SSC CHSL Typing Test 20

Time Left: 10:00

My father owns one photo of Mikhail, Petya, and myself together. It was taken by our mother. She was no photographer. The three of us are arranged by height on our dock over the river. We seem to be smelling something unpleasant. It's from the summer our father was determined to teach us proper diving form. He'd followed the Olympics from Mexico City on our radio, and the exploits of the East German Fischer had filled him with ambition for his boys. But our dock had been too low, and so he'd called it the Zero Meter Diving Platform. The bottom where we dove was marshy and shallow and frightened us. "What are you frightened of?" he said to us. "I'm not frightened. Boris, are you frightened?" "I'm not frightened," I told him, though my brothers knew I was. I was ten and imagined myself his ally. Petya was five. Mikhail was seven. Both are weeping in the photo, their hands on their thighs. Sometimes at night when our mother was still alive our father would walk the ridge above us, to see the moon on the river, he said. He would shout off into the darkness: he was Victor Grigoryevich Prushinsky, director of the Physico-Energy Institute. While she was alive, that was the way our mother—Mikhail's and my mother—introduced him. Petya's mother didn't introduce him to anyone. Officially, Petya was our full brother, but at home our father called him Half-life. He said it was a physicist's joke. "Give your brother your potatoes," he would order Petya. And poor little Petya would shovel his remaining potatoes onto Mikhail's plate. During their fights, Mikhail would say to him things like, "Your hair seems different than ours. Don't you think?" So there was a murderousness to our play. We went on rampages around the dacha, chopping at each other with sticks and clearing swaths in the lilacs and wildflowers in mock battles. And our father would thrash us. He used an ash switch. Four strokes for me, then three for Mikhail, and I was expected to apply the fourth. Then three for Petya, and Mikhail was expected to apply the fourth. Our faces were terrible to behold. We always applied the final stroke as though we wanted to outdo the first three. When calm, he quoted to us Strugatsky's dictum that reason was the ability to use the powers of the surrounding world without ruining that world. Striped with welts and lying on our bellies on our beds, we tinted his formulation with our own colorations of fury and misery. Twenty-five years later, that same formulation would appear in my report to the nuclear power secretary of the Central Committee concerning the catastrophic events at the power station at Chernobyl.

Time Left: 10:00

The machine age gives us year by year more hours of leisure but it fails to teach us how to use them. It gives us mechanical habits of mind and represses the spirit to adventure-except along machine-made lines. We will need all our creative powers to think our way our of the social problems which science has created for us. It is science that has given us the unexpected redistribution of the age groups. Almost every year, some modem drug adds a little more to the average span of life, until the upper group is overcrowded. In the United States, for instance, there are already nine million people 1950's. In fifteen years' time, this number will reach the astonishing figure of forty-five million. Who is to keep them? It will need some readjustment. And so, science goes on raising its problems. Compared with our fundamental question-What is Life? These problems may seem to be of less importance. But they are not really so. What is happening is that science is creating problems faster than they can be solved. Man is struggling in a sort of vicious circle, always striving to catch up and never getting nearer. And there are no signs that the glut of discoveries is coming to an end. War is the most example; Science has pushed it so far forward that ethics and morals are floundering hopelessly behind. It makes one sometimes ask: What is science really after? What are its aims? What is its goal? Its aims seem to be obvious. They are material, of course. One aim is the complete understanding, indeed the conquest, of man's environment; the conquest of everything material, big or small, bringing all powers within man's reach. The order aim is the understanding of all the mysteries that lie within the human body-the material mysteries, the innumerable chemical and physical actions that make the body work. If these are the apparent aims of science, surely, they cannot represent the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal, if there is such a thing, must be the understanding of everything that makes life worthwhile, the enrichment of all that if life means. That goes beyond material things; for man needs more than food and shelter and clothing and the understanding of what goes on within his stomach. The machine age gives us year by year more hours of leisure but it fails to teach us how to use them. It gives us mechanical habits of mind and represses the spirit to adventure-except along machine-made lines. We will need all our creative powers to think our way our of the social problems which science has created for us. It is science that has given us the unexpected redistribution of the age groups. Almost every year, some modem drug adds a little more to the average span of life, until the upper group is overcrowded. In the United States, for instance, there are already nine million people 1950's. In fifteen years' time, this number will reach the astonishing figure of forty-five million. Who is to keep them? It will need some readjustment. And so, science goes on raising its problems. Compared with our fundamental question-What is Life? These problems may seem to be of less importance. But they are not really so. What is happening is that science is creating problems faster than they can be solved. Man is struggling in a sort of vicious circle, always striving to catch up and never getting nearer. And there are no signs that the glut of discoveries is coming to an end. War is the most example; Science has pushed it so far forward that ethics and morals are floundering hopelessly behind. It makes one sometimes ask: What is science really after? What are its aims? What is its goal? Its aims seem to be obvious. They are material, of course. One aim is the complete understanding, indeed the conquest, of man's environment; the conquest of everything material, big or small, bringing all powers within man's reach. The order aim is the understanding of all the mysteries that lie within the human body-the material mysteries, the innumerable chemical and physical actions that make the body work. If these are the apparent aims of science, surely, they cannot represent the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal, if there is such a thing, must be the understanding of everything that makes life worthwhile, the enrichment of all that if life means. That goes beyond material things; for man needs more than food and shelter and clothing and the understanding of what goes on within his stomach.