2024 CSAT — Q23

Locate. This asks for the author’s view: separate the lines where the author asserts his own stance from views he merely reports. He reports the older stance (Newton/Galileo: the only responsibility was “to tell the truth”) and endorses the modern one (“We take it for granted now that science has a social responsibility”). His own thinking synthesises the two: truth-telling plus social responsibility.

Test (commitment test). The author is committed to a view only where a line asserts it. He asserts (i) science’s traditional job is truth, and (ii) science now has a social responsibility — he treats the latter as something “we take for granted.” Put together, his position is that science must pursue truth and be socially responsible. That is (d).

Eliminate by anatomy. (a) is the reader’s own opinion smuggled in — “value the commitment of scientists” is not a stance the passage takes. (b) is a claim the passage never actually makes — “promotion of scientific awareness in people” is nowhere asserted. (c) gets the direction backwards — the passage says the idea of science as a social enterprise “begins at the industrial revolution,” not that science caused the industrial revolution; (c) flips a temporal coincidence into causation. The transferable rule: the author’s view is the one his lines commit him to — here, a synthesis of truth and social responsibility — not a plausible adjacent claim. Key: (d).

The author reports the older view — Newton and Galileo held “the only responsibility… was to tell the truth” — and the modern view he accepts: “We take it for granted now that science has a social responsibility.” His own synthesis is that science both pursues truth AND carries social responsibility — exactly (d). (c) misreads “the idea that science is a social enterprise… begins at the industrial revolution” as science causing the industrial revolution.

The author contrasts eras: for Newton and Galileo, science’s “only responsibility… was to tell the truth”; the modern idea, which “we take for granted now,” is that science “has a social responsibility.” The author accepts both — science’s commitment to truth and its modern social responsibility.

(d) — science must pursue truth but be responsible for social welfare — states exactly this synthesis. (a) and (b) assert positions the passage never takes; (c) misreads a temporal claim (“the idea… begins at the industrial revolution”) as science causing the industrial revolution.

Answer: (d).

The author’s view here is a synthesis of an old responsibility (truth) and a new one (social responsibility), and the trap (c) exploits a single sentence — “the idea… begins at the industrial revolution” — by reading temporal coincidence as causation. The scoring move is the commitment test: collect only the stances the author’s lines actually assert (truth + social responsibility), and the option that combines them (d) is his view; the option that invents a cause-effect (c) is not.