Comprehension
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
When we teach engineering problems now, we ask students to come to a single “best” solution defined by technical ideals like low cost, speed to build, and ability to scale. This way of teaching primes students to believe that their decision-making is purely objective, as it is grounded in math and science. This is known as technical-social dualism, the idea that the technical and social dimensions of engineering problems are readily separable and remain distinct throughout the problem-definition and solution process.
Nontechnical parameters such as access to a technology, cultural relevancy or potential harms are deemed political and invalid in this way of learning. But those technical ideals are at their core social and political choices determined by a dominant culture focused on economic growth for the most privileged segments of society. By choosing to downplay public welfare as a critical parameter for engineering design, we risk creating a culture of disengagement from societal concerns amongst engineers that is antithetical to the ethical code of engineering.
In my field of medical devices, ignoring social dimensions has real consequences. . . . Most FDA-approved drugs are incorrectly dosed for people assigned female at birth, leading to unexpected adverse reactions. This is because they have been inadequately represented in clinical trials.
Beyond physical failings, subjective beliefs treated as facts by those in decision-making roles can encode social inequities. For example, spirometers, routinely used devices that measure lung capacity, still have correction factors that automatically assume smaller lung capacity in Black and Asian individuals. These racially based adjustments are derived from research done by eugenicists who thought these racial differences were biologically determined and who considered nonwhite people as inferior. These machines ignore the influence of social and environmental factors on lung capacity.
Many technologies for systemically marginalized people have not been built because they were not deemed important such as better early diagnostics and treatment for diseases like endometriosis, a disease that afflicts 10 percent of people with uteruses. And we hardly question whether devices are built sustainably, which has led to a crisis of medical waste and health care accounting for 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Social justice must be made core to the way engineers are trained. Some universities are working on this. . . . Engineers taught this way will be prepared to think critically about what problems we choose to solve, how we do so responsibly and how we build teams that challenge our ways of thinking.
Individual engineering professors are also working to embed societal needs in their pedagogy. Darshan Karwat at the University of Arizona developed activist engineering to challenge engineers to acknowledge their full moral and social responsibility through practical self-reflection. Khalid Kadir at the University of California, Berkeley, created the popular course Engineering, Environment, and Society that teaches engineers how to engage in place-based knowledge, an understanding of the people, context and history, to design better technical approaches in collaboration with communities. When we design and build with equity and justice in mind, we craft better solutions that respond to the complexities of entrenched systemic problems.
When we teach engineering problems now, we ask students to come to a single “best” solution defined by technical ideals like low cost, speed to build, and ability to scale. This way of teaching primes students to believe that their decision-making is purely objective, as it is grounded in math and science. This is known as technical-social dualism, the idea that the technical and social dimensions of engineering problems are readily separable and remain distinct throughout the problem-definition and solution process.
Nontechnical parameters such as access to a technology, cultural relevancy or potential harms are deemed political and invalid in this way of learning. But those technical ideals are at their core social and political choices determined by a dominant culture focused on economic growth for the most privileged segments of society. By choosing to downplay public welfare as a critical parameter for engineering design, we risk creating a culture of disengagement from societal concerns amongst engineers that is antithetical to the ethical code of engineering.
In my field of medical devices, ignoring social dimensions has real consequences. . . . Most FDA-approved drugs are incorrectly dosed for people assigned female at birth, leading to unexpected adverse reactions. This is because they have been inadequately represented in clinical trials.
Beyond physical failings, subjective beliefs treated as facts by those in decision-making roles can encode social inequities. For example, spirometers, routinely used devices that measure lung capacity, still have correction factors that automatically assume smaller lung capacity in Black and Asian individuals. These racially based adjustments are derived from research done by eugenicists who thought these racial differences were biologically determined and who considered nonwhite people as inferior. These machines ignore the influence of social and environmental factors on lung capacity.
Many technologies for systemically marginalized people have not been built because they were not deemed important such as better early diagnostics and treatment for diseases like endometriosis, a disease that afflicts 10 percent of people with uteruses. And we hardly question whether devices are built sustainably, which has led to a crisis of medical waste and health care accounting for 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Social justice must be made core to the way engineers are trained. Some universities are working on this. . . . Engineers taught this way will be prepared to think critically about what problems we choose to solve, how we do so responsibly and how we build teams that challenge our ways of thinking.
