Cat 2009 English Test 94

http://www.complore.com/test4PDF.php?id=297

Archives

Forums

B-Schools

Events

MBA

Vocabulary

English Test 94 Directions for Questions from 1 to 4: Leslie A. Adelson, whom Andreas Huyssen has accurately called “the leading scholar in the field of ‘Turkish- German literature,’” seeks in her latest book to redefine those often arbitrarily applied terms “Turkish” and “German.” Adelson adamantly advocates for understanding “Turkish” and “German” less as historically loaded labels and more as the names of two living cultures that exist essentially inside one another. Although her title includes the phrase “A New Critical Grammar of Migration,” much of the secondary material, analysis, and primary texts are not so new at all. Instead, Adelson has based this book on at least three previous journal articles and one conference paper.Readers familiar with Adelson’s previous articles will find themselves rereading key passages from tho se publications transplanted verbatim into the book manuscript. In addition, they will find that the chief aims of the articles have much in common with the book’s goals as well. Knowing this research history, one central question emerged for me as a reviewer: what would motivate readers to devote time to a book that at first glance simply seems to repeat previouslypublished material? As I read further, however, more and more valid reasons became clear. One general answer might be that, although Adelson obviously incorporates previous research, The Turkish Turn just as clearly indicates steady development and productive expansion of theoretical ideas that address viewing Turkish literature as an inextricable part of German culture. One more specific answer is that Adelson’s new twist more intently considers “the literature of Turkish migration as part of an evolving national tradition of Holocaust memory in Germany” . By reorganizing and supplementing old material, the author, in her own words, attempts to broach the “relative novum in German literature” of the “sustained combination of story lines about Turkish migration and twentieth-century German history” . In most of her works on Turkish-German literature, Adelson contends in one formulation or another that German and Turkish experiences since World War II and again since reunification share more similarities than differences . In her 2000 article as well as the present book, she identifies her central frustration with current German Studies: “Despite the fact that ensuing migrations and births have made Turks the largest minority in unified Germany, they are rarely seen as intervening meaningfully in the narrative of postwar German history” . As far back as her 1994 publication “Opposing Oppositions: Turkish-German Questions in Contemporary German Studies,” and as recently as a paper presented in 2004, “Hello Germany! Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration,” Adelson has been proposing innovative methods for confronting nonconstructive labels that have encased Turks and Germans in the language of stereotype. In her latest study, she reiterates her scholarly interest in overturning ways that other scholars have defined the relationship between TurkishGerman citizens and German society as the dominant culture. To name one example, Adelson demands her readers to reject boldly the prevalent idea that Turkish literature is “situated in a predictable sense ‘between two worlds’” . According to the author, taking this first step and subsequently performing the suggested style of reading would allow scholars to produce a more complete picture of the Turkish experience as a fundamental part of German history. In addition, this enlightened reading highlights ways that Turkish literature “touches” German history as incontestably as German literature meets German history. As in previous texts, the author again aims to expand the analytical paradigms scholars have used to study German-Turkish relationships in this century. Expanding current methods of analysis involves, for Adelson, devising methodological alternatives in order to produce new readings of narratives from authentic Turkish voices, including Aras Ören, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Zafir Senoçak, and Feridun Zaimoglu. In order to study anew previously analyzed works such as Der Hof im Spiegel (2001), Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (1998), and Kanak Sprak (1995), Adelson broadly splits the study into three thematicallydivided chapters with subdivisions featuring theoretical and literary analysis. In its own way, each of the divisions skillfully encourages and sustains her far-reaching intention of “undoing accepted ideas and methods of analysis and dichotomies after the Third Reich” , as well as imparting an undeniable “Turkish inflection of German memory” . In the first chapter, “Dialogue and Storytelling,” she focuses on the medium of dialog and its corresponding opposite, silence, in various texts to intimate specific ways that Turks have begun to join the conversation about the German past. By embracing or remaining just outside dialogs with Germans, Turkish characters in the texts leave ambiguous impressions. On one hand, they have begun finding their own words for the Nazi past, while on the other, they simultaneously desire and yet do not desire to join these conversations. Focusing on this key issue, Adelson emphasizes the common ground that Germans and Turks share. In contexts like these, according to Adelson, Germans and Turks produce “touching tales,” and thereby reveal their overwhelming similarities. Chapter 2 carries the ambiguous title “Genocide and Taboo,” which once again causes Turkish history and German history to touch. In this chapter, Adelson contemplates the “crisis of historical consciousness” in the twentieth century, but especially since the 1990s, when the “culture of memory [underwent] a radical shift” . Focusing on the novel, Perilous Kinship (2001), Adelson describes how the intertwined worlds at work in the story represent the “entangled tale of German taboos” . In the spirit of shattering old stereotypes, the second part of the chapter elucidates how, for example, mention of the Holocaust in Kanak Sprak essentially “defies myths of the lovable oppressed Turk” and rejects images of the silenced, victimized “defiant young Turks”. Adelson deftly uses these examples to support her claims that the new triangulated formation between Germans, Jews, and Turks “releases conventional victim/perpetrator labels” . Not limiting the discussion of genocide to the Holocaust, Adelson also presents and analyzes texts that consider the Turks’ double memory work of dealing with the Armenian genocide as well as the Holocaust in Germany. Chapter 3, “Capital and Labor,” illuminates the role that economics and labor have played in forming the conventional picture of the Turk in Germany. Adelson cites theories that make migrant laborers into emblematic subjects of a global economy only to ask readers to challenge such outdated tropes . In a discussion that spans popular perception of the Turkish Gastarbeiter to popular perception of headscarves as “related to a gendered critique of violence” , Adelson leaves no stone unturned in her profound consideration of the formation and sustainability of Turkish stereotypes in Germany in this century. The chapter’s combination of extensive theory and close readings encourages viewing literature and literary theory at the “crossroads of German national history and Turkish migration” . Adelson’s three all-embracing chapters strongly imply that this intersection marks the point of a major, yet ignored or underestimated, national German transformation.

