The following questions are from the Sentence Elimination Pattern that are very popular in Verbal Ability for CAT. Sentence Elimination questions often feature in the CAT. Given 4/5 options, you are asked to choose the one that does not fit in. The other three sentences will make a cogent paragraph. Let us look at some examples below. Make sure you go through these CAT Questions from Sentence Elimination 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.
A. By Ptolemy V’s reign in 205 BC , Egypt was in open revolt and the Rosetta stone was one of many that Ptolemy commissioned as a piece of political propaganda in 196 BC, to state publicly his claim to be the rightful pharaoh of Egypt.
B. These Greek rulers could neither speak the language of the people nor read hieroglyphs, and this fuelled resentment amongst the population.
C. Beginning with the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 BC, Greek was the language of the governing elite in Egypt.
D. Without the Rosetta stone, we would know nothing of the ancient Egyptians, and the details of their three thousand years of history would remain a mystery.
A. You will know that it has because you will start experiencing aha moments with respect to that problem.
B. Once you admit that your unconscious mind is the source of whatever brilliance you possess, you can take steps to extract the maximum possible benefit from your association with it.
C. What you must instead do is interest your unconscious mind in working on a problem by working on it with your conscious mind
D. What you will quickly discover is that it can’t be ordered about.
A. Cognitive science, however, tells us that students need to develop these different ways of thinking by means of extended, focused mental effort.
B. NO matter what happens in the relatively brief period students spend in the classroom, there is not enough time to develop the long-term memory structures required for subject mastery.
C. A traditional science instructor concentrates on teaching factual knowledge, with the implicit assumption that expert-like ways of thinking about the subject are already present.
D. To ensure that the necessary extended effort is made, teachers need to engage students in thinking deeply about the subject at an appropriate level, monitor that thinking and guide it to be more expert-like.
A. Yes, it's true that we drive a couple hundred species to extinction every day, but there are tens of millions --hundreds of millions--between us and catastrophe.
B. But of course this constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of biological realities. What we've done in actual fact is make ourselves the chief agent of natural selection in these enemy species.
C. Generation after generation, we are in effect producing a population of insects more and more resistant to our insecticides. If we wanted to produce such insects, this would be exactly the way to go about it!
D. Very simply, all too often we've acted as though we could make species of small, fast breeding creatures extinct down to the very last member, the way we might do with elephants or pandas.
E. Our insecticide hasn’t killed off every last member of the targeted species in a given field, but the 80% that are most susceptible to the deadly effect of the insecticide, leaving alive as breeding stock for the next generation the 20% that was less susceptible.
A. What we call “fundamentalism” has always existed in a symbiotic relationship with a secularization that is experienced as cruel, violent and invasive.
B. Historically, wherever secular governments were established to separate religion and politics, a counter-cultural movement developed in response, determined to bring religion back into public life.
C. In the developing world, secularization usually came with colonial rule; it was hence seen as a foreign import and rejected as profoundly unnatural.
D. All too often an aggressive secularism has pushed religion into a violent riposte.
A. In the entire body of Harappan and other Indus art and sculpture there are no monuments erected to glorify warfare and no depictions of war or conquered enemies.
B. It is speculated that the rulers might have been wealthy merchants, or powerful landlords or spiritual leaders, who showed their power and status through the use of seals and fine jewelry.
C. Decorated with animal motifs, many of the seals, the most commonly found objects in Harappan cities, are inscribed with short pieces of the Indus script.
D. It appears that the Harappan and other Indus rulers governed their cities through the control of trade and religion, not by military might.
A. Besides generating buzz, a season-based reality show does as well as a top-five show in terms of viewership.
B. The key, then, is for channels to find bankable reality formats and milk them till the cows come home.
C. Then again, they have realized that the easier way to gain ad revenue to cover costs is by luring advertisers to a fail-proof, steady-TRP format like reality TV.
D. The nearly 15% year-on-year rise in production cost levels for reality shows has networks rattled.
A. In China, for example, World Bank money has not been so important quantitatively, yet the Chinese generally credit the bank for having helpful blueprints and information.
B. While most of US$800 billion invested in infrastructure in developing countries each year comes from domestic sources, the provision of infrastructure financing by multilateral development institutions globally is important.
C. By contrast, their greatest failures have come from funding grandiose projects that benefit the current elite, but do not properly balance environmental, social, and development priorities.
D. Multilateral development institutions have had their most consistent success when they serve as “knowledge” banks, helping to share experience, best practices, and technical knowledge across regions.
A. Forecasts say that in just two years, the total quantum of e-waste generated around the world will be 50 million tonnes.
B. In China, for instance, 73.9 million computers, 0.25 billion mobile phones and 56.6 million televisions were sold in 2011.
C. Close to 90 per cent of the world’s electronic waste — worth nearly $19 billion — is illegally traded or dumped each year, to destinations half way across the world.
D. While Europe and North America are by far the largest producers of e-waste, Asia’s cities are fast catching up as consumers of electronic goods and as generators of e-waste.
A. There is a special intimacy to poetry because, in this idea of the art, the medium is not an expert's body, as when one goes to the ballet: in poetry, the medium is the audience's body.
B. In such movement the image fully becomes an intellectual and emotional complex because it dramatically exists both in the space of description and in the time of musical structure.
C. The luminous details in poetry must not only be precise, they must also be rendered so as to elicit and reward a dynamic sense of movement.
D. Poetry is a centaur. The thinking word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties.
A. In 400 BC, Leonidas' 300 Spartans died at Thermopylae in Greece while their countrymen vied at Olympia.
B. Troops were forbidden to enter the sacred Olympic precinct; but they were there in 420 B.C. when a Spartan attack was feared. Spartans had been banned from competing.
