Passage -1

“Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leaders genuinely and adequately philosophise ... cities will have no rest from evils, nor will the human race.” This thought starts the discussion of the philosophers’ knowledge and of their upbringing and education. The future philosophers, both women and men, are selected from the group of guardians whose general cultural training they share. If they combine moral firmness with quickness of mind, they are subject to a rigorous curriculum of higher learning that will prepare them for the ascent from the world of the senses to the world of intelligence and truth, an ascent. To achieve this ascent, the students have to undergo, first, a preparatory schooling of ten years’ duration in the ‘liberal arts’: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and theoretical harmonics. Afterwards they are admitted to the training in the master-science of ‘dialectic’, a science that supposedly enables its possessor to deal in a systematic way with the objects of real knowledge – the Forms in general, – and with the Form of the Good in particular, – the principle of the goodness of all else. This study is to last for another five years. Successful candidates are then sent back as administrators of ordinary political life for 15 years. At the age of fifty the rulers are granted leave to pursue philosophy; but even that pursuit is interrupted by periods of service as overseers over the order of the state. This completes, in a nutshell, the description of the philosopher-kings’ and -queens’ education and activities.

Q1 Based on the passage above which if the following statements are true :

1. It is desirable for a prosperous kingdom to have a philosopher king.
2. The training for such kings involves a combination of  moral firmness and quickness of mind.
3. A philosopher king is a king who turns philosophical at the age of fifty.

 Passage -2

Man must act to his fellowmen as though life had meaning; in short, living an absurdity. He must revolt from both a cowardly suicide and an equally cowardly embrace of faith. Man must return into the role of a philosophical tight- rope walker performing precariously in front of intensely physical death.  In this confrontation the metaphysical rope walker is to act “as if” his actions mattered with the awareness that  they do not in any long-range sense.As is obvious, his life, the lives of all humanity, do not finally matter. Death is definitive.

 What does the author imply by the phrase “living in absurdity” ?

A cardboard of size 40cm x 30 cm is folded into a box. Mr. Spider lives in the cardboard box and goes from right bottom corner to diagonally opposite  top left corner of the box in 10 seconds. What is the speed of Mr. Spider ?

A man smokes multiple cigarettes in a day and makes them himself. In order to reduce his expenses he recycles the tobacco in the used cigarette ends to make a new cigarette. He needs 6 cigarette ends to make a new cigarette and uses 10 gm tobacco for each new cigarette. How many cigarettes can he smoke with 360 grams of tobacco?

Passage -3

Plato’s design of an autocratic rule by an aristocracy of the mind has received a lot of flak. But our assessment of his politics must here be limited to that of the kind of happiness it supposedly provides. Regardless of whether or not we find Plato's assumption plausible of an overall principle of the Good as the basis of the political order, his model state has, at least in theory, the advantage that it guarantees both internal and external peace. That is no mean feat in a society where interstate and civil wars were a constant threat, and often enough ended in the destruction of the entire city. In addition, the division of functions guarantees a high degree of efficiency, if every citizen does what he/she is naturally suited to do. But what about the citizens’ needs, beyond those for security and material goods? Are they to find their life’s fulfillment only in the pursuit of their jobs?

Plato seems to think so, when he characterizes each class by its specific kind of desire and its respective good : the philosophers are lovers of wisdom (philosophoi), the soldiers lovers of honor (philotimoi), and the workers are lovers of material goods (philochrêmatoi). That human beings find, or at least try to find, satisfaction in the kinds of goods they cherish is a point that is further pursued in the depiction of the decay of the city and its ruling citizens, from the best – the aristocracy of the mind – down to the worst – the tyranny of lust.

 what is the main focus of the passage above