Para Jumbles — XAT Previous-Year Questions
24 previous-year questions on Para Jumbles from XAT, with full solutions. Practise free — check answers as you go; sign in to save your progress.
Para Jumbles · XAT PYQs
Read the following statements and answer the question that follows.
- Back then, they were owned by companies and installed on their premises.
- Rooms and servers began to replace computer mainframes in the 1990’s.
- These were supplemented by processors from Intel, which by the mid-2000s translated its dominance of PC semiconductors into a near monopoly of the server market.
- They mostly ran on chips made by IBM and HP, the big tech of the day.
- Things started to change once again around a decade ago, when Amazon began selling some of its spare server capacity.
Which of the following combinations is the MOST logically ordered?
Go through the statements below and answer the question that follows.
- Maybe you have survived major trauma and have a hard time feeling safe.
- You’ll probably discover that your fear and struggles make sense on account of what you’ve lived through.
- Instead of beating yourself up for reacting in ways you don’t understand, you can develop compassion for yourself and what you’ve been through.
- Perhaps you have experienced a sudden death, and you are often anxious about the health of your loved ones.
- You may also find out that you have more strength than you knew, the same strength that has sustained you this far….
Which of the following combinations is the MOST logically ordered?
Arrange the following into a meaningful sequence:
- I’m not sure when I first became aware of the Singularity.
- In the almost half century that I've immersed myself in computer and related technologies, I've sought to understand the meaning and purpose of the continual upheaval that I have witnessed at many levels.
- Gradually, I've become aware of a transforming event looming in the first half of the twenty first century.
- I'd have to say it was a progressive awakening.
- Just as a black hole in space dramatically alters the patterns of matter and energy accelerating toward its event horizon, this impending Singularity in our future is increasingly transforming every institution and aspect of human life, from sexuality to spirituality.
Arrange the following into a meaningful sequence:
- Our knowledge about life developed over the centuries thanks to the many philosophers, physicists, chemists and biologists, who examined such complex matters according to their different points of view.
- Out of this long history, I wish to quote here only one date, the year 1953.
- In that year, Miller and Urey carried out their famous experiment about the primordial universal soup, whose foundations had already been expounded by the Russian chemist Alexandre Oparin in 1924.
- From a mixture of five gases, methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and water vapor, and an electric discharge as the source of energy, complex molecules were produced, including amino acids.
Arrange the following sentences in a LOGICAL sequence:
1. But when it comes to companies that lack computer programmers, the government is far more sympathetic.
2. As a result, limited access to foreign talent is a common gripe of tech founders and venture capitalists.
3. And, demand for the latter has soared among British startups.
4. This is less inconsistent than it may seem.
5. An HGV driver takes between six and ten weeks to train; a competent coder several years.
Read the following statements and answer the question that follows.
1. Some countries are, at least, trying to curb emissions.
2. Morocco is building a colossal solar-power plant in the desert.
3. States in the Middle East and North Africa can do little on their own to mitigate climate change.
4. Saudi Arabia is not going to stop exporting oil, but it plans to build a solar plant that will be about 200 times the size of the biggest such facility operating today.
5. Politics often gets in the way of problem solving.
Arrange the above five statements in a logical sequence.
Read the following statements and answer the question that follows.
1. Behavioral models in finance most often critique the efficient market hypothesis, which states that if investors behave rationally then prices should reflect all available information about the financial asset in consideration.
2. A number of behavioral models, including feedback models where investors bid up the price, have been used to explain this phenomenon.
3. But asset price bubbles and crashes belie this conclusion.
4. Finance is one of the fields where behavioral models have been used extensively, enough for behavioral finance.
5. This idea of “irrational exuberance” is now widely accepted and used in financial analysis, especially while analyzing asset price bubbles.
Arrange the above five statements in a logical sequence.