C. And yet, Spartan-like, America was represented at the Games while she was still fighting in Vietnam.
D. Civilization has advanced since then and—commendably — Olympiads of 1916, 1940 and 1944 were cancelled due to worldwide conflagration.
A. A mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.
B. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.
C. Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
D. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed.
A. Rowling’s declarations on Twitter on what she “always thought” of a particular character are not only newsworthy, but a cause for pride.
B. Rowling seems eager to retain an influence on how we understand her books by revealing ostensibly new information about her characters.
C. Rowling’s chances for being a diverse author lie in the future, not the past.
D. Whether these character points were announced to readers via Twitter or alluded to within the Potter books, however, the meanings that we as a diverse international community of readers wish to take from them trump Rowling’s intentions as an author.
A. Consumers prefer reliability when it’s available, and giving the state’s imprimatur to legalized gambling goes a long way toward ensuring that.
B. Legalizing gambling would only ramp up the incentive to find new ways to fix games.
C. In Britain, betting shops were legalized in 1961, and giant gambling companies, like William Hill and Ladbrokes, watch out for suspiciously prescient bets.
D. Taking gambling into the light makes the marketplace more hostile to cheaters.
A. Since birds are the modern descendants of dinosaurs, they are likely to have once had teeth instead of beaks.
B. However, 100 million years ago a diverse range of non-avian dinosaurs spouted all manner of plumage, and like modern birds, doubtless made a great deal of use of them, even if they could not fly.
C. This fact became known way back in 1861 when paleontologists discovered a bird fossil, about 150 million years old, now classified as Archaeopteryx, which had teeth.
D. Researchers have now published details of how avian edentulism occurred in one common bird ancestor more than 100 million years ago.
A. We don't actually do two, or three or 10 things at once, we just switch from one to another to another.
B. Multitasking makes us demonstrably efficient, increasing cognitive performance.
C. Each time we shift attention, there is a metabolic cost we pay in glucose.
D. Some brain activities are more expensive than others, and switching attention is among the most expensive.
A. Muhammad Ali’s rejection of the Vietnam War was thus a rejection of war itself as a viable means of solving human problems, real or perceived.
B. In refusing the draft, Ali thus also refused to believe that national boundaries somehow categorically divided human beings into “us” and “them”.
C. Violence is the tool of the hegemon; by eschewing it you are already challenging the means through which hegemony is legitimized.
D. The best way to stand up to power and injustice is to be steadfast in your resistance while shunning violence.
A. There are few more emotional ways to view history than through the lens of a camera.
B. To take photographs is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in a face of fleeing reality.
C. They are not about dialing for quotes or quick sound bites.
D. Photographs convey the ultimate journalistic credo: to be present at the site of action at the right time, and alive to capture the fleeting moments that transform our lives.
A. If we are not to make grievous mistakes in the name of good things such as fighting corruption or tackling crime, then we, the people, must reflect.
B. The problem is not of manipulation or political ambition; it is the willingness with which otherwise sensible citizens allow themselves to follow the Piper.
C. If we realize that it is our sentiments that are disturbed, not our security, perhaps we will see the issue with greater equanimity.
D. It is in the nature of democratic politics for ambitious politicians to use emotions to climb up the ladder of power.
A. As global warming speeds up the melting of these glaciers, this weight is lifting, and the surface slowly is springing back.
B. Though the average hiker wouldn't notice, the Alps and other mountain ranges have experienced a gradual growth spurt over the past century or so.
C. These glaciers are giant scrapers that carve out valleys and carry away rock debris on ice conveyor belts, sculpting mountains.
D. For thousands of years, the weight of the glaciers atop these mountains has pushed against the Earth's surface, causing it to depress.
A. India is self-sufficient in strategic armaments – nuclear weapons and delivery systems, including advanced and accurate ballistic and cruise missiles, and nuclear-powered submarines.
B. By focusing militarily on Pakistan and ignoring China’s challenge, India inspires little confidence about its judgment, resolve, and prospects as a consequential power in the extended region.
C. While India wishes to stand up to China and emerge as the other nodal power in Asia, this ambition is undermined by diffidence and skewed capabilities.
D. But paradoxically, India has become the world’s largest importer of conventional weaponry, leaving its foreign policy hostage to the whims and interests of vendor states.
A. Automotive interests have consciously shaped a vision of the streets as places where cars belong.
B. Indeed, the twenty-first century's apex predator is the automobile.
C. A fatal collision is an everyday phenomenon— the kind of death, it seems, that is always expected.
D. Cars prowl the streets, growling in revving ravenousness.
A. Farmers need to be encouraged to grow more pulses not simply because demand is projected to rise by roughly 50 per cent between now and 2024.
B. The Subramanian committee has rightly noted that the worst case scenario for farmers is weak government procurement combined with continuation of stock-holding and export restrictions.
C. Volatility in production and prices of pulses, the committee's report has shown, is far higher than that for cereals, and this is neither in the interests of the producers nor the consumers.
D. Pulses also help in soil rejuvenation and naturally fixing atmospheric nitrogen, without consuming much water.
A. German scientists analyzing the 3300-year-old bust have found evidence suggesting that a royal sculptor at the time may have smoothed creases around the mouth and fixed a bumpy nose to depict the 'Beauty of the Nile' in a better light.
B. The new rendering at the entrance of the Egyptian city of Samalut attempts to re-create the strangeness of the Amarna style. That is probably best done in a museum instead of on a highway, where it might scare people.
