The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

Lyric poetry is a genre of private meditation rather than public commitment. The impulse in Marxism toward changing a society deemed unacceptable in its basic design would seem to place demands on lyric poetry that such poetry, with its tendency toward the personal, the small scale, and the idiosyncratic, could never answer. There is within Marxism, however, also a strand of thought that would locate in lyric poetry alternative modes of perception and description that call forth a vision of worlds at odds with a repressive reality or that draw attention to the workings of ideology within the hegemonic culture. The poetic imagination may indeed deflect larger social concerns, but it may also be implicitly critical and utopian.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

The dominant hypotheses in modern science believe that language evolved to allow humans to exchange factual information about the physical world. But an alternative view is that language evolved, in modern humans at least, to facilitate social bonding. It increased our ancestors' chances of survival by enabling them to hunt more successfully or to cooperate more extensively. Language meant that things could be explained and that plans and past experiences could be shared efficiently.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

Foreign peacekeepers often exist in a bubble in the poor countries in which they are deployed; they live in posh compounds, drive fancy vehicles, and distance themselves from locals. This may be partially justified as they are outsiders, living in constant fear, performing a job that is emotionally draining. But they are often despised by the locals, and many would like them to leave. A better solution would be bottom-up peace building, which would involve their spending more time working with communities, understanding their grievances and earning their trust, rather than only meeting government officials.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

Certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed – the effect of an articulation between sign and referent – but to be 'naturally' given. Simple visual signs appear to have achieved a 'near-universality' in this sense: though evidence remains that even apparently 'natural' visual codes are culture specific. However, this does not mean that no codes have intervened; rather, that the codes have been profoundly naturalized. The operation of naturalized codes reveals not the transparency and 'naturalness' of language but the depth, the habituation and the near-universality of the codes in use. They produce apparently 'natural' recognitions. This has the (ideological) effect of concealing the practices of coding which are present.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

The human mind is wired to see patterns. Not only does the brain process information as it comes in, it also stores insights from all our past experiences. Every interaction, happy or sad, is catalogued in our memory. Intuition draws from that deep memory well to inform our decisions going forward. In other words, intuitive decisions are based on data, and not contrary to data as many would like to assume. When we subconsciously spot patterns, the body starts firing neuro chemicals in both the brain and gut. These "somatic markers" are what give us that instant sense that something is right or that it's off. Not only are these automatic processes faster than rational thought, but our intuition draws from decades of diverse qualitative experience (sights, sounds, interactions, etc.) a wholly human feature that big data alone could never accomplish.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

Manipulating information was a feature of history long before modern journalism established rules of integrity. A record dates back to ancient Rome, when Antony met Cleopatra and his political enemy Octavian launched a smear campaign against him with "short, sharp slogans written upon coins." The perpetrator became the first Roman Emperor and "fake news had allowed Octavian to hack the republican system once and for all". But the 21st century has seen the weaponization of information on an unprecedented scale. Powerful new technology makes the fabrication of content simple, and social networks amplify falsehoods peddled by States, populist politicians, and dishonest corporate entities. The platforms have become fertile ground for computational propaganda, 'trolling' and 'troll armies'.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

It's not that modern historians of medieval Africa have been ignorant about contacts between Ethiopia and Europe; they just had the power dynamic reversed. The traditional narrative stressed Ethiopia as weak and in trouble in the face of aggression from external forces, so Ethiopia sought military assistance from their fellow Christians to the north. But the real story, buried in plain sight in medieval diplomatic texts, simply had not yet been put together by modern scholars. Recent research pushes scholars of medieval Europe to imagine a much more richly connected medieval world: at the beginning of the so-called Age of Exploration, there is evidence that the kings of Ethiopia were sponsoring their own missions of diplomacy, faith and commerce.