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RC1
For most people, the family is the most sacred part of private life, and therefore,
the bit they are keenest to keep the state away from. That is why the idea that
the British government has a child-care strategy sounds so immediately
repellent. Surely the state already encroaches far too far in our lives: do we
really want it playing with our babies? Yet in this area, it is worth curbing a
natural aversion to government interventionalism: child- rearing is part of the
state's business.
Children are the focus of much of the British government’s current
hyperactivity. It has targeted its anti-poverty measures at families with children
and is now extending pre-school education and state-supported child care for
working parents. It is also spending heavily on Sure Strat, an expensive scheme
focused on helping poor children.
The government has got into the nannying business for both good and bad
reasons. The first bad reason is its determination to envelop everybody in the
warm embrace of a Scandinavian- style welfare system. Its child- care policies
are the sharpest illustration of the plan to extend tax funded benefits up as well
as down the income scale by providing pre-school education for all and also,
increasingly, keeping schools open after hours to offer child care to hard-
pressed parents. In the background lies the idea that by providing the well-off as
well as the poor with tax-funded benefits which they will want to hang on to,
Labour will make it that much harder for a future Tory government to roll back
the state.
The second bad reason is to get women out to work. The government has been
pushing them in that direction for years, and providing child care will give them
an extra shove. The government has a clear interest in getting mothers back to
work-they will boost economic growth and tax revenue – but families, not
governments, should decide whether mothers trade their time with their children
for cash.
The only good reason for the state to intervene in child-rearing is that the
youngsters themselves may benefit. If intervention substantially, improves the
prospects of the children concerned- and the gain must be substantial, to
override the presumption that parents make the best parents-then that is
justification in itself. Moreover, in that case, there would be further benefits for
society at large, if children are troublesome, they make life hard for those they
are taught with. If they grow up criminal, they will steal the cars of those who
live near them. If they grow up ill-educated, they will contribute less to the
economy.
Do pre-school programmes actually work? The answer is nuanced. While high-
quality, part time pre school education seems to help children cope with school,
dumping babies in nurseries all day long before they are one is also pretty
clearly bad for them. So, the government needs to temper its enthusiasm for
universal child care and working mothers.
And what about targeting children whose parents are too poor, too reckless or
too drugged to give them a decent up – bringing? Unfortunately, such schemes
are not the panaceas they were once thought to be. Head start, America’s
programme for pre school education for three- and four year old disadvantaged
children has consumed $66 billion over four decades, and nobody really knows
whether it has done any good. That is why the General Accounting Office has
commissioned a large scale study to answer the question. Sure Start, the version
the British government is pushing, looks more promising- it starts earlier, is
more intensive and involves mothers, which evidence suggest are all important-
but as it trolls out, the British government needs to pay closer attention than
Americans had to, whether this is a good way to spend money.
Those who fear letting governments further into their family life are rightly
suspicious: governments are not to be trusted. Nor, sadly, are some parents. If
the state can act to improve children’s prospects, and hence society’s prospects
too, it should. The government’s child care strategy is not wrong in principle,
but ministers also have to show that it will work, and that remains to be seen.

Q.1
Why according to the passage, should the government not interfere in child
rearing?
a)because only mothers can understand babies
b)because as it is the government has too much to handle
c)family is a holy part of one’s private life
d)the government simply does not have resources for it
e)none of the above

Q.2
Which of the following is/are the features of the child care scheme that are
described by the author are detrimental one(s)?
a)It engulfs everyone in the welfare system
b)It wants women to go and work outside
c)Either a or b
d)Both a and b
e)Neither a nor b

Q.3
Which of the following in the context of the passage, is correct?
a)Sure Start is a cost friendly scheme to help poor children
b)Child care policies will curb benefits from tax funds
c)Women must work to encourage economic growth and tax revenue
d)Women should leave child rearing responsibilities to the govt.
e)None of the above

Q.4
Which of the following best describes the author’s stand on child-care strategies
by the government?
a)supportive
b)critical
c)sarcastic
d)philosophical
e)balanced

RC2
Most diseases or conditions improve by themselves, are self-limiting, or even if
fatal, seldom follow a strictly downward spiral. In each case, intervention can
appear to be quite efficacious. This becomes all the more patent if you assume
the point of view of a knowing practitioner of fraudulent medicine.
To take advantage of the natural ups and downs of any disease (as well as of
any placebo effect), it’s best to begin your treatment when the patient is getting
worse. In this way, anything that happens can more easily be attributed to your
wonderful and probably expensive intervention. If the patient improves, you
take credit; if he remains stable, your treatment stopped his downward course.
On the other hand, if the patient worsens, the dosage or intensity of the
treatment was not great enough; if he dies, he delayed too long in coming to
you.
In any case, the few instances in which your intervention is successful will
likely be remembered (not so few, if the disease in question is self-limiting),
while the vast majority of failures will be forgotten and buried. Chance provides
more than enough variation to account for the sprinkling of successes that will
occur with almost any treatment; indeed, it would be a miracle if there weren’t
any “miracle cures.”
Even in outlandish cases, it’s often difficult to refute conclusively some
proposed cure or procedure. Consider a diet doctor who directs his patients to
consume two whole pizzas, four birch beers, and two pieces of cheesecake for
every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and an entire box of fig bars with a quart of
milk for a bedtime snack, claiming that other people have lost six pounds a
week on such a regimen. When several patients follow his instructions for three
weeks, they find they’ve gained about seven pounds each. Have the doctor’s
claims been refuted?
Not necessarily, since he might respond that a whole host of auxiliary
understandings weren’t met: the pizzas had too much sauce, or the dieters slept
sixteen hours a day, or the birch beer wasn’t the right brand. Number and
probability do, however, provide the basis for statistics, which, together with
logic, constitutes the foundation of the scientific method, which will eventually
sort matters out if anything can. However, just as the existence of pink does not
undermine the distinction between red and white, and dawn doesn’t indicate that
day and night are really the same, this problematic fringe area doesn’t negate
the fundamental differences between science and its impostors.
The philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine ventures even further and maintains
that experience never forces one to reject any particular belief. He views science
as an integrated web of interconnecting hypotheses, procedures, and
formalisms, and argues that any impact of the world on the web can be
distributed in many different ways. If we’re willing to make drastic enough
changes in the rest of the web of our beliefs, the argument goes, we can hold to
our belief in the efficacy of the above diet, or indeed in the validity of any
pseudoscience.

Q.1
The claim that “it would be a miracle if there weren’t any ‘miracle cures’”
would be most weakened by evidence that showed that:
[A] some crackpot treatments have turned out to have authentic medical benefit.
[B] the possibility of improvement is nonexistent during the course of many
illnesses.
[C] the number of fraudulent medical practitioners has dwindled considerably.
[D] some patients recover from illness without any sort of intervention at all.

Q.2
In the context of the passage, its discussion of various medical conditions, and
the particulars of those conditions, the term self-limiting (line 19) refers to
medical conditions that:
[A] run a definite course that does not result in the patient’s death.
[B] impair the patient’s ability to engage in everyday activities.
[C] have a very high rate of mortality.
[D] never shows improvement.

Q.3
Suppose that in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of his work, a faith healer
compiles a book of interviews of people who swear that he has cured them just
by blessing them. The author would most likely respond by asserting that:
[A] eyewitness testimony of emotional events tends to be unreliable.
[B] the interviewees would have gotten better without the healer’s intervention.
[C] the ability to cure people does not justify shameless self-promotion.
[D] the interviewees have been deluded into thinking that they have improved
when they have not.