CAT 2020 VARC section was a true nightmare. It was the most taxing section of the three. With some of its questions requiring critical reasoning, demanded even the avid readers to read and reread the passages before landing on an answer. We've tried our best to present these actual questions from CAT 2020 VARC section in their least intimidating from (at least in the font), with detailed solutions in a student friendly format to test yourself and understand the importance of reading for VARC section of the CAT exam. For a curated reading list head out here: Bharath's Reading List. If you are planning to take CAT 2020 paper as a full fledged mock, it would help if you go back to : CAT Question Bank and solve questions that are not from actual CAT Question papers.
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer
to each question.
Mode of transportation affects the travel experience and thus can
produce new types of travel writing and perhaps even new “identities.” Modes of
transportation determine the types and duration of social encounters; affect the
organization and passage of space and time; . . . and also affect perception and
knowledge—how and what the traveler comes to know and write about. The completion of the
first U.S. transcontinental highway during the 1920s . . . for example, inaugurated a new
genre of travel literature about the United States—the automotive or road narrative. Such
narratives highlight the experiences of mostly male protagonists “discovering themselves” on
their journeys, emphasizing the independence of road travel and the value of rural folk
traditions.
Travel writing’s relationship to empire building— as a type of
“colonialist discourse”—has drawn the most attention from academicians. Close connections
have been observed between European (and American) political, economic, and administrative
goals for the colonies and their manifestations in the cultural practice of writing travel
books. Travel writers’ descriptions of foreign places have been analyzed as attempts to
validate, promote, or challenge the ideologies and practices of colonial or imperial
domination and expansion. Mary Louise Pratt’s study of the genres and conventions of 18th-
and 19th-century exploration narratives about South America and Africa (e.g., the “monarch
of all I survey” trope) offered ways of thinking about travel writing as embedded within
relations of power between metropole and periphery, as did Edward Said’s theories of
representation and cultural imperialism. Particularly Said’s book, Orientalism,
helped scholars understand ways in which representations of people in travel texts were
intimately bound up with notions of self, in this case, that the Occident defined itself
through essentialist, ethnocentric, and racist representations of the Orient. Said’s work
became a model for demonstrating cultural forms of imperialism in travel texts, showing how
the political, economic, or administrative fact of dominance relies on legitimating
discourses such as those articulated through travel writing. . . .
Feminist
geographers’ studies of travel writing challenge the masculinist history of geography by
questioning who and what are relevant subjects of geographic study and, indeed, what counts
as geographic knowledge itself. Such questions are worked through ideological constructs
that posit men as explorers and women as travelers—or, conversely, men as travelers and
women as tied to the home. Studies of Victorian women who were professional travel writers,
tourists, wives of colonial administrators, and other (mostly) elite women who wrote
narratives about their experiences abroad during the 19th century have been particularly
revealing. From a “liberal” feminist perspective, travel presented one means toward female
liberation for middle- and upper-class Victorian women. Many studies from the 1970s onward
demonstrated the ways in which women’s gendered identities were negotiated differently “at
home” than they were “away,” thereby showing women’s self-development through travel. The
more recent poststructural turn in studies of Victorian travel writing has focused attention
on women’s diverse and fragmented identities as they narrated their travel experiences,
emphasizing women’s sense of themselves as women in new locations, but only as they worked
through their ties to nation, class, whiteness, and colonial and imperial power structures.
From the passage, we can infer that feminist scholars’ understanding of the experiences of Victorian women travellers is influenced by all of the following EXCEPT scholars':
From the passage, we can infer that travel writing is most similar to:
From the passage, it can be inferred that scholars argue that Victorian women experienced self-development through their travels because:
American travel literature of the 1920s:
According to the passage, Said’s book, “Orientalism”:
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer
to each question.
Although one of the most contested concepts in political
philosophy, human nature is something on which most people seem to agree. By and large,
according to Rutger Bregman in his new book Humankind, we have a rather pessimistic view –
not of ourselves exactly, but of everyone else. We see other people as selfish,
untrustworthy and dangerous and therefore we behave towards them with defensiveness and
suspicion. This was how the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes conceived our natural
state to be, believing that all that stood between us and violent anarchy was a strong state
and firm leadership.
But in following Hobbes, argues Bregman, we ensure that the
negative view we have of human nature is reflected back at us. He instead puts his faith in
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century French thinker, who famously declared that man was
born free and it was civilisation – with its coercive powers, social classes and restrictive
laws – that put him in chains.
Hobbes and Rousseau are seen as the two poles of the
human nature argument and it’s no surprise that Bregman strongly sides with the Frenchman.
He takes Rousseau’s intuition and paints a picture of a prelapsarian idyll in which, for the
better part of 300,000 years, Homo sapiens lived a fulfilling life in harmony with nature .
. . Then we discovered agriculture and for the next 10,000 years it was all property, war,
greed and injustice. . . .
