RC ASSIGNMENT-6

PASSAGE 1

When the smartphone brings messages, alerts and notifications that invite instant
responses – and induces anxiety if those messages fail to arrive – everyone’s sense of
time changes, and attention that used to be focused more or less distantly on, say,
tomorrow’s mail is concentrated in the present moment.

In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), an engineer named Kurt Mondaugen

enunciates a law of human existence: ‘Personal density … is directly proportional to
temporal bandwidth.’ The narrator explains: ‘“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of
your present, your now … The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your
bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the
more tenuous you are.’

The genius of Mondaugen’s Law is its understanding that the unmeasurable moral
aspects of life are as subject to necessity as are the measurable physical ones; that
unmeasurable necessity, in Wittgenstein’s phrase about ethics, is ‘a condition of the
world,
like logic’. You cannot reduce your engagement with the past and future without
diminishing yourself, without becoming ‘more tenuous’.

Judy Wajcman, in her book Pressed for Time, iden-tifies the ‘acceleration of life in digital
capitalism’ not as something radically new but as an extension of earlier technological
changes. ‘Temporal disor-ganization’ has always put different kinds of pres-sure on
different social groups, and the culture of digital interruption places different kinds of
stress on the interrupted (employees, children) and the intruders (managers, parents)
leaving both unhappy, like Hegel’s mutually constrained slaves and masters.

Wajcman is more sanguine about relations among equals: teenagers use messaging
services to open private channels of communication after encoun-tering one another in the
shared arena of social networks; they make a snap judgment of someone else’s online
profile, then follow it with extended online contact uninterrupted by work or play. But
Wajcman oversimplifies, for example, the benefits of using smartphones to reschedule
dinner dates at the last moment, ‘thereby facilitating temporal coordination’. As
Mondaugen’s Law predicts, that same flexibility reduces (in Pynchon’s words) both
‘temporal bandwidth’ and ‘personal density’ by weakening one’s commitments to the
future, even trivial ones.

In the Inferno, Dante portrays the circle of the Neutrals, those who used their lives neither
for good nor for evil, as a crowd following a banner around the upper circle of Hell, stung
by wasps and hornets. Today the Neutrals each follow a screen they hold before them,
stung by buzzing notifications. In popular culture, the zombie apocalypse is now the
favoured fantasy of disaster in horror movies set in the near future because it has already
 RC ASSIGNMENT-6

been prefigured in reality: the undead lurch through the streets, each staring blankly at a
screen.

1.What is the author’s opinion of smartphones and their effect on contemporary society?(Is
the author giving his own opinion or quoting others or both?)
1] He admits that they have some benefits, but maintains that these do not make up for the
anxiety they cause.(Does the passage suggest ‘making up ‘for anxiety anywhere?)
2] He appreciates their practical benefits, but worries about the stress they cause due to
constant notifications.(Can you spot any word/words that shows that the author is
worried?)
3]He admires them as useful objects, but is concerned that they may result in a
change in people’s sense of time.
4]He criticizes them for causing constant stress and making people live more in the
present.

2.What does Mondaugen’s Law state? (Para 1and 2 mention Mondaugen- his law-his law
reiterates the idea –the more you are in the present , the more fragile you are)
1] People’s ‘temporal bandwidth’ depends on how much they focus on the present.
2] People’s ‘temporal bandwidth’ depends on how much they live in the past and
future.
3] People are more ‘dense’ the more they live in the past and future.
4] People are more ‘dense’ the more they are grounded in the present.
3.The example from the Inferno is meant to: (Last Para mentions Inferno and draws
an anology between neutrals and present day smart phone users)
1] Draw a parallel between the situation of the Neutrals and modern smartphone
users.
2] Imply that people who are addicted to smartphones will end up in hell, just like the
Neutrals.
3] Show that in the present day, people use their lives neither for good nor for evil,
just like the Neutrals.
4] Suggest that modern culture favours people like the Neutrals, who blindly follow
banners.

4.According to Judy Wajcman, the modern digital world: (ponder on the importance
of ‘but’ in the fifth para)
1] Is predominantly beneficial.
2] Leaves everyone unhappy.
3] Has both its pros and cons.
4] Cannot be determined.
 RC ASSIGNMENT-6

5.Choose the odd one out.

