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CAT Questions | CAT Para Completion

CAT Verbal Ability | CAT Paragraph Completion

The following questions are from the Paragraph Completion Pattern that appear in Verbal Ability for CAT. Paragraph Completion questions often feature in the CAT. You can expect 1~2 questions from Para Completion in CAT Exam. Given a paragraph and 4 options,the question asks which of the options completes the paragraph best. Comprehending the paragraph is key to solving these. Let us look at some examples below. Make sure you go through these CAT Questions from Paragraph Completion to have an idea on how to solve these! If you would like to take these questions as a Quiz, head on here to take these questions in a test format, absolutely free.

CAT Paragraph Completion: What Happens to our Brain as we age

What happens to our brains as we age is of crucial importance not just to science but to public policy. By 2030, for example, 72 million people in the US will be over 65, double the figure in 2000 and their average life expectancy will likely have edged above 20 years. However, this demographic time-bomb would be much less threatening if the elderly were looked upon as intelligent contributors to society rather than as dependants in long-term decline.
1. The idea that we get dumber as we grow older is just a myth, according to brain research that will encourage anyone old enough to know better.
2. It is time we rethink what we mean by the ageing mind before our false assumptions result in decisions and policies that marginalize the old or waste precious public resources to re-mediate problems that do not exist.
3. Many of the assumptions scientists currently make about ‘cognitive decline’ are seriously flawed and, for the most part, formally invalid.
4. Using computer models to simulate young and old brains, Ramscar and his colleagues found they could account for the decline in test scores simply by factoring in experience
Choice B
CAT Paragraph Completion: Threats to Insurance Industry

The better behaviour resulting from smart devices is just one threat to the insurance industry. Conventional risk pools (for home or car insurance, for example) are shrinking as preventable accidents decline, leaving the slow-footed giants of the industry at risk. Business is instead moving to digital-native insurers, many of which are offering low premiums to those willing to collect and share their data. Yet the biggest winners could be tech companies rather than the firms that now dominate the industry. Insurance is increasingly reliant on the use of technology to change behaviour; firms act as helicopter parents to policyholders, warning of impending harm—slow down; reduce your sugar intake; call the plumber—the better to reduce unnecessary payouts.
1. The growing mountain of personal data available to individuals and, crucially, to firms is giving those with the necessary processing power the ability to distinguish between low-risk and high-risk individuals.
2. Cheap sensors and the tsunami of data they generate can improve our lives; blackboxes in cars can tell us how to drive more carefully and wearable devices will nudge us toward healthier lifestyles.
3. Yet this sort of relationship relies on trust, and the Googles and Apples of the world, on which consumers rely day-by-day and hour-by-hour, may be best placed to win this business.
4. The uncertainty that underpins the need for insurance is now shrinking thanks to better insights into individual risks.
Choice C
CAT Paragraph Completion:The Death Penalty

The expenditure of time, money and sparse judicial and prosecutorial resources is often justified by claims of a powerful deterrent message embodied in the ultimate punishment- the death penalty. But studies repeatedly suggest that there is no meaningful deterrent effect associated with the death penalty and further, any deterrent impact is no doubt greatly diluted by the amount of time that inevitably passes between the time of the conduct and the punishment. In 2010, the average time between sentencing and execution in the United States averaged nearly 15 years.
1. A single federal death penalty case in Philadelphia was found to cost upwards of $10 million — eight times higher than the cost of trying a death eligible case where prosecutors seek only life imprisonment.
2. The ethics of the issue aside, it is questionable whether seeking the death penalty is ever worth the time and resources that it takes to sentence someone to death.
3. Apart from delaying justice, the death penalty diverts resources that could be used to help the victims’ families heal.
4. A much more effective deterrent would be a sentence of life imprisonment imposed close in time to the crime.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph Completion: A Poor Monsoon

The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has come out with the dismaying prediction that the southwest monsoon this year will be below normal. If this prognosis holds true, it may mar the prospects of redeeming the rabi crop output losses through bumper harvests in the later kharif season. India's farm sector has certainly acquired a degree of resilience when it comes to the monsoon - as reflected in the positive growth numbers in all the weak monsoon years since 2009. However, monsoon rainfall and its distribution still remain crucial.
1. They impact supplies and prices of most farm commodities, especially coarse cereals, pulses, oilseeds, vegetables, fruit and livestock products, as well as the rural sector demand for consumer goods.
2. A poor monsoon and subsequent food inflation might well throw off the Reserve Bank of India's schedule for rate cuts.
3. Nevertheless, the first stage monsoon forecast of the IMD should normally be taken with a pinch of salt, as the weather agency's accuracy record on this count is none too inspiring.
4. The monsoon’s behavior this year seems to bear out the notion that climate change is affecting the Indian monsoon and altering its rainfall calendar.
Choice A
CAT Paragraph Completion: Better Wage Laws and Union Clout

