CAT 2019 Question Paper | Verbal Slot 2

CAT Questions

Generally, students preparing for CAT exam have apprehension with the VARC due to its unpredictability over the years. However, with continuous practice and dedication, one can easily score big. A good reading habit and solving CAT previous year paper would take you places. You should consider Bharath’s Curated Reading List for daily reading. It consists of hand-picked reading articles that bolster your online preparation for CAT. Start your practice with this beautiful RC question from CAT 2019 question paper.

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The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1 million people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.

Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” . . .

In his 1985 article, Calthorpe made a statement that still jars with most people: “The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.” “Green Manhattan” was the inflammatory title of a 2004 New Yorker article by David Owen. “By the most significant measures,” he wrote, “New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world . . . The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. . . . Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful.” He went on to note that this very compactness forces people to live in the world’s most energy-efficient apartment buildings. . . .

Urban density allows half of humanity to live on 2.8 per cent of the land. . . . Consider just the infrastructure efficiencies. According to a 2004 UN report: “The concentration of population and enterprises in urban areas greatly reduces the unit cost of piped water, sewers, drains, roads, electricity, garbage collection, transport, health care, and schools.” . . .

[T]he nationally subsidised city of Manaus in northern Brazil “answers the question” of how to stop deforestation: give people decent jobs. Then they can afford houses, and gain security. One hundred thousand people who would otherwise be deforesting the jungle around Manaus are now prospering in town making such things as mobile phones and televisions. . . .

Of course, fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, disease and injustice as much as business, innovation, education and entertainment. . . . But if they are overall a net good for those who move there, it is because cities offer more than just jobs. They are transformative: in the slums, as well as the office towers and leafy suburbs, the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan . . .

Question 11 : Which one of the following statements would undermine the author’s stand regarding the greenness of cities?

1. The compactness of big cities in the West increases the incidence of violent crime.
2. Sorting through rubbish contributes to the rapid spread of diseases in the slums.
3. The high density of cities leads to an increase in carbon dioxide and global warming.
4. Over the last decade the cost of utilities has been increasing for city dwellers.

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Video Explanation

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Explanatory Answer

According to the author, high urban density makes cities green. The argument that high density of cities results in an increase in carbon dioxide and global warming goes against this.

Options 1 and 2 are unrelated to the idea of greenness of big cities.

According to the author, high urban density forces ‘minimum energy and material use’, thereby making cities green. Option 4 only talks of increasing cost of utilities for city dwellers, ignoring the point about recycling and reduced opportunities to be wasteful in big cities mentioned in the passage. So, it does not really help undermine the author’s stand.

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The question is "Which one of the following statements would undermine the author’s stand regarding the greenness of cities?"

Hence, the answer is The high density of cities leads to an increase in carbon dioxide and global warming.

Choice C is the correct answer.