This article is part of the ‘CAT 2016 Sprint Preparation Series’. We will be posting questions from previous year CAT papers, forums, mock tests, and other entrances that are on par with the level of difficulty you can expect in CAT 2016. We will be posting the solutions and traps/things to look at while solving similar questions so that you are avoid making silly mistakes during the test.

VARC | Set 3

CAT 2016 Sprint Preparation Series

Reading Comprehension

Passage 1:

Fifty feet away three male lions lay by the road. They didn’t appear to have a hair on their heads. Noting the colour of their noses (leonine noses darken as they age, from pink to black), Craig estimated that they were six years old—young adults. “This is wonderful!” he said, after staring at them for several moments. “This is what we came to see. They really are maneless.” Craig, a professor at the University of Minnesota, is arguably the leading expert on the majestic Serengeti lion, whose head is mantled in long, thick hair. He and Peyton West, a doctoral student who has been working with him in Tanzania, had never seen the Tsavo lions that live some 200 miles east of the Serengeti. The scientists had partly suspected that the maneless males were adolescents mistaken for adults by amateur observers. Now they knew better.

The Tsavo research expedition was mostly Peyton’s show. She had spent several years in Tanzania, compiling the data she needed to answer a question that ought to have been answered long ago: Why do lions have manes? It’s the only cat, wild or domestic, that displays such ornamentation. In Tsavo she was attacking the riddle from the opposite angle. Why do its lions not have manes? (Some “maneless” lions in Tsavo East do have partial manes, but they rarely attain the regal glory of the Serengeti lions’.) Does environmental adaptation account for the trait? Are the lions of Tsavo, as some people believe, a distinct subspecies of their Serengeti cousins?

The Serengeti lions have been under continuous observation for more than 35 years, beginning with George Schaller’s pioneering work in the 1960s. But the lions in Tsavo, Kenya’s oldest and largest protected ecosystem, have hardly been studied. Consequently, legends have grown up around them. Not only do they look different, according to the myths, they behave differently, displaying greater cunning and aggressiveness. “Remember too,” Kenya: The Rough Guide warns, “Tsavo’s lions have a reputation of ferocity.” Their fearsome image became well-known in 1898, when two males stalled construction of what is now Kenya railways by allegedly killing and eating 135 Indian and African labourers. A British Army officer in charge of building a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River, Lt. Col. J. H. Patterson, spent nine months pursuing the pair before he brought them to bay and killed them. Stuffed and mounted, they now glare at visitors to the Field Museum in Chicago. Patterson’s account of the leonine reign of terror, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, was an international best-seller when published in 1907. Still in print, the book has made Tsavo’s lions notorious. That annoys some scientists. “People don’t want to give up on mythology,” Dennis King told me one day. The zoologist has been working in Tsavo off and on for four years. “I am so sick of this man-eater business. Patterson made a helluva lot of money off that story, but Tsavo’s lions are no more likely to turn man-eater than lions from elsewhere.”

But tales of their savagery and wiliness don’t all come from sensationalist authors looking to make a buck. Tsavo lions are generally larger than lions elsewhere, enabling them to take down the predominant prey animal in Tsavo, the Cape buffalo, one of the strongest, most aggressive animals of Earth. The buffalo don’t give up easily: They often kill or severely injure an attacking lion, and a wounded lion might be more likely to turn to cattle and humans for food.

And other prey is less abundant in Tsavo than in other traditional lion haunts. A hungry lion is more likely to attack humans. Safari guides and Kenya Wildlife Service rangers tell of lions attacking Land Rovers, raiding camps, stalking tourists. Tsavo is a tough neighbourhood, they say, and it breeds tougher lions.

But are they really tougher? And if so, is there any connection between their manelessness and their ferocity? An intriguing hypothesis was advanced two years ago by Gnoske and Peterhans: Tsavo lions may be similar to the unmanned cave lions of the Pleistocene. The Serengeti variety is among the most evolved of the species— the latest model, so to speak—while certain morphological differences in Tsavo lions (bigger bodies, smaller skulls, and maybe even lack of a mane) suggest that they are closer to the primitive ancestor of all lions. Craig and Peyton had serious doubts about this idea, but admitted that Tsavo lions pose a mystery to science.

Q.1. The book Man-Eaters of Tsavo annoys some scientists because
(1) it revealed that Tsavo lions are ferocious.
(2) Patterson made a helluva lot of money from the book by sensationalism.
(3) it perpetuated the bad name Tsavo lions had.
(4) it narrated how two male Tsavo lions were killed.

Q.2. According to the passage, which of the following has NOT contributed to the popular image of Tsavo lions as savage creatures?
(1) Tsavo lions have been observed to bring down one of the strongest and most aggressive animals—the Cape buffalo.
(2) In contrast to the situation in traditional lion haunts, scarcity of non-buffalo prey in the Tsavo makes the Tsavo lions more aggressive.
(3) The Tsavo lion is considered to be less evolved than the Serengeti variety.
(4) Tsavo lions have been observed to attack vehicles as well as humans.

Q.3. The sentence which concludes the first paragraph, “Now they knew better”, implies that:
(1) The two scientists were struck by wonder on seeing maneless lions for the first time.
(2) Though Craig was an expert on the Serengeti lion, now he also knew about the Tsavo lions.
(3) Earlier, Craig and West thought that amateur observers had been mistaken.
(4) Craig was now able to confirm that darkening of the noses as lions aged applied to Tsavo lions as well.

