Practice Set B for CLAT 2021: I rang the doorbell and got ushered up to the room that used to be somewhat mine. Without much chit-chat, Sherlock Holmes gestured for me to take a comfy seat. Then, he stood by the fireplace, giving me the once-over in his unique, thoughtful way.
“Watson, you never mentioned you were planning to dive into the working world.”
“How on earth did you figure that out?”
“I see it, I deduce it. How do I know you’ve been caught in the rain recently and have a not-so-graceful servant girl?”
“Holmes, this is too much. I did go for a stroll in the countryside on Thursday and came back looking like a disaster, but I changed my clothes. I can’t fathom how you deduced that. And as for Mary Jane, she’s a handful, but I can’t see how you’re connecting the dots there either.”
“It’s a piece of cake,” he said. “Just by glancing, I can tell that on the inside of your left shoe, where the firelight hits it, the leather has six nearly parallel cuts. Clearly, someone carelessly slashed at the sole edges to scrape off caked mud. Hence, my double deduction: you braved awful weather, and you had a particularly clumsy boot-slitting London servant girl.”
In stories, detectives like Holmes often have super-sharp minds, capable of seeing and analyzing things ordinary folks can’t. They excel at inference, deduction, induction, and conclusion.
On the flip side, there’s G.K. Chesterton’s fictional Catholic priest, Father Brown. His secret weapon is an extraordinary sense of sympathy and empathy, letting him imagine and feel as criminals do. He explains, “I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.”
Sherlock tracks down the culprit from the outside, using science, experiments, and deduction. In contrast, Father Brown taps into a range of psychological experiences gained from confessions. He relies on introspection, intuition, and empathy.
Then there’s another breed of detectives like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, who is a storyteller. He gathers information from the stories others tell, patiently listening to countless versions of what happened, where, and how. He pays attention to credibility and ambiguity, figuring out why the puzzle pieces don’t fit. In the end, he unravels the truth.
Questions
In order to solve cases, Poirot uses the art of ______ the narratives that he has been told.
(A) Building a fantasy based on
(B) Empathizing with all the characters in
(C) Creating new plots for
(D) Detecting and analyzing the missing links in
CORRECT OPTION: D
The word incorrigible is the antonym of
(A) Habitual
(B) Unperformable
(C) Repentant
(D) Incurable
CORRECT OPTION: C
For the three detectives mentioned in the passage, which one of these would be nonessential for solving criminal cases?
(A) Forgiving nature
(B) Sensitivity
(D) Patience
CORRECT OPTION: A
From the passage, it can be inferred that
(A) Watson is Holmes’ mentor.
(B) Earlier, Watson used to live with Holmes.
(C) Watson is a detective.
(D) Watson shares all his personal matters with Holmes.
CORRECT OPTION: B
It is evident that for solving cases, Father Brown relies largely on
(A) His own sympathetic and empathic thought process about criminals.
(B) A sympathetic approach towards various people’s opinion on the case to be solved.
(C) A deductive analysis of the crime and his ability to sympathize.
(D) All the above.
CORRECT OPTION: A
Read Also: CLAT 2021 English Language, Practice Set B – Previous Year Questions
