CAT 2021 Slot 2 — VARC Question 20
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
Answer & solution
- A
The industry that has built up around researching what comprises and encourages creativity has destroyed the creative process itself.
- B
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.
- D
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.
Easy
This is a para-summary. Pin the central idea and reject options that distort, add, or omit. The passage's argument: creativity is now hugely valued, but precisely because it has been so over-invested with value, its meaning has become impossible to police, and this obsession with the idea of creativity now gets in the way of real creativity.
Distortion (too strong). The passage says obsession "gets in the way of" real creativity, not that the research "industry" has destroyed the creative process. "Destroyed" overshoots. Reject.
Misattribution. It is the obsession with the idea/value of creativity that stifles real creativity, not creativity "proliferating" or having a "mutating identity" on its own. The cause is misstated. Reject.
Captures the essence. "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." This mirrors the passage: over-investment of value → loss of stable meaning → hampering of real creativity. Keep.
Shifts the point. It makes the issue "impossible to define the concept" and centres "original thought," whereas the passage's conclusion is that obsession hampers real creativity. The takeaway is distorted. Reject.
Option (c) best captures the essence: over-valuing creativity has stripped the concept of real meaning and now hampers real creativity.