In the given text, the blanks are numbered (i)-(iv). Select the best match for all the blanks.
Steve was advised to keep his head ___________ (i) before heading _____________ (ii) to bat; for, while he had a head ____________ (iii) batting, he could only do so with a cool head _____________ (iv) his shoulders.}
(i) down (ii) down (iii) on (iv) for
(i) on (ii) down (iii) for (iv) on
(i) down (ii) out (iii) for (iv) on
(i) on (ii) out (iii) on (iv) for
Step 1: Idiom for (i).
"Keep your head down" is a standard idiom meaning “stay calm/avoid drawing attention.” \(\Rightarrow \)(i) = down.
Step 2: Verb-particle choice for (ii).
"Head out to bat" is the natural sports collocation when a batter goes to the crease. "Head down" would imply moving downward physically, which is incorrect here. \(\Rightarrow \)(ii) = out.
Step 3: Fixed expression for (iii).
"To have a head for something" means to have a talent/aptitude for it. \(\Rightarrow \)(iii) = for.
Step 4: Set phrase for (iv).
The idiom is "a cool head on his shoulders," not "for" his shoulders. \(\Rightarrow \)(iv) = on.
\[\boxed{\text{(C) down, out, for, on}}\]


When people who are talking don’t share the same culture, knowledge, values, and assumptions, mutual understanding can be especially difficult. Such understanding is possible through the negotiation of meaning. To negotiate meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. You also need the flexibility in world view, and a generous tolerance for mistakes, as well as a talent for finding the right metaphor to communicate the relevant parts of unshared experiences or to highlight the shared experiences while demphasizing the others. Metaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in large measure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorize your experiences. Problems of mutual understanding are not exotic; they arise in all extended conversations where understanding is important.
When it really counts, meaning is almost never communicated according to the CONDUIT metaphor, that is, where one person transmits a fixed, clear proposition to another by means of expressions in a common language, where both parties have all the relevant common knowledge, assumptions, values, etc. When the chips are down, meaning is negotiated: you slowly figure out what you have in common, what it is safe to talk about, how you can communicate unshared experience or create a shared vision. With enough flexibility in bending your world view and with luck and charity, you may achieve some mutual understanding.
Communication theories based on the CONDUIT metaphor turn from the pathetic to the evil when they are applied indiscriminately on a large scale, say, in government surveillance or computerized files. There, what is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included, and it is assumed that the words in the file have meaning in themselves—disembodied, objective, understandable meaning. When a society lives by the CONDUITmetaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are the likely products.
Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humanity such a burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons. Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might hide from the problems and the generals. To the contrary, there was a high insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coart forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, but always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
...Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.
Two designs A and B, shown in the figure, are proposed for a thin-walled closed section that is expected to carry only torque. Both A and B have a semi-circular nose, and are made of the same material with a wall thickness of 1 mm. With strength as the only criterion for failure, the ratio of maximum torque that B can support to the maximum torque that A can support is _________ (rounded off to two decimal places).
A thin flat plate is subjected to the following stresses: \[ \sigma_{xx} = 160 \, {MPa}; \, \sigma_{yy} = 40 \, {MPa}; \, \tau_{xy} = 80 \, {MPa}. \] Factor of safety is defined as the ratio of the yield stress to the applied stress. The yield stress of the material under uniaxial tensile load is 250 MPa. The factor of safety for the plate assuming that material failure is governed by the von Mises criterion is _________ (rounded off to two decimal places).
A prismatic vertical column of cross-section \( a \times 0.5a \) and length \( l \) is rigidly fixed at the bottom and free at the top. A compressive force \( P \) is applied along the centroidal axis at the top surface. The Young’s modulus of the material is 200 GPa and the uniaxial yield stress is 400 MPa. If the critical value of \( P \) for yielding and for buckling of the column are equal, the value of \( \frac{l}{a} \) is __________ (rounded off to one decimal place).
A uniform rigid bar of mass 3 kg is hinged at point F, and supported by a spring of stiffness \( k = 100 \, {N/m} \), as shown in the figure. The natural frequency of free vibration of the system is ___________ rad/s (answer in integer).
A jet-powered airplane is steadily climbing at a rate of 10 m/s. The air density is 0.8 kg/m³, and the thrust force is aligned with the flight path. Using the information provided in the table below, the airplane’s thrust to weight ratio is ___________ (rounded off to one decimal place). 