C. The miracle of the Nefertiti bust in Berlin is that it combines the realism of the Amarna style, as it is known, with a feel for grace and harmony to create one of the world’s great icons of beauty.
D. By getting the colossally awful sculpture of the ancient queen pulled down, Egyptians have shown the way forward. We need to topple art that’s an insult to our public spaces.
A. Though the “mother of all laws”, the Constitution is external to society and has a largely exhortatory relationship to it.
B. This is not a defect — the Constitution is required to reflect the republic in the best possible light, and is at its most majestic when doing so.
C. However, this also means that the Constitution is unable to directly confront obstinate realities like caste that flout its fundamental tenets, because acknowledging caste amounts to confessing that the republic is more desire than reality.
D. Right from the Preamble, where it presumes that “we, the people” are indeed a unified and homogenous collectivity, the Constitution treats hoped-for outcomes as though they were established facts.
A. The imaginary worlds of fiction serve as means to escape the ties and the ennui of the real world and indulge vicariously in an alternate reality.
B. Reading fiction trains people in this domain, just as reading nonfiction books about, say, genetics or history builds expertise in those subject areas.
C. The defining characteristic of fiction is not that it is made-up but that it is about human, or humanlike beings and their intentions and interactions.
D. The solitary act of holing up with a book is actually an exercise in human interaction.
A. Sea ice acts as a blanket on top of the ocean, protecting the water from incoming solar energy and atmospheric heat.
B. This effect accelerates overall warming, which in turn melts more land ice and drives up sea levels.
C. Although the sea ice is shrinking, it does not add to water levels as it melts because it is already part of the ocean’s mass.
D. As that frozen coating disappears, its white surface is no longer there to reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere—so the ocean absorbs much more solar energy.
A. Party politics is all too often merely the surf, spray and scum of the ocean that is society – it’s the prevailing undercurrents, the slow shifting of tectonic plates, that count in the long run.
B. Emmanuel Macron’s victory in France’s legislative elections is the consummation of a political revolution which started with his triumph in the recent presidential election.
C. While on the surface the dominance of Macron’s party – founded less than two years ago – is a huge transformation of the political landscape in France, the low turnout suggests that this is skin deep.
D. In France, growing abstention is the powerful current that risks, eventually, pulling the country under.
A. Since Plato at least, we have held that subduing our passions to the iron rule of reason is our supreme aspiration; it is the ideal for human cognition.
B. If human beings can indeed be described as rational animals, it is due to the fact that humans, of all animals, are the only ones capable of irrational thoughts and action.
C. Ironically, we think that the more we are like Star Trek's unfeeling alien Mr. Spock, the more human we really are.
D. We delight in pretending that our most prized and most humanly attribute is our forebrain, which houses, we also pretend, our capacity for rational thought.
A. Inflation, which increases nominal but not real wages, is assumed to trick workers into accepting a lower remuneration for their services; it is thus an indirect wage cut that helps prevent an increase in unemployment.
B. An economic concept that serves as the linchpin for monetary policy makers is that wages are quite inflexible in a market economy, so unemployment is bound to shoot up whenever workers refuse to accept lower wages.
C. The stagflation of the 1970s proved quite convincingly that high unemployment and high inflation can very well co-exist, and given that wages may not be as rigid as many economists assume, any effort to micromanage the economy may well be a fool’s errand.
D. While framing monetary policies, central bank chiefs keep this inverse relationship in mind, trying to maintain a non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, which is the unemployment rate at which inflation too is just under control.
A. Sprinters cock the lead knee high and drive the foot into the track with a stiffened ankle—a punch delivered with high velocity and a sudden stop.
B. The swiftest runners achieve top speed by swinging their legs more rapidly than slow runners while repositioning their limbs between takeoff and landing.
C. What faster runners do better is apply a more powerful force to the ground through their foot, and, just as critically, do this in a briefer contact period.
D. Both swift runners and slow runners take roughly the same time when airborne to move their legs back into position for the next stride.
A. If the regions, peoples and nations currently demanding more freedom seem to be driven by “cultural nationalism”, that in turn is driven by technological change plus global competition.
B. Information-rich societies reward the development of human capital; so, the ability to study in your first language, participate in a rich national culture and create unique local selling points for incoming foreign investment is more important than ever.
C. The mixture of austerity, corruption and political sclerosis at the center has limited the reality of regional democracy and pushed autonomous regions such as Catalonia to fight for self-determination.
D. Above the problems of economic failure and racial polarization, the positive factor driving progressive nationalisms, from Scotland to Catalonia, is technological change.
A. Commonwealth enthusiasts believe that the Commonwealth has supposedly vast potential, which could be augmented further with a little additional funding, yet membership will always remain cheaper than the EU, and not only in terms of the UK’s direct financial contribution.
B. But given the fact that there are huge variations in the levels of trade conducted by individual member states, it is difficult to see what we can actually learn from an average figure for “Commonwealth advantage” between two notional Commonwealth states.
C. In this light, the Commonwealth is the international relations equivalent of a homeopathic remedy – a cadre of staff so small as to be almost invisible when dissolved across a body comprising 2.4 billion people, which nevertheless does or could achieve miraculous results.
D. Somehow, this Commonwealth of the future will cost less than the EU in terms of the vast number of hours required to negotiate its treaties and other formal agreements; it will not require members to make significant concessions in return for some collective good; and it will have only the most rudimentary of mechanisms to enforce its will.
A. Museums are not neutral spaces, where objects exist without context; they do more than allow us to engage with history and art.
