CAT VARC Questions
Five jumbled 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 out and key in the number of that
sentence as your answer.
1. About half of all the oxygen we breathe is made near the surface of
the ocean by phytoplankton that photosynthesize just like land-dwelling
plants.
2. A team of scientists that includes Boston University experts has
discovered they also produce oxygen on the seafloor.
3. The research team used deep-sea chambers that land on the seafloor
and enclose the seawater, sediment, polymetallic nodules, and living
organisms.
4. The discovery is a surprise considering oxygen is typically created by
plants and organisms with help from the sun—not by rocks on the ocean
floor.
5. The deep-sea rocks, called polymetallic nodules, don’t only host a
surprising number of sea critters.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best
answer for each question.
In 1982, a raging controversy broke out over a forest act drafted by the Government of India. This act
sought to strengthen the already extensive powers enjoyed by the forest bureaucracy in controlling
the extraction, disposal and sale of forest produce. It also gave forest officials greater powers to
strictly regulate the entry of any person into reserved forest areas. While forest officials justified the
act on the grounds that it was necessary to stop the continuing deforestation, it was bitterly
opposed by representatives of grassroots organisations, who argued that it was a major violation of
the rights of peasants and tribals living in and around forest areas. . . .
The debate over the draft forest act fuelled a larger controversy over the orientation of state forest
policy. It was pointed out, for example, that the draft act was closely modelled on its predecessor,
the Forest Act of 1878. The earlier Act rested on a usurpation of rights of ownership by the colonial
state which had little precedent in precolonial history. It was further argued that the system of
forestry introduced by the British—and continued, with little modification, after 1947—emphasised
revenue generation and commercial exploitation, while its policing orientation excluded villagers
who had the most longstanding claim on forest resources. Critics called for a complete overhaul of
forest administration, pressing the government to formulate policy and legislation more appropriate
to present needs. . . .
That debate is not over yet. The draft act was shelved, though it has not as yet been formally
withdrawn. Meanwhile, the 1878 Act (as modified by an amendment in 1927) continues to be in
operation. In response to its critics, the government has made some important changes in forest
policy, e.g., no longer treating forests as a source of revenue, and stopping ecologically hazardous
practices such as the clearfelling of natural forests. At the same time, it has shown little inclination
to meet the major demand of the critics of forest policy—namely, abandoning the principle of state
monopoly over forest land by handing over areas of degraded forests to individuals and
communities for afforestation.
. . . [The] 1878 Forest Act itself was passed only after a bitter and prolonged debate within the
colonial bureaucracy, in which protagonists put forward arguments strikingly similar to those being
advanced today. As is well known, the Indian Forest Department owes its origin to the requirements
of railway companies. The early years of the expansion of the railway network, c. 1853 onwards, led
to tremendous deforestation in peninsular India owing to the railway’s requirements of fuelwood and
construction timber. Huge quantities of durable timbers were also needed for use as sleepers
across the newly laid tracks. Inexperienced in forestry, the British called in German experts to
commence systematic forest management. The Indian Forest Department was started in 1864, with
Dietrich Brandis, formerly a Lecturer at Bonn, as the first Inspector General of Forests. The new
department needed legislative backing to function effectively, and in the following year, 1865, the
first forest act was passed. . .
Which one of the following best encapsulates the reason for the “raging
controversy” developing into a “larger controversy”?
According to the passage, which one of the following reforms is yet to happen in
India’s forest policies?
All of the following, if true, would weaken the narrative presented in the passage
EXCEPT that:
According to the passage, which one of the following is not common to the 1878
Forest Act and the 1982 draft forest act?
Five jumbled 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 out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.
1. The profound emotional impact of music has inspired ongoing research into its
relationship with emotions.
2. Music is a universal phenomenon that utilizes a myriad brain resources.
3. This inherent connection to musical expression is deeply intertwined with human
identity and experience.
4. The proclivity to create and appreciate music is ubiquitous among humans,
permeating daily life across diverse societies.
5. Engaging with music is among the most cognitively demanding tasks a human
can undergo, and it is identified across cultures.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose
the best answer for each question.
