Precis Writing Exercise No. 79/80
Checking Fee For This Exercise: $1
Total Marks: 100Time Allowed: 3:00 Hours
Q.1. Make a precis of the given passage and suggest a suitable heading. (20)
The psychological causes of unhappiness, it is clear, are many and various. But all have something in common. The typical unhappy man is one who having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction, has come to value this one kind of satisfaction more than any other, and has, therefore, given to his life a one-sided direction, together with a quite undue emphasis upon the achievement as apposed to the activities connected with it. There is, however, a further development which is very common in the present day. A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of "Pleasure". That is to say, he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide; that happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness. The narcissist and megalomaniac believe that happiness is possible, though they may adopt mistaken means of achieving it; but the man who seeks intoxication, in whatever form, has given up hope except in oblivion. In his case the first thing to be done is to persuade him that happiness is desirable. Men, who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact. Perhaps their pride is like that of the fox who had lost his tail; if so, they way to cure it is to point out to them how they can grow a new tail. Very few men, I believe, will deliberately choose unhappiness if they see a way of being happy. I do not deny that such men exist, but they are not sufficiently numerous to be important. It is common in our day, as it has been in many other periods of the world's history, to suppose that those among us who are wise have seen through all the enthusiasms of earlier times aand have become aware that there is noting left to live for. The man who hold this nature of the universe and consider to be the only rational attitude for an enlightened man. Their pride in their unhappiness makes less sophisticated people suspicious of its genuineness; they think that the man who enjoys being miserable is not miserable.
Q.2. Write a precis of the following passage and suggest a suitable title. (20)
One of the most ominous and discreditable symptoms of the want of candour in present-day sociology is the deliberate neglect of the population question. It is, or should be, transparently, clear that, if the state is resolved, on humanitarian ground, to inhibit the operation of natural selection, some rational regulation of population, both as regards quality and quantity, is imperatively necessary. There is no self-acting adjustment, apart from starvation, of numbers to the means of subsistence. If all natural checks are removed, a population in advance of the optimum number will be produced and maintained at the cost of a reduction in the standard of living. When this pressure begins to be felt, that section of the population which is capable of reflection and which has a standard of living which may be lost will voluntarily restrict its numbers, even to the point of failing to replace death by an equivalent number of new births; while the underworld, which always exists in every civilized society. The failure and misfits and derelicts, moral and physical will exercise no restraint and will be a constantly increasing drain upon the national resources. The population will thus be recruited in a very undue proportion by those strata of society which do not possess the qualities of useful citizens. The importance of the problem would seem to be sufficiently obvious. But politicians know that the subject is unpopular. The urban have no votes. Employers are like surplus of labour, which can be drawn upon when trade is good. Militarists want as much food for powder as they can get. Revolutionists instinctively oppose any real remedy for social evils; they know that every unwanted child is a potential insurgent. All three can appeal to a Quasi-Religious prejudice, resting apparently on the ancient theory of natural rights which are supposed to include the right of unlimited procreation. This objection is now chiefly urged by a celibate or childless priests; but it is held with such fanatical vehemence that the fear of losing the votes which they control is a welcome excuse for the baser sort of politicians to shelve the subject as inopportune. The socialist calculation is probably erroneous; for experience has shown that it is aspiration, not desperation, that makes revolutions.
Q.3. Make a precis of the following passage and suggest a suitable heading. (20)
Year 2013
Culture, in human societies, has two main aspects; an external, formal aspect and an inner, ideological aspect. The external forms of culture, social or artistic, are merely an organized expression of its inner ideological aspect, and both are an inherent component of a given social structure. They are changed or modified when this structure is changed or modified and because of this organic link they also help and influence such changes in their parent organism. Cultural problems, therefore, cannot be studied or understood or solved in isolation from social problems i.e. problems of political and economic relationships. The cultural problems of the underdeveloped countries, therefore, have to be understood and solved in the light of the large perspective, in the context of underlying social problems. Very broadly speaking, these problems are primarily the problems of arrested growth; they originate primarily from long years of imperialist -- Colonialist domination and the remnants of a backward outmoded social structure. This should not require much elaboration European Imperialism caught up with the countries of Asia, Africa or Latin America between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some of them were fairly developed feudal societies with ancient traditions of advanced feudal culture. Others had yet to progress beyond primitive pastoral tribalism. Social and cultural development of them all was frozen at the point of their political subjugation and remained frozen until the coming of political independence. The culture of these ancient feudal societies, in spite of much technical and intellectual excellence, was restricted to a small privileged class and rarely intermingled with the parallel unsophisticated fold culture of the general masses. Primitive tribal culture, in spite of its child like beauty, had little intellectual content. Both feudal and tribal societies living contagiously in the same homelands were constantly engaged in tribal, racial, and religious or other feuds with their tribal and feudal rivals. Colonialist - imperialist domination accentuated this dual fragmentation, the vertical division among different tribal and national groups, the horizontal division among different classes within the same tribal or national group. This is the basic ground structure, social and cultural, bequeathed to the newly liberated countries by their former over lords.
