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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
___________________________________________________________.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:
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:
_________________________________________________. 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:
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.
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.
_________________________________________________. 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:
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.
_________________________________________________. 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:
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:
_________________________________________________. 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:
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.
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.
___________________________________________________________. 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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__________________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.
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.
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._____________________
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