Question:easy

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 of 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 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 the sake of the consequences, as thousands are working now, for example, in search of a cure for cancer. But this is not the primary motive for scholars, for the consequences are usually subordinate to the satisfaction of curiosity.

Q51. Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline means

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Re-read the sentence right before this line: parents try to extinguish curiosity, so "survives" means the curiosity is not lost.
Updated On: Jul 20, 2026
  • Children retaining their curiosity in spite of being discouraged by their parents
  • Children pursuing their mental curiosity
  • Children's curiosity subdued due to parents' intervention
  • Children being disciplined by their parents
  • Children being reprimanded by their parents
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The Correct Option is A

Solution and Explanation

Treat "survives" as the key word here. Something "survives" an obstacle when it continues to exist despite that obstacle trying to remove it.

The obstacle in this passage is named directly: "Parents do their best to extinguish curiosity in their children." So "parental discipline" refers to this deliberate parental effort to kill off curiosity.

Putting the two together, "children whose curiosity survives parental discipline" are simply the children whose curiosity is still alive even after their parents tried to stamp it out, which is stated word for word in option (a). The other options either describe children being successfully disciplined (the opposite result) or drift away from the idea of curiosity surviving at all.

So the answer is (a).

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