“. . . [T]he idea of craftsmanship is not simply nostalgic. . . . Crafts require distinct skills, an all-round approach to work that involves the whole product, rather than individual parts, and an attitude that necessitates devotion to the job and a focus on the communal interest. The concept of craft emphasises the human touch and individual judgment.
Essentially, the crafts concept seems to run against the preponderant ethos of management studies which, as the academics note, have long prioritised efficiency and consistency. . . . Craft skills were portrayed as being primitive and traditionalist.
The contrast between artisanship and efficiency first came to the fore in the 19th century when British manufacturers suddenly faced competition from across the Atlantic as firms developed the “American system” using standardised parts. . . . the worldwide success of the Singer sewing machine showed the potential of a mass-produced device. This process created its own reaction, first in the form of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century, and then again in the “small is beautiful” movement of the 1970s. A third crafts movement is emerging as people become aware of the environmental impact of conventional industry.
There are two potential markets for those who practise crafts. The first stems from the existence of consumers who are willing to pay a premium price for goods that are deemed to be of extra quality. . . . The second market lies in those consumers who wish to use their purchases to support local workers, or to reduce their environmental impact by taking goods to craftspeople to be mended, or recycled.
For workers, the appeal of craftsmanship is that it allows them the autonomy to make creative choices, and thus makes a job far more satisfying. In that sense, it could offer hope for the overall labour market. Let the machines automate dull and repetitive tasks and let workers focus purely on their skills, judgment and imagination. As a current example, the academics cite the “agile” manifesto in the software sector, an industry at the heart of technological change. The pioneers behind the original agile manifesto promised to prioritise “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. By bringing together experts from different teams, agile working is designed to improve creativity.
But the broader question is whether crafts can create a lot more jobs than they do today. Demand for crafted products may rise but will it be easy to retrain workers in sectors that might get automated (such as truck drivers) to take advantage? In a world where products and services often have to pass through regulatory hoops, large companies will usually have the advantage.
History also suggests that the link between crafts and creativity is not automatic. Medieval craft guilds were monopolies which resisted new entrants. They were also highly hierarchical with young men required to spend long periods as apprentices and journeymen before they could set up on their own; by that time the innovative spirit may have been knocked out of them. Craft workers can thrive in the modern era, but only if they don’t get too organised.”
Question:
We can infer from the passage that medieval crafts guilds resembled mass production in that both:
**Options:**
- 1) Discouraged innovation by restricting entry through strict rules.
- 2) Did not always employ egalitarian production processes.
- 3) Focused excessively on product quality.
- 4) Did not necessarily promote creativity.
Explanation:
The passage compares medieval craft guilds to modern mass production in terms of how they restricted creativity and innovation. Guilds were monopolistic and hierarchical, enforcing strict rules on entry and progression that stifled innovation, similar to how mass production prioritizes efficiency over creativity.
Analysis of Options:
- Option 1: Correct. The passage mentions that medieval guilds resisted new entrants and required long apprenticeships, which often suppressed innovative spirit. This is analogous to mass production’s focus on standardization.
- Option 2: Incorrect. While the guilds were hierarchical, the passage does not discuss egalitarianism or lack thereof in production processes for either guilds or mass production.
- Option 3: Incorrect. The passage does not claim that guilds or mass production focused excessively on quality.
- Option 4: Partially correct but too vague. While the passage mentions that guilds and mass production may not promote creativity, the specific parallel is their discouragement of innovation through restrictive rules, as captured in Option 1.
Passage-Based Question: Economics and Collaboration
“. . . [T]he idea of craftsmanship is not simply nostalgic. . . . Times have changed for the once almighty discipline. Economics has been taken to task, within and beyond its ramparts. Some economists have reached out, imported, borrowed, and collaborated—been less imperial, more open. Consider Thomas Piketty and his outreach to historians. The booming field of behavioral economics—the fusion of economics and social psychology—is another case. Economists are exploring alternatives to the caricature of Rational Man to explain how humans make decisions.”
Detailed Question:
In the passage, the author discusses the evolution of economics, highlighting its shift from being an independent and dominant discipline to one that now borrows and collaborates with other fields to address limitations. This interdisciplinary approach reflects a contrast between the previous isolationism of economics and its current openness to fields such as social psychology and history.
**Question:**
“Times have changed for the once almighty discipline.” We can infer from this statement and the associated paragraph that the author is being:
**Options:**
- 1) Judgemental about the ability of economic tools to accurately manage crises leading to the downfall of this lofty science.
- 2) Disparaging of economists’ inability to precisely predict market behaviour, and are now borrowing from other disciplines to remedy this.
- 3) Critical of economists’ openly borrowing and collaborating across disciplines to explain how humans make decisions.
