Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Test - 16

Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.

On 15 July 1099, the armies of the First Crusade, which departed from their European homelands about three years earlier, broke into Jerusalem and conquered it. This marked the beginning of an almost 200-year period in which the Holy Land was ruled by a Latin Catholic elite. Latins arrived for a wide range of motives, contributing to the development of what is referred to in scholarly discourse as ‘Frankish society’. It is often assumed that the Western population that settled in the Holy Land had very little interest in learning. Thus, for example, the late British historian Steven Runciman wrote in his influential A History of the Crusades (1951-54) that the society of the Crusader states, including the Kingdom of Jerusalem, ‘consisted almost entirely of soldiers and merchants, [and] was not fitted to create or maintain a high intellectual standard’. And the German historian Hans E Mayer has argued that, except in the field of feudal customary law, ‘the Franks contributed little or nothing to the advancement of science and learning in the Middle Ages’.

And yet, it now seems that the Kingdom of Jerusalem did, in fact, make its own important cultural contributions. In 1281, a certain John of Antioch gave a beautiful codex to a Hospitaller knight named William of Santo Stefano. At the heart of the precious volume were French translations that John had prepared of two Latin works dating to the days of ancient Rome: Cicero’s De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium. In the production of these translations, John was not only fulfilling the request of an important knight but also making a significant step in the history of the French language: at the time, translations from Latin into French were rare and innovative, and never before had a complete Latin text on rhetoric been translated into French. Furthermore, to these translations John appended one of the earliest vernacular treatises on logic. But the most surprising detail concerning this book is that it was produced thousands of kilometres from the contemporary centres of Western learning, in a port city that then served as the capital of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: Acre.

An additional text that is particularly useful in order to get a glimpse of the intellectual arena that developed in the Kingdom of Jerusalem is the Notitia de Machometo or ‘Information about Muhammed’. This treatise was composed in 1271, also in Acre, by a Dominican named William of Tripoli. It was dedicated to Teobaldo Visconti, a prominent churchman who arrived at Acre on pilgrimage, and, while in the city, was notified of his election as Pope Gregory X. William writes that his reason for compiling this text was that he understood that Teobaldo was interested in Islam. This led him to produce an impressive survey of Islamic history, custom and theology, which includes numerous Quranic passages in (mostly accurate) Latin translation, as well as considerable information that was very hard to come by at the time in Latin Christendom, for example a precise account of the Muslim prayer. Carefully reading the Notitia, it becomes clear that William must have consulted various texts, some of which are no longer extant. Beyond texts, William also made use of informants, at least some of whom were Eastern Christian, probably Copts.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.

On 15 July 1099, the armies of the First Crusade, which departed from their European homelands about three years earlier, broke into Jerusalem and conquered it. This marked the beginning of an almost 200-year period in which the Holy Land was ruled by a Latin Catholic elite. Latins arrived for a wide range of motives, contributing to the development of what is referred to in scholarly discourse as ‘Frankish society’. It is often assumed that the Western population that settled in the Holy Land had very little interest in learning. Thus, for example, the late British historian Steven Runciman wrote in his influential A History of the Crusades (1951-54) that the society of the Crusader states, including the Kingdom of Jerusalem, ‘consisted almost entirely of soldiers and merchants, [and] was not fitted to create or maintain a high intellectual standard’. And the German historian Hans E Mayer has argued that, except in the field of feudal customary law, ‘the Franks contributed little or nothing to the advancement of science and learning in the Middle Ages’.

And yet, it now seems that the Kingdom of Jerusalem did, in fact, make its own important cultural contributions. In 1281, a certain John of Antioch gave a beautiful codex to a Hospitaller knight named William of Santo Stefano. At the heart of the precious volume were French translations that John had prepared of two Latin works dating to the days of ancient Rome: Cicero’s De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium. In the production of these translations, John was not only fulfilling the request of an important knight but also making a significant step in the history of the French language: at the time, translations from Latin into French were rare and innovative, and never before had a complete Latin text on rhetoric been translated into French. Furthermore, to these translations John appended one of the earliest vernacular treatises on logic. But the most surprising detail concerning this book is that it was produced thousands of kilometres from the contemporary centres of Western learning, in a port city that then served as the capital of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: Acre.

An additional text that is particularly useful in order to get a glimpse of the intellectual arena that developed in the Kingdom of Jerusalem is the Notitia de Machometo or ‘Information about Muhammed’. This treatise was composed in 1271, also in Acre, by a Dominican named William of Tripoli. It was dedicated to Teobaldo Visconti, a prominent churchman who arrived at Acre on pilgrimage, and, while in the city, was notified of his election as Pope Gregory X. William writes that his reason for compiling this text was that he understood that Teobaldo was interested in Islam. This led him to produce an impressive survey of Islamic history, custom and theology, which includes numerous Quranic passages in (mostly accurate) Latin translation, as well as considerable information that was very hard to come by at the time in Latin Christendom, for example a precise account of the Muslim prayer. Carefully reading the Notitia, it becomes clear that William must have consulted various texts, some of which are no longer extant. Beyond texts, William also made use of informants, at least some of whom were Eastern Christian, probably Copts.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.