Individual engineering professors are also working to embed societal needs in their pedagogy. Darshan Karwat at the University of Arizona developed activist engineering to challenge engineers to acknowledge their full moral and social responsibility through practical self-reflection. Khalid Kadir at the University of California, Berkeley, created the popular course Engineering, Environment, and Society that teaches engineers how to engage in place-based knowledge, an understanding of the people, context and history, to design better technical approaches in collaboration with communities. When we design and build with equity and justice in mind, we craft better solutions that respond to the complexities of entrenched systemic problems.
Question: 1
We can infer that the author would approve of a more evolved engineering pedagogy that includes all of the following EXCEPT:
We can infer that the author would approve of a more evolved engineering pedagogy that includes all of the following EXCEPT:
Updated On: Jul 26, 2025
- moving towards technical-social dualism where social community needs are incorporated in problem-definition and solutions.
- design that is based on the needs of communities using local knowledge and responding to local priorities.
- making considerations of environmental sustainability intrinsic to the development of technological solutions.
- a more responsible approach to technical design and problem-solving than a focus on speed in developing and bringing to scale.
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The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
The solution to this problem requires understanding the author's perspective on the limitations of current engineering pedagogy and what an evolved approach would encompass. The passage critiques technical-social dualism by explaining how traditional methods fail to integrate social considerations into engineering design. The author advocates for integrating social justice and societal needs into engineering education.
When analyzing the options, it's important to identify which one does not align with the author's advocated pedagogical evolution. The correct answer is moving towards technical-social dualism where social community needs are incorporated in problem-definition and solutions. This option describes the current criticized practice wherein technical and social dimensions are considered separate. The other options support the desired integration of social and environmental considerations into engineering education:
| 1. | Design based on communities' needs and local knowledge aligns with incorporating societal input. |
| 2. | Making environmental sustainability a priority aligns with a more responsible engineering approach. |
| 3. | Focusing on responsible technical design over speed aligns with considering broader impacts and responsibilities. |
Therefore, the author would not approve of continuing the practice of technical-social dualism, making the first option the correct exception.
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Question: 2
All of the following are examples of the negative outcomes of focusing on technical ideals in the medical sphere EXCEPT the:
All of the following are examples of the negative outcomes of focusing on technical ideals in the medical sphere EXCEPT the:
Updated On: Jul 26, 2025
- continuing calibration of medical devices based on past racial biases that have remained unadjusted for changes.
- incorrect assignment of people as female at birth which has resulted in faulty drug interventions.
- neglect of research and development of medical technologies for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases that typically afflict marginalised communities.
- exclusion of non-privileged groups in clinical trials which leads to incorrect drug dosages.
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The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
The question asks which option is not a negative outcome of focusing on technical ideals in the medical sphere. We examine each option in relation to the passage:
Continuing calibration of medical devices based on past racial biases that have remained unadjusted for changes: The passage discusses spirometers with racially biased adjustments, highlighting this as a negative outcome.
Incorrect assignment of people as female at birth which has resulted in faulty drug interventions: While the passage addresses issues with drug interventions due to inadequate representation, it does not relate this directly to the assignment of gender at birth but rather the broader issue of dosing based on inaccurate clinical trials. The incorrect assignment here is unrelated to the core negative outcomes discussed.
Neglect of research and development of medical technologies for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases that typically afflict marginalised communities: The neglect of certain diseases, such as endometriosis, is specifically mentioned in the passage as a negative outcome.
Exclusion of non-privileged groups in clinical trials which leads to incorrect drug dosages: This directly aligns with the passage's point on inadequate representation in clinical trials resulting in adverse drug reactions.
Thus, the correct answer is option 2: incorrect assignment of people as female at birth which has resulted in faulty drug interventions.
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Question: 3
The author gives all of the following reasons for why marginalised people are systematically discriminated against in technology-related interventions EXCEPT:
The author gives all of the following reasons for why marginalised people are systematically discriminated against in technology-related interventions EXCEPT:
Updated On: Jul 26, 2025
- “And we hardly question whether devices are built sustainably, which has led to a crisis of medical waste and health care accounting for 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”
- “But those technical ideals are at their core social and political choices determined by a dominant culture focused on economic growth for the most privileged segments of society.”