By calling for exempting unionized businesses from the minimum wage, unions are creating more incentives for employers to favor unionized workers over the non-unionized sort. Such exemptions strengthen their power. This is useful because for all the effort unions throw at raising the minimum wage, laws for better pay have an awkward habit of undermining union clout.
1. High rates of unionization make minimum-wage rules unnecessary as collaborative wage setting achieves the flexibility goals of a low minimum wage and the fairness goals of a high one.
2. Workers who have no real alternative to employment in the unregulated shadows of the labor market are even more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse than workers with the legal right to take low wages.
3. The labor ethos of worker solidarity seems hollow if non-union workers are underpriced by union workers and left unemployed or scrambling for unauthorized work.
4. Once employers are obliged to pay the same minimum wage to both unionized and non-unionized labor, workers often see less reason to pay the dues to join a union.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph Completion: Choice of a Major

The premise that the choice of major amounts to choosing a career path rests on the faulty notion that the major is important for its content, and that the acquisition of that content is valuable to employers. But information is fairly easy to acquire and what is acquired in 2015 will be obsolete by 2020. What employers want are basic but difficult-to-acquire skills. When they ask students about their majors, it is usually not because they want to assess the applicants’ mastery of the content, but rather because they want to know if the students can talk about what they learned. They care about a potential employee’s abilities: writing, researching, quantitative, and analytical skills.
1. As students flock to the two or three majors they see as good investments, professors who teach in those majors are overburdened, and the majors themselves become more formulaic and less individualized.
2. Often it is the art historians and anthropology majors, for example, who, having marshaled the abilities of perspective, breadth, creativity, and analysis, have moved a company or project or vision forward.
3. Furthermore, the link between education and earnings is notoriously fraught, with cause and effect often difficult to disentangle.
4. A vocational approach to education eviscerates precisely the qualities that are most valuable about it: intellectual curiosity, creativity and critical thinking.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph Completion: Oil Prices and Global Growth

Normally, falling oil prices would boost global growth. This time, though, matters are less clear cut. The big economic question is whether lower prices reflect weak demand or have been caused by a surge in the supply of crude. If weak demand is the culprit, that is worrying: it suggests the oil price is a symptom of weakening growth. If the source of weakness is financial (debt overhangs and so on), then cheaper oil may not boost growth all that much: consumers may simply use the gains to pay down their debts. Indeed, in some countries, cheaper oil may even make matters worse by increasing the risk of deflation.
1. An energy-induced drop in prices, though good for consumer purchasing power, risks reinforcing expectations of lower inflation overall; it is part of the threat’s pernicious nature that such expectations easily become self-fulfilling.
2. The International Energy Agency, an oil importers’ club, said it expects global demand to rise by just 700,000 barrels a day (b/d) this year, 200,000 b/d below its forecast only last month.
3. On balance, energy consumers win and energy producers and exporting countries lose with falling oil prices.
4. On the other hand, if plentiful supply is driving prices down, that is potentially better news: cheaper oil should eventually boost spending in the world’s biggest economies.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph Completion: 16th Century Europe

The 16th century in Europe was a great century of change. The humanists and artists of the Renaissance would help characterize the age as one of individualism and self-creativity. Humanists such as Petrarch helped restore the dignity of mankind while men like Machiavelli injected humanism into politics. When all is said and done, the Renaissance helped to secularize European society.
1. The year 1543 can be said to have marked the origin of the Scientific Revolution, with Copernicus publishing De Revolutionibus and setting in motion a wave of scientific advance.
2. The century witnessed the growth of royal power, the appearance of centralized monarchies and the discovery of new lands.
3. The very powerful notion that man makes his own history and destiny took root.
4. In the meantime, urbanization continued unabated as did the growth of universities.
Choice C
CAT Paragraph Completion: Ideological Taming

As democratic nation states reorient themselves to being accountable to global financial markets, non-democratic bodies such as the World Trade Organization, and trade agreements such as General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and Trade in Services Agreement, they will necessarily become less responsive to the aspirations of their own citizens. With overt repression not always the most felicitous or cost-effective policy option, it has become imperative to find ways and means to ideologically tame the economically excluded. This is critical because growing discontent could lead to political instability.
1. This is where behavioral economics in monitoring and ‘nudging’ the behavior of the financial elite comes in.
2. Hence the new focus on the minds and behavior of the poor.
3. Ergo the drive to find market-led solutions to socio-economic problems.
4. Development is about freeing prices and making markets more efficient.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph Completion: The Real Threat of ISIS

