Amar is a 15 year old school going student. Which one of the following now can be answered or responded by Amar which he could not answer or might face difficulty in answering/responding five years ago?

Correct option is C

The correct answer is (c) 'Describe the most crowded place of your city as if you are flying in the sky'.
This task requires abstract thinking and imaginative perspective-taking, which are cognitive abilities that typically develop during adolescence, as per Jean Piaget’s Formal Operational Stage. At age 15, Amar is capable of hypothetical reasoning and can mentally place himself in an imaginary scenario, such as flying over a city and describing it from a bird’s-eye view — something he might have struggled with at age 10.

Children around 10 years of age are generally in the Concrete Operational Stage, where they think logically but only in terms of real, concrete events. Imaginative tasks that involve shifting perspectives or creating novel mental images — such as viewing the city from the sky — are usually beyond the grasp of concrete operational thinking.

Thus, at 15, Amar’s cognitive development now includes the ability to think abstractly and creatively, enabling him to describe situations that go beyond direct experience, such as a fictional or dream-like perspective of a city.

Information Booster

1. Formal Operational Stage begins around age 11 and involves abstract and hypothetical thinking.
2. Adolescents can think about situations that are not immediately present or even real.
3. Perspective-taking and mental simulation are enhanced at this stage.
4. This developmental milestone enables higher-order language use, including metaphor and symbolism.
5. Tasks like imagining flying or dreaming require second-order thinking — imagining something beyond firsthand experience.

Additional Knowledge

• Option (a): "Describe the most crowded place of your city in your own words" involves descriptive language and recollection of observed details, which are manageable even for a 10-year-old child using concrete reasoning.
• Option (b): "Describe the cleanliness and beauty of your city" relies on sensory observations and simple value judgments, which a child in the concrete operational stage can handle.
• Option (d): "Describe the beauty of your city as you saw in a dream" is close to abstract thinking, but interpreting dreams involves less structured spatial imagination compared to the aerial viewpoint in option (c). Hence, (c) requires a more complex cognitive leap.