CAT VARC Questions
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the
best answer for each question.
The history of any major technological or industrial advance is inevitably shadowed by a less
predictable history of unintended consequences and secondary effects — what economists
sometimes call “externalities.” Sometimes those consequences are innocuous ones, or even
beneficial. Gutenberg invents the printing press, and literacy rates rise, which causes a
significant part of the reading public to require spectacles for the first time, which creates a
surge of investment in lens-making across Europe, which leads to the invention of the
telescope and the microscope.
Oftentimes the secondary effects seem to belong to an entirely different sphere of society.
When Willis Carrier hit upon the idea of air-conditioning, the technology was primarily
intended for industrial use: ensuring cool, dry air for factories that required low-humidity
environments. But…it touched off one of the largest migrations in the history of the United
States, enabling the rise of metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Las Vegas that barely existed
when Carrier first started tinkering with the idea in the early 1900s.
Sometimes the unintended consequence comes about when consumers use an invention in a
surprising way. Edison famously thought his phonograph, which he sometimes called “the
talking machine,” would primarily be used to take dictation….But then later innovators…
discovered a much larger audience willing to pay for musical recordings made on
descendants of Edison’s original invention. In other cases, the original innovation comes into
the world disguised as a plaything…the way the animatronic dolls of the mid-1700s inspired
Jacquard to invent the first “programmable” loom and Charles Babbage to invent the first
machine that fit the modern definition of a computer, setting the stage for the revolution in
programmable technology that would transform the 21st century in countless ways.
We live under the gathering storm of modern history’s most momentous unintended
consequence….carbon-based climate change. Imagine the vast sweep of inventors whose
ideas started the Industrial Revolution, all the entrepreneurs and scientists and hobbyists who
had a hand in bringing it about. Line up a thousand of them and ask them all what they had
been hoping to do with their work. Not one would say that their intent had been to deposit
enough carbon in the atmosphere to create a greenhouse effect that trapped heat at the
surface of the planet. And yet here we are.
Ethyl (leaded fuel) and Freon belonged to the same general class of secondary effect:
innovations whose unintended consequences stem from some kind of waste by-product that
they emit. But the potential health threats of Ethyl (unleaded fuel) were visible in the 1920s,
unlike, say, the long-term effects of atmospheric carbon build up in the early days of the
Industrial Revolution….
Indeed, it is reasonable to see CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) as a forerunner of the kind of
threat we will most likely face in the coming decades, as it becomes increasingly possible for
individuals or small groups to create new scientific advances — through chemistry or
biotechnology or materials science — setting off unintended consequences that reverberate
on a global scale.
We can assume that the author would support all of the following views EXCEPT:
The author lists all of the following examples as “externalities” of major technical advances EXCEPT:
Carrier, Babbage, and Edison are mentioned in the passage to illustrate the author’s point that
Which of the following best conveys the main point of the first paragraph?
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the
best answer for each question.
(. . .) There are three other common drivers for carnivore-human attacks, some of which are
more preventable than others. Natural aggression-based conflicts – such as those involving
females protecting their young or animals protecting a food source – can often be avoided as
long as people stay away from those animals and their food.
Carnivores that recognise humans as a means to get food, are a different story. As they
become more reliant on human food they might find at campsites or in rubbish bins, they
become less avoidant of humans. Losing that instinctive fear response puts them into more
situations where they could get into an altercation with a human, which often results in that
bear being put down by humans. “A fed bear is a dead bear,” says Servheen, referring to a
common saying among biologists and conservationists.
Predatory or predation-related attacks are quite rare, only accounting for 17% of attacks in
North America since 1955. They occur when a carnivore views a human as prey and hunts it
like it would any other animal it uses for food. (. . .)
Then there are animal attacks provoked by people taking pictures with them or feeding them
in natural settings such as national parks which often end with animals being euthanised out
of precaution. “Eventually, that animal becomes habituated to people, and [then] bad things
happen to the animal. And the folks who initially wanted to make that connection don’t
necessarily realise that,” says Christine Wilkinson, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley,
California, who’s been studying coyote-human conflicts.
After conducting countless postmortems on all types of carnivore-human attacks spanning 75
years, Penteriani’s team believes 50% could have been avoided if humans reacted differently.
