CAT Questions | CAT Paragraph Completion Questions

The question is from CAT Paragraph Completion. CAT exam will have 1~2 questions from Paragraph Completion. Solve CAT Questions from Paragraph Completion to get more practice and 2IIMs CAT questions bank provides you with CAT questions from Para Completion that can help you gear for CAT Exam.

Question 7: 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. 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.

Explanatory Answer

Method of solving this CAT Question from Paragraph Completion:

The paragraph starts saying that normally falling oil prices boost global growth, but that this time, knowing whether the lower prices reflect weak demand or increase in supply is important to discern whether there is cause for cheer.

The paragraph discusses the case of weak demand leading to lower prices, especially where the source of weakness is financial. The penultimate line talks of cheaper oil increasing the risk of deflation.

Option A- This option elaborates on the idea of deflation discussed in the penultimate line. While it is tempting to say that this option completes the paragraph best, it should be noted that the given paragraph has a structure and this option does not fit it. The paragraph has stated two possible causes for the low price- weak demand and increase in supply. If sentence A were to complete the paragraph, the case of increase in supply and how it impacts global growth will not be discussed, leaving the paragraph incomplete. Hence option A is ruled out.

Option B- It is clear this option is not the correct one, as it is irrelevant to the given paragraph.

Option C- This option, again, does not complete the given paragraph. It offers a tangential thought.

Option D- This completes the paragraph given best, as it discusses the case of lower prices caused by surge in supply of oil, the second factor stated in the “big economic question� the paragraph talks of.

The question is " Choose the Sentence that completes the Paragraph "

Hence, the answer is Sentence D

Choice D is the correct answer.