Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Test - 18

Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

We don’t live in that same world anymore where we can turn a corner and be eaten by a giant cat. We need our long-term higher-order creative thinking. We need it pretty much all the time.Prolonging fight-or-flight into a chronic condition means that neurons in the brain related to things like learning, memory, and judgment all suffer the consequences, thanks to the wide-ranging effects of double-edged sword stress hormones called glucocorticoids. Recent research has even shown a constantly stressed out brain appears to lead to a kind of hardening of neural pathways. Essentially, feeling chronic stress makes it harder to not perceive stress, creating a vicious cycle of unending stress.

Aside from the many health issues like diabetes and cardiac disease that chronic stress leads to, it also causes behavioral changes as people reach for levers of control to reduce stress. These levers include among others, self-medication and displacement aggression.

Self-medication is self-explanatory, it’s pretty much any addictive substance or behavior you can think of, but displacement aggression is a special something among mammals. It turns out that we can reduce our stress by picking on those below us in our social hierarchies. In other words, this is where anti-social behaviors like bullying, racism, and anti-immigrant xenophobia are born. You know, those same things that fuel fascism.

So to solve these problems, we need to go to the root, which is what’s causing the stress in the first place. What’s the most common cause of stress? It’s money. Whether it be the lack of sufficient money, or money that is too irregular or infrequent, or money that feels like the flow of it could stop at any moment. There are a lot of reasons to stress about money, and it all comes down to the fact that we built a system that requires money for our continued survival.

Unconditional basic income cuts to the root by ending our existential money-based fears. With UBI, no matter what happens, our ability to secure our basic needs is guaranteed, from birth to death. That feeling of emancipatory security is transformative in the most profound of ways. It creates trust.

What happened in the Great Depression? The amount of resources and energy were unchanged. The manufacturing capacity was unchanged. The amount of human labor willing to work to produce what was needed was unchanged. And yet the system essentially ground to a halt. Why? Because there was insufficient money in most people’s hands and thus a lack of trust.

Nothing was stopping anyone from exchanging goods and services. As Alan Watts has described the situation, it was like everyone showed up on Monday to build a house, and they were told there would be no work that day, not because of a lack of wood or hammers or nails or cement, but because they were all out of inches. Money doesn’t really exist like we think it does. It’s just a tool of measurement built on trust.

So what are we doing hoarding so much of an imaginary construct in some places, and preventing any of it from reaching other places? Why have we invented something out of thin air, and then pretended it is a finite resource?
The answer is because we didn’t create enough democracy. We didn’t make citizens equal enough. We didn’t free citizens enough to engage in and grow democracy. And we weren’t able to do that because we didn’t implement unconditional basic income to free people from the imposition of survival work. It’s a catch-22. Its two sides of a coin. We need UBI for democracy, and we need democracy for UBI. It’s a feedback loop for prosperity…

Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

We don’t live in that same world anymore where we can turn a corner and be eaten by a giant cat. We need our long-term higher-order creative thinking. We need it pretty much all the time.Prolonging fight-or-flight into a chronic condition means that neurons in the brain related to things like learning, memory, and judgment all suffer the consequences, thanks to the wide-ranging effects of double-edged sword stress hormones called glucocorticoids. Recent research has even shown a constantly stressed out brain appears to lead to a kind of hardening of neural pathways. Essentially, feeling chronic stress makes it harder to not perceive stress, creating a vicious cycle of unending stress.

Aside from the many health issues like diabetes and cardiac disease that chronic stress leads to, it also causes behavioral changes as people reach for levers of control to reduce stress. These levers include among others, self-medication and displacement aggression.

Self-medication is self-explanatory, it’s pretty much any addictive substance or behavior you can think of, but displacement aggression is a special something among mammals. It turns out that we can reduce our stress by picking on those below us in our social hierarchies. In other words, this is where anti-social behaviors like bullying, racism, and anti-immigrant xenophobia are born. You know, those same things that fuel fascism.

So to solve these problems, we need to go to the root, which is what’s causing the stress in the first place. What’s the most common cause of stress? It’s money. Whether it be the lack of sufficient money, or money that is too irregular or infrequent, or money that feels like the flow of it could stop at any moment. There are a lot of reasons to stress about money, and it all comes down to the fact that we built a system that requires money for our continued survival.

