The passages given below are followed by a set of questions. Choose the most…
2025
The passages given below are followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.
Not even a three-day brainstorming session among top psychologists at the Chinese university could unravel one of the world’s greatest puzzles- how the Chinese mind ticks. Michael Bond had reason to pace the pavement of the Chinese university campus last week. The psychologists who co-ordinated and moderated a three-day seminar in Chinese psychology and most of the participants came a long way to knock heads. “If a bomb hits this building,” muttered Bond, half-seriously, “it would wipe out the whole discipline.” But the only thing that went off in the cho yiu conference hall of Chinese university was the picking of brains, the pouring out of brains and a refrain from an ongoing mantra: “more work needs to be done” or “we don’t know”. Each of the 36 participants was allowed 30 minutes plus the use of an overhead projector to condense years of research into data and theories. Their content spilled over from twenty areas of Chinese behavior, including reading, learnings, psychopathology, social interaction, personality, and modernization.
An overriding question for observers, however, was why, in this group of 21 Chinese and 15 non-Chinese, weren’t there more professionals from mainland China presenting research on the indigenous people.? Michael Philips, a psychiatrist who works in Hubei province, explained: “The cultural revolution silenced and froze the research,” said Canadian born doctor who has lived and worked in China for more than 10 years. “And 12 years later, research is underway but it is too early to have anything yet. Besides, most of the models being used are from the west anyway.” In such a specialist field, how can non-Chinese academics do research without possessing fluency in Chinese? Those who cannot read, write or speak the language usually team up with Chinese colleagues. “In ten years we won’t be able to do this. It’s a money thing”, said William Gabrenya, of Florida Institute of technology, who described himself as an illiterate gweilo who lags fluency in Chinese. He said that 93% of the non-Chinese authors in his field cannot read Chinese.
Dr. Gabrenya raised questions such as why is research dependant on all university students, why is research done on Chinese people in coastal cities?(Singapore, Taiwan, Shanghai, and Hongkong) but not Inland? “Chinese psychology is so Confucian, too neat. He's been dead for a long time. How about the guy on a motorcycle in Taipei?” Dr. Gabrenya said urging that research has a more contemporary outlook. The academics came from Israel, Sweden, Taiwan, Singapore, US, British Columbia and of course HongKong. Many of the visual aides they used by way of illustration contained eye-squinting type and cobweb-like graphs. One speaker, a sociologist from Illinois even warned her colleagues that she would not give anyone enough time, to digest the long, skinny columns of numbers. Is Chinese intelligence different from western? For half of the audience who are illiterate in Chinese, Prof. Jimmy Chan of HKU examined each of the Chinese characters for intelligence. Phrases such as “A mind as fast as an arrow” and connections between strokes for sun and the moon were made.
After his 25 mins speech, Chan and the group lamented that using western tests is the only measure available to psychologists, who are starving for indigenous studies of Chinese by Chinese. How do Chinese children learn? David Kember of Hong Kong Polytechnic University zeroed in on deep learning versus surface. Deep is when the student is sincerely interested in his own reasons. The surface is memorizing and spitting out facts. It doesn’t nurture any deep understanding. If the language of instruction happens to be the children's second language, students in Hong Kong have all sorts of challenges with English speaking teachers from Australia, Britain, and America with accents and colloquialisms. Do Westerners have more self-esteem than Chinese? Dr. Leung Kwok, Chairman of the psychology department of a Chinese university, points his finger at belief systems: the collectivist's mindset often stereotypes Chinese unfairly.
The philosophy of YUEN( a concept used to explain good and bad events which are predetermined and out of the individual's control) does not foster a positive self-concept. Neither do collectivists beliefs, such as sacrifice for the group, compromise, and importance of using connections. “If a Chinese loses or fails, he has a stronger sense of responsibility. He tends to blame it on himself. A non-Chinese from the west may blame it on forces outside himself,” Dr. Leung said. By the end of the three-day session, there were as many questions raised as answered. It was agreed there was room for further research. To the laymen, so much of the discussion was foreign and riddled with jargon and ongoing references to studies and researches. The work of the participants will resurface in a forthcoming handbook of Chinese psychology, which will be edited by Dr.Bond and published by Oxford university press
According to the passage the author suggests that:
- A.
not many people study Chinese psychology
- B.
Chinese psychology is a difficult subject to study
- C.
Chinese psychology is a difficult subject to organize.
- D.
the building is in danger of attack
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: A
Concept: In an inference-based reading comprehension question, the correct option is the claim that the passage's details directly support - even if the passage never uses those exact words - while distractors typically borrow the passage's topic or vocabulary but attach it to a claim the text never actually makes.
Application: The passage converges on one recurring point about the state of Chinese-psychology research. Michael Philips notes that the Cultural Revolution “silenced and froze” the research for over a decade, with work “underway but... too early to have anything yet.” William Gabrenya adds that 93% of the non-Chinese authors in the field cannot even read Chinese, which narrows who can contribute original research. By the close of the session, the group “lamented that using western tests is the only measure available to psychologists, who are starving for indigenous studies of Chinese by Chinese.” And the opening line itself notes only 21 Chinese participants (out of 36) presenting at a conference meant to cover the whole field. Every one of these threads points to the same fact: comparatively few people are actively producing indigenous research on Chinese psychology.
Contrast with the other options:
“Chinese psychology is a difficult subject to study” - the passage cites concrete external obstacles to conducting research (the Cultural Revolution's decade-long disruption, non-Chinese scholars' unfamiliarity with the language, reliance on borrowed Western models), but it never asserts that the topic itself is conceptually hard to grasp.
“Chinese psychology is a difficult subject to organize” - the seminar itself was tightly structured (36 speakers, each given a fixed 30-minute slot with a projector); the recurring “more work needs to be done” refrain describes gaps in existing findings, not any trouble organizing the field or the event.
“The building is in danger of attack” - Bond's bomb remark is explicitly flagged as made “half-seriously,” a wry exaggeration about how much of the discipline's expertise was concentrated in one room, not a genuine threat assessment.
So the only claim the passage's evidence directly supports is that not many people study Chinese psychology.