St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)
End Semester Examination – March /APRIL 2015
B.Com –II Semester
c1 12 2 ge: GENERAL ENGLISH
Duration: 3 Hours Max. Marks: 100
Note: Read the questions carefully and answer.
Do not exceed the paragraph limit.
Each paragraph should contain at least four sentences.
SECTION – A
Read the passages below and answer the questions.
Passage One
College Has Been Oversold – Alex Tabarrok
Education is the key to the future: You’ve heard it a million times, and it’s not wrong. Educated people have higher wages and lower unemployment rates, and better educated countries grow faster and innovate more than other countries.
But going to college is not enough. You also have to study the right subjects. And American students are not studying the fields with the greatest economic potential.
Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50%. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has been flat.
Moreover, many of today’s STEM graduates are foreign-born and taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries. Consider computer technology. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago.
The story is the same in other technology fields. The United States graduated 5,036 chemical engineers in 2009, no more than we did 25 years ago. In mathematics and statistics there were 15,496 graduates in 2009, slightly more than the 15,009 graduates of 1985.
Few fields have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?
If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying? In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.
The story is the same in psychology, which graduates about 95,000 students a year, more than double the number of 25 years ago and far in excess of the number of available jobs.
Perhaps most oddly, despite the decline in the number of news media jobs, especially in the print media, the number of students in communication and journalism also has nearly doubled since 1985.
There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math.
As a result, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees. Baggage porters and bellhops don’t need college degrees, but in 2008 17.4% of them had at least a bachelor’s degree and 45% had some college education. Mail carriers don’t need a college education, but in 2008 14% had at least a bachelor’s degree and 61% had some college education.
Passage Two
Cultivating the Imagination – Martha Nussbaum
Cuts in the humanities are bad for business and bad for democracy. Even if a nation’s only goal were economic prosperity, the humanities supply essential ingredients for a healthy business culture.
Why is the U.S. moving away from the humanities just at the time that our rivals are discovering their worth?
Nations such as China and Singapore, which previously ignored the humanities, are now aggressively promoting them, because they have concluded that the cultivation of the imagination through the study of literature, film, and the other arts is essential to fostering creativity and innovation. They also have found that teaching critical thinking and argumentation (a skill associated with courses in philosophy) is essential in order to foster healthy debate inside a business world that might too easily become complacent or corrupt.
We in the U.S. are moving away from the humanities just at the time that our rivals are discovering their worth. But a healthy business culture is not all that life in America is about.
We also pride ourselves on our open democracy, and on the freedoms of speech and the press that make our political life one in which the people rule. To keep democracy vital, we urgently need the abilities that the humanities foster. First, we need critical thinking: the ability to debate respectfully with others, to tell a good argument from a bad one, to examine tradition and prejudice in a Socratic spirit.
Second, we need history: a knowledge of the world and its many cultures and religions. Knowledge is not a guarantee of good political behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior. In a world full of simple stereotypes, we will only preserve democratic values of debate and mutual respect if we try hard to understand the past and the present.
Finally, we need the imaginative ability to put ourselves in the positions of people different from ourselves, whether by class or race or religion or gender. Democratic politics involves making decisions that affect other people and groups. We can only do this well if we try to imagine what their lives are like and how changes of various sorts affect them. The imagination is an innate gift, but it needs refinement and cultivation; this is what the humanities provide.
“But my child needs a job,” a parent might say.Yes, but preparing for a job and learning the lessons of the humanities are not mutually exclusive. The American system of higher education, unlike almost all other higher education systems in the world — where students enter university to study just a single subject — encourages students to major in one subject, often one related to future work, while taking general education courses in a variety of disciplines.
The future engineer or computer programmer can still learn skills of argument from Plato’s dialogues and gain a deeper grasp of the lives of others through literature and the arts.
If we cut the humanities, our nation will be the loser, both economically and politically.
- Answer ALL in about one paragraph each: (4X5=20)
- Why does Alex Tabarrok think that ‘college has been oversold’?
- Why does he think that going to college is not enough but one also has to study the right subjects?
- Why does Martha Nussbaum say that ‘cuts in the humanities are bad for business and bad for democracy’?
- What are the abilities that the humanities foster according to her?
- Answer ALL in about three to four paragraphs each: (2 x 15 =30)
- Point out any three major differences between Alex Tabarrok and Martha Nussbaum in their ideas on education. Comment on the differences by giving your own opinion on each of them.
- The context of the above debate on education is United States of America. If the same debate on the relevance of humanities education (literature, philosophy, art and cinema) were to happen in India what would be your position on it? Respond to the question as a commerce student who is also required to do four semesters of General English and Language papers.
SECTION – B
- Answer ALL in about three or four paragraphs each. (2 X15=30)
- Read the extract from the essay ‘What clash of Civilization?’ by AmartyaSen
A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be found in Samuel Huntington’s influential 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The difficulty with Huntington’s approach begins with his system of unique categorization, well before the issue of a clash—or not—is even raised. Indeed, the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines, which closely follow religious divisions to which singular attention is paid. Huntington contrasts Western civilization with “Islamic civilization,” “Hindu civilization,” “Buddhist civilization,” and so on. The alleged confrontations of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of hardened divisiveness.
In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other partitions, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to “the Islamic world,” “the Western world,” “the Hindu world,” “the Buddhist world,” the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.
As an individual living in a city like Bangalore do you think that one’s identity is only with one’s religion? How would you relate the above excerpt on religious classification of the world with your life in Bangalore and your identity as an individual?
- Compare the essays ‘Mona’s Story’ by Urvashi Bhutalia and ‘What Clash of Civilization?’ by AmartyaSen and see if there are any similarities or differences in terms of the themes discussed and the style of the writing.
SECTION – C
- Answer ALL in about two paragraphs each. (2 x10=20)
- Pick any two poems among all the poems that you have read from your textbook, one which was very interesting and the other which was utterly boring (less interesting). Now, give any two reasons as to why the first one was interesting and the second one boring. What kind of a poem gets your attention and interest?
- When she left me
after lunch, I read
for a while.
But I suddenly wanted
to look again
and I saw the half-eaten
sandwich,
bread,
lettuce and salami,
all carrying the shape
of her bite.
- K. Ramanujan
Read the above poem carefully and answer the below questions by using your imagination.
- Why did the speaker want to ‘look again’, suddenly?
- Why does the ‘shape of her bite’ on the food she had left half eaten get his attention so much?
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