Directions: You have one brief passage with 5 questions following the passage. Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.

Faith in progress is deep within our culture. We have been taught to believe that our lives are better than the lives of those who came before us. The ideology of modern economics suggests that material progress has yielded enhanced satisfaction and well-being. But much of our confidence about our own well-being comes from the assumption that our lives are easier than those of earlier generations.
The lives of the so-called primitive peoples are thought to be harsh–their existence dominated by the ‘incessant quest for food’. In fact, primitives did very little work. By contemporary standards we’d have to judge them very lazy.
The key to understanding why these ‘stone-age people’ failed to act like us – increasing their work effort to get more things–is that they had limited desires. In the race between wanting and having, they had kept their wanting low–and, in this way ensured their own kind of satisfaction. They were materially poor by contemporary standards, but in at least one dimension– time–we have to count them richer.

Q:

What does the writer attribute to modern economics? 

• 1
  That material progress leads to higher satisfaction and well-being.
• 2
  That it forces us to assume progress.
• 3
  That our lives are easier than before.
• 4
  The progress is a natural process.