When a child is born, her first connection to the world is established through her mother, or in a broader sense,her parents. An infant sees the world through her parent's eyes ; she tries to imbibe everything she recognises in her parents. Thus, a parent-child relationship lays the foundation of the 'building of her li y . Parenting is the bringing up of a child. It is like the nourishment that is necessary for a sapling to grow into a big and fruitful tree. Hence, for a child to grow into a wonderful human being, good parenting is essential. Parenting styles vary from culture to culture. The world is a big place comprising of a variety of people having different ways of living.Although culture is the key ingredient, the economic situation and standard of living also have an impact on parenting. While there are a common set of values in different cultures like honesty and integrity, the value system stands divided on some of the major facets of parenting, exemplifi ed by the comparison of the Indianstyle with that of the West.
Which of the following is a major differentiator on some of the major facets of parenting ?
- Honesty
- Intregrity
- Love
- Value System
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
The given comprehension passage revolves around the varying styles of parenting influenced by cultural and economic factors. Let us analyze the passage to understand what differentiates major facets of parenting:
- The passage states that when a child is born, the first worldview comes from the parents. As the child grows, the nourishment required is similar to that of a sapling needing nourishment to become a fruitful tree. Hence, good parenting is emphasized as essential for the child's development into a wonderful human being.
- Parenting styles vary markedly according to different cultures, as stated in the passage. It suggests that culture primarily influences these styles, along with economic situations and living standards.
- Although common values like honesty and integrity are recognized across cultures, the passage explicitly notes that the "value system" is what stands divided on some major facets of parenting. This emphasizes the conclusion that different cultures, exemplifying Indian-style parenting compared to Western, have distinctive value systems.
Hence, examining the options provided:
- Honesty: Described as a common value across cultures, not a differentiator.
- Integrity: Also described as a common value, not a differentiator.
- Love: Love is generally an underlying principle in parenting but is not highlighted in the passage as a differentiator across major facets.
- Value System: Mentioned explicitly as divided across parenting styles, thereby acting as the key differentiator and is the correct answer.
Thus, out of the given options, the "Value System" is the major differentiator in some of the facets of parenting according to the passage.
Parenting is basically :
- Culture dependent
- Culture independent
- Country independent
- Common across all cultures
The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
The given question asks about the nature of parenting in relation to culture. To determine the correct option, let's analyze the passage provided.
The passage states:
When a child is born, her first connection to the world is established through her mother, or in a broader sense, her parents. An infant sees the world through her parent's eyes; she tries to imbibe everything she recognizes in her parents. Thus, a parent-child relationship lays the foundation of the 'building of her life.' Parenting is the bringing up of a child. It is like the nourishment that is necessary for a sapling to grow into a big and fruitful tree. Hence, for a child to grow into a wonderful human being, good parenting is essential. Parenting styles vary from culture to culture. The world is a big place comprising a variety of people having different ways of living. Although culture is the key ingredient, the economic situation and standard of living also have an impact on parenting.
From this passage, the key insight is as follows:
- Parenting styles differ from one culture to another, indicating that cultural context plays a significant role in determining how parenting is executed.
- The text mentions that while there are some common values, the approaches to parenting are not universal across cultures.
Given this understanding, we see that the fundamental assertion of the passage is that parenting is shaped and influenced significantly by cultural contexts. Therefore, the correct answer is Culture dependent.
Let's evaluate the other options to ensure our choice is correct:
- Culture independent: This option suggests that parenting does not vary with culture, which contradicts the passage's emphasis on cultural diversity affecting parenting.
- Country independent: While the passage discusses cultural differences, it does not specify country independence, which is a different context.
- Common across all cultures: This suggests a uniformity in parenting styles, which the passage explicitly refutes by pointing out cultural variations.
Hence, after careful analysis, option Culture dependent is indeed the correct answer.
Parenting here is compared to :
- Nourishing a plant
- Looking after a pet
- Maintaining a vehicle
- Maintaining a relationship
The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
To answer this question, we need to understand the metaphor used in the given passage. The passage compares parenting to something essential for growth, specifically likening it to the process necessary for a sapling to grow into a fruitful tree.
