CAT (VARC) PYQs

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Lyric poetry is a genre of private meditation rather than public commitment. The impulse in Marxism toward changing a society deemed unacceptable in its basic design would seem to place demands on lyric poetry that such poetry, with its tendency toward the personal, the small scale, and the idiosyncratic, could never answer. There is within Marxism, however, also a strand of thought that would locate in lyric poetry alternative modes of perception and description that call forth a vision of worlds at odds with a repressive reality or that draw attention to the workings of ideology within the hegemonic culture. The poetic imagination may indeed deflect larger social concerns, but it may also be implicitly critical and utopian.</p>

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 horrifying photograph of children fleeing a deadly napalm attack has become a defining image not only of the Vietnam War but the 20th century. ___ (1) ___. Dark smoke billowing behind them, the young subjects' faces are painted with a mixture of terror, pain and confusion. ___ (2) ___. Soldiers from the South Vietnamese army's 25th Division follow helplessly behind. ___ (3) ___. The picture was officially titled "The Terror of War," but the photo is better known by the nickname given to naked 9-year-old at its centre "Napalm Girl". ___ (4) ___. Sentence: Taken outside the village of Trang Bang on June 8, 1972, the picture captured the trauma and indiscriminate violence of a conflict that claimed, by some estimates, a million or more civilian lives.

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: ___ (1) ___ Prices are rising at their fastest rate in 40 years, consequently, return-to-office-related costs have shot up - think petrol and food, for instance. ___ (2) ___ . Yet wages haven't kept up with inflation even despite the salary growth many workers have enjoyed during a favorable pandemic labour market. ___ (3) ___ . This is especially jarring for workers who were able to save during remote work, when these expenditures weren't a factor. ___ (4) ___ . In April 2022, Umus, a London university lecturer, told BBC Work life that they were spending nearly a quarter of what they made every day on return-to-work costs. Sentence: This reality is putting stress on employees who have to pay for transport, desk lunches, more childcare, clothing and that after-work socialisation - costs they haven't incurred for nearly two years.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. When the tradwife puts on that georgic, pinstriped dress, she is not just admiring the visual cues of a fantastical past. She takes these dreams of storybook bliss literally, tracing them backward in time until she reaches a logical conclusion that satisfies her. And by doing so, she ends up delivering an unhappy reminder of just how much our lives consist of artifice and playacting. The tradwife outrages people because of herdeliberately regressive ideals. And yet her behaviour is, on some level, indistinguishable from the nontradwife's. The tradwife's trollish genius is to beat us at our own dress-up game. By insisting that the idyllic cottage daydream should be real, right down to the primitive gender roles, she leaves others feeling hollow, cheated. The hullabaloo and headaches she causes may be the price we pay for taking too many things at face value: our just deserts, served Instagram-perfect by a manicured and on a gorgeous ceramic dish, with fat, mouthwatering maraschino cherries on op.

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: Somalia has been dealing with an enormous humanitarian catastrophe, driven by the longest and most severe drought the country has experienced in at least 40 years. ___ (1) ___ . Five consecutive rainy seasons have failed, causing more than 8million people - almost half of the country's population to experience acute food insecurity. ___ (2) ___ . More than 43,000 people are believed to have lost their lives, with half of the lives lost likely being children under five. The damage the drought has caused is far-reaching. ___ (3) ___ . Farmers have lost all their agricultural income, while pastoralists have lost more than 3 million livestock, impoverishing entire communities, and leaving them on the brink of famine. ___ (4) ___ . Some, like the pastoralists, may never be able to go back as their livelihoods have been irreversibly wiped out. Sentence: Many have had to leave their homes behind, with more than 1.3 million people being displaced due to the drought.

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. Part of the appeal of forecasting is not just that it seems to work, but that you don't seem to need specialized expertise to succeed at it. 2. The tight connection between forecasting and building a model of the world helps explain why so much of the early interest in the idea came from the intelligence community. 3. This was true even though the latter had access to classified intelligence. 4. One frequently cited study found that accurate forecasters' predictions of geopolitical events, when aggregated using standard scientific methods, were more accurate than the forecasts of members of the US intelligence community who answered the same questions in a confidential prediction market. 5. The aggregated opinions of non-experts doing forecasting have proven to be a better guide to the future than the aggregated opinions of experts.

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. To create a synapse, the neuron has specialized structures, often seen as tiny swellings, at its terminal end of the axon where it stores the chemicals that are emitted to transmit a signal to the next neuron. 2. This fetal warm-up act-the soldering of neural connections before the eyes actually function-is crucial to the performance of the visual system. 3. The reasons for this paring back of synapses is a mystery, but synaptic pruning is thought to sharpen and reinforce the "correct" synapses, while removing the weak and unnecessary ones. 4. Neural connections between the eyes and the brain are formed long before birth, establishing the wiring and the circuitry that allow a child to begin visualizing the world the minute she emerges from the womb. 5. During this rehearsal period, synapses-points of chemical connection-between nerve cells are generated in great excess, only to be pruned back during later development.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Humans have managed to tweak the underlying biology of various plants and animals to produce high-tech crops and microbes. But regulating these entities is complicated, as the framework of policies and procedures are outdated and not flexible enough to adapt to emerging technology. The question is whether regulation will ever be able to keep up with human innovation, to regulate living things, which are apt to be unpredictable and unique; to capture all the potential risks when new biological entities are introduced, or when they pass on variations of their genes?