Question

The world dismisses curiosity by calling it idle curiosity even though curious

persons are seldom idle. Parents do their best to extinguish curiosity in their

children because it makes life difficult to be faced every day with a string of

unanswerable questions about what makes fire hot or why grass grows.

Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline are invited to join the

University of Scholars. Within the university, they can keep asking their

questions and try finding answers. Some of the questions which the scholars

ask seem to the world to be scarcely worth asking; let alone answering. They

ask questions too minute and specialized for you and me to understand

without years of explanation.

But to you who are now part of the university, the person will say that he

wants to know the answer simply because he does not know it. The way the

mountain climber wants to climb a mountain, simply because it is there.

Similarly, a historian when asked by outsiders why he studies history may

come out with the argument that he has learnt to repeat on such occasions,

something about knowledge of the past making it possible to understand

the present and mould the future. But if you really want to know why a

historian studies the past, the answer is much simpler. Something happened

and he would like to know what.

All this does not mean that the answers which scholars find to their

questions have no consequences. They may have many consequences but

these seldom form the reason for asking the question or pursuing the

answers. It is true that scholars can be put to work for answering questions

for sake of the consequences as thousands are working now. For example, in

search of a cure for cancer as the consequences are usually subordinate to

the satisfaction of curiosity.​

Answer 1

Answer:

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with the preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill large animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephants had been behaving. They all said the same thing; he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.