Verbal Ability – Summary – Both Socrates and Bacon were

Verbal Ability – Summary

The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the summary that best captures the author’s position.

Question

Both Socrates and Bacon were very good at asking useful questions. In fact, Socrates is largely credited with corning up with a way of asking questions, ‘the Socratic method/ which itself is at the core of the ‘scientific method, ‘popularised by Bacon. The Socratic method disproves arguments by finding exceptions to them, and can therefore lead your opponent to a point where they admit something that contradicts their original position. In common with Socrates, Bacon stressed it was as important to disprove a theory as it was to prove one – and real-world observation and experimentation were key to achieving both aims. Bacon also saw science as a collaborative affair, with scientists working together, challenging each other.

A) Both Socrates and Bacon advocated clever questioning of the opponents to disprove their arguments and theories.
B) Both Socrates and Bacon advocated challenging arguments and theories by observation and experimentation.
C) Both Socrates and Bacon advocated confirming arguments and theories by finding exceptions.
D) Both Socrates and Bacon advocated examining arguments and theories from both sides to prove them.

Answer

Option (D)

Solution

After reading the above passage about Summary from CAT 2017 – Verbal Ability, we can infer that, Both Socrates and Bacon believed that arguments and theories can be validated only by examining them from both sides. This point is stated only in option D.
Option A, which states that Socrates and Bacon advocated clever questioning in order to disprove the arguments and theories put forth by opponents, is not the appropriate summary of the paragraph.
Option B captures only a part of the argument.
Option C is a distortion of the paragraph.

Download CAT 2017 Question Paper with answers and detailed solutions in PDF

CAT 2017 Questions from Verbal Ability – Summary

Verbal Ability – Summary – Q1: A fundamental property of language is that it is slippery and messy and more liquid than solid, a gelatinous mass that changes shape to fit. As Wittgenstein would remind us, “usage has no sharp boundary.”
Verbal Ability – Summary – Q2: North American walnut sphinx moth caterpillars (Amorpha juglandis) look like easy meals for birds, but they have a trick up their sleeves—they produce whistles that sound like bird alarm calls
Verbal Ability – Summary – Q3: For each of the past three years, temperatures have hit peaks not seen since the birth of meteorology, and probably not for more than 110,000 years.
Verbal Ability – Summary – Q4: A translator of literary works needs a secure hold upon the two languages involved, supported by a good measure of familiarity with the two cultures.
Verbal Ability – Summary – Q5: To me, a “classic” means precisely the opposite of what my predecessors understood: a work is classical by reason of its resistance to contemporaneity and supposed universality, by reason of its capacity to indicate human particularity and difference in that past epoch.

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