English Precis & Composition - Page 4 of 4

CSS Solved Precis 2008

Q.1. Write a précis of the following passage in about 100 words and suggest the title:

Objectives pursued by, organizations should be directed to the satisfaction of demands resulting from the wants of mankind. Therefore, the determination of appropriate objectives for organized activity must be preceded by an effort to determine precisely what their wants are. Industrial organizations conduct market studies to learn what consumer goods should be produced. City Commissions make surveys to ascertain what civic projects would be of most benefit. Highway Commissions conduct traffic counts to learn what constructive programmes should be undertaken. Organizations come into being as a means for creating and exchanging utility. Their success is dependent upon the appropriateness of the series of acts contributed to the system. The majority of these acts is purposeful, that is, they are directed to the accomplishment of some objectives. These acts are physical in nature and find purposeful employment in the alteration of the physical environment. As a result utility is created, which, through the process of distribution, makes it possible for the cooperative system to endure.

Before the Industrial Revolution most cooperative activity was accomplished in small owner managed enterprises, usually with a single decision maker and simple organizational objectives. Increased technology and the growth of industrial organization made necessary the establishment of a hierarchy of objectives. This is turn, required a division of the management function until today a hierarchy of decision makers exists in most organizations.

The effective pursuit of appropriate objectives contributes directly to organizational efficiency. As used here, efficiency is a measure of the want satisfying power of the cooperative system as a whole. Thus efficiency is the summation of utilities received from the organization divided by the utilities given to the organization, as subjectively evaluated by each contributor.

The functions of the management process is the delineation of organizational objectives and the coordination of activity towards the accomplishment of these objectives. The system of coordinated activities must be maintained so that each contributor, including the manager, gains more than he contributes.

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CSS Solved Precis 2007

Q:1 Make a précis of the given passage and suggest a suitable heading.

The author of a work of imagination is trying to effect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not. I suppose that everything we eat has some effect upon us than merely the pleasure of taste and mastication; it affects us during the process of assimilation and digestion; and I believe that exactly the same is true of any thing we read.

The fact that what we read does not concern merely something called our literary taste, but that it affects directly, though only amongst many other influences , the whole of what we are, is best elicited , I think, by a conscientious examination of the history of our individual literary education. Consider the adolescent reading of any person with some literary sensibility. Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seductions of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of one poet. Very likely he was carried away by several poets, one after the other. The reason for this passing infatuation is not merely that our sensibility to poetry is keener in adolescence than in maturity. What happens is a kind of inundation, or invasion of the undeveloped personality, the empty (swept and garnished) room, by the stronger personality of the poet. The same thing may happen at a later age to persons who have not done much reading. One author takes complete possession of us for a time; then another, and finally they begin to affect each other in our mind. We weigh one against another; we see that each has qualities absent from others, and qualities incompatible with the qualities of others: we begin to be, in fact, critical: and it is our growing critical power which protects us from excessive possession by anyone literary personality. The good critic- and we should all try to critics, and not leave criticism to the fellows who write reviews in the papers- is the man who, to a keen and abiding sensibility, joins wide and increasingly discriminating. Wide reading is not valuable as a kind of hoarding, and the accumulation of knowledge or what sometimes is meant by the term „a well-stocked mind.‟ It is valuable because in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by anyone, or by any small number. The very different views of life, cohabiting in our minds, affect each other, and our own personality asserts itself and gives each a place in some arrangement peculiar to our self.

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CSS Solved Precis 2006

Q:1. Make a précis of the given passage and suggest a suitable heading:

It was not so in Greece, where philosophers professed less, and undertook more. Parmenides pondered nebulously over the mystery of knowledge; but the pre-Socratics kept their eyes with fair consistency upon the firm earth, and sought to ferret out its secrets by observation and experience, rather than to create it by exuding dialectic; there were not many introverts among the Greeks. Picture Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher; would he not be perilous company for the dessicated scholastics who have made the disputes about the reality of the external world take the place of medieval discourses on the number of angles that could sit on the point of a pin? Picture Thales, who met the challenge that philosophers were numskulls by “cornering the market” and making a fortune in a year. Picture Anaxagoras, who did the work of Darwin for the Greeks and turned Pericles form a wire-pulling politician into a thinker and a statesman, Picture old Socrates, unafraid of the sun or the stars, gaily corrupting young men and overturning governments; what would he have done to these bespectacled seedless philosophasters who now litter the court of the once great Queen? To Plato, as to these virile predecessors, epistemology was but the vestibule of philosophy, akin to the preliminaries of love; it was pleasant enough for a while, but it was far from the creative consummation that drew wisdom’s lover on. Here and there in the shorter dialogues, the Master dallied amorously with the problems of perception, thought, and knowledge; but in his more spacious moments he spread his vision over larger fields, built himself ideal states and brooded over the nature and destiny of man. And finally in Aristotle philosophy was honoured in all her boundless scope and majesty; all her mansions were explored and made beautiful with order; here every problem found a place and every science brought its toll to wisdom. These men knew that the function of philosophy was not to bury herself in the obscure retreats of epistemology, but to come forth bravely into every realm of inquiry, and gather up all knowledge for the coordination and illumination of human character and human life.

