Question

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. Idle curiosity means

• A. curiosity is lazy
• B. idle people are curious
• C. curiosity is apt
• D. casual curiosity

Hint:

The author immediately says curious people are "seldom idle", which rules out the literal meaning of laziness.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is D

This is a vocabulary-in-context question. The word "idle" has more than one everyday sense, so the trick is to pick the sense that the passage itself supports, rather than the first meaning that comes to mind.

1. Curiosity is lazy: This takes "idle" to mean lazy or inactive. But the passage's own next words say curious people are "seldom idle", directly denying that curious people are lazy, so this reading contradicts the text.
2. Idle people are curious: This reverses subject and description; the phrase "idle curiosity" describes curiosity, not idle people, so this option misreads the grammar of the phrase.
3. Curiosity is apt: "Apt" means fitting or suitable, which has no connection to the sense of dismissal the author is building around "idle curiosity".
4. Casual curiosity: The world calls curiosity "idle" to write it off as unserious or without real purpose, even though the author disagrees. "Casual" captures that sense of being dismissed as unimportant, which is the only reading consistent with the sentence.

The correct option is that "idle curiosity" means casual curiosity, that is, curiosity treated by others as trivial rather than serious.

Let's summarize:

• When a word could be read literally or idiomatically, check the surrounding sentence for a clue about which sense the author intends.
• Here, the author's own denial that curious people are lazy rules out the literal meaning of "idle".

So the correct answer is casual curiosity.