100 Must Solve Reading Comprehension Andheri|Borivali|Powai|Mira Road|Pune|Online 8999-11-8999 Give the best mocks for CAT and OMETS: https://catking.in/product/all-mocks/ SET 1 The greatest challenge in understanding the role of randomness in life is that although the basic principles of randomness arise from everyday logic, many of the consequences that follow from those principles provecounterintuitive. In the mid-1960s, Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, was lecturing a group of Israeli air force flight instructors on the conventional wisdom of behaviour modification and its application to the psychology of flight training. He drove home the point that rewarding positive behaviour works, but punishing mistakes does not. One of his students interrupted, saying ‘I’ve often praised people warmly for beautifully executed manoeuvres, and the next time they always do worse. And I’ve screamed at people for badly executed manoeuvres, and by and large the next time they improve. Don’t tell me that reward works and punishment doesn’t.’ The other flight instructors agreed. To Kahneman the flight instructors’ experiences rang true. On the other hand, he believed in the animal experiments that demonstrated that reward works better than punishment. He ruminated on this apparent paradox. The answer lies in a phenomenon called regression towards the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, purely due to chance, by a more ordinary one. Here is how it works: The student pilots all had a certain personal ability to fly fighter planes. Raising their skill level involved many factors and required extensive practice, so although their skill was slowly improving through flight training, the change wouldn’t be noticeable from one manoeuvre to the next. Any especially good or especially poor performance was thus mostly a matter of luck. So if a pilot made an exceptionally good landing – one far above his normal level of performance – then the odds would be good that he would perform closer to his norm – that is, worse – the next day. And if his instructor had praised him, it would appear that the praise had done no good. But if a pilot made an exceptionally bad landing, then the odds would be good that the next day he would perform closer to his norm – that is, better. And if his instructor had a habit of screaming ‘you clumsy ape’ when a student performed poorly, it would appear that his criticism did some good. In reality, it made no difference at all. This error in intuition spurred Kahneman’s thinking. How widespread, he wondered, was this misunderstanding of uncertainty? Do we make other misjudgements when faced with uncertainty? And what are its implications for human decision making? Kahneman found that even among sophisticated subjects, when it came to random processes, people’s beliefs and intuition very often let them down. Andheri|Borivali|Powai|Mira Road|Pune|Online 8999-11-8999 Give the best mocks for CAT and OMETS: https://catking.in/product/all-mocks/ Suppose four publishers have rejected the manuscript for your novel. Your intuition might say that the rejections by all those publishing experts mean that your manuscript is no good. But is your intuition correct? Is your novel unsellable? We all know from experience that if several tosses of a coin come up heads, it doesn’t mean we are tossing a two-headed coin. Could it be that publishing success is so unpredictable that even if our novel is destined for the best-seller list, numerous publishers could miss the point and reject it? One book in the 1950s was initially rejected by publishers with such comments as ‘very dull’ and ‘a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions’. Today, that book, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, has sold 30 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books in history. 1. According to the passage, which of the following best explains the apparently paradoxical observation that ‘reward doesn’t improve performance but punishment does’? A. The basic principle of randomness is that rewarding positive behaviour works but punishing mistakes does not. B. Experiments in animal behaviour have proved that reward works better than punishment. C. Punishing mistakes merely preceded the improvement but contrary to appearances, did not cause it. D. Punishing mistakes tends to force the person making a mistake to be more careful the next time, hence causes an improvement the next time, just as praise makes one complacent. 2. Which of the following can be inferred from the student-pilots’ flight training example? A. An excellent performance of a student at any time is an aberration and has no basis in behaviour modification and its application in psychology. B. Students should be complimented constantly if they have to improve their performance gradually. C. Students who have been screamed at with regularity, in spite of how they perform, are more likely to better their performance than others who have never been screamed at. D.. Students who maintain regularity of practice are more likely to gradually improve their performance which may not be noticeable from one test to the next. 3. All these are examples of ‘regression towards the mean’ EXCEPT: A. When there was a sudden increase in burglaries in a particular city, the number of policemen in the city was increased, due to which the number of burglaries went down. B.. Mahesh, a politician, seemed set to win the next election, but his popularity went down abruptly after a scandal regarding his personal life became known. C. Diego, a football player, broke the record for goals scored in one season, but the next season, he scored far fewer goals, leading critics to wonder if he had lost his talent. Andheri|Borivali|Powai|Mira Road|Pune|Online 8999-11-8999 Give the best mocks for CAT and OMETS: https://catking.in/product/all-mocks/ D. Previously, Sonia didn’t believe in homeopathic medicine, but when her particularly bad migraine got better after she took some homeopathic medicine, she decided that there must be something to it. 4. The example of Anne Frank’s book proves that … A. Publishers are not good judges of the quality of literature. B. Writers should keep trying to get their books published, even if they are rejected by multiple publishers. C. Success in publishing depends mainly on chance, not the quality of the work. D. Intuition is not a good guide to predicting which books will be successful. SET 2 If American policy towards Europe in the postwar years had been a conspicuous success, and towards Asia a disappointing balance between success and failure, it could be said that the most conspicuous thing about relations with Latin America was the absence of any policy. Franklin Roosevelt, to be sure, had launched a “Good Neighbour” policy, but being a good neighbour was, it seemed, a negative rather than a positive affair, a matter of keeping hands off, of making the Monroe Doctrine, in form at least, multilateral. All through the postwar years, the states of Latin America -- Mexico and Chile were partial exceptions -- were in the throes of major economic and social crises. Population was growing faster than in any other part of the globe, without a comparable increase in wealth or productivity; the gap between the poor and the rich was widening; and as the rich and powerful turned to the military for the preservation of order and privilege, the poor turned to revolution. Deeply involved in other quarters of the globe, the United States paid little attention to the fortunes or misfortunes of her neighbours to the south, and when she did intervene, it appeared to be on the side of order and the status quo rather than on the side of reform. So frightened was the United States of “Communism” in Latin America that it preferred military dictatorship to reformers who might drift too far to the “left”, and sustained a Batista in Cuba, a Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, a Peron in Argentina, and a Jimenez in Venezuela. In his last two years, President Eisenhower had tried to mend his Latin American fences. Though rejecting a Brazilian proposal of a Marshall Plan for Latin America, he did take the initiative in setting up an Inter-American development Bank with a capital of one billion dollars, almost half of it supplied by the United States. Other government investments in Latin America ran to some four billion dollars, while private investment exceeded nine billion. Yet, though to most Americans, all this seemed a form of economic aid, many Latin Americans regarded it as economic imperialism. In September 1960, came a co-operative plan that could not be regarded as other than enlightened: the Act of Bogota, which authorized a grant of half a billion dollars to subsidize not only economic but social and educational progress in Latin America. “We are not Andheri|Borivali|Powai|Mira Road|Pune|Online 8999-11-8999 Give the best mocks for CAT and OMETS: https://catking.in/product/all-mocks/ saints”, said President Eisenhower when he visited Santiago de Chile, “We know we make mistakes, but our heart is in the right place”. But was it? President Kennedy was confronted by the same dilemma that had perplexed his predecessors. Clearly it was essential to provide a large-scale aid to the countries south of Rio Grande, but should this aid go to bolster up established regimes and thus help maintain status quo, or should it be used to speed up social reform, even at the risk of revolt? As early as 1958, the then Senator Kennedy has asserted that “the objective of our aid program in Latin America should not be to purchase allies, but to consolidate a free and democratic Western Hemisphere, alleviating those conditions which might foster opportunities for communistic infiltration and uniting our peoples on the basis of constantly increasing living standard”.