- 4) Sarcastic about how economists, who earlier shunned other disciplines, are now beginning to incorporate them in their analyses.
Explanation:
The statement “Times have changed for the once almighty discipline” suggests that the author is reflecting on how economics, once independent and dominant, is now evolving by incorporating insights from other disciplines. The author highlights this shift with a tone of sarcasm, contrasting the past insularity of economists with their current willingness to collaborate.
Let’s evaluate the options:
- Option 1: Incorrect. The passage does not discuss crises or the downfall of economics as a science. It focuses on the evolution of economics and interdisciplinary collaboration.
- Option 2: Incorrect. While the passage acknowledges limitations in traditional economics, it does not adopt a disparaging tone. Instead, it views borrowing and collaboration positively.
- Option 3: Incorrect. The author does not criticize borrowing or collaboration but uses sarcasm to highlight the change from past practices.
- Option 4: Correct. The author uses sarcasm to point out how economists, once resistant to interdisciplinary approaches, are now embracing them to address limitations in their analyses.
Passage-Based Question: Homo Economicus
“For generations, economists have presumed that people have interests—’preferences,’ in the neoclassical argot—that get revealed in the course of peoples’ choices. Interests come before actions and determine them. If you are hungry, you buy lunch; if you are cold, you get a sweater. If you only have so much money and can’t afford to deal with both your growling stomach and your shivering, which need you choose to meet using your scarce savings reveals your preference.”
Question:
Q: We can infer from the passage that the term *‘homo economicus’* refers to someone who:
- Maximises their opportunities based on nonmarket choices.
- Is not influenced by the preferences and choices of others.
- Makes rational decisions based on their own preferences.
- Believes in borrowing and collaborating with other disciplines in their work.
Analysis:
The term *homo economicus* is traditionally used in economics to describe an individual who acts rationally to maximize utility based on their own preferences. The passage discusses how this model assumes interests determine actions, emphasizing rationality in decision-making processes. It contrasts this with real-world behavior, which often includes irrationality and emotional influences.
Evaluation of Options:
- Option 1: Incorrect. While *homo economicus* involves rational decision-making, this option emphasizes nonmarket choices, which is not part of its definition.
- Option 2: Incorrect. The passage does not state that *homo economicus* is uninfluenced by others’ preferences; it focuses on individual rationality based on preferences.
- Option 3: Correct. This accurately captures the essence of *homo economicus* as described in the passage: someone who makes rational decisions based on personal preferences.
- Option 4: Incorrect. This describes the interdisciplinary approach in modern economics, not the traditional *homo economicus* model.
The job of a peer reviewer is thankless. Collectively, academics spend around 70 million hours every year evaluating each other’s manuscripts on the behalf of scholarly journals — and they usually receive no monetary compensation and little if any recognition for their effort. Some do it as a way to keep abreast with developments in their field; some simply see it as a duty to the discipline. Either way, academic publishing would likely crumble without them.
In recent years, some scientists have begun posting their reviews online, mainly to claim credit for their work. Sites like Publons allow researchers to either share entire referee reports or simply list the journals for whom they’ve carried out a review….
The rise of Publons suggests that academics are increasingly placing value on the work of peer review and asking others, such as grant funders, to do the same. While that’s vital in the publish-or-perish culture of academia, there’s also immense value in the data underlying peer review. Sharing peer review data could help journals stamp out fraud, inefficiency, and systemic bias in academic publishing.….
Peer review data could also help root out bias. Last year, a study based on peer review data for nearly 24,000 submissions to the biomedical journal eLife found that women and non-Westerners were vastly underrepresented among peer reviewers. Only around one in every five reviewers was female, and less than two percent of reviewers were based in developing countries…. Openly publishing peer review data could perhaps also help journals address another problem in academic publishing: fraudulent peer reviews. For instance, a minority of authors have been known to use phony email addresses to pose as an outside expert and review their own manuscripts.…
Opponents of open peer review commonly argue that confidentiality is vital to the integrity of the review process; referees may be less critical of manuscripts if their reports are published, especially if they are revealing their identities by signing them. Some also hold concerns that open reviewing may deter referees from agreeing to judge manuscripts in the first place, or that they’ll take longer to do so out of fear of scrutiny….
Even when the content of reviews and the identity of reviewers can’t be shared publicly, perhaps journals could share the data with outside researchers for study. Or they could release other figures that wouldn’t compromise the anonymity of reviews but that might answer important questions about how long the reviewing process takes, how many researchers editors have to reach out to on average to find one who will carry out the work, and the geographic distribution of peer reviewers.
Of course, opening up data underlying the reviewing process will not fix peer review entirely, and there may be instances in which there are valid reasons to keep the content of peer reviews hidden and the identity of the referees confidential. But the norm should shift from opacity in all cases to opacity only when necessary.