The real threat from ISIS is not territorial but ideological. Fighters are flocking to the fledgling caliphate because they are attracted to the notion that violence and bloodshed can create a space of totalitarian homogeneity. It’s not simply the attraction of a particular religious interpretation. ISIS offers a counter-narrative to nationalism and the emptiness of godless globalization. The society that the caliphate has created is multi-ethnic, transnational, and fully conversant in the latest technology.
1. We may well look back at the first year of the Islamic State and wax nostalgic about how comparatively placid it was.
2. And yet it also offers a very specific, historically grounded identity.
3. However, ISIS is not a state. States are part of the world that ISIS rejects.
4. It has a 100-year plan for taking over the world and imposing its own version of Islamic orthodoxy.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph Completion: Giving Offence

The notion of giving offence suggests that certain beliefs are so important or valuable to certain people that they should be put beyond the possibility of being insulted, caricatured or even questioned. The importance of the principle of free speech is precisely that it provides a challenge to the idea that some questions are beyond contention, and thus acts as a challenge to authority. Once we give up on the right to offend in the name of “tolerance” or “respect,” we constrain our ability to challenge those in power, and therefore to challenge injustice.
1. For such diverse societies to function and to be fair, we need to show respect for other peoples, cultures, and viewpoints, and quell offensive voices.
2. The right to subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism is the bedrock of an open, diverse, just society.
3. If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism
4. The more that policymakers give license for people to be offended, the more that people will seize the opportunity to feel offended.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph Completion: The East India Company

The East India Company no longer exists, and it has, thankfully, no exact modern equivalent. Walmart, which is the world’s largest corporation in revenue terms, does not number among its assets a fleet of nuclear submarines; neither Facebook nor Shell possesses regiments of infantry. Yet the East India Company – the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok – was the ultimate model for many of today’s joint-stock corporations. The most powerful among them do not need their own armies: they can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out. The East India Company remains history’s most terrifying warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders become those of the state. Three hundred and fifteen years after its founding, its story has never been more current.
1. The East India Company's story is the first example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a failing corporation, the right to regulate and severely rein it in.
2. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarized East India Company.
3. Answerable only to its shareholders and with no stake in the just governance of the region, or its long-term wellbeing, the East India Company’s rule quickly turned into the straightforward pillage of India, and the rapid transfer westwards of its wealth.
4. If history shows anything, it is that in the intimate dance between the power of the state and that of the corporation, while the latter can be regulated, it will use all the resources in its power to resist.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph Completion: Changing Taste

The only guarantee we have of taste is that it will change. In response to novelty, even as the resistance to the unfamiliar reaches a threshold, fluency begets liking. Consider the case of the Sydney Opera House. A few decades ago, the now widely cherished building was the center of a national scandal. Not only did the building not fit the traditional form of an opera house; it did not fit the traditional form of a building. No one thought an opera house could look like the Sydney Opera House until architect Jørn Utzon, taking his idea from a peeled orange, said it could. Utzon changed the idea of what one could ask for in the building, projecting future tastes no one knew they had.
1. As a dominant sculptural building that can be seen and experienced from all sides, the Sydney Opera House is the focal point of Sydney Harbor and a reflection of its character.
2. In fact, had Utzon had been left to finish his masterpiece, it would have been more beautiful, more functional and less costly than what it turned out to be.
3. Utzon made the building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available technology, and he persevered through extraordinary malicious criticism to a building that changed the image of an entire country.
4. The world changed around the building, in response to it, which is why, in the curious words of one architecture critic, “Utzon’s breathtaking building looks better today than ever.”
Choice D
CAT Paragraph Completion: Behavioral Genetics

Behavioral geneticists have found that the effects of being brought up in a given family are sometimes detectable in childhood, but that they tend to peter out by the time the child has grown up. That is, the reach of the genes appears to get stronger as we age, not weaker. Perhaps our genes affect our environments, which in turn affect ourselves. Young children are at the mercy of parents and have to adapt to a world that is not of their choosing. As they get older, however, they can gravitate to the micro-environments that best suit their natures. Whatever genetic quirks incline a youth toward one niche or another will be magnified over time as they develop the parts of themselves that allow them to flourish in their chosen worlds.
1. Although it is true that fraternal twins raised apart have remarkable similarities in most respects, still the intervention of the environment has caused several differences in the way they behave.
2. However, it is still not known whether the more abstract attributes like personality, intelligence and likes and dislikes are gene-coded in our DNA, too.
3. The environment, then, is not a stamping machine that pounds us into a shape but a cafeteria of options from which our genes and our histories incline us to choose.
4. But even knowing the totality of genetic predictors, there will be many things about ourselves that no genome scan — and for that matter, no demographic checklist — will ever reveal.
Choice C
CAT Paragraph completion : How Indians Got to Zero

