Precis Writing Exercise No. 72/80
Checking Fee For This Exercise: $1
Total Marks: 100
Time Allowed: 3:00 Hours
Q.1. Make a precis of the following extract. (20)
The present-day industrial establishment is a great distance removed from that of the last century or even of twenty-five years ago. This improvement has been the result of a variety of forces --- government standards and factory inspection: general technological and agricultural advance by substituting machine power for heavy or repetitive manual, labour, the need to compete for a labour force: and union intervention to improve working conditions in addition to wages and Hours.
However, except where the improvement contributed to increased productivity, the effort to make more pleasant has to do support a large burden of proof. It was permissible to seek the elimination of hazardous, unsanitary, unhealthful, or otherwise objectionable conditions of work. The speedup might be resisted to a point. But the test was not what was agreeable but what was unhealthful or at minimum, excessively fatiguing. The trend toward increased leisure is not reprehensible, but we resist vigorously that notion that a man should work less hard on the job. Here older attitudes are involved. We are gravely suspicious of any tendency to expand less than the maximum effort, for this has long been a prime economic virtue.
In strict logic there is as much to be said for making work pleasant and agreeable as for shortening Hours. On the whole it is probably as important for a wage-earner to have pleasant working conditions as a pleasant home. To a degree, he can escape the latter but not the former --- though not doubt the line between an agreeable tempo and what is flagrant feather-bedding is difficult to draw.
Moreover, it is a commonplace of the industrial scene that the dreariest and most burdensome tasks, require as they do a minimum of though and skill frequently have the largest number of takers. The solution to this problem lies, as we shall see presently, in driving up the supply of crude manpower at the bottom of the ladder. Nonetheless the basic paint remains, the case for more leisure is not stronger on purely prima facie grounds than the case for making labour-time itself more agreeable. The test, it is worth repeating, is not the effect on productivity -- It is not seriously argued that the shorter work week increases productivity --- that men produce more in fewer Hours than they would in more. Rather it is whether fewer Hours are always to be preferred to more but pleasant ones.
Q.2. Write a precis of the following passage. (20)
Those who regard the decay of civilization as something quite normal and natural console themselves with the thought that it is not civilization, but a civilization, which is falling a prey to dissolution, that there will be a new age and a new race in which there will blossom a new civilization. But that is a mistake. The earth no longer has in reverse, as it had once, gifted people as yet unused, who can relieve us and take our place in some distant future as the leader of our spiritual life. We already know all those that the earth has to dispose of. There is not one among them which is not already taking such a part in our civilization that its spiritual fate is determined by our own. All of them, the gifted and the un-gifted, the distant and the near, have felt the influence of those forces of barbarism which are yet working among us. All of them are, like ourselves, diseased, and only as we recover can they recover.
It is not the civilization of a race, but that of mankind, present and future alike, that we must give up as lost, if belief in the rebirth of our civilization is a vain thing. But it need not to be so given up. If the ethical is the essential element in civilization, decadence changes into renaissance as soon as ethical activities are set to work again in our convictions and in the ideas which we undertake to stamp upon reality. The attempt to bring this about is well worth making, and it should be world-wide. It is true that the difficulties that have to be reckoned with in this undertaking are so great that only the strongest faith in the power of the ethical spirit will let us venture on it.
Again the renewal of civilization is hindered by the fact that it is so exclusively the individual personality which must be looked to as the agent in the new movement.
The renewal of civilization has nothing to do with movements which bear the characters of the experiences of the crowd, these are never anything but reactions to external happenings. But civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it, a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. It is only an ethical movement which can rescue us from the slough of barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence on in individuals.
The final decision as to what the future of a society shall be depends not on how near its organization is to perfection, but on the degrees of worthiness in its individual members. The most important, and yet the least easily determinable, element in history is the series of unobtrusive general changes which take place in the individual dispositions, and that is why it is so difficult to understand thoroughly the men and events of past times. The character and worth of individuals among the mass and the way they work themselves into membership of the whole body, receiving influences from it and giving others back, we can even today only partially and uncertainly understand.
