Question:hard
Read the following passage and answer the question below.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality. The linguistic relativity hypothesis focuses on structural differences among natural languages such as Hopi, Chinese, and English, and asks whether the classifications of reality implicit in such structures affect our thinking about reality. Analytically, linguistic relativity as an issue stands between two others: a semiotic-level concern with how speaking any natural language whatsoever might influence the general potential for human thinking, and a functional or discourse-level concern with how using any given language code in a particular way might influence thinking, that is, the impact of special discursive practices such as schooling and literacy on formal thought. Although analytically distinct, the three issues are intimately related in both theory and practice. For example, claims about linguistic relativity depend on understanding the general psychological mechanisms linking language to thinking, and on understanding the diverse uses of speech in discourse to accomplish acts of descriptive reference. Hence, the relation of particular linguistic structures to patterns of thinking forms only one part of the broader array of questions about the significance of language for thought. Proposals of linguistic relativity necessarily develop two linked claims among the key terms of the hypothesis, language, thought, and reality. First, languages differ significantly in their interpretations of experienced reality, both what they select for representation and how they arrange it. Second, language interpretations have influences on thought about reality more generally, whether at the individual or cultural level. Claims for linguistic relativity thus require both articulating the contrasting interpretations of reality latent in the structures of different languages, and accessing their broader influences on, or relationships to, the cognitive interpretation of reality.
Question: If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were to be true, which of the following conclusions would logically follow?
1. To develop vernacular languages, government should promote public debates and discourses.
2. Promote vernacular languages as medium of instruction in schools.
3. Cognitive and cultural realities are related.
Read the following passage and answer the question below.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality. The linguistic relativity hypothesis focuses on structural differences among natural languages such as Hopi, Chinese, and English, and asks whether the classifications of reality implicit in such structures affect our thinking about reality. Analytically, linguistic relativity as an issue stands between two others: a semiotic-level concern with how speaking any natural language whatsoever might influence the general potential for human thinking, and a functional or discourse-level concern with how using any given language code in a particular way might influence thinking, that is, the impact of special discursive practices such as schooling and literacy on formal thought. Although analytically distinct, the three issues are intimately related in both theory and practice. For example, claims about linguistic relativity depend on understanding the general psychological mechanisms linking language to thinking, and on understanding the diverse uses of speech in discourse to accomplish acts of descriptive reference. Hence, the relation of particular linguistic structures to patterns of thinking forms only one part of the broader array of questions about the significance of language for thought. Proposals of linguistic relativity necessarily develop two linked claims among the key terms of the hypothesis, language, thought, and reality. First, languages differ significantly in their interpretations of experienced reality, both what they select for representation and how they arrange it. Second, language interpretations have influences on thought about reality more generally, whether at the individual or cultural level. Claims for linguistic relativity thus require both articulating the contrasting interpretations of reality latent in the structures of different languages, and accessing their broader influences on, or relationships to, the cognitive interpretation of reality.
Question: If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were to be true, which of the following conclusions would logically follow?
1. To develop vernacular languages, government should promote public debates and discourses.
2. Promote vernacular languages as medium of instruction in schools.
3. Cognitive and cultural realities are related.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality. The linguistic relativity hypothesis focuses on structural differences among natural languages such as Hopi, Chinese, and English, and asks whether the classifications of reality implicit in such structures affect our thinking about reality. Analytically, linguistic relativity as an issue stands between two others: a semiotic-level concern with how speaking any natural language whatsoever might influence the general potential for human thinking, and a functional or discourse-level concern with how using any given language code in a particular way might influence thinking, that is, the impact of special discursive practices such as schooling and literacy on formal thought. Although analytically distinct, the three issues are intimately related in both theory and practice. For example, claims about linguistic relativity depend on understanding the general psychological mechanisms linking language to thinking, and on understanding the diverse uses of speech in discourse to accomplish acts of descriptive reference. Hence, the relation of particular linguistic structures to patterns of thinking forms only one part of the broader array of questions about the significance of language for thought. Proposals of linguistic relativity necessarily develop two linked claims among the key terms of the hypothesis, language, thought, and reality. First, languages differ significantly in their interpretations of experienced reality, both what they select for representation and how they arrange it. Second, language interpretations have influences on thought about reality more generally, whether at the individual or cultural level. Claims for linguistic relativity thus require both articulating the contrasting interpretations of reality latent in the structures of different languages, and accessing their broader influences on, or relationships to, the cognitive interpretation of reality.
Question: If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were to be true, which of the following conclusions would logically follow?
1. To develop vernacular languages, government should promote public debates and discourses.
2. Promote vernacular languages as medium of instruction in schools.
3. Cognitive and cultural realities are related.
Show Hint
Separate prescriptive policy suggestions from statements that are pure logical consequences of the hypothesis.
Updated On: Jul 10, 2026
- 1 only
- 2 only
- 3 only
- 1 and 2
Show Solution
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
Before checking the three statements, separate two different kinds of sentence: a factual claim that follows from the hypothesis, and a policy opinion about what someone should do. Only the first kind can be said to logically follow from a hypothesis about how language and thought relate.
- Statement 1, government should promote public debates for vernacular languages: this recommends an action. The hypothesis describes a relationship between language and thought, it does not tell any government what policies to adopt, so this is an opinion layered on top of the hypothesis, not a consequence of it.
- Statement 2, vernacular languages as medium of instruction: same issue, this is a should statement about schooling policy. Even if it sounds reasonable given the hypothesis, it is not something the hypothesis itself asserts.
- Statement 3, cognitive and cultural realities are related: language is part of a culture, and thought is a cognitive process. The hypothesis's entire claim is that the language a culture uses shapes how its speakers think, which is exactly a claim that cultural and cognitive realities are linked. This statement is just the hypothesis restated at a general level.
Since 1 and 2 are policy opinions and only 3 restates the hypothesis itself, the only statement that truly follows is statement 3, giving 3 only as the answer.
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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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- [Fifty] years after its publication in English [in 1972], and just a year since [Marshall] Sahlins himself died—we may ask: why did [his essay] "Original Affluent Society" have such an impact, and how has it fared since? ... Sahlins's principal argument was simple but counterintuitive: before being driven into marginal environments by colonial powers, huntergatherers, or foragers, were not engaged in a desperate struggle for meager survival. Quite the contrary, they satisfied their needs with far less work than people in agricultural and industrial societies, leaving them more time to use as they wished. Hunters, he quipped, keep bankers' hours. Refusing to maximize, many were "more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game." . . . The so-called Neolithic Revolution, rather than improving life, imposed a harsher work regime and set in motion the long history of growing inequality ...
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.
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Applicants have been shortlisted for interviews for some data analyst positions. Some of the applicants have advanced expertise in one or more fields among the following: data analysis, database handling and coding. The numbers of applicants with different advanced expertise are given in the 2 × 8 table below.
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