Main Idea

Q.No: 1

Test Name : CAT 2017 Actual Paper Slot 1

Question Numbers : (1 to 6) The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

Understanding where you are in the world is a basic survival skill, which is why we, like most species come hard-wired with specialised brain areas to create cognitive maps of our surroundings. Where humans are unique, though, with the possible exception of honeybees, is that we try to communicate this understanding of the world with others. We have a long history of doing this by drawing maps - the earliest versions yet discovered were scrawled on cave walls 14,000 years ago. Human cultures have been drawing them on stone tablets, papyrus, paper and now computer screens ever since.

Given such a long history of human map-making, it is perhaps surprising that it is only within the last few hundred years that north has been consistently considered to be at the top. In fact, for much of human history, north almost never appeared at the top, according to Jerry Brotton, a map historian... "North was rarely put at the top for the simple fact that north is where darkness comes from," he says. "West is also very unlikely to be put at the top because west is where the sun disappears."

Confusingly, early Chinese maps seem to buck this trend. But, Brotton, says, even though they did have compasses at the time, that isn't the reason that they placed north at the top. Early Chinese compasses were actually oriented to point south, which was considered to be more desirable than deepest darkest north. But in Chinese maps, the Emperor, who lived in the north of the country was always put at the top of the map, with everyone else, his loyal subjects, looking up towards him. "In Chinese culture the Emperor looks south because it's where the winds come from, it's a good direction. North is not very good but you are in a position of subjection to the emperor, so you look up to him," says Brotton.

Given that each culture has a very different idea of who, or what, they should look up to it's perhaps not surprising that there is very little consistency in which way early maps pointed. In ancient Egyptian times the top of the world was east, the position of sunrise. Early Islamic maps favoured south at the top because most of the early Muslim cultures were north of Mecca, so they imagined looking up (south) towards it. Christian maps from the same era (called Mappa Mundi) put east at the top, towards the Garden of Eden and with Jerusalem in the centre.

So when did everyone get together and decide that north was the top? It's tempting to put it down to European explorers like Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Megellan, who were navigating by the North Star. But Brotton argues that these early explorers didn't think of the world like that at all. "When Columbus describes the world it is in accordance with east being at the top," he says. "Columbus says he is going towards paradise, so his mentality is from a medieval mappa mundi." We've got to remember, adds Brotton, that at the time, "no one knows what they are doing and where they are going."

Which one of the following best describes what the passage is trying to do?

It questions an explanation about how maps are designed.

It corrects a misconception about the way maps are designed.

It critiques a methodology used to create maps.

It explores some myths about maps.

Answer key/Solution

Q.No: 2

Test Name : CAT 2017 Actual Paper Slot 1

Question Numbers : (13 to 18) The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

This year alone, more than 8,600 stores could close, according to industry estimates, many of them the brand- name anchor outlets that real estate developers once stumbled over themselves to court. Already there have been 5,300 retail closings this year...Sears Holdings-which owns Kmart-said in March that there's "substantial doubt" it can stay in business altogether, and will close 300 stores this year. So far this year, nine national retail chains have filed for bankruptcy.

Local jobs are a major casualty of what analysts are calling, with only a hint of hyperbole, the retail apocalypse. Since 2002, department stores have lost 448,000 jobs, a 25% decline, while the number of store closures this year is on pace to surpass the worst depths of the Great Recession. The growth of online retailers, meanwhile, has failed to offset those losses, with the e-commerce sector adding just 178,000 jobs over the past 15 years. Some of those jobs can be found in the massive distribution centers Amazon has opened across the country, often not too far from malls the company helped shutter.

But those are workplaces, not gathering places. The mall is both. And in the 61 years since the first enclosed one opened in suburban Minneapolis, the shopping mall has been where a huge swath of middleclass America went for far more than shopping. It was the home of first jobs and blind dates, the place for family photos and ear piercings, where goths and grandmothers could somehow walk through the same doors and find something they all liked. Sure, the food was lousy for you and the oceans of parking lots encouraged car- heavy development, something now scorned by contemporary planners. But for better or worse, the mall has been America's public square for the last 60 years.

So what happens when it disappears?

Think of your mall. Or think of the one you went to as a kid. Think of the perfume clouds in the department stores. The fountains splashing below the skylights. The cinnamon wafting from the food court. As far back as ancient Greece, societies have congregated around a central marketplace. In medieval Europe, they were outside cathedrals. For half of the 20th century and almost 20 years into the new one, much of America has found their agora on the terrazzo between Orange Julius and Sbarro, Waldenbooks and the Gap, Sunglass Hut and Hot Topic.

That mall was an ecosystem unto itself, a combination of community and commercialism peddling everything you needed and everything you didn't: Magic Eye posters, wind catchers, Air Jordans. ...

A growing number of Americans, however, don't see the need to go to any Macy's at all. Our digital lives are frictionless and ruthlessly efficient, with retail and romance available at a click. Malls were designed for leisure, abundance, ambling. You parked and planned to spend some time. Today, much of that time has been given over to busier lives and second jobs and apps that let you swipe right instead of haunt the food court. Malls, says Harvard business professor Leonard Schlesinger, "were built for patterns of social interaction that increasingly don't exist."

The central idea of this passage is that:

the closure of malls has affected the economic and social life of middle-class America.

the advantages of malls outweigh their disadvantages.

malls used to perform a social function that has been lost.

malls are closing down because people have found alternate ways to shop.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The author rues the loss of the social function of the malls throughout the passage. It served as a place where people from all walks of life could gather without being questioned or looked at. The author also whips up nostalgia in order to emphasise on the lost social usage of the shopping malls.

Q.No: 3

Test Name : CAT 2017 Actual Paper Slot 1

Question Numbers : (19 to 21) The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

Scientists have long recognised the incredible diversity within a species. But they thought it reflected evolutionary changes that unfolded imperceptibly, over millions of years. That divergence between populations within a species was enforced, according to Ernst Mayr, the great evolutionary biologist of the 1940s, when a population was separated from the rest of the species by a mountain range or a desert, preventing breeding across the divide over geologic scales of time. Without the separation, gene flow was relentless. But as the separation persisted, the isolated population grew apart and speciation occurred.

In the mid-1960s, the biologist Paul Ehrlich - author of The Population Bomb (1968) - and his Stanford University colleague Peter Raven challenged Mayr's ideas about speciation. They had studied checkerspot butterflies living in the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in California, and it soon became clear that they were not examining a single population. Through years of capturing, marking and then recapturing the butterflies, they were able to prove that within the population, spread over just BO acres of suitable checkerspot habitat, there were three groups that rarely interacted despite their very close proximity.

Among other ideas, Ehrlich and Raven argued in a now classic paper from 1969 that gene flow was not as predictable and ubiquitous as Mayr and his cohort maintained, and thus evolutionary divergence between neighbouring groups in a population was probably common. They also asserted that isolation and gene flow were less important to evolutionary divergence than natural selection (when factors such as mate choice, weather, disease or predation cause better-adapted individuals to survive and pass on their successful genetic traits). For example, Ehrlich and Raven suggested that, without the force of natural selection, an isolated population would remain unchanged and that, in other scenarios, natural selection could be strong enough to overpower gene flow...

Which of the following best sums up Ehrlich and Raven's argument in their classic 1969 paper?

Ernst Mayr was wrong in identifying physical separation as the cause of species diversity.

Checkerspot butterflies in the BO-acre Jasper Ridge Preserve formed three groups that rarely interacted with each other.

While a factor, isolation was not as important to speciation as natural selection.

Gene flow is less common and more erratic than Mayr and his colleagues claimed.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
Mayr’s contention was that speciation takes place due to factors like geographical isolation. However the 1969 paper challenges this notion and places the emphasis on natural selection.

Q.No: 4

Test Name : CAT 2017 Actual Paper Slot 1

Question Numbers : (22 to 24) The passage below is accompanied by a set of three questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

Do sports mega events like the summer Olympic Games benefit the host city economically? It depends, but the prospects are less than rosy. The trick is converting...several billion dollars in operating costs during the 17- day fiesta of the Games into a basis for long-term economic returns. These days, the summer Olympic Games themselves generate total revenue of $4 billion to $5 billion, but the lion's share of this goes to the International Olympics Committee, the National Olympics Committees and the International Sports Federations. Any economic benefit would have to flow from the value of the Games as an advertisement for the city, the new transportation and communications infrastructure that was created for the Games, or the ongoing use of the new facilities.

Evidence suggests that the advertising effect is far from certain. The infrastructure benefit depends on the initial condition of the city and the effectiveness of the planning. The facilities benefit is dubious at best for buildings such as velodromes or natatoriums and problematic for 100,000-seat Olympic stadiums. The latter require a conversion plan for future use, the former are usually doomed to near vacancy. Hosting the summer Games generally requires 30-plus sports venues and dozens of training centers. Today, the Bird's Nest in Beijing sits virtually empty, while the Olympic Stadium in Sydney costs some $30 million a year to operate.

Part of the problem is that Olympics planning takes place in a frenzied and time-pressured atmosphere of intense competition with the other prospective host cities - not optimal conditions for contemplating the future shape of an urban landscape. Another part of the problem is that urban land is generally scarce and growing scarcer. The new facilities often stand for decades or longer. Even if they have future use, are they the best use of precious urban real estate?

Further, cities must consider the human cost. Residential areas often are razed and citizens relocated (without adequate preparation or compensation). Life is made more hectic and congested. There are, after all, other productive uses that can be made of vanishing fiscal resources.

The central point in the first paragraph is that the economic benefits of the Olympic Games Options:

are shared equally among the three organising committees.

accrue mostly through revenue from advertisements and ticket sales.

accrue to host cities, if at all, only in the long term.

are usually eroded by expenditure incurred by the host city.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The passage shows explicitly how the host city is at a disadvantage for conducting the Olympic Games. Whatever financial benefit the host city receives takes place only in the long run. The benefits however are not guaranteed and depend on numerous factors.

Q.No: 5

Test Name : CAT 2017 Actual Paper Slot 2

Question Numbers (1 to 6) : The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

Creativity is at once our most precious resource and our most inexhaustible one. As anyone who has ever spent any time with children knows, every single human being is born creative; every human being is innately endowed with the ability to combine and recombine data, perceptions, materials and ideas, and devise new ways of thinking and doing. What fosters creativity? More than anything else: the presence of other creative people. The big myth is that creativity is the province of great individual geniuses. In fact creativity is a social process. Our biggest creative breakthroughs come when people learn from, compete with, and collaborate with other people.

Cities are the true fonts of creativity... With their diverse populations, dense social networks, and public spaces where people can meet spontaneously and serendipitously, they spark and catalyze new ideas. With their infrastructure for finance, organization and trade, they allow those ideas to be swiftly actualized.

