English Reading Comprehension

In the final analysis, the author of the passage

Directions: Read the passage and answer the following questions.

Passage II
Two recent publications offer different assessments of the career of the famous British nurse Florence Nightingale. A book by Andy Summers seeks to debunk the idealization and present a reality at odds with Nightingale's heroic reputation. According to Summers, Nightingale's importance during the Crimean War has been exaggerated: not until the War's end did she become supervisor of the female nurses. In addition, Summers writes that the contribution of the nurses to the relief of the wounded was at best marginal, The prevailing problems of military medicine were caused by army organizational practices, and the addition offered by few nurses to the medical staff could be no more than symbolic. Nightingale's place 'in the national pantheon, Summers asserts, is largely due to the propagandistic efforts of contemporary newspaper reporters.

By contrast, the editors of a new volume of Nightingale's letters view Nightingale as a person who significantly influenced not only her own age but also subsequent generations' They highlight her ongoing efforts to reform sanitary conditions after the War. For example, when she learned that peacetime living conditions in British barracks were so horrible that the death rate of enlisted men far exceeded that of the neighbouring civilian population, she succeeded in persuading the government to establish a Royal Commission on the Health of the Army. She used sums raised through public contributions to found a nurses training hospital in London. Even in administrative matters, the editors assert, her practical intelligence was formidable: as recently as 1947 the British army's medical services were still using the cost accounting system she had devised in the eighteen sixties.

Andy Summers argues that the Nightingale's heroic reputation was due to

Directions: Read the passage and answer the following questions.

Passage II
Two recent publications offer different assessments of the career of the famous British nurse Florence Nightingale. A book by Andy Summers seeks to debunk the idealization and present a reality at odds with Nightingale's heroic reputation. According to Summers, Nightingale's importance during the Crimean War has been exaggerated: not until the War's end did she become supervisor of the female nurses. In addition, Summers writes that the contribution of the nurses to the relief of the wounded was at best marginal, The prevailing problems of military medicine were caused by army organizational practices, and the addition offered by few nurses to the medical staff could be no more than symbolic. Nightingale's place 'in the national pantheon, Summers asserts, is largely due to the propagandistic efforts of contemporary newspaper reporters.

By contrast, the editors of a new volume of Nightingale's letters view Nightingale as a person who significantly influenced not only her own age but also subsequent generations' They highlight her ongoing efforts to reform sanitary conditions after the War. For example, when she learned that peacetime living conditions in British barracks were so horrible that the death rate of enlisted men far exceeded that of the neighbouring civilian population, she succeeded in persuading the government to establish a Royal Commission on the Health of the Army. She used sums raised through public contributions to found a nurses training hospital in London. Even in administrative matters, the editors assert, her practical intelligence was formidable: as recently as 1947 the British army's medical services were still using the cost accounting system she had devised in the eighteen sixties.

The tramp convinced the highway man, to give him the pistol by ___

Directions: Read the given passage and answer the following question:

A tramp was one day walking on a country road when he suddenly met a highway man. Pointing a pistol, the man exclaimed, “Your money or your life.”
“My friend,” said the tramp, “I cannot deliver my money for I should be helping you in evil doing. However, exchange is lawful. I will give you my purse for the pistol.”
The robber agreed and said, “That is right. I shall give you my pistol and you will give me your purse.”
The exchange took place. As soon as the tramp received the pistol, he pointed the pistol at the robber’s head and said, “Now, my friend, my purse back or the weapon may go off.”
“Fire!” said the robber, “There is no powder in the pistol.”

The whole dialogue depicts that the highway man was __

Directions: Read the given passage and answer the following question:

A tramp was one day walking on a country road when he suddenly met a highway man. Pointing a pistol, the man exclaimed, “Your money or your life.”
“My friend,” said the tramp, “I cannot deliver my money for I should be helping you in evil doing. However, exchange is lawful. I will give you my purse for the pistol.”
The robber agreed and said, “That is right. I shall give you my pistol and you will give me your purse.”
The exchange took place. As soon as the tramp received the pistol, he pointed the pistol at the robber’s head and said, “Now, my friend, my purse back or the weapon may go off.”
“Fire!” said the robber, “There is no powder in the pistol.”

The whole paragraph suggests that the coolie was

Directions: Read the given passage and answer the following question.

A stranger who had de-boarded the train, came across a fat looking coolie and asked him,
“Can you tell me the way to the nearest inn?”
“Yes,” said the coolie.
“Do you want one where you can spend the night?”
“No,” said the stranger, “I only want a meal.”
“In that case,” replied the coolie, “Peacock Hotel will be the best.”
“Will you be kind enough to show me the way”? said the stranger.
“I would be glad to go with you personally,” said the coolie.
“Thank you very much,” said the stranger.

“Can you tell me the way...”, indicates

Directions: Read the given passage and answer the following question.

A stranger who had de-boarded the train, came across a fat looking coolie and asked him,
“Can you tell me the way to the nearest inn?”
“Yes,” said the coolie.
“Do you want one where you can spend the night?”
“No,” said the stranger, “I only want a meal.”
“In that case,” replied the coolie, “Peacock Hotel will be the best.”
“Will you be kind enough to show me the way”? said the stranger.
“I would be glad to go with you personally,” said the coolie.
“Thank you very much,” said the stranger.

In context, which of the following is the best version of sentence 11 (reproduced below)? In the sky, sun allowed the drops to sparkle so brightly, as it caught them, like thousands of stars.

Direction for questions 7 to 12: The following passage is an early draft of an essay. Some parts of the passage need to be rewritten. Read the passage and select the best answers for the questions that follow. Some questions are about particular sentences or parts of sentences and ask you to improve sentence structure or word choice. Other questions ask you to consider organization and development. In choosing answers, follow the requirements of standard written English.

Passage – II
(1)  I would always find myself behind the old oak tree in our back yard. (2) This was my favorite spot. (3) The thick trunk, like a bodyguard, protected me from the imaginary bullets that flew towards my body. (4) I would lean against the hard bark and for some reason it was comforting to have something sturdy to lean on. (5) It was dark brown, and every now and then a spider would nestle between the pieces of bark. (6)  Sometimes I would touch the tree to peek around the corner and my fingers would be sticky. (7)  I could never quite figure out why that was, and it was giving me the hardest time getting it off, a constant reminder of my tree.
(8)  When my brother and I weren't at "battle," I would lie beneath my oak tree and daydream. (9) As I looked up I could see millions of branches protecting me from everything above. (10)  At the end of each branch were hundreds of more leaves that would gently catch the morning dew, and carefully allowed it to make its way to the grass. (11)  In the sky, sun allowed the drops to sparkle so brightly, as it caught them, like thousands of stars. (12)  This was my heaven, and as I lay there, I could feel the plush grass, like a snuggly old blanket, holding my body gently against the ground.
(13) The grasshoppers would appear from around a blade of grass as if they were asking for approval to hop on my blanket. (14)  A leaf would jump off its branch to greet me as I sat. (15)  It would float through the air as light as feather and land softly on the grass. (16)  As the autumn drew near, it was like a rainstorm of brown, yellow and red leaves, all falling to make way for the beautiful spring leaves.
(17)  When winter came the tree stood bare, unprotected and sad. (18) Suddenly my favorite spot was stripped of its innocence and baring the naked truth. (19) But it never failed, as spring rolled around, the old oak tree lit up with vibrant green leaves and reassured me that it was ready for my companionship once again.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.