Tone

Of a passage is the mood of the author in which he is writing. Tone is more content specific than style. Within a passage, we can have various tones, but the style remains the same throughout. Some common tones are, Satirical, Cynical, Didactic, Objective, Appreciating, Informative, Optimistic and Pessimistic.    

Let us read some passages with different tones.

Passage
Delivering mail to small villages in India was once a difficult, perilous, and exciting job. The postman travelled on foot, often wading through swamps or crawling through jungles in order to reach the many villages on his route.
The Indian mailman might sometimes encounter a fierce tiger or panther along the way, yet the only weapon he carried was a sharp spear. He never went to work without his bells, which he would shake in order (so he said) to ward off evil spirits. Wild animals or evil spirits, nothing ever interrupted his work.

The Indian letter carrier was an honoured and respected person; he was treated with great courtesy. So wise was he thought to be that he was frequently called upon to settle village disputes. It is certainly evident that only a very brave man would take a job that compelled him to fight off wild animals in order to get his work done. You can understand why everyone in India looked upon the man who delivered mail as a true national hero.

Tone: The author is all praises for the postman. Hence the tone is Laudatory or appreciating.



Passage
The core of modern doctoring is diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. Most medical schools emphasis little else. Western doctors have been analysing the wheezes and pains of their patients since the seventeenth century to identify the underlying disease or the cause of complaints. They did it well, and good diagnosis became the hallmark of a good physician. They were less strong on treatment. But when sulphonamides were discovered in 1935 to treat certain bacterial infections, doctors found themselves with powerful new tools. The era of modern medicine was born. Today there is an ever-burgeoning array of complex diagnostic tests, and of pharmaceutical and surgical methods of treatment. Yet what impact has all this on health?
Most observers ascribe recent improvements in health in rich countries to better living standards and changes in lifestyle. The World

Health Organization cites the wide differences in health between Western and Eastern Europe. The two areas have similar patterns of disease: heart disease, senile dementia, arthritis and cancer are the most common causes of sickness and death. Between, 1947 and 1964, both parts of Europe saw general health improve, with the arrival of cleaner water, better sanitation and domestic refrigerators. Since the mid-1960s however, East European countries, notably Poland and Hungary, have seen mortality rates rise and life expectancy fall- why? The WHO ascribes the divergence to differences in lifestyle – diet, smoking habits, alcohol, a sedentary way of life 9factors associated with chronic and degenerative diseases) – rather than differences in access to modern medical care.

In contrast, the huge sums now spent in the same of medical progress produces only marginal improvements in health. America devotes nearly 12% of its CNP to its high-technology medicine, more than any other developed country – Yet, overall, Americans die younger, lose more babies, and are at least as likely to suffer from chronic diseases.
Some medical procedures demonstrably do work: mending broken bones, The removal of cataracts, drugs for ulcers, vaccination, aspiring for headaches, antibiotics for bacterial infections, techniques that save new born babies, some organ transplants. Yet the evidence is scant for many other common treatments.

The coronary by-pass, a common surgical technique, is usually performed to overcome the obstruction caused by a blood clot in arteries leading to the heart. Deprived of oxygen, tissues in the heart might otherwise die. Yet, according to a 1988 study conducted in Europe, coronary by-pass surgery is beneficial only in the short term. A by-pass patient who dies within five years has probably lasted longer than if he had simply taken drugs. But among those who get to live past five years, the drug-takers live longer than those who have had surgery.

An American study completed in 1988 concluded that removing tissue from the prostate gland after the appearance of 9non-cancerous) growths, but before the growths can do much damaged, does not prolong life expectancy. Yet the operation was performed regularly and cost Medicare, the federally subsidized system for the elderly, over $1 million a year.
Though they have to go through extensive clinical trials, it is not always clear that drugs provide health benefits. According to Dr. Louise Russell, a professor of economics at Rutges University, in New Jersey, although anti-cholesterol drugs have been shown in clinical trials to reduce the incidence of deaths due to coronary heat disease, in ordinary life there is no evidence that they extend the individual drug-taker’s life expectancy.