One thing, however, is clear. Were the collective body works more strongly on the individual than the latter does upon it, the result is deterioration because the noble elements on which everything depends, namely the spiritual and moral worthiness of the individual is thereby necessarily constricted and hampered. Decay of the spiritual and moral life then sets in which renders society incapable of understanding and solving the problems which it has to face. Therefore, sooner or later, it is the duty of individuals to a higher conception of their capabilities and undertake the function which only the individual can perform, that of producing new spiritual-ethical ideas. If this does not come about many times over nothing can save us.
Q.3. Make a precis of the following passage and suggest a suitable title. (20)
"I was a firm believer is democracy, whereas he (D.H. Lawrence) had developed the whole philosophy of Fascism before the politicians had thought of it. 'I don't believe", he wrote, "in democratic control. I think the working man is fit to elect governors or overseers for his immediate circumstances, but for no more. You must utterly revise the electorate. The working man shall elect superiors for the things that concern him immediately, no more. From the other classes, as they rise, shall be elected the higher governors. The thing must culminate in one real head, as every organic thing must -- no foolish republics with no foolish presidents, but an elected king, something like Julius Caesar." He, of course, in his imagination, supposed that when a dictatorship was established he would be the Julius Caesar. This was the part of the dream-like quality of all his thinking. He never let himself bump into reality. He would go into long tirades about how one must proclaim "the truth" to the multitude, and he seemed to have no doubt that multitude would listen. Would he put his political philosophy into a book? No in our corrupt society the written word is always a lie. Would he go in Hyde Park and proclaim "the truth" from a soap box? No: that would be far too dangerous (odd streaks of prudence emerged in him from time to time). Well, I said, what would you do? At this point he would change the subject.
Gradually I discovered that he had no real wish to make the world better, but only to indulge in eloquent Soliloquy about how bad it was. If anybody heard the soliloquies so much the better, but they were designed at most to produce a little faithful band of disciplines who could sit in the deserts of New Mexico and feel holy. All this was conveyed to me in the language of a Fascist dictator as what I must preach, the "must" having thirteen under-linings
(Lord Russell)
Q.4. Write a precis of the following passage and assign 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 and 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 deal 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 over simplification 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 functional 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. Summarize the following passage, tracing the main arguments and reducing it about one-third of its present length. (20)
The attention we give to terrorism often seems disproportionate to its real importance. Terrorism incidents make superb copy for journalists, but kill and maim fewer people than road accidents. Nor is terrorism politically effective. Empires rise and fall according to the real determinants of politics -- namely overwhelming force or strong popular support -- not according to a bit of mayhem caused by isolated fanatics whom one would take seriously enough to vote for it. Indeed, the very variety of incidents that might be described as "terrorism" has been such as to lead critics to suggest that no single subject for investigation exists at all. Might we not regard terrorism as a kind of minor blotch on the skin of an industrial civilization whose very heart is filled with violent dreams and aspirations. Who would call in the dermatologist when the heart itself is sick.
But popular opinion takes terrorism very seriously indeed and popular opinion is probably right. For the significance of terrorism lies not only in the grotesque nastiness of terroristic outrages but also in the moral claims they imply. Terrorism is the most dramatic exemplification of the moral fault of blind willfulness. Terrorism is a solipsistic denial of the obligation of self-control we all must recognize when we live in civilized communities.
Certainly the sovereign high road to misunderstanding terrorism is the pseudo-scientific project of attempting do discover its causes. Terrorists themselves talk of the frustrations which have supposedly necessitated their actions but to transform these facile justifications into scientific hypotheses is to succumb to the terrorists own fantasies. To kill and main people is a choice people make, and glib invocations of necessity are baseless. Other people living in the same situation see no such necessity at all. Hence there are no "causes" of terrorism; only decision to terrorize. It is a moral phenomenon and only a moral discussion can be adequate to it.
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