CAT 2021 Slot 2 VARC Question & Solution

Reading ComprehensionEasy

Question

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

Creativity is now viewed as the engine of economic progress. Various organizations are devoted to its study and promotion; there are encyclopedias and handbooks surveying creativity research. But this proliferating success has tended to erode creativity’s stable identity: it has become so invested with value that it has become impossible to police its meaning and the practices that supposedly identify and encourage it. Many people and organizations committed to producing original thoughts now feel that undue obsession with the idea of creativity gets in the way of real creativity.

Options

The obsession with original thought, how it can be promoted and researched, has made it impossible for people and organizations to define the concept anymore.

The industry that has built up around researching what comprises and encourages creativity has destroyed the creative process itself.

Creativity has proliferated to the extent that is no longer a stable process, and its mutating identity has stifled the creative process.

The value assigned to creativity today has assumed such proportions that the concept itself has lost its real meaning and this is hampering the engendering of real creativity.

Solution

The main points of the paragraph are:

1. The value of creativity to economic progress has been realised, with serious investment being done to study/promote it.

2. But this success fires back. Policing its meaning can lead to obsession, hampering creativity itself.

A: It is extreme in approach. The paragraph does not imply that it has become impossible to define the concept, but it becomes difficult to practice creativity when it is being forced on oneself.

B: It is also extreme. The obsession hampers, not completely destroys the creative process.

C: This option is a distortion and fails to capture the above points.

D: Comes the closest to capturing the above two points, and hence, is the answer.