- The passage states that parenting is essential for a child to grow into a wonderful human being. This suggests a nurturing and development-focused approach, similar to the care needed for a plant.
- The comparison is directly made in the passage: "It is like the nourishment that is necessary for a sapling to grow into a big and fruitful tree." Here, the explicit comparison to a plant being nurtured is mentioned.
- Let's evaluate the options given:
- Nourishing a plant: This option directly aligns with the passage's metaphor of parenting as nurturing, similar to nourishing a sapling.
- Looking after a pet: While a pet also requires care, the passage focuses more on growth and development over time, akin to a plant maturing over years.
- Maintaining a vehicle: Maintaining a vehicle emphasizes upkeep and repair rather than growth and development.
- Maintaining a relationship: While important, maintaining a relationship does not imply the structured growth and nurturing indicated in the passage.
- From the analysis above, the correct answer is Nourishing a plant, as it is the metaphor explicitly used in the passage.
Thus, the correct answer is: Nourishing a plant.
Top Questions on Reading Comprehension
- Acrucial moderating factor in how people experience comparisons is self-esteem. Individuals with high self-esteem are more likely to interpret upward comparison as informative rather than threatening. They are more resilient in the face of others’ success and more likely to believe they can reach their own goals. In contrast, people with low self-esteem are more prone to interpret comparison as judgment, reinforcing negative self-views and triggering feelings of inadequacy.
This dynamic creates a self-reinforcing loop. People with high self-esteem are less vulnerable to upward comparison, which intensifies those doubts. Those with a secure sense of self are more likely to use comparison as a learning tool. The same external stimulus—a colleague’s achievements, a friend’s popularity—can have radically different effects depending on internal stability.
Self-esteem also influences how people choose their comparison targets. Research has found that individuals often engage in “selective comparison,” seeking out those who confirm their existing beliefs about themselves. This can become a subtle form of self-sabotage. Someone who feels unworthy may subconsciously seek out targets that reinforce that sense, perpetuating a narrative of inferiority. One of the most promising antidotes to social comparison is temporal comparison—evaluating oneself not against others, but against one’s own past. This method has been shown to increase motivation and satisfaction, especially when individuals can see concrete progress. Temporal comparison activates the same reward circuits as social comparison but avoids the threat systems associated with social ranking. It also reinforces agency: individuals focus on what they can control and improve rather than what others control. In therapeutic and coaching settings, temporal comparison is used to help clients build self-efficacy and track growth over time.
Moreover, people who focus on self-improvement rather than social dominance are less likely to fall into cycles of envy or self-pity. They can still use others as inspiration, but they do so without attaching their self-worth to the outcome. This is not to say they never compare—but that they focus on learning, rather than judgment. The most skilful approach to comparison may lie in eliminating it, but in reframing it as feedback. When we interpret comparison as information rather than a verdict, we can ask, “What can I learn from this?” This shift turns comparison into a growth tool. Teachers mentor their students, not as rivals. Psychologists emphasize that the key variable here is mindset.
A fixed mindset sees comparison as a threat. If someone else is better, it means we are worse. A growth mindset sees comparison as a map. If someone else has reached a certain level, it means the path exists. This reframing is not just a cognitive trick. It changes the emotional tone of comparison, making it more likely to inspire than to wound. Reframing also requires emotional regulation—the ability to notice an initial pang of envy or shame without reacting impulsively. With practice, individuals can learn to pause, reflect, and reinterpret their emotional responses. Over time, this builds resilience and self-trust, allowing comparison to become a learning tool rather than a cage.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
When people who are talking don’t share the same culture, knowledge, values, and assumptions, mutual understanding can be especially difficult. Such understanding is possible through the negotiation of meaning. To negotiate meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. You also need the flexibility in world view, and a generous tolerance for mistakes, as well as a talent for finding the right metaphor to communicate the relevant parts of unshared experiences or to highlight the shared experiences while demphasizing the others. Metaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in large measure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorize your experiences. Problems of mutual understanding are not exotic; they arise in all extended conversations where understanding is important.
