) and (D). One of these parts may contain an error. You have to indicate that part as your answer. If there is no error, mark (E) as your answer.
(A) Of the three, tea, coffee and cocoa, the (B) latter is his all time favorite (C) and he can have (D) it any time of the day. (E) No error
- (A)
- (B)
- (C)
- (D)
- (E)
Directions: The sentence given below is divided into four parts (A), (B), (C) and (D). One of these parts may contain an error. You have to indicate that part as your answer. If there is no error, mark (E) as your answer.
The arrival (A) of details (B) is a matter for future consideration (C) and should not (D) be thought about now. (E) No error
- (A)
- (B)
- (C)
- (D)
- (E)
Directions: The sentence given below is divided into four parts (A), (B), (C) and (D). One of these parts may contain an error. You have to indicate that part as your answer. If there is no error, mark (E) as your answer.
(A) I (B) should have liked to (C) have gone with them, but my work (D) was not complete. (E) No error
- (A)
- (B)
- (C)
- (D)
- (E)
Directions: Pick out the antonym.
SINECURE
- optimistic forecast
- voluntary restriction
- unwelcome news
- arduous employment
Directions: In the following sentence, the parts marked P, Q, R and S have been jumbled up. Rearrange these parts in the right sequence to produce the correct sentence. Choose the option that shows the correct sequence of the parts.
I believe
(P) the man
(Q) lives next door
(R) whose dog
(S) died
- P Q R S
- P S R Q
- P R S Q
- P R Q S
Directions: In the following sentence, the parts marked P, Q, R and S have been jumbled up. Rearrange these parts in the right sequence to produce the correct sentence. Choose the option that shows the correct sequence of the parts.
Studies are a cure
(P) just as bowling is good for kidneys,
(Q) shooting for the lungs,
(R) walking for the digestion and riding for the head
(S) for mental deficiency or disease
- S P Q R
- P Q R S
- S Q R P
- P S Q R
A suitable title of the passage would be
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
I suppose their little bones have years ago been lost among the stones and winds of those high glacial pastures. I suppose their leathers blew eventually into the piles of tumbleweed beneath the straggling cattle fences and rotted there in the mountain snows along with dead steers and all the other things that drift to an end in the corners of the wire. I do not quite know why I should be thinking of birds over the New York Times at breakfast, particularly the birds of my youth half a continent away. It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
It used to seem marvelous to me, but I read now that there are machines that can do these things in a small way, machines that can crawl about like animals, and that it may not be long now until do more things - maybe even make themselves – I saw that piece in the Times just now. And then they will, maybe – well, who knows - but you read about it more and more with no one raising any protest, and already they can add better than we and reach up and hear things through the dark and finger the guns over the night sky.
This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the world that confronts me in my biological books and journals, until there are times when I sit quietly in my chair and try to hear the little purr of the cogs in my head and the tubes flaring and dying as the messages go through them and the circuits snap shut or open. This is the great age, make no mistake about it: the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say now is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious about; and man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea. Well, he’s got it all right and that’s why, I guess, that I sit here in my chair, with the article crunched in my hand, remembering those two birds and that blue mountain sunlight. There is another magazine article on my desk that reads “Machines Are Getting Smarter Every Day.” I don’t deny it, but I’ll still stick with the birds. It’s life I believe in, not machines.
Maybe you don’t believe there is any difference. A skeleton is all joints and pulleys, I’ll admit. And when man was in his simpler stages of machine building in the eighteenth century, he quickly saw the resemblances. “What.” wrote Hobbes, “is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?” Tinkering about in their shops it was inevitable in the end that men would see the world as a huge machine “subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines.”
The idea took on with a vengeance. Little automatons toured the country - dolls controlled by clockwork. Clocks described as little worlds were taken on tours by their designers. They were made up of moving figures, shifting scenes and other remarkable devices. The life of the cell was unknown. Man, whether he was conceived as possessing a soul or not, moved and jerked about like these tiny tippets. A human being thought of himself in terms of his own tools and implements. He had been fashioned like the puppets he produced and was only a more clever model made by a greater designer.