Question 22: Based on the passage, we can infer that the author would most probably support:
Detailed Solution:
The correct answer is 3. More careful screening to ensure the recruitment of content-familiar peer reviewers.
Explanation:
- Option 1: Incorrect. While transparency is mentioned as a potential benefit, the author emphasizes maintaining balance and only using openness where necessary.
- Option 2: Incorrect. The author does not advocate for unconditional preservation of anonymity but suggests it should be maintained selectively.
- Option 3: Correct. The passage highlights specific reforms but supports practices that would attract informed reviewers to enrich the publication process and ensure legitimacy.
- Option 4: Incorrect. While publicising data is discussed, the emphasis is on ensuring sustainable operational quality more than publishing actual outputs.
Thus, Option 3 is the most plausible inference based on the passage’s focus on improvement and relevance of efforts in academia.
Languages become endangered and die out for many reasons. Sadly, the physical annihilation of communities of native speakers of a language is all too often the cause of language extinction. In North America, European colonists brought death and destruction to many Native American communities. This was followed by US federal policies restricting the use of indigenous languages, including the removal of native children from their communities to federal boarding schools where native languages and cultural practices were prohibited. As many as 75 percent of the languages spoken in the territories that became the United States have gone extinct, with slightly better language survival rates in Central and South America . . .
Even without physical annihilation and prohibitions against language use, the language of the “dominant” cultures may drive other languages into extinction; young people see education, jobs, culture and technology associated with the dominant language and focus their attention on that language. The largest language “killers” are English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, Hindi, and Chinese, all of which have privileged status as dominant languages threatening minority languages.
When we lose a language, we lose the worldview, culture and knowledge of the people who spoke it, constituting a loss to all humanity. People around the world live in direct contact with their native environment, their habitat. When the language they speak goes extinct, the rest of humanity loses their knowledge of that environment, their wisdom about the relationship between local plants and illness, their philosophical and religious beliefs as well as their native cultural expression (in music, visual art and poetry) that has enriched both the speakers of that language and others who would have encountered that culture. . . .
As educators deeply immersed in the liberal arts, we believe that educating students broadly in all facets of language and culture . . . yields immense rewards. Some individuals educated in the liberal arts tradition will pursue advanced study in linguistics and become actively engaged in language preservation, setting out for the Amazon, for example, with video recording equipment to interview the last surviving elders in a community to record and document a language spoken by no children.
Certainly, though, the vast majority of students will not pursue this kind of activity. For these students, a liberal arts education is absolutely critical from the twin perspectives of language extinction and global citizenship. When students study languages other than their own, they are sensitized to the existence of different cultural perspectives and practices. With such an education, students are more likely to be able to articulate insights into their own cultural biases, be more empathetic to individuals of other cultures, communicate successfully across linguistic and cultural differences, consider and resolve questions in a way that reflects multiple cultural perspectives, and, ultimately extend support to people, programs, practices, and policies that support the preservation of endangered languages.
There is ample evidence that such preservation can work in languages spiraling toward extinction. For example, Navajo, Cree and Inuit communities have established schools in which these languages are the language of instruction and the number of speakers of each has increased.
Question 9: It can be inferred from the passage that it is likely South America had a slightly better language survival rate than North America for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:
Detailed Solution:
The correct answer is 2. Locals were provided job opportunities in the colonial administration.
Explanation:
- Option 1: True. The passage suggests that policies like removing children from their families were a significant factor in language extinction in North America, and this may not have been as prevalent in South America.
- Option 2: False. There is no mention in the passage of locals in South America being provided jobs in colonial administrations, making this the best choice for the “EXCEPT” question.
- Option 3: True. The inability of colonial governments to mainstream locals in South America could have contributed to better language survival rates.
- Option 4: True. The passage implies that physical annihilation of native populations was more prevalent in North America than in South America.
Thus, Option 2 is the correct answer as it is not supported by the passage.
Moutai has been the global booze sensation of the decade. A bottle of its Flying Fairy which sold in the 1980s for the equivalent of a dollar now retails for $400. Moutai’s listed shares have soared by almost 600% in the past five years, outpacing the likes of Amazon. . . .
It does this while disregarding every Western marketing mantra. It is not global, has meagre digital sales and does not appeal to millennials. It scores pitifully on environmental, social and governance measures. In the Boy Scout world of Western business it would leave a bad taste, in more ways than one.
Moutai owes its intoxicating success to three factors—not all of them easy to emulate. First, it profits from Chinese nationalism. Moutai is known as the “national liquor”. It was used to raise spirits and disinfect wounds in Mao’s Long March. It was Premier Zhou Enlai’s favourite tipple, shared with Richard Nixon in 1972. Its centuries-old craftsmanship—it is distilled eight times and stored for years in earthenware jars—is a source of national pride. It also claims to be hangover-proof, which would make it an invention to rival gunpowder….