On 15 July 1099, the armies of the First Crusade, which departed from their European homelands about three years earlier, broke into Jerusalem and conquered it. This marked the beginning of an almost 200-year period in which the Holy Land was ruled by a Latin Catholic elite. Latins arrived for a wide range of motives, contributing to the development of what is referred to in scholarly discourse as ‘Frankish society’. It is often assumed that the Western population that settled in the Holy Land had very little interest in learning. Thus, for example, the late British historian Steven Runciman wrote in his influential A History of the Crusades (1951-54) that the society of the Crusader states, including the Kingdom of Jerusalem, ‘consisted almost entirely of soldiers and merchants, [and] was not fitted to create or maintain a high intellectual standard’. And the German historian Hans E Mayer has argued that, except in the field of feudal customary law, ‘the Franks contributed little or nothing to the advancement of science and learning in the Middle Ages’.

And yet, it now seems that the Kingdom of Jerusalem did, in fact, make its own important cultural contributions. In 1281, a certain John of Antioch gave a beautiful codex to a Hospitaller knight named William of Santo Stefano. At the heart of the precious volume were French translations that John had prepared of two Latin works dating to the days of ancient Rome: Cicero’s De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium. In the production of these translations, John was not only fulfilling the request of an important knight but also making a significant step in the history of the French language: at the time, translations from Latin into French were rare and innovative, and never before had a complete Latin text on rhetoric been translated into French. Furthermore, to these translations John appended one of the earliest vernacular treatises on logic. But the most surprising detail concerning this book is that it was produced thousands of kilometres from the contemporary centres of Western learning, in a port city that then served as the capital of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: Acre.

An additional text that is particularly useful in order to get a glimpse of the intellectual arena that developed in the Kingdom of Jerusalem is the Notitia de Machometo or ‘Information about Muhammed’. This treatise was composed in 1271, also in Acre, by a Dominican named William of Tripoli. It was dedicated to Teobaldo Visconti, a prominent churchman who arrived at Acre on pilgrimage, and, while in the city, was notified of his election as Pope Gregory X. William writes that his reason for compiling this text was that he understood that Teobaldo was interested in Islam. This led him to produce an impressive survey of Islamic history, custom and theology, which includes numerous Quranic passages in (mostly accurate) Latin translation, as well as considerable information that was very hard to come by at the time in Latin Christendom, for example a precise account of the Muslim prayer. Carefully reading the Notitia, it becomes clear that William must have consulted various texts, some of which are no longer extant. Beyond texts, William also made use of informants, at least some of whom were Eastern Christian, probably Copts.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.

On 15 July 1099, the armies of the First Crusade, which departed from their European homelands about three years earlier, broke into Jerusalem and conquered it. This marked the beginning of an almost 200-year period in which the Holy Land was ruled by a Latin Catholic elite. Latins arrived for a wide range of motives, contributing to the development of what is referred to in scholarly discourse as ‘Frankish society’. It is often assumed that the Western population that settled in the Holy Land had very little interest in learning. Thus, for example, the late British historian Steven Runciman wrote in his influential A History of the Crusades (1951-54) that the society of the Crusader states, including the Kingdom of Jerusalem, ‘consisted almost entirely of soldiers and merchants, [and] was not fitted to create or maintain a high intellectual standard’. And the German historian Hans E Mayer has argued that, except in the field of feudal customary law, ‘the Franks contributed little or nothing to the advancement of science and learning in the Middle Ages’.

And yet, it now seems that the Kingdom of Jerusalem did, in fact, make its own important cultural contributions. In 1281, a certain John of Antioch gave a beautiful codex to a Hospitaller knight named William of Santo Stefano. At the heart of the precious volume were French translations that John had prepared of two Latin works dating to the days of ancient Rome: Cicero’s De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium. In the production of these translations, John was not only fulfilling the request of an important knight but also making a significant step in the history of the French language: at the time, translations from Latin into French were rare and innovative, and never before had a complete Latin text on rhetoric been translated into French. Furthermore, to these translations John appended one of the earliest vernacular treatises on logic. But the most surprising detail concerning this book is that it was produced thousands of kilometres from the contemporary centres of Western learning, in a port city that then served as the capital of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: Acre.

