Reading Comprehension - Previous Year CAT/MBA Questions
The best way to prepare for Reading Comprehension is by going through the previous year Reading Comprehension CAT questions. Here we bring you all previous year Reading Comprehension CAT questions along with detailed solutions.
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The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
There is a group in the space community who view the solar system not as an opportunity to expand human potential but as a nature preserve, forever the provenance of an elite group of scientists and their sanitary robotic probes. These planetary protection advocates [call] for avoiding “harmful contamination” of celestial bodies. Under this regime, NASA incurs great expense sterilizing robotic probes in order to prevent the contamination of entirely theoretical biospheres. . . .
Transporting bacteria would matter if Mars were the vital world once imagined by astronomers who mistook optical illusions for canals. Nobody wants to expose Martians to measles, but sadly, robotic exploration reveals a bleak, rusted landscape, lacking oxygen and flooded with radiation ready to sterilize any Earthly microbes. Simple life might exist underground, or down at the bottom of a deep canyon, but it has been very hard to find with robots. . . . The upsides from human exploration and development of Mars clearly outweigh the welfare of purely speculative Martian fungi. . . .
The other likely targets of human exploration, development, and settlement, our moon and the asteroids, exist in a desiccated, radiation-soaked realm of hard vacuum and extreme temperature variations that would kill nearly anything. It’s also important to note that many international competitors will ignore the demands of these protection extremists in any case. For example, China recently sent a terrarium to the moon and germinated a plant seed—with, unsurprisingly, no protest from its own scientific community. In contrast, when it was recently revealed that a researcher had surreptitiously smuggled super-resilient microscopic tardigrades aboard the ill-fated Israeli Beresheet lunar probe, a firestorm was unleashed within the space community. . . .
NASA’s previous human exploration efforts made no serious attempt at sterility, with little notice. As the Mars expert Robert Zubrin noted in the National Review, U.S. lunar landings did not leave the campsites cleaner than they found it. Apollo’s bacteria-infested litter included bags of feces. Forcing NASA’s proposed Mars exploration to do better, scrubbing everything and hauling out all the trash, would destroy NASA’s human exploration budget and encroach on the agency’s other directorates, too. Getting future astronauts off Mars is enough of a challenge, without trying to tote weeks of waste along as well. A reasonable compromise is to continue on the course laid out by the U.S. government and the National Research Council, which proposed a system of zones on Mars, some for science only, some for habitation, and some for resource exploitation. This approach minimizes contamination, maximizes scientific exploration . . .
Mars presents a stark choice of diverging human futures. We can turn inward, pursuing ever more limited futures while we await whichever natural or manmade disaster will eradicate our species and life on Earth. Alternatively, we can choose to propel our biosphere further into the solar system, simultaneously protecting our home planet and providing a backup plan for the only life we know exists in the universe. Are the lives on Earth worth less than some hypothetical microbe lurking under Martian rocks?
The author’s overall tone in the first paragraph can be described as
- (a)
approving of the amount of money NASA spends to restrict the spread of contamination in space.
- (b)
equivocal about the reasons extended by the group of scientists seeking to limit space exploration.
- (c)
sceptical about the excessive efforts to sanitise planets where life has not yet been proven to exist.
- (d)
indifferent to the elitism of a few scientists aiming to corner space exploration.
Solution
Discuss
ReportThe author is unlikely to disagree with any of the following EXCEPT:
- (a)
space contamination should be minimised until the possibility of life on the astronomical body being explored is ruled out.
- (b)
the exorbitant costs of continuing to keep the space environment pristine may be unsustainable.
- (c)
the proposal for a zonal segregation of the Martian landscape into regions for different purposes.
- (d)
that while NASA’s earlier missions were not ideal in their approach to space contamination, they likely did no grave damage.
The contrasting reactions to the Chinese and Israeli “contaminations” of lunar space
- (a)
indicate that national scientists may have different sensitivities to issues of biosphere protection.
- (b)
are valid as the contamination of the lunar environment from animal sources is far greater than from plants.
- (c)
are evidence of China’s reasonable approach towards space contamination.
