English — Set 38

Context: The world dismisses curiosity by calling it idle or mere idle curiosity even though curious persons are seldom idle. Parents do their best to extinguish curiosity in their children because it makes life difficult to be faced everyday with a string of unanswerable questions about what makes fire hot or why grass grows. Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline are invited to join our university. With the university, they go on asking their questions and trying to find the answers. In the eyes of a scholar, that is what a university for. some of the questions which the scholars ask seem to the world to be scarcely worth asking, let alone answering. they asked questions too minute and specialised for you and me to understand without years of explanation. If the world inquires of one of them why he wants to know the answer to a particular question he may say especially if he is a scientist, that the answer will in some obscure way make possible a new machine or weapon or gadget. He talks that way because he knows that the world understands and respects utility. But to you who are now part of the university, he will say that he wants to know the answer simply because he does not know it, the way the mountain climber wants to climb a mountain, simply because it is there. Similarly a historian asked by an outsider why he studies history may come out with the argument that he has learnt to respect to report on such occasions, something about knowledge of the past making it possible to understand the present and mould the future. But if you really want to know why a historian studies the past, the answer is much simpler, something happened and he would like to know what. All this does not mean that the answers which scholars to find to their enormous consequences but these seldom form the reason for asking the question or pursuing the answers. It is true that scholars can be put to work answering questions for sake of the consequences as thousands are working now, for example, in search of a cure for cancer. But this is not the primary scholars. For the consequences are usually subordinate to the satisfaction of curiosity.

Context: In questions given below out of four alternatives, choose the one which can be substituted for the given sentence.

Context: Study the following passage and answer the question which is based on it (10-14) The Indian middle class consist of so many strata that it defies categorisation under a single term class, which would imply a considerable degree of homogeneity. Yet two paradoxical features characterise its conduct fairly uniformly; extensive practice and intensive abhorrence of corruption. In the several recent surveys of popular perceptions of corruptions, politicians of course invariably and understandably top the list, closely followed by bureaucrats, policemen, lawyers, businessmen and others. The quintessential middle class. If teachers do not figure high on this priority list, it is not for lack of trying, but for lack of opportunities. Over the years, the sense of shock over acts of corruption in the middle class has witnessed a steady decline, as its ambitions for a better material life have soared but the resources for meeting such ambitions have not kept pace. What is fascinating, however, is the intense yearning of this class for a clean corruptionless politics and society, a yearning that has again and again surfaced with any figure public or obscure, focus on his mission of eradicating corruption. Even the repeated failure of this promise on virtually every man's part has not subjected it to the law of diminishing returns.

Context: Pick out the best one which can complete incomplete stem correctly and meaningfully