Medical practice varies widely from one country to another. Each year in America about 60 of every 10,000 people have a coronary by-pass; in Britain about six. Anti-diabetic drugs are far more commonly used in some European countries than others. One woman in five in Britain has a hysterectomy (removal of the womb) at some time during her life. In America and Denmark, seven out of ten do so.

Why? If coronary heart problems were far commoner in America than Britain, or diabetes in one part of Europe than another, such differences would be justified. But that is not so. Nor do American and Danish women become evidently healthier than British ones. It is the medical practice, not the pattern of illness or the outcome, that differs. Perhaps American patients expect their doctors to “do something” more urgently than British ones? Perhaps American doctors are readier to comply? Certainly the American medical industry grows richer as a result.

To add injury to insult, modern medical procedures may not be just of questionable worth but sometimes dangerous. Virtually all drugs have some adverse side effects on some people. No surgical procedure is without risk. Treatments that prolong life can also promote sickness: the heart attack victim may be saved, but survive disabled.
Attempts have been made to sort out this tangle. The ‘outcomes movement”, born in America during the past decade, aims to lessen the use of inappropriate drugs and pointless surgery by reaching some medical consensus – which drug to give? Whether to operate or medicate? – Though better assessment of the outcome of treatments.

Ordinary clinical trials measure the safety and immediate efficacy of products or procedures. The outcomes enthusiasts try to measure and evaluate far wider consequences. Do patients actually feel better? What is the impact on life expectancy and other health statistics? And instead of relying on results from just a few thousand patients, the effects of treating tens of thousands are studied retrospectively. As an example of what this can turn up, the adverse side effects associated with Opern, an antiarthritis drug, were not spotted until it was widely used.

Yet Dr. Arnold Epstein, of the Harvard Medical School, argues that, worthy as it maybe, the outcomes movement is likely to measure: patients can very widely in their responses. In some, a given drug may relieve pain, in others not; pain is highly subjective. Many medical controversies will hard. And what of the promised heat – disease or cancer cures? Scientists accept that they are unlikely to find an answer to cancer, heat disease or degenerative brain illnesses for a long while yet. These diseases appear to be highly complex, triggered when a number of bodily functions go away. No one pill or surgical procedure is likely to be the panacea. The doctors probably would do better looking at the patient’s diet and lifestyle before he becomes ill than giving him six pills for the six different bodily failures that are causing his illness once he has got it.

Nonetheless modern medicine remains entrenched. It is easier to pop pills than change a lifetime’s habits. And there is always the hope of some new miracle cure - or some individual miracle.
Computer technology has helped produce cameras so sensitive that they can detect the egg in the womb, to be extracted for test-tube fertilization. Biomaterials have created an artificial heart that is expected to increase life expectancy among those fitted with one by an average of 54 months. Biotechnology has produced expensive new drugs for the treatment of cancer. Some have proved lifesavers against some rare cancers; none has yet had a substantial impact on overall death rates due to cancer.
These innovations have vastly increased the demand and expectations of health care and pushed medical bills even higher – not lower, as was once hoped. Inevitably, governments, employers and insurers who finance health care have rebelled over the past decade against its astronomic costs, and have introduced budgets and rationing to curb them. Just as inevitably, this limits access to health care: rich people get it more easily than poor ones.
Some proposed solution would mean no essential change, just better management of the current system. But others, mostly from American academics, go further, aiming to reduce the emphasis on modern medicine and its advance. Their thrust is two – headed: (i) prevention is better – and might be cheaper – than cure; (ii) if you want high-tech, high-cost medicine, you (or your insurers, but not the public) must pay for it, especially when its value is uncertain.

Thus the finance of health-care systems, private or public, could be skewed to favour prevention rather than cure. Doctors would be reimbursed for all preventive practices, whilst curative measures would be severely rationed. Today the skew is all the other way: governments or insurers pay doctors to diagnose disease and prescribe treatment, but not to give advice on smoking or diet.
Most of the main chronic diseases are man-made. By reducing environmental pollution, screening for and treating biological risk indicators such as much blood pressure, providing vaccination and other such measures – above all, by changing people’s own behaviour – within decades the incidence of these diseases could bed much reduced. Governments could help by imposing ferocious “sin taxes” on unhealthy products such as cigarettes, alcohol, may be even fatty foods, to discourage consumption.
The trouble is that nobody knows precisely which changes – apart from stopping smoking – are really worth putting into effect, let alone how. It is clear that people whose blood pressure is brought down have a brighter future than if it stayed high; it is not clear that cholesterol screening and treatment are similarly valuable. Today’s view of what constitutes a good diet may be judged wrong tomorrow.

