Comprehension

Creativity is at once our most precious resource and our most inexhaustible one. As anyone who has ever spent any time with children knows, every single human being is born creative; every human being is innately endowed with the ability to combine and recombine data, perceptions, materials and ideas, and devise new ways of thinking and doing. What fosters creativity? More than anything else: the presence of other creative people. The big myth is that creativity is the province of great individual geniuses. In fact creativity is a social process. Our biggest creative breakthroughs come when people learn from, compete with, and collaborate with other people.
Cities are the true fonts of creativity... With their diverse populations, dense social networks, and public spaces where people can meet spontaneously and serendipitously, they spark and catalyze new ideas. With their infrastructure for finance, organization and trade, they allow those ideas to be swiftly actualized.
As for what staunches creativity, that's easy, if ironic. It's the very institutions that we build to manage, exploit and perpetuate the fruits of creativity — our big bureaucracies, and sad to say, too many of our schools. Creativity is disruptive; schools and organizations are regimented, standardized and stultifying.
The education expert Sir Ken Robinson points to a 1968 study reporting on a group of 1,600 children who were tested over time for their ability to think in out-of-the-box ways. When the children were between 3 and 5 years old, 98 percent achieved positive scores. When they were 8 to 10, only 32 percent passed the same test, and only 10 percent at 13 to 15. When 280,000 25-year-olds took the test, just 2 percent passed. By the time we are adults, our creativity has been wrung out of us.
I once asked the great urbanist Jane Jacobs what makes some places more creative than others. She said, essentially, that the question was an easy one. All cities, she said, were filled with creative people; that's our default state as people. But some cities had more than their shares of leaders, people and institutions that blocked out that creativity. She called them "squelchers."
Creativity (or the lack of it) follows the same general contours of the great socio-economic divide - our rising inequality - that plagues us. According to my own estimates, roughly a third of us across the United States, and perhaps as much as half of us in our most creative cities - are able to do work which engages our creative faculties to some extent, whether as artists, musicians, writers, techies, innovators, entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, journalists or educators - those of us who work with our minds. That leaves a group that I term "the other 66 percent," who toil in low-wage rote and rotten jobs — if they have jobs at all — in which their creativity is subjugated, ignored or wasted. Creativity (or the lack of it) follows the same general contours of the great socio-economic divide - our rising inequality - that plagues us. According to my own estimates, roughly a third of us across the United States, and perhaps as much as half of us in our most creative cities - are able to do work which engages our creative faculties to some extent, whether as artists, musicians, writers, techies, innovators, entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, journalists or educators - those of us who work with our minds. That leaves a group that I term "the other 66 percent," who toil in low-wage rote and rotten jobs — if they have jobs at all — in which their creativity is subjugated, ignored or wasted.
Creativity itself is not in danger. It's flourishing is all around us - in science and technology, arts and culture, in our rapidly revitalizing cities. But we still have a long way to go if we want to build a truly creative society that supports and rewards the creativity of each and every one of us.

Question: 1

In the author's view, cities promote human creativity for all the following reasons EXCEPT that the

Updated On: Sep 26, 2024
  • contain spaces that enable people to meet and share new ideas.
  • expose people to different and novel ideas, because they are home to varied groups of people.
  • provide the financial and institutional networks that enable ideas to become reality.
  • provide access to cultural activities that promote new and creative ways of thinking.
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The Correct Option is D

Solution and Explanation

The correct answer is (D):
(1), (2) and (3) are mentioned in the second paragraph, refer to “diverse populations” - (2), “new ideas” - (1) and “infrastructure for finance, organization” - (3).

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Question: 2

The author uses 'ironic' in the third paragraph to point out that

Updated On: Sep 26, 2024
  • people need social contact rather than isolation to nurture their creativity
  • institutions created to promote creativity eventually stifle it
  • the larger the creative population in a city, the more likely it is to be stifled
  • large bureaucracies and institutions are the inevitable outcome of successful cities
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The Correct Option is B

Solution and Explanation

The correct answer is (B):
While (4) is beside the point, (1) does not address the question at hand. (3) goes contrary to received wisdom in the passage. (2) is explicitly mentioned in the third paragraph, refer to “what staunches creativity …. It's the very institutions”

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Question: 3

The central idea of this passage is that

Updated On: Sep 26, 2024
  • social interaction is necessary to nurture creativity
  • creativity and ideas are gradually declining in all societies
  • the creativity divide is widening in societies in line with socio-economic trends
  • more people should work in jobs that engage their creative faculties
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The Correct Option is A

Solution and Explanation

The correct answer is (A):
Neither (2) nor (3) are mentioned as such in the passage. (4) is a recommendation, not the central idea of the passage. The passage is on creativity, and the central idea can be found in the first paragraph itself - “What fosters creativity? … the presence of other creative people”, a theme that resonates throughout the passage.

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Question: 4

Jane Jacobs believed that cities that are more creative

Updated On: Sep 26, 2024
  • have to struggle to retain their creativity
  • have to 'squelch' unproductive people and promote creative ones
  • have leaders and institutions that do not block creativity
  • typically do not start off as creative hubs
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The Correct Option is C

Solution and Explanation

The correct answer is (C):
The alarming view in (2) is not echoed in the passage. (4) also runs contrary to the passage, Jane Jacobs argues in the fifth paragraph that all cities are filled with creative people. (1) is a lay opinion. Jane Jacobs argues that “some cities had more than their shares of leaders, people and institutions that blocked out that creativity”, hence we can safely infer that the more creative cities have leaders and institutions that do not block creativity.

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Question: 5

The 1968 study is used here to show that

Updated On: Sep 26, 2024
  • as they get older, children usually learn to be more creative
  • schooling today does not encourage creative thinking in children
  • the more children learn, the less creative they become
  • technology today prevents children from being creative.
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The Correct Option is B

Solution and Explanation

The correct answer is (B):(1) again runs contrary to the passage, which places creativity as inversely proportional to age. (4) is not mentioned in the passage. (3) paints with too brand a brush. (2) is resonated in the third paragraph, “staunches creativity … many of our schools”.

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Question: 6

The author's conclusions about the most 'creative cities' in the US (paragraph 6) are based on his assumption that

Updated On: Sep 26, 2024
  • people who work with their hands are not doing creative work.
  • more than half the population works in non-creative jobs.
  • only artists, musicians., writers., and so on should be valued in a society.
  • most cities ignore or waste the creativity of low-wage workers
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The Correct Option is A

Solution and Explanation

The correct answer is (A):
(2) is not supported by the passage, refer to “the other 66 percent who toil” in the sixth paragraph. The recommendation in (3) is not the author's. (4) assumes that low-wage workers are creative, which is suspect. The author mentions “work which engages our creative faculties … those of us who work with our minds”, the assumption then being that those who work with their hands are not creative.

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