Unconditional basic income cuts to the root by ending our existential money-based fears. With UBI, no matter what happens, our ability to secure our basic needs is guaranteed, from birth to death. That feeling of emancipatory security is transformative in the most profound of ways. It creates trust.

What happened in the Great Depression? The amount of resources and energy were unchanged. The manufacturing capacity was unchanged. The amount of human labor willing to work to produce what was needed was unchanged. And yet the system essentially ground to a halt. Why? Because there was insufficient money in most people’s hands and thus a lack of trust.

Nothing was stopping anyone from exchanging goods and services. As Alan Watts has described the situation, it was like everyone showed up on Monday to build a house, and they were told there would be no work that day, not because of a lack of wood or hammers or nails or cement, but because they were all out of inches. Money doesn’t really exist like we think it does. It’s just a tool of measurement built on trust.

So what are we doing hoarding so much of an imaginary construct in some places, and preventing any of it from reaching other places? Why have we invented something out of thin air, and then pretended it is a finite resource?
The answer is because we didn’t create enough democracy. We didn’t make citizens equal enough. We didn’t free citizens enough to engage in and grow democracy. And we weren’t able to do that because we didn’t implement unconditional basic income to free people from the imposition of survival work. It’s a catch-22. Its two sides of a coin. We need UBI for democracy, and we need democracy for UBI. It’s a feedback loop for prosperity…

Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

We don’t live in that same world anymore where we can turn a corner and be eaten by a giant cat. We need our long-term higher-order creative thinking. We need it pretty much all the time.Prolonging fight-or-flight into a chronic condition means that neurons in the brain related to things like learning, memory, and judgment all suffer the consequences, thanks to the wide-ranging effects of double-edged sword stress hormones called glucocorticoids. Recent research has even shown a constantly stressed out brain appears to lead to a kind of hardening of neural pathways. Essentially, feeling chronic stress makes it harder to not perceive stress, creating a vicious cycle of unending stress.

Aside from the many health issues like diabetes and cardiac disease that chronic stress leads to, it also causes behavioral changes as people reach for levers of control to reduce stress. These levers include among others, self-medication and displacement aggression.

Self-medication is self-explanatory, it’s pretty much any addictive substance or behavior you can think of, but displacement aggression is a special something among mammals. It turns out that we can reduce our stress by picking on those below us in our social hierarchies. In other words, this is where anti-social behaviors like bullying, racism, and anti-immigrant xenophobia are born. You know, those same things that fuel fascism.

So to solve these problems, we need to go to the root, which is what’s causing the stress in the first place. What’s the most common cause of stress? It’s money. Whether it be the lack of sufficient money, or money that is too irregular or infrequent, or money that feels like the flow of it could stop at any moment. There are a lot of reasons to stress about money, and it all comes down to the fact that we built a system that requires money for our continued survival.

Unconditional basic income cuts to the root by ending our existential money-based fears. With UBI, no matter what happens, our ability to secure our basic needs is guaranteed, from birth to death. That feeling of emancipatory security is transformative in the most profound of ways. It creates trust.

What happened in the Great Depression? The amount of resources and energy were unchanged. The manufacturing capacity was unchanged. The amount of human labor willing to work to produce what was needed was unchanged. And yet the system essentially ground to a halt. Why? Because there was insufficient money in most people’s hands and thus a lack of trust.

Nothing was stopping anyone from exchanging goods and services. As Alan Watts has described the situation, it was like everyone showed up on Monday to build a house, and they were told there would be no work that day, not because of a lack of wood or hammers or nails or cement, but because they were all out of inches. Money doesn’t really exist like we think it does. It’s just a tool of measurement built on trust.

So what are we doing hoarding so much of an imaginary construct in some places, and preventing any of it from reaching other places? Why have we invented something out of thin air, and then pretended it is a finite resource?
The answer is because we didn’t create enough democracy. We didn’t make citizens equal enough. We didn’t free citizens enough to engage in and grow democracy. And we weren’t able to do that because we didn’t implement unconditional basic income to free people from the imposition of survival work. It’s a catch-22. Its two sides of a coin. We need UBI for democracy, and we need democracy for UBI. It’s a feedback loop for prosperity…

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions

If you see police choking someone to death, you might choose to pepper-spray them and flee. You might even save an innocent life. But what ethical considerations justify such dangerous heroics? More important: do we have the right to defend ourselves and others from government injustice when government agents are following an unjust law? I think the answer is yes. But that view needs defending. Under what circumstances might active self-defence, including possible violence, be justified?

