Read the following passage and answer the questions given below :
A private workplace always helps. Jane Austen asked that a certain squeaky hinge should never be oiled so that she always had a warning whenever someone was approaching the room where she wrote. William Faulkner, lacking a lock on his study door, detached the door knob and brought it into the room with him. Mark Twain’s family knew better than to breach his study door—they would blow a horn to draw him out. Graham Greene went even further, renting a secret office; only his wife knew the address and the telephone number. After all, everyone of us needs a workplace where we can work on our creation uninterruptedly. Equally we need our private space too! A daily walk has always been a source of inspiration. For many artists, a regular stroll was essentially a creative inspiration. Charles Dickens famously took three hour walks every afternoon, and what he observed on them fed directly into his writing. Tchaikovsky could make do with a two-hour jaunt but wouldn’t return a moment early; convinced that doing so would make him ill. Ludwig van Beethoven took lengthy strolls after lunch, carrying a pencil and paper with him in case inspiration struck. Nineteenth century composer Erik Satie did the same on his long hikes from Paris to the working class suburb where he lived, stopping under street lamps to jot down ideas that came on his journey; it’s rumored that when those lamps were turned off during the war years, his music declined too. Many great people had limited social life too. One of Simone de Beauvoir’s close friends puts it this way. “There were no receptions, parties. It was an uncluttered kind of life, a simplicity deliberately constructed so that she could do her work’. To Pablo the idea of Sunday was an ‘at home day’.

Comprehension of Unseen Passage
Nature writing is non-fiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment. Nature writing encompasses a wide variety of works, ranging from those that place primary emphasis on natural historical facts (such as field guides) to those in which philosophical interpretation predominate. It includes natural history essays, poetry, essays of solitude or escape, as well as travel and adventure writing.
Nature writing often draws heavily on scientific information and facts about the natural world; at the same time, it is frequently written in the first person and incorporates personal observations of and philosophical reflections upon nature.
Modern nature writing traces its roots to the works of natural history that were popular in the second half of the 19th century and throughout the 19th. An important early figure was the “parson-naturalist” Gilbert · White (1720 – 1793), a pioneering English naturalist and omithologist. He is best known for his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789).
Read the passage and choose the most appropriate option.

Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below:
Philosophy of Education is a label applied to the study of the purpose, process, nature and ideals of education. It can be considered a branch of both philosophy and education. Education can be defined as the teaching and learning of specific skills, and the imparting of knowledge, judgment and wisdom, and is something broader than the societal institution of education we often speak of.
Many educationalists consider it a weak and woolly field, too far removed from the practical applications of the real world to be useful. But philosophers dating back to Plato and the Ancient Greeks have given the area much thought and emphasis, and there is little doubt that their work has helped shape the practice of education over the millennia.
Plato is the earliest important educational thinker, and education is an essential element in “The Republic” (his most important work on philosophy and political theory, written around 360 B.C.). In it, he advocates some rather extreme methods: removing children from their mothers’ care and raising them as wards of the and differentiating children suitable to the various castes, the highest receiving the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the less able. He believed that education should be holistic, including facts, skills, physical discipline, music and art. Plato believed that talent and intelligence is not distributed genetically and thus is not found in children born to all classes, although his proposed system of selective public education for an educated minority of the population does not really follow a democratic model.
Aristotle considered human nature, habit and reason to be equally important forces to be cultivated in education, the ultimate aim of which should be to produce good and virtuous citizens. He proposed that teachers lead their students systematically, and that repetition be used as a key tool to develop good habits, unlike Socrates’ emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas. He emphasized the balancing of the theoretical and practical aspects of subjects taught, among which he explicitly mentions reading, writing, mathematics, music, physical education, literature, history, and a wide range of sciences, as well as play, which he also considered important.
During the Medieval period, the idea of Perennialism was first formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas in his work “De Magistro”. Perennialism holds that one should teach those things deemed to be of everlasting importance to all people everywhere, namely principles and reasoning, not just facts (which are apt to change over time), and that one should teach first about people, not machines or techniques. It was originally religious in nature, and it was only much later that a theory of secular perennialism developed.
During the Renaissance, the French skeptic Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was one of the first to critically look at education. Unusually for his time, Montaigne was willing to question the conventional wisdom of the period, calling into question the whole edifice of the educational system, and the implicit university-educated philosophers were necessarily wiser than uneducated farm workers, for example.

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