St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)
End Semester Examination – October 2015
B.Com – I Semester
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.
Do not copy sentences or paragraphs from the passage.
A glossary of difficult words is given at the end of the paper.
SECTION – A
Read the passage below and answer the questions.
When a Relationship Becomes a Game
It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and Kamakshi Zeidler, a 34-year-old plastic surgeon in Los Gatos, California, is explaining how to fill up a “love tank.”
“If you do little things for your partner… you get signals your love tank is full. And if you don’t, you’ll get signals that your love tank is almost empty. It’s based on how much you love each other. Well, through the app,” she adds.
Zeidler and her husband Brendon form a satisfied, if busy, pair. Both work long hours and have little time for spontaneous romantic gestures.
The “love tank” Kamakshi describes is one feature of a “couples’ app” called Kahnoodle. A 2011 addition to the app market, couples’ apps target spouses in a demographic sweet spot—old enough to need reinvigoration in their relationships, but still young enough to be tech-savvy—and offer a counterintuitive, strangely Anthony Weiner[1]-friendly service: an intimate social network, built for two.
But San Francisco-based Kahnoodle explores a new frontier of couples-app potential.
“It’s basically gamification of your relationships,” says Sonja Poole, a pleased Kahnoodler and 43-year-old associate professor at the University of San Francisco.
Gamification is a buzzword referring to the use of game concepts, like point rewards and badges, to engage users in non-game, or “real life,” situations. The website Lumosity gamifies intelligence training through animated exercises, and loyalty-based businesses like Belly use reward programs and badges to pull customers into affiliated restaurants. Foursquare encourages loyalty by awarding mayorships to frequent visitors of stores and restaurants.
Consumers respond very well to gamification in other sectors; businesses report increases in “engagement” by hundreds of percentage points when they gamify.
Using gamification, Kahnoodle wants to make maintaining your relationship automatic and easy—as easy as tapping a button. Its options include sending push notifications to initiate sex; “Koupons” that entitle the bearer to redeemable movie nights and kinky sex; and, of course, the love tank, which fills or empties depending on how many acts of love you’ve logged.
“Novelty works like an endorphin,” says Zuhairah Scott Washington, the company’s founder. “Couples have a desire to go out and do something new, but oftentimes they’re tired. The mobile app… incorporates a lot of research on what makes relationships successful but gamifies it to make it fun, makes it fun to do the work required to keep relationships fresh.”
Poole’s husband, Damone, has a demanding job that “keeps his attention away from the relationship.” She estimates that he checks his smartphone upwards of 50 times a day, mostly for work. She likes Kahnoodle because “it reminds him, ‘I need to do something for her,’” she says. “Any little bit helps.”
By many measures, the app should work. But the relationship between a man and his Starbucks[2] reward history is a lot less complex than the relationship between Sonja and Damone. Right?
Psychologist Eli Finkel of Northwestern University certainly thinks so. According to Finkel, you run into a couple of problems when you gamify love. Kahnoodle’s “Kudos” service, which allows one partner to reward another for a romantic gesture, might foster an “exchange mentality,” a tit-for-tat view of interaction that can be harmful in romantic situations—exchange mentality is commonly seen in cases of date rape, for example.
Finkel also says relationships are supposed to be tricky.
“Much of the benefit of doing considerate things is linked to the fact that those things required thoughtfulness and effort,” Finkel writes in an email. “Take the thoughtfulness out of the acts and they lose much of their meaning.”
Social psychologist and CEO of mental health network Psych Central John Grohol agrees. “You can’t substitute gamification for those core things people strive for,” he says. “Filling up a love tank isn’t the same as having a personal connection.”
Yet from a psychological perspective, human relationships “are inherently game-like,” says Professor Andrew Colman, a psychologist and game theory expert at University of Leicester in the U.K. According to a 2009 study that analyzes dating in terms of game theory, humans assess potential mates according to investments, risk-reward behaviors, and other factors that mirror the way we analyze a game. Game theory, for instance, explains why we love “the chase.” “A male’s willingness to court for a long time is a signal that he is likely to be a good male,” study author Robert Seymour writes.
This explains why women who wait for sex usually end up finding a better match. You want the higher reward; you stay in the game longer. Like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And online dating apps like Let’s Date and Zoosk have already seen positive results from gamification.
Of course, online dating is a far cry from your 20th anniversary. But the game of love is “still a game after decades of living together,” Colman says. “It doesn’t mean you’re trivializing it.”
Predictably, he says, the objection most people will have to Kahnoodle is that it’s mechanized game-playing; it takes the creativity and spontaneity out of relationship maintenance.
But as it turns out, spontaneity and creativity don’t necessarily predict lasting relationships. Relationships that are built on a “solid, comfortable, interesting, and pleasurable bed of reality” succeed above all others, according to an article by relationship psychologists John Adams and Constance Avery-Clark.
Adams and Avery-Clark stress the importance of “de-emphasizing over-romantic notions of super-compatibility in favor of a rational approach to relationships.” In other words, it’s not about whether spouses want to smooch endlessly on street corners or read separate newspapers at breakfast. They just need to be on the same page about what they do want, and how to go about getting it.
Zeidler and her husband seem to be.