Civil disobedience is a public act that aims to create social or legal change. Think of Henry David Thoreau’s arrest in 1846 for refusing to pay taxes to fund the colonial exploits of the United States. In such a case, disobedient citizens visibly break the law and accept punishment, so as to draw attention to a cause. But justifiable resistance need not have a civic character. It need not aim at changing the law, reforming dysfunctional institutions or replacing bad leaders. Sometimes, it is simply about stopping an immediate injustice.

Some people say we may not defend ourselves against government injustice because governments and their agents have ‘authority’. But the authority argument doesn’t work. It’s one thing to say that you have a duty to pay your taxes or follow the speed limit. It is quite another to show that you are specifically bound to allow a government and its agents to use excessive violence and ignore your rights to due process.

Others say that we should resist government injustice, but only through peaceful methods. Indeed, we should, but that doesn’t differentiate between self-defence against civilians or government. The common-law doctrine of self-defence is always governed by a necessity proviso: you may lie or use violence only if necessary, that is, only if peaceful actions are not as effective. But peaceful methods often fail to stop wrongdoing. Eric Garner peacefully complained: ‘I can’t breathe,’ until he drew his last breath.

Another argument is that we shouldn’t act as vigilantes. But invoking this point here misunderstands the antivigilante principle, which says that when there exists a workable public system of justice, you should defer to public agents trying, in good faith, to administer justice. So if cops attempt to stop a mugging, you shouldn’t insert yourself. But if they ignore or can’t stop a mugging, you may intervene. If the police themselves are the muggers the antivigilante principle does not forbid you from defending yourself. It insists you defer to more competent government agents when they administer justice, not that you must let them commit injustice.

Some people find my thesis too dangerous. They claim that it’s hard to know exactly when self-defence is justified; that people make mistakes, resisting when they should not. Perhaps. But that’s true of self-defence against civilians, too. No one says we lack a right of self-defence against each other because applying the principle is hard. Rather, some moral principles are hard to apply.

However, this objection gets the problem exactly backwards. In real life, people are too deferential and conformist in the face of government authority and reluctant to stand up to political injustice. If anything, the dangerous thesis is that we should defer to government agents when they seem to act unjustly. Remember, self-defence against the state is about stopping an immediate injustice, not fixing broken rules.

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions

If you see police choking someone to death, you might choose to pepper-spray them and flee. You might even save an innocent life. But what ethical considerations justify such dangerous heroics? More important: do we have the right to defend ourselves and others from government injustice when government agents are following an unjust law? I think the answer is yes. But that view needs defending. Under what circumstances might active self-defence, including possible violence, be justified?

Civil disobedience is a public act that aims to create social or legal change. Think of Henry David Thoreau’s arrest in 1846 for refusing to pay taxes to fund the colonial exploits of the United States. In such a case, disobedient citizens visibly break the law and accept punishment, so as to draw attention to a cause. But justifiable resistance need not have a civic character. It need not aim at changing the law, reforming dysfunctional institutions or replacing bad leaders. Sometimes, it is simply about stopping an immediate injustice.

Some people say we may not defend ourselves against government injustice because governments and their agents have ‘authority’. But the authority argument doesn’t work. It’s one thing to say that you have a duty to pay your taxes or follow the speed limit. It is quite another to show that you are specifically bound to allow a government and its agents to use excessive violence and ignore your rights to due process.

Others say that we should resist government injustice, but only through peaceful methods. Indeed, we should, but that doesn’t differentiate between self-defence against civilians or government. The common-law doctrine of self-defence is always governed by a necessity proviso: you may lie or use violence only if necessary, that is, only if peaceful actions are not as effective. But peaceful methods often fail to stop wrongdoing. Eric Garner peacefully complained: ‘I can’t breathe,’ until he drew his last breath.

Another argument is that we shouldn’t act as vigilantes. But invoking this point here misunderstands the antivigilante principle, which says that when there exists a workable public system of justice, you should defer to public agents trying, in good faith, to administer justice. So if cops attempt to stop a mugging, you shouldn’t insert yourself. But if they ignore or can’t stop a mugging, you may intervene. If the police themselves are the muggers the antivigilante principle does not forbid you from defending yourself. It insists you defer to more competent government agents when they administer justice, not that you must let them commit injustice.

