The passage given below is followed by a set of three questions.
Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.
Does the end justify the means? This question occurred to me when I read that Alberto Fujimori, former
president of Peru, had been sentenced to seven and a half years' imprisonment for corruption, to run
concurrently with the twenty-five years he is already serving for abuse of human rights.
As it happens, I was in Peru during the election that first brought Fujimori to power. His opponent was the
world-famous novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, who I, like many others, assumed would win. He was highly
intelligent, extremely eloquent, had a clear idea of what was needed for Peru to emerge from its current
nightmare, and he was standing for election out of patriotism and for the good of his country. He had
nothing to prove, nothing to gain; it is rare indeed to encounter a candidate so transparently unmotivated by
personal goals.
Fujimori won. I hadn't appreciated just how much his obscurity might help him, so great was the
disillusionment in the country with national figures. Fujimori was a distinguished academic agronomist, but
you could be the most famous agronomist in the world and still live in the most perfect obscurity. One
Peruvian peasant captured the mood perfectly when asked why he had voted for Fujimori. 'Because I didn't
know anything about him,' he replied. In other words, every man's past disqualifies him from high public
office.
The Peru that Fujimori inherited was in terrible condition. Inflation was so rapid that you couldn't buy
anything of any value in the local currency: you had to use dollars. But inflation was not the worst or
greatest of Peru's worries. That honour belonged to Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the Maoist insurgency
that at the time controlled quite a lot of the national territory. I was convinced that, if Sendero won, there
would be another Cambodia in Peru: tyranny on a much larger scale.
The history of Sendero was instructive, from two points of view. First, it destroys the notion that such
revolutionary movements are the direct and spontaneous product of the grievances of the poor. The second
is that it illustrates the dangerous folly of expanding tertiary education as a means of economic development
rather than as a consequence of economic development.
The founder of Sendero was the professor of philosophy at Ayacucho University, Abimael Guzman, known
to his acolytes as Presidente Gonzalo. His ideas were the application of Maoism to Peru and were
collectively as Gonzalo Thought. He was the object of a grotesque cult of personality.
Ayacucho University itself had been in abeyance since the seventeenth century; the Peruvian government
thought to revive it as a means of developing the economy of the local area, one of the poorest and most
backward in the country, and bringing to it a modicum of social progress. What it brought instead was a
Peruvian Pol Pot (who had written his thesis on Kant), who was easily able to influence and indoctrinate
young men and women who were the first generation ever to receive tertiary education, and who were the
scions of an immemorially oppressed people.
40. What can you infer about the candidates for elections in Peru from the author's observations about
them?
(a) Most of them lived in obscurity before the elections.
(b) A candidate's past disqualified him from political office.
(c) In Peru, all the candidates other than Mario Vargas were motivated by personal goals.
(d) Fujimori won because he was a famous agronomist.
41. The author is most likely to agree with which of the following with regard to tertiary education?
(a) A government should focus on various tertiary education programmes to help in a country's
development.
(b) Unless a government focuses on tertiary education, it cannot hope to develop.
(c) It makes sense to expand tertiary education programmes only when a country is economically
developed.
(d) Tertiary education is only a means to the end that is economic development.
42. What can be inferred about the author's feelings about Sendero not winning?
(a) The author was disappointed and disillusioned that an honest man standing for elections out of
patriotism was defeated.
(b) The author was amused that a man's past disqualified him from public office.
(c) The author felt bitter that a famous agronomist could live in perfect obscurity.
(d) The author was relieved that a man who had the makings of a dictator had lost.
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