The Indians got to zero in two stages. First they overcame the problem of denoting empty spaces in place-value notation by drawing a circle around the space where there was a "missing" entry. This much the Babylonians had done. The circle gave rise to the present-day symbol 0 for zero. The second step was to regard that extra symbol just like the other nine. This meant developing the rules for doing arithmetic using this additional symbol along with all the others. This second step – changing the underlying conception so that the rules of arithmetic operated not on the numbers themselves but on symbols for the numbers – was the key.
1. Indeed, our sense of numbers depends on the symbols, and we cannot divorce the symbols from the numbers they represent.
2. Over time, it led to a change in the conception of numbers to a more abstract one that included zero.
3. Everything becomes much clearer when there is a special symbol to mark a space with no value.
4. A remarkable thing about this number system is that using just the ten digits from 0 to 9, we can represent any of the infinitely many positive whole numbers.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph completion - A Writer's Voice

The true essence of a writer’s voice lies far beneath the surface. It is not merely a matter of grammar and word choice. It is the writer's craving to connect. It is less craft and more courage – less ink and more blood. It is not only how the writer tells his story; it is the story he chooses tell. The story he must tell. It is the reason he writes.
1. It reveals itself in details the eye doesn't easily take in— in some unexpected hesitation or cunning adverb or barely audible inflection that makes you sit up and take notice.
2. And contrary to popular belief, a writer’s voice is learnt more than it’s “found” or “discovered.”
3. It is the fiery truth that burns in his heart until it becomes unbearable to wait even a single moment longer before putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard.
4. It is the way an author expresses personal attitude— through word choice, asides, sentence flow, paragraph density, and other individual stylistic devices.
Choice C
CAT Paragraph completion - Court Packing

When components of his New Deal got struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt threatened to increase the number of its judges from nine to fifteen through a court-reform bill. He reasoned that packing the court with six new judges would bring about a new majority that would side with the government. _________________________________________. For, in 1937, Justice Owen Roberts changed his vote to side with the government-leaning judges, and Roosevelt thereafter did not need to pursue court packing.

Choose the option which fits in best in the given blank:
1. The judiciary refused to let in a Trojan horse into its citadel of independence.
2. The resultant public backlash put paid to his plans.
3. His relationship with the judiciary was fraught with confrontation and conflict.
4. Shortly thereafter, ‘a switch in time saved the nine’.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph completion -The Essential Religious Practices Test

To mediate the competing claims of individuals, communities and the state, very early on in its history, the Supreme Court invented something that it called the “essential religious practices test”. Under this test, ostensibly religious practices could gain constitutional sanction only if — in the view of the Court — they were “essential” or “integral” to the religion in question. In the beginning, the court emphasized that essential religious practices would have to be determined by taking an internal point of view, and looking to the tenets and the doctrines of the religion itself. In later years, however, the court began to take an increasingly interventionist stance, using the essential religious practices test to make wide-ranging — often untethered — claims about religions, and even trying to mold religions into more rationalistic and homogenous monoliths, while marginalizing dissident traditions.
1. In crux, the Supreme Court rules that an essential practice, like a ritual, in pursuance of religious beliefs, is a critical aspect of the faith itself and that freedom of religion encompass this aspect.
2. The high watermark of this approach came in 2004, when the court held that the public performance of the Tandava dance was no essential part of the religion of the Ananda Marga sect, even though it had been specifically set down as such in their holy book.
3. For example, the landmark verdict by the Bombay High Court that women should be allowed to enter the Haji Ali sanctum was based on careful and circumspect perusal of passages from the Koran and the Hadith, material placed before it by the Dargah Trust.
4. After all, in a society where religion and the public sphere have always been so intertwined, religious exclusion has a public character, and not just an issue of sacral traditions but one of civil rights and material and sym
Choice B
CAT Paragraph completion - The Selfish Gene

In his book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins puts forth the radical theory that all living creatures are essentially vehicles for their genes, and exist merely to transmit and propagate their genes._____________________________________________________In fact, Dawkins later wrote that his choice of the word “selfish” was wrong, since it attributed an anthropomorphic quality to what is essentially a bunch of chemicals. A better term, he thought, would have been “the immortal gene”.