- (d)
reveal global biases prevalent in attitudes towards different countries
The author mentions all of the following reasons to dismiss concerns about contaminating Mars EXCEPT:
- (a)
the use of similar probes on astronomical bodies like the moon have had little effect on the environment.
- (b)
earlier explorations have already contaminated pristine space environments.
- (c)
the lack of evidence of living organisms on Mars makes possible contamination from earthly microbes a moot point.
- (d)
efforts to contain contamination on Mars are likely to be derailed as competitor countries may not follow similar restrictions.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Moutai has been the global booze sensation of the decade. A bottle of its Flying Fairy which sold in the 1980s for the equivalent of a dollar now retails for $400. Moutai’s listed shares have soared by almost 600% in the past five years, outpacing the likes of Amazon. . . .
It does this while disregarding every Western marketing mantra. It is not global, has meagre digital sales and does not appeal to millennials. It scores pitifully on environmental, social and governance measures. In the Boy Scout world of Western business it would leave a bad taste, in more ways than one.
Moutai owes its intoxicating success to three factors—not all of them easy to emulate. First, it profits from Chinese nationalism. Moutai is known as the “national liquor”. It was used to raise spirits and disinfect wounds in Mao’s Long March. It was Premier Zhou Enlai’s favourite tipple, shared with Richard Nixon in 1972. Its centuries-old craftsmanship—it is distilled eight times and stored for years in earthenware jars—is a source of national pride. It also claims to be hangover-proof, which would make it an invention to rival gunpowder....
Second, it chose to serve China’s super-rich rather than its middle class. Markets are littered with the corpses of firms that could not compete in the cut-throat battle for Chinese middleclass wallets. And the country’s premium market is massive—at 73m-strong, bigger than the population of France, notes Euan McLeish of Bernstein, an investment firm, and still less crowded with prestige brands than advanced economies. Moutai is to these well-heeled drinkers what vintage champagne is to the rest of the world.....
Third, Moutai looks beyond affluent millennials and digital natives. The elderly and the middle-aged, it found, can be just as lucrative. Its biggest market now is (male) drinkers in their mid-30s. Many have no siblings, thanks to four decades of China’s one-child policy—which also means their elderly parents can splash out on weddings and banquets. Moutai is often a guest of honour.
Moutai has succeeded thanks to nationalism, elitism and ageism, in other words—not in spite of this unholy trinity. But it faces risks. The government is its largest shareholder—and a meddlesome one. It appears to want prices to remain stable. Exorbitantly priced booze is at odds with its professed socialist ideals. Yet minority investors—including many foreign funds—lament that Moutai’s wholesale price is a third of what it sells for in shops. Raising it could boost the company’s profits further. Instead, in what some see as a travesty of corporate governance, its majority owner has plans to set up its own sales channel.....
In the long run, its biggest risk may be millennials. As they grow older, health concerns, work-life balance and the desire for more wholesome pursuits than binge-drinking may curb the “Ganbei!” toasting culture [heavy drinking] on which so much of the demand for Moutai rests. For the time being, though, the party goes on.
- (a)
Which one of the following is both a reason for Moutai’s success as well as a possible threat to that success?
- (b)
Its appeal to the older age group.
- (c)
Chinese love of liquor filled celebration.
- (d)
Its appeal to the rich.
- (e)
Government involvement in its business.
In the context of the passage we can infer that to succeed in the liquor industry in China, a marketing firm must consider all of the following factors affecting the Chinese liquor market EXCEPT that
- (a)
the government may control the pricing of products.
- (b)
the competition for winning over the middle class is very stiff.
- (c)
there are few competitors to meet the demands of high end liquor consumers.
- (d)
there is money to be made from marketing to the middle class.
The phrase “would make it an invention to rival gunpowder” has been used in the passage in a sense that is
- (a)
literal.
- (b)
synonymical.
- (c)
metaphorical.
- (d)
substantive.
In the context of the passage, it is most likely that the author refers to Moutai’s marketing strategy as “the unholy trinity” because
- (a)
it profits from Chinese nationalist feelings.