Then in the nineteenth century, the cell was discovered, and the single machine in its turn was found to be the product of millions of infinitesimal machines - the cells. Now, finally, the cell itself dissolves away into an abstract chemical machine and that into some intangible, inexpressible flow of energy. The secret seems to lurk all about, the wheels get smaller and smaller, and they torn more rapidly, but when you try to seize it the life is gone- and so, by popular definition, some would say that life was never there in the first place. The wheels and the cogs are the secret and we can make them better in time- machines that will run faster and more accurately than real mice to real cheese.
I have no doubt it can be done, though a mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is to me a fine sight and more complicated. I think, in his multiform activity, than a machine "mouse" running a maze. Also I like to think of the possible shape of the future brooding in mice, just as it brooded once in a rather ordinary mousy insectivore who became a man. It leaves a nice fine indeterminate sense of wonder that even an electronic brain hasn’t got, because you know perfectly well that if the electronic brain changes, it will be because of something man has done to it. But what man will do to himself he doesn’t really know. A certain scale of time and a ghostly intangible thing called change are ticking in him. Powers and potentialities like the oak in the seed, or a red and awful ruin. Either way, it's impressive; and the mouse has it, too. Or those birds, I’ll never forget those birds - yet before I measured their significance. I learned the lesson of time first of all. I was young then and left alone in a great desert – part of an expedition that had scattered its men over several hundred miles in order to carry on research more effectively. I learned there that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm.
- The Bird and the Machine
- Man and Machine
- Man and Machine: A Functional Overview
- What Machine Can, Man Can't: And Vice Versa
We can surely conclude from the passage that the author
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
I suppose their little bones have years ago been lost among the stones and winds of those high glacial pastures. I suppose their leathers blew eventually into the piles of tumbleweed beneath the straggling cattle fences and rotted there in the mountain snows along with dead steers and all the other things that drift to an end in the corners of the wire. I do not quite know why I should be thinking of birds over the New York Times at breakfast, particularly the birds of my youth half a continent away. It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
It used to seem marvelous to me, but I read now that there are machines that can do these things in a small way, machines that can crawl about like animals, and that it may not be long now until do more things - maybe even make themselves – I saw that piece in the Times just now. And then they will, maybe – well, who knows - but you read about it more and more with no one raising any protest, and already they can add better than we and reach up and hear things through the dark and finger the guns over the night sky.
This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the world that confronts me in my biological books and journals, until there are times when I sit quietly in my chair and try to hear the little purr of the cogs in my head and the tubes flaring and dying as the messages go through them and the circuits snap shut or open. This is the great age, make no mistake about it: the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say now is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious about; and man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea. Well, he’s got it all right and that’s why, I guess, that I sit here in my chair, with the article crunched in my hand, remembering those two birds and that blue mountain sunlight. There is another magazine article on my desk that reads “Machines Are Getting Smarter Every Day.” I don’t deny it, but I’ll still stick with the birds. It’s life I believe in, not machines.
Maybe you don’t believe there is any difference. A skeleton is all joints and pulleys, I’ll admit. And when man was in his simpler stages of machine building in the eighteenth century, he quickly saw the resemblances. “What.” wrote Hobbes, “is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?” Tinkering about in their shops it was inevitable in the end that men would see the world as a huge machine “subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines.”
The idea took on with a vengeance. Little automatons toured the country - dolls controlled by clockwork. Clocks described as little worlds were taken on tours by their designers. They were made up of moving figures, shifting scenes and other remarkable devices. The life of the cell was unknown. Man, whether he was conceived as possessing a soul or not, moved and jerked about like these tiny tippets. A human being thought of himself in terms of his own tools and implements. He had been fashioned like the puppets he produced and was only a more clever model made by a greater designer.
