CAT 2016 Question Paper

CAT 2016 was conducted on 4th December by IIM -Bangalore.
The paper had three sections:

  • Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension- 34 questions
  • Data Interpretation and Logical reasoning- 32 questions
  • Quantitative Ability- 34 questions

With CAT 2017 few days away, here is a peek into memory based CAT 2016 questions to help candidates understand the type and level of difficulty of the questions asked in CAT.

CAT 2016 Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension Section Question

Direction for questions 1 and 2: Read the following passage and answer the questions.

Valuing housework is not only about so-called housewives. It equally is about single parents and two-earner couples who need child-care during their paying jobs and lack time for housework after they get home. It is about domestic workers who do get paid, yet face inadequate wages, protections and respect. Devaluing housework for one's own family also means discounting its importance when done by others. These points suggest a broader agenda than "wages for housework," one that acknowledges and crosses differences in family composition, race and class.

Many problems flow from how the government measures economic well-being. In short, it privileges cash. If someone earns $15,000 and spends it on child care, the government sees income earned to help support the family. But if she cares for her kids herself, this economic activity disappears: no income, no work, no spending.

This economic invisibility has profound consequences. Unlike the low-wage worker, the "housewife" gets no credit for contributing to the household economy. That means no protection against future disability, unemployment or retirement via Social Security or related social insurance programs. Her labor also gets ignored by tax credits and other policies that support "working families" who struggle to make ends meet. Such problems can be addressed without providing a direct wage for housework.

Housework's economic invisibility also harms those who cannot do it all themselves. Government poverty measurement still assumes that families have an unpaid adult staying home to do the housework. "Poverty" just means not having enough cash from a paid breadwinner to cover other needs. When that archaic assumption fails, there is no accounting for the financial and time burdens on employed adults who need to pay for housework or do it on the "second shift," not just buy food and pay rent. The result is inadequate child care assistance and work-family conflict.

Finally, taking unpaid housework for granted means undervaluing those who do this essential work for pay. Historically, domestic workers have been excluded from many labor protections. Despite some progress, the Supreme Court recently gave that ignoble tradition a constitutional imprimatur by disparaging home care workers as "quasi," not "full-fledged," employees and undermining their collective bargaining rights. Even when public policies do support necessary domestic labor, they often pay absurdly low rates and constantly seek to shift work onto unpaid family members. This comes full circle when close kin are barred from getting paid for what would earn a stranger wages.

Q1. According to the passage the main definition of poverty includes:

1. the government's reluctance to include a certain workforce in the poverty estimation.
2. the inability of a wage earner to put food on the table of his/her family.
3. the lack of protection given to wage earners.
4. the government's assumption of an unpaid adult to take care of the domestic chores.

Solution: 2

Refer to the lines "Housework's economic invisibility also harms those who cannot do it all themselves. Government poverty measurement still assumes that families have an unpaid adult staying home to do the housework. "Poverty" just means not having enough cash from a paid breadwinner to cover other needs."

Q2. The central theme of the passage is:

1. the exploitation of the unsecured wage earners by the many social and economic entities.
2. the lack of concern shown by the government in estimating a family's ability to put food on the table.
3. the assumption of the government that the household chores take care of themselves without any wage being paid to anyone.
4. how unpaid domestic workers' treatment by the government affects the economy

Solution: 4

Direction for question 3: Read the paragraph and choose the option that best captures its essence.

One myth that won't seem to go away is that DTP vaccine causes sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). This belief came about because a moderate proportion of children who die of SIDS have recently been vaccinated with DTP; on the surface, this seems to point toward a causal connection. This logic is faulty however; you might as well say that eating bread causes car crashes, since most drivers who crash their cars could probably be shown to have eaten bread within the past 24 hours. If you consider that most SIDS deaths occur during the age range when three shots of DTP are given, you would expect DTP shots to precede a fair number of SIDS deaths simply by chance. In fact, when a number of well-controlled studies were conducted during the 1980s, the investigators found, nearly unanimously, that the number of SIDS deaths temporally associated with DTP vaccination was within the range expected to occur by chance. In other words, the SIDS deaths would have occurred even if no vaccinations had been given.

1. Blaming DTP vaccine for SIDS is a logical fallacy; it is also analogous to blaming eating bread for car crashes.
2. A number of studies have proven that DTP vaccines are not responsible for SIDS alone.
3. The myth that DTP vaccine causes SIDS is deeply entrenched in the minds of people and even proven research works are unable to eradicate this myth.
4. Studies conducted during the 1980s concluded that blaming DTP vaccines for SIDS is logically fallacious; yet, the myth seems to persist.

