Question:medium
Directions for questions 107 to 111: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.
The Celts may be taken as a starting point for a study of the long series of people whose arrival and settlement in Britain have contributed to its history. They provide a link between the prehistoric period, at the end of which they had emerged ...
(Passage of 230 words, from "The Celts" by Nora Chadwick, Penguin edition.)According to the passage, who were the enemies of the Celtic people?
Directions for questions 107 to 111: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.
The Celts may be taken as a starting point for a study of the long series of people whose arrival and settlement in Britain have contributed to its history. They provide a link between the prehistoric period, at the end of which they had emerged ...
(Passage of 230 words, from "The Celts" by Nora Chadwick, Penguin edition.)
The Celts may be taken as a starting point for a study of the long series of people whose arrival and settlement in Britain have contributed to its history. They provide a link between the prehistoric period, at the end of which they had emerged ...
(Passage of 230 words, from "The Celts" by Nora Chadwick, Penguin edition.)
According to the passage, who were the enemies of the Celtic people?
Show Hint
Think about where the historical record of the Celts actually comes from.
Updated On: Jul 15, 2026
- The people of Britain
- Romans
- The ancient classical writers
- The Vikings
Show Solution
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Understanding the Concept.
The question asks who the passage names as the "enemies" of the Celtic people. This is not necessarily about who fought the Celts in war, but about who worked against the Celts' place in history.
Step 2: Key Approach.
A people's true historical "enemy" is often whoever controls the surviving record about them. If the Celts left few of their own accounts, and most of what survives was written by outsiders with their own biases, those outside writers effectively become the enemy of a fair historical record.
Step 3: Detailed Explanation.
The ancient classical writers, mainly Greek and Roman historians, are the main source for what is known about the early Celts, and they frequently wrote about the Celts as outsiders or rivals, often painting them in a negative or dismissive light. This bias meant the Celts were pushed down in importance in the historical record, not because they lacked achievements, but because the writers recording history were not sympathetic to them. The people of Britain, the Romans as a military force, and the Vikings do not fit this specific role of shaping a biased written record about the Celts.
Step 4: Final Answer.
The ancient classical writers are identified as the enemies of the Celtic people in this sense, matching option (c).
The question asks who the passage names as the "enemies" of the Celtic people. This is not necessarily about who fought the Celts in war, but about who worked against the Celts' place in history.
Step 2: Key Approach.
A people's true historical "enemy" is often whoever controls the surviving record about them. If the Celts left few of their own accounts, and most of what survives was written by outsiders with their own biases, those outside writers effectively become the enemy of a fair historical record.
Step 3: Detailed Explanation.
The ancient classical writers, mainly Greek and Roman historians, are the main source for what is known about the early Celts, and they frequently wrote about the Celts as outsiders or rivals, often painting them in a negative or dismissive light. This bias meant the Celts were pushed down in importance in the historical record, not because they lacked achievements, but because the writers recording history were not sympathetic to them. The people of Britain, the Romans as a military force, and the Vikings do not fit this specific role of shaping a biased written record about the Celts.
Step 4: Final Answer.
The ancient classical writers are identified as the enemies of the Celtic people in this sense, matching option (c).
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Top Questions on Reading Comprehension
- The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
For early postcolonial literature, the world of the novel was often the nation. Postcolonial novels were usually [concerned with] national questions. Sometimes the whole story of the novel was taken as an allegory of the nation, whether India or Tanzania. This was important for supporting anti-colonial nationalism, but could also be limiting - land-focused and inward looking.
My new book "Writing Ocean Worlds" explores another kind of world of the novel: not the village or nation, but the Indian Ocean world. The book describes a set of novels in which the Indian Ocean is at the centre of the story. It focuses on the novelists Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Lindsey Collen and Joseph Conrad [who have] centred the Indian Ocean world in the majority of their novels. . . Their work reveals a world that is outward-looking full of movement, border-crossing and south-south interconnection. They are all very different - from colonially inclined (Conrad) to radically anti-capitalist (Collen), but together draw on and shape a wider sense of Indian Ocean space through themes, images, metaphors and language. This has the effect of remapping the world in the reader's mind, as centred in the interconnected global south. ... The Indian Ocean world is a term used to describe the very long-lasting connections among the coasts of East Africa, the Arab coasts, and South and East Asia.