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CSS Solved Precis 2005

Q1. Make a précis of the given passage and suggest a suitable heading

Basically, psychoses and neuroses represent man’s inability to maintain a balanced or equated polarity in conducting his life. The ego becomes exclusively or decidedly one sided. In psychoses there is a complete collapse of the ego back into the inner recesses of the personal and collective unconsciouses. When he is repressed toward fulfilling some life goal and where he is further unable to sublimate himself toward another goal, man regresses into goal structures not actually acceptable to himself or to the society. Strong emotional sickness of the psychotic type is like having the shadow run wild. The entire psyche regresses to archaic, animal forms of behaviors. In less severe forms of emotional sickness there may be an accentuated and overpowering use of one of the four mental functions at the expense of the other three. Either thinking, feeling, intuiting or seeing may assume such a superior role as to render the other three inoperative. The persona may become so dominant as to create a totally one-sided ego, as in some forms of neurotic behavior. All in all, whatever the type of severity of the emotional disorder, it can be taken as a failure of the psyche to maintain a proper balance between the polarities of life. Essentially, psychoses and neuroses are an alienation of the self from its true goal of self actualization. In this sense the culture is of no consequence. Emotional disorder is not a question of being out of tune with one’s culture so much as it is of being out of tune with one’s self. Consequently, neurosis is more than bizarre behavior, especially as it may be interpreted by contemporaries in the culture. This interpretation avoids the sociological question of what is a mental disorder, since form of behavior which is acceptable in one culture may be considered neurotic in other culture. To Jung, the deviation from cultural norms is not the point. The inability to balance out personal polarities is.

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CSS Solved Precis 2004

Q1. Make a precis of the given passage and suggest a suitable heading:

We’re dealing with a very dramatic and very fundamental paradigm shift here. You may try” to lubricate your’ social interactions with personality techniques and skills, but in the process, you may truncate the vital character base. You can’t have the fruits without the roots. It’s the principle of sequencing: Private victory precedes Public Victory. Selfmastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationship with others. Some people say that you have to like yourself before you can like others. I think’ that idea has merit but if you don’t know yourself, if you don’t control yourself, if you don’t have mastery over yourself, it’s very hard to like yourself, except in some short-term, psychup, superficial way. Real self-respect comes from dominion over*self from true independence. Independence is an achievement. Inter dependence is a choice only independent people can make. Unless we are willing to achieve real independence, it’s foolish to try to develop human relations skills. We might try. We might even have some degree of success when the sun is shining. But when the difficult times come – and they will – We won’t have the foundation to keep things together. The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won’t be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary” for effective interdependence. The techniques and skills that really make a difference in human interaction are the ones that almost naturally flow from a truly independent character. So the place to begin building any relationship is inside ourselves, inside our Circle of Influence, our own character. As we become independent – Proactive, centered in correct principles, value driven and able to organize and execute around the priorities in our life with integrity – we then can choose to become interdependent – capable of building rich, enduring, highly productive relationships with other people.

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CSS Solved Precis 2003

Q1. Make a precis of the given passage and give a suitable heading:

If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of a society. Its ah is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world. It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand, not creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. Works indeed of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations. It does not promise a generation of Aristotle or Newtons of Napoleons or Washingtons of Raphaels or Shakespearcs though such miracles of nature it has before now contained within its precincts. Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, through such too it includes within its scope. But a University training is the great ordinary means to a great ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular aspirations. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them, ft teaches him to sec things as they arc, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical and to – discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. (John H. Ncwman)

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CSS Solved Precis 2002

Q1. Make a precis of the given passage, and also give a suitable heading

‘The official name of our species is homo sapiens; but there are many anthropologists who prefer to think of man as homo Fabcr-thc smith, the maker of tools It would be possible. I think, to reconcile these two definitions in a third. If man is a knower and an efficient doer, it is only because he is also a talker In order to be Faber and Sapiens, Homo must first be loquax, the loquacious one. Without language we should merely be hairless chimpanzees. Indeed \vc should be something much worse. Possessed of a high IQ but no language, we should be like the Yahoos of Gulliver’s Travels- Creatures too clever to be guided by instinct, too Self-centered to live in a state of animal grace, and therefore condemned forever, frustrated and malignant, between contented ape hood and aspiring ‘humanity. It was language that made possible the accumulation of knowledge and the broadcasting of information. It was language that permitted the expression of religious insight, the formulation of ethical ideals, the codification to laws, It was language, in a word, that turned us into human beings and gave birth to civilization.

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CSS Solved Precis 2001

Q1.Make a precise of the following passage in about one-third of its length and suggest a suitable heading.

