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The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage,
choose the best answer for each question.
Many human phenomena and
characteristics – such as behaviors, beliefs, economies, genes, incomes, life expectancies,
and other things – are influenced both by geographic factors and by non-geographic factors.
Geographic factors mean physical and biological factors tied to geographic location,
including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal species, soils, and
topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under the term culture,
other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual people. . .
.
[T]he differences between the current economies of North and South Korea . . .
cannot be attributed to the modest environmental differences between [them] . . . They are
instead due entirely to the different [government] policies . . . At the opposite extreme,
the Inuit and other traditional peoples living north of the Arctic Circle developed warm fur
clothes but no agriculture, while equatorial lowland peoples around the world never
developed warm fur clothes but often did develop agriculture. The explanation is
straightforwardly geographic, rather than a cultural or historical quirk unrelated to
geography. . . . Aboriginal Australia remained the sole continent occupied only by
hunter/gatherers and with no indigenous farming or herding . . . [Here the] explanation is
biogeographic: the Australian continent has no domesticable native animal species and few
domesticable native plant species. Instead, the crops and domestic animals that now make
Australia a food and wool exporter are all non-native (mainly Eurasian) species such as
sheep, wheat, and grapes, brought to Australia by overseas colonists.
Today, no
scholar would be silly enough to deny that culture, history, and individual choices play a
big role in many human phenomena. Scholars don't react to cultural, historical, and
individual-agent explanations by denouncing "cultural determinism," "historical
determinism," or "individual determinism," and then thinking no further. But many scholars
do react to any explanation invoking some geographic role, by denouncing "geographic
determinism" . . .
Several reasons may underlie this widespread but nonsensical
view. One reason is that some geographic explanations advanced a century ago were racist,
thereby causing all geographic explanations to become tainted by racist associations in the
minds of many scholars other than geographers. But many genetic, historical, psychological,
and anthropological explanations advanced a century ago were also racist, yet the validity
of newer non-racist genetic etc. explanations is widely accepted today.
Another
reason for reflex rejection of geographic explanations is that historians have a tradition,
in their discipline, of stressing the role of contingency (a favorite word among historians)
based on individual decisions and chance. Often that view is warranted . . . But often, too,
that view is unwarranted. The development of warm fur clothes among the Inuit living north
of the Arctic Circle was not because one influential Inuit leader persuaded other Inuit in
1783 to adopt warm fur clothes, for no good environmental reason.
A third reason
is that geographic explanations usually depend on detailed technical facts of geography and
other fields of scholarship . . . Most historians and economists don't acquire that detailed
knowledge as part of the professional training.
All of the following can be inferred from the passage EXCEPT:
All of the following are advanced by the author as reasons why non-geographers disregard geographic influences on human phenomena EXCEPT their:
The examples of the Inuit and Aboriginal Australians are offered in the passage to show:
The author criticises scholars who are not geographers for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage,
choose the best answer for each question.
For early postcolonial literature, the
world of the novel was often the nation. Postcolonial novels were usually [concerned with]
national questions. Sometimes the whole story of the novel was taken as an allegory of the
nation, whether India or Tanzania. This was important for supporting anti-colonial
nationalism, but could also be limiting – land-focused and inward-looking.
My new
book "Writing Ocean Worlds" explores another kind of world of the novel: not the village or
nation, but the Indian Ocean world. The book describes a set of novels in which the Indian
Ocean is at the centre of the story. It focuses on the novelists Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak
Gurnah, Lindsey Collen and Joseph Conrad [who have] centred the Indian Ocean world in the
majority of their novels. . . . Their work reveals a world that is outward-looking – full of
movement, border-crossing and south-south interconnection. They are all very different –
from colonially inclined (Conrad) to radically anti-capitalist (Collen), but together draw
on and shape a wider sense of Indian Ocean space through themes, images, metaphors and
language. This has the effect of remapping the world in the reader's mind, as centred in the
interconnected global south. . . .
The Indian Ocean world is a term used to
describe the very long-lasting connections among the coasts of East Africa, the Arab coasts,
and South and East Asia. These connections were made possible by the geography of the Indian
Ocean. For much of history, travel by sea was much easier than by land, which meant that
port cities very far apart were often more easily connected to each other than to much
closer inland cities. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that what we now call
globalisation first appeared in the Indian Ocean. This is the interconnected oceanic world
referenced and produced by the novels in my book. . . .