Read the passage below and answer the 3 associated questions:
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as it had to. (This is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat.) But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens. While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing, and maintaining things. Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees
find themselves—not unlike Soviet workers, actually—working forty- or even fifty-hour weeks on paper but effectively working fifteen hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles, or downloading TV box sets. The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. (Think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.) And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
Go through the statements below and answer the question that follows:
P. Fast food intake for more than three times a week is associated with greater odds of atopic disorders such as asthma, eczema or rhinitis. Thus, it should be definitely and strictly controlled in children as it does no good.
Q. Regular junk food intake can lead to physical and psychological issues among children.
R. Lack of Vitamins such as A and C, and minerals such as magnesium and calcium, encourage the development of deficiency diseases and osteoporosis, as well as dental caries due to higher intake.
S. Junk food, which are rich in energy with lots of fat and sugar, are relatively low in other important nutrients such as protein, fiber,
vitamins and minerals.
T. Emotional and self-esteem problems, along with chronic illnesses in later life due to obesity, are the issues associated with the
junk food.
Which of the following combinations is the MOST logically ordered?
Read the passage below and answer the 3 associated questions:
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as it had to. (This is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat.) But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens. While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing, and maintaining things. Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees
find themselves—not unlike Soviet workers, actually—working forty- or even fifty-hour weeks on paper but effectively working fifteen hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles, or downloading TV box sets. The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. (Think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.) And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
Go through the statements below and answer the question that follows:
P. Surabhi’s Instagram profile has 1.4 million followers. It is filled with pictures of her posing in different settings.
Q. In India, reports suggest that WhatsApp (Much more than Facebook or Twitter) is the primary tool for the dissemination of political
communication.
R. Political campaigns pay social media companies to promote their content.
S. Political advertising on social media comes in many forms and remains underexamined in India.
T. Social media influencers are used for the dissemination of content.
Which of the following combinations is the MOST logically ordered?
Read the following statements and answer the question that follows
- They subjected the residues from sherds of the rhyta- vessels to radiocarbon dating to determine their ages and chromatography – mass spectrometry (GC-MS) – to identify their structure and isotopic composition and found that the vessels were used to store cheese.
- In many Neolithic sites near the Adriatic Sea, researchers unearthed cone-shaped clay vessels, known as rhyta, with four legs on the bottom and a round opening on the side.
- Fresh milk couldn’t be kept for long without going bad; cheese, on the other hand, could be stored for months at a time, providing much-needed calories to early farmers between harvests.
- Archaeologists who used to assume animals such as cows and goats were mainly used for meat early in their domestication history are thus forced to admit that humans might have been using animals for dairy quite early in their domestication history.
- “If you kill one cow, you eat meat for about a week until it goes off; but by milking the animals, the farmer would be spreading the food gain from that animal over several months rather than just one week”
Rank the above five statements so as to make it a logical sequence:
Read the following statements and answer the question that follows
- An in-depth exploration of the Indian case and case studies of early adopters of mobile technology will provide spectrum managers a pragmatic and modern approach whereby they could utilize their resources efficiently and optimally.
- Even as spectrum management regimes are moving from a command and control regime to a flexible use regime, new technological developments are suggesting that there are significant opportunities in managing large swathes of spectrum as a common property resource, in addition to flexible use.
- Political legacies and market realities in different regimes pose unique challenges for spectrum managers who must negotiate a tricky path to the land promised by technological possibility.
- On the other hand, supply of spectrum is restricted due to competing nature of uses and vested interests of incumbent holders.
- The demand for spectrum has never been so acute as today's communication services extend beyond simple voice to complex data and video, augmented by evolving technologies such as peer-to-peer sharing, social networking, Fourth and Fifth Generation networks, Big Data, and cloud computing.
Rank the above five statements so as to make it a logical sequence:
Read the passage below and answer the questions that follow.
