What is the author's main argument?

Doubt, held in balance with conviction, is a virtue that enables learning and humility (The author defends 'honest doubt' as the condition of learning while warning that doubting everything is also useless, urging balance.)

Why does the author point out that cruel deeds were done by people who were 'sure'?

To prove certainty has real dangers (The example shows that certainty 'does not pause to ask whether it might be wrong,' making it a dangerous instrument.)

What does 'committed, but correctable' mean as a way to live?

Act firmly on beliefs while staying open to revising them (The 'narrow ridge' is holding beliefs firmly enough to act yet loosely enough to revise, balancing commitment and openness.)

As used in the passage, "wracked" most nearly means:

tormented (People "wracked with doubt" are tormented by it; the author contrasts them with the people who were sure, who did the cruelest deeds.)

According to the passage, what is true of a person who doubts everything equally?

They are as useless as a person who doubts nothing (The passage states it directly: "A person who doubts everything equally is as useless as one who doubts nothing.")

In Praise of Doubt: Level 5 Reading Comprehension Questions

Doubt has a bad reputation. We speak of it as weakness, as the enemy of conviction, as the gray fog that keeps a person from acting. Yet consider what certainty has cost the world. The cruelest deeds in history were rarely done by people wracked with doubt; they were done by people who were sure. Certainty does not pause to ask whether it might be wrong, and a mind that cannot imagine its own error is a dangerous instrument.

Doubt, by contrast, is the quiet admission that our view of things is partial. It is what lets us listen to an opponent without simply waiting for our turn to speak. It is what makes a scientist test the belief she most wants to be true. Far from paralyzing us, honest doubt is the condition of learning anything at all, for nothing new can enter a mind already convinced it is full.

This is not a call to believe nothing. A person who doubts everything equally is as useless as one who doubts nothing. The art lies in holding our beliefs firmly enough to act on them and loosely enough to revise them. To live well is to walk that narrow ridge: committed, but correctable.

Comprehension questions