IPMAT Indore 2025 · Verbal Ability · Question 38
IPMAT Indore 2025 previous year question on RC Inference Questions, with the answer and a step-by-step solution.
RC passage 2: Passage — this question belongs to a set. Read the full set with all 6 questions →
According to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, commodities available for consumption are not inherently negative things. Baudrillard tried to interpret consumption in modern societies by engaging with the 'cargo myth' prevalent among the indigenous Melanesian people living in the South Pacific. The Melanesians did not know what aeroplanes were. However, they saw that these winged entities descended from the air for white people and appeared to make them happy. They also noted that aeroplanes never descended for the Melanesian people.
The Melanesian natives noted that the white people had placed objects similar to the aeroplane on the ground. They concluded that these objects were attracting the aeroplanes in the air and bringing them to the ground. Through a magical process, the aeroplanes were bringing plenty to the white people and making them happy. The Melanesian people concluded that they would need to place objects that simulated the aeroplane on the ground and attract them from the air. Baudrillard believes that the cargo myth holds an important analogy for the ways in which consumers engage with objects of consumption.
According to Baudrillard, the modern consumer "sets in place a whole array of sham objects, of characteristic signs of happiness, and then waits for happiness to alight". For instance, modern consumers believe that they will get happiness if they buy the latest available version of a mobile phone or automobile. However, consumption does not usually lead to happiness. While consumers should ideally be blaming their heightened expectations for their lack of happiness, they blame the commodity instead.
They feel that they should have waited for the next version of a mobile phone or automobile before buying the one they did. The version they bought is somehow inferior and therefore cannot make them happy. Baudrillard argues that consumers have replaced 'real' happiness with 'signs' of happiness. This results in the endless deferment of the arrival of total happiness.
In Baudrillard's words, "in everyday practice, the blessings of consumption are not experienced as resulting from work or from a production process; they are experienced as a miracle". Modern consumers view consumption in the same magical way as the Melanesian people viewed the aeroplanes in the cargo myth. Television commercials also present objects of consumption as miracles. As a result, commodities appear to be distanced from the social processes which lead to their production. In effect, objects of consumption are divorced from the reality which produces them.
- ABy rejecting colonialism and all other forms of economic oppression.
- BBy banning television commercials that promise real happiness.
- CBy recognising that commodities produce miraculous change.
- DBy understanding the connection between production and consumption.
Answer & solution
Answer: Option D
Line in the passage
Final two sentences — commodities appear distanced from the social processes which lead to their production, so objects of consumption are divorced from the reality which produces them.
How to reach it, step by step
Step 1. Note that the stem asks for a remedy, but the passage never states one outright. So you must find the diagnosis and reverse it.
Step 2. The diagnosis is in the closing lines: consumption is experienced as a miracle rather than as the result of work and a production process, so goods end up divorced from the reality that produces them.
Step 3. Reverse it. If the fault is that the link to production is hidden, the repair is seeing that link — stop treating the object as something that fell from the sky and recognise it as something made by labour.
Step 4. That reversal is option (d), the only option that names production at all.
Why the other three fall
(a) Too wide and not in the text. Colonialism and economic oppression are the reader's extrapolation from the Melanesian example.
(b) A banning remedy is never proposed, and the passage's complaint is that the commercials promise a miracle, not real happiness.
(c) The reversal trap. Believing commodities work miracles is the disease the passage describes, so it cannot be the cure.
Teaching point: A useful rule to give the batch: when the stem asks 'how can X be improved' and the passage offers no solution sentence, locate the cause and flip it. The flipped cause is the answer roughly every time.
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