Then in the nineteenth century, the cell was discovered, and the single machine in its turn was found to be the product of millions of infinitesimal machines - the cells. Now, finally, the cell itself dissolves away into an abstract chemical machine and that into some intangible, inexpressible flow of energy. The secret seems to lurk all about, the wheels get smaller and smaller, and they torn more rapidly, but when you try to seize it the life is gone- and so, by popular definition, some would say that life was never there in the first place. The wheels and the cogs are the secret and we can make them better in time- machines that will run faster and more accurately than real mice to real cheese.
I have no doubt it can be done, though a mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is to me a fine sight and more complicated. I think, in his multiform activity, than a machine "mouse" running a maze. Also I like to think of the possible shape of the future brooding in mice, just as it brooded once in a rather ordinary mousy insectivore who became a man. It leaves a nice fine indeterminate sense of wonder that even an electronic brain hasn’t got, because you know perfectly well that if the electronic brain changes, it will be because of something man has done to it. But what man will do to himself he doesn’t really know. A certain scale of time and a ghostly intangible thing called change are ticking in him. Powers and potentialities like the oak in the seed, or a red and awful ruin. Either way, it's impressive; and the mouse has it, too. Or those birds, I’ll never forget those birds - yet before I measured their significance. I learned the lesson of time first of all. I was young then and left alone in a great desert – part of an expedition that had scattered its men over several hundred miles in order to carry on research more effectively. I learned there that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm.
- is disappointed with the kind and amount of progress made
- does not appreciate scientific advancement
- would love to remain superstitious about a few things
- none of these
The opening lines of the passage give an idea of
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
I suppose their little bones have years ago been lost among the stones and winds of those high glacial pastures. I suppose their leathers blew eventually into the piles of tumbleweed beneath the straggling cattle fences and rotted there in the mountain snows along with dead steers and all the other things that drift to an end in the corners of the wire. I do not quite know why I should be thinking of birds over the New York Times at breakfast, particularly the birds of my youth half a continent away. It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
It used to seem marvelous to me, but I read now that there are machines that can do these things in a small way, machines that can crawl about like animals, and that it may not be long now until do more things - maybe even make themselves – I saw that piece in the Times just now. And then they will, maybe – well, who knows - but you read about it more and more with no one raising any protest, and already they can add better than we and reach up and hear things through the dark and finger the guns over the night sky.
This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the world that confronts me in my biological books and journals, until there are times when I sit quietly in my chair and try to hear the little purr of the cogs in my head and the tubes flaring and dying as the messages go through them and the circuits snap shut or open. This is the great age, make no mistake about it: the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say now is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious about; and man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea. Well, he’s got it all right and that’s why, I guess, that I sit here in my chair, with the article crunched in my hand, remembering those two birds and that blue mountain sunlight. There is another magazine article on my desk that reads “Machines Are Getting Smarter Every Day.” I don’t deny it, but I’ll still stick with the birds. It’s life I believe in, not machines.
Maybe you don’t believe there is any difference. A skeleton is all joints and pulleys, I’ll admit. And when man was in his simpler stages of machine building in the eighteenth century, he quickly saw the resemblances. “What.” wrote Hobbes, “is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?” Tinkering about in their shops it was inevitable in the end that men would see the world as a huge machine “subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines.”
The idea took on with a vengeance. Little automatons toured the country - dolls controlled by clockwork. Clocks described as little worlds were taken on tours by their designers. They were made up of moving figures, shifting scenes and other remarkable devices. The life of the cell was unknown. Man, whether he was conceived as possessing a soul or not, moved and jerked about like these tiny tippets. A human being thought of himself in terms of his own tools and implements. He had been fashioned like the puppets he produced and was only a more clever model made by a greater designer.
Then in the nineteenth century, the cell was discovered, and the single machine in its turn was found to be the product of millions of infinitesimal machines - the cells. Now, finally, the cell itself dissolves away into an abstract chemical machine and that into some intangible, inexpressible flow of energy. The secret seems to lurk all about, the wheels get smaller and smaller, and they torn more rapidly, but when you try to seize it the life is gone- and so, by popular definition, some would say that life was never there in the first place. The wheels and the cogs are the secret and we can make them better in time- machines that will run faster and more accurately than real mice to real cheese.
