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CAT -English Aptitude Questions
These General Aptitude Questions are helpful in all upcoming CAT examination
Directions for questions 1 to 4: Each of the following questions has a sentence with two blanks. Given below each question are five pairs of words. Choose the pair that best completes the sentence.
1. The genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, apart from being mis-described in the most sinister and-washing rhetoric, on something dark and interior to ___________ and perpetrators alike.
(1) innovative; communicator
(2) enchanting; leaders
(3) disingenuous; victims
(4) exigent; exploiters
(5) tragic; sufferers
Ans:3
2. As navigators, calendar makers, and other_________ of the night sky accumulated evidence to the contrary, ancient astronomers were forced to _________ that certain bodies might move in circles about
points, which in turn moved in circles about the earth.
(1) scrutinizers; believe
(2) observers; agree
(3) scrutinizers; suggest
(4) observers; concede
(5) students; conclude
Ans:4
3. Every human being, after the first few days of his life, is a product of two factors; on the one hand, there is his ______________endowment; and on the other hand, there is the effect of environment, including ___________.
(1) constitutional; weather
(2) congenital; education
(3) personal; climate
(4) economic; learning
(5) genetic; pedagogy
Ans:2
4. minds by central __________ of education and propaganda are some of the major evils which appear to be on the increase as a result of the impact of science upon minds suited by _________ to an earlier kind
of world.
(1) tenets; fixation
(2) aspects; inhibitions
(3) institutions; inhibitions
(4) organs; tradition
(5) departments; repulsion
Ans:1
Directions for questions 5 to 8: Each of the following questions has a paragraph from which the last sentence has been deleted. From the given options, choose the sentence that completes the paragraph in the most appropriate way.
5.Most people at their first consultation take a furtive look at the surgeonâs hands in the hope of reassurance.. Prospective patients look for delicacy, sensitivity, steadiness, perhaps unblemished pallor. On this basis, Henry Perowne loses a number of cases each year. Generally, he knows happen before the patient does: the downward glance repeated, the prepared questions beginning to falter, the overemphatic thanks during the retreat to the door.
(1) Other people do not communicate due to their poor observation.
(2) Other patients do
(3) But Perowne himself is not concerned.
(4) But others will take their place, he thought.
(5) These hands are steady enough, but they are large.
Ans:3
6.Trade protectionism, disguised as concern for the climate, is raising its head. Citing competitiveness concerns, powerful industrialized countries are holding out threats of a levy on imports of energy- intensive products from developing countries that refuse to accept their demands. The actual source of
protectionist sentiment in the OECD countries is, of course, their current lackluster economic performance, combined with the challenges posed by he rapid economic rise of China and India in that order.
(1) Climate change is evoked to bring trade protectionism through the back door.
(2) OECD countries are taking refuge in climate change issues to erect trade barriers against these two countries.
(3) Climate change concerns have come as a convenient stick to beat the rising trade power of China and India.
(4) Defenders of the global economic status quo are posing as climate change champions.
(5) Today's climate change champions are the perpetrators of global economic inequity
Ans:4
7. Mattancherry is Indian jewry's most famous settlement. Its pretty streets of pastel colored house ,connected by first-floor passages and home to the last twelve saree-and-sarong-wearing, white-skinned Indian Jews are visited by thousands of tourists each year. Its synagogue, built in 1568, with a floor of
blue-and-white Chinese tiles, a carpet given by Haile Selassie and the frosty Yaheh selling tickets at the door, stands as an image of religious tolerance.
(1) Mattancherry represents, therefore, the perfect picture of peaceful co-existence.
(2) Indiaâs Jews have almost never suffered discrimination, except for European colonizers and each other.
(3) Jews in India were always tolerant.
(4) Religious tolerance has always been only a façade and nothing more.
(5) The pretty pastel streets are, thus, very popular with the tourists.
Ans:1
8. Given the cultural and intellectual interconnections, the question of what is âWesternâ and what is âEasternâ (or Indian) is often hard to decide, and the issue can be discussed only in more dialectical terms. The diagnosis of a thought as âpurely Westernâ or âpurely Indianâ can be very illusory.
(1) Thoughts are not the kind of things that can be easily categorized.
(2) Though âoccidentalismâ and âorientalismâ as dichotomous concepts have found many adherents.
(3) âEast is East and West is Westâ has been a discredited notion for a long time now.