A 2017 study co-authored by Penteriani found that engaging in risky behaviour around large
carnivores increases the likelihood of an attack.
Two of the most common risky behaviours are parents leaving their children to play outside
unattended and walking an unleashed dog, according to the study. Wilkinson says 66% of
coyote attacks involve a dog. “[People] end up in a situation where their dog is being chased,
or their dog chases a coyote, or maybe they’re walking their dog near a den that’s marked,
and the coyote wants to escort them away,” says Wilkinson.
Experts believe climate change also plays a part in the escalation of human-carnivore
conflicts, but the correlation still needs to be ironed out. “As finite resources become scarcer,
carnivores and people are coming into more frequent contact, which means that more conflict
could occur,” says Jen Miller, international programme specialist for the US Fish & Wildlife
Service. For example, she says, there was an uptick in lion attacks in western India during a
drought when lions and people were relying on the same water sources.
(. . .) The likelihood of human-carnivore conflicts appears to be higher in areas of low-income
countries dominated by vast rural landscapes and farmland, according to Penteriani’s
research. “There are a lot of working landscapes in the Global South that are really
heterogeneous, that are interspersed with carnivore habitats, forests and savannahs, which
creates a lot more opportunity for these encounters, just statistically,” says Wilkinson.
According to the passage, which of the following scenarios would MOST likely
exacerbate the frequency of carnivore-human conflicts?
Given the insights provided by Penteriani’s research and Wilkinson’s statement, which of the following conclusions
can be drawn about the relationship between landscape heterogeneity and human-carnivore conflicts?
According to the passage, what is a significant factor that contributes to the habituation of carnivores to human
presence?
Which of the following statements, if false, would be inconsistent with the concerns raised in the passage regarding
the drivers of carnivore-human conflicts?
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. No known real researcher of human behaviour would say that gender is all nature or all nurture.
2. The evidence for a biological basis for gender certainly doesn’t mean we should be complacent in the face of sexism.
3. Many people are uncomfortable with the idea that gender is not purely a social construct.
4. Despite this empirical truth, researchers who study the biological basis of gender often face political pushback.
5. There’s a political preference for gender to be only a reflection of social factors and so entirely malleable.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the
best answer for each question.
The job of a peer reviewer is thankless. Collectively, academics spend around 70 million
hours every year evaluating each other’s manuscripts on the behalf of scholarly journals —
and they usually receive no monetary compensation and little if any recognition for their effort.
Some do it as a way to keep abreast with developments in their field; some simply see it as a
duty to the discipline. Either way, academic publishing would likely crumble without them.
In recent years, some scientists have begun posting their reviews online, mainly to claim
credit for their work. Sites like Publons allow researchers to either share entire referee reports
or simply list the journals for whom they’ve carried out a review….
The rise of Publons suggests that academics are increasingly placing value on the work of
peer review and asking others, such as grant funders, to do the same. While that’s vital in the
publish-or-perish culture of academia, there’s also immense value in the data underlying peer
review. Sharing peer review data could help journals stamp out fraud, inefficiency, and
systemic bias in academic publishing.….
Peer review data could also help root out bias. Last year, a study based on peer review data
for nearly 24,000 submissions to the biomedical journal eLife found that women and non-
Westerners were vastly underrepresented among peer reviewers. Only around one in every
five reviewers was female, and less than two percent of reviewers were based in developing
countries…. Openly publishing peer review data could perhaps also help journals address
another problem in academic publishing: fraudulent peer reviews. For instance, a minority of
authors have been known to use phony email addresses to pose as an outside expert and
review their own manuscripts.…
Opponents of open peer review commonly argue that confidentiality is vital to the integrity of
the review process; referees may be less critical of manuscripts if their reports are published,
especially if they are revealing their identities by signing them. Some also hold concerns that
open reviewing may deter referees from agreeing to judge manuscripts in the first place, or
that they’ll take longer to do so out of fear of scrutiny….