I have no doubt it can be done, though a mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is to me a fine sight and more complicated. I think, in his multiform activity, than a machine "mouse" running a maze. Also I like to think of the possible shape of the future brooding in mice, just as it brooded once in a rather ordinary mousy insectivore who became a man. It leaves a nice fine indeterminate sense of wonder that even an electronic brain hasn’t got, because you know perfectly well that if the electronic brain changes, it will be because of something man has done to it. But what man will do to himself he doesn’t really know. A certain scale of time and a ghostly intangible thing called change are ticking in him. Powers and potentialities like the oak in the seed, or a red and awful ruin. Either way, it's impressive; and the mouse has it, too. Or those birds, I’ll never forget those birds - yet before I measured their significance. I learned the lesson of time first of all. I was young then and left alone in a great desert – part of an expedition that had scattered its men over several hundred miles in order to carry on research more effectively. I learned there that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm.
- mockery of a well-built system
- an amazed concern about how much has changed
- inconsistencies in human behaviour from time to time
- careless cramming of a lot of objects, aimlessly huddled together
The first sentence of para 6 indicates that
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
I suppose their little bones have years ago been lost among the stones and winds of those high glacial pastures. I suppose their leathers blew eventually into the piles of tumbleweed beneath the straggling cattle fences and rotted there in the mountain snows along with dead steers and all the other things that drift to an end in the corners of the wire. I do not quite know why I should be thinking of birds over the New York Times at breakfast, particularly the birds of my youth half a continent away. It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
It used to seem marvelous to me, but I read now that there are machines that can do these things in a small way, machines that can crawl about like animals, and that it may not be long now until do more things - maybe even make themselves – I saw that piece in the Times just now. And then they will, maybe – well, who knows - but you read about it more and more with no one raising any protest, and already they can add better than we and reach up and hear things through the dark and finger the guns over the night sky.
This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the world that confronts me in my biological books and journals, until there are times when I sit quietly in my chair and try to hear the little purr of the cogs in my head and the tubes flaring and dying as the messages go through them and the circuits snap shut or open. This is the great age, make no mistake about it: the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say now is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious about; and man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea. Well, he’s got it all right and that’s why, I guess, that I sit here in my chair, with the article crunched in my hand, remembering those two birds and that blue mountain sunlight. There is another magazine article on my desk that reads “Machines Are Getting Smarter Every Day.” I don’t deny it, but I’ll still stick with the birds. It’s life I believe in, not machines.
Maybe you don’t believe there is any difference. A skeleton is all joints and pulleys, I’ll admit. And when man was in his simpler stages of machine building in the eighteenth century, he quickly saw the resemblances. “What.” wrote Hobbes, “is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?” Tinkering about in their shops it was inevitable in the end that men would see the world as a huge machine “subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines.”
The idea took on with a vengeance. Little automatons toured the country - dolls controlled by clockwork. Clocks described as little worlds were taken on tours by their designers. They were made up of moving figures, shifting scenes and other remarkable devices. The life of the cell was unknown. Man, whether he was conceived as possessing a soul or not, moved and jerked about like these tiny tippets. A human being thought of himself in terms of his own tools and implements. He had been fashioned like the puppets he produced and was only a more clever model made by a greater designer.
Then in the nineteenth century, the cell was discovered, and the single machine in its turn was found to be the product of millions of infinitesimal machines - the cells. Now, finally, the cell itself dissolves away into an abstract chemical machine and that into some intangible, inexpressible flow of energy. The secret seems to lurk all about, the wheels get smaller and smaller, and they torn more rapidly, but when you try to seize it the life is gone- and so, by popular definition, some would say that life was never there in the first place. The wheels and the cogs are the secret and we can make them better in time- machines that will run faster and more accurately than real mice to real cheese.
