Reading Comprehension Test 55

[passage-header]The extract is taken from a book written sixty years ago by a British scientist in which he considers the relationship between science and society.[/passage-header]  The pioneers of the teaching of science imagined that its introduction into education would remove the conventionality, artificiality, and backward-looking-ness which were characteristic of classical studies, but they were gravely disappointed. So in their time, had the humanists thought that the study of the classical authors in the original would banish at once the dull pedantry and superstition of medieval scholasticism. The 95346 professional schoolmaster was a match for both of them and has almost managed to make the understanding of chemical reactions as dull and as dogmatic an affair as the reading of Virgil's Aeneid.  
   The chief claim for the use of science in education is that it teaches a child something about the actual universe in which he is living, in making him acquainted with the results of scientific discovery, and at the same time teaches him how to think logically and inductively by studying scientific method. A certain limited success has been reached in the first of these aims, but practically none at all in the second. Those privileged members of the community who have been through a secondary or public school education may be expected to know something about the elementary physics and chemistry of a hundred years ago, but they probably know hardly more than any bright boy can pick up from an interest in the wireless or scientific hobbies out of school hours.
   As to the learning of scientific method, the whole thing is 44698palpably a farce. Actually, for the convenience of teachers and the requirements of the examination system, it is necessary that the pupils not only do not learn scientific method but learn precisely the reverse, that is, to believe exactly what they are told and to reproduce it when asked, whether it seems nonsense to them or not. The way in which educated people respond to such quackeries as spiritualism or 19675 astrology, not to say more dangerous ones such as racial theories or currency myths show that fifty years of education in the method of science in Britain or Germany has produced no visible effect whatever. The only way of learning the method of science is the long and bitter way of personal experience, and, until the educational or social systems are altered, to make this possible, the best we can expect is the production of a minority of people who are able to acquire some of the techniques of science and a still smaller minority who are able to use and develop them.
[passage-footer]Adapted from: The Social Function of Science, John D Bernal (1939)[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]The passage is taken from a description of the life of certain Pacific Islanders written by a pioneering sociologist.[/passage-header]     By the time a child is six or seven, she has all the essential avoidances well enough by heart to be trusted with the care of a younger child. And she also develops a number of simple techniques. She learns to weave firm square balls from palm leaves, to make pinwheels of palm leaves or frangipani blossoms, to climb a coconut tree by walking up the trunk on flexible little feet, to break open a coconut with one firm well-directed blow of a knife as long as she is tall, to play a number of group games and sing the songs which go with them, to tidy the house by picking up the litter on the stony floor, to bring water from the sea, to spread out the copra to dry and to help gather it in when rain threatens, to go to a neighboring house and bring back a lighted faggot for the chief's pipe or the cook-house fire.
     But in the case of the little girls, all these tasks are merely supplementary to the main business of baby-tending. Very small boys also have some care of the younger children, but at eight or nine years of age, they are usually relieved of it. Whatever rough edges have not been smoothed off by this responsibility for younger children are worn off by their contact with older boys. For little boys are admitted to interesting and important activities only as long as their behavior is circumspect and helpful. Where small girls are 57275 brusquely pushed aside, small boys will be patiently tolerated and they become adept at making themselves useful. The four or five little boys who all wish to assist in the important business of helping a grown youth lasso reef eels, organize themselves into a highly efficient working team; one boy holds the bait, another holds an extra lasso, others spoke eagerly about in holes in the reef looking for prey, while still another tucks the captured eels into his lavalava. The small girls, burdened with heavy babies or the care of little staggers who are too small to adventure on the reef, discouraged by the hostility of the small boys and the scorn of the older ones, have little opportunity for learning the more adventurous forms of work and play. So while the little boys first undergo the chastening effects of baby-tending and then have many opportunities to learn effective cooperation under the supervision of older boys, the girls' education is less comprehensive. They have a poke eagerly about in holes in the reef looking for prey, while still another tucks the captured eels into his lavalava. The small girls, burdened with heavy babies or the care of little staggers who are too small to adventure on the reef, discouraged by the hostility of the small boys and the scorn of the older ones, have little opportunity for learning the more adventurous forms of work and play. So while the little boys first undergo the chastening effects of baby-tending and then have many opportunities to learn effective cooperation under the supervision of older boys, the girls' education is less comprehensive. They have a 70490 high standard of individual responsibility, but the community provides them with no 17859 lessons in cooperation with one another. This is particularly apparent in the activities of young people; the boys organize quickly; the girls waste hours in bickering, 21798 innocent of any technique for quick and efficient cooperation.
