2024 CSAT — Q34

Locate. Find the passage’s actual claims about travel: with long experience and exposure to foreign beaches “where his language is not spoken,” the merchant learns “the worth of what he carries, and what is parochial and what is universal”; delicate goods like “justice, love and honour, courtesy” are valid everywhere but “variously moulded”; and “the art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows.”

Test (the three-boundary check, per statement). Statement 2 is almost a transcription of the last line — travel helps those who wish to learn fundamental common values. Inside all boundaries → valid. Statement 1 — travel leads to an understanding of humans — is a fair inference: learning what is universal in human values like justice and love, and living “at ease among their fellows,” is coming to understand people. Entities and qualifier hold → valid. Statement 3 — a long-travelled person can “resolve differences amongst people.” The passage speaks of learning and living at ease, never of resolving differences between others. That outcome is a new entity/mechanism the text never states → invalid. Negation confirms: “a long-travelled person cannot necessarily resolve others’ differences” leaves the passage untouched.

Eliminate by anatomy. (b)/(d) admit Statement 3 — a claim the passage never actually makes, one that introduces a power the passage never grants — a conflict-resolution power the passage never grants. (c)/(d) likewise carry Statement 3. (c) also drops the valid Statement 2. The transferable rule: travel “to live at ease among fellows” is about the traveller’s own understanding and ease — it does not silently become a power to arbitrate others’ disputes. Key: (a).

Statement 2: “the art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows” — a near-direct restatement that travel helps those who wish to learn fundamental common values → valid. Statement 1: the merchant learns “what is parochial and what is universal” in “justice, love and honour, courtesy” and to “live at ease among their fellows” — travel yielding an understanding of humans is a fair inference inside the passage’s entities → valid. Statement 3: the passage NEVER says travel lets one “resolve differences amongst people” — that outcome is absent (ENTITY/MECHANISM boundary) → invalid. So 1 and 2 only → (a).

Statement 1 — travel leads to an understanding of humans. The merchant learns what is universal versus parochial in human values and how to “live at ease among their fellows.” Understanding humans is a fair inference from this. Negate it and the passage’s claim about the gain of travel weakens. Valid.

Statement 2 — travel helps those who wish to learn fundamental common values. Nearly verbatim: “the art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows.” Valid.

Statement 3 — a long-travelled person can resolve differences amongst people. The passage is about learning values and living at ease, not about resolving disputes between others. “Resolve differences amongst people” is an outcome the text never states. Negate it and nothing in the passage changes. Invalid (adds an outcome/entity outside the text).

Answer: (a) 1 and 2 only.

The trap is Statement 3’s quiet leap from the traveller’s own understanding and ease to a power to resolve other people’s differences. The passage grants the first (learning, living at ease among fellows); it never grants the second. Valid-assumption questions reward the reader who refuses to let a plausible-sounding extension (“a wise traveller could surely mediate disputes”) count as an assumption the text actually makes. Statements 1 and 2 stay inside the passage; 3 walks out of it.