Precis Writing Exercise No. 78/80
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)
It was not so in Greece, where philosophers professed less, and undertook more. Parmenides pondered nebulously over the mystery of knowledge; but the pre-Socratic kept their eyes with fair consistency upon the firm earth, and sought to ferret out its secrets by observation and experience, rather than to create it by exuding dialectic; there were not many introverts among the Greeks. Picture Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher; would he not be perilous company for the desiccated scholastic who have made the dispute about the reality of the external world take the place of medieval discourses on the number of angles that could sit on the point of a pin? Picture Thales, who met the challenge that philosophers were numskulls by "cornering the market" and making a fortune in a year. Picture Anaxagoras, who did the work of Darwin for the Greeks and turned Pericles form a wire-pulling politician into a thinker and a statesman. Picture old Socrates, unafraid of the sun or the stars, gaily corrupting young men and overturning governments; what would he have done to these bespectacled seedless philosophasters who now litter the court of the once great Queen? To Plato, as to these virile predecessors, epistemology was but the vestibule of philosophy, akin to the preliminaries of love; ti was pleasant enough to a while, but it was far from the creative consummation that drew wisdom's lover on. Here and there in the shorter dialogues, the Master dallied amorously with the problems of perception, thought, and knowledge; but in his more spacious moments he spread his vision over larger fields, but himself ideal states and brooded over the nature and destiny of man. And finally in Aristotle philosophy was honoured in all her boundless scope and majesty; all her mansion were explored and made beautiful with order; here every problem found a place and every science brought its toll to wisdom. These men knew that the function of philosophy was not to bury herself in the obscure retreats of epistemology, but to come forth bravely into every realm of inquiry, and gather up all knowledge for the coordination and illumination of human character and human life.
Q.2. Make a precis of the given passage and suggest a suitable heading. (20)
The author of a work of imagination is trying to effect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not. I suppose that everything we eat has some effect upon us than merely the pleasure of taste and mastication; it affects us during the process of assimilation and digestion; and I believe that exactly the same ti true of any thing we read.
The fact that what we read does not concern merely something called our literary taste, but that if affects directly, though only amongst many other influences, the whole of what we are, is best elicited, I think, by a conscientious examination of the history of our individual literary education. Consider the adolescent reading of any person with some literary sensibility. Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seductions of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of one poet. Very likely he was carried away by several poets, one after the other. The reason for this passing infatuation is not merely that our sensibility to poetry is keener in adolescence than in maturity. What happens is a kind of inundation, or invasion of the undeveloped personality, the empty (swept and garnished) room, by the stronger personality of the poet. The same thing may happen at a later age to persons who have not done much reading. One author takes complete possession of us for a time; then another, and finally they begin to affect each other in our mind. We weigh one against another; we see that each has qualities absent from others, and qualities incompatible with the qualities of others: we begin to be, in fact, critical: and it is our growing critical power which protects us from excessive possession by anyone literary personality. The good critic and we should all try to critics, and not leave criticism to the fellows who write reviews in the papers - is the man who, to a keen and abiding sensibility, joins wide and increasingly discriminating. Wide reading is not valuable as a kind of hoarding, and the accumulation of knowledge or what sometimes is meant by the term 'a well-stocked mind'. It is valuable because in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by anyone, or by any small number. The very different views of life, cohabiting in our minds, affect each other, and our own personality asserts itself and gives each a place in some arrangement peculiar to our self.
Q.3. Write a precis of the following passage in about 100 words and suggest the title. (20)
Objective pursued by, organizations should be directed to the satisfaction of demands resulting from the wants of mankind. Therefore, the determination of appropriate objective for organized activity must be preceded by an effort to determine precisely what their wants are. Industrial organizations conduct market studies to learn what consumer goods should be produced. City Commissions make surveys to ascertain what civic projects would be of most benefit. Highway Commissions conduct traffic counts to learn what constructive programmes should be undertaken, Organizations come into being as a means for creating and exchanging utility. Their success is dependent upon the appropriateness of the series of acts contributed to the system. The majority of these acts is purposeful, that it, they are directed to the accomplishment of some objectives. These acts are physical in nature and find purposeful employment in the alteration of the physical environment. As a result utility is created, which, through the process of distribution, makes it possible for the cooperative system to endure.
Before the industrial Revolution most cooperative activity was accomplished in small owner managed enterprises, usually with a single decision maker and simple organizational objectives. Increased technology and the growth of industrial organization made necessary the establishment of a hierarchy of objectives. This in turn, required a division of the management function until today a hierarchy of decision makers exists in most organizations.