(4) Compartmentalizing thoughts is often desirable.
(5) The origin of a thought is not the kind of thing to which âpurityâ happens easily.
Ans:5
Directions for Questions 9 to 13: The passage given below is followed by a set of five questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.
Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a
complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every
individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. For these reasons some cognitive scientists have described language as a psychological faculty, a mental
organ, a neural system, and a computational module. But I prefer the admittedly quaint term "instinct." It conveys the idea that people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin
webs. Web-spinning was not invented by some unsung spider genius and does not depend on having had the right education or on having an aptitude for architecture or the construction trades. Rather, spiders spin spider webs because they have spider brains, which give them the urge to spin and the competence to succeed. Although there are differences between webs and words, I will encourage you to see language in this way, for it helps to make sense of the phenomena we will explore.
Thinking of language as an instinct inverts the popular wisdom, especially as it has been passed down in the canon of the humanities and social sciences. Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general capacity to use -symbols: a three year old, we shall see, is a grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious iconography, traffic signs, and the other staples of the semiotics curriculum. Though language is a magnificent ability unique to Homo sapiens among living species, it does not call for sequestering the study of humans from the domain of biology, for a magnificent ability unique to a particular living species is far from unique in the animal kingdom. Some kinds of bats home in on flying insects using Doppler sonar. Some kinds of migratory birds navigate thousands of miles by calibrating the positions of the constellations against the time of day and year. In nature's talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale
Once you begin to look at language not as the ineffable essence of human uniqueness but as a biological adaption to communicate information, it is no longer as tempting to see language as an insidious shaper of thought, and, we shall see, it is not. Moreover, seeing language as one of nature's engineering marvels - an organ with "that perfection of structure and co-adaption which justly excites our admiration," in Darwin's words-give us a new respect for your ordinary Joe and the much-maligned English language (or any language). The complexity of language, birthright; it is not something that parents teach their children or something that must be elaborated in school er from time to more sophisticated than the thickest style manual or the most state-of-the-art computer language system, and the same applies to all healthy human beings, even the notorious syntax-fracturing professional athlete and the, you know, like, inarticulate teenage skateboarder. Finally, since language is the product of a well-engineered biological instinct, we shall see that it is not nutty barrel of monkeys that entertainer-columnists make it out to be.
9. According to the passage, which of the following does not stem from popular wisdom on language?
(1) Language is a cultural artifact.
(2) Language is a cultural invention.
(3) Language is learnt as we grow.
(4) Language is unique to Homo sapiens
(5) Language is a psychological faculty
Ans: 5
10.Which of the following can be used to replace the "spiders know how to spin webs" analogy as used by the author?
(1) A kitten learning to jump over a wall
(2) Bees collecting nectar
(3) A donkey carrying a load
(4) A horse running a Derby
(5) A pet dog protecting its owner's property
Ans:2
11.According to the passage, which of the following is unique to human beings?
(1) Ability to use symbols while communicating with one another.
(2) Ability to communicate with each other through voice modulation.
(3) Ability to communicate information to other members of the species.
(4) Ability to use sound as means of communication.
(5) All of the above
Ans:2
12. According to th passage, complexity od language cannot be taught by parents or at school to children because
(1) Children instinctively know language.
(2) children learn the language on their own.
(3) language is not amenable to teaching.
(4) children know language better their teachers or parents.
(5) children are born with the knowledge of semiotics.
Ans:1
13.which of the following best summarizes the passage?
(1) language is unique to Homo sapiens
(2) language is neither learnt nor taught.
(3) language is not a cultural invention or artifact as it is made out.
(4) language is instinctive ability of human beings.
(5) language is use of symbols unique to human beings.
Ans:4
Directions for Questions 14 to 18: The passage given below is followed by a set of five questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.
When I was little, children were bought two kinds of ice cream, sold from those white wagons with the canopies made of silvery metal: either the two-cent cone or the four-cent ice cream pie. The two-cent
cone was very small, in fact it could fit comfortably into a child's hand, and it was made by taking the ice cream from its container with a special scoop and piling it on the cone. Granny always suggested I eat
only a part of the cone, then throw away the pointed end, because it had been touched by the vendor's hand (though that was the best part, nice and crunchy, and it was regularly eaten in secret, after a
pretense of discarding it).
