PTE revision

Question 1

What is a covenant?

Answer 1

A religious agreement between God and a person.
For example, Abraham kept loyal and faithful to God, and God blessed Abraham with many descendants.

Question 2

What is the Jewish Diaspora?

Answer 2

The Jewish Diaspora is the term used for describing how the Jews were pushed out of their promised land and spread around the world. For example, first they were pushed out by the Babylonian Empire, then the Roman Empire, and they are still fighting for it now.

Question 3

What was life like for Jews during the holocaust.

Answer 3

First Germans took their furniture.
Then they had to be taken to concentration camps, and the ones who weren’t had to keep moving around and live in Ghettos to not get caught.
The “askia” were plans to kill the Jews, and Germans could arrive at any moment to take them Jews away.

Question 4

What is samsara in Buddhism?

Answer 4

The cycle of life death and rebirth.

Question 5

What is Dukkha in Buddhism?

Answer 5

Suffering

Question 6

What does Anicca mean in Buddhism?

Answer 6

Nothing lasts forever.

Question 7

What does anatta mean in Buddhism?

Answer 7

Everything is connected.

Question 8

What are Buddhist beliefs about suffering? The 4 noble truths.

Answer 8

1.Suffering is an inescapable part of life.
2.Suffering comes our hatred and craving to avoid suffering.
3.We can end this by ending our want to avoid suffering.
4.Following the eightfold path.

Question 9

Christian beliefs about suffering

Answer 9

Suffering is the result of our free will that God gave us.

People can grow from suffering.

Only God sees suffering fully; we can never understand why we suffer because we can’t see God’s perspective.

Question 10

What is the humanist approach to suffering?

Answer 10

Science is the best way to understand the world.

Seek happiness in themselves and other people in the here and now.

Empathy and responsibility for our actions.

Suffering is a natural part of life but can be reduced by human action.

Question 11

Arguments against free will

Answer 11

Behaviour is predictable.
Determinism makes the world more understandable, and has more evidence.

Question 12

The Libet experiment

Answer 12

Your brain is most active a few seconds before you do a task showing that small unimportant decisions are made subconsciously.

Question 13

Freud’s theory.

Answer 13

The ego, what shows on the surface, is the product of the id and the superego.

The id is your impulses and desires.

The superego are the rules and rational part of your mind.

Question 14

Behaviourism

Answer 14

A theory that your mind and thoughts can be fully shown through your physical behaviour.

Question 15

Genetics and determinism.

Answer 15

The warrior gene, MAOA, absorbs a certain molecule in the brain. When someone has a deficiency in it, they are more likely to commit violent crime.

Violent criminals tend to have more activity in the prefrontal cortex, which controls emotions, and more activity in the amygdala, which generates emotional impulses.

Question 16

What do Buddhists bive about free will. Three poisons.

Answer 16

We must eliminate ignorance(pig), hatred(snake), and greed(cockeral) from our lives.

Question 17

What did Peter singer say about happiness?

Answer 17

1. Happiness is a surplus of pleasure over pain aver a lifetime.
2. Happiness us how satisfied we are with our lives.

Question 17

What is hedonism?

Answer 17

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of hedonism said that
We have 2 sovereign masters, pleasure over pain, and we should live our lives by maximising pleasure and reducing pain.

Question 18

What did Robert Nozick do to argue against hedonism.

Answer 18

He imagined a world where you could plug yourself into a machine and experience infinite pleasure forever, arguing that there is some value in reality.

Question 19

Virtue ethics

Answer 19

John stuart mill- better socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. A life with only low quality physical pleasures like eating and drinking, even if these actions bring a lot of pleasure, are worse than high quality pleasures like intellectual studies and religion, which help people be kinder and more empathetic people.

Question 20

What chemicals in the brain cause happiness?

Answer 20

Dopamine is when you’re expecting to be rewarded and gives motivation.

Oxytocin encourages social interactions.

Serotonin in low levels causes depression.

Endorphins try to mask pain to make us feel more happy.

Question 21

Hame three faulty thinking monsters.

Answer 21

Emotional reasoning is believing negative emotions are true.

Black and white thinking is tendency to see life as success or failure with no middle ground.

Selective abstraction is focusing on negative and ignoring positive emotions.

Question 22

Christianity and happiness.

Answer 22

You gain pleasure from helping other people and looking after poor and elderly people. It makes you feel like you’re life has meaning.

Question 23

Buddhism and happiness.

Answer 23

Desire drives humans. Desire is more favourable than having something you want right now.

Can be good if it motivates us to do good like giving to charity or keeping fit.

Can be bad when it motivates us to do bad things like being selfish.