The effective pursuit of appropriate objectives contributes directly to the organizational efficiency. As used there, efficiency is a measure of the want satisfying power of the cooperative system as a whole. Thus efficiency is the summation of utilities received from the organization divided by the utilities given to the organization, as subjectively evaluated by each contributor.
The functions of the management process is the delineation of organizational objectives and the coordination of activity towards the accomplishment of these objectives. The system of coordinated activities must be maintained so that each contributor, including the manager, gains more than he contributes.
Before the industrial Revolution most cooperative activity was accomplished in small owner managed enterprises, usually with a single decision maker and simple organizational objectives. Increased technology and the growth of industrial organization made necessary the establishment of a hierarchy of objectives. This in turn, required a division of the management function until today a hierarchy of decision makers exists in most organizations.
The effective pursuit of appropriate objectives contributes directly to the organizational efficiency. As used there, efficiency is a measure of the want satisfying power of the cooperative system as a whole. Thus efficiency is the summation of utilities received from the organization divided by the utilities given to the organization, as subjectively evaluated by each contributor.
The functions of the management process is the delineation of organizational objectives and the coordination of activity towards the accomplishment of these objectives. The system of coordinated activities must be maintained so that each contributor, including the manager, gains more than he contributes.
Q.4. Make a precis of the given passage and suggest a suitable heading. (20)
From Plato to Tolstoi art has been accused of exciting our emotions and thus of disturbing the order and harmony of our moral life. "Poetical imagination, according to Plato, waters our experience of lust and anger, of desire and pain, and makes them grow when they ought to starve with drought." Tolstoi sees in art a source of infection. "Not only in infection", he says, "a sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art." But the flaw in this theory is obvious. Tolstoi suppresses a fundamental moment of art, the moment of form. The aesthetic experience - the experience of contemplation - is a different state of mind from the coolness of our theoretical and the sobriety of our moral judgment. It is filled with the liveliest energies of passion, but the passion itself is here transformed both in its nature and in its meaning. Wordsworth defines poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility". But the tranquility we feel in great poetry is not that of recollection. The emotions aroused by the poet do not belong to a remote past. They are "here" - alive and immediate. We are aware of their full strength, but this strength tends in a new direction. It is rather seen than immediately felt. Our passions are no longer dark and impenetrable powers; they become, as it were, transparent. Shakespeare never gives us an aesthetic theory. He does not speculate about the nature of art. Yet in the only passage in which he speaks of the character and functions of dramatic art the whole stress is laid upon this point. "The purpose of playing, "as Hamlet explains, "both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as, twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her won image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure." But the image of the passion is not the passion itself. The poet who represents a passion does not infect us with this passion. At a Shakespeare play we are not infected with the ambition of Macbeth, with the cruelty of Richard III or with the jealously of Othello. We are not at the mercy of these emotions; we look through them; we seem to penetrate into their very nature and essence. In this respect Shakespeare's theory of dramatic art, if he had such a theory, is a complete agreement with the conception of the fine arts of the great painters and sculptors.
Q.5. Write a precis of the following passage in about 100 words and suggest a suitable title. (20)
Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature envy is the most unfortunate; not only does the envious person wish to inflict misfortune and do so whenever he can with impunity, but he is also himself rendered unhappy by envy. Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has, he derives pain from what others have. If he can, he deprives others of their advantages, which to him is as desirable as ti would be to secure the same advantage himself. If this passion is allowed to run riot it becomes fatal to all excellence, and even to the most useful exercise of exceptional skill. Why should a medical man go to see his patients in a car when the labourer has to walk to his work? Why should the scientific investigator be allowed to spend his time in a warm room when others have to face the inclemency of the elements? Why should a man who possesses some rare talent of great importance to the world be save from the drudgery of his own housework? To such questions envy finds no answer. Fortunately, however, there is in human nature a compensating passion, namely that of admiration. Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and to diminish envy. What cure is there for envy? For the saint there is the cure of selflessness, though even in the case of saints envy of other saints is by no means impossible. But, leaving saints out of account, the only cure for envy in the case of ordinary men and women is happiness, and the difficulty is that envy is itself a terrible obstacle to happiness. But the envious man may say: "What is the good of telling me that the cure for envy is happiness? I cannot find happiness while I continue to feel envy, and you tell me that I cannot cease to be envious until I find happiness". But real life is never so logical as this. Merely to realize the causes of one's own envious feeling is to take a long step towards curing them.
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