- “These racially based adjustments are derived from research done by eugenicists who thought these racial differences were biologically determined and who considered nonwhite people as inferior.”
- “Beyond physical failings, subjective beliefs treated as facts by those in decision-making roles can encode social inequities.”
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The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
The question asks which reason the author does not include as a cause of systemic discrimination against marginalized people in technology-related interventions. Each option provided is a statement from the original passage, and only one of them does not relate directly to justification or description of discrimination.
The passage discusses various ways marginalized people face discrimination through the technology intervention process. It mentions:
The passage discusses various ways marginalized people face discrimination through the technology intervention process. It mentions:
- Technical ideals as social and political choices favoring privileged segments of society and neglecting public welfare.
- Biased clinical trials and the resulting medication dosages leading to health disparities.
- Use of spirometers with racially biased correction factors resulting from inaccurate scientific beliefs.
- The lack of attention to engineering for marginalized groups and impactful problems like endometriosis.
“And we hardly question whether devices are built sustainably, which has led to a crisis of medical waste and health care accounting for 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”
This statement focuses on sustainability and environmental concerns rather than directly explaining how marginalized groups face discrimination in technological applications.Was this answer helpful?
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Question: 4
In this passage, the author is making the claim that:
In this passage, the author is making the claim that:
Updated On: Jul 26, 2025
- technical-social dualism has emerged as a technique for engineering students to incorporate social considerations into their technical problem-solving processes.
- engineering students today are trained to be non-subjective in their reasoning as this best enables them to develop much-needed universal solutions.
- the objective of best solutions in engineering has shifted the focus of pedagogy from humanism and social obligations to technological perfection.
- engineering students today are taught to focus on objective technical outcomes, independent of the social dimensions of their work.
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The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
The passage discusses the contemporary approach to engineering education, where students are trained to focus on finding a single "best" solution relying on technical criteria such as low cost, scalability, and speed. This training method results in a technical-social dualism that separates technical outcomes from social considerations, which are often dismissed as political or invalid. The passage argues that this focus on technical ideals neglects the social and political choices underlying those standards, leading to a disengagement from societal concerns and ethical codes within engineering. It highlights the real-world consequences of ignoring social dimensions in engineering, such as medical inequities and technological disregard for marginalized communities. To address these issues, it advocates for incorporating social justice into engineering education, with some universities and educators already taking steps to integrate societal needs into their curricula.
From the passage, we ascertain that the author's main claim is: engineering students today are taught to focus on objective technical outcomes, independent of the social dimensions of their work.
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Top Questions on Science and Culture
- The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
Nature has all along yielded her flesh to humans. First,we took nature's materials as food, fibers and shelter. Then we learned to extract raw materials from her biosphere to create our own new synthetic materials. Now Bios is yielding us her mind-we are taking her logic.
Clockwork logic-the logic of the machines-will only build simple contraptions. Truly complex systems such as a cell,a meadow,an economy or a brain (natural or artificial) require a rigorous nontechnological logic. We now see that no logic except bio-logic can assemble a thinking device, or even a workable system of any magnitude.
It is an astounding discovery that one can extract the logic of Bios out of biology and have something useful. Although many philosophers in the past have suspected one could abstract the laws of life and apply them elsewhere, it wasn't until the complexity of computers and human-made systems became as complicated as living things,that it was possible to prove this. It's eerie how much of life can be transferred. So far,some of the traits of the living that have successfully been transported to mechanical systems are: self-replication,self-governance, limited self-repair,mild evolution, and partial learning.
We have reason to believe yet more can be synthesized and made into something new. Yet at the same time that the logic of Bios is being imported into machines, the logic of Technos is being imported into life. The root of bioengineering is the desire to control the organic long enough to improve it. Domesticated plants and animals are examples of technos-logic applied to life. The wild aromatic root of the Queen Anne's lace weed has been fine-tuned over generations by selective herb gatherers until it has evolved into a sweet carrot of the garden; the udders of wild bovines have been selectively enlarged in a "unnatural" way to satisfy humans rather than calves. Milk cows and carrots,therefore, are human inventions as much as steam engines and gunpowder are. But milk cows and carrots are more indicative of the kind of inventions humans will make in the future: products that are grown rather than manufactured.