B. They are forms in and of themselves, which, to varying degrees, enable and propagate missions and legacies through design and architecture.
C. Try as some museums might to go unnoticed as simply the pedestal or wall on which history and art work hangs, there is no escaping the weight of the objects and stories told within their architecture.
D. A museum of modern art in Cologne isn’t so different from a museum of modern art in Chicago – you see the same major-canon artists, arranged in more or less the same way.
A. In the breakneck pace of decolonisation, nations were thrown together in months; often their alarmed populations fell immediately into violent conflict to control the new state apparatus, and the power and wealth that came with it.
B. If there are so few formerly colonised countries that are now peaceful, affluent and democratic, it is not, as the west often pretends, because “bad leaders” somehow ruined otherwise perfectly functional nations.
C. On the premise that the colonial epoch had not permitted the growth of indigenous economic institutions, the new states were encouraged, largely by the West, to entrust economic modernization to parastatal corporations administered by inexperienced bureaucrats.
D. Many infant states were held together only by strongmen who entrusted the system to their own tribes or clans, maintained power by stoking sectarian rivalries and turned ethnic or religious differences into super-charged axes of political terror.
A. The stereotype that creativity is enhanced by a mood disorder is dangerous, both for those with mood disorders and those pursuing creativity: it could keep them from seeking treatment if they believe treatment would diminish their creative ability.
B. However, there are differences that might vary systematically between the groups: for instance, people who have achieved real creative success typically face the stress of being in the public eye, while the average person does not.
C. Most people chosen to be included in the creative groups are successful writers or artists, while those in the less-creative group are typically average people living nearby to wherever the study is taking place.
D. Just that component could account for any number of differences in the instance of mood disorder, given that stress is a major cause for the onset of mood disorders.
A. Many of those who are racked with self-doubt often seek confirmation of their distorted self-perception.
B. This seems logical as those with a negative self-image would be just the ones who would want to overcompensate.
C. The reason for their behaviour is the desire for coherence: if others respond in a way that confirms their self-image, then the world is as it should be.
D. In some cases, individuals actually provoke others to respond negatively to them, in order hear their own bleak view of themselves.
A. In fact, compared to other mammals, humans are actually naturally adapted for a relatively low protein intake, requiring protein to make up just 10% of our daily calorie requirement.
B. Over the past 50 years, research has consistently found that whenever we tinker with our natural protein needs, it can have adverse consequences, at all phases of our lives.
C. This became associated with an increased risk of developing chronic diseases such as cancer in later life, forcing the formula to be adapted to have a lower protein content.
D. Human breast milk is quite low in protein: when cow’s milk formula was first used to create an artificial replacement for breast milk, the excessive protein content was found to cause accelerated growth rates in early life.
A. On the sliding scale of attribution that art historians use – painted by; hand of; studio of; circle of; style of; copy of – each step takes the artist farther from the painting.
B. If a fake is so expert that even after the most thorough examination its authenticity is still open to doubt, is it not as satisfactory a work of art as if it were genuine?
C. Leaving straight forgeries aside, any discussion about the “authenticity” of an artwork opens suddenly, like a trapdoor, into the murk of semantics.
D. Added to this is the unease about overpainting: Salvator Mundi had been worked over so many times and so heavily, critics argue, that it is less by Da Vinci than by his restorers.
A. Letters let us write words while emoji let us write gestures.
B. Emoji are so widely used that they are rightly called the lingua franca of the world.
C. They are the equivalent of gesticulating to add emphasis.
D. While they convey a writer's intentions, emoji are not a language in themselves.
A. In laughing along, the target of the joke shows that he’s a good sport, thereby completing the ritual.
B. Ridicule can actually reinforce a group when the target is confident of their in-group status.
C. By laughing together at each other and at themselves, the rest of the group show their membership.
D. Laughing at someone is among the strongest markers of social exclusion in human connection.
A. In its “I Want to Be Recycled” campaign, Keep America Beautiful urges consumers to reduce their plastic footprint by imagining the reincarnation of shampoo bottles and boxes post recycling.
B. Keep America Beautiful has, for decades, publicly opposed or marketed against legislation that would increase producer responsibility for plastic waste management.
C. In fact, its greatest success has been to shift the onus of environmental responsibility onto the public while simultaneously becoming a trusted name in the environmental movement.
D. A corporate greenwashing front, it has built public support for a legal framework that punishes individual litterers, while imposing almost no responsibility on plastic manufacturers.
A. Researchers found that the stone tools of H. erectus were made from stones lying around at the botton of a hill, for instance, rather than from the better-quality stones found uphill.
B. In contrast, H. sapiens and Neanderthals, who came later, put in the effort to find good stone for the tools they made and even transported these stones over long distances.
C. Excavations from the Arabian Peninsula indicate that the species Homo erectus failed to put in enough effort to create good quality stone tools which were crucial to their survival.
D. This lackadaisical attitude, coupled with the inability to adapt to a changing environment, was what, according to these researchers, contributed to the population's demise.
A. The political nature of the target modifies the standard economic constraints, encouraging local governments to generate whatever additional economic activity is required so that, along with the economic activity of the private and real-estate sectors, the target is reached.
B. The fact is that Chinese GDP will be unaffected by a trade war with the U.S., no matter how severe, because the government will do whatever it takes to meet its growth targets. To see the conflict’s true toll, one should look at rising Chinese debt instead.
C. Thus, while GDP numbers may tell us something about the government’s priorities, they’re a poor measure of the underlying performance of the economy, for, as long as China has debt capacity, and the government is willing to use it, China can achieve any GDP growth target it wants.