[passage-footer]Adapted from: Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead(1928)[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]The excerpt is taken from a novel. Mr. Harding, now an old man, has lost his position as the Warden of a hospital for old men. He has just come from an unsuccessful interview with Mr. Slope concerning his reappointment to the position.[/passage-header]    Mr. Harding was not a happy man as he walked down the palace pathway, and stepped out into the close. His position and pleasant house were a second time gone from him; but he could endure it. He had been schooled and insulted by a man young enough to be his son; but that he could put up with. He could even draw from the very injuries which had been inflicted on him some of that consolation which, we may believe, martyrs always receive from the injustice of their own sufferings. He had admitted to his daughter that he wanted the comfort of his old home, and yet he could have returned to his lodgings in the High Street, if not with exultation, at least with satisfaction, had that been all. But the venom of the chaplain's harangue had worked into his blood, and sapped the life of his sweet contentment.
     '47041New men are carrying out new measures, and are carting away the useless rubbish of past centuries!10746' What cruel words these had been - and how often are they now used with all the heartless cruelty of a Slope! A man is sufficiently condemned if it can only be shown that either in politics or religion he does not belong to some new school established within the last score of years. He may then regard himself as rubbish and expect to be carted away. A man is nothing now unless he has within him a full appreciation of the new year; an era in which it would seem that neither honesty nor truth is very desirable, but in which success is the only touchstone of merit. We must laugh at everything that is established. Let the joke be ever so bad, ever so untrue to the real principles of joking; nevertheless we must laugh - or else beware the cart. We must talk, think, and live up to the spirit of the times, or else we are naught. 81138 New men and new measures, long credit and few scruples, great success or wonderful ruin, such are now the tastes of Englishmen who know how to live 45737! Alas, alas! Under such circumstances, Mr. Harding could not but feel that he was an Englishman who did not know how to live. This new doctrine of Mr. Slope and the rubbish cart sadly disturbed his 76943 equanimity.
    'The same thing is going on throughout the whole country!' 'Work is now required from every man who receives wages!' And had he been living all his life receiving wages, and doing no work? Had he in truth so lived as to now in his old age justly be reckoned as rubbish fit only to be hidden away in some huge dust-hole? The 52628 school of men to whom he professes to belong, the Grantlys, the Gwynnes, are afflicted with no such self-accusations as these which troubled Mr. Harding. They, as a rule, are as satisfied with the wisdom and propriety of their own conduct as can be any Mr. Slope or any Bishop with his own. But, unfortunately for himself, Mr. Harding had little of this self-reliance. When he heard himself designated as rubbish by the Slopes of the world, he had no other resources than to make inquiry within his own bosom as to the truth of the designation. Alas, alas! The evidence seemed generally to go against him.
[passage-footer]Adapted from: The Warden, Anthony Trollope (1855)[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]The passage is taken from "The Rule of the Road," an essay written by a twentieth-century essayist. 
[/passage-header]    A stout old lady was walking with her basket down the middle of a street in Petrograd to the great confusion of the traffic and with no small peril to herself. It was pointed out to her that the pavement was the place for pedestrians, but she replied: 'I'm going to walk where I like. We've got liberty now.' It did not occur to the dear old lady that if liberty entitled the pedestrian to walk down the middle of the road, then the end of such liberty would be universal chaos. Everybody would be getting in everybody else's way and nobody would get anywhere. Individual liberty would have become social anarchy.
    40189 There is a danger of the world getting liberty-drunk in these days like the old lady with the basket, and it is just as well to remind ourselves of what the rule of the road means.19508. 38037 It means that in order that the liberties of all may be preserved, the liberties of everybody must be curtailed 10486. When the policeman, say, at Piccadilly Circus, steps into the middle of the road and puts out his hand, he is the symbol, not of tyranny, but of liberty. You may not think so. You may, being in a hurry, and seeing your car pulled up by this 26056 insolence of office, feel that your liberty has been outraged. How dare this fellow interfere with your free use of the public highway? Then, if you are a reasonable person, you will reflect that if he did not interfere with you, he would interfere with no one, and the result would be that Piccadilly Circus would be a maelstrom that you would never cross at all. You have submitted to a curtailment of private liberty in order that you may enjoy a social order which makes your liberty a reality.