Genetic engineering is precisely what cattle breeders do when they select better strains of Holsteins,only bioengineers employ more precise and powerful control. While carrot and milk cow breeders had to rely on diffuse organic evolution,modern genetic engineers can use directed artificial evolution-purposeful design-which greatly accelerates improvements.
The overlap of the mechanical and the lifelike increases year by year. Part of this bionic convergence is a matter of words. The meanings of "mechanical" and "life" are both stretching until all complicated things can be perceived as machines, and all self-sustaining machines can be perceived as alive. Yet beyond semantics, two concrete trends are happening: (1) Human-made things are behaving more lifelike, and (2) Life is becoming more engineered. The apparent veil between the organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two really are, and have always been, of one being.- CAT - 2022
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Science and Culture
- The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
As software improves,the people using it become less likely to sharpen their own know-how. Applications that offer lots of prompts and tips are often to blame; simpler,less solicitous programs push people harder to think, act and learn.
Ten years ago, information scientists at Utrecht University in the Netherlands had a group of people carry out complicated analytical and planning tasks using either rudimentary software that provided no assistance or sophisticated software that offered a great deal of aid. The researchers found that the people using the simple software developed better strategies,made fewer mistakes and developed a deeper aptitude for the work. The people using the more advanced software,meanwhile, would often "aimlessly click around" when confronted with a tricky problem. The supposedly helpful software actually short-circuited their thinking and learning.
[According to] philosopher Hubert Dreyfus.....our skills get sharper only through practice, when we use them regularly to overcome different sorts of difficult challenges. The goal of modern software,by contrast,is to ease our way through such challenges. Arduous, painstaking work is exactly what programmers are most eager to automate-after all, that is where the immediate efficiency gains tend to lie. In other words,a fundamental tension ripples between the interests of the people doing the automation and the interests of the people doing the work.
Nevertheless, automation's scope continues to widen. With the rise of electronic health records,physicians increasingly rely on software templates to guide them through patient exams. The programs incorporate valuable checklists and alerts,but they also make medicine more routinized and formulaic-and distance doctors from their patients.....Harvard Medical School professor Beth Lown,in a 2012 journal article....warned that when doctors become "screen-driven," following a computer's prompts rather than "the patient's narrative thread," their thinking can become constricted. In the worst cases,they may miss important diagnostic signals.....
In a recent paper published in the journal Diagnosis, three medical researchers.....examined the misdiagnosis of Thomas Eric Duncan,the first person to die of Ebola in the U.S., at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. They argue that the digital templates used by the hospital's clinicians to record patient information probably helped to induce a kind of tunnel vision. "These highly constrained tools," the researchers write, "are optimized for data capture but at the expense of sacrificing their utility for appropriate triage and diagnosis, leading users to miss the forest for the trees." Medical software,they write is no "replacement for basic history-taking, examination skills and critical thinking."....
There is an alternative. In "human-centered automation," the talents of people take precedence....In this model,software plays an essential but secondary role. It takes over routine functions that a human operator has already mastered,issues alerts when unexpected situations arise,provides fresh information that expands the operator's perspective and counters the biases that often distort human thinking. The technology becomes the expert's partner,not the expert's replacement.- CAT - 2022
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Science and Culture
- The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question. [Octopuses are] misfits in their own extended families . . . They belong to the Mollusca class Cephalopoda. But they don’t look like their cousins at all. Other molluscs include sea snails, sea slugs, bivalves – most are shelled invertebrates with a dorsal foot. Cephalopods are all arms, and can be as tiny as 1 centimetre and as large at 30 feet. Some of them have brains the size of a walnut, which is large for an invertebrate. . . . It makes sense for these molluscs to have added protection in the form of a higher cognition; they don’t have a shell covering them, and pretty much everything feeds on cephalopods, including humans. But how did cephalopods manage to secure their own invisibility cloak? Cephalopods fire from multiple cylinders to achieve this in varying degrees from species to species. There are four main catalysts – chromatophores, iridophores, papillae and leucophores. . . .
