Questions 1-11. Read the following passage carefully before you begin to answer the questions.
First Passage – Questions 1–11. Read the following passage carefully before you choose your answers. This passage is excerpted from an essay written in nineteenth-century England.
It has been well said that the highest aim in
education is analogous to the highest aim in
mathematics, namely, to obtain not results but
powers, not particular solutions, but the means by
which endless solutions may be wrought. He is the
5 most effective educator who aims less at perfecting
specific acquirements than at producing that mental
condition which renders acquirements easy, and leads
to their useful application; who does not seek to make
10 his pupils moral by enjoining particular courses of
action, but by bringing into activity the feelings and
sympathies that must issue in noble action. On the
same ground it may be said that the most effective
writer is not he who announces a particular discovery,
15 who convinces men of a particular conclusion, who
demonstrates that this measure is right and that
measure wrong; but he who rouses in others the
activities that must issue in discovery, who awakes
men from their indifference to the right and the
20 wrong, who nerves their energies to seek for the truth
and live up to it at whatever cost. The influence of
such a writer is dynamic. He does not teach men how
to use sword and musket, but he inspires their souls
with courage and sends a strong will into their
25 muscles. He does not, perhaps, enrich your stock of
data, but he clears away the film from your eyes that
you may search for data to some purpose. He does
not, perhaps, convince you, but he strikes you,
undeceives you, animates you. You are not directly
30 fed by his books, but you are braced as by a walk up
to an alpine summit, and yet subdued to calm and
reverence as by the sublime things to be seen from
Such a writer is Thomas Carlyle. It is an idle
35 question to ask whether his books will be read a
century hence: if they were all burnt as the grandest
of Suttees on his funeral pile, it would be only like
cutting down an oak after its acorns have sown a
forest. For there is hardly a superior or active mind
40 of this generation that has not been modified by
Carlyle’s writings; there has hardly been an English
book written for the last ten or twelve years that
would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived.
The character of his influence is best seen in the fact
45 that many of the men who have the least agreement
with his opinions are those to whom the reading of
Sartor Resartus was an epoch in the history of their
minds. The extent of his influence may be best seen in
the fact that ideas which were startling novelties when
50 he first wrote them are now become common-places.
And we think few men will be found to say that this
influence on the whole has not been for good. There
are plenty who question the justice of Carlyle’s
estimates of past men and pasttimes, plenty who
55 quarrel with the exaggerations of the Latter-Day
Pamphlets, and who are as far as possible from
looking for an amendment of things from a Carlylian
theocracy with the ‘greatest man’, as a Joshua who is
to smite the wicked (and the stupid) till the going
60 down of the sun. But for any large nature, those
points of difference are quite incidental. It is not as a
theorist, but as a great and beautiful human nature,
that Carlyle influences us. You may meet a man
whose wisdom seems unimpeachable, since you find
65 him entirely in agreement with yourself; but this
oracular man of unexceptionable opinions has a
green eye, a wiry hand, and altogether a Wesen, or
demeanour, that makes the world look blank to you,
and whose unexceptionable opinions become a bore;
70 while another man who deals in what you cannot but
think ‘dangerous paradoxes’, warms your heart by the
pressure of his hand, and looks out on the world with
so clear and loving an eye, that nature seems to reflect
the light of his glance upon your own feeling. So it is
75 with Carlyle. When he is saying the very opposite of
what we think, he says it so finely, with so hearty
conviction—he makes the object about which we
differ stand out in such grand relief under the clear
light of his strong and honest intellect—he appeals
80 so constantly to our sense of the manly and the
truthful—that we are obliged to say ‘Hear! hear!’ to
the writer before we can give the decorous ‘Oh! oh!’