The four-cent pie was made by a special little machine, also silvery, which pressed two disks of sweet biscuit against a cylindrical section of ice cream. First you had to thrust your tongue into the gap
between the biscuits until it touched the central nucleus of ice cream; then, gradually, you ate the whole thing, the biscuit surfaces softening as they became soaked in creamy nectar. Granny had no advice to
give here: in theory the pies had been touched only by the machine; in practice, the vendor had held them against his hand while giving them to us, but it was impossible to isolate the contaminated area.
I was fascinated, however, by some of my peers, whose parents bought them not a four-cent pie but two two-cent cones. These privileged children advanced proudly with one cone in their right hand and one in their left; and expertly moving their head from side to side, they licked first one, then the other. This liturgy seemed to me so sumptuously enviable, that many times I asked to be allowed to celebrate it. In vain. My elders were inflexible: a four-cent ice, yes; but two two-cent ones, absolutely no.
As anyone can see, neither mathematics nor economy nor dietetics justified this refusal. Nor did hygiene, assuming that in due course the tips of both cones were discarded. The pathetic, and obviously
mendacious, justification was that a boy concerned with turning his eyes from one cone to the other was more inclined to stumble over stones, steps, or cracks in the pavement. I dimly sensed that there was
another secret justification, cruelly pedagogical, but I was unable to grasp it.
Today, citizen and victim of a consumer society, a civilization of excess and waste (which the society of the thirties was not),I realize that those dear and now departed elders were right. Two two-cent cones
instead of one at four cents did not signify squandering, economically speaking, but symbolically they surely did. It was for this precise reason, that I yearned for them: because two ice creams suggested
excess. And this was precisely why they were denied me: because they looked indecent, an insult to poverty, a display of fictitious privilege, a boast of wealth. Only spoiled children ate two cones at once,
those children who in fairy tales were rightly punished, as Pinocchio was when he rejected the skin and the stalk. And parents who encouraged this weakness, appropriate to little parvenus, were bringing up
their children in the foolish theater of "I'd like to but I can't." They were preparing them to turn up at tourist-class cheek-in with a fake Gucci bag bought from a street peddler on the beach at Rimini
Nowadays the moralist risks seeming at odds with morality, in a world where the consumer civilization now wants even adults to be spoiled, and promises them always something more, from the wristwatch
in the box of detergent to the bonus bangle sheathed, with the magazine it accompanies, in a plastic envelope. Like the parents of those ambidextrous gluttons I so envied, the consumer civilization
pretends to give more, but actually gives, for four cents, what is worth four cents. You will throw away the old transistor radio to purchase the new one, that boasts an alarm clock as well, but some
inexplicable defect in the mechanism will guarantee that the ratio lasts only a year. The new cheap car will have leather seats, double side mirror adjustable from inside, and a paneled dashboard, but it will
not last nearly so long as the glorious old Fiat 500, which, even when it broke down, could be started again with a kick
The morality of the old days made Spartans of us all, while today's mortality wants all of us to be sybarites.
14. which of the following cannot be inferred from the passage?
(1). today's society is more extravagant than the society of the 1930s
(2). the act of eating two ice cream cones is akin to a ceremonial process.
(3). elders rightly suggested that a boy turning eyes from one cone to other was more likely to fall.
(4). despite seeming to promise more, the consumer civilization gives away exactly what the thing is worth.
(5). the consumer civilization attempts to spoil children and adults alike.
Ans:3
15. In the passage, the phrase "little parvenus" refers to
(1). naughty midgets.
(2). old hags.
(3). arrogant people.
(4) young upstarts
(5) foolish kids.
Ans:4
16. The author pined for two cent cones instead of one four-cent pie because
(1). it made dietetic sense.
(2). it suggested intemperance.
(3). it was more fun.
(4). it had a visual appeal.
(5). he was a glutton.
Ans:2
17. what does the author mean by "nowadays the moralist risks seeming at odds with morality?
(1). the moralist of yesterday have become immoral today.
(2). the concept of morality has changed over the years.
(3). consumerism is amoral.
(4). the risks associated with immorality have gone up.
(5). the purist's view of morality is fast becoming popular.
Ans:2
18. According to the author, the justification for refusal to let him eat two cones was plausibly
(1). didactic.
(2). dietetic.
(3). dialectic
(4). diatonic.
(5). diastolic.
Ans:1