Choose the option which fits in best in the given blank:
1. Only when individuals behave in their genetic self-interest and form alliances, genes are passed on for species to survive.
2. Genes are not sentient; they passes through bodies and affect them, but are not affected by them on the way through.
3. Dawkins’s proposition is that pure altruistic behavior has never helped anyone in the history of any species.
4. Genes may be willing to abandon the individual to replicate themselves.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph completion: Technological Change

___________________________________________________________.For instance, 19th-century Japan was a world where steam and sail, railroads and rickshaws all shared common space. Industrial revolutions were distributed unequally in place and time. In the Second World War, the most common transport for the German army wasn’t tanks and other motorized vehicles but horses. The technological world wasn’t flat. This is the world, still, today. It is lumpy and bumpy, with old and new technologies accumulating on top of and beside each other.

Choose the option which fits in best in the given blank:
1. Throughout history, imperatives besides efficiency have driven technological change.
2. As they layer and stack, technologies persist over time.
3. The best ideas do not necessarily become popular right away.
4. Some innovations spread slowly, while others do so quickly.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph completion - Economic Models

Economic models are stylized abstractions of reality; designing them is an art and a science. I once had a professor who’d compare economic models to maps. _____________________________. The same is true for economic models. You choose what’s important to include in order to understand how certain factors relate to each other. Even then, the math gets very complicated. Equations help economists see subtle points, higher order effects, changes in incentives, and how their ideas relate to earlier work. It also helps them to test their theories on data.

Choose the option which fits in best in the given blank:
1. The power of maps comes at a cost: when you distill the information, you introduce uncertainty.
2. Designing a map with the wrong audience in mind can render your map almost completely useless.
3. If they cannot be understood and interpreted by the lay man, they serve no purpose.
4. If you include every tree and back road, the map is intractable.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph completion - Solitude

_________________________________________________. In his book, The Republic, Plato proffered a parable in which Socrates celebrates the solitary philosopher. In the allegory of the cave, the philosopher escapes from the darkness of an underground den – and from the company of other humans – into the sunlight of contemplative thought. Alone but not lonely, the philosopher becomes attuned to her inner self and the world. In solitude, the soundless dialogue ‘which the soul holds with herself’ finally becomes audible.

Choose the option which fits in best in the given blank:
1. Philosophers have long made a careful, and important, distinction between solitude and loneliness.
2. Solitude is a state of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness and conscience.
3. Philosophers recommend solitude in short bursts, to enable the process of self-discovery.
4. If we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph completion - The Habitual Mind

While your intentional mind is thoughtful, it's easily waylaid by deep-seated habits. If you're trying to lose weight, for example, standard interventions like weight loss programs will leave your intentional mind feeling motivated, but they won't feed your habitual mind. To accomplish that, you must first derail existing habits and create a window of opportunity to act on new intentions.
1. So, the next time you want to watch your favourite movie or TV show on Netflix, make yourself watch it on the treadmill instead.
2. Studies have shown that maintaining a food diary—a record of everything you eat and drink – is one of the best ways to start.
3. Doing squats and calf raises while brushing your teeth, for example, will reward you with the double confidence of a shinier smile and improved fitness.
4. So, get rid of unhealthy cues by moving junk food out of your pantry, and put fresh fruit out where it's easy to see.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph completion - Voter Ambivalence

As ambivalence is often linked to the victories of populists, there is a general sense that our ambivalence is destabilizing, dangerous and needs to be purged. The failure to reach clarity implies a failed agency on the part of the ambivalent citizen; it is they who carry the burden of resolving their own feelings and returning to a place of undivided certainty. Yet, the more we dismiss and disparage ambivalence, rebuking voters who “should know better”, the more we risk its manifestation in destructive ways.
1. The point is that, rather than reflecting some psychological deficiency or cognitive dissonance, ambivalence is an active and willful position to take.
2. People who have been reduced to decision-takers will be more likely to see radical, revolutionary, even destructive change as the only way to resolve their ambivalence.
3. Ambivalence is even rational, in that it requires an awareness of mutually exclusive choices and a refusal to choose; just as wanting a bit of both is also rational.
4. Slowing down, and contemplating how our democracy is working for us as a community, potentially limits the power of those who benefit from the status quo.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph completion - Sanctions

_________________________________________________. For instance, they were effective in putting pressure of South Africa’s apartheid government because they complimented political organizing by the country’s black majority. South Africans, including whites, also tended to view their country as a democracy and were sensitive to being turned into a pariah state.