Labor and capital are the opposite poles of capitalist society. This polarity begins in each enterprise and is realized on a national and even international scale as a giant duality of classes which dominates the social structure. And yet this polarity is incorporated in a necessary identity between the two. Whatever its form, whether as money or commodities or means of production, capital is labor: it is labor that has been performed in the past, the objectified product of preceding phases of the cycle of production which becomes capital only through appropriation by the capitalist and its use in the accumulation of more capital. At the same time, as living labor which is purchased by the capitalist to set the production process into motion, labor is capital. That portion of money capital which is set aside for the payment of labor, the portion which in each cycle is converted into living labor power, is the portion of capital which stands for and corresponds to the
working population, and upon which the latter subsists. Before it is anything else, therefore, the working class is the animate part of capital, the part which will set in motion the process that
yields to the total capital its increment of surplus value. As such, the working class is first of all, raw material for exploitation. This working class lives a social and political existence of its own,
outside the direct grip of capital. It protests and submits, rebels or is integrated into bourgeois society, sees itself as a class or loses sight of its own existence, in accordance with the forces that act upon it and the moods, conjunctures, and conflicts of social and political life. But since, in its permanent existence, it is the living part of capital, its occupational structure, modes of work,
and distribution through the industries of society are determined by the ongoing processes of the accumulation of capital. It is seized, released, flung into various parts of the social machinery and expelled by others, not in accord with its own will or self-activity, but in accord with the movement of capital.
Read the following statements and answer the questions that follow:
- But its most advanced formulation is called superstring theory, which even predicts the precise number of dimensions: ten.
- However, the theory has already swept across the major physics research laboratories of the world and has irrevocably altered the scientific landscape of modern physics, generating a staggering number of research papers in the scientific literature (over 5,000 by one count).
- Scientifically, the hyperspace theory goes by the names of Kaluza-Klein theory and supergravity.
- The usual three dimensions of space (length, width, and breadth) and one of time are now extended by six more spatial dimensions.
- We caution that the theory of hyperspace has not yet been experimentally confirmed and would, in fact, be exceedingly difficult to prove in the laboratory.
Rank the above five statements so as to make it a logical sequence:
Read the passage below and answer the questions that follow.
Labor and capital are the opposite poles of capitalist society. This polarity begins in each enterprise and is realized on a national and even international scale as a giant duality of classes which dominates the social structure. And yet this polarity is incorporated in a necessary identity between the two. Whatever its form, whether as money or commodities or means of production, capital is labor: it is labor that has been performed in the past, the objectified product of preceding phases of the cycle of production which becomes capital only through appropriation by the capitalist and its use in the accumulation of more capital. At the same time, as living labor which is purchased by the capitalist to set the production process into motion, labor is capital. That portion of money capital which is set aside for the payment of labor, the portion which in each cycle is converted into living labor power, is the portion of capital which stands for and corresponds to the
working population, and upon which the latter subsists. Before it is anything else, therefore, the working class is the animate part of capital, the part which will set in motion the process that
yields to the total capital its increment of surplus value. As such, the working class is first of all, raw material for exploitation. This working class lives a social and political existence of its own,
outside the direct grip of capital. It protests and submits, rebels or is integrated into bourgeois society, sees itself as a class or loses sight of its own existence, in accordance with the forces that act upon it and the moods, conjunctures, and conflicts of social and political life. But since, in its permanent existence, it is the living part of capital, its occupational structure, modes of work,
and distribution through the industries of society are determined by the ongoing processes of the accumulation of capital. It is seized, released, flung into various parts of the social machinery and expelled by others, not in accord with its own will or self-activity, but in accord with the movement of capital.
Read the following statements and answer the questions that follow:
- It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators.
- It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of the victims.
- The victims were people; a true identification with them would involve grasping their lives rather than grasping at their deaths.
- The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.
- By definition the victims are dead, and unable to defend themselves from the use that others make of their deaths.
