Question:medium

Passage:

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. Within 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 is for. Some of the questions which the scholars ask seem to the world to be scarcely worth asking, let alone answering. They ask questions too minute and specialized for you and me to understand without years of explanation. If the world inquires 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. 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 for scholars. For the consequences are usually subordinate to the satisfaction of curiosity.

Question:
It may be inferred from the passage that curiosity

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Look at the opening line about curious persons never being idle, and notice what all the examples in the passage (scholars, the mountain climber, the historian) have in common.
Updated On: Jul 20, 2026
  • Results in Boredom
  • Breeds inefficiency
  • Results in action
  • Is liked by the society
  • Is linked to genes of parents
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The Correct Option is C

Solution and Explanation

Think of this as an inference question, so the correct choice has to be something the passage strongly implies rather than something it states outright, but it also has to be firmly backed by the text rather than being a stretch.

Scan the passage for what curiosity actually leads to in each example given: children keep questioning and searching for answers, scholars spend years working through highly specialized problems, a climber climbs a mountain purely to satisfy the urge, a historian goes looking for what actually happened, and thousands of scientists work toward a cure for cancer. Every single one of these is a person doing something, not a person sitting idle or bored. Combine that with the passage's opening claim that "curious persons are seldom idle," and the pattern is unmistakable: curiosity pushes people toward action.

Now eliminate the distractors quickly. Boredom (a) and inefficiency (b) both describe a lack of productive activity, which is the exact opposite of what the passage shows. Being liked by society (d) is undercut by the passage's own framing - the world "dismisses" curiosity and parents try to stamp it out in children. Genetic linkage to parents (e) is simply not a topic the passage touches. That leaves "Results in action" as the only choice consistent with every example given, confirming the answer as option (c), which is option 3 in this numbering.
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