As for what staunches creativity, that’s easy, if ironic. It’s the very institutions that we build to manage, exploit and perpetuate the fruits of creativity – our big bureaucracies, and sad to say, too many of our schools. Creativity is disruptive; schools and organizations are regimented, standardized and stultifying.

The education expert Sir Ken Robinson points to a 1968 study reporting on a group of 1,600 children who were tested over time for their ability to think in out-of-thebox ways. When the children were between 3 and 5 years old, 98 percent achieved positive scores. When they were 8 to 10, only 32 percent passed the same test, and only 10 percent at 13 to 15. When 280,000 25- year-olds took the test, just 2 percent passed. By the time we are adults, our creativity has been wrung out of us.

I once asked the great urbanist Jane Jacobs what makes some places more creative than others. She said, essentially, that the question was an easy one. All cities, she said, were filled with creative people; that’s our default state as people. But some cities had more than their shares of leaders, people and institutions that blocked out that creativity. She called them “squelchers.”

Creativity (or the lack of it) follows the same general contours of the great socio-economic divide - our rising inequality - that plagues us. According to my own estimates, roughly a third of us across the United States, and perhaps as much as half of us in our most creative cities - are able to do work which engages our creative faculties to some extent, whether as artists, musicians, writers, techies, innovators, entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, journalists or educators - those of us who work with our minds. That leaves a group that I term “the other 66 percent,” who toil in low-wage rote and rotten jobs - if they have jobs at all - in which their creativity is subjugated, ignored or wasted.

Creativity itself is not in danger. It’s flourishing is all around us - in science and technology, arts and culture, in our rapidly revitalizing cities. But we still have a long way to go if we want to build a truly creative society that supports and rewards the creativity of each and every one of us.

The central idea of this passage is that

social interaction is necessary to nurture creativity.

creativity and ideas are gradually declining in all societies.

the creativity divide is widening in societies in line with socio-economic trends.

more people should work in jobs that engage their creative faculties.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
Option 1 is the correct answer as the entire passage revolves around the idea how cities help in flourishing of creativity. The author describes the importance of social interaction and how the lack of it, spoils creativity. Option 2 is ruled out because the author explicitly states that “creativity itself is not in danger”. Option 3 is incorrect since it is discussed only in the last 2 paragraphs. Option 4 is too generic. It can’t be the main idea.

Q.No: 6

Test Name : CAT 2017 Actual Paper Slot 2

Questions Numbers (7 to 12) : The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

During the frigid season...it’s often necessary to nestle under a blanket to try to stay warm. The temperature difference between the blanket and the air outside is so palpable that we often have trouble leaving our warm refuge. Many plants and animals similarly hunker down, relying on snow cover for safety from winter’s harsh conditions. The small area between the snowpack and the ground, called the subnivium...might be the most important ecosystem that you have never heard of.

The subnivium is so well-insulated and stable that its temperature holds steady at around 32 degree Fahrenheit (0 degree Celsius). Although that might still sound cold, a constant temperature of 32 degree Fahrenheit can often be 30 to 40 degrees warmer than the air temperature during the peak of winter. Because of this large temperature difference, a wide variety of species...depend on the subnivium for winter protection.

For many organisms living in temperate and Arctic regions, the difference between being under the snow or outside it is a matter of life and death. Consequently, disruptions to the subnivium brought about by climate change will affect everything from population dynamics to nutrient cycling through the ecosystem.

The formation and stability of the subnivium requires more than a few flurries. Winter ecologists have suggested that eight inches of snow is necessary to develop a stable layer of insulation. Depth is not the only factor, however. More accurately, the stability of the subnivium depends on the interaction between snow depth and snow density. Imagine being under a stack of blankets that are all flattened and pressed together. When compressed, the blankets essentially form one compacted layer. In contrast, when they are lightly placed on top of one another, their insulative capacity increases because the air pockets between them trap heat. Greater depths of low-density snow are therefore better at insulating the ground.

Both depth and density of snow are sensitive to temperature. Scientists are now beginning to explore how climate change will affect the subnivium, as well as the species that depend on it. At first glance, warmer winters seem beneficial for species that have difficulty surviving subzero temperatures; however, as with most ecological phenomena, the consequences are not so straightforward. Research has shown that the snow season (the period when snow is more likely than rain) has become shorter since 1970. When rain falls on snow, it increases the density of the snow and reduces its insulative capacity. Therefore, even though winters are expected to become warmer overall from future climate change, the subnivium will tend to become colder and more variable with less protection from the aboveground temperatures.

The effects of a colder subnivium are complex...For example, shrubs such as crowberry and alpine azalea that grow along the forest floor tend to block the wind and so retain higher depths of snow around them. This captured snow helps to keep soils insulated and in turn increases plant decomposition and nutrient release. In field experiments, researchers removed a portion of the snow cover to investigate the importance of the subnivium’s insulation. They found that soil frost in the snow-free area resulted in damage to plant roots and sometimes even the death of the plant.

The purpose of this passage is to

introduce readers to a relatively unknown ecosystem: the subnivium.

explain how the subnivium works to provide shelter and food to several species.

outline the effects of climate change on the subnivium.

draw an analogy between the effect of blankets on humans and of snow cover on species living in the subnivium.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
Option 3 is the correct answer as the entire passage presents the effects of climate change on Subnivium. This rules out options 1 and 2 that keep Subnivium (and not the effects of climate change on it) as the point of focus. Option 4 is used as an example only in the first paragraph of the passage and therefore it can’t be the purpose of the passage.

Q.No: 7

Test Name : CAT 2017 Actual Paper Slot 2

Questions Numbers (13 to 18):The end of the age of the internal combustion engine is in sight. There are small signs everywhere: the shift to hybrid vehicles is already under way among manufacturers. Volvo has announced it will make no purely petrol-engined cars after 2019 ... and Tesla has just started selling its first electric car aimed squarely at the middle classes: the Tesla 3 sells for $35,000 in the US, and 400,000 people have put down a small, refundable deposit towards one. Several thousand have already taken delivery, and the company hopes to sell half a million more next year. This is a remarkable figure for a machine with a fairly short range and a very limited number of specialised charging stations.

Some of it reflects the remarkable abilities of Elon Musk, the company’s founder, as a salesman, engineer, and a man able to get the most out his factory workers and the governments he deals with ... Mr Musk is selling a dream that the world wants to believe in.

This last may be the most important factor in the story. The private car is ... a device of immense practical help and economic significance, but at the same time a theatre for myths of unattainable self-fulfilment. The one thing you will never see in a car advertisement is traffic, even though that is the element in which drivers spend their lives. Every single driver in a traffic jam is trying to escape from it, yet it is the inevitable consequence of mass car ownership.

The sleek and swift electric car is at one level merely the most contemporary fantasy of autonomy and power. But it might also disrupt our exterior landscapes nearly as much as the fossil fuel-engined car did in the last century. Electrical cars would of course pollute far less than fossil fuel-driven ones; instead of oil reserves, the rarest materials for batteries would make undeserving despots and their dynasties fantastically rich. Petrol stations would disappear. The air in cities would once more be breathable and their streets as quiet as those of Venice. This isn’t an unmixed good. Cars that were as silent as bicycles would still be as dangerous as they are now to anyone they hit without audible warning.

The dream goes further than that. The electric cars of the future will be so thoroughly equipped with sensors and reaction mechanisms that they will never hit anyone. Just as brakes don’t let you skid today, the steering wheel of tomorrow will serve you away from danger before you have even noticed it...

This is where the fantasy of autonomy comes full circle. The logical outcome of cars which need no driver is that they will become cars which need no owner either. Instead, they will work as taxis do, summoned at will but only for the journeys we actually need. This the future towards which Ubem.is working. The ultimate development of the private car will be to reinvent public transport. Traffic jams will be abolished only when the private car becomes a public utility. What then will happen to our fantasies of independence? We’ll all have to take to electrically powered bicycles.

Which of the following statements best reflects the author’s argument?

Hybrid and electric vehicles signal the end of the age of internal combustion engines.

Elon Musk is a remarkably gifted salesman.

The private car represents an unattainable myth of independence.

The future Uber car will be environmentally friendlier than even the Tesla.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
Option 3 is the correct answer as it is explicitly stated in paragraph 2 of the passage. Other options are beyond the scope of the passage.

Q.No: 8

Test Name : CAT 2017 Actual Paper Slot 2

Question Numbers (19 to 21) : Typewriters are the epitome of a technology that has been comprehensively rendered obsolete by the digital age. The ink comes off the ribbon, they weigh a ton, and second thoughts are a disaster. But they are also personal, portable and, above all, private. Type a document and lock it away and more or less the only way anyone else can get it is if you give it to them. That is why the Russians have decided to go back to typewriters in some government offices, and why in the US, some departments have never abandoned them. Yet it is not just their resistance to algorithms and secret surveillance that keeps typewriter production lines – well one, at least – in business (the last British one closed a year ago). Nor is it only the nostalgic appeal of the metal body and the stout welldefined keys that make them popular on eBay. A typewriter demands something particular: attentiveness. By the time the paper is loaded, the ribbon tightened, the carriage returned, the spacing and the margins set, there’s a big premium on hitting the right key. That means sorting out ideas, pulling together a kind of order and organising details before actually striking off. There can be no thinking on screen with a typewriter. Nor are there any easy distractions. No online shopping. No urgent emails. No Twitter. No need even for electricity - perfect for writing in a remote hideaway. The thinking process is accompanied by the encouraging clack of keys, and the ratchet of the carriage return. Ping!

Which one of the following best describes what the passage is trying to do?

It describes why people continue to use typewriters even in the digital age.

It argues that typewriters will continue to be used even though they are an obsolete technology.

It highlights the personal benefits of using typewriters.

It shows that computers offer fewer options than typewriters.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
Option 1 is the correct answer as the author provides examples of the US and Russia to tell that these countries have taken up the use of typewriter. The author also supports their using of typewriters by providing us with positive aspects of the typewriters. Option 2 is beyond the scope of the passage. Option 3 is incorrect since clearly it is not the main aim of the passage. There is no hint to make that claim. Option 4 is incorrect since this difference has nowhere been made.

Q.No: 9

Test Name : CAT 2017 Actual Paper Slot 2

Question Numbers (22 to 24) : Despite their fierce reputation, Vikings may not have always been the plunderers and pillagers popular culture imagines them to be. In fact, they got their start trading in northern European markets, researchers suggest.