Culture, in human societies, has two main aspects; an external, formal aspect and an inner, ideological aspect. The external forms of culture, social or artistic, are merely an organized expression of its inner ideological aspect, and both are an inherent component of a given social structure. They are changed or modified when this structure is changed or modified and because of this organic link they also help and influence such changes in their parent organism. Cultural problems, therefore, cannot be studied or understood or solved in isolation from social problems i.e. problems of political and economic relationships. The cultural problems of the underdeveloped countries, therefore, have to be understood and solved in the light of the large perspective, in the context of underlying social problems. Very broadly speaking, these problems are primarily the problems of arrested growth; they originate primarily from long years of imperialist -- Colonialist domination and the remnants of a backward outmoded social structure. This should not require much elaboration European Imperialism caught up with the countries of Asia, Africa or Latin America between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some of them were fairly developed feudal societies with ancient traditions of advanced feudal culture. Others had yet to progress beyond primitive pastoral tribalism. Social and cultural development of them all was frozen at the point of their political subjugation and remained frozen until the coming of political independence. The culture of these ancient feudal societies, in spite of much technical and intellectual excellence, was restricted to a small privileged class and rarely intermingled with the parallel unsophisticated fold culture of the general masses. Primitive tribal culture, in spite of its child like beauty, had little intellectual content. Both feudal and tribal societies living contagiously in the same homelands were constantly engaged in tribal, racial, and religious or other feuds with their tribal and feudal rivals. Colonialist - imperialist domination accentuated this dual fragmentation, the vertical division among different tribal and national groups, the horizontal division among different classes within the same tribal or national group. This is the basic ground structure, social and cultural, bequeathed to the newly liberated countries by their former over lords.
Q.4. Write a precis of the following passage and suggest a suitable heading to it. (20)
Probably the only protection for contemporary man is to discover how to use his intelligence in the service of love and kindness. The training of human intelligence must include the simultaneous development of the emphatic capacity. Only in this way can intelligence be made an instrument of social morality and responsibility -- and thereby increase the chances of survival.
The need to produce human beings with trained morally sensitive intelligence is essentially a challenge to educators and educational institutions. Traditionally, the realm of social morality was left to religion and the churches as guardians or custodians. But their failure to fulfill this responsibility and their yielding to the seductive lures of the men of wealth and pomp and power documented by the history of the last two thousand years and have now resulted in the irrelevant "God is Dead" theological rhetoric. The more pragmatic men of power have had no time or inclination to death with the fundamental problems of social morality. For them simplistic Machiavellianism must remain the guiding principle of their decisions-power is morality, morality is power. This oversimplification increases the chances of nuclear devastation. We must therefore hope that educators and educational institutions have the capacity, the commitment and the time to instill moral sensitivity as an integral part of the complex pattern of function human intelligence. Some way must be found in the training of human beings to give them the assurance to love, the security to be kind, and the integrity required for a functional empathy.
Q.5. Make a precis of the following text and suggest a suitable title. (20)
In studding the breakdowns of civilizations, the writer has subscribed to the conclusion - no new discovery! - that war has proved to have been the proximate cause of the breakdown of every civilization which is know for certain to have broken down, in so far as it has been possible to analyze the nature of these breakdowns and to account for their occurrence. Like other evils war has no insidious way of appearing not intolerable until it has secured such a stranglehold upon the lives of its addicts that they no longer have the power to escape from its grip when its deadlines has become manifest. In the early stages of civilization's growth, the cost of wars in suffering and destruction might seem to be exceeded by the benefits occurring from the winning of wealth and power and the cultivation of the "military virtues"; and, in this phase of history, states have often found themselves able to indulge in war with one another with something like impunity even for the defeated party. War does not begin to reveal its malignity till the war making society has begun to increase its economic ability to exploit physical nature and its political ability to organize manpower; but, as soon as this happens, the good of war to which the growing society has long since been dedicated proves himself a Moloch by devouring an ever larger share of the increasing fruits of man's industry and intelligence in the process of taking an ever larger toll of life and happiness; and, when the society's growth in efficiency reaches a point at which it becomes capable of mobilizing a lethal quantum of its energies and resources of military use then war reveals itself as being a cancer which is bound to prove fatal to its victim unless he can cut it out and cast it from him, since its malignant tissues have now learnt to grow faster that the healthy tissues on which they feed.
In the past when this danger-point in the history of the relations between war and civilization has been reached and recognized, serious efforts have sometimes been made to get rid of war in time to save society, and these endeavours have been apt to take one or other of two alternative directions. Salvation cannot, of course, be sought anywhere except in the working of the consciences of individual human beings; but individuals have a choice between trying to achieve their aims through direct action as private citizens and trying to achieve then through indirect action as citizen of states. Personal refusal to lend himself in any way to any war waged by his state for any purpose and in any circumstances is a line of attack against the institution of war that is likely to appeal to an ardent and self-sacrificing nature; by comparison, the alternative peace strategy of seeking to persuade and accustom governments to combine in jointly resisting aggression when it comes and in trying to remove its stimuli before hand may seem a circuitous and unheroic line of attack on the problem. Yet experience up to date indicates unmistakably, in the present writer's opinion, that the second of these two hard roads is by far the more promising.
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