I have no doubt it can be done, though a mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is to me a fine sight and more complicated. I think, in his multiform activity, than a machine "mouse" running a maze. Also I like to think of the possible shape of the future brooding in mice, just as it brooded once in a rather ordinary mousy insectivore who became a man. It leaves a nice fine indeterminate sense of wonder that even an electronic brain hasn’t got, because you know perfectly well that if the electronic brain changes, it will be because of something man has done to it. But what man will do to himself he doesn’t really know. A certain scale of time and a ghostly intangible thing called change are ticking in him. Powers and potentialities like the oak in the seed, or a red and awful ruin. Either way, it's impressive; and the mouse has it, too. Or those birds, I’ll never forget those birds - yet before I measured their significance. I learned the lesson of time first of all. I was young then and left alone in a great desert – part of an expedition that had scattered its men over several hundred miles in order to carry on research more effectively. I learned there that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm.
- the author has a bias towards inanimate objects
- the sight of a real mouse is more pleasing than the sight of a machine mouse
- inanimate objects can never completely oust and supplant animate ones
- none of these
The author gives the example of dolls and puppets to
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
I suppose their little bones have years ago been lost among the stones and winds of those high glacial pastures. I suppose their leathers blew eventually into the piles of tumbleweed beneath the straggling cattle fences and rotted there in the mountain snows along with dead steers and all the other things that drift to an end in the corners of the wire. I do not quite know why I should be thinking of birds over the New York Times at breakfast, particularly the birds of my youth half a continent away. It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
It used to seem marvelous to me, but I read now that there are machines that can do these things in a small way, machines that can crawl about like animals, and that it may not be long now until do more things - maybe even make themselves – I saw that piece in the Times just now. And then they will, maybe – well, who knows - but you read about it more and more with no one raising any protest, and already they can add better than we and reach up and hear things through the dark and finger the guns over the night sky.
This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the world that confronts me in my biological books and journals, until there are times when I sit quietly in my chair and try to hear the little purr of the cogs in my head and the tubes flaring and dying as the messages go through them and the circuits snap shut or open. This is the great age, make no mistake about it: the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say now is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious about; and man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea. Well, he’s got it all right and that’s why, I guess, that I sit here in my chair, with the article crunched in my hand, remembering those two birds and that blue mountain sunlight. There is another magazine article on my desk that reads “Machines Are Getting Smarter Every Day.” I don’t deny it, but I’ll still stick with the birds. It’s life I believe in, not machines.
Maybe you don’t believe there is any difference. A skeleton is all joints and pulleys, I’ll admit. And when man was in his simpler stages of machine building in the eighteenth century, he quickly saw the resemblances. “What.” wrote Hobbes, “is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?” Tinkering about in their shops it was inevitable in the end that men would see the world as a huge machine “subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines.”
The idea took on with a vengeance. Little automatons toured the country - dolls controlled by clockwork. Clocks described as little worlds were taken on tours by their designers. They were made up of moving figures, shifting scenes and other remarkable devices. The life of the cell was unknown. Man, whether he was conceived as possessing a soul or not, moved and jerked about like these tiny tippets. A human being thought of himself in terms of his own tools and implements. He had been fashioned like the puppets he produced and was only a more clever model made by a greater designer.
Then in the nineteenth century, the cell was discovered, and the single machine in its turn was found to be the product of millions of infinitesimal machines - the cells. Now, finally, the cell itself dissolves away into an abstract chemical machine and that into some intangible, inexpressible flow of energy. The secret seems to lurk all about, the wheels get smaller and smaller, and they torn more rapidly, but when you try to seize it the life is gone- and so, by popular definition, some would say that life was never there in the first place. The wheels and the cogs are the secret and we can make them better in time- machines that will run faster and more accurately than real mice to real cheese.
