The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
People spontaneously create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think “if only” or “what if” and imagine how the past could have been different. The mind computes counterfactuals for many reasons. Counterfactuals explain the past and prepare for the future, they implicate various relations including causal ones, and they affect intentions and decisions. They modulate emotions such as regret and relief, and they support moral judgments such as blame. The ability to create counterfactuals develops throughout childhood and contributes to reasoning about other people's beliefs, including their false beliefs.
People spontaneously create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think “if only” or “what if” and imagine how the past could have been different. The mind computes counterfactuals for many reasons. Counterfactuals explain the past and prepare for the future, they implicate various relations including causal ones, and they affect intentions and decisions. They modulate emotions such as regret and relief, and they support moral judgments such as blame. The ability to create counterfactuals develops throughout childhood and contributes to reasoning about other people's beliefs, including their false beliefs.
- Counterfactuals help people to prepare for the future by understanding intentions and making decisions.
- People create counterfactual alternatives to reality for various reasons, including reasoning about other people's beliefs.
- Counterfactual alternatives to reality are created for a variety of reasons and is part of one's developmental process.
- Counterfactual thinking helps to reverse past and future actions and reason out false beliefs.
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
The paragraph discusses counterfactual thinking, highlighting how people create hypothetical alternatives to reality for various purposes. These include explaining historical events, planning for the future, understanding relationships (including cause and effect), eliciting emotions, and supporting ethical conclusions. It also mentions that the ability to generate such counterfactuals develops during childhood and helps in understanding others' beliefs. Option C summarizes these key points effectively and accurately.
The preparation for the future is the main focus of Option A, and it ignores the larger motivations for developing counterfactual alternatives.
The developmental aspect and different reasons for creating are not highlighted in Option B.
Option D oversimplifies the function of counterfactuals and falsely implies that counterfactual reasoning aids in reversing past and future actions. This is not the passage's primary purpose.
The correct option is (C):Counterfactual alternatives to reality are created for a variety of reasons and is part of one's developmental process.
Top Questions on Para Summary
Para-Summary Paragraph:
Public debates often oversimplify complex issues into binary choices such as right/wrong or safe/unsafe. This reductive framing limits nuanced thinking, discourages dialogue, and pushes people to defend positions rather than understand diverse viewpoints.Which sentence best summarizes this paragraph?
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Human memory is not a recording of the past but a reconstruction influenced by expectations, emotions, and present needs. People often recall events differently at different times, not because they are careless, but because memory adapts to serve current goals. Understanding this adaptive nature explains why eyewitness testimonies are unreliable and why personal narratives evolve over time.
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Certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed – the effect of an articulation between sign and referent – but to be ‘naturally’ given. Simple visual signs appear to have achieved a ‘near-universality’ in this sense: though evidence remains that even apparently ‘natural’ visual codes are culture specific. However, this does not mean that no codes have intervened; rather, that the codes have been profoundly naturalized. The operation of naturalized codes reveals not the transparency and ‘naturalness’ of language but the depth, the habituation and the near-universality of the codes in use. They produce apparently ‘natural’ recognitions. This has the (ideological) effect of concealing the practices of coding which are present.
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