CAT 2017 Slot 1 — VARC Question 25
The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the author’s position.
To me, a “classic” means precisely the opposite of what my predecessors understood: a work is classical by reason of its resistance to contemporaneity and supposed universality, by reason of its capacity to indicate human particularity and difference in that past epoch. The classic is not what tells me about shared humanity–or, more truthfully put, what lets me recognize myself as already present in the past, what nourishes in me the illusion that everything has been like me and has existed only to prepare the way for me. Instead, the classic is what gives access to radically different forms of human consciousness for any given generation of readers, and thereby expands for them the range of possibilities of what it means to be a human being.
Answer & solution
Correct answer: A classic is a work exploring the new, going beyond the universal, the contemporary, and the notion of a unified human consciousness.
- A
A classic is able to focus on the contemporary human condition and a unified experience of human consciousness.
- B
A classical work seeks to resist particularity and temporal difference even as it focuses on a common humanity.
A classic is a work exploring the new, going beyond the universal, the contemporary, and the notion of a unified human consciousness.
- D
A classic is work that provides access to a universal experience of the human race as opposed to radically different forms of human consciousness.
Easy
Para-summary: lock onto the author’s own position, not the conventional view he is rejecting. The author redefines a “classic” as the opposite of universality/shared humanity — it gives access to radically different forms of consciousness and expands what it means to be human. The right summary keeps that inversion; eliminate options that restate the traditional definition or contradict him.
Option 1 — eliminate. “focus on the contemporary human condition and a unified experience of human consciousness” is exactly the view the author rejects (“resistance to contemporaneity”, gives access to radically different consciousness). It reverses his position.
Option 2 — eliminate. This describes the predecessors’ notion (resisting particularity, focusing on a “common humanity”) — again the opposite of what the author argues a classic does.
Option 3 — correct. “exploring the new, going beyond the universal, the contemporary, and the notion of a unified human consciousness” captures the author’s inversion compactly: a classic resists contemporaneity/universality and opens up difference. This is his position.
Option 4 — eliminate. It champions a “universal experience of the human race as opposed to radically different forms of human consciousness” — the direct contrary of the author’s claim.
The author’s position is best summarised by Option 3: a classic explores the new, going beyond the universal, the contemporary, and a unified human consciousness.
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