I have no doubt it can be done, though a mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is to me a fine sight and more complicated. I think, in his multiform activity, than a machine "mouse" running a maze. Also I like to think of the possible shape of the future brooding in mice, just as it brooded once in a rather ordinary mousy insectivore who became a man. It leaves a nice fine indeterminate sense of wonder that even an electronic brain hasn’t got, because you know perfectly well that if the electronic brain changes, it will be because of something man has done to it. But what man will do to himself he doesn’t really know. A certain scale of time and a ghostly intangible thing called change are ticking in him. Powers and potentialities like the oak in the seed, or a red and awful ruin. Either way, it's impressive; and the mouse has it, too. Or those birds, I’ll never forget those birds - yet before I measured their significance. I learned the lesson of time first of all. I was young then and left alone in a great desert – part of an expedition that had scattered its men over several hundred miles in order to carry on research more effectively. I learned there that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm.
- substantiate that mechanical devices and man have nothing in common.
- invalidate the proposition that man and machine are identical in all respects.
- to be convinced about the analogies people draw to correlate man and machine.
- thank the designer that produced the puppets.
We can surely say that the author doesn't deny the fact that the whole human body is a complicated machine.
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
I suppose their little bones have years ago been lost among the stones and winds of those high glacial pastures. I suppose their leathers blew eventually into the piles of tumbleweed beneath the straggling cattle fences and rotted there in the mountain snows along with dead steers and all the other things that drift to an end in the corners of the wire. I do not quite know why I should be thinking of birds over the New York Times at breakfast, particularly the birds of my youth half a continent away. It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
It used to seem marvelous to me, but I read now that there are machines that can do these things in a small way, machines that can crawl about like animals, and that it may not be long now until do more things - maybe even make themselves – I saw that piece in the Times just now. And then they will, maybe – well, who knows - but you read about it more and more with no one raising any protest, and already they can add better than we and reach up and hear things through the dark and finger the guns over the night sky.
This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the world that confronts me in my biological books and journals, until there are times when I sit quietly in my chair and try to hear the little purr of the cogs in my head and the tubes flaring and dying as the messages go through them and the circuits snap shut or open. This is the great age, make no mistake about it: the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say now is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious about; and man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea. Well, he’s got it all right and that’s why, I guess, that I sit here in my chair, with the article crunched in my hand, remembering those two birds and that blue mountain sunlight. There is another magazine article on my desk that reads “Machines Are Getting Smarter Every Day.” I don’t deny it, but I’ll still stick with the birds. It’s life I believe in, not machines.
Maybe you don’t believe there is any difference. A skeleton is all joints and pulleys, I’ll admit. And when man was in his simpler stages of machine building in the eighteenth century, he quickly saw the resemblances. “What.” wrote Hobbes, “is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?” Tinkering about in their shops it was inevitable in the end that men would see the world as a huge machine “subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines.”
The idea took on with a vengeance. Little automatons toured the country - dolls controlled by clockwork. Clocks described as little worlds were taken on tours by their designers. They were made up of moving figures, shifting scenes and other remarkable devices. The life of the cell was unknown. Man, whether he was conceived as possessing a soul or not, moved and jerked about like these tiny tippets. A human being thought of himself in terms of his own tools and implements. He had been fashioned like the puppets he produced and was only a more clever model made by a greater designer.
Then in the nineteenth century, the cell was discovered, and the single machine in its turn was found to be the product of millions of infinitesimal machines - the cells. Now, finally, the cell itself dissolves away into an abstract chemical machine and that into some intangible, inexpressible flow of energy. The secret seems to lurk all about, the wheels get smaller and smaller, and they torn more rapidly, but when you try to seize it the life is gone- and so, by popular definition, some would say that life was never there in the first place. The wheels and the cogs are the secret and we can make them better in time- machines that will run faster and more accurately than real mice to real cheese.
I have no doubt it can be done, though a mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is to me a fine sight and more complicated. I think, in his multiform activity, than a machine "mouse" running a maze. Also I like to think of the possible shape of the future brooding in mice, just as it brooded once in a rather ordinary mousy insectivore who became a man. It leaves a nice fine indeterminate sense of wonder that even an electronic brain hasn’t got, because you know perfectly well that if the electronic brain changes, it will be because of something man has done to it. But what man will do to himself he doesn’t really know. A certain scale of time and a ghostly intangible thing called change are ticking in him. Powers and potentialities like the oak in the seed, or a red and awful ruin. Either way, it's impressive; and the mouse has it, too. Or those birds, I’ll never forget those birds - yet before I measured their significance. I learned the lesson of time first of all. I was young then and left alone in a great desert – part of an expedition that had scattered its men over several hundred miles in order to carry on research more effectively. I learned there that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm.