For their part Ghosh,
Gurnah, Collen and even Conrad reference a different set of histories and geographies than
the ones most commonly found in fiction in English. Those [commonly found ones] are mostly
centred in Europe or the US, assume a background of Christianity and whiteness, and mention
places like Paris and New York. The novels in [my] book highlight instead a largely Islamic
space, feature characters of colour and centralise the ports of Malindi, Mombasa, Aden, Java
and Bombay. . . . It is a densely imagined, richly sensory image of a southern cosmopolitan
culture which provides for an enlarged sense of place in the world.
This
remapping is particularly powerful for the representation of Africa. In the fiction, sailors
and travellers are not all European. . . . African, as well as Indian and Arab characters,
are traders, nakhodas (dhow ship captains), runaways, villains, missionaries and activists.
This does not mean that Indian Ocean Africa is romanticised. Migration is often a matter of
force; travel is portrayed as abandonment rather than adventure, freedoms are kept from
women and slavery is rife. What it does mean is that the African part of the Indian Ocean
world plays an active role in its long, rich history and therefore in that of the wider
world.
All of the following claims contribute to the "remapping" discussed by the passage, EXCEPT:
Which one of the following statements is not true about migration in the Indian Ocean world?
On the basis of the nature of the relationship between the items in each pair below, choose the odd pair out:
All of the following statements, if true, would weaken the passage's claim about the relationship between mainstream English-language fiction and Indian Ocean novels EXCEPT:
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage,
choose the best answer for each question.
[Fifty] years after its publication in
English [in 1972], and just a year since [Marshall] Sahlins himself died—we may ask: why did
[his essay] "Original Affluent Society" have such an impact, and how has it fared since? . .
. Sahlins's principal argument was simple but counterintuitive: before being driven into
marginal environments by colonial powers, hunter-gatherers, or foragers, were not engaged in
a desperate struggle for meager survival. Quite the contrary, they satisfied their needs
with far less work than people in agricultural and industrial societies, leaving them more
time to use as they wished. Hunters, he quipped, keep bankers' hours. Refusing to maximize,
many were "more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game." . . . The
so-called Neolithic Revolution, rather than improving life, imposed a harsher work regime
and set in motion the long history of growing inequality . . .
Moreover, foragers
had other options. The contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who had long been surrounded by
farmers, knew they had alternatives and rejected them. To Sahlins, this showed that foragers
are not simply examples of human diversity or victimhood but something more profound: they
demonstrated that societies make real choices. Culture, a way of living oriented around a
distinctive set of values, manifests a fundamental principle of collective
self-determination. . . .
But the point [of the essay] is not so much the
empirical validity of the data—the real interest for most readers, after all, is not in
foragers either today or in the Paleolithic—but rather its conceptual challenge to
contemporary economic life and bourgeois individualism. The empirical served a philosophical
and political project, a thought experiment and stimulus to the imagination of
possibilities.
With its title's nod toward The Affluent Society (1958),
economist John Kenneth Galbraith's famously skeptical portrait of America's postwar
prosperity and inequality, and dripping with New Left contempt for consumerism, "The
Original Affluent Society" brought this critical perspective to bear on the contemporary
world. It did so through the classic anthropological move of showing that radical
alternatives to the readers' lives really exist. If the capitalist world seeks wealth
through ever greater material production to meet infinitely expansive desires, foraging
societies follow "the Zen road to affluence": not by getting more, but by wanting less. If
it seems that foragers have been left behind by "progress," this is due only to the
ethnocentric self-congratulation of the West. Rather than accumulate material goods, these
societies are guided by other values: leisure, mobility, and above all, freedom. . .
.
Viewed in today's context, of course, not every aspect of the essay has aged
well. While acknowledging the violence of colonialism, racism, and dispossession, it does
not thematize them as heavily as we might today. Rebuking evolutionary anthropologists for
treating present-day foragers as "left behind" by progress, it too can succumb to the
temptation to use them as proxies for the Paleolithic. Yet these characteristics should not
distract us from appreciating Sahlins's effort to show that if we want to conjure new
possibilities, we need to learn about actually inhabitable worlds.