Rank the above five statements so as to make it a logical sequence:
Read the following statements and answer the question that follows:
- This is Russia’s Wild West, though the mountains lie to the south of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
- The Caucasus range has throughout history held Russians, especially fierce nationalists like Solzhenitsyn, in fear and awe.
- Here, between the Black and Caspian seas, is a land bridge where Europe gradually vanishes amid a six-hundred-mile chain of mountains as high as eighteen thousand feet – mesmerizing in their spangled beauty, especially after the yawning and flat mileage of the steppe lands to the north.
- Here, since the seventeenth century, Russian colonizers have tried to subdue congeries of proud peoples: Chechens, Ingush, Ossetes, Daghestanis, Abkhaz, Kartvelians, Kakhetians, Armenians, Azeris, and others.
- Here, the Russians encountered Islam in both its moderation and implacability.
Which of the following options is the best logical order of the above statements?
Read the following statements and answer the question that follows:
- The periodic table orders the elements in a way that helps to understand why atoms behave as they do.
- The properties of the elements are due to electronic configuration, and their recurring pattern gives rise to periodicity.
- In other words, what gives the elements their properties and what order lies below the surface of their seemingly random nature?
- What makes Fluorine react violently with Caesium while its nearest neighbour neon is reluctant to react with anything?
Which of the following options is the best logical order of the above statements?
Read the following poem and answer the question that follows:
I sought a soul in the sea
And found a coral there
Beneath the foam for me
An ocean was all laid bare.
Into my heart’s night
Along a narrow way
I groped; and lo! The light,
An infinite land of day.âââââââ
The FIRST and the LAST sentences of the paragraph are numbered 1 & 6. The others, labelled as P, Q, R and S are given below:
1. Suppose I know someone, Smith.
P. One day you come to me and say: “Smith is in Cambridge.”
Q. I inquire, and find you stood at Guildhall and saw at the other end a man and said: “That was Smith.”
R. I’d say: “Listen. This isn’t sufficient evidence.”
S. I’ve heard that he has been killed in a battle in this war.
6. If we had a fair amount of evidence he was killed I would try to make you say that you’re being credulous.
Which of the following combinations is the MOST LOGICALLY ORDERED?
Read the following poem and answer the question that follows:
I sought a soul in the sea
And found a coral there
Beneath the foam for me
An ocean was all laid bare.
Into my heart’s night
Along a narrow way
I groped; and lo! The light,
An infinite land of day.âââââââ
The FIRST and the LAST sentences of the paragraph are numbered 1 & 6. The others, labelled as P, Q, R and S are given below:
1. The word “symmetry” is used here with a special meaning, and therefore needs to be defined.
P. For instance, if we look at a vase that is left-and-right symmetrical, then turn it 180â° around the vertical axis, it looks at the same.
Q. When we have a picture symmetrical, one side is somehow the same as the other side.
R. When is a thing symmetrical – how can we define it?
S. Professor Hermann Weyl has given this definition of symmetry: a thing is symmetrical if one can subject it to a certain operation and it appears exactly the same after operation.
6. We shall adopt the definition of symmetry in Weyl’s more general form, and in that form we shall discuss symmetry of physical laws.
Which of the following combinations is the MOST LOGICALLY ORDERED?
The first and the last sentences of the paragraph are numbered 1 & 6. The others, labeled as P, Q, R and S, are given below:
1. The world of cinema is indeed a strange one and baffles many a critic.
P. But there are incorrigible optimists who see a bright future.
Q. The pundits still predict doom and they insist that it is the end of the road for cinema.
R. At the temples of the box office, fortunes are made and unmade.
S. The world of cinema has, they say, its own attraction.
6. Perhaps a positive outlook is not unwarranted. A doomsday approach is far too fatal at this stage.
Which of the following combinations given below is the most logically ordered?
Read the following sentences and choose the option that best arranges them in a logical order.
- It is certainly true that the critics–those persons whom the dictionary describes as “skilled in judging the qualities or merits of some class of things, especially of literary or artistic work” – have long harboured murderous thoughts about the conditions of drama, but their ineffectuality as public executioners is legendary.