D. In China, the government sets the GDP growth rate early in the year at a level thought adequate to accommodate its social and political objectives, among which is to keep unemployment low.
A. Expertise is not an isolated event: rather, it changes when the social context changes.
B. Even exceptional players who find themselves in a different team with many other exceptional players, may find themselves playing below par.
C. In team sports, this includes supporting staff such as physical therapists and managers.
D. A network of high performing athletes and support staff provides a rich social platform for professional excellence.
A. Additionally, many native species are only found in the snag forest habitat of dead and dying trees created by high-severity wildfire.
B. Decades of science have shown that forest fires are an essential part of Western U.S. forest ecosystems and create highly biodiverse wildlife habitat.
C. Despite this steadily accumulating evidence, the government has posited that more active management of forests could help prevent future fires.
D. Many native animals thrive in the years and decades after large intense fires, including deer, bats, woodpeckers, and songbirds as well as spotted owls.
A. Coastal wetlands can even grow in height as sea level rises, protecting communities further inland.
B. Salt marshes and mangrove forests store flood waters and protect coasts from hurricanes and storms.
C. Continuously removing and storing atmospheric carbon, wetlands act as 'carbon sinks' that help mitigate climate change.
D. In addition, wetlands make ecosystems and human communities more resilient in the face of climate change.
A. Moreover, as temperatures rise, information technologies will work less efficiently, starting off a vicious cycle.
B. As much of the physical infrastructure that undergirds the internet is right next to the coast, rising seas can seriously imperil the internet.
C. The world’s data centers already have roughly the same carbon footprint as the global aviation industry.
D. The internet, the primary vector of information about climate change, is increasingly a vector of the problem itself.
A. As every language has evolved in a specific geocultural niche, it has different ways of talking of and codifying the world.
B. To learn another language, we must suspend our habit of glossing over differences, which distorts our understanding of others and of ourselves.
C. The work of learning new ways of talking – new sounds, grammars and storytelling techniques – stretches and builds the mind.
D. Therefore, it is not possible to achieve fluency in another language without learning its speakers’ perspectives.
A. The biggest fallout of NPA accumulation, particularly in the public sector banks, is that industrial credit growth rate has plunged in the last few years.
B. Without doubt, there are cases of bad loans where the debt repayment problems have been caused by diversion of funds.
C. Non-performing assets (NPAs) or bad loans in the Indian banking system have arisen primarily for reasons beyond the control of public sector bank management.
D. But the bulk of the problem has been caused by unexpected changes in the economic environment: timetables, exchange rates, and growth rate assumptions going wrong.
The Questions that follow, are from actual CAT papers. If you wish to take them separately or plan to solve actual CAT papers at a later point in time, It would be a good idea to stop here.
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. In
English, there is no systematic rule for the naming of numbers; after ten, we have
"eleven" and "twelve" and then the teens: "thirteen", "fourteen", "fifteen" and so
on.
2. Even more confusingly, some English words invert the numbers they refer to:
the word "fourteen" puts the four first, even though it appears last.
3. It can
take children a while to learn all these words, and understand that "fourteen" is
different from "forty".
4. For multiples of 10, English speakers switch to a
different pattern: "twenty", "thirty", "forty" and so on.
5. If you didn't know the
word for "eleven", you would be unable to just guess it – you might come up with
something like "one-teen".
1. Having an
appreciation for the workings of another person's mind is considered a prerequisite for
natural language acquisition, strategic social interaction, reflexive thought, and moral
judgment.
2. It is a 'theory of mind' though some scholars prefer to call it
'mentalizing' or 'mindreading', which is important for the development of one's
cognitive abilities.
3. Though we must speculate about its evolutionary origin, we
do have indications that the capacity evolved sometime in the last few million
years.
4. This capacity develops from early beginnings in the first year of life to
the adult's fast and often effortless understanding of others' thoughts, feelings, and
intentions.
5. One of the most fascinating human capacities is the ability to
perceive and interpret other people's behaviour in terms of their mental states.
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. Self-care particularly links to loneliness, behavioural problems, and
negative academic outcomes.
2. "Latchkey children" refers to children who routinely return home from
school to empty homes and take care of themselves for extended periods of time.
3. Although self-care
generally points to negative outcomes, it is important to consider that the bulk of research has yet to
track long-term consequences.
4. In research and practice, the phrase "children in self-care" has come
to replace latchkey in an effort to more accurately reflect the nature of their circumstances.
5.
Although parents might believe that self-care would be beneficial for development, recent research has found
quite the opposite.
1. The banning of Northern Lights could be considered a precursor to
censoring books for "moral", world view or religious reasons.
2. Attempts to ban books are attempts to
silence authors who have summoned immense courage in telling their stories.
3. Now the banning and
challenging of books in the US has escalated to an unprecedented level.
4. The widely acclaimed fantasy
novel Northern Lights was banned in some parts of the US, and was the second most challenged book in the
US.
5. The American Library Association documented an unparalleled number of reported book challenges
in 2022, about 2,500 unique titles.
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. Although hard skills have traditionally ruled the roost, some
companies are moving away from choosing prospective hires based on technical abilities alone.
2.
Companies are shaking off the old definition of an ideal candidate and ditching the idea of looking for the
singularly perfect candidate altogether.
3. Now, some job descriptions are frequently asking for
candidates to demonstrate soft skills, such as leadership or teamwork.
4. That's not to say that
practical know-how is no longer required – some jobs still call for highly specific expertise
5. The
move towards prioritising soft skills "is a natural response to three years of the pandemic" says a senior
recruiter at Cenlar FSB.