An additional text that is particularly useful in order to get a glimpse of the intellectual arena that developed in the Kingdom of Jerusalem is the Notitia de Machometo or ‘Information about Muhammed’. This treatise was composed in 1271, also in Acre, by a Dominican named William of Tripoli. It was dedicated to Teobaldo Visconti, a prominent churchman who arrived at Acre on pilgrimage, and, while in the city, was notified of his election as Pope Gregory X. William writes that his reason for compiling this text was that he understood that Teobaldo was interested in Islam. This led him to produce an impressive survey of Islamic history, custom and theology, which includes numerous Quranic passages in (mostly accurate) Latin translation, as well as considerable information that was very hard to come by at the time in Latin Christendom, for example a precise account of the Muslim prayer. Carefully reading the Notitia, it becomes clear that William must have consulted various texts, some of which are no longer extant. Beyond texts, William also made use of informants, at least some of whom were Eastern Christian, probably Copts.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Read the following passage and answer the set of five questions that follow.

In his classic Le suicide (1897), the French sociologist Émile Durkheim presented aggregate indicators suggesting that Protestantism was a leading correlate of suicide incidence. The proposition that Protestants have higher suicide rates than Catholics has been ‘accepted widely enough for nomination as sociology’s one law’.

Protestant countries today still tend to have substantially higher suicide rates. This fact suggests that the relation of religion and suicide remains a vital topic. Every year, more than 800,000 people commit suicide worldwide, making it a leading cause of death, in particular among young adults. The prevalence of suicide creates far-reaching emotional, social and economic ramifications, and invokes major policy efforts to prevent them.

Previous social science research on suicide has looked at the matter from an economics perspective. The economists have modelled suicide as a choice between life and death where the utility of staying alive or ending life are weighed against each other. If the utility of staying alive falls below the utility of ending life, suicide is an ‘optimal’ choice.

Within such a framework, two classes of mechanisms predict higher suicide rates of Protestants than Catholics from a theoretical viewpoint. First, as Durkheim suggested, Protestant and Catholic denominations differ in their group structure. Protestantism is a more individualistic religion. According to this ‘sociological channel’, when life hits hard, Catholics can rely on a stronger community, which might keep up their life spirit.

We think there is also a ‘theological channel’. Protestant doctrine stresses the importance of salvation by God’s grace alone, and not by any merit of one’s own work. By contrast, Catholic doctrine allows for God’s judgment to be affected by one’s deeds and sins. As a consequence, committing suicide entails the disutility of forgoing paradise for Catholics but not for Protestants.

Catholics (but not Protestants) also consider the confession of sins a holy sacrament. Since suicide is the only sin that (by definition) can no longer be confessed, this creates a substitution effect that diverts Catholics from committing suicide. It steers them towards other responses to times of utmost desperation.

So which of the two classes of theoretical mechanisms - the sociological or the theological channel - is more likely to account for the higher suicide rate among Protestants? Ultimately, additional analyses that draw on historical church-attendance data and present-day suicide data confirm the sociological rather than the theological mechanism. One key is that the suicidal tendency of Protestants is more pronounced in areas with low church attendance. The strongest effect is thus more likely to be found in areas with little social integration rather than in areas with high devotion to the Protestant doctrine.

Finally, more contemporary data shows that, while Protestants still have a higher suicide rate than Catholics, it is highest among people without a religious affiliation who are not subject to theological doctrine. Both pieces of evidence suggest that the sociological channel to explain Protestants’ higher suicide rate is more relevant than the theological channel.

Read the following passage and answer the set of five questions that follow.

In his classic Le suicide (1897), the French sociologist Émile Durkheim presented aggregate indicators suggesting that Protestantism was a leading correlate of suicide incidence. The proposition that Protestants have higher suicide rates than Catholics has been ‘accepted widely enough for nomination as sociology’s one law’.

Protestant countries today still tend to have substantially higher suicide rates. This fact suggests that the relation of religion and suicide remains a vital topic. Every year, more than 800,000 people commit suicide worldwide, making it a leading cause of death, in particular among young adults. The prevalence of suicide creates far-reaching emotional, social and economic ramifications, and invokes major policy efforts to prevent them.

Previous social science research on suicide has looked at the matter from an economics perspective. The economists have modelled suicide as a choice between life and death where the utility of staying alive or ending life are weighed against each other. If the utility of staying alive falls below the utility of ending life, suicide is an ‘optimal’ choice.

Within such a framework, two classes of mechanisms predict higher suicide rates of Protestants than Catholics from a theoretical viewpoint. First, as Durkheim suggested, Protestant and Catholic denominations differ in their group structure. Protestantism is a more individualistic religion. According to this ‘sociological channel’, when life hits hard, Catholics can rely on a stronger community, which might keep up their life spirit.

We think there is also a ‘theological channel’. Protestant doctrine stresses the importance of salvation by God’s grace alone, and not by any merit of one’s own work. By contrast, Catholic doctrine allows for God’s judgment to be affected by one’s deeds and sins. As a consequence, committing suicide entails the disutility of forgoing paradise for Catholics but not for Protestants.