Combs carved from animal antlers, as well as comb manufacturing waste and raw antler material has turned up at three archaeological sites in Denmark, including a medieval marketplace in the city of Ribe. A team of researchers from Denmark and the U.K. hoped to identify the species of animal to which the antlers once belonged by analyzing collagen proteins in the samples and comparing them across the animal kingdom, Laura Geggel reports for Live Science. Somewhat surprisingly, molecular analysis of the artifacts revealed that some combs and other material had been carved from reindeer antlers.... Given that reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) don’t live in Denmark, the researchers posit that it arrived on Viking ships from Norway. Antler craftsmanship, in the form of decorative combs, was part of Viking culture. Such combs served as symbols of good health, Geggel writes. The fact that the animals shed their antlers also made them easy to collect from the large herds that inhabited Norway.

Since the artifacts were found in marketplace areas at each site it’s more likely that the Norsemen came to trade rather than pillage. Most of the artifacts also date to the 780s, but some are as old as 725. That predates the beginning of Viking raids on Great Britain by about 70 years. [Traditionally, the so-called “Viking Age” began with these raids in 793 and ended with the Norman conquest of Great Britain in 1066.) Archaeologists had suspected that the Vikings had experience with long maritime voyages [that] might have preceded their raiding days. Beyond Norway, these combs would have been a popular industry in Scandinavia as well. It’s possible that the antler combs represent a larger trade network, where the Norsemen supplied raw material to craftsmen in Denmark and elsewhere.

The primary purpose of the passage is:

to explain the presence of reindeer antler combs in Denmark.

to contradict the widely-accepted beginning date for the Viking Age in Britain, and propose an alternate one.

to challenge the popular perception of Vikings as raiders by using evidence that suggests their early trade relations with Europe.

to argue that besides being violent pillagers, Vikings were also skilled craftsmen and efficient traders.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The main aim of the author appears to dismiss the popular believe that Vikings were pillagers. The passage revolves around the idea that Vikings started out as traders. This makes option 3 correct. Option 1 is ruled out because the example of combs has been used only as an illustration. Option 4 is incorrect because the passage discusses a period before Vikings turned into pillagers. Option 2 is beyond the scope of the passage.

Q.No: 10

Test Name : CAT 2018 Actual Paper Slot 1

Directions for questions 6 to 9:

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice. . . .

Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet [new evidence] from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology [indicates] that evolution is more complex than we once assumed. . . .

In his book On Human Nature (1978), the evolutionary biologist Edward O Wilson claimed that human culture is held on a genetic leash. The metaphor [needs revision]. . . . Imagine a dog-walker (the genes) struggling to retain control of a brawny mastiff (human culture). The pair’s trajectory (the pathway of evolution) reflects the outcome of the struggle. Now imagine the same dog-walker struggling with multiple dogs, on leashes of varied lengths, with each dog tugging in different directions. All these tugs represent the influence of developmental factors, including epigenetics, antibodies and hormones passed on by parents, as well as the ecological legacies and culture they bequeath. . . .

The received wisdom is that parental experiences can’t affect the characters of their offspring. Except they do. The way that genes are expressed to produce an organism’s phenotype – the actual characteristics it ends up with – is affected by chemicals that attach to them. Everything from diet to air pollution to parental behaviour can influence the addition or removal of these chemical marks, which switches genes on or off. Usually these so-called ‘epigenetic’ attachments are removed during the production of sperm and eggs cells, but it turns out that some escape the resetting process and are passed on to the next generation, along with the genes. This is known as ‘epigenetic inheritance’, and more and more studies are confirming that it really happens. Let’s return to the almond-fearing mice. The inheritance of an epigenetic mark transmitted in the sperm is what led the mice’s offspring to acquire an inherited fear. . . .

Epigenetics is only part of the story. Through culture and society, [humans and other animals] inherit knowledge and skills acquired by [their] parents. . . . All this complexity . . . points to an evolutionary process in which genomes (over hundreds to thousands of generations), epigenetic modifications and inherited cultural factors (over several, perhaps tens or hundreds of generations), and parental effects (over single-generation timespans) collectively inform how organisms adapt. These extra-genetic kinds of inheritance give organisms the flexibility to make rapid adjustments to environmental challenges, dragging genetic change in their wake – much like a rowdy pack of dogs.

Which of the following options best describes the author's argument?

Darwin’s and Mendel’s theories together best explain evolution.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection cannot fully explain evolution.

Mendel’s theory of inheritance is unfairly underestimated in explaining evolution.

Wilson’s theory of evolution is scientifically superior to either Darwin’s or Mendel’s.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
In the passage, the author doesn’t compare Darwin and Mendel. He doesn’t blame one or praise the other. The author also doesn’t state that either Darwin or Mendel is better. So, option 2 is the best choice.

Q.No: 11

Test Name : CAT 2018 Actual Paper Slot 1

Directions for questions 20 to 24:

. . . “Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between elephants and people has dramatically changed,” [says psychologist Gay] Bradshaw. . . . “Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence. Now, I use the term ‘violence’ because of the intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression of humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of elephants.” . . .

Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But. . . Bradshaw and several colleagues argue. . . that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture. . . .

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. . . . Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years. Studies of established herds have shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young females are socialized into the matriarchal network, while young males go off for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into the fold as mature adults. . . .

This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues [demonstrate], ha[s] effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats. . . . As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised by ever younger and inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants, meanwhile, that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of poachers are coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines traditional elephant life. “The loss of elephant elders,” [says] Bradshaw . . . "and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants.”

What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various elephant researchers. . . weren’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. . . .

[According to Bradshaw], “Elephants are suffering and behaving in the same ways that we recognize in ourselves as a result of violence. . . . Except perhaps for a few specific features, brain organization and early development of elephants and humans are extremely similar.”

Which of the following statements best expresses the overall argument of this passage?

The brain organisation and early development of elephants and humans are extremely similar.

The relationship between elephants and humans has changed from one of coexistence to one of hostility.

Recent elephant behaviour could be understood as a form of species-wide trauma-related response.

Elephants, like the humans they are in conflict with, are profoundly social creatures.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
In the passage, the author focuses on PTSD in elephants. Option 1 is too generic. Option 4 is too narrow and misleading. The focus of the passage is not on conflict. Option 2 is too narrow. It only talks about one part of the first paragraph. Option 3 best captures the essence of the passage.

Q.No: 12

Test Name : CAT 2018 Actual Paper Slot 2

Directions for questions 1 to 5: Will a day come when India’s poor can access government services as easily as drawing cash from an ATM? . . . [N]o country in the world has made accessing education or health or policing or dispute resolution as easy as an ATM, because the nature of these activities requires individuals to use their discretion in a positive way. Technology can certainly facilitate this in a variety of ways if it is seen as one part of an overall approach, but the evidence so far in education, for instance, is that just adding computers alone doesn’t make education any better. . . .

The dangerous illusion of technology is that it can create stronger, top down accountability of service providers in implementation-intensive services within existing public sector organisations. One notion is that electronic management information systems (EMIS) keep better track of inputs and those aspects of personnel that are ‘EMIS visible’ can lead to better services. A recent study examined attempts to increase attendance of Auxiliary Nurse Midwife (ANMs) at clinics in Rajasthan, which involved high-tech time clocks to monitor attendance. The study’s title says it all: Band-Aids on a Corpse . . . e-governance can be just as bad as any other governance when the real issue is people and their motivation. For services to improve, the people providing the services have to want to do a better job with the skills they have. A study of medical care in Delhi found that even though providers, in the public sector had much better skills than private sector providers their provision of care in actual practice was much worse.

In implementation-intensive services the key to success is face-to-face interactions between a teacher, a nurse, a policeman, an extension agent and a citizen. This relationship is about power. Amartya Sen’s . . . report on education in West Bengal had a supremely telling anecdote in which the villagers forced the teacher to attend school, but then, when the parents went off to work, the teacher did not teach, but forced the children to massage his feet. . . . As long as the system empowers providers over citizens, technology is irrelevant.

The answer to successfully providing basic services is to create systems that provide both autonomy and accountability. In basic education for instance, the answer to poor teaching is not controlling teachers more . . . The key . . . is to hire teachers who want to teach and let them teach, expressing their professionalism and vocation as a teacher through autonomy in the classroom. This autonomy has to be matched with accountability for results—not just narrowly measured through test scores, but broadly for the quality of the education they provide.

A recent study in Uttar Pradesh showed that if, somehow, all civil service teachers could be replaced with contract teachers, the state could save a billion dollars a year in revenue and double student learning. Just the additional autonomy and accountability of contracts through local groups—even without complementary system changes in information and empowerment—led to that much improvement. The first step to being part of the solution is to create performance information accessible to those outside of the government. . . .

The main purpose of the passage is to:

find a solution to the problem of poor service delivery in education by examining different strategies.

argue that some types of services can be improved by providing independence and requiring accountability.

critique the government’s involvement in educational activities and other implementation-intensive services.

analyse the shortcomings of government-appointed nurses and their management through technology.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
Options 1,3 and 4 talk about the specific issues or are the examples of a common issue which is clearly mentioned in Option (2), the right answer.

Q.No: 13

Test Name : CAT 2018 Actual Paper Slot 2

Directions for questions 6 to 10: More and more companies, government agencies, educational institutions and philanthropic organisations are today in the grip of a new phenomenon: ‘metric fixation’. The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is possible – and desirable – to replace professional judgment (acquired through personal experience and talent) with numerical indicators of comparative performance based upon standardised data (metrics); and that the best way to motivate people within these organisations is by attaching rewards and penalties to their measured performance.

The rewards can be monetary, in the form of pay for performance, say, or reputational, in the form of college rankings, hospital ratings, surgical report cards and so on. But the most dramatic negative effect of metric fixation is its propensity to incentivise gaming: that is, encouraging professionals to maximise the metrics in ways that are at odds with the larger purpose of the organisation. If the rate of major crimes in a district becomes the metric according to which police officers are promoted, then some officers will respond by simply not recording crimes or downgrading them from major offences to misdemeanours. Or take the case of surgeons. When the metrics of success and failure are made public – affecting their reputation and income – some surgeons will improve their metric scores by refusing to operate on patients with more complex problems, whose surgical outcomes are more likely to be negative. Who suffers? The patients who don’t get operated upon.

When reward is tied to measured performance, metric fixation invites just this sort of gaming. But metric fixation also leads to a variety of more subtle unintended negative consequences. These include goal displacement, which comes in many varieties: when performance is judged by a few measures, and the stakes are high (keeping one’s job, getting a pay rise or raising the stock price at the time that stock options are vested), people focus on satisfying those measures – often at the expense of other, more important organisational goals that are not measured. The best-known example is ‘teaching to the test’, a widespread phenomenon that has distorted primary and secondary education in the United States since the adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Short-termism is another negative. Measured performance encourages what the US sociologist Robert K Merton in 1936 called ‘the imperious immediacy of interests … where the actor’s paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes consideration of further or other consequences’. In short, advancing short-term goals at the expense of long-range considerations. This problem is endemic to publicly traded corporations that sacrifice long-term research and development, and the development of their staff, to the perceived imperatives of the quarterly report.