Choose the option which fits in best in the given blank:
1. Sanctions are particularly useful against countries where a strong political opposition lends its voice against the country's isolation and economic stagnation.
2. Sanctions work best when they align with the preferences of the targeted country’s population.
3. Sanctions remain Western powers’ favored option for demonstrating their resolve to rogue states when diplomacy fails and military force is either unwarranted or too risky.
4. Sanctions are more likely to work when the goal is modest rather than asking for major military concession or a fundamental change to the political nature of a regime.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph completion -Emotional Intelligence

The idea that you can increase your emotional intelligence by broadening your emotion vocabulary is grounded in neuroscience. Your brain is not static; it rewires itself with experience. When you learn new emotion words, you sculpt your brain’s micro wiring, giving it the means to construct new emotional experiences. And the more emotions that you know, the more finely your brain can construct emotional meaning automatically from other people’s actions.
1. Since people use the same emotion words without necessarily meaning the same thing, a good emotion vocabulary is key to emotional intelligence.
2. In short, your emotional intelligence is a function of the emotions you experience and the expressions you perceive in other people.
3. Hence, learning foreign languages, which have emotion words that have no direct equivalent in English, can greatly enhance your emotional intelligence.
4. In short, every emotion word you learn is a new tool for future emotional intelligence.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph completion - Stories that Move Us

_________________________________________________. For example, two of the world’s best-loved and most abiding narratives – The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series – invoke values that were familiar in the middle ages but are generally considered repulsive today. Disorder in these stories is characterized by the usurpation of rightful kings or their rightful heirs; justice and order rely on their restoration. We find ourselves cheering the resumption of autocracy, the destruction of industry and even, in the case of Narnia, the triumph of divine right over secular power.

Choose the option which fits in best in the given blank:
1. Stories that possess narrative fidelity, reflecting the way we expect humans and the world to behave, are the ones we like best.
2. Stories can be so powerful that they sweep all before them: even our fundamental values and beliefs.
3. Stories that resonate powerfully with the narrative structure our minds are prepared for triumph over facts and evidence.
4. If a narrative is simple and intelligible, resonating with our deep needs and desires, it captures our imagination and holds sway over us.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph completion -Political Defection

We have good reason, of course, to be cynical about the morality of politicians. But if money alone was sufficient to buy the loyalty of legislators, there would be serial instability. Too many politicians, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, can resist everything but temptation.

Choose the option which fits in best in the given blank:
1. And the bane of politics is the lack of ideological anchor among politicians.
2. Defection remains an occasional game because money is, at best, a one-time payoff.
3. Politicians, alas, suffer from a poverty of philosophy and are driven by narrow self-interest.
4. Political defection on the promise of money and power vitiates the political atmosphere.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph completion - Number Choice

_________________________________________________. When asked to think of a random number between 1 and 10, most people will think of 7. This response is determined by arithmetic. The numbers 1 and 10 don't feel random enough; neither does 5, which is right in the middle; nor do 2 and the even numbers, which are factors or multiples of others. The number 7 emerges the winner more often than not, since it is the only number that cannot be divided or multiplied within the first 10.

Choose the option which fits in best in the given blank:
1. This is interesting, as studies have shown that even numbers are generally more liked than odd numbers.
2. It turns out the world’s favorite number is seven, a choice prompted by the desire to be unique.
3. Seven feels more random and elusive, because – arithmetically speaking – it is.
4. Seven is literally more thought-provoking: it takes our brains longer to process odd numbers.
Choice C
CAT Paragraph completion -Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity

We would do better to worry about what humans might do with Artificial Intelligence (AI), rather than what it might do by itself. We humans are far more likely to deploy intelligent systems against each other, or to become over-reliant on them. As in the fable of the sorcerer’s apprentice, if AIs do cause harm, it’s more likely to be because we give them well-meaning but ill-thought-through goals – not because they wish to conquer us.
1. Natural stupidity, rather than artificial intelligence, remains the greatest risk.
2. Indeed, the greatest danger of artificial intelligence is that it is likely to fuel natural stupidity.
3. Artificial intelligence is, more often than not, laced with natural stupidity.
4. Natural stupidity, it seems, eclipses artificial intelligence at every instance.
Choice A
CAT Paragraph completion - Battles in Culture Wars