- True
- False
- Can't say
- None of these
The lines in the third para, ''This is the world ..... the circuits snap shut or open'' indicate that
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
I suppose their little bones have years ago been lost among the stones and winds of those high glacial pastures. I suppose their leathers blew eventually into the piles of tumbleweed beneath the straggling cattle fences and rotted there in the mountain snows along with dead steers and all the other things that drift to an end in the corners of the wire. I do not quite know why I should be thinking of birds over the New York Times at breakfast, particularly the birds of my youth half a continent away. It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
It used to seem marvelous to me, but I read now that there are machines that can do these things in a small way, machines that can crawl about like animals, and that it may not be long now until do more things - maybe even make themselves – I saw that piece in the Times just now. And then they will, maybe – well, who knows - but you read about it more and more with no one raising any protest, and already they can add better than we and reach up and hear things through the dark and finger the guns over the night sky.
This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the world that confronts me in my biological books and journals, until there are times when I sit quietly in my chair and try to hear the little purr of the cogs in my head and the tubes flaring and dying as the messages go through them and the circuits snap shut or open. This is the great age, make no mistake about it: the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say now is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious about; and man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea. Well, he’s got it all right and that’s why, I guess, that I sit here in my chair, with the article crunched in my hand, remembering those two birds and that blue mountain sunlight. There is another magazine article on my desk that reads “Machines Are Getting Smarter Every Day.” I don’t deny it, but I’ll still stick with the birds. It’s life I believe in, not machines.
Maybe you don’t believe there is any difference. A skeleton is all joints and pulleys, I’ll admit. And when man was in his simpler stages of machine building in the eighteenth century, he quickly saw the resemblances. “What.” wrote Hobbes, “is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?” Tinkering about in their shops it was inevitable in the end that men would see the world as a huge machine “subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines.”
The idea took on with a vengeance. Little automatons toured the country - dolls controlled by clockwork. Clocks described as little worlds were taken on tours by their designers. They were made up of moving figures, shifting scenes and other remarkable devices. The life of the cell was unknown. Man, whether he was conceived as possessing a soul or not, moved and jerked about like these tiny tippets. A human being thought of himself in terms of his own tools and implements. He had been fashioned like the puppets he produced and was only a more clever model made by a greater designer.
Then in the nineteenth century, the cell was discovered, and the single machine in its turn was found to be the product of millions of infinitesimal machines - the cells. Now, finally, the cell itself dissolves away into an abstract chemical machine and that into some intangible, inexpressible flow of energy. The secret seems to lurk all about, the wheels get smaller and smaller, and they torn more rapidly, but when you try to seize it the life is gone- and so, by popular definition, some would say that life was never there in the first place. The wheels and the cogs are the secret and we can make them better in time- machines that will run faster and more accurately than real mice to real cheese.
I have no doubt it can be done, though a mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is to me a fine sight and more complicated. I think, in his multiform activity, than a machine "mouse" running a maze. Also I like to think of the possible shape of the future brooding in mice, just as it brooded once in a rather ordinary mousy insectivore who became a man. It leaves a nice fine indeterminate sense of wonder that even an electronic brain hasn’t got, because you know perfectly well that if the electronic brain changes, it will be because of something man has done to it. But what man will do to himself he doesn’t really know. A certain scale of time and a ghostly intangible thing called change are ticking in him. Powers and potentialities like the oak in the seed, or a red and awful ruin. Either way, it's impressive; and the mouse has it, too. Or those birds, I’ll never forget those birds - yet before I measured their significance. I learned the lesson of time first of all. I was young then and left alone in a great desert – part of an expedition that had scattered its men over several hundred miles in order to carry on research more effectively. I learned there that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm.