Once a society accepts a secular mode of creativity, within which the creator replaces
God, imaginative transactions assume a self-conscious form. The tribal imagination,
on the other hand, is still to a large extent dreamlike and hallucinatory. It admits
fusion between various planes of existence and levels of time in a natural and artless
manner. In tribal stories, oceans fly in the sky as birds, mountains swim in water as
fish, animals speak as humans and stars grow like plants. Spatial order and temporal
sequence do not restrict the narrative. This is not to say that tribal creations have no
conventions or rules, but simply that they admit the principle of association between
emotion and the narrative motif. Thus stars, seas, mountains, trees, men and animals
can be angry, sad or happy.
It might be said that tribal artists work more on the basis of their racial and sensory
memory than on the basis of a cultivated imagination. In order to understand this
distinction, we must understand the difference between imagination and memory. In
the animate world, consciousness meets two immediate material realities: space and
time. We put meaning into space by perceiving it in terms of images. The image-
making faculty is a genetic gift to the human mind—this power of imagination helps
us understand the space that envelops us. With regard to time, we make connections
with the help of memory; one remembers being the same person today as one was
yesterday.
The tribal mind has a more acute sense of time than the sense of space. Somewhere
along the history of human civilization, tribal communities seem to have realized that
domination over territorial space was not their lot. Thus, they seem to have turned
almost obsessively to gaining domination over time. This urge is substantiated in
their ritual of conversing with their dead ancestors: year after year, tribals in many
parts of India worship terracotta or carved-wood objects representing their ancestors,
aspiring to enter a trance in which they can converse with the dead. Over the
centuries, an amazingly sharp memory has helped tribals classify material and natural
objects into a highly complex system of knowledge. . . .
One of the main characteristics of the tribal arts is their distinct manner of
constructing space and imagery, which might be described as ‘hallucinatory’. In both
oral and visual forms of representation, tribal artists seem to interpret verbal or
pictorial space as demarcated by an extremely flexible ‘frame’. The boundaries
between art and non-art become almost invisible. A tribal epic can begin its narration
from a trivial everyday event; tribal paintings merge with living space as if the two
were one and the same. And within the narrative itself, or within the painted imagery,
there is no deliberate attempt to follow a sequence. The episodes retold and the
images created take on the apparently chaotic shapes of dreams. In a way, the syntax
of language and the grammar of painting are the same, as if literature were painted
words and painting were a song of images.
On the basis of the passage, which one of the following explains the
main difference between imagination and memory?
Which one of the following best explains why tribals in India worship
their dead ancestors?
Non-human living forms exhibit human emotions in tribal narratives
because tribal narratives:
All of the following, if true, would weaken the passage’s claims about the
hallucinatory tribal imagination EXCEPT that:
The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) 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
four numbers as your answer.
1. When I ask the distinguished LGBTQ activist and writer Cherie Moraga
whether she uses Latinx to refer to herself, she tells me, ‘I worked too
hard for the “a” in Latina to give it up! I refer to myself as Xicana. ’
2. Of our accumulated ethnic population, only a third use Hispanic to
identify themselves, a mere 14 percent use Latino, and less than 2
percent recognize Latinx.
3.They have done this, although gender in languages is grammatical, not
sociological or sexual, and found in linguistic families throughout the
world, from French to Russian to Japanese.
4. More recently, activists seeking to render our name gender neutral,
out of respect for our LGBTQ members, have devised yet another name
for us: Latinx.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose
the best answer for each question.
Over the course of the twentieth century, humans built, on average, one large dam a
day, hulking structures of steel and concrete designed to control flooding, facilitate
irrigation, and generate electricity. Dams were also lucrative contracts, large-scale
employers, and the physical instantiation of a messianic drive to conquer territories
and control nature. Some of the results of that drive were charismatic mega-
infrastructure—the Hoover on the Colorado River or the Aswan on the Nile—but most
of the tens of thousands of dams that dot the Earth’s landscape have drawn little
attention. These are the smaller, though not inconsequential, barriers that today
impede the flow of water on nearly two-thirds of the world’s large waterways.
Chances are, what your map calls a “lake” is actually a reservoir, and that thin blue line
that emerges from it once flowed very differently.
