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Read the paragraph and answer the questions that follow.

Are people ___ (i) ___ or even typically, guided by reason, rather than, say, by passion or impulse ? If the norms of rational behaviour are not followed by people in their actual behaviour, how can we seek the same answer to two rather different questions : what would be rational for a person to do ? And what would the person actually do ? Shouldn't the economists who make such double use of maximisation - whether through explicit reasoning ___ (ii) ___ by implicit presumption - be invited to apply their minds to this ?

A number of economists have indeed paid attention to systematic departures from rationality in actual choices made by people. One argument that has been invoked, in a line of reasoning proposed by Herbert Simon, goes by the name of bounded rationality. It concerns the possibility that people may not, in all cases, look for fully ___ (iii) ___ choices because of their inability to be sufficiently focussed. There is considerable evidence, powerfully presented, for example, ___ (iv) ___ Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky, that people may fail to understand adequately the nature of the uncertainty.

Pick the most appropriate word to fill (iv) in the given passage :

Solution

Correct Option: 2
OptionExplanation
Option 1: with"With" typically suggests accompaniment or means, as in "presented with evidence," not authorship. It doesn't correctly show who performed the action of presenting, so it doesn't fit here.
Option 2: byCorrect. "Presented by Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky" correctly shows the agent, the people who carried out the action of presenting the evidence. This is the standard passive voice construction: [action] + by + [doer of the action].
Option 3: at"At" is used to indicate a specific point, location, or time (e.g., "presented at a conference"), not the doer of an action. It doesn't logically connect to naming the researchers here.
Option 4: up"Up" doesn't form any meaningful or grammatically correct phrase with "presented" in this context (unlike, say, "given up"). Its usage here would be nonsensical.

Correct answer: by

Rule applied: In passive voice constructions, the preposition "by" is used to introduce the doer/agent of the action (e.g., "The report was written by the team," "The evidence was presented by the researchers"). Since the sentence identifies Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky as the people who presented the evidence, "by" is grammatically and contextually correct.

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