When a constitutional challenge pits individuals against the state, the court’s task is clear: if it finds that there has been a breach by the state, it must strike down the offending law, and vindicate the rights at issue. When, however, the court is called upon to settle a battle in the culture wars, the task is fraught with greater complexity. This is because these conflicts often represent deep, long-standing and irreconcilable divisions in society, touching issues of personal belief and conviction.
1. But ironically, these battles in culture wars are the ones that are particularly ill-suited for resolution through courtroom litigation, for they risk creating deeply embittered and alienated communities, and an erosion of faith in the neutrality and impartiality of state institutions.
2. Ideally, in resolving these, the court's reasoning should be limited to technical points of law, avoiding constitutional questions and deciding only the case before it, while refraining from expressing any opinion on the validity of any personal belief or conviction.
3. It would be a betrayal of the Constitution’s transformative purpose if the court were to retreat in the face of strident claims to cultural integrity, and duck deciding the “real” questions before it.
4. Constitutional documents often consciously refrain from directly addressing them: for example, the framers of the Constitution deliberately placed the provision for a uniform civil code in the unenforceable “Directive Principles” chapter, thinking that it was too divisive to be made a fundamental right.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph completion -Populists

___________________________________________________________. They are allergic to reflection and are naturally kinetic. They despise policy detail, nuance and pauses for thought. The essence of populism is not democracy, but the insistence that there are simple solutions to complex problems – solutions that are withheld from the public by a metropolitan elite of “saboteurs”, “enemies of the people” and consumers of carrot cake.

Choose the option which fits in best in the given blank:
1. Populists point to tears in the fabric of accepted political wisdom.
2. Populists are catalysts for political change.
3. Populists survive by staying in motion.
4. Populists pit the people against an intransigent elite.
Choice C
CAT Paragraph completion - Tackling Violence

Violence is akin to infectious disease. One event leads to another : just as flu causes more flu, violence causes more violence. To contain infectious diseases, public health officials try to get people to change their behavior so that a rapid effect can be seen even when larger structural factors can’t be tackled. Yet, when it comes to violence, the discussion is often underpinned by an assumption that this behavior is innate and immutable, and that people engaging in it are beyond redemption.
1. Violence is best treated by a three- pronged approach: interrupt transmission, prevent future spread, and change group norms.
2. In fact, penal measures such as increased stop-and-search and stricter sentencing are most effective in containing outbreaks of violence.
3. Solutions to violence prevention are sought in the criminal justice system rather than in public health measures.
4. Across much of the world, being ‘tough on crime’ is a vote winner, which makes the public health approach to preventing violence a hard sell.
Choice C
CAT Paragraph completion - Mathematical Maturity

It is low mathematical maturity that causes crippling math anxiety in students. Unfortunately, math education that focuses on procedures and formulas stokes the problem. To develop mathematical maturity, students have to be encouraged to think about the concepts they learn. They have to be encouraged to ask themselves the questions that mathematicians often ask themselves: Why is this result true? Why does this procedure work? Can this problem be solved in a different way? Why is this result important? And so on.
1. Learning mathematical maturity will serve students more in their life than anything else mathematical education can offer them.
2. In short, for students to learn mathematical maturity, they must actively engage with the subject, by seeking the meaning behind the result.
3. Without this kind of thinking, students end up falsely believing that mathematics is purely mechanical and disconnected from real life.
4. Good mathematics education should give us the ability to think mathematically as well as the ability to make sense of numerical data all around us.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph completion - The Resource Curse

Many countries with abundant natural resources seem to suffer from slower economic growth, more corruption, more conflict, more authoritarian politics and more poverty than their peers with fewer resources. Academics studying this oddity have worked out that the poor performance of these countries isn't only because powerful crooks siphon off money and stash it offshore, though that is also true. The startling idea that they have discovered is that money flowing from natural resources could make the people in these countries even worse off than if the riches had never been discovered.
1. High corruption in these countries means that while the elite get very rich, their compatriots suffer extreme hardship.
2. However, some mineral-rich countries, including Norway, admittedly seem to have escaped what the academics call as the resource curse.
3. More money can make you poorer: this is also sometimes known as the Paradox of Poverty from Plenty.
4. Prosperity of the elite in these countries causes sky-rocketing prices, which in turn adversely affects local industry and agriculture.
Choice D
CAT Paragraph completion - The Tech View of Dieting