To the debit side of the ledger must also be added the transactional costs of metrics: the expenditure of employee time by those tasked with compiling and processing the metrics in the first place – not to mention the time required to actually read them. . . .

What is the main idea that the author is trying to highlight in the passage?

All kinds of organisations are now relying on metrics to measure performance and to give rewards and punishments.

Long-term organisational goals should not be ignored for short-term measures of organisational success.

Performance measurement needs to be precise and cost-effective to be useful for evaluating organisational performance.

Evaluating performance by using measurable performance metrics may misguide organisational goal achievement.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The author introduces the matter, mentions a few benefits about the cause and then projects the negative outcome of evaluating performance measurement. The right answer is option (4).

Q.No: 14

Test Name : CAT 2018 Actual Paper Slot 2

What main point does the author want to convey through the examples of the police officer and the surgeon?

Critical public roles should not be evaluated on metrics-based performance measures.

Some professionals are likely to be significantly influenced by the design of performance measurement systems.

Metrics-linked rewards may encourage unethical behaviour among some professionals.

The actions of police officers and surgeons have a significantly impact on society.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The correct answer can be inferred from the 2nd paragraph where author talks in general about the professionals. Thus, the right answer is option (3).

Q.No: 15

Test Name : CAT 2018 Actual Paper Slot 2

Directions for questions 15 to 19: NOT everything looks lovelier the longer and closer its inspection. But Saturn does. It is gorgeous through Earthly telescopes. However, the 13 years of close observation provided by Cassini, an American spacecraft, showed the planet, its moons and its remarkable rings off better and better, revealing finer structures, striking novelties and greater drama. . . .

By and large the big things in the solar system—planets and moons—are thought of as having been around since the beginning. The suggestion that rings and moons are new is, though, made even more interesting by the fact that one of those moons, Enceladus, is widely considered the most promising site in the solar system on which to look for alien life. If Enceladus is both young and bears life, that life must have come into being quickly. This is also believed to have been the case on Earth. Were it true on Enceladus, that would encourage the idea that life evolves easily when conditions are right.

One reason for thinking Saturn’s rings are young is that they are bright. The solar system is suffused with comet dust, and comet dust is dark. Leaving Saturn’s ring system (which Cassini has shown to be more than 90% water ice) out in such a mist is like leaving laundry hanging on a line downwind from a smokestack: it will get dirty. The lighter the rings are, the faster this will happen, for the less mass they contain, the less celestial pollution they can absorb before they start to discolour. . . . Jeff Cuzzi, a scientist at America’s space agency, NASA, who helped run Cassini, told the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston that combining the mass estimates with Cassini’s measurements of the density of comet-dust near Saturn suggests the rings are no older than the first dinosaurs, nor younger than the last of them—that is, they are somewhere between 200m and 70m years old.

That timing fits well with a theory put forward in 2016, by Matija Cuk of the SETI Institute, in California and his colleagues. They suggest that at around the same time as the rings came into being an old set of moons orbiting Saturn destroyed themselves, and from their remains emerged not only the rings but also the planet’s current suite of inner moons—Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus and Mimas. . . .

Dr Cuk and his colleagues used computer simulations of Saturn’s moons’ orbits as a sort of time machine. Looking at the rate at which tidal friction is causing these orbits to lengthen they extrapolated backwards to find out what those orbits would have looked like in the past. They discovered that about 100m years ago the orbits of two of them, Tethys and Dione, would have interacted in a way that left the planes in which they orbit markedly tilted. But their orbits are untilted. The obvious, if unsettling, conclusion was that this interaction never happened—and thus that at the time when it should have happened, Dione and Tethys were simply not there. They must have come into being later. . . .

The main objective of the passage is to:

demonstrate how the orbital patterns of Saturn’s rings and moons change over time.

highlight the beauty, finer structures and celestial drama of Saturn’s rings and moons.

provide evidence that Saturn’s rings and moons are recent creations.

establish that Saturn’s rings and inner moons have been around since the beginning of time.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
2nd paragraph, 4-5 lines, it can be inferred from the passage that the author has provided evidence that Saturn’s rings and moons are recent creations. In addition to this, author has talked in depth about the rings and moons creation. The right answer is option (3).

Q.No: 16

Test Name : CAT 2018 Actual Paper Slot 2

Directions for questions 20 to 24: . . . The complexity of modern problems often precludes any one person from fully understanding them. Factors contributing to rising obesity levels, for example, include transportation systems and infrastructure, media, convenience foods, changing social norms, human biology and psychological factors. . . . The multidimensional or layered character of complex problems also undermines the principle of meritocracy: the idea that the ‘best person’ should be hired. There is no best person. When putting together an oncological research team, a biotech company such as Gilead or Genentech would not construct a multiple-choice test and hire the top scorers, or hire people whose resumes score highest according to some performance criteria. Instead, they would seek diversity. They would build a team of people who bring diverse knowledge bases, tools and analytic skills. . . .

Believers in a meritocracy might grant that teams ought to be diverse but then argue that meritocratic principles should apply within each category. Thus the team should consist of the ‘best’ mathematicians, the ‘best’ oncologists, and the ‘best’ biostatisticians from within the pool. That position suffers from a similar flaw. Even with a knowledge domain, no test or criteria applied to individuals will produce the best team. Each of these domains possesses such depth and breadth, that no test can exist. Consider the field of neuroscience. Upwards of 50,000 papers were published last year covering various techniques, domains of enquiry and levels of analysis, ranging from molecules and synapses up through networks of neurons. Given that complexity, any attempt to rank a collection of neuroscientists from best to worst, as if they were competitors in the 50-metre butterfly, must fail. What could be true is that given a specific task and the composition of a particular team, one scientist would be more likely to contribute than another. Optimal hiring depends on context. Optimal teams will be diverse.

Evidence for this claim can be seen in the way that papers and patents that combine diverse ideas tend to rank as high-impact. It can also be found in the structure of the so-called random decision forest, a state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithm. Random forests consist of ensembles of decision trees. If classifying pictures, each tree makes a vote: is that a picture of a fox or a dog? A weighted majority rules. Random forests can serve many ends. They can identify bank fraud and diseases, recommend ceiling fans and predict online dating behaviour. When building a forest, you do not select the best trees as they tend to make similar classifications. You want diversity. Programmers achieve that diversity by training each tree on different data, a technique known as bagging. They also boost the forest ‘cognitively’ by training trees on the hardest cases – those that the current forest gets wrong. This ensures even more diversity and accurate forests.

Yet the fallacy of meritocracy persists. Corporations, non-profits, governments, universities and even preschools test, score and hire the ‘best’. This all but guarantees not creating the best team. Ranking people by common criteria produces homogeneity. . . . That’s not likely to lead to breakthroughs.

Which of the following best describes the purpose of the example of neuroscience?

Neuroscience is an advanced field of science because of its connections with other branches of science like oncology and biostatistics.

Unlike other fields of knowledge, neuroscience is an exceptionally complex field, making a meaningful assessment of neuroscientists impossible.

In narrow fields of knowledge, a meaningful assessment of expertise has always been possible.

In the modern age, every field of knowledge is so vast that a meaningful assessment of merit is impossible.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
3rd and 4th paragraph, proves option (4) to be the right answer.

Q.No: 17

Test Name : CAT Actual Paper 2020 Slot-2

Question Numbers (1 to 5): The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

In a low-carbon world, renewable energy technologies are hot business. For investors looking to redirect funds, wind turbines and solar panels, among other technologies, seem a straightforward choice. But renewables need to be further scrutinized before being championed as forging a path toward a low-carbon future. Both the direct and indirect impacts of renewable energy must be examined to ensure that a climate-smart future does not intensify social and environmental harm. As renewable energy production requires land, water, and labor, among other inputs, it imposes costs on people and the environment. Hydropower projects, for instance, have led to community dispossession and exclusion . . . Renewable energy supply chains are also intertwined with mining, and their technologies contribute to growing levels of electronic waste . . . Furthermore, although renewable energy can be produced and distributed through small-scale, local systems, such an approach might not generate the high returns on investment needed to attract capital.
Although an emerging sector, renewables are enmeshed in long-standing resource extraction through their dependence on minerals and metals . . . Scholars document the negative consequences of mining . . . even for mining operations that commit to socially responsible practices[:] “many of the world’s largest reservoirs of minerals like cobalt, copper, lithium, [and] rare earth minerals”—the ones needed for renewable technologies—“are found in fragile states and under communities of marginalized peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.” Since the demand for metals and minerals will increase substantially in a renewablepowered future . . . this intensification could exacerbate the existing consequences of extractive activities.
Among the connections between climate change and waste, O’Neill . . . highlights that “devices developed to reduce our carbon footprint, such as lithium batteries for hybrid and electric cars or solar panels [,] become potentially dangerous electronic waste at the end of their productive life.” The disposal of toxic waste has long perpetuated social injustice through the flows of waste to the Global South and to marginalized communities in the Global North . . .
While renewable energy is a more recent addition to financial portfolios, investments in the sector must be considered in light of our understanding of capital accumulation. As agricultural finance reveals, the concentration of control of corporate activity facilitates profit generation. For some climate activists, the promise of renewables rests on their ability not only to reduce emissions but also to provide distributed, democratized access to energy . . . But Burke and Stephens . . . caution that “renewable energy systems offer a possibility but not a certainty for more democratic energy futures.” Small-scale, distributed forms of energy are only highly profitable to institutional investors if control is consolidated somewhere in the financial chain. Renewable energy can be produced at the household or neighborhood level. However, such small-scale, localized production is unlikely to generate high returns for investors. For financial growth to be sustained and expanded by the renewable sector, production and trade in renewable energy technologies will need to be highly concentrated, and large asset management firms will likely drive those developments.

Which one of the following statements best captures the main argument of the last paragraph of the passage?

Renewable energy produced at the household or neighbourhood level is more efficient than massproduced forms of energy.

The development of the renewable energy sector is a double-edged sword.

Renewable energy systems are not democratic unless they are corporate-controlled.

Most forms of renewable energy are not profitable investments for institutional investors.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The passage says that renewable energy produced at the household or neighbourhood level is unlikely to generate high returns for investors but it does not say that renewable energy produced at this level is more efficient than mass-produced forms of energy. Therefore, option 1 is incorrect. Option 2 is correct because the passage dwells on both the advantages and disadvantages of renewable energy. Refer to “Both the direct and indirect impacts of renewable energy must be examined to ensure that a climate-smart future does not intensify social and environmental harm.” Option 3 contradicts what is said in the passage about democratic distribution of renewable energy. Refer to “For some climate activists, the promise of renewables rests on their ability not only to reduce emissions but also to provide distributed, democratized access to energy . . . But Burke and Stephens . . . caution that “renewable energy systems offer a possibility but not a certainty for more democratic energy futures.”” Option 4 is incorrect because the passage says the passage says that renewable technology is a hot business. It is also said that if renewable energy is produced and distributed at small scale it might not generate high returns on investment.