    Liberty is not a personal affair only, but a social contract. It is an accommodation of interests. In matters which do not touch anybody else's liberty, of course, I may be as free as I like. If I choose to go down the road in a dressing-gown who shall say me nay? You have liberty to laugh at me, but I have liberty to be indifferent to you. And if I have a fancy for dyeing my hair, or waxing my moustache (which heaven forbid), or wearing an overcoat and sandals, or going to bed late or getting up early, I shall follow my fancy and ask no man's permission. I shall not inquire of you whether I may eat mustard with my mutton. And you will not ask me whether you may follow this religion or that, whether you may prefer Ella Wheeler Wilcox to Wordsworth, or champagne to shandy.
    In all these and a thousand other details, you and I please ourselves and ask no one's leave. We have a whole kingdom in which we rule alone, can do what we choose, be wise or ridiculous, harsh or easy, conventional or odd. But directly we step out of that kingdom, our personal liberty of action becomes 26731 qualified by other people's liberty. I might like to practice on the trombone from midnight till three in the morning. If I went on to the top of Everest to do it, I could please myself, but if I do it in my bedroom my family will object, and if I do it out in the streets the neighbors will remind me that my liberty to blow the trombone must not interfere with their liberty to sleep in quiet. There are a lot of people in the world, and I have to accommodate my liberty to their liberties.
    50110 We are all liable to forget this, and unfortunately, we are much more conscious of the imperfections of others in this respect than of our own 47904. 51256 A reasonable consideration for the rights or feelings of others is the foundation of social conduct 37865.
    98867 It is in small matters of conduct, in the observance of the rule of the road, that we pass judgment upon ourselves, and declare that we are civilized or uncivilized 28868. 74393 The great moments of heroism and sacrifice are rare. 86189 It is the little habits of commonplace intercourse that make up the great sum of life and sweeten or make bitter the journey 61100.
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[passage-header]The passage is taken from "The Rule of the Road," an essay written by a twentieth-century essayist. 
[/passage-header]    A stout old lady was walking with her basket down the middle of a street in Petrograd to the great confusion of the traffic and with no small peril to herself. It was pointed out to her that the pavement was the place for pedestrians, but she replied: 'I'm going to walk where I like. We've got liberty now.' It did not occur to the dear old lady that if liberty entitled the pedestrian to walk down the middle of the road, then the end of such liberty would be universal chaos. Everybody would be getting in everybody else's way and nobody would get anywhere. Individual liberty would have become social anarchy.
    40189 There is a danger of the world getting liberty-drunk in these days like the old lady with the basket, and it is just as well to remind ourselves of what the rule of the road means.19508. 38037 It means that in order that the liberties of all may be preserved, the liberties of everybody must be curtailed 10486. When the policeman, say, at Piccadilly Circus, steps into the middle of the road and puts out his hand, he is the symbol, not of tyranny, but of liberty. You may not think so. You may, being in a hurry, and seeing your car pulled up by this 26056 insolence of office, feel that your liberty has been outraged. How dare this fellow interfere with your free use of the public highway? Then, if you are a reasonable person, you will reflect that if he did not interfere with you, he would interfere with no one, and the result would be that Piccadilly Circus would be a maelstrom that you would never cross at all. You have submitted to a curtailment of private liberty in order that you may enjoy a social order which makes your liberty a reality.
    Liberty is not a personal affair only, but a social contract. It is an accommodation of interests. In matters which do not touch anybody else's liberty, of course, I may be as free as I like. If I choose to go down the road in a dressing-gown who shall say me nay? You have liberty to laugh at me, but I have liberty to be indifferent to you. And if I have a fancy for dyeing my hair, or waxing my moustache (which heaven forbid), or wearing an overcoat and sandals, or going to bed late or getting up early, I shall follow my fancy and ask no man's permission. I shall not inquire of you whether I may eat mustard with my mutton. And you will not ask me whether you may follow this religion or that, whether you may prefer Ella Wheeler Wilcox to Wordsworth, or champagne to shandy.
    In all these and a thousand other details, you and I please ourselves and ask no one's leave. We have a whole kingdom in which we rule alone, can do what we choose, be wise or ridiculous, harsh or easy, conventional or odd. But directly we step out of that kingdom, our personal liberty of action becomes 26731 qualified by other people's liberty. I might like to practice on the trombone from midnight till three in the morning. If I went on to the top of Everest to do it, I could please myself, but if I do it in my bedroom my family will object, and if I do it out in the streets the neighbors will remind me that my liberty to blow the trombone must not interfere with their liberty to sleep in quiet. There are a lot of people in the world, and I have to accommodate my liberty to their liberties.
