English Test 99
Directions for Questions from 1 to 5:
Go through the passage below and answer the question that follow.
This confusion concerns nothing less than the concept of socialism itself. It may mean, and is often
used to describe, merely the ideals of social justice, greater equality and security which are the ultimate aims of socialism. But it means also the
particular method by which most socialists hope to attain these ends and which many competent people regard as the only methods by which they
can be fully and quickly attained. In this sense socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production,
and the creation of a system of “planned economy” in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.
There are many people who call themselves socialists although they care only about the first, who fervently believe in those ultimate aims of
socialism but neither care nor understand how they can be achieved, and who are merely certain they must be achieved, whatever the cost. But to
nearly all those to whom socialism is not merely a hope but an object of practical politics, the characteristic methods of modern socialism are as
essential as the ends themselves. Most people, on the other hand, who value the ultimate ends of socialism no less than the socialists, refuse to
support socialism because of the dangers to other values they see in the methods proposed by the socialists. The dispute about socialism has thus
become largely a dispute about means and
not about ends—although the question whether the different ends of socialism can be simultaneously achieved is also involved.
This would be enough to create confusion. And the confusion has been further increased by the
common practice of denying that those who repudiate the means value the ends. But this is not all. The situation is still more complicated by the
fact that the same means, the “economic planning” which is the prime instrument for socialist reform, c