Q.No: 18

Test Name : CAT Actual Paper 2020 Slot-2

Question Numbers (6 to 10): The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

The claims advanced here may be condensed into two assertions: [first, that visual] culture is what images, acts of seeing, and attendant intellectual, emotional, and perceptual sensibilities do to build, maintain, or transform the worlds in which people live. [And second, that the] study of visual culture is the analysis and interpretation of images and the ways of seeing (or gazes) that configure the agents, practices, conceptualities, and institutions that put images to work. . . .

Accordingly, the study of visual culture should be characterized by several concerns. First, scholars of visual culture need to examine any and all imagery – high and low, art and nonart. . . . They must not restrict themselves to objects of a particular beauty or aesthetic value. Indeed, any kind of imagery may be found to offer up evidence of the visual construction of reality. . . .

Second, the study of visual culture must scrutinize visual practice as much as images themselves, asking what images do when they are put to use. If scholars engaged in this enterprise inquire what makes an image beautiful or why this image or that constitutes a masterpiece or a work of genius, they should do so with the purpose of investigating an artist’s or a work’s contribution to the experience of beauty, taste, value, or genius. No amount of social analysis can account fully for the existence of Michelangelo or Leonardo. They were unique creators of images that changed the way their contemporaries thought and felt and have continued to shape the history of art, artists, museums, feeling, and aesthetic value. But study of the critical, artistic, and popular reception of works by such artists as Michelangelo and Leonardo can shed important light on the meaning of these artists and their works for many different people. And the history of meaning-making has a great deal to do with how scholars as well as lay audiences today understand these artists and their achievements.

Third, scholars studying visual culture might properly focus their interpretative work on lifeworlds by examining images, practices, visual technologies, taste, and artistic style as constitutive of social relations. The task is to understand how artifacts contribute to the construction of a world. . . . Important methodological implications follow: ethnography and reception studies become productive forms of gathering information, since these move beyond the image as a closed and fixed meaning event. . . .

Fourth, scholars may learn a great deal when they scrutinize the constituents of vision, that is, the structures of perception as a physiological process as well as the epistemological frameworks informing a system of visual representation. Vision is a socially and a biologically constructed operation, depending on the design of the human body and how it engages the interpretive devices developed by a culture in order to see intelligibly. . . . Seeing . . . operates on the foundation of covenants with images that establish the conditions for meaningful visual experience.

Finally, the scholar of visual culture seeks to regard images as evidence for explanation, not as epiphenomena.

Which set of keywords below most closely captures the arguments of the passage?

Scholars, Social Analysis, Michelangelo and Leonardo, Interpretive Devices.

Imagery, Visual Practices, Lifeworlds, Structures of Perception.

Visual Construction of Reality, Work of Genius, Ethnography, Epiphenomena.

Visual Culture, Aesthetic Value, Lay Audience, Visual Experience.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
Michelangelo and Leonardo are given as examples. So, they cannot be included as main arguments of the passage. Thus, option 1 can be eliminated. Similarly, option 3 can also be eliminated because ‘epiphenomena’ is not one of the main arguments of the given passage. Option 4 contains the phrase ‘lay audience’ which is also not one of the main points of the passage. Thus, option 2 is the correct choice. The keywords given in option 2 talk about the study of visual culture as mentioned in 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th paragraphs respectively.

Q.No: 19

Test Name : CAT Actual Paper 2020 Slot-3

Question Numbers (14 to 18): The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

I’ve been following the economic crisis for more than two years now. I began working on the subject as part of the background to a novel, and soon realized that I had stumbled across the most interesting story I’ve ever found. While I was beginning to work on it, the British bank Northern Rock blew up, and it became clear that, as I wrote at the time, “If our laws are not extended to control the new kinds of super-powerful, super-complex, and potentially super-risky investment vehicles, they will one day cause a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions.” . . . I was both right and too late, because all the groundwork for the crisis had already been done— though the sluggishness of the world’s governments, in not preparing for the great unraveling of autumn 2008, was then and still is stupefying. But this is the first reason why I wrote this book: because what’s happened is extraordinarily interesting. It is an absolutely amazing story, full of human interest and drama, one whose byways of mathematics, economics, and psychology are both central to the story of the last decades and mysteriously unknown to the general public. We have heard a lot about “the two cultures” of science and the arts—we heard a particularly large amount about it in 2009, because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the speech during which C. P. Snow first used the phrase. But I’m not sure the idea of a huge gap between science and the arts is as true as it was half a century ago—it’s certainly true, for instance, that a general reader who wants to pick up an education in the fundamentals of science will find it easier than ever before. It seems to me that there is a much bigger gap between the world of finance and that of the general public and that there is a need to narrow that gap, if the financial industry is not to be a kind of priesthood, administering to its own mysteries and feared and resented by the rest of us. Many bright, literate people have no idea about all sorts of economic basics, of a type that financial insiders take as elementary facts of how the world works. I am an outsider to finance and economics, and my hope is that I can talk across that gulf.

My need to understand is the same as yours, whoever you are. That’s one of the strangest ironies of this story: after decades in which the ideology of the Western world was personally and economically individualistic, we’ve suddenly been hit by a crisis which shows in the starkest terms that whether we like it or not—and there are large parts of it that you would have to be crazy to like—we’re all in this together. The aftermath of the crisis is going to dominate the economics and politics of our societies for at least a decade to come and perhaps longer.

Which one of the following best captures the main argument of the last paragraph of the passage?

In the decades to come, other ideologies will emerge in the aftermath of the crisis.

The ideology of individualism must be set aside in order to deal with the crisis.

Whoever you are, you would be crazy to think that there is no crisis.

The aftermath of the crisis will strengthen the central ideology of individualism in the Western world.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The concluding paragraph of the passage highlights the larger impact and the need for a collective response to a crisis that is the result of an individualistic ideology. Thus, 2 is correct. The other options distort the information given in the paragraph.

Q.No: 20

Test Name : CAT Actual Paper 2021 Slot-2

Comprehension:
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

Many people believe that truth conveys power. . . . Hence sticking with the truth is the best strategy for gaining power. Unfortunately, this is just a comforting myth. In fact, truth and power have a far more complicated relationship, because in human society, power means two very different things.

On the one hand, power means having the ability to manipulate objective realities: to hunt animals, to construct bridges, to cure diseases, to build atom bombs. This kind of power is closely tied to truth. If you believe a false physical theory, you won’t be able to build an atom bomb. On the other hand, power also means having the ability to manipulate human beliefs, thereby getting lots of people to cooperate effectively. Building atom bombs requires not just a good understanding of physics, but also the coordinated labor of millions of humans. Planet Earth was conquered by Homo sapiens rather than by chimpanzees or elephants, because we are the only mammals that can cooperate in very large numbers. And large-scale cooperation depends on believing common stories. But these stories need not be true. You can unite millions of people by making them believe in completely fictional stories about God, about race or about economics. The dual nature of power and truth results in the curious fact that we humans know many more truths than any other animal, but we also believe in much more nonsense. . . .

When it comes to uniting people around a common story, fiction actually enjoys three inherent advantages over the truth. First, whereas the truth is universal, fictions tend to be local. Consequently if we want to distinguish our tribe from foreigners, a fictional story will serve as a far better identity marker than a true story. . . . The second huge advantage of fiction over truth has to do with the handicap principle, which says that reliable signals must be costly to the signaler. Otherwise, they can easily be faked by cheaters. . . . If political loyalty is signaled by believing a true story, anyone can fake it. But believing ridiculous and outlandish stories exacts greater cost, and is therefore a better signal of loyalty. . . . Third, and most important, the truth is often painful and disturbing. Hence if you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. An American presidential candidate who tells the American public the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about American history has a 100 percent guarantee of losing the elections. . . . An uncompromising adherence to the truth is an admirable spiritual practice, but it is not a winning political strategy. . . .

Even if we need to pay some price for deactivating our rational faculties, the advantages of increased social cohesion are often so big that fictional stories routinely triumph over the truth in human history. Scholars have known this for thousands of years, which is why scholars often had to decide whether they served the truth or social harmony. Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same fiction, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity?

The central theme of the passage is about the choice between:

stories that unite people and those that distinguish groups from each other.

attaining social cohesion and propagating objective truth.

truth and power.

leaders who unknowingly spread fictions and those who intentionally do so.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The entire passage is about uniting people and a discourse on objective truth. Therefore, option (2) comprehensively covers the entire passage. The other options are narrow in scope and so, cannot be the answer. Option (3) is too generic. (3) is incorrect because the author is not talking about the choice between truth and power.

Q.No: 21

Test Name : CAT Actual Paper 2021 Slot-3

Comprehension:
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

Today we can hardly conceive of ourselves without an unconscious. Yet between 1700 and 1900, this notion developed as a genuinely original thought. The “unconscious” burst the shell of conventional language, coined as it had been to embody the fleeting ideas and the shifting conceptions of several generations until, finally, it became fixed and defined in specialized terms within the realm of medical psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis.

The vocabulary concerning the soul and the mind increased enormously in the course of the nineteenth century. The enrichments of literary and intellectual language led to an altered understanding of the meanings that underlie time-honored expressions and traditional catchwords. At the same time, once coined, powerful new ideas attracted to themselves a whole host of seemingly unrelated issues, practices, and experiences, creating a peculiar network of preoccupations that as a group had not existed before. The drawn-out attempt to approach and define the unconscious brought together the spiritualist and the psychical researcher of borderline phenomena (such as apparitions, spectral illusions, haunted houses, mediums, trance, automatic writing); the psychiatrist or alienist probing the nature of mental disease, of abnormal ideation, hallucination, delirium, melancholia, mania; the surgeon performing operations with the aid of hypnotism; the magnetizer claiming to correct the disequilibrium in the universal flow of magnetic fluids but who soon came to be regarded as a clever manipulator of the imagination; the physiologist and the physician who puzzled over sleep, dreams, sleepwalking, anesthesia, the influence of the mind on the body in health and disease; the neurologist concerned with the functions of the brain and the physiological basis of mental life; the philosopher interested in the will, the emotions, consciousness, knowledge, imagination and the creative genius; and, last but not least, the psychologist.