- (b)
it contradicts the Western strategy of marketing.
- (c)
there is nothing holy about marketing techniques for liquor.
- (d)
it exposes the firm to long term risks.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Languages become endangered and die out for many reasons. Sadly, the physical annihilation of communities of native speakers of a language is all too often the cause of language extinction. In North America, European colonists brought death and destruction to many Native American communities. This was followed by US federal policies restricting the use of indigenous languages, including the removal of native children from their communities to federal boarding schools where native languages and cultural practices were prohibited. As many as 75 percent of the languages spoken in the territories that became the United States have gone extinct, with slightly better language survival rates in Central and South America . . .
Even without physical annihilation and prohibitions against language use, the language of the "dominant" cultures may drive other languages into extinction; young people see education, jobs, culture and technology associated with the dominant language and focus their attention on that language. The largest language "killers" are English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, Hindi, and Chinese, all of which have privileged status as dominant languages threatening minority languages.
When we lose a language, we lose the worldview, culture and knowledge of the people who spoke it, constituting a loss to all humanity. People around the world live in direct contact with their native environment, their habitat. When the language they speak goes extinct, the rest of humanity loses their knowledge of that environment, their wisdom about the relationship between local plants and illness, their philosophical and religious beliefs as well as their native cultural expression (in music, visual art and poetry) that has enriched both the speakers of that language and others who would have encountered that culture. . . .
As educators deeply immersed in the liberal arts, we believe that educating students broadly in all facets of language and culture . . . yields immense rewards. Some individuals educated in the liberal arts tradition will pursue advanced study in linguistics and become actively engaged in language preservation, setting out for the Amazon, for example, with video recording equipment to interview the last surviving elders in a community to record and document a language spoken by no children.
Certainly, though, the vast majority of students will not pursue this kind of activity. For these students, a liberal arts education is absolutely critical from the twin perspectives of language extinction and global citizenship. When students study languages other than their own, they are sensitized to the existence of different cultural perspectives and practices. With such an education, students are more likely to be able to articulate insights into their own cultural biases, be more empathetic to individuals of other cultures, communicate successfully across linguistic and cultural differences, consider and resolve questions in a way that reflects multiple cultural perspectives, and, ultimately extend support to people, programs, practices, and policies that support the preservation of endangered languages.
There is ample evidence that such preservation can work in languages spiraling toward extinction. For example, Navajo, Cree and Inuit communities have established schools in which these languages are the language of instruction and the number of speakers of each has increased.
In the context of the passage, which one of the following hypothetical scenarios, if true, is NOT an example of the kind of loss that occurs when a language becomes extinct?
- (a)
The Inuits of Alaska have 35 different words to describe the texture of snow. When the language becomes extinct, we will lose that understanding of nature.
- (b)
The Andamanese language has a word to describe someone who has lost a stepsister. When the language dies, we will lose the concept of the word and the emotions it evokes.
- (c)
The Lamkangs of Manipur have only 3 remaining native speakers of the language. When they die, we will lose one more group from the government list of indigenous tribes.
- (d)
The Nicobarese language describes 20 different moods of the ocean. By the time the last speaker is educated in a Central Board school, they will have forgotten their language.
It can be inferred from the passage that it is likely South America had a slightly better language survival rate than North America for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:
- (a)
the colonial government was unable to mainstream the locals.
- (b)
not many native speakers were killed by European colonists.
- (c)
European colonists allowed children of native speakers to stay at home with their families.
- (d)
locals were provided job opportunities in the colonial administration.
The author believes that a liberal arts education combined with participation in language preservation empower students in all of the following ways EXCEPT that they will
- (a)
learn different languages.
- (b)
overcome cultural barriers to communication.
- (c)
develop a better understanding of their own culture.
- (d)
establish schools to preserve languages spiralling towards extinction.
Which one of the following hypothetical scenarios, if true, would most strongly undermine the central ideas of the passage?
- (a)
Recording a dying language that has only a few remaining speakers freezes it in time: it stops evolving further.
