Text completion!!

[Vivekamohan]

I found the below text completion very difficult to understand...plz help me to understand each and every sentence of this text completion...

Perceptions of the ..........role of intellectual practices within modern life underlie the familiar stereotypes of the educated as eggheads,ideologues or worse.These negative characterizations may be rooted in a ......of the aims of academia,but they are unlikely to be .......unless teachers take efforts to address them directly.

Blank 1:incongruous,refractory,salubrious
Blank2:dissemination,confounding,corroboration
Blank 3: espoused,dispelled,promulgated

This question I found in manhattan text completion and sentence equivalence in page no:38....

[tommywallach]

Hey Vive,

The sentence is about how people view intellectuals badly. So we need a negative word for the first blank. Incongruous means "not in harmony with," which fits well. Refractory is also negative, but it means "stubborn and unmanageable," which doesn't make any sense when applied to "intellectual practices." Salubrious is a good thing, so it doesn't work.

The second sentence is describing where the negative view of intellectuals come from. Academia is not inherently bad, so we need a word that would explain how people could get a BAD set of ideas from academia. This would require some sort of misunderstanding, hence confounding, which means "causing confusion."

Finally, the last blank is about how to get rid of these negative views. We simply need a word that means "get rid of." Dispelled is the best option.

Hope that helps!

-t

[Vivekamohan]

Thanks for the great explanation!!

[tommywallach]

Glad to help!

-t