1. Boa Senior, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese
occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent
in Bo.
2. The indigenous population has been steadily collapsing since the island chain was colonised
by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.
3.
Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought
to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.
4. The last speaker of an ancient
tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's oldest
cultures.
5. Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa
Senior spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. The legal status of resources mined in space remains ambiguous; and while the market for asteroid
minerals is currently nonexistent, this is likely to change as technical hurdles diminish.
2. Outer
space is a commons, and all of it is open for exploration, however, space law developed in the 1950s and 60s
is state-centric and arguably ill-suited to a commercial future.
3. Laws adopted by the US and
Luxembourg are first steps, but they only protect firms from competing claims by their compatriots; a
Chinese company will not be bound by US law.
4. Critics say the US is conferring rights that it has no
authority to confer; Russia in particular has condemned this, citing the US' disrespect for international
law.
5. At issue now is commercial activity, as private firms”rather than nation
states”look to space for profit.
1. There is a dark side to academic research, especially in India, and at its centre is the phenomenon of
predatory journals.
2. But in truth, as long as you pay, you can get anything published.
3. In look
and feel thus, they are exactly like any reputed journal.
4. They claim to be indexed in the most
influential databases, say they possess editorial boards that comprise top scientists and researchers, and
claim to have a rigorous peer-review structure.
5. But a large section of researchers and scientists
across the world are at the receiving end of nothing short of an academic publishing scam.
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. The care with which philosophers examine arguments for and against forms of biotechnology makes this an
excellent primer on formulating and assessing moral arguments.
2. Although most people find at least
some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why: what is wrong with
re-engineering our nature?
3. Breakthroughs in genetics present us with the promise that we will soon
be able to prevent a host of debilitating diseases, and the predicament that our newfound genetic knowledge
may enable us to enhance our genetic traits.
4. To grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to
confront questions that verge on theology, which is why modern philosophers and political theorists tend to
shrink from them.
5. One argument is that the drive for human perfection through genetics is
objectionable as it represents a bid for mastery that fails to appreciate the gifts of human powers and
achievements.
1. It has taken on a warm, fuzzy glow in the advertising world, where its potential is being widely
discussed, and it is being claimed as the undeniable wave of the future.
2. There is little enthusiasm
for this in the scientific arena; for them marketing is not a science, and only a handful of studies have
been published in scientific journals.
3. The new, growing field of neuromarketing attempts to reveal
the inner workings of consumer behaviour and is an extension of the study of how choices and decisions are
made.
4. Some see neuromarketing as an attempt to make the "art" of advertising into a science, being
used by marketing experts to back up their proposals with some form of real data.
5. The marketing gurus
have already started drawing on psychology in developing tests and theories, and advertising people have
borrowed the idea of the focus group from social scientists.
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. They often include a foundation course on navigating capitalism with Chinese characteristics and have
replaced typical cases from US corporates with a focus on how Western theories apply to China's buzzing
local firms.
2. The best Chinese business schools look like their Western rivals but are now growing
distinct in terms of what they teach and the career boost they offer.
3. Western schools have enhanced
their offerings with double degrees, popular with domestic and overseas students alike-and boosted the
prestige of their Chinese partners.
4. For students, a big draw is the chance to rub shoulders with
captains of China's private sector.
5. Their business courses now largely cater to the growing demand
from China Inc which has become more global, richer and ready to recruit from this sinocentric student body.
1. A typical example is Wikipedia, where the overwhelming majority of contributors are male and so the
available content is skewed to reflect their interests.
2. Without diversity of thought and
representation, society is left with a distorted picture of future options, which are likely to result in
augmenting existing inequalities.
3. Gross gender inequality in the technology sector is problematic,
not only for the industry-wide marginalisation of women, but because technology designs embody the values of
their makers.
4. While redressing unequal representation in the workplace is a step in the right
direction, broader social change is needed to address the structural inequalities embedded within the
current organisation of work and employment.
5. If technology merely reflects the perspectives of the
male stereotype, then new technologies are unlikely to accommodate the diverse social contexts within which
they operate.
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
A. For feminists, the question of how we read is inextricably linked with the question of what we
read.
B. Elaine Showalter’s critique of the literary curriculum is exemplary of this work.
C. Androcentric literature structures the reading experience differently depending on the gender of the
reader.
D. The documentation of this realization was one of the earliest tasks undertaken by feminist critics.
E. More specifically, the feminist inquiry into the activity of reading begins with the realization that the
literary canon is androcentric, and that this has a profoundly damaging effect on women readers.
A. Talk was the most common way for enslaved men and women to subvert the rules of their bondage, to gain
more agency than they were supposed to have.
B. Even in conditions of extreme violence and unfreedom, their words remained ubiquitous, ephemeral,
irrepressible, and potentially transgressive.
C. Slaves came from societies in which oaths, orations, and invocations carried great potency, both between
people and as a connection to the all-powerful spirit world.
D. Freedom of speech and the power to silence may have been preeminent markers of white liberty in Colonies,
but at the same time, slavery depended on dialogue: slaves could never be completely muted.
E. Slave-owners obsessed over slave talk, though they could never control it, yet feared its power to bind
and inspire—for, as everyone knew, oaths, whispers, and secret conversations bred conspiracy and
revolt.
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
A. You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect
data.
B. Economists and technologists believe that a new kind of capitalism is being created - different from
industrial capitalism as was merchant capitalism.
C. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose
of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights.
D. There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance, a different dynamic growing
up: information as a social good, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced.
E. Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be
copied and pasted infinitely.