- (b)
Most liberal arts students will pursue jobs in publishing and human resource management rather than doctorates in linguistics.
- (c)
A liberal arts education requires that, in addition to being fluent in English, students gain fluency in two of the top five most spoken languages globally.
- (d)
Schools that teach endangered languages can preserve the language only for a generation.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Fears of artificial intelligence (AI) have haunted humanity since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill, enslave or replace people. But over the past couple of years new AI tools have emerged that threaten the survival of human civilisation from an unexpected direction. AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. AI has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.
Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our DNA. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures….What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new AI tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using AI to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of AI tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults…
Through its mastery of language, AI could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although there is no indication that AI has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans it is enough if the AI can make them feel emotionally attached to it….
What will happen to the course of history when AI takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. AI is fundamentally different. AI can create completely new ideas, completely new culture…. Of course, the new power of AI could be used for good purposes as well. I won’t dwell on this, because the people who develop AI talk about it enough….
We can still regulate the new AI tools, but we must act quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, AI can make exponentially more powerful AI.… Unregulated AI deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When AI hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy….And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for AI to disclose that it is an AI. If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an AI—that’s the end of democracy. This text has been generated by a human. Or has it?
The author terms language “the operating system of our civilization” for all the following reasons EXCEPT that it
- (a)
has laid the foundation for the creation of cultural artefacts through writing and telling of stories.
- (b)
can influence political views and opinions as it engenders close emotional ties among people.
- (c)
is fundamental to the articulation and spread of human values and culture in our society.
- (d)
is the basis of AI tools like ChatGPT which can be used to generate academic content and opinion.
The tone of the passage could best be described as
- (a)
prescient, as the author analyses the future impact of the use of new AI tools on crucial areas of our society and culture.
- (b)
alarmist, because the passage discusses scenarios of the influence of new AI tools on language and human emotions.
- (c)
quizzical, as the passage poses several questions, concluding with the question of whether or not the passage content has been generated by AI.
- (d)
cautionary, because the author lays out some adverse effects of the proliferation of unregulated AI tools.
We can infer that the author is most likely to agree with which of the following statements?
- (a)
One of the biggest casualties from the spread of unregulated AI is likely to be the democratic process.
- (b)
Apart from its drawbacks, AI tools have been beneficial in boosting technological and industrial advance worldwide.
- (c)
People’s fears of the dangers of students using ChatGPT and other new AI tools are unfounded.
- (d)
The commonly expressed fear that future AI developments will fatally harm humans is unfounded.
The author identifies all of the following as dire outcomes of the capture of language by AI EXCEPT that it could
- (a)
out-strip human creativity and endeavours in the spheres such as art and music and, in the formulation of laws.
- (b)
spawn a completely new culture through its ability to create new ideas and opinions.
- (c)
eventually subvert democratic processes through the mass creation and spread of fake political content and news.
- (d)
apply its mastery of language to create strong emotional ties which could exacerbate the polarization of political views.
There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.
Sentence: Taken outside the village of Trang Bang on June 8, 1972, the picture captured the trauma and indiscriminate violence of a conflict that claimed, by some estimates, a million or more civilian lives.
Paragraph: The horrifying photograph of children fleeing a deadly napalm attack has become a defining image not only of the Vietnam War but the 20th century. ___(1)___. Dark smoke billowing behind them, the young subjects’ faces are painted with a mixture of terror, pain and confusion. ___(2)___. Soldiers from the South Vietnamese army’s 25th Division follow helplessly behind. ___(3)___. The picture was officially titled “The Terror of War,” but the photo is better known by the nickname given to naked 9-year-old at its centre “Napalm Girl”. ___(4)___.
- (a)
Option 2
- (b)
Option 1
- (c)
Option 4
- (d)
Option 3
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
For early postcolonial literature, the world of the novel was often the nation. Postcolonial novels were usually [concerned with] national questions. Sometimes the whole story of the novel was taken as an allegory of the nation, whether India or Tanzania. This was important for supporting anti-colonial nationalism, but could also be limiting – land-focused and inward-looking.