Damming a river is always a partisan act. Even when explicit infrastructure goals—
irrigation, flood control, electrification—were met, other consequences were
significant and often deleterious. Across the world, river control displaced millions of
people, threatening livelihoods, foodways, and cultures. In the western United States,
dams were often an instrument of colonialism, used to dispossess Indigenous people
and subsidize settler agriculture. And as dams slowed the flow of water, inhibited the
movement of nutrients, and increased the amount of toxic algae and other parasites,
they snuffed out entire river ecologies. Declining fish populations are the most evident
effect, but dams also threaten a host of other animals—from birds and reptiles to
fungi and plants—with extinction. Every major dam, then, is also a sacrifice zone, a
place where lives, livelihoods, and ways of life are eliminated so that new sorts of
landscapes can support water-intensive agriculture and cities that sprout
downstream of new reservoirs.
Such sacrifices have been justified as offerings at the temples of modernity. Justified
by—and for—whom, though? Over the course of the twentieth century, rarely were the
costs and benefits weighed thoughtfully and decided democratically. As Kader Asmal,
chair of the landmark 2000 World Commission on Dams, concluded, “There have been
precious few, if any, comprehensive, independent analyses as to why dams came
about, how dams perform over time, and whether we are getting a fair return from our
$2 trillion investment.” A quarter-century later, Asmal’s words ring ever truer. A litany
of dams built in the mid-twentieth century are approaching the end of their expected
lives, with worrying prospects for their durability. Droughts, magnified and multiplied
by the effects of climate change, have forced more and more to run below capacity. If
ever there were a time to rethink the mania for dams, it would be now.
There is some evidence that a combination of opposition, alternative energy sources,
and a lack of viable projects has slowed the construction of major dams. But a wave
of recent and ongoing construction, from India and China to Ethiopia and Canada,
continues to tilt the global balance firmly in favor of water impoundment.
What does the author wish to communicate by referring to the Hoover
and Aswan dams in the first paragraph?
Which one of the following sets of terms is closest to mapping the key
arguments of the passage?
The word “instantiation” is used in the first paragraph. Which one of the
following pairs of terms would be the best substitute for it in the context
of its usage in the paragraph?
All of the following statements may be considered valid inferences from the passage EXCEPT that:
The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the
option that best captures the essence of the passage.
The return to the tailor is the juxtaposition of three key things for the
mindful Indian shopper. The first is the conscious shift away from the
homogeneity of fast fashion, the idea of a hundred other people owning
exactly the same Zara trench coat or H&M pleated skirt. The second is
an actual understanding of the waste behind the fast fashion market,
and wanting not to contribute to that anymore. The last is the shift
toward customisation and fit—the idea of having imaginations brought to
life and to have them fit exactly; without paying exorbitant rates for that
bespoke tailoring. For the individual with a keen fashion sense and a
genuine desire to move away from the waste and uniformity of fast
fashion without paying the premium for it that indie brands would
invariably demand, the tailor is the perfect crossover.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose
the best answer for each question.
Imagine a world in which artificial intelligence is entrusted with the highest moral
responsibilities: sentencing criminals, allocating medical resources, and even
mediating conflicts between nations. This might seem like the pinnacle of human
progress: an entity unburdened by emotion, prejudice or inconsistency, making ethical
decisions with impeccable precision. . . .
Yet beneath this vision of an idealised moral arbiter lies a fundamental question: can
a machine understand morality as humans do, or is it confined to a simulacrum of
ethical reasoning? AI might replicate human decisions without improving on them,
carrying forward the same biases, blind spots and cultural distortions from human
moral judgment. In trying to emulate us, it might only reproduce our limitations, not
transcend them. But there is a deeper concern. Moral judgment draws on intuition,
historical awareness and context – qualities that resist formalisation. Ethics may be
so embedded in lived experience that any attempt to encode it into formal structures
risks flattening its most essential features. If so, AI would not merely reflect human
shortcomings; it would strip morality of the very depth that makes ethical reflection
possible in the first place.