- the author has a free flow of ideas going into his brain.
- the author is not able to make out anything.
- there is some sudden enlightenment dawning on the author, making him disbelieve everything.
- the author is understanding things in jerks and pauses.
The tone of the passage is
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
I suppose their little bones have years ago been lost among the stones and winds of those high glacial pastures. I suppose their leathers blew eventually into the piles of tumbleweed beneath the straggling cattle fences and rotted there in the mountain snows along with dead steers and all the other things that drift to an end in the corners of the wire. I do not quite know why I should be thinking of birds over the New York Times at breakfast, particularly the birds of my youth half a continent away. It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
It used to seem marvelous to me, but I read now that there are machines that can do these things in a small way, machines that can crawl about like animals, and that it may not be long now until do more things - maybe even make themselves – I saw that piece in the Times just now. And then they will, maybe – well, who knows - but you read about it more and more with no one raising any protest, and already they can add better than we and reach up and hear things through the dark and finger the guns over the night sky.
This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the world that confronts me in my biological books and journals, until there are times when I sit quietly in my chair and try to hear the little purr of the cogs in my head and the tubes flaring and dying as the messages go through them and the circuits snap shut or open. This is the great age, make no mistake about it: the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say now is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious about; and man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea. Well, he’s got it all right and that’s why, I guess, that I sit here in my chair, with the article crunched in my hand, remembering those two birds and that blue mountain sunlight. There is another magazine article on my desk that reads “Machines Are Getting Smarter Every Day.” I don’t deny it, but I’ll still stick with the birds. It’s life I believe in, not machines.
Maybe you don’t believe there is any difference. A skeleton is all joints and pulleys, I’ll admit. And when man was in his simpler stages of machine building in the eighteenth century, he quickly saw the resemblances. “What.” wrote Hobbes, “is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?” Tinkering about in their shops it was inevitable in the end that men would see the world as a huge machine “subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines.”
The idea took on with a vengeance. Little automatons toured the country - dolls controlled by clockwork. Clocks described as little worlds were taken on tours by their designers. They were made up of moving figures, shifting scenes and other remarkable devices. The life of the cell was unknown. Man, whether he was conceived as possessing a soul or not, moved and jerked about like these tiny tippets. A human being thought of himself in terms of his own tools and implements. He had been fashioned like the puppets he produced and was only a more clever model made by a greater designer.
Then in the nineteenth century, the cell was discovered, and the single machine in its turn was found to be the product of millions of infinitesimal machines - the cells. Now, finally, the cell itself dissolves away into an abstract chemical machine and that into some intangible, inexpressible flow of energy. The secret seems to lurk all about, the wheels get smaller and smaller, and they torn more rapidly, but when you try to seize it the life is gone- and so, by popular definition, some would say that life was never there in the first place. The wheels and the cogs are the secret and we can make them better in time- machines that will run faster and more accurately than real mice to real cheese.
I have no doubt it can be done, though a mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is to me a fine sight and more complicated. I think, in his multiform activity, than a machine "mouse" running a maze. Also I like to think of the possible shape of the future brooding in mice, just as it brooded once in a rather ordinary mousy insectivore who became a man. It leaves a nice fine indeterminate sense of wonder that even an electronic brain hasn’t got, because you know perfectly well that if the electronic brain changes, it will be because of something man has done to it. But what man will do to himself he doesn’t really know. A certain scale of time and a ghostly intangible thing called change are ticking in him. Powers and potentialities like the oak in the seed, or a red and awful ruin. Either way, it's impressive; and the mouse has it, too. Or those birds, I’ll never forget those birds - yet before I measured their significance. I learned the lesson of time first of all. I was young then and left alone in a great desert – part of an expedition that had scattered its men over several hundred miles in order to carry on research more effectively. I learned there that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm.
- narrative
- that of unreserved criticism of machines
- suggestive of an alarming apprehension
- sceptical