Précis Practice Set — 3 Timed Passages with Model Answers

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Rules for each passage: 30 minutes, one paragraph, ⅓ length, your own words, title on top, word count at the end. Only open the model after you've written yours, then compare line by line: Did I keep the thesis? Did I copy any phrase? Did I keep an example?

Passage 1 — Freedom (≈270 words → target ≈90)

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Freedom is commonly imagined as the absence of restraint, the condition of a person who may do whatever he pleases. Yet a moment's reflection shows how thin this idea is. A man who is ruled by every appetite, who eats whatever tempts him and speaks whatever anger dictates, is not free in any meaningful sense; he is the servant of impulses he did not choose. True freedom begins only when a person can govern himself, when he can weigh a desire against his larger purposes and decline it if necessary. In this sense discipline is not the enemy of liberty but its foundation. What holds for individuals holds also for nations. A society that demands rights while refusing duties soon discovers that its rights are hollow, for rights exist only where others are willing to respect them. Free speech means little if no one is prepared to listen; free elections mean little if voters sell their ballots; the rule of law means nothing if every citizen regards himself as the exception. The history of many new nations shows the pattern clearly: independence won with great sacrifice was squandered when the habits of self-restraint that liberty requires failed to take root. Freedom, then, is less a gift to be received than an achievement to be sustained. Each generation must learn afresh that the right to choose carries with it the obligation to choose well, and that a people unable to govern itself will sooner or later be governed by someone else.

• ✅ Model

  Title: Freedom Rests on Self-Discipline

  Freedom is wrongly equated with unrestrained licence. A person driven by every impulse is enslaved rather than free, for real liberty rests on self-control — the ability to subordinate desires to higher aims. Nations are no different: rights become meaningless when citizens neglect the duties that sustain them, since rights depend on mutual respect. Many newly independent states lost hard-won freedom because they never cultivated the discipline it demands. Freedom must therefore be continually earned; each generation must accept that the power to choose entails a duty to choose wisely, or it will forfeit self-government. (Words: 95)

  Compression notes: the three examples (free speech, elections, rule of law) became one clause — "neglect the duties that sustain them"; the closing epigram is paraphrased, not copied.

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Passage 2 — Science and the Humanities (≈275 words → target ≈90)

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It has become fashionable to divide learning into two camps: the sciences, which are said to be useful, and the humanities, which are tolerated as ornaments. Parents urge their children towards engineering and medicine, universities starve their departments of history and literature, and governments measure education by the number of technicians it produces. This division rests on a misunderstanding of what each branch of knowledge offers. Science tells us how the world works; it can build a bridge, cure a fever, or split an atom. But it cannot tell us whether the bridge should be built, who should receive the cure first, or whether the atom should be used to light a city or destroy one. These are questions of value, and the disciplines that train us to think about value — history, philosophy, literature — are precisely those we are neglecting. A scientist without a sense of history repeats the errors of the past; an engineer without moral imagination designs efficiently for ends he has never examined. Conversely, a humanist ignorant of science speaks with confidence about a world he does not understand. The remedy is not to choose between the two but to join them. The most creative periods of human history, from the scholars of Baghdad to the Renaissance cities of Italy, were those in which the poet and the mathematician worked in the same court and argued in the same language. An education that produces only specialists will produce a society that knows how to do almost anything and has no idea what is worth doing.

• ✅ Model

  Title: Knowing How and Knowing Why

  Modern societies prize the sciences as useful while treating the humanities as dispensable, and families, universities and governments act accordingly. This reflects a misunderstanding. Science explains how things work and confers great power, but only the humanities equip us to judge how that power should be used. Scientists lacking historical and moral understanding repeat old mistakes and pursue unexamined ends, while humanists ignorant of science misjudge the world. The answer lies in integration rather than rivalry, as history's most creative ages show. An education that yields only specialists creates a society capable of everything yet unsure of what matters. (Words: 98)

  Compression notes: bridge/fever/atom → "great power"; Baghdad and Renaissance Italy → "history's most creative ages".

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Passage 3 — Nature as Capital (≈235 words → target ≈78)

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For most of human history, nature appeared inexhaustible. Forests seemed endless, rivers self-renewing, and the air too vast to be spoiled by anything a human being could do. Our economic habits were formed in that age of apparent plenty, and they have survived long after the plenty has gone. We still count the timber we cut as income, though a forest felled is capital consumed; we still measure growth by the goods a nation produces, never subtracting the soil eroded, the aquifers drained or the lungs damaged in producing them. The result is a system of accounts that reports prosperity while the foundations of prosperity crumble. The poorest suffer first. It is the farmer whose well runs dry, the fisherman whose catch disappears, and the slum-dweller who breathes the city's smoke who pay the price of a growth they barely share. To speak of the environment as a luxury concern, to be addressed once development is complete, is therefore to misunderstand both. There can be no lasting development on a ruined foundation, and no protection of nature that ignores the livelihoods of the poor. The task of this century is to reconcile the two: to build economies that treat nature as capital to be preserved rather than income to be spent.

• ✅ Model

  Title: Nature: Capital, Not Income

  Humanity long regarded nature as limitless, and the economic habits formed then persist. Natural resources are still treated as income rather than depleting capital, and growth figures ignore environmental damage, so national accounts show prosperity even as its basis erodes. The poor, who gain least from such growth, bear its costs first. Protecting the environment is therefore no luxury to follow development; neither can succeed without the other. This century must build economies that conserve nature instead of consuming it. (Words: 80)

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Self-Marking Rubric (score each précis out of 20)