Still, many have tried to formalise ethics, by treating certain moral claims not as
conclusions, but as starting points. A classic example comes from utilitarianism,
which often takes as a foundational axiom the principle that one should act to
maximise overall wellbeing. From this, more specific principles can be derived, for
example, that it is right to benefit the greatest number, or that actions should be
judged by their consequences for total happiness. As computational resources
increase, AI becomes increasingly well-suited to the task of starting from fixed ethical
assumptions and reasoning through their implications in complex situations.
But what, exactly, does it mean to formalise something like ethics? The question is
easier to grasp by looking at fields in which formal systems have long played a central
role. Physics, for instance, has relied on formalisation for centuries. There is no single
physical theory that explains everything. Instead, we have many physical theories,
each designed to describe specific aspects of the Universe: from the behaviour of
quarks and electrons to the motion of galaxies. These theories often diverge.
Aristotelian physics, for instance, explained falling objects in terms of natural motion
toward Earth’s centre; Newtonian mechanics replaced this with a universal force of
gravity. These explanations are not just different; they are incompatible. Yet both
share a common structure: they begin with basic postulates – assumptions about
motion, force or mass – and derive increasingly complex consequences. . . .
Ethical theories have a similar structure. Like physical theories, they attempt to
describe a domain – in this case, the moral landscape. They aim to answer questions
about which actions are right or wrong, and why. These theories also diverge and,
even when they recommend similar actions, such as giving to charity, they justify
them in different ways. Ethical theories also often begin with a small set of
foundational principles or claims, from which they reason about more complex moral
problems.
The passage compares ethics to physics, where different theories apply
to different aspects of a domain and says AI can reason from fixed
starting points in complex cases. Which one of the assumptions below
must hold for that comparison to guide practice?
All of the following can reasonably be inferred from the passage EXCEPT:
Choose the one option below that comes closest to being the opposite of
“utilitarianism”.
Which one of the options below best summarises the passage?
The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) 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
four numbers as your answer.
1. The effigy of a candidate establishes a personal link between him and
the voters; the candidate does not only offer a programme for
judgement, he suggests a physical climate, a set of daily choices
expressed in a morphology, a way of dressing, a posture.
2. Some candidates for Parliament adorn their electoral prospectus with
a portrait; this presupposes that photography has a power to convert
which must be analysed.
3. Inasmuch as photography is an ellipse of language and a
condensation of an ‘ineffable’ social whole, it constitutes an anti-
intellectual weapon and tends to spirit away ‘politics’ (that is to say a
body of problems and solutions) to the advantage of a ‘manner of being’,
a socio-moral status.
4. Photography tends to restore the paternalistic nature of elections,
whose elitist essence has been disrupted by proportional representation
and the rule of parties (the Right seems to use it more than the Left).
The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it
best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.
Sentence: In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located
to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12.
Paragraph: The first suggested evidence of a human genetic mutation
associated with aggressive behaviour came from a study in 1993.
_____(1)____. Genetic and metabolic studies were conducted on a large
Dutch family in which several of the males has a syndrome of borderline
mental retardation and abnormal behaviour. _____(2)____. The
undesirable behaviour included impulsive aggression, arson and
exhibitionism. _____(3)____. A point mutation was identified in the eighth
exon of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) structural gene which
changes glutamine to a termination codon. _____(4)____.
The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the
option that best captures the essence of the passage.
In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which must be
borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-belief
is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to
refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief
that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past
should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the
hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as
it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past.
There is no logically necessary connection between events at different
times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the
future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes
ago. Hence the occurrences which are CALLED knowledge of the past
are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into
present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even
if no past had existed.
The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it
best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.
Sentence: Productivity gains, once expected to feed through to broader
living standards, now primarily serve to enhance returns to wealth.
Paragraph: Economists now argue that inequality is no longer a by-
product of growth but a condition of it. ____ (1) ____. Unlike wages,
wealth reflects not just income but also access to assets, favourable
institutional conditions – such as low interest rates – and public policies
like low taxes and housing shortages. ____ (2) ____. In other words,
wealth depends on political choices in ways that income currently does
not. It’s not just the inequality itself that is the issue but the erosion of
mechanisms that once constrained it. ____ (3) ____. Wealth and income
inequality are linked, but where wages have stagnated and collective
bargaining has weakened, capital income – derived from profits, rents
and interest – has been boosted by design. ____ (4) ____.