Even when the content of reviews and the identity of reviewers can’t be shared publicly,
perhaps journals could share the data with outside researchers for study. Or they could
release other figures that wouldn’t compromise the anonymity of reviews but that might
answer important questions about how long the reviewing process takes, how many
researchers editors have to reach out to on average to find one who will carry out the work,
and the geographic distribution of peer reviewers.
Of course, opening up data underlying the reviewing process will not fix peer review entirely,
and there may be instances in which there are valid reasons to keep the content of peer
reviews hidden and the identity of the referees confide
According to the passage, which of the following is the only reason NOT given in
favour of making peer review data public?
According to the passage, some are opposed to making peer reviews public for all the following reasons EXCEPT that it
All of the following are listed as reasons why academics choose to review other scholars’ work EXCEPT:
Based on the passage we can infer that the author would most probably support
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.
Sentence: Science has officially crowned us superior to our early-rising brethren.
Paragraph: My fellow night owls, grab a strong cup of coffee and gather around: I have
great news. ___(1)___. For a long time, our kind has been unfairly maligned.
Stereotyped as lazy and undisciplined. Told we ought to be morning larks. Advised to
go to bed early so we can wake before 5am and run a marathon before breakfast like
all high-flyers seem to do. Now, however, we are having the last laugh. ___(2)___. It
may be a tad more complicated than that. A study published last week, which you may
have already seen while scrolling at 1am, suggests that staying up late could be good
for brain power. ___(3)___. Is this study a thinly veiled PR exercise conducted by a
caffeine-pill company? Nope, it’s legit. ___(4)___. Research led by academics at
Imperial College London studied data on more than 26,000 people and found that
“self-declared ‘night owls’ generally tend to have higher cognitive scores”.
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.
Sentence: Yet each day the flock produced eggs with calcareous shells though they
apparently had not ingested any calcium from land which was entirely lacking in
limestone.
Paragraph: Early in this century a young Breton schoolboy who preparing himself for
a scientific career began to notice a strange fact about hens in his father's poultry
yard. ___(1) ___. As they scratched the soil they constantly seemed to be pecking at
specks of mica, a siliceous material dotting the ground. ___(2)___. No one could
explain to Louis Kervran why the chickens selected the mica, or why each time a bird
was killed for the family cooking pot no trace of the mica could be found in its gizzard.
___(3) ___. It took Kervran many years to establish that the chickens were transmuting
one element into another. ___(4)___.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the
best answer for each question.
[S]pices were a global commodity centuries before European voyages. There was a complex
chain of relations, yet consumers had little knowledge of producers and vice versa. Desire for
spices helped fuel European colonial empires to create political, military and commercial
networks under a single power.
Historians know a fair amount about the supply of spices in Europe during the medieval
period – the origins, methods of transportation, the prices – but less about demand. Why go
to such extraordinary efforts to procure expensive products from exotic lands? Still, demand
was great enough to inspire the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco Da Gama,
launching the first fateful wave of European colonialism. . . .
So, why were spices so highly prized in Europe in the centuries from about 1000 to 1500?
One widely disseminated explanation for medieval demand for spices was that they covered
the taste of spoiled meat. . . . Medieval purchasers consumed meat much fresher than what
the average city-dweller in the developed world of today has at hand. However, refrigeration
was not available, and some hot spices have been shown to serve as an anti-bacterial agent.
Salting, smoking or drying meat were other means of preservation. Most spices used in
cooking began as medical ingredients, and throughout the Middle Ages spices were used as
both medicines and condiments. Above all, medieval recipes involve the combination of
medical and culinary lore in order to balance food's humeral properties and prevent disease.
Most spices were hot and dry and so appropriate in sauces to counteract the moist and wet
properties supposedly possessed by most meat and fish. . . .
Where spices came from was known in a vague sense centuries before the voyages of
Columbus. Just how vague may be judged by looking at medieval world maps . . . To the
medieval European imagination, the East was exotic and alluring. Medieval maps often
placed India close to the so-called Earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden described in the
Bible.
Geographical knowledge has a lot to do with the perceptions of spices’ relative scarcity and
the reasons for their high prices. An example of the varying notions of scarcity is the
conflicting information about how pepper is harvested. As far back as the 7th century
Europeans thought that pepper in India grew on trees "guarded" by serpents that would bite
and poison anyone who attempted to gather the fruit. The only way to harvest pepper was to
burn the trees, which would drive the snakes underground. Of course, this bit of lore would
explain the shriveled black peppercorns, but not white, pink or other colors.
