Question:easy
Read the passage and answer the question that follows.
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 every day with a string of answerable 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 mainly what a university is for. Some of the questions that 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 a mountain climber wants to climb a mountain simply because it is there. Similarly, a historian, when asked by outsiders why he studies history, may come out with an argument that he has learnt to repeat 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. All this does not mean that the answers which scholars find to their questions have no consequences. They may have enormous consequences, but these seldom form the reason for asking the question or pursuing the answers. 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 function of the scholar, for the consequences are usually subordinate to the satisfaction of curiosity.
Q. In the statement 'that is mainly what a university is for', 'that' refers to
Read the passage and answer the question that follows.
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 every day with a string of answerable 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 mainly what a university is for. Some of the questions that 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 a mountain climber wants to climb a mountain simply because it is there. Similarly, a historian, when asked by outsiders why he studies history, may come out with an argument that he has learnt to repeat 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. All this does not mean that the answers which scholars find to their questions have no consequences. They may have enormous consequences, but these seldom form the reason for asking the question or pursuing the answers. 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 function of the scholar, for the consequences are usually subordinate to the satisfaction of curiosity.
Q. In the statement 'that is mainly what a university is for', 'that' refers to
Show Hint
Read the one or two sentences right before the pronoun "that"; it refers to the idea stated there.
Updated On: Jul 14, 2026
- parents' refusal to answer questions
- children's curiosity that survives parents' strictures
- questions not worth answering
- the aim and scope of the university to provide an opportunity to curious minds to find out the answers to their questions
Show Solution
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
This question tests how well you can trace back a pronoun to its antecedent idea in a passage. "That" is a demonstrative pronoun, and it stands in for something already mentioned, not something new.
- Parents' refusal to answer questions: The passage says parents try to kill curiosity in children, but this detail belongs to an earlier part of the paragraph, before the sentence about university even starts, so it is too far away to be the antecedent.
- Children's curiosity that survives parents' strictures: This is what lets a child reach the university gates, but it is not, by itself, what the author calls the purpose of the university.
- Questions not worth answering: This phrase never even appears with this meaning in the passage; the author never calls scholars' questions worthless, only says the world sees them that way.
- The aim and scope of the university to provide an opportunity to curious minds to find out the answers to their questions: The line right before "that" describes students at university continuing to ask questions and search for answers. This is exactly the activity "that" is standing in for.
The correct option is that "that" refers to the university's purpose of giving curious students room to keep questioning and searching for answers, since this is the idea stated in the sentence immediately before it.
Let's summarize:
- Pronoun-reference questions are solved by reading backward, not forward, from the pronoun.
- The nearest matching idea, not a loosely related detail from earlier in the passage, is usually the answer.
So the correct answer is option 4.
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