CAT (VARC) PYQs

There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Paragraph: The experience of reading philosophy is often disquieting. When reading philosophy, the values around which one has heretofore organised one's life may come to look provincial, flatly wrong, or even evil ___ (1) ___ . When beliefs previously held as truths are rendered implausible, new beliefs, values, and ways of living may be required ___ (2) ___ . What's worse, philosophers admonish each other to remain unsutured until such time as a defensible new answer is revealed or constructed. Sometimes philosophical writing is even strictly critical in that it does not even attempt to provide an alternative after tearing down a cultural or conceptual citadel ___ (3) ___ . The reader of philosophy must be prepared for the possibility of this experience. While reading philosophy can help one clarify one's values, and even make one self-conscious for the first time of the fact that there are good reasons for believing what one believes, it can also generate unremediated doubt that is difficult to live with ___ (4) ___ . Sentence: This philosophical cut at one's core beliefs, values, and way of life is difficult enough.

There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit. Paragraph: The researchers also uncovered an unexpected genetic link between Native Americans and Japanese people ___ (1) ___ . During the deglaciation period, another group branched out from northern coastal China and travelled to Japan ___ (2) ___ . "We were surprised to find that this ancestral source also contributed to the Japanese gene pool, especially the indigenous Ainus," says Li ___ (3) ___ . They shared similarities in how they crafted stemmed projectile points for arrowheads and spears ___ (4) ___ . "This suggests that the Pleistocene connection among the Americas, China, and Japan was not confined to culture but also to genetics," says senior author Qing-Peng Kong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Sentence: The discovery helps to explain archeological similarities between the Paleolithic peoples of China, Japan, and the Americas.

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. In English, there is no systematic rule for the naming of numbers; after ten, we have "eleven" and "twelve" and then the teens: "thirteen", "fourteen", "fifteen" and so on. 2. Even more confusingly, some English words invert the numbers they refer to: the word "fourteen" puts the four first, even though it appears last. 3. It can take children a while to learn all these words, and understand that "fourteen" is different from "forty". 4., English speakers switch to a different pattern: "twenty", "thirty", "forty" and so on. 5. If you didn't know the word for "eleven", you would be unable to just guess it - you might come up with something like "one-teen".

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. Having an appreciation for the workings of another person's mind is considered a prerequisite for natural language acquisition, strategic social interaction, reflexive thought, and moral judgment. 2. It is a 'theory of mind' though some scholars prefer to call it 'mentalizing' or 'mindreading', which is important for the development of one's cognitive abilities. 3. Though we must speculate about its evolutionary origin, we do have indications that the capacity evolved sometime in the last few million years. 4. This capacity develops from early beginnings in the first year of life to the adult's fast and often effortless understanding of others' thoughts, feelings, and intentions. 5. One of the most fascinating human capacities is the ability to perceive and interpret other people's behaviour in terms of their mental states.

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>What precisely are the "unusual elements" that make a particular case so attractive to a certain kind of audience?</li> <li>It might be a particularly savage or unfathomable level of depravity, very often it has something to do with the precise amount of mystery involved.</li> <li>Unsolved, and perhaps unsolvable cases offer something that "ordinary" murder doesn't.</li> <li>Why are some crimes destined for perpetual re-examination and others locked into permanent obscurity?</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. Algorithms hosted on the internet are accessed by many, so biases in Al models have resulted in much larger impact, adversely affecting far larger groups of people. 2. Though "algorithmic bias" is the popular term, the foundation of such bias is not in algorithms, but in the data; algorithms are not biased, data is, as algorithms merely reflect persistent patterns that are present in the training data. 3. Despite their widespread impact, it is relatively easier to fix Al biases than human- generated biases, as it is simpler to identify the former than to try to make people unlearn behaviors learnt over generations. 4. The impact of biased decisions made by humans is localised and geographically confined, but with the advent of Al, the impact of such decisions is spread over a much wider scale.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Colonialism is not a modern phenomenon. World history is full of examples of one society gradually expanding by incorporating adjacent territory and settling its people on newly conquered territory. In the sixteenth century, colonialism changed decisively because of technological developments in navigation that began to connect more remote parts of the world. The modern European colonial project emerged when it became possible to move large numbers of people across the ocean and to maintain political control in spite of geographical dispersion. The term colonialism is used to describe the process of European settlement, violent dispossession and political domination over the rest of the world, including the Americas, Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Manipulating information was a feature of history long before modern journalism established rules of integrity. A record dates back to ancient Rome, when Antony met Cleopatra and his political enemy Octavian launched a smear campaign against him with "short, sharp slogans written upon coins." The perpetrator became the first Roman Emperor and "fake news had allowed Octavian to hack the republican system once and for all". But the 21st century has seen the weaponization of information on an unprecedented scale. Powerful new technology makes the fabrication of content simple, and social networks amplify falsehoods peddled by States, populist politicians, and dishonest corporate entities. The platforms have become fertile ground for computational propaganda, 'trolling' and 'troll armies'.