“We’re busy, working professionals,” she reiterates. The love tank makes it “a little easier to constantly think about each other.” And Kahnoodle Concierge, a recently launched service that plans surprise-filled date nights for as little as $20 a month, is a godsend. “If my husband and I can simply show up to the same place, it’s great.”
Kahnoodle keeps the Zeidlers engaged. And in a world where couples spendmore time with their smartphones than each other, that’s no easy feat.
- Answer the following in ONE paragraph each. (5 x 3 = 15)
- What have you understood by the term ‘gamification’? Describe it in your own words.
- What does Eli Finkel mean by ‘exchange mentality’? Give an example and explain the concept.
- What insight has Game Theory offered to the study of human relationships? Does it make any sense to you?
- Answer the following in about THREE or FOUR paragraphs each. (15 x 2 = 30)
- The article above presents two contrasting views on human relationship. What are these two views? Which view makes sense to you the most? Use experiences, observations or fictional narratives in your response to make your point.
- The above article just seems to be an advertisement for the new app Kahnoodle.What do you think is the position of the writer of the article with regard to technology and human relationships? What do you have to say about the way in which technology is altering human relationships? Use experiences and observations in your answer.
SECTION – B
Read the story and answer the questions.
Dolls
In a certain town there lived a couple. The husband would bring home a bushel of fish every day. His wife would eat up all the middles of the fish and leave him only fish heads and fish tails. She did this every day.
What did he do? He had a sister in town. He went to her house one day and said, “Sister, every day I bring home a bushel of fish. When I come to eat, the fish have only heads and tails, no middles.
What shall I do?”
His sister told him, “If that’s the case, Brother, go to the carpenter, and ask him to make three dolls for you. Place one doll next to the cooking fire. Place another with the pots and pans. Put the third one in the niche in the wall. After you’ve done that, bring home as usual your bushel of fish and then leave. Let’s see what happens.”
He did exactly what his sister told him to do. He went to the carpenter and got three dolls made. He placed one near the cooking fire, a second one among the pots, and another in the wall niche. And he brought in his daily bushel of fish, gave it to his wife, and went out as usual.
She cooked the fish in a hurry, and was going to pick up a platter when the doll among the pots piped up and asked, “Why a platter?”
The doll in the wall answered, “To eat like a thief.”
The doll near the cooking fire added, “Without her husband!”
She gasped, “They talk, and like that!”
She was scared of the dolls and rushed out of the house, and didn’t get back till her husband came home. When he came home, she fed him, and then ate her own dinner. The fish were whole, as whole as when they were brought.
Her husband said nothing. He finished his meal, and went to his sister’s house. He said to her, “Sister, I did as you told me to. Today, all the fish were whole.”
One interpretation of the above story goes this way: ‘this tale seems to express an understanding of the phenomenon of “projection,” in which a rejected inner voice or impulse is attributed to an external object or person.’
- Answer the question in about THREE or FOUR paragraphs. (1 x 15 = 15)
- a) Why do you think the wife was scared of the dolls?
- Do you agree with the above interpretation of the story as an expression of the phenomenon of ‘projection’?
- What would be your interpretation of the above story?
SECTION – C
- The below questions are based on the texts that you have read in the classroom. Answer the questions in about FIVE paragraphs each. (2 x 20 = 20)
- “Words shape how I see the world, how I move through problems, how I relax. They give me comfort, order and structure” says Hannah Giorgis.
- Do you think there is a relationship between the language you speak and your thoughts, dreams and actions? How has the language that you speak shaped your opinions, beliefs or perspectives?
- What kind of a relationship do you have with the languages you speak? Do you like them? Do you think about them often? How did you learn them?
- “We go on talking but I can see a faint shadow on his face- he is puzzled and doesn’t know what is puzzling him. I move closer to him, into his arms and the shadow is gone. And the tune comes back, flows into my mind, to the tip of my tongue. “
- What do you think she does when the tune comes back again? Why do you think the writer of this story has given this kind of an ending? Does it make you look at the whole story any differently?
- Among all the characters in all the three stories that you have read in the class room to which one were you able to relate well and why? Write about similar characters that you have encountered in real life or fiction.
Glossary:
spouses: a husband or wife, considered in relation to their partner.
demographic: relating to the dynamic balance of a population especially with regard to density and capacity for expansion or decline; a portion of a population, especially considered as consumers.
reinvigorate: give new energy or strength to.
savvy: shrewd and knowledgeable; having common sense and good judgement
intuitive: based on feelings rather than facts or proof
novelty:the quality of being new, original, or unusual
Endorphin: a chemical naturally released in the brain to reduce pain, that in large amounts can make you feel relaxed or full of energy
inherent:existing as a natural or basic part of something
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[1]American politician Anthony Weiner, former member of the United States House of Representatives from New York City, was involved in two sexual scandals related to sexting, or sending explicit sexual material by cell phone. The first, sometimes dubbed Weinergate,[ led to his resignation as a congressman in 2011. The second, during his attempt to return to politics as candidate for mayor of New York City, involved three women Weiner admitted having sexted after further explicit pictures were published in July 2013.
[2]Starbucks Corporation, doing business as Starbucks Coffee, is an American coffee company and coffeehouse chain based in Seattle, Washington. Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world ahead of UK rival Costa Coffee, with 22,551 stores in 65 countries and territories, including 12,739 in the United States, 1,868 in China, 1,395 in Canada, 1,117 in Japan and 830 in the United Kingdom.
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