We can infer that Sahlins's main goal in writing his essay was to:
The author mentions Tanzania's Hadza community to illustrate:
The author of the passage criticises Sahlins's essay for its:
The author of the passage mentions Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" to:
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage,
choose the best answer for each question.
RESIDENTS of Lozère, a hilly department
in southern France, recite complaints familiar to many rural corners of Europe. In remote
hamlets and villages, with names such as Le Bacon and Le Bacon Vieux, mayors grumble about a
lack of local schools, jobs, or phone and internet connections. Farmers of grazing animals
add another concern: the return of wolves. Eradicated from France last century, the
predators are gradually creeping back to more forests and hillsides. "The wolf must be taken
in hand," said an aspiring parliamentarian, Francis Palombi, when pressed by voters in an
election campaign early this summer. Tourists enjoy visiting a wolf park in Lozère, but
farmers fret over their livestock and their livelihoods. . . .
As early as the
ninth century, the royal office of the Luparii—wolf-catchers—was created in France to tackle
the predators. Those official hunters (and others) completed their job in the 1930s, when
the last wolf disappeared from the mainland. Active hunting and improved technology such as
rifles in the 19th century, plus the use of poison such as strychnine later on,
caused the population collapse. But in the early 1990s the animals reappeared. They crossed
the Alps from Italy, upsetting sheep farmers on the French side of the border. Wolves have
since spread to areas such as Lozère, delighting environmentalists, who see the predators'
presence as a sign of wider ecological health. Farmers, who say the wolves cause the deaths
of thousands of sheep and other grazing animals, are less cheerful. They grumble that green
activists and politically correct urban types have allowed the return of an old
enemy.
Various factors explain the changes of the past few decades. Rural
depopulation is part of the story. In Lozère, for example, farming and a once-flourishing
mining industry supported a population of over 140,000 residents in the mid-19th
century. Today the department has fewer than 80,000 people, many in its towns. As humans
withdraw, forests are expanding. In France, between 1990 and 2015, forest cover increased by
an average of 102,000 hectares each year, as more fields were given over to trees. Now,
nearly one-third of mainland France is covered by woodland of some sort. The decline of
hunting as a sport also means more forests fall quiet. In the mid-to-late 20th
century over 2m hunters regularly spent winter weekends tramping in woodland, seeking
boars, birds and other prey. Today the Fédération Nationale des Chasseurs, the national
body, claims 1.1m people hold hunting licences, though the number of active hunters is
probably lower. The mostly protected status of the wolf in Europe—hunting them is now
forbidden, other than when occasional culls are sanctioned by the state—plus the efforts of
NGOs to track and count the animals, also contribute to the recovery of wolf
populations.
As the lupine population of Europe spreads westwards, with
occasional reports of wolves seen closer to urban areas, expect to hear of more clashes
between farmers and those who celebrate the predators' return. Farmers' losses are real, but
are not the only economic story. Tourist venues, such as parks where wolves are kept and the
animals' spread is discussed, also generate income and jobs in rural areas.
The inhabitants of Lozère have to grapple with all of the following problems, EXCEPT:
Which one of the following has NOT contributed to the growing wolf population in Lozère?
The author presents a possible economic solution to an existing issue facing Lozère that takes into account the divergent and competing interests of:
Which one of the following statements, if true, would weaken the author's claims?
There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and
decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best
fit.
Sentence:This philosophical cut at one's core beliefs, values, and way
of life is difficult enough.
Paragraph: The experience of reading philosophy
is often disquieting. When reading philosophy, the values around which one has
heretofore organised one's life may come to look provincial, flatly wrong, or even evil.
___(1)___. When beliefs previously held as truths are rendered implausible, new beliefs,
values, and ways of living may be required. ___(2)___. What's worse, philosophers
admonish each other to remain unsutured until such time as a defensible new answer is
revealed or constructed. Sometimes philosophical writing is even strictly critical in
that it does not even attempt to provide an alternative after tearing down a cultural or
conceptual citadel. ___(3)___. The reader of philosophy must be prepared for the
possibility of this experience. While reading philosophy can help one clarify one's
values, and even make one self-conscious for the first time of the fact that there are
good reasons for believing what one believes, it can also generate unremediated doubt
that is difficult to live with. ___(4)___.
There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and
decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best
fit.
Sentence: The discovery helps to explain archeological similarities between
the Paleolithic peoples of China, Japan, and the Americas.