Catholics (but not Protestants) also consider the confession of sins a holy sacrament. Since suicide is the only sin that (by definition) can no longer be confessed, this creates a substitution effect that diverts Catholics from committing suicide. It steers them towards other responses to times of utmost desperation.

So which of the two classes of theoretical mechanisms - the sociological or the theological channel - is more likely to account for the higher suicide rate among Protestants? Ultimately, additional analyses that draw on historical church-attendance data and present-day suicide data confirm the sociological rather than the theological mechanism. One key is that the suicidal tendency of Protestants is more pronounced in areas with low church attendance. The strongest effect is thus more likely to be found in areas with little social integration rather than in areas with high devotion to the Protestant doctrine.

Finally, more contemporary data shows that, while Protestants still have a higher suicide rate than Catholics, it is highest among people without a religious affiliation who are not subject to theological doctrine. Both pieces of evidence suggest that the sociological channel to explain Protestants’ higher suicide rate is more relevant than the theological channel.

Read the following passage and answer the set of five questions that follow.

In his classic Le suicide (1897), the French sociologist Émile Durkheim presented aggregate indicators suggesting that Protestantism was a leading correlate of suicide incidence. The proposition that Protestants have higher suicide rates than Catholics has been ‘accepted widely enough for nomination as sociology’s one law’.

Protestant countries today still tend to have substantially higher suicide rates. This fact suggests that the relation of religion and suicide remains a vital topic. Every year, more than 800,000 people commit suicide worldwide, making it a leading cause of death, in particular among young adults. The prevalence of suicide creates far-reaching emotional, social and economic ramifications, and invokes major policy efforts to prevent them.

Previous social science research on suicide has looked at the matter from an economics perspective. The economists have modelled suicide as a choice between life and death where the utility of staying alive or ending life are weighed against each other. If the utility of staying alive falls below the utility of ending life, suicide is an ‘optimal’ choice.

Within such a framework, two classes of mechanisms predict higher suicide rates of Protestants than Catholics from a theoretical viewpoint. First, as Durkheim suggested, Protestant and Catholic denominations differ in their group structure. Protestantism is a more individualistic religion. According to this ‘sociological channel’, when life hits hard, Catholics can rely on a stronger community, which might keep up their life spirit.

We think there is also a ‘theological channel’. Protestant doctrine stresses the importance of salvation by God’s grace alone, and not by any merit of one’s own work. By contrast, Catholic doctrine allows for God’s judgment to be affected by one’s deeds and sins. As a consequence, committing suicide entails the disutility of forgoing paradise for Catholics but not for Protestants.

Catholics (but not Protestants) also consider the confession of sins a holy sacrament. Since suicide is the only sin that (by definition) can no longer be confessed, this creates a substitution effect that diverts Catholics from committing suicide. It steers them towards other responses to times of utmost desperation.

So which of the two classes of theoretical mechanisms - the sociological or the theological channel - is more likely to account for the higher suicide rate among Protestants? Ultimately, additional analyses that draw on historical church-attendance data and present-day suicide data confirm the sociological rather than the theological mechanism. One key is that the suicidal tendency of Protestants is more pronounced in areas with low church attendance. The strongest effect is thus more likely to be found in areas with little social integration rather than in areas with high devotion to the Protestant doctrine.

Finally, more contemporary data shows that, while Protestants still have a higher suicide rate than Catholics, it is highest among people without a religious affiliation who are not subject to theological doctrine. Both pieces of evidence suggest that the sociological channel to explain Protestants’ higher suicide rate is more relevant than the theological channel.

Read the following passage and answer the set of five questions that follow.

In his classic Le suicide (1897), the French sociologist Émile Durkheim presented aggregate indicators suggesting that Protestantism was a leading correlate of suicide incidence. The proposition that Protestants have higher suicide rates than Catholics has been ‘accepted widely enough for nomination as sociology’s one law’.

Protestant countries today still tend to have substantially higher suicide rates. This fact suggests that the relation of religion and suicide remains a vital topic. Every year, more than 800,000 people commit suicide worldwide, making it a leading cause of death, in particular among young adults. The prevalence of suicide creates far-reaching emotional, social and economic ramifications, and invokes major policy efforts to prevent them.

Previous social science research on suicide has looked at the matter from an economics perspective. The economists have modelled suicide as a choice between life and death where the utility of staying alive or ending life are weighed against each other. If the utility of staying alive falls below the utility of ending life, suicide is an ‘optimal’ choice.

Within such a framework, two classes of mechanisms predict higher suicide rates of Protestants than Catholics from a theoretical viewpoint. First, as Durkheim suggested, Protestant and Catholic denominations differ in their group structure. Protestantism is a more individualistic religion. According to this ‘sociological channel’, when life hits hard, Catholics can rely on a stronger community, which might keep up their life spirit.