A. The victim’s trauma after assault rarely gets the attention that we lavish on the moment of damage
that divided the survivor from a less encumbered past.
B. One thing we often do with narratives of sexual assault is sort their respective parties into different
temporalities: it seems we are interested in perpetrators’ futures and victims’ pasts.
C. One result is that we don’t have much of a vocabulary for what happens in a victim’s life
after the painful past has been excavated, even when our shared language gestures toward the future, as the
term “survivor” does.
D. Even the most charitable questions asked about the victims seem to focus on the past, in pursuit of
understanding or of corroboration of painful details.
E. As more and more stories of sexual assault have been made public in the last two years, the genre of
their telling has exploded --- crimes have a tendency to become not just stories but genres.
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:>
A. The logic of displaying one’s inner qualities through outward appearance was based on a distinction
between being a woman and being feminine.
B. 'Appearance' became a signifier of conduct - to look was to be and conformity to the feminine
ideal was measured by how well women could use the tools of the fashion and beauty industries.
C. The makeover-centric media sets out subtly and not-so-subtly, ‘good’ and ‘bad’
ways to be a woman, layering these over inequalities of race and class.
D. The denigration of working-class women and women of colour often centres on their perceived failure to
embody feminine beauty.
E. ‘Woman’ was considered a biological category, but femininity was a ‘process’ by
which women became specific kinds of women.
A. Machine learning models are prone to learning human-like biases from the training data that feeds these
algorithms.
B. Hate speech detection is part of the on-going effort against oppressive and abusive language on social
media.
C. The current automatic detection models miss out on something vital: context.
D. It uses complex algorithms to flag racist or violent speech faster and better than human beings
alone.
E. For instance, algorithms struggle to determine if group identifiers like "gay" or
"black" are used in offensive or prejudiced ways because they're trained on imbalanced
datasets with unusually high rates of hate speech.
Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a
meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in.
1. His idea to use sign language was not a completely new idea as Native Americans used hand gestures to
communicate with other tribes.
2. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, observed that men
who are deaf are incapable of speech.
3. People who were born deaf were denied the right to sign a will
as they were “presumed to understand nothing; because it is not possible that they have been able to learn
to read or write.”
4. Pushback against this prejudice began in the 16th century when Pedro Ponce de León
created a formal sign language for the hearing impaired.
5. For millennia, people with hearing
impairments encountered marginalization because it was believed that language could only be learned by
hearing the spoken word.
1. One argument is that actors that do not fit within a single, well-defined category may suffer an
“illegitimacy discount”.
2. Others believe that complex identities confuse audiences about an
organization’s role or purpose.
3. Some organizations have complex and multidimensional identities that
span or combine categories, while other organizations possess narrow identities.
4. Identity is one of
the most important features of organizations, but there exist opposing views among sociologists about how
identity affects organizational performance.
5. Those who think that complex identities are beneficial
point to the strategic advantages of ambiguity, and organizations’ potential to differentiate themselves
from competitors.
1. ‘Stat’ signaled something measurable, while ‘matic’ advertised free labour; but ‘tron’, above all,
indicated control.
2. It was a totem of high modernism, the intellectual and cultural mode that decreed
no process or phenomenon was too complex to be grasped, managed and optimized.
3. Like the heraldic
shields of ancient knights, these morphemes were painted onto the names of scientific technologies to
proclaim one’s history and achievements to friends and enemies alike.
4. The historian Robert Proctor at
Stanford University calls the suffix ‘-tron’, along with ‘-matic’ and ‘-stat’, embodied symbols.
5. To
gain the suffix was to acquire a proud and optimistic emblem of the electronic and atomic age.
Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a
meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in.
1. A particularly interesting example of inference occurs in many single panel comics.
2. It’s the creator’s participation and imagination that makes the single-panel comic so
engaging and so rewarding.
3. Often, the humor requires you to imagine what happened in the instant immediately before or immediately
after the panel you’re being shown.
4. To get the joke, you actually have to figure out what some of these missing panels must be.
5. It is as though the cartoonist devised a series of panels to tell the story and has chosen to show you
only one – and typically not even the funniest.
1. Socrates told us that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ and that to ‘know
thyself’ is the path to true wisdom
2. It suggests that you should adopt an ancient rhetorical method favored by the likes of Julius Caesar and
known as ‘illeism’ – or speaking about yourself in the third person.
3. Research has shown that people who are prone to rumination also often suffer from impaired decision
making under pressure and are at a substantially increased risk of depression.
4. Simple rumination – the process of churning your concerns around in your head – is not the
way to achieve self-realization.
5. The idea is that this small change in perspective can clear your emotional fog, allowing you to see past
your biases.
1. Ocean plastic is problematic for a number of reasons, but primarily because marine animals eat it.
2. The largest numerical proportion of ocean plastic falls in small size fractions.
3. Aside from clogging up the digestive tracts of marine life, plastic also tends to adsorb pollutants from
the water column.
4. Plastic in the oceans is arguably one of the most important and pervasive environmental problems
today.
5. Eating plastic has a number of negative consequences such as the retention of plastic particles in the
gut for longer periods than normal food particles.
Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a
meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in.
1. Displacement in Bengal is thus not very significant in view of its magnitude.
2. A factor of displacement in Bengal is the shifting course of the Ganges leading to erosion of river
banks.
3. The nature of displacement in Bengal makes it an interesting case study.”
4. Since displacement due to erosion is well spread over a long period of time, it remains invisible.
5. Rapid displacement would have helped sensitize the public to its human costs.
1. In many cases time inconsistency is what prevents our going from intention to action.
2. For people to continuously postpone getting their children immunized, they would need to be constantly
fooled by themselves.
