XAT 2014 Question Paper - VALR

Fill in the blanks with the most appropriate option that follows:

For the following questions answer them individually

Read the definitions below and select the best match between the numbered sentences and the
definitions.
Premise: A proposition from which another statement is inferred or follows a conclusion.
Assumption: Something, which is accepted as true.Facts: Something, which can be checked.
Reason: A cause, explanation or justification for an action or event.
Conclusion: An end, finish or summarization of process or argument.
Proposition: A statement that expresses judgment or opinion.
Question: A sentence worded or expressed so as to elicit opinion.
Inductive inference: An end, finish or summarization reached for “the whole”, based on “a particular” real incidence.
Deductive Inference: An end, finish or summarization reached based on the combining and recombining two or more than two assumptions

Read the following sentences and choose the option that best arranges them in a logical order.

Analyze the following passage and provide appropriate answers for the questions that follow.
The assumption of rationality puts an economist in a position to “explain” some features of market behavior, such as the dispersion of prices of psychophysically identical goods such as beer according to the amount spent on advertising them (no doubt, the fact that most beer is bought by individuals rather than as raw material by firms, which could be expected to be more rational than individuals, is part of the explanation.) Clearly something is wrong somewhere with the usual model of a competitive market with perfect information, for the virtually content less advertising cannot be considered as increasing the utility of beer in an obvious way. But if one can keep the assumption of rational actors, one need not get into the intellectual swamp of sentiment nor of preferences that depend on price. If one agrees, for example, that consumers use advertising as an index of the effort a producer will put into protecting its reputation and so as a predictor of quality control efforts, one can combine it with the standard mechanism and derive testable consequences from it.

But why, logically speaking, does it not matter that any of us, with a few years’ training, could disprove the assumptions? It is for the same reason that the statistical mechanics of gases is not undermined when Rutherford teaches a lot of only moderately bright physicists to use X-ray diffraction to disprove the assumption that molecules are little hard elastic balls. The point is, departures that Rutherford teaches us to find from the mechanism built into statistical mechanics are small and hardly ever systematic at level of gases. Ignorance and error about the quality of beer is also, unlikely to be systematic at the level of the consumers’ beer market, though it would become systematic if buyers imposed quality control procedures on sellers in contracts of sale (as corporations very often do in their contracts with suppliers). So when we find beers that advertising can make the ignorance and error systematic at the level of markets, just as lasers with wavelengths resonant with the internal structures and sizes of molecules can make molecular motions in gases systematic. The interesting one is that virtually content-less advertising is nevertheless information to a rational actor.

Analyze the following passage and provide appreciate answers for the questions that follow.

Ideas involving the theory probability play a decisive part in modern physics. Yet we will still lack a satisfactory, consistence definition of probability; or, what amounts to much the same, we still lack a satisfactory axiomatic system for the calculus of probability. The relations between probability and experience are also still in need of clarification. In investigating this problem we shall discover what will at first seem an almost insuperable objection to my methodological views. For although probability statements play such a vitally important role in empirical science, they turn out to be in principle impervious to strict falsification. Yet this very stumbling block will become a touchstone upon which to test my theory, in order to find out what it is worth. Thus, we are confronted with two tasks. The first is to provide new foundations for the calculus of probability. This I shall try to do by developing the theory of probability as a frequency theory, along the lines followed by Richard von Mises, But without the use of what he calls the ‘axiom of convergence’ (or ‘limit axiom’) and with a somewhat weakened ‘axiom of randomness’ The second task is to elucidate the relations between probability and experience. This means solving what I call the problem of decidability statements. My hope is that the investigations will help to relieve the present unsatisfactory situation in which physicists make much use of probabilities without being able to say, consistently, what they mean by ‘probability’.

Analyze the following passage and provide appropriate answers for the questions that follow.

The ways by which you may get money almost exception lead downwards. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been trulyidle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job.” but to perform well a certain work; and even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pays him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed. God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God’s coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen. I did not know that mankind was suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe--“That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of governments which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most government are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objection which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rules in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment or in the least degree, resign his conscience to legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents on injustice.

Analyze the following passage and provide appropriate answers for the questions that follow.

Either explicitly or implicitly, our informants suggest that the objects that transfix them are hoped to be conduits to, rather than surrogates for, love, respect, recognition, status, security, escape, or attractiveness. These are the social relations we desire, consciously or subconsciously, beneath the objects that we find so compelling. The value of the objects that we focus our longing upon inheres less in the object or in a Lacanian search for childhood love than in the culture. The hope for the hope that an altered state of being may result keeps the cycle of desire moving. Desires are nurtured by self-embellished fantasies of a wholly different self, and they may be stimulated by external sources, including advertising, retail displays, films, television programs, stories told by other people, and the consumption behavior of real or imaginary others. But we find that the person who feels strong desire has almost always actively stimulated this desire by attending, seeking out, entertaining, and embellishing such images. The desires that occupy us are vivid and riveting fantasies that we participate in nurturing, growing, and pursuing, through self-seduction.

The social nature of desire implies that preferences of consumers are far from being independent. Yet, choice models assume that preferences of consumers act as individuals. The mimetic aspect of desire creates difficulties for using individual attitude or intention measures to predict adoption of new products whose use will be visible. The notion of desire we have derived suggests that the appeal of the desired object is not inherent in the object itself. Models that begin with preferences for product attributes or benefits are therefore problematic. The consumer, individually and jointly, has a role in constructing the object of desire, within a social context. What makes consumer desire attach to a particular object is not so much the object’s particular characteristics as the consumer’s own hopes for an altered state of being,involving an altered set of social relationships.