(Titles of books are written in italics with all important words in capitals in the standard
format)
1.Dante 2.kurt mondaugen
3.judy wajcman 4.thomas Pynchon

ANSWER KEY:

Ans 1. (4) Ans 2(3) Ans 3. (1) Ans 4. (3) Ans 5. (2)
 RC ASSIGNMENT-6

PASSAGE 2

About 10,000 years ago, human beings began to devote almost all their time and
effort to manipu-lating the lives of a few animal and plant species. From sunrise to
sunset humans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground and led
sheep to prime pastures. This work, they thought, would provide them with more
fruit, grain and meat. It was a revolution in the way humans lived – the Agricultural
Revolution.
This revolution enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra
food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into
population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the
average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s
biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Not kings, priests or merchants. The culprits were a
handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated
Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolu-tion from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten
thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in
the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the
world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has
become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the
Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you
can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other
plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface,
almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to
ubiquitous?

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. Our species had been living a
fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began
to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans
in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of
wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and
pebbles, so people broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space,
water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding
under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so people had to keep a watch out for worms and
blight. Wheat was defenceless against other organisms that liked to eat it, from rabbits to
locust swarms, so the farmers had to guard and protect it. Wheat was thirsty, so humans
lugged water from springs and streams to water it.

The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing
apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water
buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient
skel- etons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of
 RC ASSIGNMENT-6

ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural
tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to
their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate
wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which
means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the people.

1.Why, according to the author, was the Ag-ricultural Revolution ‘history’s biggest
fraud’?
1] It led to a negative change in lifestyle for human beings.(Does the last para say
anything about it?)
2] It resulted in kings, priests and merchants taking advantage of everyone else.(Are
they mentioned definitely in this context?)
3] It provided people with more fruit, grain and meat, but at the price of back-
breaking labour.(Can you differentiate between what was provided and what was
‘thought’ that it would provide?)
4] It resulted in wheat domesticating humans, rather than vice versa.(Was
Agricultural Revolution about wheat or is it taken as a symbol?)

2.According to the author, wheat domesticated human beings, rather than vice versa.
This is meant to be ______ the real situation. (Para 4seems to present Wheat as a
human i.e. personifies it)
1] a metaphor for( Can you detect the author drawing any similarity?)
2] a comical view of (Is humour suggested anywhere?)
3] an exaggeration of (Does the author overemphasize anything?)
4] a different way of looking at (What does the third para imply?)

3.According to the author, wheat is:

1] Solely to be blamed for the Agricultural Revolution. (Is it only about wheat?)
2] An ambitious plant that ruthlessly ex-ploited humans for its own survival.
3] One of the main reasons that humans adopted an unhealthy lifestyle.
4] All of the above.

4.Which of the following is true as per this passage?

1] Wheat originated as an ordinary grass in the Middle East.
2] Wheat has been growing in North America for 10,000 years.(Isn’t it too much to
assume so?)
3]Foraging for food is harder than growing it on a farm.
4]Wheat covers 2.25% of the globe’s surface.

5.Which of these is NOT one of the things human beings did for wheat, as per this
passage?(What isn’t covered by Para 4?)
 RC ASSIGNMENT-6

1] Clearing obstructions from wheat fields

2] Removing competing plants from the wheat fields
3] Protecting wheat from parasites and preda-tors
4] Providing nutrients to enable wheat to grow faster

ANSWER KEY-

Ans 1(1) Ans 2.(4) Ans3.(3) Ans.4(1) Ans5.(4)

 RC ASSIGNMENT-6

PASSAGE 3

Mad Max: Fury Road was a movie made in the editing room. With very little dialogue, lots of
complicated action scenes, a near-endless car chase, and many mostly-unnamed characters
to connect with and keep track of, the movie’s editing made the difference between a
gripping action movie and an incoherent mess.

So it’s odd, perhaps, that director George Miller chose Margaret Sixel as the movie’s editor.
Not only had she never worked on an action movie before, instead working on movies like
Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City, she didn’t even particularly like action movies. Yet she
made the movie a triumph, and became the 12th woman in history to win the Oscar for best
editing.

People have attributed her success to the fact that she’s a woman, working in the action
genre. Miller himself said he wanted her to work on the movie ‘because if a guy did it, it
would look like every other action movie’. But Sixel denies that, saying: ‘I don’t feel very
female about it.’ And I think it does a slight disservice to Sixel’s talent to attribute her
success to the fact that she’s a woman, as though all male editors edit in exactly the same
way, and all female editors bring more emotion and empathy to the equation. Sixel didn’t
create an Oscar-worthy movie out of over 470 hours of footage because she was a woman.