We think there is also a ‘theological channel’. Protestant doctrine stresses the importance of salvation by God’s grace alone, and not by any merit of one’s own work. By contrast, Catholic doctrine allows for God’s judgment to be affected by one’s deeds and sins. As a consequence, committing suicide entails the disutility of forgoing paradise for Catholics but not for Protestants.

Catholics (but not Protestants) also consider the confession of sins a holy sacrament. Since suicide is the only sin that (by definition) can no longer be confessed, this creates a substitution effect that diverts Catholics from committing suicide. It steers them towards other responses to times of utmost desperation.

So which of the two classes of theoretical mechanisms - the sociological or the theological channel - is more likely to account for the higher suicide rate among Protestants? Ultimately, additional analyses that draw on historical church-attendance data and present-day suicide data confirm the sociological rather than the theological mechanism. One key is that the suicidal tendency of Protestants is more pronounced in areas with low church attendance. The strongest effect is thus more likely to be found in areas with little social integration rather than in areas with high devotion to the Protestant doctrine.

Finally, more contemporary data shows that, while Protestants still have a higher suicide rate than Catholics, it is highest among people without a religious affiliation who are not subject to theological doctrine. Both pieces of evidence suggest that the sociological channel to explain Protestants’ higher suicide rate is more relevant than the theological channel.

Read the passage carefully and answer the set of four questions that follow.

Is there any point thinking about what to do? It is often said that our judgments and behaviour are really caused by immediate intuitions and gut feelings, with reasoning happening only afterwards. But that claim misses an important point. Experiments also indicate that reasoning shapes the cognitive system that produces future responses. The more we reason that something is good or bad, right or wrong, attractive or unattractive, the more influential that attitude becomes over our intuitions and gut feelings.

Aristotle would not be surprised. Aristotle’s view, however, does not explain how your thought and behaviour can be influenced by social stereotypes that you do not endorse in your own reasoning. We can understand this process better if we turn to the idea of sedimentation developed by three French philosophers in the middle of the 20th century.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the term ‘sedimentation’ in his book Phenomenology of Perception (1945). He uses it to describe the process of taking on information about our bodies and environment in a form that enables us to act intelligently without much attention, effort or thought. Just as a river accumulates particles and deposits them as sedimented structures that direct the river’s flow, argued Merleau-Ponty, so we accumulate information as we go about our lives, which gradually and unconsciously builds into a contoured bedrock of understanding that guides our behaviour.

For a unified account of how our behaviour can be effortlessly influenced by our own repeatedly endorsed motivations and by social stereotypes that we do not endorse, we can turn to the existentialist writings of Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir articulates her version of sedimentation most fully in The Second Sex (1949). Her focus is on how we develop our goals and values. Girls and boys are raised with different expectations and inducements, and so are continually encouraged to think and act in ways that fit their assigned gender. 

The version of sedimentation that de Beauvoir argued for is specifically existentialist. It is our chosen motivations, along with strategies and information for acting on them, that become sedimented. But our sedimented ideas and goals are not the only influences on our thought. By considering other people’s ideas or taking up a critical perspective on our own ideas, we can formulate conclusions at odds with our sedimented outlook. This explains why inattentive aspects of our behaviour can manifest sedimented stereotypes that we do not endorse. If the existentialism of de Beauvoir and Fanon is right, we are not the puppets of inherited ideologies. We can reason about the attitudes that matter most to us, and we can reform our social environments. In both ways, we can actively reshape the sedimented outlook that guides our behaviour.

Read the passage carefully and answer the set of four questions that follow.

Is there any point thinking about what to do? It is often said that our judgments and behaviour are really caused by immediate intuitions and gut feelings, with reasoning happening only afterwards. But that claim misses an important point. Experiments also indicate that reasoning shapes the cognitive system that produces future responses. The more we reason that something is good or bad, right or wrong, attractive or unattractive, the more influential that attitude becomes over our intuitions and gut feelings.

Aristotle would not be surprised. Aristotle’s view, however, does not explain how your thought and behaviour can be influenced by social stereotypes that you do not endorse in your own reasoning. We can understand this process better if we turn to the idea of sedimentation developed by three French philosophers in the middle of the 20th century.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the term ‘sedimentation’ in his book Phenomenology of Perception (1945). He uses it to describe the process of taking on information about our bodies and environment in a form that enables us to act intelligently without much attention, effort or thought. Just as a river accumulates particles and deposits them as sedimented structures that direct the river’s flow, argued Merleau-Ponty, so we accumulate information as we go about our lives, which gradually and unconsciously builds into a contoured bedrock of understanding that guides our behaviour.

For a unified account of how our behaviour can be effortlessly influenced by our own repeatedly endorsed motivations and by social stereotypes that we do not endorse, we can turn to the existentialist writings of Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir articulates her version of sedimentation most fully in The Second Sex (1949). Her focus is on how we develop our goals and values. Girls and boys are raised with different expectations and inducements, and so are continually encouraged to think and act in ways that fit their assigned gender. 