The human self is the next great frontier of the Silicon Valley, which has introduced a slew of technology products for dieting. These products have a whole new language, one that encourages people to think and talk about nutrition differently. Dieting is no longer a necessary problem of vanity, as it has been historically termed, but a problem of knowledge and efficiency—a rhetorical shift with broad implications for how people think of themselves. Where bodies might have previously been idealized as personal temples, they’re now just another device to be managed, a system whose use people are expected to master.
1. Eating salads is now 'bio-hacking one's personal ecosystem', and watching one's figure is now 'optimizing one's performance'.
2. For these companies, laundering what are often fairly conventional diet practices through the language of technology provides the imprimatur of newness in the eyes of seasoned dieters.
3. In effect, these are elaborate, expensive instructions to make a dietary addition or replacement that will unlock the human body’s true potential.
4. But if people internalize the idea that changing their body should be as simple and necessary as cleaning up old files on a laptop, the stakes for those who don’t or can’t do it could easily become even more severe.
Choice A
CAT Paragraph completion - Social Contact and Physical Pain

A series of fascinating papers suggest that in humans and other social mammals, social pain and physical pain are processed by the same neural circuits. This might explain why, in many languages, it is hard to describe the impact of breaking social bonds without the words we use to denote physical pain and injury. Social contact even reduces physical pain.
1. As the prison system knows only too well, one of the most effective forms of torture is solitary confinement.
2. This is why we hug our children when they hurt themselves: affection is a powerful analgesic.
3. Self-harm is often used as an attempt to alleviate distress: another indication that physical pain is not as bad as emotional pain.
4. The impact of loneliness on physical health is comparable to that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day: loneliness appears to raise the risk of early death by 26%.
Choice B
CAT Paragraph completion - Trade Policy

In strictly economic terms, the political character of a nation's trading partners should not matter. However, in a world of strategic competition, international commerce can be, and usually is, an instrument of policy, and its use in that context should not be denied simply because it breaches the sacred principle of free trade.
1. This is the Rodrik trilemma: it is not possible to have the nation-state, democracy, and globalization at the same time.
2. As Friedrich List, the nineteenth-century pioneer of economic nationalism, pointed out, free trade assumes a peaceful world.
3. That is why, all over the world, nations have been revolting against globalization in the name of democracy.
4. As limiting free trade inevitably leads to trade wars, it is not possible to achieve legitimate protectionist aims without disrupting the world economic system.
Choice B

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IPMAT 2020 Question Paper - IPM Indore Verbal

__________________Infrastructure, in the form of paved surfaces, disrupts water absorption and lowers water retention. This leads to disastrous levels of flooding which diminishes the biodiversity and impoverishes the people of the region.
Land should be used mindfully to prevent water logging during heavy rains.
1. Climate change is not the only cause for flooding.
2. Flooding can happen after heavy or low rainfall.
3. Infrastructure can actually cause a lot of trouble during flooding.
4. Water retention is less important to prevent flooding.
Choice A
Climate change is not the only cause for flooding.
IPMAT 2020 Question Paper - IPM Indore Verbal

Few look forward to old age and all that it brings in its wake - deteriorating health, loss of vigour, restricted mobility, increasing dependence on others, not to mention a sense of foreboding and anxiety. Yet, one has to learn to cope with the onset of old age. Firstly, it is imperative to prepare to accept old age in spite of the restrictions or limitations it imposes on one's mobility. Equally important is the need to adopt a positive attitude towards life.

_______________Above all, peace of mind, is the efficacious balm that brings equanimity to one's life. We must resign ourselves to growing old, and in the process let us try to make life as fulfilling and meaningful as possible.
1. The role of humour and fun are indispensable as these are the spice of life and guaranteed to bring cheer and bonhomie, besides keeping one's mind off life's grim realities.
2. Owing to advances in medical science, we can now expect to live well beyond 90 years.
3. Physical debility and stiffening body joints 'creaking' in protest may make mobility difficult - something one should learn to take in one's stride stoically.
4. Turning nostalgic and recalling 'those good old days' when they were young and life was radically different from what it is today, help one accept old age.
Choice A
The role of humour and fun are indispensable as these are the spice of life and guaranteed to bring cheer and bonhomie, besides keeping one's mind off life's grim realities.
IPMAT 2020 Question Paper - IPM Indore Verbal

The Arab Spring is widely believed to have stemmed from dissatisfaction with the rule of local governments, though some have speculated that wide gaps in income levels may have had a hand as well. Issues such as political corruption, human rights violations, unemployment, and educated but dissatisfied youth may have been responsible as well._____________________
1. Thus, youth unrest was the main reason for the Arab Spring
2. Some also cite the 2009-10 Iranian election protests as one of the reasons behind the Arab Spring
3. The Arab Spring was due to the wide gap between the haves and the have-nots
4. To sum up, the Arab Spring was a series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions across the Arab world
Choice B
Some also cite the 2009-10 Iranian election protests as one of the reasons behind the Arab Spring