These connections were made possible by the geography of the Indian Ocean. For much of history, travel by sea was much easier than by land, which meant that port cities very far apart were often more easily connected to each other than to much closer inland cities. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that what we now call globalisation first appeared in the Indian Ocean. This is the interconnected oceanic world referenced and produced by the novels in my book. For their part Ghosh, Gurnah, Collen and even Conrad reference a different set of histories and geographies than the ones most commonly found in fiction in English. Those [commonly found ones] are mostly centred in Europe or the US, assume a background of Christianity and whiteness, and mention places like Paris and New York. The novels in [my] book highlight instead a largely Islamic space, feature characters of colour and centralise the ports of Malindi, Mombasa, Aden, Java and Bombay. . . . It is a densely imagined, richly sensory image of a southern cosmopolitan culture which provides for an enlarged sense of place in the world.
This remapping is particularly powerful for the representation of Africa. In the fiction, sailors and travellers are not all European. . . African, as well as Indian and Arab characters, are traders, nakhodas (dhow ship captains), runaways, villains, missionaries and activists. This does not mean that Indian Ocean Africa is romanticised. Migration is often a matter of force; travel is portrayed as abandonment rather than adventure, freedoms are kept from women and slavery is rife. What it does mean is that the African part of the Indian Ocean world plays an active role in its long, rich history and therefore in that of the wider world.- CAT - 2023
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Many human phenomena and characteristics - such as behaviors, beliefs, economies, genes, incomes, life expectancies, and other things - are influenced both by geographic factors and by non-geographic factors. Geographic factors mean physical and biological factors tied to geographic location, including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal species, soils, and topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under the term culture, other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual people.... [T]he differences between the current economies of North and South Korea ... cannot be attributed to the modest environmental differences between [them] ... They are instead due entirely to the different [government] policies ... At the opposite extreme, the Inuit and other traditional peoples living north of the Arctic Circle developed warm fur clothes but no agriculture, while equatorial lowland peoples around the world never developed warm fur clothes but often did develop agriculture. The explanation is straightforwardly geographic, rather than a cultural or historical quirk unrelated to geography. . . Aboriginal Australia remained the sole continent occupied only by hunter/gatherers and with no indigenous farming or herding ... [Here the] explanation is biogeographic: the Australian continent has no domesticable native animal species and few domesticable native plant species. Instead, the crops and domestic animals that now make Australia a food and wool exporter are all nonnative (mainly Eurasian) species such as sheep, wheat, and grapes, brought to Australia by overseas colonists.
Today, no scholar would be silly enough to deny that culture, history, and individual choices play a big role in many human phenomena. Scholars don't react to cultural, historical, and individual-agent explanations by denouncing "cultural determinism," "historical determinism," or "individual determinism," and then thinking no further. But many scholars do react to any explanation invoking some geographic role, by denouncing "geographic determinism" ... Several reasons may underlie this widespread but nonsensical view. One reason is that some geographic explanations advanced a century ago were racist, thereby causing all geographic explanations to become tainted by racist associations in the minds of many scholars other than geographers. But many genetic, historical, psychological, and anthropological explanations advanced a century ago were also racist, yet the validity of newer non-racist genetic etc. explanations is widely accepted today. Another reason for reflex rejection of geographic explanations is that historians have a tradition, in their discipline, of stressing the role of contingency (a favorite word among historians) based on individual decisions and chance. Often that view is warranted . . . But often, too, that view is unwarranted. The development of warm fur clothes among the Inuit living north of the Arctic Circle was not because one influential Inuit leader persuaded other Inuit in 1783 to adopt warm fur clothes, for no good environmental reason. A third reason is that geographic explanations usually depend on detailed technical facts of geography and other fields of scholarship ... Most historians and economists don't acquire that detailed knowledge as part of the professional training.- CAT - 2023
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Moreover, foragers had other options. The contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who had long been surrounded by farmers, knew they had alternatives and rejected them. To Sahlins, this showed that foragers are not simply examples of human diversity or victimhood but something more profound: they demonstrated that societies make real choices. Culture, a way of living oriented around a distinctive set of values, manifests a fundamental principle of collective self-determination. . .
But the point [of the essay] is not so much the empirical validity of the data-the real interest for most readers, after all, is not in foragers either today or in the Paleolithic-but rather its conceptual challenge to contemporary economic life and bourgeois individualism. The empirical served a philosophical and political project, a thought experiment and stimulus to the imagination of possibilities.
With its title's nod toward The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith's famously skeptical portrait of America's postwar prosperity and inequality, and dripping with New Left contempt for consumerism, "The Original Affluent Society" brought this critical perspective to bear on the contemporary world. It did so through the classic anthropological move of showing that radical alternatives to the readers' lives really exist. If the capitalist world seeks wealth through ever greater material production to meet infinitely expansive desires, foraging societies follow "the Zen road to affluence": not by getting more, but by wanting less. If it seems that foragers have been left behind by "progress," this is due only to the ethnocentric self-congratulation of the West. Rather than accumulate material goods, these societies are guided by other values: leisure, mobility, and above all, freedom. . .
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