Solution: 4

Explanation:

The paragraph talks about the myth that DTP vaccine causes SIDS. It also cites the research works done in the 1980s. 1 is partially correct. 2 is a misleading option as it seems to suggest that DTP vaccines are responsible for many other things too. 3 is wrong because the phrase "deeply entrenched in the minds of people" is an extreme conclusion which is not mentioned in the paragraph. 4 is the best answer as it talks about the two main points discussed in the paragraph.

Directions for question 4: The following paragraph has five sentences. One of these doesn't belong to the paragraph. Type in the option number of the odd sentence.

1. What Burke feared the East India Company would do to England in 1772 actually happened to Iceland in 2008-11, when the systemic collapse of all three of the country's major privately owned commercial banks brought the country to the brink of complete bankruptcy.
2. A powerful corporation can still overwhelm or subvert a state every bit as effectively as the East India Company did in Bengal in 1765.
3. East India company is one of the greatest MNCs and is the model for modern companies.
4. Corporate influence, with its fatal mix of power, money and unaccountability, is particularly potent and dangerous in frail states where corporations are insufficiently or ineffectually regulated, and where the purchasing power of a large company can outbid or overwhelm an underfunded government.
5. As the international subprime bubble and bank collapses of 2007-2009 have so recently demonstrated, just as corporations can shape the destiny of nations, they can also drag down their economies.

Solution:3

The correct order is 5124. The entire paragraph talks about the negative influence of the East India Company. Sentence 3 deals with a different topic.

Directions for question 5: The following question contains five sentences which need to be arranged in a logical order to create a coherent paragraph. Type in the sequence in the space provided below the paragraph.

1. Seewiesen measured the brain activity of frigatebirds and found that they sleep in flight with either one cerebral hemisphere at a time or both hemispheres simultaneously.
2. When sleeping at the edge of a group, mallards keep one cerebral hemisphere awake and the corresponding eye open and directed away from the other birds, toward a potential threat.
3. For the first time, researchers have discovered that birds can sleep in flight.
4. How frigatebirds are able to perform adaptively on such little sleep remains a mystery.
5. Given the adverse effect sleep loss has on performance, it is commonly assumed that these birds must fulfill their daily need for sleep on the wing.

Solution: 35124

The correct order is 35124.

Direction for question 6 to 9: In a question paper there are 2 parts. Part A has 5 questions of 2 marks each, one can score either 0 or 2. Part B has 4 questions of 10 marks each, one can score either 0 or 10 or 5 for partially correct answer. No two persons can score the same marks.

CAT 2016 Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning section questions

Question 6. Which of the following score is not possible?

(a) 43 (b) 45 (c) 47 (d) 37

Solution: c) 47

Question 7. Ashish and Rani attempted 6 questions each. What can be the minimum possible difference in their scores?

(a) 0 (b) 1 (c) 2 (d) 4

Solution: b) 1

Question 8. Ravi, Vibhor, Vaibhav, Rishabh attempted 7 questions each and no one scored zero (0) in any of these 7 questions. What would be the maximum difference between the total marks scored by Ravi and Vibhor and that of Vaibhav and Rishabh?

(a) 44 (b) 46 (c) 47 (d) 52

Solution: a) 44

Question 9. If some body scored 33 in total then which of the following is not possible:

(a) Attempted 7 (b) Attempted more than 7 (c) Attempted more than 6 (d) Attempted 6 or less

Solution: d) Attempted 6 or less

CAT 2016 Quantitative Ability Section Question

Question 10: If a circular sheet is divided by its 4 chords in various regions, then find the maximum number of regions in which circle can be divided.

Solution: Correct Answer: b

Question 11: Four consecutive prime numbers are arranged in ascending order. The product of the first three numbers is 7429 and that of the last three numbers is 12673. Find the sum of the first and last numbers.

Solution: Correct Answer : c

Let us check the nearest cube root of 7429. Which is 8000. The cube root of 8000 is 20.
On further inspection we find that the first three prime numbers would be 17, 19 and 23 as
17 X 19 X 23 = 7429
Therefore, the last prime number is 29
Sum of first and last prime numbers is 17 + 29 = 46
Therefore, option (c) is the correct answer.

Question 12: A milk man adds 23 litres of freely available water to 92 litres of milk. He sells the mixtures at a price which is 12% less than the price of pure milk. Find the overall profit percentage.

Solution: Correct Answer : c

Question 13: If x + 1, x + b, x + 6 are in Geometric Progression, where x and b are positive integers, then b is

Solution: Correct Answer : b

Question 14: The compound interest earned on a principal amount at 5%, compounded annually, during 3rd year is Rs. 220.5. Find the principal amount (in Rs.).

Solution: Correct Answer : d

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