Much must change before any of these “caring” rather than “cure” schemes will get beyond the academic drawing-board. Nobody has yet been able to assemble a coherent preventive programmed. those countries that treat medicine as a social cost have been wary of moves to restrict public use of advanced and/or costly medical procedures, while leaving the rich to buy what they like. They fear that this would simply leave ordinary people with third-class medicine.
In any case, before fundamental change can come, society will have to recognize that modern medicine is an imprecise science that does not always work; and that questions of how much to spend on it, and how, should not be determined, almost incidentally, by doctors’ medical preferences.

Tone: The author is critical of modern science and its techniques. Hence, the tone is Critical, Disapproving or even Vitrifying.



Passage
If Madonna wants tall dark men in raincoats with talking watches, she will get them. the reason for this is that sexy film starts have their pick of suitors. And if peahens want peacocks with resplendent tails, they to will get them. The reason for this is Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Peacocks’ huge tails and some other examples of male ornamentation seemed to pose a problem for Darwin. In theory only those characteristics which enhance an animal’s survival and that of its offspring ought to evolve. But many male ornaments seemed useless or even unhelpful for survival. So Darwin (and later Ronald Fisher, a British biologist and statistician) worked out an explanation for the evolution an abundance of such colourful displays. It says they evolve because females want them to.

Suppose that random mutation throws up some peacocks with big garish tails and others with nondescript ones. Suppose also that peacocks must compete with each other for the attentions of peahens rather than vice versa. If, for whatever reason, peahens preferred big tails and tended to mate. If, for owners, then their male offspring would tend to have big tails too. The big tails are starting to spread. If nobody wants to mate with the small-tailed birds, their small-tailed descendants will dwindle. Soon the world becomes a more resplendent place.
The story invites several questions, though. Why do many females prefer ornament in the first place? One view says that sexual selection can help to explain that fact as well. If a few females happen to prefer big tails (perhaps because of another random mutation), this preference can work in tandem with the spread of big tails and multiply too. Any female who mates with a small-tailed male will produce male offspring who will have a harder time finding a mate. So the peahen that is indifferent to tail size will have fewer descendants.

Dr. Alexandra Basolo, a biologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, has poked a small hole in this part of the story by attaching plastic swords to some fishes’ tails. Some research done when she was at the University of Texas in Austin and reported in the latest issue of Science suggests that sometimes a general preference for male ornament does not evolve in tandem with the ornamentation. The female taste becomes well established before the gaudy ornament of her mate evolves. So the preference itself cannot be explained by sexual selections.

How could one show such a thing? Dr. Basolo found a genus of small freshwater fish in Central America that seems perfect for such an experiment. She thinks that originally none of the fishing the genus Xiphophorus had males with long sword like tails. Then one species, the swordtails, evolved them while another, the sword less platy fish, stayed without. Female swordtails prefer males with long swords; the longer sword, the more they like them. The sword appears to serve no purpose apart from attracting females.
Dr. Basolo took swordless platy fish, sewed colourful artificial swords to them and let them court females of their own species. Sure enough, the females showed a clear liking for long swords – the longer the better – even though they had never seen such ornament in their own species before. She also tried the trick with transparent swords invisible to the females. They showed no special interest. in them, so she concluded that swords did not make the males swim in a more attractive way; the females just liked the look of them.

Why did they like it? Dr. Basolo suggests that the swords remind them of a favourite food, but that is only a guess. the point of her finding is that it suggests that the female swordtail’s preference evolved before the sword itself. So its taste for the garish and useless remains as my serious as ever.

Tone: The author is trying to analyse and study Darwin’s theory and related works. Hence the tone is Analytical.
After having read the above passages, you must have got some idea about the tone of a passage. Now for practice, try and guess the style of these passages.


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