[Chromatophores] are organs on their bodies that contain pigment sacs, which have red, yellow and brown pigment granules. These sacs have a network of radial muscles, meaning muscles arranged in a circle radiating outwards. These are connected to the brain by a nerve.
When the cephalopod wants to change colour, the brain carries an electrical impulse through the nerve to the muscles that expand outwards, pulling open the sacs to display the colours on the skin. Why these three colours? Because these are the colours the light reflects at the depths they live in (the rest is absorbed before it reaches those depths). . . .
Well, what about other colours? Cue the iridophores. Think of a second level of skin that has thin stacks of cells. These can reflect light back at different wavelengths. . . . It’s using the same properties that we’ve seen in hologram stickers, or rainbows on puddles of oil. You move your head and you see a different colour. The sticker isn’t doing anything but reflecting light – it’s your movement that’s changing the appearance of the colour. This property of holograms, oil and other such surfaces is called “iridescence”. . . .
Papillae are sections of the skin that can be deformed to make a texture bumpy. Even humans possess them (goosebumps) but cannot use them in the manner that cephalopods can. For instance, the use of these cells is how an octopus can wrap itself over a rock and appear jagged or how a squid or cuttlefish can imitate the look of a coral reef by growing miniature towers on its skin. It actually matches the texture of the substrate it chooses.
Finally, the leucophores: According to a paper, published in Nature, cuttlefish and octopuses possess an additional type of reflector cell called a leucophore. They are cells that scatter full spectrum light so that they appear white in a similar way that a polar bear’s fur appears white. Leucophores will also reflect any filtered light shown on them . . . If the water appears blue at a certain depth, the octopuses and cuttlefish can appear blue; if the water appears green, they appear green, and so on and so forth.- CAT - 2022
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Science and Culture
- The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question. Critical theory of technology is a political theory of modernity with a normative dimension. It belongs to a tradition extending from Marx to Foucault and Habermas according to which advances in the formal claims of human rights take center stage while in the background centralization of ever more powerful public institutions and private organizations imposes an authoritarian social order. Marx attributed this trajectory to the capitalist rationalization of production. Today it marks many institutions besides the factory and every modern political system, including so-called socialist systems. This trajectory arose from the problems of command over a disempowered and deskilled labor force; but everywhere [that] masses are organized – whether it be Foucault’s prisons or Habermas’s public sphere – the same pattern prevails. Technological design and development is shaped by this pattern as the material base of a distinctive social order. Marcuse would later point to a “project” as the basis of what he called rather confusingly “technological rationality.” Releasing technology from this project is a democratic political task. In accordance with this general line of thought, critical theory of technology regards technologies as an environment rather than as a collection of tools. We live today with and even within technologies that determine our way of life. Along with the constant pressures to build centers of power, many other social values and meanings are inscribed in technological design. A hermeneutics of technology must make explicit the meanings implicit in the devices we use and the rituals they script. Social histories of technologies such as the bicycle, artificial lighting or firearms have made important contributions to this type of analysis. Critical theory of technology attempts to build a methodological approach on the lessons of these histories. As an environment, technologies shape their inhabitants. In this respect, they are comparable to laws and customs. Each of these institutions can be said to represent those who live under their sway through privileging certain dimensions of their human nature. Laws of property represent the interest in ownership and control. Customs such as parental authority represent the interest of childhood in safety and growth. Similarly, the automobile represents its users in so far as they are interested in mobility. Interests such as these constitute the version of human nature sanctioned by society. This notion of representation does not imply an eternal human nature. The concept of nature as non-identity in the Frankfurt School suggests an alternative. On these terms, nature is what lies at the limit of history, at the point at which society loses the capacity to imprint its meanings on things and control them effectively. The reference here is, of course, not to the nature of natural science, but to the lived nature in which we find ourselves and which we are. This nature reveals itself as that which cannot be totally encompassed by the machinery of society. For the Frankfurt School, human nature, in all its transcending force, emerges out of a historical context as that context is [depicted] in illicit joys, struggles and pathologies. We can perhaps admit a less romantic . . . conception in which those dimensions of human nature recognized by society are also granted theoretical legitimacy.
- CAT - 2022
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Science and Culture
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