CAT 2023 Daily Practice Questions for 14 September

Question 1: The four sentences (labelled A, B, C, D) below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer:

A. But the attention of the layman, not surprisingly, has been captured by the atom bomb, although there is at least a chance that it may never be used again.
B. Of all the changes introduced by man into the household of nature, [controlled] large-scale nuclear fission is undoubtedly the most dangerous and most profound.
C. The danger to humanity created by the so-called peaceful uses of atomic energy may, however, be much greater.
D. The resultant ionizing radiation has become the most serious agent of pollution of the environment and the greatest threat to man’s survival on earth.

Question 2 : The four sentences (labelled A, B, C, D) below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer:

A. While you might think that you see or are aware of all the changes that happen in your immediate environment, there is simply too much information for your brain to fully process everything.
B. Psychologists use the term ‘change blindness’ to describe this tendency of people to be blind to changes though they are in the immediate environment.
C. It cannot be aware of every single thing that happens in the world around you.
D. Sometimes big shifts happen in front of your eyes and you are not at all aware of these changes.

Question 3 : The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. With the Treaty of Westphalia, the papacy had been confined to ecclesiastical functions, and the doctrine of sovereign equality reigned. What political theory could then explain the origin and justify the functions of secular political order? In his Leviathan, published in 1651, three years after the Peace of Westphalia, Thomas Hobbes provided such a theory. He imagined a “state of nature” in the past when the absence of authority produced a “war of all against all.” To escape such intolerable insecurity, he theorized, people delivered their rights to a sovereign power in return for the sovereign’s provision of security for all within the state’s border. The sovereign state’s monopoly on power was established as the only way to overcome the perpetual fear of violent death and war.

A. Thomas Hobbes theorized the voluntary surrender of rights by people as essential for emergence of sovereign states.
B. Thomas Hobbes theorized the emergence of sovereign states as a form of transactional governance to limit the power of the papacy.
C. Thomas Hobbes theorized the emergence of sovereign states based on a transactional relationship between people and sovereign state that was necessitated by a sense of insecurity of the people.
D. Thomas Hobbes theorized that sovereign states emerged out of people’s voluntary desire to overcome the sense of insecurity and establish the doctrine of sovereign equality.

Question 4 : The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

All humans make decisions based on one or a combination of two factors. This is either intuition or information. Decisions made through intuition are usually fast, people don’t even think about the problem. It is quite philosophical, meaning that someone who made a decision based on intuition will have difficulty explaining the reasoning behind it. The decision-maker would often utilize her senses in drawing conclusions, which again is based on some experience in the field of study. On the other side of the spectrum, we have decisions made based on information.

These decisions are rational — it is based on facts and figures, which unfortunately also means that it can be quite slow. The decision-maker would frequently use reports, analyses, and indicators to form her conclusion. This methodology results in accurate, quantifiable decisions, meaning that a person can clearly explain the rationale behind it.

A. While decisions based on intuition can be made fast, the reasons that led to these cannot be spelt out.
B. We make decisions based on intuition or information on the basis of the time available.
C. It is better to make decisions based on information because it is more accurate, and the rationale behind it can be explained.
D. Decisions based on intuition and information result in differential speed and ability to provide a rationale.

Question 5 : The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

The rural-urban continuum and the heterogeneity of urban settings pose an obvious challenge to identifying urban areas and measuring urbanization rates in a consistent way within and across countries. An objective methodology for distinguishing between urban and rural areas that is based on one or two metrics with fixed thresholds may not adequately capture the wide diversity of places. A richer combination of criteria would better describe the multifaceted nature of a city’s function and its environment, but the joint interpretation of these criteria may require an element of human judgment.

A. Distinguishing between urban and rural areas might call for some judgment on the objective methodology being used to define a city’s functions.
B. The difficulty of accurately identifying urban areas means that we need to create a rich combination of criteria that can be applied to all urban areas.
C. Current methodologies used to define urban and rural areas are no longer relevant to our being able to study trends in urbanisation.
D. With the diversity of urban landscapes, measurable criteria for defining urban areas may need to be supplemented with human judgment.