    50110 We are all liable to forget this, and unfortunately, we are much more conscious of the imperfections of others in this respect than of our own 47904. 51256 A reasonable consideration for the rights or feelings of others is the foundation of social conduct 37865.
    98867 It is in small matters of conduct, in the observance of the rule of the road, that we pass judgment upon ourselves, and declare that we are civilized or uncivilized 28868. 74393 The great moments of heroism and sacrifice are rare. 86189 It is the little habits of commonplace intercourse that make up the great sum of life and sweeten or make bitter the journey 61100.
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[passage-header]The excerpt is taken from a novel. Mr. Harding, now an old man, has lost his position as the Warden of a hospital for old men. He has just come from an unsuccessful interview with Mr. Slope concerning his reappointment to the position.[/passage-header]    Mr. Harding was not a happy man as he walked down the palace pathway, and stepped out into the close. His position and pleasant house were a second time gone from him; but he could endure it. He had been schooled and insulted by a man young enough to be his son; but that he could put up with. He could even draw from the very injuries which had been inflicted on him some of that consolation which, we may believe, martyrs always receive from the injustice of their own sufferings. He had admitted to his daughter that he wanted the comfort of his old home, and yet he could have returned to his lodgings in the High Street, if not with exultation, at least with satisfaction, had that been all. But the venom of the chaplain's harangue had worked into his blood, and sapped the life of his sweet contentment.
     '47041New men are carrying out new measures, and are carting away the useless rubbish of past centuries!10746' What cruel words these had been - and how often are they now used with all the heartless cruelty of a Slope! A man is sufficiently condemned if it can only be shown that either in politics or religion he does not belong to some new school established within the last score of years. He may then regard himself as rubbish and expect to be carted away. A man is nothing now unless he has within him a full appreciation of the new year; an era in which it would seem that neither honesty nor truth is very desirable, but in which success is the only touchstone of merit. We must laugh at everything that is established. Let the joke be ever so bad, ever so untrue to the real principles of joking; nevertheless we must laugh - or else beware the cart. We must talk, think, and live up to the spirit of the times, or else we are naught. 81138 New men and new measures, long credit and few scruples, great success or wonderful ruin, such are now the tastes of Englishmen who know how to live 45737! Alas, alas! Under such circumstances, Mr. Harding could not but feel that he was an Englishman who did not know how to live. This new doctrine of Mr. Slope and the rubbish cart sadly disturbed his 76943 equanimity.
    'The same thing is going on throughout the whole country!' 'Work is now required from every man who receives wages!' And had he been living all his life receiving wages, and doing no work? Had he in truth so lived as to now in his old age justly be reckoned as rubbish fit only to be hidden away in some huge dust-hole? The 52628 school of men to whom he professes to belong, the Grantlys, the Gwynnes, are afflicted with no such self-accusations as these which troubled Mr. Harding. They, as a rule, are as satisfied with the wisdom and propriety of their own conduct as can be any Mr. Slope or any Bishop with his own. But, unfortunately for himself, Mr. Harding had little of this self-reliance. When he heard himself designated as rubbish by the Slopes of the world, he had no other resources than to make inquiry within his own bosom as to the truth of the designation. Alas, alas! The evidence seemed generally to go against him.
[passage-footer]Adapted from: The Warden, Anthony Trollope (1855)[/passage-footer]

[passage-header][/passage-header]I have yet to meet a poetry-lover under thirty who was not an introvert, or an introvert who was not unhappy in adolescence. At school, particularly, maybe, if as in my own case, it is a boarding school, he sees the extrovert successful, happy, and good and himself unpopular or neglected; and what is hardest to bear is not unpopularity, but the consciousness that it is deserved, that he is grubby and inferior and frightened and dull. Knowing no other kind of society than the 92355 contingent, he imagines that this arrangement is part of the eternal scheme of things, that he is doomed to a life of failure and envy. It is not till he grows up, till years later he runs across the heroes of his school days and finds them grown commonplace and sterile, that he realizes that the introvert is the lucky one, the best adapted to an industrial civilization the collective values of which are so infantile that he alone can grow, who has educated his fantasies and learned how to draw upon the resources of his inner life. [passage-footer]Adapted from an article written by W.H Auden.[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]The excerpt is taken from a novel. Mr. Harding, now an old man, has lost his position as the Warden of a hospital for old men. He has just come from an unsuccessful interview with Mr. Slope concerning his reappointment to the position.[/passage-header]    Mr. Harding was not a happy man as he walked down the palace pathway, and stepped out into the close. His position and pleasant house were a second time gone from him; but he could endure it. He had been schooled and insulted by a man young enough to be his son; but that he could put up with. He could even draw from the very injuries which had been inflicted on him some of that consolation which, we may believe, martyrs always receive from the injustice of their own sufferings. He had admitted to his daughter that he wanted the comfort of his old home, and yet he could have returned to his lodgings in the High Street, if not with exultation, at least with satisfaction, had that been all. But the venom of the chaplain's harangue had worked into his blood, and sapped the life of his sweet contentment.