Some people find my thesis too dangerous. They claim that it’s hard to know exactly when self-defence is justified; that people make mistakes, resisting when they should not. Perhaps. But that’s true of self-defence against civilians, too. No one says we lack a right of self-defence against each other because applying the principle is hard. Rather, some moral principles are hard to apply.

However, this objection gets the problem exactly backwards. In real life, people are too deferential and conformist in the face of government authority and reluctant to stand up to political injustice. If anything, the dangerous thesis is that we should defer to government agents when they seem to act unjustly. Remember, self-defence against the state is about stopping an immediate injustice, not fixing broken rules.

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions

If you see police choking someone to death, you might choose to pepper-spray them and flee. You might even save an innocent life. But what ethical considerations justify such dangerous heroics? More important: do we have the right to defend ourselves and others from government injustice when government agents are following an unjust law? I think the answer is yes. But that view needs defending. Under what circumstances might active self-defence, including possible violence, be justified?

Civil disobedience is a public act that aims to create social or legal change. Think of Henry David Thoreau’s arrest in 1846 for refusing to pay taxes to fund the colonial exploits of the United States. In such a case, disobedient citizens visibly break the law and accept punishment, so as to draw attention to a cause. But justifiable resistance need not have a civic character. It need not aim at changing the law, reforming dysfunctional institutions or replacing bad leaders. Sometimes, it is simply about stopping an immediate injustice.

Some people say we may not defend ourselves against government injustice because governments and their agents have ‘authority’. But the authority argument doesn’t work. It’s one thing to say that you have a duty to pay your taxes or follow the speed limit. It is quite another to show that you are specifically bound to allow a government and its agents to use excessive violence and ignore your rights to due process.

Others say that we should resist government injustice, but only through peaceful methods. Indeed, we should, but that doesn’t differentiate between self-defence against civilians or government. The common-law doctrine of self-defence is always governed by a necessity proviso: you may lie or use violence only if necessary, that is, only if peaceful actions are not as effective. But peaceful methods often fail to stop wrongdoing. Eric Garner peacefully complained: ‘I can’t breathe,’ until he drew his last breath.

Another argument is that we shouldn’t act as vigilantes. But invoking this point here misunderstands the antivigilante principle, which says that when there exists a workable public system of justice, you should defer to public agents trying, in good faith, to administer justice. So if cops attempt to stop a mugging, you shouldn’t insert yourself. But if they ignore or can’t stop a mugging, you may intervene. If the police themselves are the muggers the antivigilante principle does not forbid you from defending yourself. It insists you defer to more competent government agents when they administer justice, not that you must let them commit injustice.

Some people find my thesis too dangerous. They claim that it’s hard to know exactly when self-defence is justified; that people make mistakes, resisting when they should not. Perhaps. But that’s true of self-defence against civilians, too. No one says we lack a right of self-defence against each other because applying the principle is hard. Rather, some moral principles are hard to apply.

However, this objection gets the problem exactly backwards. In real life, people are too deferential and conformist in the face of government authority and reluctant to stand up to political injustice. If anything, the dangerous thesis is that we should defer to government agents when they seem to act unjustly. Remember, self-defence against the state is about stopping an immediate injustice, not fixing broken rules.

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions

If you see police choking someone to death, you might choose to pepper-spray them and flee. You might even save an innocent life. But what ethical considerations justify such dangerous heroics? More important: do we have the right to defend ourselves and others from government injustice when government agents are following an unjust law? I think the answer is yes. But that view needs defending. Under what circumstances might active self-defence, including possible violence, be justified?

Civil disobedience is a public act that aims to create social or legal change. Think of Henry David Thoreau’s arrest in 1846 for refusing to pay taxes to fund the colonial exploits of the United States. In such a case, disobedient citizens visibly break the law and accept punishment, so as to draw attention to a cause. But justifiable resistance need not have a civic character. It need not aim at changing the law, reforming dysfunctional institutions or replacing bad leaders. Sometimes, it is simply about stopping an immediate injustice.

