CAT (VARC) PYQs

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. To me, a "classic" means precisely the opposite of what my predecessors understood: a work is classical by reason of its resistance to contemporaneity and supposed universality, by reason of its capacity to indicate human particularity and difference in that past epoch. The classic is not what tells me about shared humanity or, more truthfully put, what lets me recognize myself as already present in the past, what nourishes in me the illusion that everything has been like me and has existed only to prepare the way for me. Instead, the classic is what gives access to radically different forms of human consciousness for any given generation of readers, and thereby expands for them the range of possibilities of what it means to be a human being.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. A translator of literary works needs a secure hold upon the two languages involved, supported by a good measure of familiarity with the two cultures. For an Indian translating works in an Indian language into English, finding satisfactory equivalents in a generalized western culture of practices and symbols in the original would be less difficult than gaining fluent control of contemporary English. When a westerner works on texts in Indian languages the interpretation of cultural elements will be the major challenge, rather than control over the grammar and essential vocabulary of the language concerned. It is much easier to remedy lapses in language in a text translated into English, than flaws of content. Since it is easier for an Indian to learn the English language than it is for a Briton or American to comprehend Indian culture, translations of Indian texts is better left to Indians.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. For each of the past three years, temperatures have hit peaks not seen since the birth of meteorology, and probably not for more than 110,000 years. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is at its highest level in 4 million years. This does not cause storms like Harvey, there have always been storms and hurricanes along the Gulf of Mexico but it makes them wetter and more powerful. As the seas warm, they evaporate more easily and provide energy to storm fronts. As the air above them warms, it holds more water vapour. For every half a degree Celsius in warming, there is about a 3% increase in atmospheric moisture content. Scientists call this the Clausius Clapeyron equation. This means the skies fill more quickly and have more to dump. The storm surge was greater because sea levels have risen 20 cm as a result of more than 100 years of human related global warming which has melted glaciers and thermally expanded the volume of sea water.

The sentences given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the numbers as your answer. 1. The process of handing down implies not a passive transfer, but some contestation in defining what exactly is to be handed down. 2. Wherever Western scholars have worked on the Indian past, the selection is even more apparent and the inventing of a tradition much more recognizable. 3. Every generation selects what it requires from the past and makes its innovations, some more than others. 4. It is now a truism to say that traditions are not handed down unchanged, but are invented. 5. Just as life has death as its opposite, so is tradition by default the opposite of innovation.

The sentences given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the numbers as your answer. <ol> <li>Scientists have for the first time managed to edit genes in a human embryo to repair a genetic mutation, fuelling hopes that such procedures may one day be available outside laboratory conditions.</li> <li>The cardiac disease causes sudden death in otherwise healthy young athletes and affects about one in 500 people overall.</li> <li>Correcting the mutation in the gene would not only ensure that the child is healthy but also prevents transmission of the mutation to future generations.</li> <li>It is caused by a mutation in a particular gene and a child will suffer from the condition even if it inherits only one copy of the mutated gene.</li> <li>In results announced in Nature this week, scientists fixed a mutation that thickens the heart muscle, a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.</li> </ol>

The sentences given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the numbers as your answer. 1. The study suggests that the disease did not spread with such intensity, but that it may have driven human migrations across Europe and Asia. 2. The oldest sample came from an individual who lived in southeast Russia about 5,000 years ago. 3. The ages of the skeletons correspond to a time of mass exodus from today's Russia and Ukraine into western Europe and central Asia, suggesting that a pandemic could have driven these migrations. 4. In the analysis of fragments of DNA from $101$ Bronze Age skeletons for sequences from Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the disease, seven tested positive. 5. DNA from Bronze Age human skeletons indicate that the black plague could have emerged as early as $3,000$ BCE, long before the epidemic that swept through Europe in the mid-1300s.

The sentences given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the numbers as your answer. 1. This visual turn in social media has merely accentuated this announcing instinct of ours, enabling us with easy-to-create, easy-to-share, easy-to-store and easy-to-consume platforms, gadgets and apps. 2. There is absolutely nothing new about us framing the vision of who we are or what we want, visually or otherwise, in our Facebook page, for example. 3. Turning the pages of most family albums, which belonged to a period well before the digital dissemination of self-created and self-curated moments and images, would reconfirm the basic instinct of documenting our presence in a particular space, on a significant occasion, with others who matter. 4. We are empowered to book our faces and act as celebrities within the confinement of our respective friend lists, and communicate our activities, companionship and locations with minimal clicks and touches. 5. What is unprecedented is not the desire to put out news feeds related to the self, but the ease with which this broadcast operation can now be executed, often provoking (un)anticipated responses from beyond one's immediate location.

Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. People who study children's language spend a lot of time watching how babies react to the speech they hear around them. 2. They make films of adults and babies interacting, and examine them very carefully to see whether the babies show any signs of understanding what the adults say. 3. They believe that babies begin to react to language from the very moment they are born. 4. Sometimes the signs are very subtle slight movements of the baby's eyes or the head or the hands. 5. You'd never notice them if you were just sitting with the child, but by watching a recording over and over, you can spot them.

Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. Neuroscientists have just begun studying exercise's impact within brain cells - on the genes themselves. 2. Even there, in the roots of our biology, they've found signs of the body's influence on the mind. 3. It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes. 4. In today's technology driven, plasma screened in world, it's easy to forget that we are born movers animals, in fact because we've engineered movement right out of our lives. 5. It's only in the past few years that neuroscientists have begun to describe these factors and how they work, and each new discovery adds awe-inspiring depth to the picture

Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer. 1. The water that made up ancient lakes and perhaps an ocean was lost. 2. Particles from the Sun collided with molecules in the atmosphere, knocking them into space or giving them an electric charge that caused them to be swept away by the solar wind. 3. Most of the planet's remaining water is now frozen or buried, but clues over the past decade suggested that some liquid water, a presumed necessity for life, might survive in underground aquifers. 4. Data from NASA's MAVEN orbiter show that solar storms stripped away most of Mars's once-thick atmosphere. 5. A recent study reveals how Mars lost much of its early water, while another indicates that some liquid water remains.