The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.What’s the point of crazy new ideas when politicians can’t even manage to balance a budget? Can new ideas genuinely change the world? Now, your (very reasonable) gut response might be: They can’t - people will stubbornly stick to the old ideas that they’re comfortable with. The thing is, we know that ideas have changed over time. Yesterday’s avant-garde is today’s common sense. Simon Kuznets willed the idea of the GDP into being. The randomistas upset the apple cart of foreign aid by forcing it to prove its efficacy. The question is not can new ideas defeat old ones; the question is how.Research suggests that sudden shocks can work wonders. James Kuklinski, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, discovered that people are most likely to change their opinions if you confront them with new and disagreeable facts as directly as possible. Take the success of right-wing politicians who were already warning of “the Islamic threat” back in the 1990s, but didn’t get much attention until the shocking destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Viewpoints that had once been fringe suddenly became a collective obsession.If it is true that ideas don’t change things gradually but in fits and starts - in shocks - then the basic premise of our democracy, our journalism, and our education is all wrong. It would mean, in essence, that the Enlightenment model of how people change their opinions - through information-gathering and reasoned deliberation - is really a buttress for the status quo. It would mean that those who swear by rationality, nuance, and compromise fail to grasp how ideas govern the world. A worldview is not a Lego set where a block is added here, removed there. It’s a fortress that is defended tooth and nail, with all possible reinforcements, until the pressure becomes so overpowering that the walls cave in.American psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that group pressure can even cause us to ignore what we can plainly see with our own eyes. In a now-famous experiment, he showed test subjects three lines on a card and asked them which one was longest. When the other people in the room (all Asch’s coworkers, unbeknownst to the subject) gave the same answer, the subject did, too - even when it was clearly erroneous. It’s no different in politics. Political scientists have established that how people vote is determined less by their perceptions about their own lives than by their conceptions of society. We’re not particularly interested in what government can do for us personally; we want to know what it can do for us all. When we cast our vote, we do so not just for ourselves, but for the group we want to belong to.But Solomon Asch made another discovery. A single opposing voice can make all the difference. When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come.Question 1What is the primary argument of the passage?Rational and deliberate thought is the most effective way to change public opinion.Political affiliations and voting behaviors are mainly determined by group benefits.Significant changes in public opinion occur in response to dramatic events.Group pressure always leads individuals to conform to the majority opinion.

What’s the point of crazy new ideas when politicians can’t even manage to balance a budget? Can new ideas genuinely change the world? Now, your (very reasonable) gut response might be: They can’t - people will stubbornly stick to the old ideas that they’re comfortable with. The thing is, we know that ideas have changed over time. Yesterday’s avant-garde is today’s common sense. Simon Kuznets willed the idea of the GDP into being. The randomistas upset the apple cart of foreign aid by forcing it to prove its efficacy. The question is not can new ideas defeat old ones; the question is how.Research suggests that sudden shocks can work wonders. James Kuklinski, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, discovered that people are most likely to change their opinions if you confront them with new and disagreeable facts as directly as possible. Take the success of right-wing politicians who were already warning of “the Islamic threat” back in the 1990s, but didn’t get much attention until the shocking destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Viewpoints that had once been fringe suddenly became a collective obsession.If it is true that ideas don’t change things gradually but in fits and starts - in shocks - then the basic premise of our democracy, our journalism, and our education is all wrong. It would mean, in essence, that the Enlightenment model of how people change their opinions - through information-gathering and reasoned deliberation - is really a buttress for the status quo. It would mean that those who swear by rationality, nuance, and compromise fail to grasp how ideas govern the world. A worldview is not a Lego set where a block is added here, removed there. It’s a fortress that is defended tooth and nail, with all possible reinforcements, until the pressure becomes so overpowering that the walls cave in.American psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that group pressure can even cause us to ignore what we can plainly see with our own eyes. In a now-famous experiment, he showed test subjects three lines on a card and asked them which one was longest. When the other people in the room (all Asch’s coworkers, unbeknownst to the subject) gave the same answer, the subject did, too - even when it was clearly erroneous. It’s no different in politics. Political scientists have established that how people vote is determined less by their perceptions about their own lives than by their conceptions of society. We’re not particularly interested in what government can do for us personally; we want to know what it can do for us all. When we cast our vote, we do so not just for ourselves, but for the group we want to belong to.But Solomon Asch made another discovery. A single opposing voice can make all the difference. When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come.Question 1What is the primary argument of the passage?Rational and deliberate thought is the most effective way to change public opinion.Political affiliations and voting behaviors are mainly determined by group benefits.Significant changes in public opinion occur in response to dramatic events.Group pressure always leads individuals to conform to the majority opinion.

The capital-budgeting process aims to systematically sort good ideas from bad ones.

Thinking up a new idea is an example ofGroup of answer choicesan invention.an innovation.human capital accumulation.social overhead capital.

What did the first revisionist interpretation of the New Deal consider to be a major problem not highlighted by previous scholarship?

What did the first revisionist interpretation of the New Deal consider to be a major problem not highlighted by previous scholarship?Multiple Choicethe policies that increased rather than limited corporate powerRoosevelt's poor leadership, conducting the movement as an autocratits lack of a guiding philosophy that might have helped its reforms expand furtherits failure to help many disadvantaged groups like the urban poor and African Americans