The version of sedimentation that de Beauvoir argued for is specifically existentialist. It is our chosen motivations, along with strategies and information for acting on them, that become sedimented. But our sedimented ideas and goals are not the only influences on our thought. By considering other people’s ideas or taking up a critical perspective on our own ideas, we can formulate conclusions at odds with our sedimented outlook. This explains why inattentive aspects of our behaviour can manifest sedimented stereotypes that we do not endorse. If the existentialism of de Beauvoir and Fanon is right, we are not the puppets of inherited ideologies. We can reason about the attitudes that matter most to us, and we can reform our social environments. In both ways, we can actively reshape the sedimented outlook that guides our behaviour.

Read the passage carefully and answer the set of four questions that follow.

Is there any point thinking about what to do? It is often said that our judgments and behaviour are really caused by immediate intuitions and gut feelings, with reasoning happening only afterwards. But that claim misses an important point. Experiments also indicate that reasoning shapes the cognitive system that produces future responses. The more we reason that something is good or bad, right or wrong, attractive or unattractive, the more influential that attitude becomes over our intuitions and gut feelings.

Aristotle would not be surprised. Aristotle’s view, however, does not explain how your thought and behaviour can be influenced by social stereotypes that you do not endorse in your own reasoning. We can understand this process better if we turn to the idea of sedimentation developed by three French philosophers in the middle of the 20th century.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the term ‘sedimentation’ in his book Phenomenology of Perception (1945). He uses it to describe the process of taking on information about our bodies and environment in a form that enables us to act intelligently without much attention, effort or thought. Just as a river accumulates particles and deposits them as sedimented structures that direct the river’s flow, argued Merleau-Ponty, so we accumulate information as we go about our lives, which gradually and unconsciously builds into a contoured bedrock of understanding that guides our behaviour.

For a unified account of how our behaviour can be effortlessly influenced by our own repeatedly endorsed motivations and by social stereotypes that we do not endorse, we can turn to the existentialist writings of Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir articulates her version of sedimentation most fully in The Second Sex (1949). Her focus is on how we develop our goals and values. Girls and boys are raised with different expectations and inducements, and so are continually encouraged to think and act in ways that fit their assigned gender. 

The version of sedimentation that de Beauvoir argued for is specifically existentialist. It is our chosen motivations, along with strategies and information for acting on them, that become sedimented. But our sedimented ideas and goals are not the only influences on our thought. By considering other people’s ideas or taking up a critical perspective on our own ideas, we can formulate conclusions at odds with our sedimented outlook. This explains why inattentive aspects of our behaviour can manifest sedimented stereotypes that we do not endorse. If the existentialism of de Beauvoir and Fanon is right, we are not the puppets of inherited ideologies. We can reason about the attitudes that matter most to us, and we can reform our social environments. In both ways, we can actively reshape the sedimented outlook that guides our behaviour.

Read the passage carefully and answer the set of four questions that follow.

Is there any point thinking about what to do? It is often said that our judgments and behaviour are really caused by immediate intuitions and gut feelings, with reasoning happening only afterwards. But that claim misses an important point. Experiments also indicate that reasoning shapes the cognitive system that produces future responses. The more we reason that something is good or bad, right or wrong, attractive or unattractive, the more influential that attitude becomes over our intuitions and gut feelings.

Aristotle would not be surprised. Aristotle’s view, however, does not explain how your thought and behaviour can be influenced by social stereotypes that you do not endorse in your own reasoning. We can understand this process better if we turn to the idea of sedimentation developed by three French philosophers in the middle of the 20th century.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the term ‘sedimentation’ in his book Phenomenology of Perception (1945). He uses it to describe the process of taking on information about our bodies and environment in a form that enables us to act intelligently without much attention, effort or thought. Just as a river accumulates particles and deposits them as sedimented structures that direct the river’s flow, argued Merleau-Ponty, so we accumulate information as we go about our lives, which gradually and unconsciously builds into a contoured bedrock of understanding that guides our behaviour.

For a unified account of how our behaviour can be effortlessly influenced by our own repeatedly endorsed motivations and by social stereotypes that we do not endorse, we can turn to the existentialist writings of Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir articulates her version of sedimentation most fully in The Second Sex (1949). Her focus is on how we develop our goals and values. Girls and boys are raised with different expectations and inducements, and so are continually encouraged to think and act in ways that fit their assigned gender. 

The version of sedimentation that de Beauvoir argued for is specifically existentialist. It is our chosen motivations, along with strategies and information for acting on them, that become sedimented. But our sedimented ideas and goals are not the only influences on our thought. By considering other people’s ideas or taking up a critical perspective on our own ideas, we can formulate conclusions at odds with our sedimented outlook. This explains why inattentive aspects of our behaviour can manifest sedimented stereotypes that we do not endorse. If the existentialism of de Beauvoir and Fanon is right, we are not the puppets of inherited ideologies. We can reason about the attitudes that matter most to us, and we can reform our social environments. In both ways, we can actively reshape the sedimented outlook that guides our behaviour.