Some people say we may not defend ourselves against government injustice because governments and their agents have ‘authority’. But the authority argument doesn’t work. It’s one thing to say that you have a duty to pay your taxes or follow the speed limit. It is quite another to show that you are specifically bound to allow a government and its agents to use excessive violence and ignore your rights to due process.

Others say that we should resist government injustice, but only through peaceful methods. Indeed, we should, but that doesn’t differentiate between self-defence against civilians or government. The common-law doctrine of self-defence is always governed by a necessity proviso: you may lie or use violence only if necessary, that is, only if peaceful actions are not as effective. But peaceful methods often fail to stop wrongdoing. Eric Garner peacefully complained: ‘I can’t breathe,’ until he drew his last breath.

Another argument is that we shouldn’t act as vigilantes. But invoking this point here misunderstands the antivigilante principle, which says that when there exists a workable public system of justice, you should defer to public agents trying, in good faith, to administer justice. So if cops attempt to stop a mugging, you shouldn’t insert yourself. But if they ignore or can’t stop a mugging, you may intervene. If the police themselves are the muggers the antivigilante principle does not forbid you from defending yourself. It insists you defer to more competent government agents when they administer justice, not that you must let them commit injustice.

Some people find my thesis too dangerous. They claim that it’s hard to know exactly when self-defence is justified; that people make mistakes, resisting when they should not. Perhaps. But that’s true of self-defence against civilians, too. No one says we lack a right of self-defence against each other because applying the principle is hard. Rather, some moral principles are hard to apply.

However, this objection gets the problem exactly backwards. In real life, people are too deferential and conformist in the face of government authority and reluctant to stand up to political injustice. If anything, the dangerous thesis is that we should defer to government agents when they seem to act unjustly. Remember, self-defence against the state is about stopping an immediate injustice, not fixing broken rules.

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions

If you see police choking someone to death, you might choose to pepper-spray them and flee. You might even save an innocent life. But what ethical considerations justify such dangerous heroics? More important: do we have the right to defend ourselves and others from government injustice when government agents are following an unjust law? I think the answer is yes. But that view needs defending. Under what circumstances might active self-defence, including possible violence, be justified?

Civil disobedience is a public act that aims to create social or legal change. Think of Henry David Thoreau’s arrest in 1846 for refusing to pay taxes to fund the colonial exploits of the United States. In such a case, disobedient citizens visibly break the law and accept punishment, so as to draw attention to a cause. But justifiable resistance need not have a civic character. It need not aim at changing the law, reforming dysfunctional institutions or replacing bad leaders. Sometimes, it is simply about stopping an immediate injustice.

Some people say we may not defend ourselves against government injustice because governments and their agents have ‘authority’. But the authority argument doesn’t work. It’s one thing to say that you have a duty to pay your taxes or follow the speed limit. It is quite another to show that you are specifically bound to allow a government and its agents to use excessive violence and ignore your rights to due process.

Others say that we should resist government injustice, but only through peaceful methods. Indeed, we should, but that doesn’t differentiate between self-defence against civilians or government. The common-law doctrine of self-defence is always governed by a necessity proviso: you may lie or use violence only if necessary, that is, only if peaceful actions are not as effective. But peaceful methods often fail to stop wrongdoing. Eric Garner peacefully complained: ‘I can’t breathe,’ until he drew his last breath.

Another argument is that we shouldn’t act as vigilantes. But invoking this point here misunderstands the antivigilante principle, which says that when there exists a workable public system of justice, you should defer to public agents trying, in good faith, to administer justice. So if cops attempt to stop a mugging, you shouldn’t insert yourself. But if they ignore or can’t stop a mugging, you may intervene. If the police themselves are the muggers the antivigilante principle does not forbid you from defending yourself. It insists you defer to more competent government agents when they administer justice, not that you must let them commit injustice.

Some people find my thesis too dangerous. They claim that it’s hard to know exactly when self-defence is justified; that people make mistakes, resisting when they should not. Perhaps. But that’s true of self-defence against civilians, too. No one says we lack a right of self-defence against each other because applying the principle is hard. Rather, some moral principles are hard to apply.

However, this objection gets the problem exactly backwards. In real life, people are too deferential and conformist in the face of government authority and reluctant to stand up to political injustice. If anything, the dangerous thesis is that we should defer to government agents when they seem to act unjustly. Remember, self-defence against the state is about stopping an immediate injustice, not fixing broken rules.