All men are snobs about something. One is almost tempted to add: There is nothing about which men cannot feel snobbish. But this would doubtless be an exaggeration. There are certain disfiguring and mortal diseases about which there has probably never been any snobbery. I cannot imagine for example, that there are any leprosy-snobs. More picturesque diseases, even when they are dangerous, and less dangerous diseases, particularly when they are the diseases of the rich, can be and very frequently are a source of snobbish self-importance. I have met several adolescent consumption-snobs, who thought that it would be romantic to fade away in the flower of youth, like Keats or Marie Bashkirtseff. Alas, the final stages of the consumptive fading are generally a good deal less romantic than these ingenuous young tubercle-snobs seem to imagine. To anyone who has actually witnessed these final stages, the complacent poeticizing of those adolescents must seem as exasperating as they are profoundly pathetic. In the case of those commoner disease-snobs, whose claim to distinction is that they suffer from one of the maladies of the rich, exasperation is not tempered by very much sympathy. People who possess sufficient leisure, sufficient wealth, not to mention sufficient health, to go travelling from spa to spa, from doctor to fashionable doctor, in search of cures from problematical diseases (which, in so far as they exist at all, probably have their source in overeating) cannot expect us to be very lavish in our solicitude and pity. - Aldous Huxley
What does the author consider to be an exaggeration?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → That there is nothing about which men cannot feel snobbish
The writer begins: all men are snobs about something. He is "almost tempted to add" that there is nothing about which men cannot feel snobbish, "But this would doubtless be an exaggeration". The exaggeration is this second, wider claim; he then shows that there are some diseases, like leprosy, about which no one is snobbish.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: That all men are snobs about something — Incorrect. Wrong link: this is the writer's own opening statement, which he accepts as true.
Option 3: That modern men in particular are snobs — Incorrect. Not mentioned: the passage does not compare modern men with men of earlier times.
Option 4: That all the adolescents are consumption-snobs — Incorrect. Overstated: the writer says only that he has met several adolescent consumption-snobs; he never claims that all adolescents are.