3. In the specific case of immunization, however, it is hard to believe that time inconsistency by itself
would be sufficient to make people permanently postpone the decision if they were fully cognizant of its
benefits.
4. In most cases, even a small cost of immunization was large enough to discourage most people.
5. Not only do they have to think that they prefer to spend time going to the camp next month rather than
today, they also have to believe that they will indeed go next month.
1. Translators are like bumblebees.
2. Though long since scientifically disproved, this factoid is still routinely trotted out.
3. Similar pronouncements about the impossibility of translation have dogged practitioners since Leonardo
Bruni’s De interpretatione recta, published in 1424.
4. Bees, unaware of these deliberations, have continued to flit from flower to flower, and translators
continue to translate.
5. In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan pronounced the flight of the bumblebee to be
aerodynamically impossible
Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a
meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in.
1. As India looks to increase the number of cities, our urban planning must factor in potential natural
disasters and work out contingencies in advance.
2. Authorities must revise data and upgrade infrastructure and mitigation plans even if their local area
hasn’t been visited by a natural calamity yet.
3. Extreme temperatures, droughts, and forest fires have more than doubled since 1980.
4. There is no denying the fact that our baseline normal weather is changing.
5. It is no longer a question of whether we will be hit by nature’s fury but rather when.
1. Much has been recently discovered about the development of songs in birds.
2. Some species are restricted to a single song learned by all individuals, others have a range of
songs.
3. The most important auditory stimuli for the birds are the sounds of other birds.
4. For all bird species there is a prescribed path to development of the final song,
5. A bird begins with the subsong, passes through plastic song, until it achieves the species song.
1. Our smartphones can now track our diets, our biological cycles, even our digestive systems and
sleep-patterns.
2. Researchers have even coined a new term, “orthosomnia”, to describe the insomnia brought on
by paying too much attention to smartphones and sleep-tracking apps.
3. Sleep, nature’s soft nurse, is a blissful, untroubled state all too easily disturbed by earthly
worries or a guilty conscience.
4. The existence of a market for such apps is unsurprising: shift work, a long-hours culture and blue light
from screens have conspired to rob many of us of sufficient rest.
5. A new threat to a good night’s rest has emerged – smart-phones, with sleep-tracking apps.
Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a
meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in.
1. People who study children's language spend a lot of time watching how babies react to the speech they
hear around them.
2. They make films of adults and babies interacting, and examine them very carefully to see whether the
babies show any signs of understanding what the adults say.
3. They believe that babies begin to react to language from the very moment they are born.
4. Sometimes the signs are very subtle - slight movements of the baby's eyes or the head or the hands.
5. You'd never notice them if you were just sitting with the child, but by watching a recording over and
over, you can spot them.
1. Neuroscientists have just begun studying exercise's impact within brain cells — on the genes
themselves.
2. Even there, in the roots of our biology, they've found signs of the body's influence on the mind.
3. It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the
brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes.
4. In today's technology-driven, plasma-screened-in world, it's easy to forget that we are born movers
— animals, in fact — because we've engineered movement right out of our lives.
5. It's only in the past few years that neuroscientists have begun to describe these factors and how they
work, and each new discovery adds awe-inspiring depth to the picture
1. The water that made up ancient lakes and perhaps an ocean was lost.
2. Particles from the Sun collided with molecules in the atmosphere, knocking them into space or giving them
an electric charge that caused them to be swept away by the solar wind.
3. Most of the planet's remaining water is now frozen or buried, but clues over the past decade suggested
that some liquid water, a presumed necessity for life, might survive in underground aquifers.
4. Data from NASA's MAVEN orbiter show that solar storms stripped away most of Mars's once-thick
atmosphere.
5. A recent study reveals how Mars lost much of its early water, while another indicates that some liquid
water remains.
Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a
meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in.
1. Although we are born with the gift of language, research shows that we are surprisingly unskilled when it
comes to communicating with others
2. We must carefully orchestrate our speech if we want to achieve our goals and bring our dreams to
fruition.
3. We often choose our words without thought, oblivious of the emotional effects they can have on
others.
4. We talk more than we need to, ignoring the effect we are having on those listening to us.
5. We listen poorly, without realizing it, and we often fail to pay attention to the subtle meanings
conveyed by facial expressions, body gestures, and the tone and cadence of our voice.
1. Over the past fortnight, one of its finest champions managed to pull off a similar impression.
2. Wimbledon's greatest illusion is the sense of timelessness it evokes.
3. At 35 years and 342 days, Roger Federer became the oldest man to win the singles title in the Open Era
— a full 14 years after he first claimed the title as a scruffy, pony-tailed upstart.
4. Once he had survived the opening week, the second week witnessed the range of a rested Federer's
genius.
5. Given that his method isn't reliant on explosive athleticism or muscular ball-striking, both vulnerable
to decay, there is cause to believe that Federer will continue to enchant for a while longer.
1. Those geometric symbols and aerodynamic swooshes are more than just skin deep.
2. The Commonwealth Bank logo — a yellow diamond, with a black chunk sliced out in one corner
— is so recognisable that the bank doesn't even use its full name in its advertising.
3. It's not just logos with hidden shapes; sometimes brands will have meanings or stories within them that
are deliberately vague or lost in time, urging you to delve deeper to solve the riddle.
4. Graphic designers embed cryptic references because it adds a story to the brand; they want people to
spend more time with a brand and have that idea that they are an insider if they can understand the hidden
message.
5. But the CommBank logo has more to it than meets the eye, as squirrelled away in that diamond is the
Southern Cross constellation.
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