It was not from want of perceiving the beauty of external nature but from the different way of perceiving it, that the early Greeks did not turn their genius to portray, either in colour or in poetry, the outlines, the hues, and contrasts of all fair valley, and hold cliffs, and golden moons, and rosy lawns which their beautiful country affords in lavish abundance.

Primitive people never so far as I know, enjoy when is called the picturesque in nature, wild forests, beetling cliffs, reaches of Alpine snow are with them great hindrances to human intercourse, and difficulties in the way of agriculture. They are furthermore the homes of the enemies of mankind, of the eagle, the wolf, or the tiger, and are most dangerous in times of earthquake or tempest. Hence the grand and striking features of nature are at first looked upon with fear and dislike.

I do not suppose that Greeks different in the respect from other people, except that the frequent occurrence of mountains and forests made agriculture peculiarly difficult and intercourse scanty, thus increasing their dislike for the apparently reckless waste in nature. We have even in Homer a similar feeling as regards the sea, — the sea that proved the source of all their wealth and the condition of most of their greatness. Before they had learned all this, they called it “the unvintagable sea” and looked upon its shore as merely so much waste land. We can, therefore, easily understand, how in the first beginning of Greek art, the representation of wild landscape would find no place, whereas, fruitful fields did not suggest themselves as more than the ordinary background. Art in those days was struggling with material nature to which it felt a certain antagonism.

There was nothing in the social circumstances of the Greeks to produce any revolution in this attitude during their greatest days. The Greek republics were small towns where the pressure of the city life was not felt. But as soon as the days of the Greeks republics were over, the men began to congregate for imperial purposes into Antioch, or Alexandria, or lastly into Rome, than we seek the effect of noise and dust and smoke and turmoil breaking out into the natural longing for rural rest and retirement so that from Alexander’s day …… We find all kinds of authors — epic poets, lyricist, novelists and preachers — agreeing in the precise of nature, its rich colours, and its varied sounds. Mohaffy: Rambles in Greece

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CSS Solved Precis 2000

Q1. Make a precis of the following passage in about one-third of its length. Suggest a suitable title also.

Besant describing the middle class of the 9th century wrote ” In the first place it was for more a class apart. “In no sense did it belong to society. Men in professions of any kind (except in the Army and Navy) could only belong to society by right of birth and family connections; men in trade—bankers were still accounted tradesmen—could not possibly belong to society. That is to say, if they went to live in the country they were not called upon by the county families and in the town they were not admitted by the men into their clubs, or by ladies into their houses… The middle class knew its own place, respected itself, made its own society for itself, and cheerfully accorded to rank the deference due.”

Since then, however, the life of the middle classes had undergone great changes as their numbers had swelled and their influence had increased.

Their already well –developed consciousness of their own importance had deepened. More critical than they had been in the past of certain aspects of aristocratic life, they were also more concerned with the plight of the poor and the importance of their own values of society, thrift, hand work, piety and respectability thrift, hand work, piety and respectability as examples of ideal behavior for the guidance of the lower orders. Above all they were respectable. There were divergences of opinion as to what exactly was respectable and what was not. There were, nevertheless, certain conventions, which were universally recognized: wild and drunker behaviors were certainly not respectable, nor were godlessness or avert promiscuity, not an ill-ordered home life, unconventional manners, self-indulgence, or flamboyant clothes and personal adornments.

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CSS Solved Precis 1992

1. Write a Précis of the following passage and suggest a suitable title:

Throughout the ages of human development, men have been subject to miseries of two kinds: those imposed by external nature, and, those that human beings misguidedly inflicted upon each other. At first, by far the worst evils were those that were due to the environment. Man was a rare species, whose survival was precarious. Without the agility of the monkey, without any coating of fur, he has difficulty in escaping from wild beasts, and in most parts of the world could not endure the winter’s cold. He had only two biological advantages: the upright posture freed his hands, and intelligence enabled him to transmit experience.

Gradually these two advantages gave him supremacy. The numbers of the human species increased beyond those of any other large mammals. But nature could still assert her power by means of flood and famine and pestilence and by exacting from the great majority of mankind incessant toil in the securing of daily bread.

In our own day our bondage to external nature is fast diminishing, as a result of the growth of scientific intelligence. Famines and pestilence still occur, but we know better, year by year, what should be done to prevent them. Hard work is still necessary, but only because we are unwise: given peace and co-operation, we could subsist on a very moderate amount of toil. With the existing technique, we can, whenever we choose to exercise wisdom, be free of many ancient- forms –of bondage to external nature.

But the evils that men inflict upon each other have not diminished to the same degree. There are still wars, oppressions, and hideous cruelties, and greedy men still snatch wealth from those who are less skillful or less ruthless than themselves. Love of power still leads to vast tyrannies, or to mere obstruction when its grosser forms are impossible. And fear —deep scarcely conscious fear— is still the dominant motive in very many lives.

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