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.

With which of the following statements will the author agree the MOST?

  1. Our desire to see patterns in everything makes us unable to detect misbeliefs in others.
  2. We must try not to see patterns in everything that we observe.
  3. We must be aware that the patterns we see may not necessarily reflect the truth.
  4. The more we are sure of something, the more we are wrong about it.
  5. We must be sceptical of the beliefs we have, regardless how true they seem to us.

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Explanatory Answer

This is the author's main point and is the best answer available.

Option A is incorrect. The focus of the author is on detecting our own misbeliefs and not of others.
Option B is incorrect. The author does not advise against pattern recognition. The author advises that one should be careful with the patterns that we recognize.
Option C is incorrect. This is consistent with the passage and is a close option. However, option E is better as the author's main point is that we should be skeptical of our beliefs. Option C focuses on pattern recognition which is not the author's main point.
Option D is incorrect. The author does not imply this in the passage.


The answer is 'We must be sceptical of the beliefs we have, regardless how true they seem to us.'

Choice E is the correct answer.

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