English Language through Literature-I — DU B. A. (Prog) English Previous Year Question Papers

4. Answers for Part A are to be written in 250-300 words and Part B in 450-500 words. Believe it or not, the Internet did not give rise to procrastination. People have struggled with habitual hesitation going back to ancient civilizations. The Greek poet Hesiod, writing around 800 B.C., cautioned not to "put your work off till tomorrow and the day after." The Roman consul Cicero called procrastination "hateful" in the conduct of affairs. (He was looking at you, Marcus Antonius.) And those are just examples from recorded history. For all we know, the dinosaurs saw the meteorite coming and went back to their game of Angry Pterodactyls. What's become quite clear since the days of Cicero is that procrastination isn't just hateful, it's downright harmful. In research settings, people who procrastinate have higher levels of stress and lower well-being. In the real world, undesired delay is often associated with inadequate retirement savings and missed medical visits. Considering the season, it would be remiss not to mention past surveys by H&R Block, which found that people cost themselves hundreds of dollars by rushing to prepare income taxes near the April 15 "What I've found is that while everybody may procrastinate, not everyone is a procrastinator," says APS Fellow Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University. He is a pioneer of modem research on the subject, and his work has found that as many as 20 percent of people may be chronic procrastinators. "It really has nothing to do with time-management," he says. "As I tell people, to tell the chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up." A major misperception about procrastination is that it's an innocuous habit at worst, and maybe even a helpful one at best. Sympathizers of procrastination often say it doesn't matter when a task gets done, so long as it's eventually finished. Some even believe they work best under pressure. Stanford philosopher John Perry, author of the book The Art of Procrastination, has argued that people can dawdle to their advantage by restructuring their to-do lists so that they're always accomplishing something of value. Psychological scientists have a serious problem with. this view. They argue that it conflates beneficial, proactive behaviors like pondering (which attempts to solve a problem) or prioritizing (which organizes a series of problems) with the detrimental, self-defeating habit of genuine procrastination. If progress on a task can take many forms, procrastination is the absence of progress. "If I have a dozen things to do, obviously #10, #11, and #12 have to wait," says Ferrari. "The real ›no procrastinator has those 12 things, maybe does one or two of them, then rewrites the list, then shuffles it around, then makes an extra copy of it. That's procrastinating. That's different." One of the first studies to document the pernicious nature of procrastination was published in