Second, it chose to serve China’s super-rich rather than its middle class. Markets are littered with the corpses of firms that could not compete in the cut-throat battle for Chinese middle-class wallets. And the country’s premium market is massive—at 73m-strong, bigger than the population of France, notes Euan McLeish of Bernstein, an investment firm, and still less crowded with prestige brands than advanced economies. Moutai is to these well-heeled drinkers what vintage champagne is to the rest of the world…..
Third, Moutai looks beyond affluent millennials and digital natives. The elderly and the middle-aged, it found, can be just as lucrative. Its biggest market now is (male) drinkers in their mid-30s. Many have no siblings, thanks to four decades of China’s one-child policy—which also means their elderly parents can splash out on weddings and banquets. Moutai is often a guest of honour.
Moutai has succeeded thanks to nationalism, elitism and ageism, in other words—not in spite of this unholy trinity. But it faces risks. The government is its largest shareholder—and a meddlesome one. It appears to want prices to remain stable. Exorbitantly priced booze is at odds with its professed socialist ideals. Yet minority investors—including many foreign funds—lament that Moutai’s wholesale price is a third of what it sells for in shops. Raising it could boost the company’s profits further. Instead, in what some see as a travesty of corporate governance, its majority owner has plans to set up its own sales channel…..
In the long run, its biggest risk may be millennials. As they grow older, health concerns, work-life balance and the desire for more wholesome pursuits than binge-drinking may curb the “Ganbei!” toasting culture [heavy drinking] on which so much of the demand for Moutai rests. For the time being, though, the party goes on.
Question 20: In the context of the passage we can infer that to succeed in the liquor industry in China, a marketing firm must consider all of the following factors affecting the Chinese liquor market EXCEPT that
Solution:
The passage states that competing for the middle-class market is tough and that there are opportunities in the high-end market. It also notes the government’s control over pricing. However, it does not suggest that marketing to the middle class is particularly profitable. Thus, the correct answer is: Option 4.
Interactive Quiz
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Passage:
Moutai has been the global booze sensation of the decade. A bottle of its Flying Fairy which sold in the 1980s for the equivalent of a dollar now retails for $400. Moutai’s listed shares have soared by almost 600% in the past five years, outpacing the likes of Amazon. . . .
It does this while disregarding every Western marketing mantra. It is not global, has meagre digital sales and does not appeal to millennials. It scores pitifully on environmental, social and governance measures. In the Boy Scout world of Western business it would leave a bad taste, in more ways than one.
Moutai owes its intoxicating success to three factors—not all of them easy to emulate. First, it profits from Chinese nationalism. Moutai is known as the “national liquor”. It was used to raise spirits and disinfect wounds in Mao’s Long March. It was Premier Zhou Enlai’s favourite tipple, shared with Richard Nixon in 1972. Its centuries-old craftsmanship—it is distilled eight times and stored for years in earthenware jars—is a source of national pride. It also claims to be hangover-proof, which would make it an invention to rival gunpowder….
Second, it chose to serve China’s super-rich rather than its middle class. Markets are littered with the corpses of firms that could not compete in the cut-throat battle for Chinese middle-class wallets. And the country’s premium market is massive—at 73m-strong, bigger than the population of France, notes Euan McLeish of Bernstein, an investment firm, and still less crowded with prestige brands than advanced economies. Moutai is to these well-heeled drinkers what vintage champagne is to the rest of the world…..
Third, Moutai looks beyond affluent millennials and digital natives. The elderly and the middle-aged, it found, can be just as lucrative. Its biggest market now is (male) drinkers in their mid-30s. Many have no siblings, thanks to four decades of China’s one-child policy—which also means their elderly parents can splash out on weddings and banquets. Moutai is often a guest of honour.
Question: In the context of the passage, it is most likely that the author refers to Moutai’s marketing strategy as “the unholy trinity” because:
Solution:
The question asks us why the author refers to Moutai’s marketing strategy as “the unholy trinity.” Let’s analyze each option:
- Option 1: While nationalism is one of the factors behind Moutai’s success, this does not explain why the strategy is called “unholy.” Eliminate.
- Option 2: The passage states that the strategy relies on nationalism, elitism, and ageism, but these also expose the firm to long-term risks, such as changing millennial preferences. This aligns with the label “unholy trinity.” Keep this option.
- Option 3: The phrase “unholy” is not about the morality of selling liquor. Eliminate.
- Option 4: The strategy does contrast with Western marketing, but this is not why it is called “unholy.” Eliminate.
Correct Answer: Option 2. It exposes the firm to long term risks.