Read the following passage and answer the set of five questions that follow.

Climate change, caused by human activity, is arguably the biggest single problem facing the world today, and it is deeply entangled with the question of how to lift billions of people out of poverty without destroying the global environment in the process. But climate change also represents a crisis for economists (I am one). Decades ago, economists developed solutions - or variants on the same solution - to the problem of pollution, the key being the imposition of a price on the generation of pollutants such as carbon dioxide (CO2). The idea was to make visible, and accountable, the true environmental costs of any production process.

Carbon pricing could stabilise the global climate, and cap unwanted warming, at a fraction of the cost that we are likely to end up paying in other ways. And as emissions were rapidly reduced, we could save enough to compensate most of the ‘losers’, such as displaced coal miners; a positive-sum solution. Yet, carbon pricing has been mostly spurned in favour of regulatory solutions that are significantly more costly.

Environmental pollution is one of the most pervasive and intractable failures of market systems (and Soviet-style central planning). Almost every kind of economic activity produces harmful byproducts, which are costly to dispose of safely. The cheapest thing to do is to dump the wastes into waterways or the atmosphere. Under pure free-market conditions, that’s precisely what happens. Polluters pay nothing for dumping waste while society bears the cost.

Since most energy in modern societies comes from burning carbon-based fuels, solving this problem, whether through new technology or altered consumption patterns, will require changes in a vast range of economic activities. If these changes are to be achieved without reducing standards of living, or obstructing the efforts of less developed countries to lift themselves out of poverty, it is important to find a path to emissions reduction that minimises costs.

But since pollution costs aren’t properly represented in market prices, there’s little use in looking at the accounting costs that appear in corporate balance sheets, or the market-based costs that go into national accounting measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). For economists, the right way to think is in terms of ‘opportunity cost’, which can be defined as follows: The opportunity cost of anything of value is what you must give up so that you can have it. So how should we think about the opportunity cost of CO2 emissions?

We could start with the costs imposed on the world’s population as a whole from climate change, and measure how this changes with additional emissions. But this is an impossibly difficult task. All we know about the costs of climate change is that they will be large, and possibly catastrophic. It’s better to think about carbon budgets. We have a good idea how much more CO2 the world can afford to emit while keeping the probability of dangerous climate change reasonably low. A typical estimate is 2,900 billion tonnes - of which 1,900 billion tonnes have already been emitted.

Read the following passage and answer the set of five questions that follow.

Climate change, caused by human activity, is arguably the biggest single problem facing the world today, and it is deeply entangled with the question of how to lift billions of people out of poverty without destroying the global environment in the process. But climate change also represents a crisis for economists (I am one). Decades ago, economists developed solutions - or variants on the same solution - to the problem of pollution, the key being the imposition of a price on the generation of pollutants such as carbon dioxide (CO2). The idea was to make visible, and accountable, the true environmental costs of any production process.

Carbon pricing could stabilise the global climate, and cap unwanted warming, at a fraction of the cost that we are likely to end up paying in other ways. And as emissions were rapidly reduced, we could save enough to compensate most of the ‘losers’, such as displaced coal miners; a positive-sum solution. Yet, carbon pricing has been mostly spurned in favour of regulatory solutions that are significantly more costly.

Environmental pollution is one of the most pervasive and intractable failures of market systems (and Soviet-style central planning). Almost every kind of economic activity produces harmful byproducts, which are costly to dispose of safely. The cheapest thing to do is to dump the wastes into waterways or the atmosphere. Under pure free-market conditions, that’s precisely what happens. Polluters pay nothing for dumping waste while society bears the cost.

Since most energy in modern societies comes from burning carbon-based fuels, solving this problem, whether through new technology or altered consumption patterns, will require changes in a vast range of economic activities. If these changes are to be achieved without reducing standards of living, or obstructing the efforts of less developed countries to lift themselves out of poverty, it is important to find a path to emissions reduction that minimises costs.

But since pollution costs aren’t properly represented in market prices, there’s little use in looking at the accounting costs that appear in corporate balance sheets, or the market-based costs that go into national accounting measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). For economists, the right way to think is in terms of ‘opportunity cost’, which can be defined as follows: The opportunity cost of anything of value is what you must give up so that you can have it. So how should we think about the opportunity cost of CO2 emissions?

We could start with the costs imposed on the world’s population as a whole from climate change, and measure how this changes with additional emissions. But this is an impossibly difficult task. All we know about the costs of climate change is that they will be large, and possibly catastrophic. It’s better to think about carbon budgets. We have a good idea how much more CO2 the world can afford to emit while keeping the probability of dangerous climate change reasonably low. A typical estimate is 2,900 billion tonnes - of which 1,900 billion tonnes have already been emitted.

