XAT 2024 Question Paper | Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning

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Read the following passage and answer the THREE questions that follow.

Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all. And over the years, I’ve become convinced of one key, overarching fact about the ignorant mind. One should not think of it as uninformed. Rather, one should think of it as misinformed.

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power. As the humorist Josh Billings once put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Ironically, one thing many people “know” about this quote is that it was first uttered by Mark Twain or Will Rogers—which just ain’t so.)

Because of the way we are built, and because of the way we learn from our environment, we are all engines of misbelief. And the better we understand how our wonderful yet kludge-ridden, Rube Goldberg engine works, the better we—as individuals and as a society—can harness it to navigate toward a more objective understanding of the truth.

Based on the passage, what does the author BEST mean when he says, “we are all engines of misbelief?”

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Explanatory Answer

This choice reflects the author's idea that we often create and share beliefs, even when they're not entirely accurate, because we don't recognize our own ignorance. The passage highlights how our minds can be filled with misleading information, causing us to accept and share beliefs that might not be true. When the author says "we are all engines of misbelief," it means we naturally tend to form and spread beliefs that can be misleading or wrong.

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The answer is 'We are naturally inclined to form, and often share, misleading and inaccurate beliefs.'

Choice A is the correct answer.

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