XAT 2024 Question Paper | Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning

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

But as the behavioral economists like to remind us, we are already prone to all sorts of reductions as a species. It’s not just the scientists. We compress complex reality down into abbreviated heuristics that often work beautifully in everyday life for high-frequency, low-significance decisions. Because we are an unusually clever and self-reflective species, we long ago realized that we needed help overcoming those reductive instincts when it really matters. And so we invented a tool called storytelling. At first, some of our stories were even more reductive than the sciences would prove to be: allegories and parables and morality plays that compressed the flux of real life down to archetypal moral messages. But over time the stories grew more adept at describing the true complexity of lived experience, the whorls and the threadlike pressures. One of the crowning achievements of that growth is the realist novel. That, of course, is the latent implication of Prince Andrei’s question: “innumerable conditions made meaningful only in unpredictable moments” would fare well as a description of both War and Peace and Middlemarch, arguably the two totemic works in the realist canon. What gives the novel the grain of truth lies precisely in the way it doesn’t quite run along the expected grooves, the way it dramatizes all the forces and unpredictable variables that shape the choices humans confront at the most meaningful moments of their lives.

When we read those novels—or similarly rich biographies of historical figures—we are not just entertaining ourselves; we are also rehearsing for our own real-world experiences….

Which of the following is the BEST interpretation regarding reductive instincts?

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Explanatory Answer

Option E is the BEST interpretation regarding reductive instincts as it tells how we compress complex reality down into abbreviated heuristics and how storytelling evolved to help overcome these reductive instincts.
Reductive instincts led to compression of complex reality to moral messages. This occurred and is referred to as reductive instincts in the passage.

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The answer is 'Reductive instincts have to be overcome for survival in the real world.'

Choice E is the correct answer.

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