Spices never had the enduring allure or power of gold and silver or the commercial potential
of new products such as tobacco, indigo or sugar. But the taste for spices did continue for a
while beyond the Middle Ages. As late as the 17th century, the English and the Dutch were
struggling for control of the Spice Islands: Dutch New Amsterdam, or New York, was
exchanged by the British for one of the Moluccan Islands where nutmeg was grown.
If a trader brought white peppercorns from India to medieval Europe, all of the following are unlikely to happen,
EXCEPT:
In the context of the passage, which one of the following conclusions CANNOT be reached?
It can be inferred that all of the following contributed to a decline in the allure of spices, EXCEPT:
In the context of the passage, the people who heard the story of pepper trees being guarded by snakes would be least
likely to arrive at the conclusion that
The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of
the passage.
Recent important scientific findings have emerged from crossing the boundaries of scientific fields. They stem from
physicists collaborating with biologists, sociologists and others, to answer questions about our world. But physicists
and their potential collaborators often find their cultures out of sync. For one, physicists often discard a lot of
information while extracting broad patterns; for other scientists, information is not readily disposed. Further, many
non-physicists are uncomfortable with mathematical models. Still, the desire to work on something new and different
is real, and there are clear benefits from the collision of views.
The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option
that best captures the essence of the passage.
Different from individuals, states conduct warfare operations using the DIME model— “diplomacy, information,
military, and economics.” Most states do everything they can to inflict pain and confusion on their enemies before
deploying the military. In fact, attacks on vectors of information are a well-worn tactic of war and usually are the first
target when the charge begins. It’s common for telecom data and communications networks to be routinely
monitored by governments, which is why the open data policies of the web are so concerning to many advocates of
privacy and human rights. With the worldwide adoption of social media, more governments are getting involved in
low-grade information warfare through the use of cyber troops. According to a study by the Oxford Internet Institute
in 2020, cyber troops are “government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online.” The
Oxford research group was able to identify 81 countries with active cyber troop operations utilizing many different
strategies to spread false information, including spending millions on online advertising.
The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option
that best captures the essence of the passage.
John Cleese told Fox News Digital that comedians do not have the freedom to be funny in 2022. “There’s always been
limitations on what they’re allowed to say,” Cleese said. “I think it’s particularly worrying at the moment because you
can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you’re not checking everything you say critically before you move
on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you’re going because you’ve never been there
before. That’s what creativity is — you have to be allowed to build. And a lot of comedians now are sitting there and
when they think of something, they say something like, ‘Can I get away with it? I don’t think so. So and so got into
trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.’ You see what I mean? And that’s the death of creativity.”
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.
Sentence: [T]he Europeans did not invent globalization.
Paragraph: The first phase of globalization occurred long before the introduction of
either steam or electric power…Chinese consumers at all social levels consumed vast
quantities of spices, fragrant woods and unusual plants. The peoples of Southeast
Asia who lived in forests gave up their traditional livelihoods and completely
reoriented their economies to supply Chinese consumers….___(1)___. These
exchanges of the year 1000 opened some of the routes through which goods and
peoples continued to travel after Columbus traversed the mid-Atlantic. ___(2)___. Yet
the world of 1000 differed from that of 1492 in important ways….the travellers who
encountered one another in the year 1000 were much closer technologically.
___(3)___. They changed and augmented what was already there since 1000.
___(4)___. If globalization hadn’t yet begun, Europeans wouldn’t have been able to
penetrate the markets in so many places as quickly as they did after 1492.
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 UK is a world leader in developing cultivated meat and the approval of a
cultivated pet food is an important milestone.
2. If we’re to realise the full potential benefits of cultivated meat the government
must invest in research and infrastructure.
3. The first UK applications for cultivated meat produced for humans remain under
assessment with the Food Standards Agency.
4. The previous UK government had been looking at fast-tracking the approval of
cultivated meat for human consumption.
5. It underscores the potential for new innovation to help reduce the negative
impacts of intensive animal agriculture.