Reading Compreh...

[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][/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]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 passage is taken from a biography of Florence Nightingale who is mainly remembered for her heroic work as a nurse during the Crimean War.)[/passage-header]   The name of Florence Nightingale lives in the memory of the world by virtue of the heroic adventure of the Crimea. Had she died - as she nearly did - upon her return to England, her reputation would hardly have been different; her legend would have come down to us almost as we know it today - that gentle vision of female virtue which first took shape before the adoring eyes of the sick soldiers at Scutari. Yet, as a matter of fact, she lives for more than half a century after the Crimean War; and during the greater part of that long period all the energy and all the devotion of her extraordinary nature were working at their highest pitch. What she accomplished in those years of unknown labor could, indeed, hardly have been more glorious than her Crimean triumphs; but it was certainly more important. The true history was far stranger even than the myth. In Miss Nightingale's own eyes, the adventure of the Crimea was a mere incident - scarcely more than a useful stepping-stone in her career. It was the 91064 fulcrum with which she hoped to move the world; but it was only a fulcrum. For more than a generation, she was to sit in secret, working her lever; and her real life began at the very moment when, in popular imagination, it had ended.
    She arrived in England in a shattered state of health. The hardships and the ceaseless efforts of the last two years had undermined her nervous system; her heart was affected; she suffered constantly from fainting-fits and terrible attacks of utter physical prostration. The doctors declared that one thing alone would save her - a complete and a prolonged rest. But that was also the one thing with which she would have nothing to do. She had never been in the habit of resting; why should she begin now? Now, when her opportunity had come at last; now, when the iron was hot, and it was time to strike? No, she had work to do and come what might, she would do it. The doctors protested in vain; in vain her family lamented and entreated, in vain her friends pointed out to her the madness of such a course. Madness? Mad - possessed - perhaps she was. A frenzy had seized upon her. As she lay upon her sofa, gasping, she devoured blue-books, dictated letters, and, in the intervals of her palpitations, cracked jokes. For months at a stretch, she never left her bed. But she would not rest. At this rate, the doctors assured, even if she did not die, she would become an invalid for life. She could not help that; there was work to be done; and as for rest, very likely she might rest... when she had done it.
    Wherever she went, to London or in the country, in the hills of Derbyshire, or among the rhododendrons at Embley, she was haunted by a ghost. It was the specter of Scutari - the hideous vision of the organization of a military hospital. She would lay that phantom, or she would perish. The whole system of the Army Medical Department, the education of the Medical Officer, regulations of hospital procedure... rest? How could she rest while these things were as they were, while, if the like necessity were to arise again, the like results would follow? And, even at peace and at home, what was the sanitary condition of the Army? The mortality on the barracks was, she found, nearly double the mortality in civil life. 98791'You might as well take 1,100 men every year out upon Salisbury Plain and shoot them,'26860 she said. After inspecting the hospitals at Chatham, she smiled grimly. 'Yes, this is one more symptom of the system which, in the Crimea, put to death 16,000 men.' Scutari had given her knowledge; and it had given her power too: her enormous reputation was at her back - an incalculable force. Other work, other duties might lie before her; but most urgent, the most obvious, of all was to look to the health of the Army.
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