But I think it helped that she brought a different perspective – not necessarily the
perspective of being female, but the perspective of someone who’s not seen a lot of action
movies. She hadn’t internalized a sense of how these movies ‘should’ be done, andso was
able to bring something new. Her fresh perspective made it easier for the movie to avoid
tropes and narrative laziness, and that’s not a case of gender, so much as a case of bringing
a different eye to the project.

That isn’t to say that gender doesn’t matter at all. Editing, along with fields such as
directing and cinematography, forces the viewer into the perspec-tive of the artists,
even if we never think of them as we watch. They decide how a moment is framed,
what angle is used, what’s left in the movie and what’s left on the cutting room floor –
we see the entire movie through whatever perspective they create. This means that
we often see movies through that male gaze, leading, intentionally or uninten-
tionally, to significant differences in how male and female characters are presented,
such as where viewers’ eyes are drawn in each shot. One of the cinematographers for
Mad Max even commented that he struggled to follow Miller’s directive to keep the
focus of the scene in the centre of the shot, because his instinct told him to include the
beautiful girls in the back of the cab in the shot too. We need different perspectives in
film, and having more women behind the camera and in the editing room is an
important part of that. It lets us see movies we’ve all seen before – action movies,
superhero movies, any kind of movie – with different eyes.
 RC ASSIGNMENT-6

But gender isn’t the whole story. The success of Mad Max: Fury Road wasn’t just
because Margaret Sixel was a female editor. It’s because of the magical combination
of her female perspective, and her non-action-movie perspective, and her unique
world perspective, and her immense talent and hard work and dedication. It’s not an
‘oh it was done by a woman’ thing. It’s an ‘it was done by Margaret Sixel’ thing.

1.What is the author’s opinion of Mad Max: Fury Road?(

1] She thinks it’s an incoherent mess, despite being edited by a talented editor.(What
does Para1 convey?)
2] She considers it a decent action movie, but not Oscar-worthy. (Is there anything to
suggest so?)
3] She admires the movie, especially because of its great editing. (Can you see that
appreciatin expressed?)
4] She likes the movie immensely, and con-siders it unlike all other action movies.

2.How much difference did Margaret Sixel’s gender make in her work on Mad Max: Fury
Road?
1] It was the sole important factor.(Does Para 6 agree with this?)
2] It was a small but significant factor.(What does Para 4 Say about perspective?)
3] It made very little difference.(Can we deduce something from the beginning of Para 5?)
4] It made absolutely no difference.

3.What is the importance of movie editors, as per this passage?(What does the para 5 state
about editors- what is the central idea?)
1] Editors create the perspective we see the movies from.
2] Editors help movies avoid stale tropes and clichés.
3] Editors decide what the focus of each shot is to be.
4] Editors decide how male and female char-acters are viewed differently.

4.According to this passage, Margaret Sixel is:

1] The first female movie editor.
2] The first female movie editor to win an Oscar.

3] The first female movie editor to work on an action movie.

4] None of the above.
 RC ASSIGNMENT-6

5.Which of the following would the author agree with?

1] A person who is not familiar with a par-ticular genre can bring a fresh new per-spective
to it.(Can you spot the main idea of Para 4?)
2] Female editors bring a more emotional and empathetic perspective to the movies they
edit.( Para 3 uses the words ‘as though’ to what effect?)
3] The role of cinematographers in movies is not all that important, as the audience usually
remains unaware of their work.(What does Para 5 say about ‘perspective’)
4] The quality of direction in a movie de-pends greatly on the editing and cinema-
tography.(Is it stated or hinted?)

ANSWER KEY-

Ans 1.(3) Ans 2.(2) Ans 3.(1) Ans (4)

Ans 5.(1)
 RC ASSIGNMENT-6

PASSAGE 4

The history of life has not unspooled as a simple line. As Darwin proposed, it has grown like
a tree over time, as new species have branched off from old ones. Most of those branches
have been pruned by extinction, but not before they gave rise to life as we see it around us
on Earth today.

Scientists have been drawing and redrawing the tree of life for decades. At first they could
only compare different species by looking at their anatomy, such as the sutures of skulls
and the twists of wombs. But this method failed when scientists tried to step back and look
at life on its broadest scale. You can compare elm leaves to the leaves of maples or pines,
but there are no leaves on humans to compare them with. Fortunately, elms and humans
are both based on DNA. By sequencing snippets of genetic material from hundreds of
species, ranging from frogs to yeast to cyanobacteria, scientists over the past 25 years have
assembled the tree of life.

