UPSC CSAT : Reading comprehension home Exercise- 13 PASSAGE B

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Friday, 20 March 2015

Reading comprehension home Exercise- 13 PASSAGE B



In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In the past, most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were “solemn and rare”, there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theatre was the parish church, where the performances, though infrequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humour by frequent, gratuitous does of many kinds of entertainment- from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing. From concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distraction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy porgy, centrifugal bumblepupply) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation .The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment: but they resemble one another in being most decidedly “not of this world.” Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx’s phrase, “the opium of the people” and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.

In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization – the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be an accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the party or the state.

As the art and science of manipulation came to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the retinal propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.

1.       The author would be most likely to agree that propaganda
A.      Can serve a vital function in democracy
B.      Is concerned mainly with the irrelevant
C.       is now combined with entertainment
D.      Is universally recognized as a danger

2.       The “early advocates of universal literacy” are mentioned as
A.      Advocates of propaganda
B.      Opponents  of an idea that the author thinks is correct
C.      Proponents of an idea that he author wishes t counter
D.      People who made wrong predictions about freedom of the press

3.       The author refers to “ Brave New World” as a fictional example of a society in which
a.       Non-stop distractions are the main instrument of  government policy
b.      People are  totally unaware of political realities
c.       Entertainment is used to keep people from full awareness of social realities
d.      Entertainment resembles religion in its effects on the masses

4.       By “intelligently on the spot” the author apparently means

A.      alert to the dangers of propaganda
B.      In a particular society at a particular time
C.      In a specific time and place
D.      Conscious of political and social realities
Answer:

1.       A    The last sentence tells us that rational propaganda is “essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.” This clearly suggests that answer A is correct.

2.        C The “early advocates envisaged two possibilities; the propaganda could be concerned with the true or the false. The author wishes to show that their ideas were limited and that propaganda today is mainly concerned with the “Unreal”. In other words that author only mentions these ideas so that he can knock them down and thus to form an introduction to the idea that he wishes to discuss.

3.       C   The non-stop distractions in Brave New World are used “for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation”. This is paraphrased in option C.

4.       D   The author uses the phrase ‘on the spot’ twice. In the second instance he amplifies thus: not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy. It is obvious he means the phrase to relate to an awareness of the actually and potentially real as opposed to the unreal.

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