BACK | NEXT
TOEFL Reading Comprehension – Part 3
Now try TOEFL reading comprehension part 3 3. Click on the “start quiz” button below to display the questions. You will see the answers and explanations after you have answered the questions.
How Can You Tell If Something Is Nonsense?
How do we move beyond our prejudices to distinguish what is sensible and what is nonsensical?
Understanding the difference between sense and nonsense is vital to your well-being. Unless you can draw some clear understanding of something, you will be confused, and when you are confused, you cannot orient yourself to the world you live in. Something makes sense when it aligns with an organ of perception: you can see it, hear it or feel it.
However, this is not always an accurate measure of what is sensible. A mirage appears to be water until you get close to it and realize that you experienced an optical illusion. A hallucinogenic drug creates unusual experiences, until the drug wears off and you revise your opinion.
Sense, however, does prevail in the end. You revisited the experience, perceived anew and revised your opinion of what it meant. So far, living on the level of the concrete and experiential, the difference between sense and nonsense seems obvious. The mirage was seen as nonsense after you got close to it. The unicorn was seen as nonsense when you recovered from the hallucinogenic drug and saw that you were looking at a plain horse.
But as consciousness advances, it has to embrace abstractions. An abstraction is best described as a statistical generalization. As a child, when you saw your first dog and then other dogs similar to it, but not like it, you created a generalization called dogs. Through a survey of many dogs, you were finally able to see that both a Chihuahua and a German shepherd are both dogs.
In quantum physics, you can’t really see subatomic particles, but you can infer their nature and their properties through the statistics of mathematics and the impressions of white dots and streaks they leave on a photographic plate. Thus, you can distinguish between an electron and a positron. You can also tell when a complex interaction and transformation takes place. For example, through sophisticated instruments of observation and interpretation, you know when a negative pi meson collides with a proton. You then observe how the two particles annihilate each other, creating a lambda particle and a neutral K meson. Further observation shows us how these unstable particles live for only a billionth of a second. Now the neutral K meson decays into a positive pi meson and a negative pi meson, while the lambda particle decays into the original two particles, a negative pi meson and a proton.
Now, although this entire description is beyond the senses, it is not nonsense. This is because observation took place. This was done through mathematical descriptions and the use of highly sophisticated measuring devices. One may not have been able to see in a literal sense, but various instruments did that for the scientist, and his or her task was to interpret what was found based on past knowledge.
In the realm of the abstract, unless an idea can be tested in some way, it has a high tendency to be nonsense. In fact, the more removed it is from sense experience and the less testable it is, the more nonsensical it is likely to be. It may be well-argued nonsense, but that does not make it sensible.
Something is considered sensible if one can arrive at it through induction or deduction. Induction is working the way down from particulars to a general idea. For example, all dogs are dogs, regardless of size and predisposition. Deduction is working the way up from a general idea to a particular one. This is basically breaking down something into smaller and smaller units.
Nonsense comes in when we have to rely on authority – when things are believed not because some evidence was gathered to support it, but because someone in authority said it was true.
Without the Age of Reason, the era we live in today, of marvelous scientific advancement could not have been possible. Prior to that time, humankind thought about things in an emotional, often nonsensical way.
Reason is not something relegated to the province of the scientist or the philosopher. It is something that we all need in order to live fulfilling lives. And the most reasonable form of reason is one that distinguishes sense from nonsense on the basis of careful inquiry, patient observation and the accumulation of evidence.
Questions:
1. The writer argues that, in order to differentiate sense from nonsense, there must be a link between:
(a) argument and proof
(b) perception and sensibility
(c) the concrete and the abstract
(d) descriptions and devices
2. The writer contends that in order to determine whether non-experiential information is sensible, one should probably:
(a) be able to perceive it with the senses.
(b) relate it to the level of the concrete.
(c) perceive it anew and revise one’s opinion.
(d) be able to test the idea in some way.
3. Which of the following does the writer not use in order to refute the argument, ‘Something makes sense when it aligns with an organ of perception’?
(a) mirages
(b) optical illusions
(c) hallucinations
(d) reliance upon authority
Answers
Answer 1: The correct answer is C. The writer argues that, in order to differentiate sense from nonsense, there must be a link between the concrete and the abstract. In paragraphs 4 and 5, the writer asserts: ‘So far, living on the level of the concrete and experiential, the difference between sense and nonsense seems obvious. […] But as consciousness advances, it has to embrace abstractions’.
Answer 2: The correct answer is D. The writer contends that in order to determine whether non-experiential information is sensible one should probably be able to test the idea in some way. Remember that non-experiential means that something cannot be experienced with the senses; in other words, it is abstract. In paragraph 8, the writer states: ‘In the realm of the abstract, unless an idea can be tested in some way, it has a high tendency to be nonsense’.
Answer 3: The correct answer is D. The writer does not use reliance upon authority in order to refute the argument, ‘Something makes sense when it aligns with an organ of perception’. In the antepenultimate paragraph, the writer asserts: ‘Nonsense comes in when we have to rely on authority’. However, the writer does not relate reliance on authority to his argument about sensory perception. For example, he doesn’t suggest that authority is nonsense because it can’t be seen or heard. He only asserts that reliance on authority results in nonsense because it is not empirically tested. Answers A, B and C refute the sensory perception argument because these three things can be seen; yet they are nonsense. Quantum physics, specifically the analysis of subatomic particles, also refutes the sensory perception argument because the activity of subatomic particles cannot be perceived by the senses; yet research shows that quantum physics makes sense.
TOEFL Reading – More Practice
You have finished the TOEFL reading practice test.
You may want to go back and complete TOEFL reading practice test 1 and TOEFL reading practice test 2 if you have not already done so.
You should now go to the listening section.