Significantly, most if not all of these practices (for example, hypnotism in surgery or psychological magnetism) originated in the waning years of the eighteenth century and during the early decades of the nineteenth century, as did some of the disciplines (such as psychology and psychical research). The majority of topics too were either new or assumed hitherto unknown colors. Thus, before 1790, few if any spoke, in medical terms, of the affinity between creative genius and the hallucinations of the insane . . .

Striving vaguely and independently to give expression to a latent conception, various lines of thought can be brought together by some novel term. The new concept then serves as a kind of resting place or stocktaking in the development of ideas, giving satisfaction and a stimulus for further discussion or speculation. Thus, the massive introduction of the term unconscious by Hartmann in 1869 appeared to focalize many stray thoughts, affording a temporary feeling that a crucial step had been taken forward, a comprehensive knowledge gained, a knowledge that required only further elaboration, explication, and unfolding in order to bring in a bounty of higher understanding. Ultimately, Hartmann’s attempt at defining the unconscious proved fruitless because he extended its reach into every realm of organic and inorganic, spiritual, intellectual, and instinctive existence, severely diluting the precision and compromising the impact of the concept.

Which one of the following statements best describes what the passage is about?

The identification of the unconscious as an object of psychical research.

The growing vocabulary of the soul and the mind, as diverse processes.

The discovery of the unconscious as a part of the human mind.

The collating of diverse ideas under the single term: unconscious.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The passage deals with the word “unconscious” and how over time since it was introduced in the late 19th century has changed the way we have perceived not only the psychological aspect but language in whole and how it has changed everyday understanding of everyday traditions and ideas. Be it the psychical research or the study of the human mind. The passage encompasses all of these changes. This makes 4, the correct choice.
Incorrect options:
All the other options, 1,2 and 3 denote parts of the given passage. They are not factually incorrect but can be rendered incomplete.

Q.No: 22

Test Name : CAT Actual Paper 2021 Slot-3

Comprehension:
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

Back in the early 2000s, an awesome thing happened in the New X-Men comics. Our mutant heroes had been battling giant robots called Sentinels for years, but suddenly these mechanical overlords spawned a new threat: Nano-Sentinels! Not content to rule Earth with their metal fists, these tiny robots invaded our bodies at the microscopic level. Infected humans were slowly converted into machines, cell by cell.

Now, a new wave of extremely odd robots is making at least part of the Nano-Sentinels story come true. Using exotic fabrication materials like squishy hydrogels and elastic polymers, researchers are making autonomous devices that are often tiny and that could turn out to be more powerful than an army of Terminators. Some are 1-centimetre blobs that can skate over water. Others are flat sheets that can roll themselves into tubes, or matchstick-sized plastic coils that act as powerful muscles. No, they won’t be invading our bodies and turning us into Sentinels – which I personally find a little disappointing – but some of them could one day swim through our bloodstream to heal us. They could also clean up pollutants in water or fold themselves into different kinds of vehicles for us to drive. . . .

Unlike a traditional robot, which is made of mechanical parts, these new kinds of robots are made from molecular parts. The principle is the same: both are devices that can move around and do things independently. But a robot made from smart materials might be nothing more than a pink drop of hydrogel. Instead of gears and wires, it’s assembled from two kinds of molecules – some that love water and some that avoid it – which interact to allow the bot to skate on top of a pond.

Sometimes these materials are used to enhance more conventional robots. One team of researchers, for example, has developed a different kind of hydrogel that becomes sticky when exposed to a low-voltage zap of electricity and then stops being sticky when the electricity is switched off. This putty-like gel can be pasted right onto the feet or wheels of a robot. When the robot wants to climb a sheer wall or scoot across the ceiling, it can activate its sticky feet with a few volts. Once it is back on a flat surface again, the robot turns off the adhesive like a light switch.

Robots that are wholly or partly made of gloop aren’t the future that I was promised in science fiction. But it’s definitely the future I want. I’m especially keen on the nanometre-scale “soft robots” that could one day swim through our bodies. Metin Sitti, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, worked with colleagues to prototype these tiny, synthetic beasts using various stretchy materials, such as simple rubber, and seeding them with magnetic microparticles. They are assembled into a finished shape by applying magnetic fields. The results look like flowers or geometric shapes made from Tinkertoy ball and stick modelling kits. They’re guided through tubes of fluid using magnets, and can even stop and cling to the sides of a tube.

Which one of the following statements best summarises the central point of the passage?

Once the stuff of science fiction, nano-robots now feature in cutting-edge scientific research.

Robots will use nano-robots on their feet and wheels to climb walls or move on ceilings.

The field of robotics is likely to be feature more and more in comics like the New X-Men.

Nano-robots made from molecules that react to water have become increasingly useful.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The passage begins with an example from X-Men, how nano robots are used in the comics. Following that introduction, the entire passage deals how this nano robotic technology is playing an important role in robotic industry and research. Hence 1 is the correct option.
Incorrect Option:
2 is not factually incorrect. Passage does mention that but it does not capture the entire idea of the passage.
3 is incorrect because author does not state anything about field of robotics to feature more in X-Men.
4 is incorrect because again it captures a part of the passage, does not summarise the passage in whole.

Q.No: 23

Test Name : CAT Actual Paper 2021 Slot-3

Which one of the following statements best captures the sense of the first paragraph?

Tiny sentinels called X-Men infected people, turning them into mutant robot overlords.

None of the options listed here.

The X-Men were mutant heroes who now had to battle tiny robots called Nano-Sentinels.

People who were infected by Nano-Sentinel robots became mutants who were called X-Men.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The entire 1st paragraph showcase the rise of nano-sentinels in X-Men comics, which along with the sentinels but unlike them, invade our bodies at the microscopic level. So, the X-Men has to now fight both categories of villains. 3 captures the correct essence of the paragraph.
Incorrect options:
1 is incorrect because sentinels are not X-Men.
2 is incorrect because 3 is the correct answer.
4 is factually incorrect.

Q.No: 24

Test Name : CAT Actual Paper 2022 Slot-1

Question Numbers (9 to 12): The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

Stories concerning the Undead have always been with us. From out of the primal darkness of Mankind's earliest years, come whispers of eerie creatures, not quite alive (or alive in a way which we can understand), yet not quite dead either. These may have been ancient and primitive deities who dwelt deep in the surrounding forests and in remote places, or simply those deceased who refused to remain in their tombs and who wandered about the countryside, physically tormenting and frightening those who were still alive. Mostly they were ill-defined–strange sounds in the night beyond the comforting glow of the fire, or a shape, half-glimpsed in the twilight along the edge of an encampment. They were vague and indistinct, but they were always there with the power to terrify and disturb. They had the power to touch the minds of our early ancestors and to fill them with dread. Such fear formed the basis of the earliest tales although the source and exact nature of such terrors still remained very vague.

And as Mankind became more sophisticated, leaving the gloom of their caves and forming themselves into recognizable communities–towns, cities, whole cultures–so the Undead travelled with them, inhabiting their folklore just as they had in former times. Now they began to take on more definite shapes. They became walking cadavers; the physical embodiment of former deities and things which had existed alongside Man since the Creation. Some still remained vague and illdefined but, as Mankind strove to explain the horror which it felt towards them, such creatures emerged more readily into the light.

In order to confirm their abnormal status, many of the Undead were often accorded attributes, which defied the natural order of things–the power to transform themselves into other shapes, the ability to sustain themselves by drinking human blood, and the ability to influence human minds across a distance. Such powers– described as supernatural–only [lent] an added dimension to the terror that humans felt regarding them. And it was only natural, too, that the Undead should become connected with the practice of magic. From very early times, Shamans and witchdoctors had claimed at least some power and control over the spirits of departed ancestors, and this has continued down into more “civilized” times. Formerly, the invisible spirits and forces that thronged around men's earliest encampments, had spoken “through” the tribal Shamans but now, as entities in their own right, they were subject to magical control and could be physically summoned by a competent sorcerer. However, the relationship between the magician and an Undead creature was often a very tenuous and uncertain one. Some sorcerers might have even become Undead entities once they died, but they might also have been susceptible to the powers of other magicians when they did.

From the Middle Ages and into the Age of Enlightenment, theories of the Undead continued to grow and develop. Their names became more familiar–werewolf, vampire, ghoul–each one certain to strike fear into the hearts of ordinary humans.

Which one of the following statements best describes what the passage is about?

The passage describes the failure of human beings to fully comprehend their environment.

The writer describes the ways in which the Undead come to be associated with Shamans and the practice of magic.

The writer discusses the transition from primitive thinking to the Age of Enlightenment.

The passage discusses the evolution of theories of the Undead from primitive thinking to the Age of Enlightenment.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
The passage is primarily concerned with the manner in which our fears and beliefs about certain unexplained phenomenon – the Undead – have evolved over a period of time and how the changing theories regarding the Undead reflect this.

Q.No: 25

Test Name : CAT Actual Paper 2022 Slot-2

Question Numbers (13 to 16): The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

We begin with the emergence of the philosophy of the social sciences as an arena of thought and as a set of social institutions. The two characterisations overlap but are not congruent. Academic disciplines are social institutions. . . . My view is that institutions are all those social entities that organise action: they link acting individuals into social structures. There are various kinds of institutions. Hegelians and Marxists emphasise universal institutions such as the family, rituals, governance, economy and the military. These are mostly institutions that just grew. Perhaps in some imaginary beginning of time they spontaneously appeared. In their present incarnations, however, they are very much the product of conscious attempts to mould and plan them. We have family law, established and disestablished churches, constitutions and laws, including those governing the economy and the military. Institutions deriving from statute, like joint-stock companies are formal by contrast with informal ones such as friendships. There are some institutions that come in both informal and formal variants, as well as in mixed ones. Consider the fact that the stock exchange and the black market are both market institutions, one formal one not. Consider further that there are many features of the work of the stock exchange that rely on informal, noncodifiable agreements, not least the language used for communication. To be precise, mixtures are the norm . . . From constitutions at the top to by-laws near the bottom we are always adding to, or tinkering with, earlier institutions, the grown and the designed are intertwined.

It is usual in social thought to treat culture and tradition as different from, although alongside, institutions. The view taken here is different. Culture and tradition are sub-sets of institutions analytically isolated for explanatory or expository purposes. Some social scientists have taken all institutions, even purely local ones, to be entities that satisfy basic human needs – under local conditions . . . Others differed and declared any structure of reciprocal roles and norms an institution. Most of these differences are differences of emphasis rather than disagreements. Let us straddle all these versions and present institutions very generally . . . as structures that serve to coordinate the actions of individuals. . . . Institutions themselves then have no aims or purpose other than those given to them by actors or used by actors to explain them . . .