- But not close enough, it would seem, for this “marriage” constitutes the case of an absolute desire encountering a relative compliance.
- The reviewers, by contrast, come close to being the most loyal and effective allies the commercial theatre could possibly desire.
- Perhaps the greatest irony in a situation bursting with ironies is the reiterated idea that the critics are killing the theatre.
- We all know that when theatre people or members of the public refer to the critics, they nearly always mean the reviewers.
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.
Choose the best option:
- The mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking is one of the most important issues in the present Particle Physics.
- They are required to give masses for all quarks and leptons and to guarantee the absence of the gauge anomaly.
- In the standard electroweak model a fundamental Higgs doublet is introduced to cause the spontaneous symmetry breaking.
- Supersymmetry (SUSY), eliminating all quadratic divergences, may provide a better theoretical basis to describe a fundamental Higgs boson with a relatively small mass to a high energy cutoff scale, say the Planck scale for example.
- In the minimal SUSY extension of the standards electroweak model the Higgs sector consists of two chiral superfields of Higgs doublets (H1 and H2 with opposite hypercharges).
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.
Choose the best option:
- Shakespeare did not personally prepare his plays for publication, and no official collection of them appeared until after his death.
- Some were probably based on actors’ memories of plays.
- Many of these quartos are quite unreliable.
- A collection of his sonnets, considered by critics to be among the best ever written in English, appeared in 1609.
- Many individual plays were published during his lifetime in unauthorized editions known as quartos.
Read the sentences and choose the option that best arrange them in a logical order.
âââââââA. Some of these are tangible while others are not.
B. The micro factors look at brand building, product development, competition, pricing, decision making within organizations etc.
C. Another way to classify these factors is to distinguish which of them are macro in nature and which of them are micro.
D. The macro factors comprise government policies, state of the economy, changing demographics etc.
E. The factors influencing forecasts include social, technological, economic, political, religious, ethnic, governmental, and natural factors.
Read the following passage and answer the questions.
There is an essential and irreducible ‘duality’ in the normative conceptualization of an individual person. We can see the person in terms of his or her ‘agency’, recognizing and respecting his or her ability to form goals, commitments, values, etc., and we can also see the person in terms of his or her ‘well-being’. This dichotomy is lost in a model of exclusively self-interested motivation, in which a person’s agency must be entirely geared to his or her own well-being. But once that straitjacket of self-interested motivation is removed, it becomes possible to recognize the indisputable fact that the person’s agency can well be geared to considerations not covered – or at least not fully covered – by his or her own well-being. Agency may be seen as important (not just instrumentally for the pursuit of well-being, but also intrinsically), but that still leaves open the question as to how that agency is to be evaluated and appraised. Even though the use of one’s agency is a matter for oneself to judge, the need for careful assessment of aims, objective, allegiances, etc., and the conception of the good, may be important and exacting.
To recognize the distinction between the ‘agency aspect’ and the ‘well-being aspect’ of a person does not require us to take the view that the person’s success as an agent must be independent, or completely separable from, his or her success in terms of well-being. A person may well feel happier and better off as a result of achieving what he or she wanted to achieve – perhaps for his or her family, or community, or class, or party, or some other cause. Also it is quite possible that a person’s well-being will go down as a result of frustration if there is some failure to achieve what he or she wanted to achieve as an agent, even though those achievements are not directly concerned with his or her well-being. There is really no sound basis for demanding that the agency aspect and the well-being aspect of a person should be independent of each other, and it is, I suppose, even possible that every change in one will affect the other as well. However, the point at issue is not the plausibility of their independence, but the sustainability and relevance of the distinction. The fact that two variables may be so related that one cannot change without the other, does not imply that they are the same variable, or that they will have the same values, or that the value of one can be obtained from the other on basis of some simple transformation.