     '47041New men are carrying out new measures, and are carting away the useless rubbish of past centuries!10746' What cruel words these had been - and how often are they now used with all the heartless cruelty of a Slope! A man is sufficiently condemned if it can only be shown that either in politics or religion he does not belong to some new school established within the last score of years. He may then regard himself as rubbish and expect to be carted away. A man is nothing now unless he has within him a full appreciation of the new year; an era in which it would seem that neither honesty nor truth is very desirable, but in which success is the only touchstone of merit. We must laugh at everything that is established. Let the joke be ever so bad, ever so untrue to the real principles of joking; nevertheless we must laugh - or else beware the cart. We must talk, think, and live up to the spirit of the times, or else we are naught. 81138 New men and new measures, long credit and few scruples, great success or wonderful ruin, such are now the tastes of Englishmen who know how to live 45737! Alas, alas! Under such circumstances, Mr. Harding could not but feel that he was an Englishman who did not know how to live. This new doctrine of Mr. Slope and the rubbish cart sadly disturbed his 76943 equanimity.
    'The same thing is going on throughout the whole country!' 'Work is now required from every man who receives wages!' And had he been living all his life receiving wages, and doing no work? Had he in truth so lived as to now in his old age justly be reckoned as rubbish fit only to be hidden away in some huge dust-hole? The 52628 school of men to whom he professes to belong, the Grantlys, the Gwynnes, are afflicted with no such self-accusations as these which troubled Mr. Harding. They, as a rule, are as satisfied with the wisdom and propriety of their own conduct as can be any Mr. Slope or any Bishop with his own. But, unfortunately for himself, Mr. Harding had little of this self-reliance. When he heard himself designated as rubbish by the Slopes of the world, he had no other resources than to make inquiry within his own bosom as to the truth of the designation. Alas, alas! The evidence seemed generally to go against him.
[passage-footer]Adapted from: The Warden, Anthony Trollope (1855)[/passage-footer]

[passage-header][/passage-header]I have yet to meet a poetry-lover under thirty who was not an introvert, or an introvert who was not unhappy in adolescence. At school, particularly, maybe, if as in my own case, it is a boarding school, he sees the extrovert successful, happy, and good and himself unpopular or neglected; and what is hardest to bear is not unpopularity, but the consciousness that it is deserved, that he is grubby and inferior and frightened and dull. Knowing no other kind of society than the 92355 contingent, he imagines that this arrangement is part of the eternal scheme of things, that he is doomed to a life of failure and envy. It is not till he grows up, till years later he runs across the heroes of his school days and finds them grown commonplace and sterile, that he realizes that the introvert is the lucky one, the best adapted to an industrial civilization the collective values of which are so infantile that he alone can grow, who has educated his fantasies and learned how to draw upon the resources of his inner life. [passage-footer]Adapted from an article written by W.H Auden.[/passage-footer]

[passage-header][/passage-header]I have yet to meet a poetry-lover under thirty who was not an introvert, or an introvert who was not unhappy in adolescence. At school, particularly, maybe, if as in my own case, it is a boarding school, he sees the extrovert successful, happy, and good and himself unpopular or neglected; and what is hardest to bear is not unpopularity, but the consciousness that it is deserved, that he is grubby and inferior and frightened and dull. Knowing no other kind of society than the 92355 contingent, he imagines that this arrangement is part of the eternal scheme of things, that he is doomed to a life of failure and envy. It is not till he grows up, till years later he runs across the heroes of his school days and finds them grown commonplace and sterile, that he realizes that the introvert is the lucky one, the best adapted to an industrial civilization the collective values of which are so infantile that he alone can grow, who has educated his fantasies and learned how to draw upon the resources of his inner life. [passage-footer]Adapted from an article written by W.H Auden.[/passage-footer]