CAT 2025 Question Paper | VARC Slot 2

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Question 12 : 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- The region’s Western customers found it hard to believe that Dhaka muslin could possibly have been made by human hands – there were rumour that it was woven by mermaids, fairies and even ghosts.

Once upon the silty banks of the Meghna River, a miracle was spun — a fabric so light it was called “baft-hawa”, or woven air. This was Dhaka Muslin — the world’s most coveted cloth. ____(1)____. Handspun from a rare cotton called Phuti Karpas, found nowhere else on Earth, and woven with a 16-step sacred ritual — beginning with cleaning the cotton using the teeth of a river catfish! ____(2)____. Every spring, the maple-like leaves pushed up through the grey, silty soil to produce a single daffodil-yellow flower twice a year, which gave way to a snowy floret of cotton fibres. ____(3)____. Spun at dawn on boats by sharp-eyed young women, its threads were so fine the elderly could barely see them. Motifs of wildflowers, river breeze, and soul were etched into each piece — some so light, a 91-metre bolt could pass through a ring, or a 60' length fit inside a snuffbox. It draped Greek goddesses, Roman nobles, Mughal emperors, and European aristocrats. Marie Antoinette, Empress Joséphine — even Jane Austen adored its floating grace. ____(4)____.

Explanatory Answer

The missing sentence says "the region's Western customers" found it hard to believe that Dhaka muslin was made by human hands. This line, in praise of the fabric, is more likely to be in the first few lines of the paragraph than at the end. Consider blank 1. The lines before it talk about where Dhaka muslin was spun and call it 'the world’s most coveted cloth'. If the missing sentence is laced in blank 1, we have a reference to the region where the cloth was spun in the lines before and also an explanation for why it was the world's most coveted cloth. So, blank 1 is a very good choice to insert the sentence. Blanks 2 and 3 are placed between sentences that explain how the cloth is spun. Placing the missing sentence here would interrupt the flow of ideas. While the line before blank 4 seems to mention some Western customers, the missing sentence does not fit in well here as it is more of an introduction to the cloth than a conclusion about it.

The answer is 'Option 1'

Choice 3 is the correct answer.

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