Question

Passage:

Every conscious mental state carries a quality we call mood. We are always in some mood, pleasant or unpleasant to some degree. Bad moods may come from too little positive reinforcement in a person's life, along with too many punishments. Moods differ from emotions in one clear way: emotions are tied to a specific object, while moods are not. This split is not perfect, since emotions can also be aimed at something broad (a person can be angry at people in general), while a mood still carries a general sense about the state of the world at large. Moods show up as positive or negative feelings linked to health, personality, or how good a person feels life is. Moods can also grow out of an emotion, such as the mood that follows a specific event like failing to secure a loan. In that sense, a mood is the mind's judgment on the recent past. Goldie notes that an emotion can rise and fall inside a mood, while an emotion can still carry traits that are not object specific.

Moods matter to marketing because they color outlook and bias judgment. This is why consumer confidence surveys matter, since consumer confidence reflects the national mood. There is mood congruence when a person's thoughts and actions fall in line with their mood. Goleman describes this as a constant stream of feeling that runs in perfect harmony with a person's stream of thought. Mood congruence happens because a positive mood brings pleasant associations that soften later thoughts and actions, while a negative mood brings pessimistic associations that shape later judgment and behavior. A consumer in a good mood is more optimistic and confident about buying, and more willing to put up with things like waiting in a queue. Businesses try to put customers in the right mood using music and friendly staff, or place bakeries inside malls so the smell of fresh bread pulls shoppers in.

Thayer treats mood as a mix of biological and psychological influences, a kind of clinical thermometer that reflects everything going on inside and outside a person. For Thayer, the two building blocks of mood are energy and tension, combined in different amounts. A specific mixture of energy and tension, together with the thoughts they influence, produces moods. He describes four mood states:
- Calm-energy: the optimal mood for feeling good.
- Calm-tiredness: mild tiredness without stress, which can still feel pleasant.
- Tense-energy: a low level of anxiety suited to a fight-or-flight response.
- Tense-tiredness: a mix of fatigue and anxiety behind the unpleasant feeling of depression.

People generally feel down or feel good because of events happening around them, and this adds up to the national mood. People feel elated when their national soccer team wins an international match, and low when the team loses. An elated mood of calm-energy is an optimistic mood, which is good for business. Consumers, as socially involved individuals, are shaped by the prevailing social climate, and marketers talk about the national mood running for or against conspicuous consumption. Moods do change. Writing early in the nineteenth century, Tocqueville describes an American elite embarrassed by showy material display; sixty years later, in the Gilded Age, many people were eager to embrace a showy, materialistic style instead. The hard part is predicting a shift in national mood, since a change in mood affects everything from buying stocks to buying houses and washing machines. Thayer would argue that we should watch for national events likely to push people toward a tense-tiredness state or a calm-energy state, since these two extremes are more likely to shape behavior. Artists sensitive to national moods capture these long-term shifts. One example is the emotional distance between Charles Dickens's sentimental account of the death of Little Nell and Oscar Wilde's cruel joke about it (that one would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell), a shift from high Victorian sentiment to the sharper cynicism found later in writers like Thomas Hardy and artists like Aubrey Beardsley.

Whenever the mind is not fully absorbed, consciousness is no longer focused and ordered, and under such conditions the mind drifts toward unpleasant thoughts, building a negative mood. Csikszentmihalyi argues that the human need to keep consciousness fully active drives a good deal of consumer behavior. Sometimes it does not matter what a person is shopping for; the act of shopping itself is one way to fill the void in consciousness when there is nothing else to do.

Question: Which of the following is closest to "conspicuous consumption" as used in the passage?

• A. Audible consumption.
• B. Consumption driven by moods and emotions.
• C. Socially responsible consumption.
• D. Consumption of material items for impressing others.

Hint:

Break "conspicuous consumption" into its two plain words: conspicuous means visible to others, consumption means spending.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is D

This is a vocabulary in context question. The passage uses conspicuous consumption without defining it, so the safest route is to build the meaning from the word conspicuous (meaning visible, easy to notice) plus consumption (buying and using things), then test each option against that.

1. Audible consumption: this option swaps visible for heard, which is not what conspicuous means, and the passage never talks about sound.
2. Consumption driven by moods and emotions: mood driven buying is a real theme in the passage, but it describes why people buy, not spending that is done to be seen by others, so it answers a different question.
3. Socially responsible consumption: this adds an ethical, good for society flavor that has nothing to do with showing off wealth, which is what conspicuous consumption is about.
4. Consumption of material items for impressing others: this fits exactly, since it captures both buying material goods and doing so to be noticed or to impress people.
5. Private but not public consumption: this is backwards; conspicuous means public and visible, so private consumption is the opposite of the term.

Once the other four options are ruled out for reasons unrelated to the term's real meaning, consumption of material items for impressing others is left standing as the correct match.

Let's summarize:

• Break an unfamiliar or contextual term into its parts before checking options.
• Reject options that borrow a nearby idea from the passage (mood, ethics) instead of the term's actual meaning.

The correct option is (DD), consumption of material items for impressing others.