My new book “Writing Ocean Worlds” explores another kind of world of the novel: not the village or nation, but the Indian Ocean world. The book describes a set of novels in which the Indian Ocean is at the centre of the story. It focuses on the novelists Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Lindsey Collen and Joseph Conrad [who have] centred the Indian Ocean world in the majority of their novels. . . . Their work reveals a world that is outward-looking – full of movement, border-crossing and south-south interconnection. They are all very different – from colonially inclined (Conrad) to radically anti-capitalist (Collen), but together draw on and shape a wider sense of Indian Ocean space through themes, images, metaphors and language. This has the effect of remapping the world in the reader’s mind, as centred in the interconnected global south. . . .
The Indian Ocean world is a term used to describe the very long-lasting connections among the coasts of East Africa, the Arab coasts, and South and East Asia. These connections were made possible by the geography of the Indian Ocean. For much of history, travel by sea was much easier than by land, which meant that port cities very far apart were often more easily connected to each other than to much closer inland cities. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that what we now call globalisation first appeared in the Indian Ocean. This is the interconnected oceanic world referenced and produced by the novels in my book. . . .
For their part Ghosh, Gurnah, Collen and even Conrad reference a different set of histories and geographies than the ones most commonly found in fiction in English. Those [commonly found ones] are mostly centred in Europe or the US, assume a background of Christianity and whiteness, and mention places like Paris and New York. The novels in [my] book highlight instead a largely Islamic space, feature characters of colour and centralise the ports of Malindi, Mombasa, Aden, Java and Bombay. . . . It is a densely imagined, richly sensory image of a southern cosmopolitan culture which provides for an enlarged sense of place in the world.
This remapping is particularly powerful for the representation of Africa. In the fiction, sailors and travellers are not all European. . . . African, as well as Indian and Arab characters, are traders, nakhodas (dhow ship captains), runaways, villains, missionaries and activists. This does not mean that Indian Ocean Africa is romanticised. Migration is often a matter of force; travel is portrayed as abandonment rather than adventure, freedoms are kept from women and slavery is rife. What it does mean is that the African part of the Indian Ocean world plays an active role in its long, rich history and therefore in that of the wider world.
Which one of the following statements is not true about migration in the Indian Ocean world?
- (a)
The Indian Ocean world’s migration networks connected the global north with the global south.
- (b)
Geographical location rather than geographical proximity determined the choice of destination for migrants.
- (c)
Migration in the Indian Ocean world was an ambivalent experience.
- (d)
The Indian Ocean world’s migration networks were shaped by religious and commercial histories of the region.
All of the following claims contribute to the “remapping” discussed by the passage, EXCEPT:
- (a)
Indian Ocean novels have gone beyond the specifics of national concerns to explore rich regional pasts.
- (b)
cosmopolitanism originated in the West and travelled to the East through globalisation.
- (c)
the global south, as opposed to the global north, was the first centre of globalisation.
- (d)
the world of early international trade and commerce was not the sole domain of white Europeans.
On the basis of the nature of the relationship between the items in each pair below, choose the odd pair out:
- (a)
Indian Ocean world : Slavery
- (b)
Postcolonial novels : Anti-colonial nationalism
- (c)
Indian Ocean novels : Outward-looking
- (d)
Postcolonial novels : Border-crossing
All of the following statements, if true, would weaken the passage’s claim about the relationship between mainstream English-language fiction and Indian Ocean novels EXCEPT:
- (a)
most mainstream English-language novels have historically privileged the Christian, white, male experience of travel and adventure.
- (b)
the depiction of Africa in most Indian Ocean novels is driven by an Orientalist imagination of its cultural crudeness.
- (c)
the depiction of Africa in most Indian Ocean novels is driven by a postcolonial nostalgia for an idyllic past.