It was abandoning our nomadic lifestyle and then
domesticating animals, says Bregman, that brought about infectious diseases such as measles,
smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, malaria, cholera and plague. This may be true, but what
Bregman never really seems to get to grips with is that pathogens were not the only things
that grew with agriculture – so did the number of humans. It’s one thing to maintain
friendly relations and a property-less mode of living when you’re 30 or 40 hunter-gatherers
following the food. But life becomes a great deal more complex and knowledge far more
extensive when there are settlements of many thousands.
“Civilisation has become
synonymous with peace and progress and wilderness with war and decline,” writes Bregman. “In
reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.” Whereas traditional
history depicts the collapse of civilisations as “dark ages” in which everything gets worse,
modern scholars, he claims, see them more as a reprieve, in which the enslaved gain their
freedom and culture flourishes. Like much else in this book, the truth is probably somewhere
between the two stated positions.
In any case, the fear of civilisational collapse,
Bregman believes, is unfounded. It’s the result of what the Dutch biologist Frans de Waal
calls “veneer theory” – the idea that just below the surface, our bestial nature is waiting
to break out. . . . There’s a great deal of reassuring human decency to be taken from this
bold and thought-provoking book and a wealth of evidence in support of the contention that
the sense of who we are as a species has been deleteriously distorted. But it seems equally
misleading to offer the false choice of Rousseau and Hobbes when, clearly, humanity
encompasses both.
The author has differing views from Bregman regarding:
According to the passage, the “collapse of civilisations” is viewed by Bregman as:
None of the following views is expressed in the passage EXCEPT that:
According to the author, the main reason why Bregman contrasts life in pre-agricultural societies with agricultural societies is to:
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer
to each question.
[There is] a curious new reality: Human contact is becoming a
luxury good. As more screens appear in the lives of the poor, screens are disappearing from
the lives of the rich. The richer you are, the more you spend to be off-screen. . . .
The joy — at least at first — of the internet revolution was its democratic nature.
Facebook is the same Facebook whether you are rich or poor. Gmail is the same Gmail. And
it’s all free. There is something mass market and unappealing about that. And as studies
show that time on these advertisement-support platforms is unhealthy, it all starts to seem
déclassé, like drinking soda or smoking cigarettes, which wealthy people do less than poor
people. The wealthy can afford to opt out of having their data and their attention sold as
a product. The poor and middle class don’t have the same kind of resources to make that
happen.
Screen exposure starts young. And children who spent more than two hours a
day looking at a screen got lower scores on thinking and language tests, according to early
results of a landmark study on brain development of more than 11,000 children that the
National Institutes of Health is supporting. Most disturbingly, the study is finding that
the brains of children who spend a lot of time on screens are different. For some kids,
there is premature thinning of their cerebral cortex. In adults, one study found an
association between screen time and depression. . . .
Tech companies worked hard to
get public schools to buy into programs that required schools to have one laptop per
student, arguing that it would better prepare children for their screen-based future. But
this idea isn’t how the people who actually build the screen-based future raise their own
children. In Silicon Valley, time on screens is increasingly seen as unhealthy. Here, the
popular elementary school is the local Waldorf School, which promises a back-to-nature,
nearly screen-free education. So as wealthy kids are growing up with less screen time, poor
kids are growing up with more. How comfortable someone is with human engagement could become
a new class marker.
Human contact is, of course, not exactly like organic food . .
. . But with screen time, there has been a concerted effort on the part of Silicon Valley
behemoths to confuse the public. The poor and the middle class are told that screens are
good and important for them and their children. There are fleets of psychologists and
neuroscientists on staff at big tech companies working to hook eyes and minds to the screen
as fast as possible and for as long as possible. And so human contact is rare. . . .
There is a small movement to pass a “right to disconnect” bill, which would allow
workers to turn their phones off, but for now a worker can be punished for going offline and
not being available. There is also the reality that in our culture of increasing isolation,
in which so many of the traditional gathering places and social structures have disappeared,
screens are filling a crucial void.
Which of the following statements about the negative effects of screen time is the author least likely to endorse?
The statement “The richer you are, the more you spend to be off-screen” is supported by which other line from the passage?
The author is least likely to agree with the view that the increase in screen-time is fuelled by the fact that:
The author claims that Silicon Valley tech companies have tried to “confuse the public” by:
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, if false, could be seen as supporting the author’s claims?
Which one of the following, if true, would be an accurate inference from the first sentence of the passage?
Which one of the following best captures the main argument of the last paragraph of the passage?
All of the following, if true, could be seen as supporting the arguments in the passage, EXCEPT:
According to the passage, the author is likely to be supportive of which one of the following programmes?
The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that
best captures the essence of the passage.