When it really counts, meaning is almost never communicated according to the CONDUIT metaphor, that is, where one person transmits a fixed, clear proposition to another by means of expressions in a common language, where both parties have all the relevant common knowledge, assumptions, values, etc. When the chips are down, meaning is negotiated: you slowly figure out what you have in common, what it is safe to talk about, how you can communicate unshared experience or create a shared vision. With enough flexibility in bending your world view and with luck and charity, you may achieve some mutual understanding.
Communication theories based on the CONDUIT metaphor turn from the pathetic to the evil when they are applied indiscriminately on a large scale, say, in government surveillance or computerized files. There, what is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included, and it is assumed that the words in the file have meaning in themselves—disembodied, objective, understandable meaning. When a society lives by the CONDUITmetaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are the likely products.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humanity such a burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons. Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might hide from the problems and the generals. To the contrary, there was a high insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coart forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, but always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
...Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
As the post–World War II generation of liberal democratic leaders forged new, highly successful domestic and international institutions and policies throughout the West, the weaknesses of liberal democracy that dominated the two decades after World War II faded from view. But they did not go away.
First, because liberal democracy restrains majorities, it slows the achievement of goals that majorities support. This generates frustration with institutional restraints, and an unacknowledged envy of authoritarian systems that can act quickly and decisively. China can build huge cities in the time it takes the United States to review the environmental impact of small highway projects. Liberal democracy requires more patience than many possess. Second, liberal democracy requires tolerance for minority views and ways of life to which many citizens are deeply opposed. It is natural to feel that if we consider certain views or ways of life to be odious, we should use public power to suppress them. In many such cases, liberal democracy restrains this impulse, a psychological burden that some will find unbearable.
This leads directly to the third inherent problem of liberal democracy—the distinction it requires us to make between civic identity and personal or group identity. For example, although we may consider certain religious views false and even dangerous, we must, for civic purposes, accept those who hold these views as our equals. They may freely express these views; they may organize to promote them; they may vote, and their votes are given the same weight as ours. The same goes for race, ethnicity, gender, and all the particularities that distinguish us from one another.
This requirement often goes against the grain of natural sentiments. We want the public sphere to reflect what we find most valuable about our private commitments. Liberal democracy prevents us from fully translating our personal identities into our public lives as citizens. This too is not always easy to bear. The quest for wholeness—for a political community, or even a world, that reflects our most important commitments—is a deep yearning to which liberal leaders can always appeal.
Nor is the fourth inherent difficulty of liberal democracy—the necessity of compromise—easy to bear. If what I want is good and true, why should I agree that public decisions must incorporate competing views? James Madison gives us the answer: in circumstances of liberty, diversity of views is inevitable, and unless those who agree with us form a majority so large as to be irresistible, the alternative to compromise is inaction, which is often more damaging, or oppression, which always is.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
Beware of the old newspapers
stacked
on that little three legged stool over there.
Don’t disturb them.
I know it for a fact
that snakes have spawned in between these sheets.
Don’t even look in that direction.
It’s not because of breeze
that their corners are fluttering.
It’s alive, that nest of newspapers.
new born snakes, coiling and uncurling,
are turning their heads to look at you.
That white corner has spread its hood.
A forked tongue
shoots out of its mouth.
Keep your eyes closed.
Get rid of the whole goddamn pile if you
want to
in the morning.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
Questions Asked in CMAT exam
- A "Febian Entrepreneur" is a term used to describe a type of entrepreneur who focuses on gradual and steady growth rather than rapid scaling. Which of the following best describes the approach of a Febian Entrepreneur?
- CMAT - 2025
- Current Affairs
- The Lean Startup methodology, popularized by Eric Ries, emphasizes a cycle of building, measuring, and learning to create successful products efficiently. Which of the following is a key principle of the Lean Startup approach?
- CMAT - 2025
- Current Affairs
- Dudhwa National Park, known for its rich biodiversity and tiger conservation efforts, is located in which Indian state?
- CMAT - 2025
- Current Affairs
- The first CDS (Chief of Defence Staff) of India was appointed to enhance coordination and integration among the three branches of the Indian Armed Forces. Who was the first CDS of India?
- CMAT - 2025
- Current Affairs
- A clock is set at 8 am. It loses 10 minutes every 24 hours. What will be the true time when the clock shows 11 am?
- CMAT - 2025
- Logical and Analytical Reasoning Skills