- (d)
very few mainstream English-language novels have historically been set in American and European metropolitan centres.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
[Fifty] years after its publication in English [in 1972], and just a year since [Marshall] Sahlins himself died—we may ask: why did [his essay] “Original Affluent Society” have such an impact, and how has it fared since? . . . Sahlins’s principal argument was simple but counterintuitive: before being driven into marginal environments by colonial powers, hunter-gatherers, or foragers, were not engaged in a desperate struggle for meager survival. Quite the contrary, they satisfied their needs with far less work than people in agricultural and industrial societies, leaving them more time to use as they wished. Hunters, he quipped, keep bankers’ hours. Refusing to maximize, many were “more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game.” . . . The so-called Neolithic Revolution, rather than improving life, imposed a harsher work regime and set in motion the long history of growing inequality . . .
Moreover, foragers had other options. The contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who had long been surrounded by farmers, knew they had alternatives and rejected them. To Sahlins, this showed that foragers are not simply examples of human diversity or victimhood but something more profound: they demonstrated that societies make real choices. Culture, a way of living oriented around a distinctive set of values, manifests a fundamental principle of collective self-determination. . . .
But the point [of the essay] is not so much the empirical validity of the data—the real interest for most readers, after all, is not in foragers either today or in the Paleolithic—but rather its conceptual challenge to contemporary economic life and bourgeois individualism. The empirical served a philosophical and political project, a thought experiment and stimulus to the imagination of possibilities.
With its title’s nod toward The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s famously skeptical portrait of America’s postwar prosperity and inequality, and dripping with New Left contempt for consumerism, “The Original Affluent Society” brought this critical perspective to bear on the contemporary world. It did so through the classic anthropological move of showing that radical alternatives to the readers’ lives really exist. If the capitalist world seeks wealth through ever greater material production to meet infinitely expansive desires, foraging societies follow “the Zen road to affluence”: not by getting more, but by wanting less. If it seems that foragers have been left behind by “progress,” this is due only to the ethnocentric self-congratulation of the West. Rather than accumulate material goods, these societies are guided by other values: leisure, mobility, and above all, freedom. . . .
Viewed in today’s context, of course, not every aspect of the essay has aged well. While acknowledging the violence of colonialism, racism, and dispossession, it does not thematize them as heavily as we might today. Rebuking evolutionary anthropologists for treating present-day foragers as “left behind” by progress, it too can succumb to the temptation to use them as proxies for the Paleolithic. Yet these characteristics should not distract us from appreciating Sahlins’s effort to show that if we want to conjure new possibilities, we need to learn about actually inhabitable worlds.
The author mentions Tanzania’s Hadza community to illustrate:
- (a)
how two vastly different ways of living and working were able to coexist in proximity for centuries
- (b)
that forager communities’ lifestyles derived not from ignorance about alternatives, but from their own choice.
- (c)
that hunter-gatherer communities’ subsistence-level techniques equipped them to survive well into contemporary times.
- (d)
how pre-agrarian societies did not hamper the emergence of more advanced agrarian practices in contiguous communities.
The author of the passage mentions Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society” to:
- (a)
contrast the materialist nature of contemporary growth paths with the pacifist content ways of living among the foragers.
- (b)
show how Sahlins’s views complemented Galbraith’s criticism of the consumerism and inequality of contemporary society.
- (c)
show how Galbraith’s theories refute Sahlins’s thesis on the contentment of pre-hunter-gatherer communities.
- (d)
document the influence of Galbraith’s cynical views on modern consumerism on Sahlins’s analysis of pre-historic societies.
The author of the passage criticises Sahlins’s essay for its:
- (a)
cursory treatment of the effects of racism and colonialism on societies.
- (b)
outdated values regarding present-day foragers versus ancient foraging communities.
- (c)
critique of anthropologists who disparage the choices of foragers in today’s society.
- (d)
failure to supplement its thesis with robust empirical data.
We can infer that Sahlins's main goal in writing his essay was to:
- (a)
put forth the view that, despite egalitarian origins, economic progress brings greater inequality and social hierarchies.
- (b)
counter Galbraith’s pessimistic view of the inevitability of a capitalist trajectory for economic growth.
- (c)
highlight the fact that while we started off as a fairly contented egalitarian people, we have progressively degenerated into materialism.
- (d)
hold a mirror to an acquisitive society, with examples of other communities that have chosen successfully to be non-materialistic.