CAT 2020 Para Summary — Previous Year Question

Year

CAT 2020

Section

Topic

Difficulty

Question

Slot-1

Directions: The passage given below is followed by four alternative summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. For most of the last century, psychologists have held that intelligence is a single, largely inherited and hence relatively fixed quantity, one that experts can measure early in life with paper-and-pencil tests and will perhaps eventually gauge by watching the brain in action or by scrutinising the genome. Recently, however, criticism of this orthodoxy has mounted from an unexpected quarter. Biologists ask whether "intelligence" names one thing at all, and they question whether heritability, an estimate that depends on conceiving and breeding subjects under controlled conditions, can be validly computed for humans in the first place.

Psychologists have long held that intelligence is a single, largely inherited and hence relatively fixed quantity that experts can measure early in life; this view is now under attack from biologists who doubt both that intelligence is one thing and that its heritability can be validly estimated in humans.

Biologists have demonstrated that intelligence is not a single entity and that heritability measures are invalid, compelling psychologists to abandon the century-old I.Q.-based conception of intelligence.

Because humans, unlike plants and animals, cannot be conceived and bred under controlled conditions, heritability estimates for intelligence are unreliable, and paper-and-pencil tests should therefore be replaced by brain scans and genome studies.

The conventional psychological view holds that intelligence is inherited and difficult to alter, which is why experts have moved from paper-and-pencil measures towards examining the brain in action and scrutinising the genome.

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