Paragraph: The
researchers also uncovered an unexpected genetic link between Native Americans and
Japanese people. ___(1)___. During the deglaciation period, another group branched out
from northern coastal China and travelled to Japan. ___(2)___. "We were surprised to
find that this ancestral source also contributed to the Japanese gene pool, especially
the indigenous Ainus," says Li. ___(3)___. They shared similarities in how they crafted
stemmed projectile points for arrowheads and spears. ___(4)___. "This suggests that the
Pleistocene connection among the Americas, China, and Japan was not confined to culture
but also to genetics," says senior author Qing-Peng Kong, an evolutionary geneticist at
the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given
below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd
sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.
1. In
English, there is no systematic rule for the naming of numbers; after ten, we have
"eleven" and "twelve" and then the teens: "thirteen", "fourteen", "fifteen" and so
on.
2. Even more confusingly, some English words invert the numbers they refer to:
the word "fourteen" puts the four first, even though it appears last.
3. It can
take children a while to learn all these words, and understand that "fourteen" is
different from "forty".
4. For multiples of 10, English speakers switch to a
different pattern: "twenty", "thirty", "forty" and so on.
5. If you didn't know the
word for "eleven", you would be unable to just guess it – you might come up with
something like "one-teen".
Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given
below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd
sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.
1. Having an
appreciation for the workings of another person's mind is considered a prerequisite for
natural language acquisition, strategic social interaction, reflexive thought, and moral
judgment.
2. It is a 'theory of mind' though some scholars prefer to call it
'mentalizing' or 'mindreading', which is important for the development of one's
cognitive abilities.
3. Though we must speculate about its evolutionary origin, we
do have indications that the capacity evolved sometime in the last few million
years.
4. This capacity develops from early beginnings in the first year of life to
the adult's fast and often effortless understanding of others' thoughts, feelings, and
intentions.
5. One of the most fascinating human capacities is the ability to
perceive and interpret other people's behaviour in terms of their mental states.
The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would
yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the
sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1.
Algorithms hosted on the internet are accessed by many, so biases in AI models have
resulted in much larger impact, adversely affecting far larger groups of people.
2. Though "algorithmic bias" is the popular term, the foundation of such bias is
not in algorithms, but in the data; algorithms are not biased, data is, as algorithms
merely reflect persistent patterns that are present in the training data.
3.
Despite their widespread impact, it is relatively easier to fix AI biases than
human-generated biases, as it is simpler to identify the former than to try to make
people unlearn behaviors learnt over generations.
4. The impact of biased decisions
made by humans is localised and geographically confined, but with the advent of AI, the
impact of such decisions is spread over a much wider scale.
The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would
yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the
sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. What
precisely are the "unusual elements" that make a particular case so attractive to a
certain kind of audience?
2 . It might be a particularly savage or unfathomable
level of depravity, very often it has something to do with the precise amount of mystery
involved.
3. Unsolved, and perhaps unsolvable cases offer something that
"ordinary" murder doesn't.
4. Why are some crimes destined for perpetual
re-examination and others locked into permanent obscurity?
The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that
best captures the essence of the passage.
Manipulating information was a feature
of history long before modern journalism established rules of integrity. A record dates
back to ancient Rome, when Antony met Cleopatra and his political enemy Octavian
launched a smear campaign against him with "short, sharp slogans written upon coins."
The perpetrator became the first Roman Emperor and "fake news had allowed Octavian to
hack the republican system once and for all". But the 21st century has seen
the weaponization of information on an unprecedented scale. Powerful new technology
makes the fabrication of content simple, and social networks amplify falsehoods peddled
by States, populist politicians, and dishonest corporate entities. The platforms have
become fertile ground for computational propaganda, 'trolling' and 'troll armies'.
The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that
best captures the essence of the passage.
Colonialism is not a modern phenomenon.
World history is full of examples of one society gradually expanding by incorporating
adjacent territory and settling its people on newly conquered territory. In the
sixteenth century, colonialism changed decisively because of technological developments
in navigation that began to connect more remote parts of the world. The modern European
colonial project emerged when it became possible to move large numbers of people across
the ocean and to maintain political control in spite of geographical dispersion. The
term colonialism is used to describe the process of European settlement, violent
dispossession and political domination over the rest of the world, including the
Americas, Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia.
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