1. According to Adelson, Germans and Turks are similar because

j Both leave ambiguous impressions while talking about the past. k l m n j Turks have begun to join German conversations. k l m n j Germans have started accommodating Turks in their dialogues. k l m n j Both carry similar poignant impressions about the past. k l m n

j The words used by both are similar in various contexts k l m n i Skip this question j k l m n

2. The closest meanings of the words-novum and trope-as used in the passage are

j New and outdated k l m n j New and metaphor k l m n j Game and Figure of speech k l m n j Cult and metaphor k l m n j Trend and Figure of speech k l m n i Skip this question j k l m n

3. The primary purpose of Adelson is to

j Refute the domination of German culture. k l m n j To refute the idea that Turkish literature and German literature are disjoint. k l m n j To prove that significant overlaps exist between Turkish and German culture. k l m n j To prove that Turks have played a significant role in German history. k l m n j To prove that the use of stereotypes-Turkish and German- should be examined. k l m n i Skip this question j k l m n

4. Adelson does not

j Advocate understanding “Turkish” and “German” as historically loaded labels. k l m n j Propose innovative methods for confronting non-constructive stereotypical labels. k l m n j Incorporate previous research in the Turkish Turn. k l m n j Reorganize and supplement old material in the Turkish Turn. k l m n j View turks as intervening meaningfully in post war German History. k l m n i Skip this question j k l m n Directions for Questions from 5 to 7: The passage given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question. PASSAGE OVER the past half century the United States and other economically advanced countries have made the shift into what has been called an information society, the information age, or the post-industrial era. The futurist Alvin Toffler has labeled this transition the “Third Wave,” suggesting that it will ultimately be as consequential as the two previous waves in human history: from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, and from agricultural to industrial ones. A society built around information tends to produce more of the two things people value most in a modern democracy - freedom and equality. Freedom of choice has exploded, in everything from cable channels to low-cost shopping outlets to friends met on the Internet. Hierarchies of all sorts, political and corporate, have come under pressure and begun to crumble. People associate the information age with the advent of the Internet, in the 1990s but the shift from the industrial era started more than a generation earlier, with the de-industrialization of the Rust Belt in the United States and comparable movements away from manufacturing in other industrialized countries. This period, roughly the mid-1960s to the early 1990s was also marked by seriously deteriorating social conditions in most of the industrialized world. Crime and social disorder began to rise, making inner-city areas of the wealthiest societies on earth almost uninhabitable. The decline of kinship as a social institution, which has been going on for more than 200 years, accelerated sharply in the second half of the twentieth century. Marriages and births declined and divorce soared; and one out of every three children in the United States and more than half of all children in Scandinavia were born out of wedlock. Finally, trust and confidence in institutions went into a forty-year decline. Although a majority of people in the United States and Europe expressed confidence in their governments and fellow citizens during the late 1950s only a small minority did so by the early 1990s. The nature of people’s involvement with one another changed as well - although there is no evidence that people associated with one another less, their ties tended to be less permanent, looser, and with smaller groups of people. These changes were dramatic; they occurred over a wide range of similar countries; and they all appeared at roughly the same period in history. As such, they constituted a Great Disruption in the social values that had prevailed in the industrial-age society of the mid twentieth century. It is very unusual for social indicators to move together so rapidly; even without knowing why they did so, we have cause to suspect that the reasons might be related. Although William J. Bennett and other conservatives are often attacked for harping on the theme of moral decline, they are essentially correct: the perceived breakdown of social order is not a matter of nostalgia, poor memory, or ignorance about the hypocrisies of earlier ages. The decline is readily measurable in statistics on crime, fatherless children, broken trust, reduced opportunities for and outcomes from education, and the like. Was it simply an accident that these negative social trends, which together reflect a weakening of social bonds and common values in Western societies, occurred just as the economies of those societies were making the transition from the industrial to the information era? The two were in fact intimately connected, and although many blessings have flowed from a more complex, information-based economy, certain bad things also happened to our social and moral life. The connections were technological, economic, and cultural. The changing nature of work tended to substitute mental for physical labor, propelling millions of women into the workplace and undermining the traditional understandings on which the family had been based. Innovations in medical technology leading to the birth-control pill and increasing longevity diminished the role of reproduction and family in people’s lives. And the culture of individualism, which in the laboratory and the marketplace leads to innovation and growth, spilled over into the realm of social norms, where it corroded virtually all forms of authority and

