CAT 2025 Question Paper | VARC Slot 2

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Question 1 : The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.

Sentence: While taste is related to judgment, with thinkers at the time often writing, for example, about “judgments of taste” or using the two terms interchangeably, taste retains a vital link to pleasure, embodiment, and personal specificity that is too often elided in post-Kantian ideas about judgment—a link that Arendt herself was working to restore.

Paragraph: ____(1) ____. Denneny focused on taste rather than judgment in order to highlight what he believed was a crucial but neglected historical change. ____(2) ____. Over the course of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, across Western Europe, the word taste took on a new extension of meaning, no longer referring specifically to gustatory sensation and the delights of the palate but becoming, for a time, one of the central categories for aesthetic—and ethical—thinking. ____(3) ____. Tracing the history of taste in Spanish, French, and British aesthetic theory, as Denneny did, also provides a means to recover the compelling and relevant writing of a set of thinkers who have been largely neglected by professional philosophy. ____(4) ____.

Explanatory Answer

The missing sentence says that while taste is related to judgment, the fact that it also retains a vital link to pleasure, embodiment, and personal specificity is ignored in post-Kantian ideas about judgment.
Blank 1 is not a good choice to place this sentence as the sentence that follows it is not about taste being linked to pleasure and personal preference. The line says that Denneny focused on taste rather than judgment, in order to highlight what he believed was "a crucial but neglected historical change". The line that follows it explains what this change was: in the 17th-18th seventeenth century, across Western Europe, the word taste no longer referred specifically to gustatory sensation but became linked to aesthetic—and ethical—thinking. Placing the missing sentence in blank 2 would interrupt the flow of ideas here. So, blank 2 is also ruled out. Now, the missing sentence is about taste being linked to aesthetics. This is the idea in the sentence just before blank 3. The missing sentence also says Arendt was working to restore the link between taste, pleasure and personal specificity, a link that was largely ignored by post-Kantian thinkers. The sentence that follows blank 3 also talks of writing of a set of thinkers neglected by professional philosophy. Both sentences before and after blank 3 relate to the ideas in the missing sentence, so this is an apt choice to plug in the sentence. Blank 4 is easily ruled out as the paragraph moves on in terms of ideas. The missing sentence does not fit in well here. So, blank 3 is the correct choice.

The answer is 'Option 3'

Choice 1 is the correct answer.

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