Language is the formative institution for social life and for science . . . Both formal and informal language is involved, naturally grown or designed. (Language is all of these to varying degrees.) Languages are paradigms of institutions or, from another perspective, nested sets of institutions. Syntax, semantics, lexicon and alphabet/character-set are all institutions within the larger institutional framework of a written language. Natural languages are typical examples of what Ferguson called ‘the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’[;] reformed natural languages and artificial languages introduce design into their modifications or refinements of natural language. Above all, languages are paradigms of institutional tools that function to coordinate.

Which of the following statements best represents the essence of the passage?

The stock exchange and the black market are both market institutions.

It is usual in social thought to treat culture and tradition as different from institutions.

Institutions are structures that serve to coordinate the actions of individuals.

Language is the fundamental formal institution for social life and for science.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
Option 1 is too narrow in its scope.
Option 2 incorporates culture in the main idea which is unfounded in the passage.
Option 4 captures solely the language aspect of institutions. Thus, it is narrow in its scope.
Option 3 correctly states the main idea of the passage.

Q.No: 26

Test Name : CAT Actual Paper 2023 Slot 2

Question Numbers (9 to 12): The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

The Second Hand September campaign, led by Oxfam . . . seeks to encourage shopping at local organisations and charities as alternatives to fast fashion brands such as Primark and Boohoo in the name of saving our planet. As innocent as mindless scrolling through online shops may seem, such consumers are unintentionally—or perhaps even knowingly—contributing to an industry that uses more energy than aviation….

Brits buy more garments than any other country in Europe, so it comes as no shock that many of those clothes end up in UK landfills each year: 300,000 tonnes of them, to be exact. This waste of clothing is destructive to our planet, releasing greenhouse gasses as clothes are burnt as well as bleeding toxins and dyes into the surrounding soil and water. As ecologist Chelsea Rochman bluntly put it, “The mismanagement of our waste has even come back to haunt us on our dinner plate.”

It’s not surprising, then, that people are scrambling for a solution, the most common of which is second-hand shopping. Retailers selling consigned clothing are currently expanding at a rapid rate … If everyone bought just one used item in a year, it would save 449 million lbs of waste, equivalent to the weight of 1 million Polar bears. “Thrifting” has increasingly become a trendy practice. London is home to many second-hand, or more commonly coined ‘vintage’, shops across the city from Bayswater to Brixton.

So you’re cool and you care about the planet; you’ve killed two birds with one stone. But do people simply purchase a second-hand item, flash it on Instagram with #vintage and call it a day without considering whether what they are doing is actually effective?

According to a study commissioned by Patagonia, for instance, older clothes shed more microfibres. These can end up in our rivers and seas after just one wash due to the worn material, thus contributing to microfibre pollution. To break it down, the amount of microfibres released by laundering 100,000 fleece jackets is equivalent to as many as 11,900 plastic grocery bags, and up to 40 per cent of that ends up in our oceans… So where does this leave second-hand consumers? [They would be well advised to buy] high-quality items that shed less and last longer [as this] combats both microfibre pollution and excess garments ending up in landfills….

Luxury brands would rather not circulate their latest season stock around the globe to be sold at a cheaper price, which is why companies like ThredUP, a US fashion resale marketplace, have not yet caught on in the UK. There will always be a market for consignment but there is also a whole generation of people who have been taught that only buying new products is the norm; second-hand luxury goods are not in their psyche. Ben Whitaker, director at Liquidation Firm B-Stock, told Prospect that unless recycling becomes cost-effective and filters into mass production, with the right technology to partner it, “high-end retailers would rather put brand before sustainability.”

The central idea of the passage would be undermined if:

clothes were not thrown and burnt in landfills.

second-hand stores sold only high-quality clothes.

Primark and Boohoo recycled their clothes for vintage stores.

customers bought all their clothes online.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
For questions 9 to 12:

Passage Explanation (Paragraph-wise):
Paragraph 1: Introduces the “Second Hand September” campaign led by Oxfam, aimed at encouraging shopping at local organizations and charities as alternatives to fast fashion brands. It highlights the environmental impact of the fashion industry, including energy usage and waste contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.
Paragraph 2: Mentions the trend of second-hand shopping as a response to the environmental problems caused by fast fashion. It describes the rapid expansion of retailers selling consigned clothing and the potential environmental benefits of buying used items.
Paragraph 3: Addresses a potential issue with secondhand shopping, noting that older clothes might shed more microfibres, contributing to pollution. The paragraph points out the complexity of the issue, suggesting that buying high-quality items that last longer could be a solution.
Paragraph 4: Discusses the challenges faced by fashion resale marketplaces like ThredUP in the UK, particularly due to attitudes towards second-hand luxury goods and the preferences of luxury brands to maintain their brand image.

Question Explanation: Asks which scenario would undermine the central idea of the passage about the impact of fast fashion and the role of second-hand shopping.

Correct Answer: Second-hand stores selling only high quality clothes:

If the second hand stores only sold high quality then the suggestion of the author of buying high quality second hand clothing to stop excess microfibre pollution from cheap quality second hand clothing would be weakened.

Incorrect Answers:
1. Clothes were not thrown and burnt in landfills: has nothing to do with the suggestion of buying high quality second hand clothing.
3. Primark and Boohoo recycling clothes: Would support the passage’s advocacy for sustainable practices.
4. Customers buying all clothes online: Doesn’t directly address the central idea of reducing clothing waste through second-hand shopping.

Q.No: 27

Test Name : CAT Actual Paper 2023 Slot 3

Question Numbers (9 to 12): The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

The biggest challenge [The Nutmeg’s Curse by Ghosh] throws down is to the prevailing understanding of when the climate crisis started. Most of us have accepted . . . that it started with the widespread use of coal at the beginning of the Industrial Age in the 18th century and worsened with the mass adoption of oil and natural gas in the 20th.

Ghosh takes this history at least three centuries back, to the start of European colonialism in the 15th century. He [starts] the book with a 1621 massacre by Dutch invaders determined to impose a monopoly on nutmeg cultivation and trade in the Banda islands in today’s Indonesia. Not only do the Dutch systematically depopulate the islands through genocide, they also try their best to bring nutmeg cultivation into plantation mode. These are the two points to which Ghosh returns through examples from around the world. One, how European colonialists decimated not only indigenous populations but also indigenous understanding of the relationship between humans and Earth. Two, how this was an invasion not only of humans but of the Earth itself, and how this continues to the present day by looking at nature as a ‘resource’ to exploit. . . .

We know we are facing more frequent and more severe heatwaves, storms, floods, droughts and wildfires due to climate change. We know our expansion through deforestation, dam building, canal cutting – in short, terraforming, the word Ghosh uses – has brought us repeated disasters . . . Are these the responses of an angry Gaia who has finally had enough? By using the word ‘curse’ in the title, the author makes it clear that he thinks so. I use the pronoun ‘who’ knowingly, because Ghosh has quoted many non-European sources to enquire into the relationship between humans and the world around them so that he can question the prevalent way of looking at Earth as an inert object to be exploited to the maximum.

As Ghosh’s text, notes and bibliography show once more, none of this is new. There have always been challenges to the way European colonialists looked at other civilisations and at Earth. It is just that the invaders and their myriad backers in the fields of economics, politics, anthropology, philosophy, literature, technology, physics, chemistry, biology have dominated global intellectual discourse. . . .

There are other points of view that we can hear today if we listen hard enough. Those observing global climate negotiations know about the Latin American way of looking at Earth as Pachamama (Earth Mother). They also know how such a framing is just provided lip service and is ignored in the substantive portions of the negotiations. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh explains why. He shows the extent of the vested interest in the oil economy – not only for oil-exporting countries, but also for a superpower like the US that controls oil drilling, oil prices and oil movement around the world. Many of us know power utilities are sabotaging decentralised solar power generation today because it hits their revenues and control. And how the other points of view are so often drowned out.

Which one of the following best explains the primary purpose of the discussion of the colonisation of the Banda islands in “The Nutmeg’s Curse”?

To illustrate the role played by the cultivation of certain crops in the plantation mode in contributing to climate change.

To illustrate how systemic violence against the colonised constituted the cornerstone of colonialism.

To illustrate how colonialism represented and perpetuated the mindset that has led to climate change.

To illustrate the first instance in history when the processes responsible for climate change were initiated.

Answer key/Solution

Solution:
Passage Explanation:
Para 1: “The Nutmeg’s Curse” by Amitav Ghosh challenges the commonly accepted timeline of the climate crisis, suggesting it began not with the Industrial Age in the 18th century, but three centuries earlier with European colonialism in the 15th century.

Para 2: Ghosh traces the origins of the climate crisis to the 15th century, starting with a 1621 massacre by the Dutch in the Banda Islands, Indonesia, to monopolize nutmeg cultivation. He argues that European colonialists not only decimated indigenous populations but also disregarded indigenous environmental knowledge, treating nature as a resource to exploit.

Para 3: Ghosh suggests that current environmental disasters—heatwaves, storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires—could be seen as Earth’s response to human terraforming activities. He challenges the view of Earth as an inert object, citing non-European perspectives on human-Earth relationships.

Para 4: The book highlights that opposition to the European colonialist worldview has always existed. However, this perspective, along with supporting economic, political, and scientific views, has dominated global discourse, overshadowing alternative viewpoints.

Para 5: Ghosh points out that alternative perspectives, like the Latin American view of Earth as Pachamama, exist but are often marginalized in global discussions, including climate negotiations. He discusses the vested interests in the oil economy and how they overpower and silence these alternative voices.

Question Explanation: Question 12 seeks to determine the primary purpose of discussing the colonization of the Banda islands in Ghosh’s book. It requires understanding the central theme or message that this historical example serves in the context of the book.
Correct Answer:
3. To illustrate how colonialism represented and perpetuated the mindset that has led to climate change.
The passage suggests that Ghosh uses the colonization of the Banda islands to demonstrate how colonialism established and perpetuated a worldview that views nature as a resource to be exploited. This mindset, according to Ghosh, has significantly contributed to the current climate crisis. The example of the Banda islands serves to highlight the historical roots of this exploitative attitude towards nature.
Incorrect Answers:
1. Role of crop cultivation in contributing to climate change: While the passage mentions nutmeg cultivation, it does not suggest that this is the primary purpose of the discussion.
2. Systemic violence against the colonized: Although the passage mentions genocide by the Dutch, it is used more to illustrate the broader mindset of exploitation, not just the violence.
4. First instance of climate change processes: The passage does not claim that the colonization of the Banda islands marks the historical beginning of climate change processes, but rather uses it to illustrate the colonial mindset that contributes to climate change.

Solution:
Throughout the passage the author describes how in the history of map making, putting North on top has been a moderately recent phenomenon. The author goes on to chart the various reasons why myriad cultures desisted from placing north on top. This makes 2 the most relevant choice.