weakened the bonds holding families, neighborhoods, and nations together. The complete story is, of course, much more complex than this, and differs from one country to another. But broadly speaking, the technological change that brought about what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” in the marketplace caused similar disruption in the world of social relationships. Indeed, it would be surprising if this were not true.

5. With which of the following statements about the ‘Great Disruption’ is the author not likely to agree?

j The roots of the Great Disruption can be traced to events that occurred even before the advent of the Internet age k l m n j ) Even though the Great Disruption coincided with the process of economies transitioning from the industrial to the information age the two k l m n cannot be clearly linked j The negative social trends like crime, divorces and lack of confidence in governments were symptoms of the Great Disruption rather than its k l m n causes j The Great Disruption was an indirect outcome of two things people valued in the information age- freedom and equality k l m n j The changes that characterized the Great Disruption were neither gradual nor restricted to certain parts of the world k l m n i Skip this question j k l m n

6. Which of the following can be a possible topic for the paragraph immediately following the last para in the passage?

j The construction of a new social order in the information age by the decentralized individual k l m n j The industrial age and social organization in that age k l m n j ‘Creative destruction’ in the marketplace in the information age k l m n j Cynicism about institutions in the post-industrial age k l m n j The ‘Third Wave’ by Alvin Toffler k l m n i Skip this question j k l m n

7. Based on the passage, which of the following cannot be inferred as a possible consequence of the advent of the information age?

j Flat organizations with few levels between the junior employees and senior managers k l m n j A rise in the number of nuclear families and day-care centers for children of such families k l m n j Rising unemployment level for skilled and educated workers k l m n j Redefining of market boundaries and increased innovation by companies k l m n j A heightened nostalgia for earlier ages k l m n i Skip this question j k l m n Directions for Questions from 8 to 10: The sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labeled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

8. A. The two neighbours never fought each other. B. Fights involving three male fiddler crabs have been recorded, but the status of the participants was unknown. C. They pushed or grappled only with the intruder. D. We recorded 17 cases in which a resident that was fighting an intruder was joined by an immediate neighbour, an ally. E. We therefore tracked 268 intruder males until we saw them fighting a resident male.

j BEDAC k l m n j DEBAC k l m n j BDCAE k l m n j BCEDA k l m n j ABCDE k l m n i Skip this question j k l m n

9. A. He felt justified in bypassing Congress altogether on a variety of moves. B. At times he was fighting the entire Congress. C. Bush felt he had a mission to restore power to the presidency. D. Bush was not fighting just the democrats. E. Representative democracy is a messy business, and a CEO of the White House does not like a legislature of second guessers and time wasters.

j CAEDB k l m n j DBAEC k l m n

j CEADB k l m n j ECDBA k l m n j ABCDE k l m n i Skip this question j k l m n

10. A. In the west, Allied Forces had fought their way through southern Italy as far as Rome. B. In June 1944 Germany's military position in World War Two appeared hopeless. C. In Britain, the task of amassing the men and materials for the liberation of northern Europe had been completed. D. The Red Army was poised to drive the Nazis back through Poland. E. The situation on the eastern front was catastrophic.

j EDACB k l m n j BEDAC k l m n j BDECA k l m n j CEDAB k l m n j ABCDEF k l m n i Skip this question j k l m n

Take this test online © Copyright 2009. All Rights Reserved.