Reasoning Within The Text>Identify Counterargument Practice Test

In the rush to declare the future cashless, it is easy to treat paper money as an embarrassing relic. City councils laud transit systems that accept only tap-to-pay, merchants cite shorter lines and cleaner counters, and technologists celebrate the data trails that digital payments leave behind. In this chorus, every beep of a phone seems to register as progress. Yet the insistence on speed and traceability is only part of the story. Cash is not a mere convenience; for many people it is the only workable medium of exchange. Workers paid off the books, undocumented residents wary of creating financial footprints, elders without smartphones, and people with unstable housing all rely on bills and coins not because they prefer the hassle, but because the alternatives impose different costs.

Proponents of cashless systems often reply with a tidy metric: cashless means fewer crimes around checkouts and transit turnstiles. They point to studies showing fewer robberies near stations once the booths cease handling cash, and fewer fraudulent bills in circulation when retailers stop accepting them. It is a compelling claim, and it would be obtuse to pretend the evidence does not exist. But its force is less decisive than its packaging suggests. Crime displacement is real; robberies may move rather than vanish. And the savings for retailers who need not count drawers or reconcile tills do not magically translate into access for a worker who has no bank account and no data plan.

A common rejoinder is that solutions already exist for the unbanked: prepaid cards, app-based wallets, or kiosks that convert cash deposits into digital credits. These instruments do widen the doorway, but they also charge fees, harvest data, and tie daily life to private platforms with long terms of service no one reads. The point is not that cashless systems are inherently nefarious. It is that the harms of excluding cash are disproportionately borne by people with the least leverage to absorb them.

The question, then, is not whether digital payments confer benefits. They plainly do, including faster throughput and, in some contexts, less cash handling risk. The better question is which benefits justify which trade-offs, and who is asked to pay. Mandating cash acceptance alongside digital options in essential services and high-traffic public venues does not plunge us back into the past; it simply keeps the public square legible to those for whom a card reader is not a gate but a wall. A transit rider who feeds a bill into a machine may slow the line, but a rider turned away for lack of a chip slows the justice of the city itself.

The future may well be less cash dependent. If it is also less forgiving of lives that do not fit neatly into payment apps, we will have mistaken uniformity for progress. The aim should be a system that captures the benefits of digital tools without making cashlessness a proxy for civility or modernity. That aim is achieved not by banishing cash, but by designing around it.

Universities routinely defend general education requirements on the grounds that breadth produces better specialists. This defense is most contentious in the case of humanities courses required of students in technical majors. Critics, some of them industry leaders, argue that the classroom is a poor simulator for the messy, time-pressured communication and ethical judgment demanded at work. They cast literature and philosophy as decorative finishing schools, with little to offer a coder who will learn to talk to users only by talking to users.

Those critics are not wrong to notice a gap between seminar rooms and product launches. A semester of rhetorical theory will not teach a novice engineer how to navigate a client meeting where half the stakeholders do not know what they want and the other half do not agree. Nor will a survey of ancient ethics magically resolve a modern dilemma about data collection under vague consent. The workplace is an idiosyncratic teacher, and it imparts lessons classrooms cannot.

But it is a mistake to conclude from this that humanities coursework is therefore ornamental. The argument from workplace realism often treats every skill as contingent and every value as situational, as if there were no patterns to how misunderstandings arise or how people decide what matters. Humanities disciplines do not claim to be laboratories for office life; they claim to offer frameworks for interpreting language, intention, and meaning. They teach people to read not only texts but contexts, to identify assumptions, and to recognize when an argument sneaks in a conclusion by smuggling in a premise.

Consider the engineer who believes she can learn communication only by doing. She will indeed learn by doing, but she will learn faster, and with fewer unhappy clients, if she can diagnose which part of an interaction failed: the vocabulary, the structure, or the unspoken expectations. This diagnostic ability does not emerge from osmosis; it emerges from training that separates form from content and that forces one to inhabit perspectives not one's own. Literature is not a rehearsal for a stand-up meeting, but it is practice at inhabiting voices; philosophy is not a proxy for a compliance checklist, but it is practice at testing reasons.

The same goes for ethics. No course can supply answers to every quandary an employee will face. But courses can supply habits: to identify stakeholders, to weigh harms, to notice when a short-term gain compromises a long-term trust. If these habits are truly best learned only on the job, then every organization is a school that must bear that cost anew. If not, universities are remiss when they forego structured encounters with texts and cases that can accelerate moral imagination.

The humanities requirement is not a bet against experience; it is a complement to it. The point is not to tether programmers to Plato, but to make sure the first hard conversation a graduate has is not the first time she has thought explicitly about how conversations work.