Read the following passage and answer the set of five questions that follow.

Climate change, caused by human activity, is arguably the biggest single problem facing the world today, and it is deeply entangled with the question of how to lift billions of people out of poverty without destroying the global environment in the process. But climate change also represents a crisis for economists (I am one). Decades ago, economists developed solutions - or variants on the same solution - to the problem of pollution, the key being the imposition of a price on the generation of pollutants such as carbon dioxide (CO2). The idea was to make visible, and accountable, the true environmental costs of any production process.

Carbon pricing could stabilise the global climate, and cap unwanted warming, at a fraction of the cost that we are likely to end up paying in other ways. And as emissions were rapidly reduced, we could save enough to compensate most of the ‘losers’, such as displaced coal miners; a positive-sum solution. Yet, carbon pricing has been mostly spurned in favour of regulatory solutions that are significantly more costly.

Environmental pollution is one of the most pervasive and intractable failures of market systems (and Soviet-style central planning). Almost every kind of economic activity produces harmful byproducts, which are costly to dispose of safely. The cheapest thing to do is to dump the wastes into waterways or the atmosphere. Under pure free-market conditions, that’s precisely what happens. Polluters pay nothing for dumping waste while society bears the cost.

Since most energy in modern societies comes from burning carbon-based fuels, solving this problem, whether through new technology or altered consumption patterns, will require changes in a vast range of economic activities. If these changes are to be achieved without reducing standards of living, or obstructing the efforts of less developed countries to lift themselves out of poverty, it is important to find a path to emissions reduction that minimises costs.

But since pollution costs aren’t properly represented in market prices, there’s little use in looking at the accounting costs that appear in corporate balance sheets, or the market-based costs that go into national accounting measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). For economists, the right way to think is in terms of ‘opportunity cost’, which can be defined as follows: The opportunity cost of anything of value is what you must give up so that you can have it. So how should we think about the opportunity cost of CO2 emissions?

We could start with the costs imposed on the world’s population as a whole from climate change, and measure how this changes with additional emissions. But this is an impossibly difficult task. All we know about the costs of climate change is that they will be large, and possibly catastrophic. It’s better to think about carbon budgets. We have a good idea how much more CO2 the world can afford to emit while keeping the probability of dangerous climate change reasonably low. A typical estimate is 2,900 billion tonnes - of which 1,900 billion tonnes have already been emitted.

Read the following passage and answer the set of five questions that follow.

Climate change, caused by human activity, is arguably the biggest single problem facing the world today, and it is deeply entangled with the question of how to lift billions of people out of poverty without destroying the global environment in the process. But climate change also represents a crisis for economists (I am one). Decades ago, economists developed solutions - or variants on the same solution - to the problem of pollution, the key being the imposition of a price on the generation of pollutants such as carbon dioxide (CO2). The idea was to make visible, and accountable, the true environmental costs of any production process.

Carbon pricing could stabilise the global climate, and cap unwanted warming, at a fraction of the cost that we are likely to end up paying in other ways. And as emissions were rapidly reduced, we could save enough to compensate most of the ‘losers’, such as displaced coal miners; a positive-sum solution. Yet, carbon pricing has been mostly spurned in favour of regulatory solutions that are significantly more costly.

Environmental pollution is one of the most pervasive and intractable failures of market systems (and Soviet-style central planning). Almost every kind of economic activity produces harmful byproducts, which are costly to dispose of safely. The cheapest thing to do is to dump the wastes into waterways or the atmosphere. Under pure free-market conditions, that’s precisely what happens. Polluters pay nothing for dumping waste while society bears the cost.

Since most energy in modern societies comes from burning carbon-based fuels, solving this problem, whether through new technology or altered consumption patterns, will require changes in a vast range of economic activities. If these changes are to be achieved without reducing standards of living, or obstructing the efforts of less developed countries to lift themselves out of poverty, it is important to find a path to emissions reduction that minimises costs.

But since pollution costs aren’t properly represented in market prices, there’s little use in looking at the accounting costs that appear in corporate balance sheets, or the market-based costs that go into national accounting measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). For economists, the right way to think is in terms of ‘opportunity cost’, which can be defined as follows: The opportunity cost of anything of value is what you must give up so that you can have it. So how should we think about the opportunity cost of CO2 emissions?

We could start with the costs imposed on the world’s population as a whole from climate change, and measure how this changes with additional emissions. But this is an impossibly difficult task. All we know about the costs of climate change is that they will be large, and possibly catastrophic. It’s better to think about carbon budgets. We have a good idea how much more CO2 the world can afford to emit while keeping the probability of dangerous climate change reasonably low. A typical estimate is 2,900 billion tonnes - of which 1,900 billion tonnes have already been emitted.