This tree is not an icon, but a scientific hypothesis. It offers the simplest
interpretation of the genetic sequences that scientists have studied, how genes have
mutated from one form to another. As new species are discovered and new genes are
sequenced, the simplest interpretation may demand that some of the branches be
rearranged. Now scientists are able to compare the entire genomes of hundreds of
species.

This tree is a strange thing to behold. In the late nineteenth century, evolutionary
biologists drew the tree of life as if it were a mighty oak, with branches coming off a
main trunk. The simplest organisms such as bacteria sprouted near its base, and
human-ity was placed at its very crown, the pinnacle of evolution. But instead of a
single shaft of evolution ever ascending, scientists now see life splayed out into an
unruly thicket.

The tree is split into three main branches. Our own, the eukaryotes, includes plants,
fungi and animals, as well as single -celled protozoa, such as amoebae that live in the
forest soil and the oceans, and parasites that cause diseases like malaria, dysen-tery
and giardia. Eukaryotes all have a distinct sort of cell. They keep most of their DNA
balled up in their nucleus, and their cells contain many other compartments where
new proteins are built and energy is generated.

Biologists once thought that all of the species that were not eukaryotes fell into a
single group, known as prokaryotes. After all, they all seem to look the same. Their
DNA, for instance, floats loose inside their membranes, not coiled in a nucleus. But the
genes tell another story. Bacteria form their own branch, while there is a third major
branch on the tree of life that is more closely related to us than to bacteria. First
identified in the 1970s by Uni-versity of Illinois biologist Carl Woese, these organisms
 RC ASSIGNMENT-6

may look like bacteria, but they have cellular machinery that is radically different.
Woese named these microbes archaea, meaning ‘first’, for the branch on which they
appear.

The base of the tree of life represents the last common ancestor of all life on Earth today.
All living species share certain things in common. All of them, for example, carry their
genetic information as DNA and use RNA to turn them into proteins. The simplest
explanation for these universal properties is that all living species inherited them from a
common ancestor. That common ancestor therefore must have been a relatively
sophisticated creature. In turn, it must have descended from a long line of ancestors. For all
we know, there were deeper branches that we can’t see now because they’ve become
extinct. And beyond these vanished ancestors lies the origin of life itself.

1.What is this passage about?

1] The history and origin of life (Is Origin of life discussed ?)

2] The different kinds of forms of life(Does the tree of life represent just the types of
species or their connection with each other?)
3] The relationships among living things
4] The importance of DNA in living things
2.‘You can compare elm leaves to the leaves of maples or pines, but there are no leaves on
humans to compare them with.’ What is the point the author is making in this statement?
1] Humans cannot be compared to trees, as they lack leaves. ( Is the quoted sentence as
literal as this?)
2] The leaves on trees need to be compared to completely different body parts of humans.
3] Organisms cannot be compared to those that lack their most important features.
4] It is difficult to adequately compare vastly different organisms.

3.Which of the following is true, as per this passage?

1] Archaea are more closely related to eu-karyotes than to bacteria.
2] The microbes that cause diseases like malaria are prokaryotes.
3] The cell structure of prokaryotes is more complicated than that of eukaryotes.
4] Archaea were given a named meaning ‘first’ because they were discovered before
bacteria.

4.Humanity is the pinnacle of evolution. Would the author of this passage agree with
this statement?(Can you differentiate between the opinions of 19 cent. Evolutionary
biologists and that of the author?)
1] Yes.
2] No.
3] Partially.
4] Cannot be determined.
 RC ASSIGNMENT-6

5.What does the author mean by claiming that the tree of life is not an icon? (What
do you understand by icon?)
1] The concept of the tree of life is not un-derstood well enough in the scientific
community. Is there anything suggestive of this?)
2] The tree of life is an idea that has helped scientists understand the genetic under-
pinnings of life.
3] The tree of life is not merely a symbolic representation, but rather an explanation
for the interrelatedness of life.
4] The tree of life concept has more than just symbolic value, as it also points to the
fact that life originated from trees. (is this specifically mentioned anywhere?)

ANSWER KEY:

Ans 1(3) Ans 2.(4) Ans 3.(1) Ans4.(2) Ans5 (3).