CAT 2018 Question Paper | Verbal Slot 1

CAT Questions

This is a Medium-Hard difficulty level passage on ‘Economy and Happiness’ that appeared in CAT 2018 Question Paper Slot 1. Understanding the main idea of the passage is crucial to solving the 5 questions from this passage. Reading vigorously during your CAT Online Preparation alone can get you there. CAT Exam in recent years has been testing you only on your understanding of the passage or a sentence. Don’t lose your handle on that!

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Economists have spent most of the 20th century ignoring psychology, positive or otherwise. But today there is a great deal of emphasis on how happiness can shape global economies, or — on a smaller scale — successful business practice. This is driven, in part, by a trend in "measuring" positive emotions, mostly so they can be optimized. Neuroscientists, for example, claim to be able to locate specific emotions, such as happiness or disappointment, in particular areas of the brain. Wearable technologies, such as Spire, offer data-driven advice on how to reduce stress.

We are no longer just dealing with "happiness" in a philosophical or romantic sense — it has become something that can be monitored and measured, including by our behavior, use of social media and bodily indicators such as pulse rate and facial expressions. There is nothing automatically sinister about this trend. But it is disquieting that the businesses and experts driving the quantification of happiness claim to have our best interests at heart, often concealing their own agendas in the process. In the workplace, happy workers are viewed as a "win-win." Work becomes more pleasant, and employees, more productive. But this is now being pursued through the use of performance-evaluating wearable technology, such as Humanyze or Virgin Pulse, both of which monitor physical signs of stress and activity toward the goal of increasing productivity.

Cities such as Dubai, which has pledged to become the "happiest city in the world," dream up ever-more elaborate and intrusive ways of collecting data on well-being — to the point where there is now talk of using CCTV cameras to monitor facial expressions in public spaces. New ways of detecting emotions are hitting the market all the time: One company, Beyond Verbal, aims to calculate moods conveyed in a phone conversation, potentially without the knowledge of at least one of the participants. And Facebook [has] demonstrated that it could influence our emotions through tweaking our news feeds — opening the door to ever-more targeted manipulation in advertising and influence.

As the science grows more sophisticated and technologies become more intimate with our thoughts and bodies, a clear trend is emerging. Where happiness indicators were once used as a basis to reform society, challenging the obsession with money that G.D.P. measurement entrenches, they are increasingly used as a basis to transform or discipline individuals.

Happiness becomes a personal project, that each of us must now work on, like going to the gym. Since the 1970s, depression has come to be viewed as a cognitive or neurological defect in the individual, and never a consequence of circumstances. All of this simply escalates the sense of responsibility each of us feels for our own feelings, and with it, the sense of failure when things go badly. A society that deliberately removed certain sources of misery, such as precarious and exploitative employment, may well be a happier one. But we won't get there by making this single, often fleeting emotion, the over-arching goal.

Question 16 : According to the author, wearable technologies and social media are contributing most to:

1. happiness as a “personal project”.
2. depression as a thing of the past.
3. disciplining individualsto be happy.
4. making individuals aware of stress in their lives.

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Video Explanation

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Explanatory Answer

Close contest between options 3 and 4 here. The first paragraph says that ‘wearable technologies... offer data-driven advice on how to reduce stress’ and the third paragraph that ‘performance evaluating wearable technology... monitor physical signs of stress and activity toward the goal of increasing productivity’.

The main idea of the passage is that happiness is being quantified by businesses—ostensibly with our best interests in heart—but, in reality used as ‘a basis to transform or discipline individuals’. This is best reflected by option 3.

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The question is "According to the author, wearable technologies and social media are contributing most to:"

Hence, the answer is disciplining individualsto be happy.

Choice C is the correct answer.