The importance of an agency achievement does not rest entirely on the enhancement of well-being that it may indirectly cause. The agency achievement and well-being achievement, both of which have some distinct importance, may be casually linked with each other, but this fact does not compromise the specific importance of either. In so far as utility – based welfare calculations concentrate only on the well-being of the person, ignoring the agency aspect, or actually fails to distinguish between the agency aspect and well-being aspect altogether, something of real importance is lost.
Read the sentences and choose the option that best arrange them in a logical order.
âââââââA. In fact, it is considered as a dumping ground for unwanted people in quite a few organizations.
B. In many parts of the country, traditional castes such as Kothari, Kotwal, Bhandari and Bhandarkar have for generations been dealing in procuring, stocking, distributing goods and merchandise.
C. This is due to the fact that Indian traders have been trading with many parts of the world.
D. However, though the concept of warehousing has been prevalent for over 2000 years, the warehouse has not yet obtained due recognition in modern times.
E. The concept of warehousing or stores function is not new in India.
Read the following passage and answer the questions.
There is an essential and irreducible ‘duality’ in the normative conceptualization of an individual person. We can see the person in terms of his or her ‘agency’, recognizing and respecting his or her ability to form goals, commitments, values, etc., and we can also see the person in terms of his or her ‘well-being’. This dichotomy is lost in a model of exclusively self-interested motivation, in which a person’s agency must be entirely geared to his or her own well-being. But once that straitjacket of self-interested motivation is removed, it becomes possible to recognize the indisputable fact that the person’s agency can well be geared to considerations not covered – or at least not fully covered – by his or her own well-being. Agency may be seen as important (not just instrumentally for the pursuit of well-being, but also intrinsically), but that still leaves open the question as to how that agency is to be evaluated and appraised. Even though the use of one’s agency is a matter for oneself to judge, the need for careful assessment of aims, objective, allegiances, etc., and the conception of the good, may be important and exacting.
To recognize the distinction between the ‘agency aspect’ and the ‘well-being aspect’ of a person does not require us to take the view that the person’s success as an agent must be independent, or completely separable from, his or her success in terms of well-being. A person may well feel happier and better off as a result of achieving what he or she wanted to achieve – perhaps for his or her family, or community, or class, or party, or some other cause. Also it is quite possible that a person’s well-being will go down as a result of frustration if there is some failure to achieve what he or she wanted to achieve as an agent, even though those achievements are not directly concerned with his or her well-being. There is really no sound basis for demanding that the agency aspect and the well-being aspect of a person should be independent of each other, and it is, I suppose, even possible that every change in one will affect the other as well. However, the point at issue is not the plausibility of their independence, but the sustainability and relevance of the distinction. The fact that two variables may be so related that one cannot change without the other, does not imply that they are the same variable, or that they will have the same values, or that the value of one can be obtained from the other on basis of some simple transformation.
The importance of an agency achievement does not rest entirely on the enhancement of well-being that it may indirectly cause. The agency achievement and well-being achievement, both of which have some distinct importance, may be casually linked with each other, but this fact does not compromise the specific importance of either. In so far as utility – based welfare calculations concentrate only on the well-being of the person, ignoring the agency aspect, or actually fails to distinguish between the agency aspect and well-being aspect altogether, something of real importance is lost.
Read the sentences and choose the option that best arrange them in a logical order.
i. All it has to do is to drive up the inflation rate-examples are the damage Lyndon Johnson’s inflationary policies did to the US economy and the damage which consistently pro-inflationary policies have done to the economy of Italy.
ii. It is easy, the record shows, for a government to do harm to its domestic economy.
iii. Contrary to what economists confidently promised forty years ago, business cycles have not been abolished.
iv. They still operate pretty much the way they have been operating for the past 150 years.
v. But there is not the slightest evidence that any government policy to stimulate the economy has impact, whether that policy be Keynesian, monetarist, supply – side or neoclassical.