Brown et al. (2001) suggest that
‘metabolic theory may provide a conceptual foundation for much of ecology just as
genetic theory provides a foundation for much of evolutionary biology’. One of the
successes of genetic theory is the diversity of theoretical approaches and models that
have been developed and applied. A Web of Science (v. 5.9. Thomson Reuters) search on
genetic* + theor* + evol* identifies more than 12000 publications between 2005 and 2012.
Considering only the 10 most-cited papers within this 12000 publication set, genetic
theory can be seen to focus on genome dynamics, phylogenetic inference, game theory and
the regulation of gene expression. There is no one fundamental genetic equation, but
rather a wide array of genetic models, ranging from simple to complex, with differing
inputs and outputs, and divergent areas of application, loosely connected to each other
through the shared conceptual foundation of heritable variation.
The four sentences (labelled A, B, C, D) below, when properly sequenced would yield a
coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and
key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer:
A. It advocated a
conservative approach to antitrust enforcement that espouses faith in efficient markets
and voiced suspicion regarding the merits of judicial intervention to correct
anticompetitive practices.
B. Many industries have consistently gained market share,
the lion’s share - without any official concern; the most successful technology
companies have grown into veritable titans, on the premise that they advance ‘public
interest’.
C. That the new anticompetitive risks posed by tech giants like Google,
Facebook, and Amazon, necessitate new legal solutions could be attributed to the dearth
of enforcement actions against monopolies and the few cases challenging mergers in the
USA.
D. The criterion of ‘consumer welfare standard’ and the principle that
antitrust law should serve consumer interests and that it should protect competition
rather than individual competitors was an antitrust law introduced by, and named after,
the 'Chicago school'.
The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that
best captures the essence of the passage.
Aesthetic political representation
urges us to realize that ‘the representative has autonomy with regard to the people
represented’ but autonomy then is not an excuse to abandon one’s responsibility.
Aesthetic autonomy requires cultivation of ‘disinterestedness’ on the part of actors
which is not indifference. To have disinterestedness, that is, to have comportment
towards the beautiful that is devoid of all ulterior references to use – requires a kind
of aesthetic commitment; it is the liberation of ourselves for the release of what has
proper worth only in itself.
The four sentences (labelled A, B, C, D) below, when properly sequenced would yield a
coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and
key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer:
A. Each one personified
a different aspect of good fortune.
B. The others were versions of popular Buddhist
gods, Hindu gods and Daoist gods.
C. Seven popular Japanese deities, the Shichi
Fukujin, were considered to bring good luck and happiness.
D. Although they were
included in the Shinto pantheon, only two of them, Daikoku and Ebisu, were indigenous
Japanese gods.
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put
together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of
the sentence as your answer:
A. The logic of displaying one’s inner qualities
through outward appearance was based on a distinction between being a woman and being
feminine.
B. 'Appearance' became a signifier of conduct - to look was to be and
conformity to the feminine ideal was measured by how well women could use the tools of
the fashion and beauty industries.
C. The makeover-centric media sets out subtly and
not-so-subtly, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways to be a woman, layering these over inequalities of
race and class.
D. The denigration of working-class women and women of colour often
centres on their perceived failure to embody feminine beauty.
E. ‘Woman’ was
considered a biological category, but femininity was a ‘process’ by which women became
specific kinds of women.
The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that
best captures the essence of the passage.
The dominant hypotheses in modern
science believe that language evolved to allow humans to exchange factual information
about the physical world. But an alternative view is that language evolved, in modern
humans at least, to facilitate social bonding. It increased our ancestors’ chances of
survival by enabling them to hunt more successfully or to cooperate more extensively.
Language meant that things could be explained and that plans and past experiences could
be shared efficiently.
The four sentences (labelled A, B, C, D) below, when properly sequenced would yield a
coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and
key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer:
A. Complex computational
elements of the CNS are organized according to a “nested” hierarchic criterion; the
organization is not permanent and can change dynamically from moment to moment as they
carry out a computational task.
B. Echolocation in bats exemplifies adaptation
produced by natural selection; a function not produced by natural selection for its
current use is exaptation -- feathers might have originally arisen in the context of
selection for insulation.
C. From a structural standpoint, consistent with
exaptation, the living organism is organized as a complex of “Russian Matryoshka Dolls”
-- smaller structures are contained within larger ones in multiple layers.
D. The
exaptation concept, and the Russian-doll organization concept of living beings deduced
from studies on evolution of the various apparatuses in mammals, can be applied for the
most complex human organ: the central nervous system (CNS).
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put
together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of
the sentence as your answer:
A. Machine learning models are prone to learning
human-like biases from the training data that feeds these algorithms.
B. Hate speech
detection is part of the on-going effort against oppressive and abusive language on
social media.
C. The current automatic detection models miss out on something vital:
context.
D. It uses complex algorithms to flag racist or violent speech faster and
better than human beings alone.
E. For instance, algorithms struggle to determine if
group identifiers like "gay" or "black" are used in offensive or prejudiced ways because
they're trained on imbalanced datasets with unusually high rates of hate speech.
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