Doubt: practice-va-ps-completed-2026-06-13-075704-q9
sir i think b will be the ans
Linked Question
The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
Bad news tends to stick with us far more than good news. A single harsh comment can outweigh a dozen compliments, and one bad experience at a restaurant can wipe out the memory of many pleasant ones. Researchers find that across a wide range of situations, negative events carry more psychological weight than positive events of the same size. This bias probably had survival value, since our ancestors gained more from avoiding a threat than from enjoying a small pleasure. The effect lingers today, even when nothing dangerous is at stake. Recognising it helps explain why we dwell on criticism and worry, and why a little extra good is needed just to balance a little bad.
What the question asks: choose the option that best captures the paragraph's main idea at full scope.
The paragraph's core: bad news sticks more than good — negative events carry more psychological weight than equally sized positive ones, so they shape our judgements and memories out of proportion. (The evolutionary origin is offered only as a likely reason.)
Why A is right: "Negative events and impressions weigh on us far more heavily than equally sized positive ones, shaping our judgements and memories out of all proportion to their real size." It preserves the crucial equal-size comparison and the out-of-proportion effect — the exact shape of the claim.
Why the others fail:
💡 Teacher tip: When a paragraph stresses a precise comparison ("of the same size"), a summary that omits it (D) has quietly weakened the claim, even if it sounds right.
Answer: A
This is a main-idea question, and the key skill is separating the paragraph's central claim from the explanation it offers for that claim — which is exactly where B trips up.
Read the paragraph's structure. Almost every sentence establishes one core idea: negative events carry more psychological weight than positive events of the same size, and because of this, they shape our judgements and memories out of all proportion. The sentence about ancestors and survival value is different in kind — it is offered only as a likely reason the bias exists ("This bias probably had survival value...").
Option B, your pick, restates exactly that evolutionary sentence. That makes it the background explanation, not the main idea. A summary has to capture what the paragraph is claiming, and here the claim is the bias itself — the why-it-arose part is supporting detail. So B is a strong trap precisely because it's lifted almost verbatim from the passage, but it captures the wrong portion.
Option A keeps both elements that give the claim its shape: the equal-size comparison ("equally sized positive ones") and the out-of-proportion effect ("shaping our judgements and memories out of all proportion to their real size"). That is the paragraph's idea at full scope.
The other two are easier to rule out. C uses extreme language — "all people", "completely controlled", "can never be influenced by anything good" — turning a measured tendency into an absolute, which the passage never supports. D is the closest distractor: it gets the general direction right, but it quietly drops the two things the author stressed — that the comparison is between events of the same size, and that the weighting is out of proportion. When an author deliberately signals a precise comparison, a summary that omits it has weakened the claim, not summarised it.
Final answer: A
—————————— ✨ AI-generated answer. CATLab AI is very reliable on QA & LRDI, but VARC answers can sometimes be debatable — treat this as one considered take and verify the reasoning yourself.