Solution:
The author rues the loss of the social function of the malls throughout the passage. It served as a place where people from all walks of life could gather without being questioned or looked at. The author also whips up nostalgia in order to emphasise on the lost social usage of the shopping malls.

Solution:
Mayr’s contention was that speciation takes place due to factors like geographical isolation. However the 1969 paper challenges this notion and places the emphasis on natural selection.

Solution:
The passage shows explicitly how the host city is at a disadvantage for conducting the Olympic Games. Whatever financial benefit the host city receives takes place only in the long run. The benefits however are not guaranteed and depend on numerous factors.

Solution:
Option 1 is the correct answer as the entire passage revolves around the idea how cities help in flourishing of creativity. The author describes the importance of social interaction and how the lack of it, spoils creativity. Option 2 is ruled out because the author explicitly states that “creativity itself is not in danger”. Option 3 is incorrect since it is discussed only in the last 2 paragraphs. Option 4 is too generic. It can’t be the main idea.

Solution:
Option 3 is the correct answer as the entire passage presents the effects of climate change on Subnivium. This rules out options 1 and 2 that keep Subnivium (and not the effects of climate change on it) as the point of focus. Option 4 is used as an example only in the first paragraph of the passage and therefore it can’t be the purpose of the passage.

Solution:
Option 3 is the correct answer as it is explicitly stated in paragraph 2 of the passage. Other options are beyond the scope of the passage.

Solution:
Option 1 is the correct answer as the author provides examples of the US and Russia to tell that these countries have taken up the use of typewriter. The author also supports their using of typewriters by providing us with positive aspects of the typewriters. Option 2 is beyond the scope of the passage. Option 3 is incorrect since clearly it is not the main aim of the passage. There is no hint to make that claim. Option 4 is incorrect since this difference has nowhere been made.

Solution:
The main aim of the author appears to dismiss the popular believe that Vikings were pillagers. The passage revolves around the idea that Vikings started out as traders. This makes option 3 correct. Option 1 is ruled out because the example of combs has been used only as an illustration. Option 4 is incorrect because the passage discusses a period before Vikings turned into pillagers. Option 2 is beyond the scope of the passage.

Solution:
In the passage, the author doesn’t compare Darwin and Mendel. He doesn’t blame one or praise the other. The author also doesn’t state that either Darwin or Mendel is better. So, option 2 is the best choice.

Solution:
In the passage, the author focuses on PTSD in elephants. Option 1 is too generic. Option 4 is too narrow and misleading. The focus of the passage is not on conflict. Option 2 is too narrow. It only talks about one part of the first paragraph. Option 3 best captures the essence of the passage.

Solution:
Options 1,3 and 4 talk about the specific issues or are the examples of a common issue which is clearly mentioned in Option (2), the right answer.

Solution:
The author introduces the matter, mentions a few benefits about the cause and then projects the negative outcome of evaluating performance measurement. The right answer is option (4).

Solution:
The correct answer can be inferred from the 2nd paragraph where author talks in general about the professionals. Thus, the right answer is option (3).

Solution:
2nd paragraph, 4-5 lines, it can be inferred from the passage that the author has provided evidence that Saturn’s rings and moons are recent creations. In addition to this, author has talked in depth about the rings and moons creation. The right answer is option (3).

Solution:
3rd and 4th paragraph, proves option (4) to be the right answer.

Solution:
The passage says that renewable energy produced at the household or neighbourhood level is unlikely to generate high returns for investors but it does not say that renewable energy produced at this level is more efficient than mass-produced forms of energy. Therefore, option 1 is incorrect. Option 2 is correct because the passage dwells on both the advantages and disadvantages of renewable energy. Refer to “Both the direct and indirect impacts of renewable energy must be examined to ensure that a climate-smart future does not intensify social and environmental harm.” Option 3 contradicts what is said in the passage about democratic distribution of renewable energy. Refer to “For some climate activists, the promise of renewables rests on their ability not only to reduce emissions but also to provide distributed, democratized access to energy . . . But Burke and Stephens . . . caution that “renewable energy systems offer a possibility but not a certainty for more democratic energy futures.”” Option 4 is incorrect because the passage says the passage says that renewable technology is a hot business. It is also said that if renewable energy is produced and distributed at small scale it might not generate high returns on investment.

Solution:
Michelangelo and Leonardo are given as examples. So, they cannot be included as main arguments of the passage. Thus, option 1 can be eliminated. Similarly, option 3 can also be eliminated because ‘epiphenomena’ is not one of the main arguments of the given passage. Option 4 contains the phrase ‘lay audience’ which is also not one of the main points of the passage. Thus, option 2 is the correct choice. The keywords given in option 2 talk about the study of visual culture as mentioned in 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th paragraphs respectively.

Solution:
The concluding paragraph of the passage highlights the larger impact and the need for a collective response to a crisis that is the result of an individualistic ideology. Thus, 2 is correct. The other options distort the information given in the paragraph.

Solution:
The entire passage is about uniting people and a discourse on objective truth. Therefore, option (2) comprehensively covers the entire passage. The other options are narrow in scope and so, cannot be the answer. Option (3) is too generic. (3) is incorrect because the author is not talking about the choice between truth and power.

Solution:
The passage deals with the word “unconscious” and how over time since it was introduced in the late 19th century has changed the way we have perceived not only the psychological aspect but language in whole and how it has changed everyday understanding of everyday traditions and ideas. Be it the psychical research or the study of the human mind. The passage encompasses all of these changes. This makes 4, the correct choice.
Incorrect options:
All the other options, 1,2 and 3 denote parts of the given passage. They are not factually incorrect but can be rendered incomplete.

Solution:
The passage begins with an example from X-Men, how nano robots are used in the comics. Following that introduction, the entire passage deals how this nano robotic technology is playing an important role in robotic industry and research. Hence 1 is the correct option.
Incorrect Option:
2 is not factually incorrect. Passage does mention that but it does not capture the entire idea of the passage.
3 is incorrect because author does not state anything about field of robotics to feature more in X-Men.
4 is incorrect because again it captures a part of the passage, does not summarise the passage in whole.

Solution:
The entire 1st paragraph showcase the rise of nano-sentinels in X-Men comics, which along with the sentinels but unlike them, invade our bodies at the microscopic level. So, the X-Men has to now fight both categories of villains. 3 captures the correct essence of the paragraph.
Incorrect options:
1 is incorrect because sentinels are not X-Men.
2 is incorrect because 3 is the correct answer.
4 is factually incorrect.

Solution:
The passage is primarily concerned with the manner in which our fears and beliefs about certain unexplained phenomenon – the Undead – have evolved over a period of time and how the changing theories regarding the Undead reflect this.

Solution:
Option 1 is too narrow in its scope.
Option 2 incorporates culture in the main idea which is unfounded in the passage.
Option 4 captures solely the language aspect of institutions. Thus, it is narrow in its scope.
Option 3 correctly states the main idea of the passage.

Solution:
For questions 9 to 12:

Passage Explanation (Paragraph-wise):
Paragraph 1: Introduces the “Second Hand September” campaign led by Oxfam, aimed at encouraging shopping at local organizations and charities as alternatives to fast fashion brands. It highlights the environmental impact of the fashion industry, including energy usage and waste contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.
Paragraph 2: Mentions the trend of second-hand shopping as a response to the environmental problems caused by fast fashion. It describes the rapid expansion of retailers selling consigned clothing and the potential environmental benefits of buying used items.
Paragraph 3: Addresses a potential issue with secondhand shopping, noting that older clothes might shed more microfibres, contributing to pollution. The paragraph points out the complexity of the issue, suggesting that buying high-quality items that last longer could be a solution.
Paragraph 4: Discusses the challenges faced by fashion resale marketplaces like ThredUP in the UK, particularly due to attitudes towards second-hand luxury goods and the preferences of luxury brands to maintain their brand image.

Question Explanation: Asks which scenario would undermine the central idea of the passage about the impact of fast fashion and the role of second-hand shopping.

Correct Answer: Second-hand stores selling only high quality clothes:

If the second hand stores only sold high quality then the suggestion of the author of buying high quality second hand clothing to stop excess microfibre pollution from cheap quality second hand clothing would be weakened.

Incorrect Answers:
1. Clothes were not thrown and burnt in landfills: has nothing to do with the suggestion of buying high quality second hand clothing.
3. Primark and Boohoo recycling clothes: Would support the passage’s advocacy for sustainable practices.
4. Customers buying all clothes online: Doesn’t directly address the central idea of reducing clothing waste through second-hand shopping.

Solution:
Passage Explanation:
Para 1: “The Nutmeg’s Curse” by Amitav Ghosh challenges the commonly accepted timeline of the climate crisis, suggesting it began not with the Industrial Age in the 18th century, but three centuries earlier with European colonialism in the 15th century.

Para 2: Ghosh traces the origins of the climate crisis to the 15th century, starting with a 1621 massacre by the Dutch in the Banda Islands, Indonesia, to monopolize nutmeg cultivation. He argues that European colonialists not only decimated indigenous populations but also disregarded indigenous environmental knowledge, treating nature as a resource to exploit.

Para 3: Ghosh suggests that current environmental disasters—heatwaves, storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires—could be seen as Earth’s response to human terraforming activities. He challenges the view of Earth as an inert object, citing non-European perspectives on human-Earth relationships.

Para 4: The book highlights that opposition to the European colonialist worldview has always existed. However, this perspective, along with supporting economic, political, and scientific views, has dominated global discourse, overshadowing alternative viewpoints.

Para 5: Ghosh points out that alternative perspectives, like the Latin American view of Earth as Pachamama, exist but are often marginalized in global discussions, including climate negotiations. He discusses the vested interests in the oil economy and how they overpower and silence these alternative voices.

Question Explanation: Question 12 seeks to determine the primary purpose of discussing the colonization of the Banda islands in Ghosh’s book. It requires understanding the central theme or message that this historical example serves in the context of the book.
Correct Answer:
3. To illustrate how colonialism represented and perpetuated the mindset that has led to climate change.
The passage suggests that Ghosh uses the colonization of the Banda islands to demonstrate how colonialism established and perpetuated a worldview that views nature as a resource to be exploited. This mindset, according to Ghosh, has significantly contributed to the current climate crisis. The example of the Banda islands serves to highlight the historical roots of this exploitative attitude towards nature.
Incorrect Answers:
1. Role of crop cultivation in contributing to climate change: While the passage mentions nutmeg cultivation, it does not suggest that this is the primary purpose of the discussion.
2. Systemic violence against the colonized: Although the passage mentions genocide by the Dutch, it is used more to illustrate the broader mindset of exploitation, not just the violence.
4. First instance of climate change processes: The passage does not claim that the colonization of the Banda islands marks the historical beginning of climate change processes, but rather uses it to illustrate the colonial mindset that contributes to climate change.

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