Sight Isolates, Sound Incorporates. Whereas Sight Situates GMAT Reading Comprehension

Reading Passage Question

Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects. Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelops me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence. This centering effect of sound is what high-fidelity and sound reproduction exploits with intense sophistication. You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight.

By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.

Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness. The consciousness of each human person is totally interiorized, known to the person from the inside and inaccessible to any other person directly from the inside. Knowledge is ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon, a striving for harmony. Without harmony, an interior condition, the psyche is in bad health.

In primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound, with no reference whatsoever to any visually perceptible text, and no awareness of even the possibility of such a text, sound enters deeply into human beings' feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life. The centering action of sound (the field of sound is not spread out before me but is all around me) affects man's sense of the cosmos. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or world, think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be explored. The ancient oral world knew few explorers, though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers and pilgrims.

It will be seen that most of the characteristics of orally-based thought and expression relate intimately to the unifying, centralizing, interiorizing economy of sound as perceived by human beings. A sound-dominated verbal economy is consonant with aggregative (harmonizing) tendencies rather than with analytic, dissecting tendencies (which would come with the inscribed, visualized word: vision is a dissecting sense). It is consonant also with the conservative holism (the homeostatic present that must be kept intact), with situational thinking (again, holistic, with human action at the center) rather than abstract thinking.

“Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates”- is a reading comprehension exercise for the GMAT. Candidates must be extremely skilled in GMAT reading comprehension. This GMAT reading comprehension section contains 4 comprehension questions. The GMAT Reading Comprehension questions are designed to assess candidates' ability to comprehend, analyzation, and application skills. GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Questions can help candidates who are actively preparing.

Solutions and Explanation

1. Which of the following sentences best expresses the general claim advanced in this passage?

1. Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness.
2. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center.
3. A sound-dominated verbal economy is consonant with aggregative tendencies; a vision-dominated verbal economy produces analytic tendencies.
4. The consciousness of every human being is wholly interiorized.
5. Knowledge is ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon.

2. A homeostatic present is one that is:

1. continuous
2. stable
3. interiorized
4. passive
5. inverted

3. Which of the inferences below may most appropriately be derived from the information in this passage?

1. Sight is fundamental to knowledge, for it situates the observer outside what he views.
2. Sight is fundamental to knowledge, for it foregrounds the object to be examined against its background.
3. Sound is fundamental to knowledge, for it shares with consciousness features of interiority and harmony.
4. Sound is fundamental to knowledge, for human consciousness is inaccessible to any other person.
5. Sight is fundamental to knowledge, for it makes possible abstract thought as distinct from holistic thought.

4. According to the passage, which of the following does not characterize the effects produced by reliance upon sound?

1. simultaneity
2. centering
3. harmony
4. situational thinking
5. dissecting tendencies

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