Q.4. Which of the following, if true, would weaken the hypothesis advanced by Gnoske and Peterhans most?
(1) Craig and Peyton develop even more serious doubts about the idea that Tsavo lions are primitive.
(2) The maneless Tsavo East lions are shown to be closer to the cave lions.
(3) Pleistocene cave lions are shown to be far less violent than believed.
(4) The morphological variations in body and skull size between the cave and Tsavo lions are found to be insignificant.

 

Passage 2:

The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse. I was still too young to grasp that people of breeding were meant to affect innocence of this fundamental distinction. and that the same courtesy applied to any disparity that might rise out of religious. racial, sexual class, financial and (latterly) cultural difference. So in my innocence I would raise my hand every time the teacher asked a question, just to make it clear I knew the answer. After some months of this, the teacher and my classmates must have been vaguely aware I was a good student, but still I felt the compulsion to raise my hand. By now the teacher seldom called on me, preferring to give other children a chance to speak, too. Still my hand shot up without my even willing it, whether or not l knew the answer. If I was putting on airs, like someone who even in ordinary clothes, adds a gaudy piece of jewellery, it’s also true that I admired my teacher and was desperate to cooperate.

Another thing I was happy to discover at school was the teacher’s ‘authority’. At home, in the crowded and disordered Pamuk Apartments, things were never so clear; at our crowded table, everyone talked at the same time. Our domestic routines, our love for one another, our conversations, meals and radio hours; these ‘were never debated — they just happened. My father held little obvious authority at home, and he was often absent. He never scolded my brother or me, never even raised his eyebrows in disapproval. In later years, he would introduce us to his friends as ‘my two younger brothers’, and we felt he had earned the right to say so. My mother was the only authority I recognised at home. But she was hardly a distant or alien tyrant: her power came from my desire to be loved by her. And so – I was fascinated by the power my teacher wielded over her twenty-five pupils.

Perhaps I identified my teacher with my mother, for I had an insatiable desire for her approval. ‘Join your arms together like this and sit down quietly,’ she would say, and I would press my arms against my chest and sit patiently all through the lesson. But gradually the novelty wore off; soon it was no longer exciting to have every answer or solve an arithmetic problem ahead of everyone else or earn the highest mark; time began to flow with painful slowness, or stop flowing altogether.

Turning away from the fat, half-witted girl who was writing on the blackboard, who gave everyone — teachers, school caretakers and her classmates — the same vapid, trusting smile, my eyes would float to the window, to the upper branches of the chestnut tree that I could just see rising up between the apartment buildings. A crow would land on a branch. Because I was viewing it from below, I could see the little cloud floating behind it — as it moved, it kept changing shape: first a fox’s nose, then a head, then a dog. I didn’t want it to stop looking like a dog, but as it continued its journey it changed into one of the fourlegged silver sugar bowls from my grandmother??s always—locked display case, and I??d long to be at home. Once I??d conjured up the reassuring silence of the shadows of home, my father would step out from them, as if from a dream, and off we??d go on a family outing to the Bosphorus. Just then, a window in the apartment building opposite would , open, a maid would shake her duster and gaze absentmindedly at the street that I could not see from where I was sitting. What was going down there? I’d wonder. I’d hear a horse cart rolling over the cobblestones, and a rasping voice would cry out ‘Eskiciiiiiii! The maid would watch the junk dealer make his way down the street before pulling her head back inside and shutting the window behind her, but then, right next to that window, moving as fast as the first cloud but going in the opposite direction, I’d see a second cloud. But now my attention was called back to the classroom, and seeing all the other raised hands, I would eagerly raise my hand too: long before I worked out from my classmates’ responses what the teacher had asked us, I was foggily confident I had the answer.

It was exciting, though sometimes painful, to get to know my classmates as individuals, and to find out how different they were from me. There was that sad boy who, whenever he was asked to read out loud in Turkish class, would skip every other line; the poor boy’s mistake was as involuntary as the laughter it would elicit from the class. In first grade, there was a girl who kept her red hair in a ponytail, who sat next to me for a time. Although her bag was a slovenly jumble of half-eaten apples, simits, sesame seeds, pencils and hair bands, it always smelled of dried lavender around her, and that attracted me; I was also drawn to her for speaking so openly about the little taboos of daily life, and if I didn’t see her at the weekend, I missed her, though there was another girl so tiny and delicate that I was utterly entranced by her as well. Why did that boy keep on telling lies even knowing no one was going to believe him’? How could that girl be so indiscreet about the goings-on in her house? And could this other girl be shedding real tears as she read that poem about Ataturk?’

Just as I was in the habit of looking at the fronts of cars and seeing noses, so too did I like to scrutinise my classmates, looking for the creatures they resembled. The boy with the pointed nose was a fox and the big one next to him was, as everyone said, a bear, and the one with the thick hair was a hedgehog… I remember a Jewish girl called Mari telling us all about Passover — there were days when no one in her grandmother’s house was allowed to touch the light switches. Another girl reported that one evening, when she was in her room, she turned around so fast she glimpsed the shadow of an angel — a fearsome story that stayed with me. There was a girl with very long legs who wore very long socks and always looked as if she was about to cry; her father was a government minister and when he died in a plane crash from which Prime Minister Menederes emerged without a scratch, I was sure she’d been crying because she had known in advance what was going to happen. Lots of children had problems with their teeth; a few wore braces. On the top floor of the building that housed the lycée dormitory and the sports hall, just next to the infirmary, there was rumoured to be a dentist, and when teachers got angry they would often threaten to send naughty children there. For lesser infractions pupils were made to stand in the corner between the blackboard and the door with their backs to the class, sometimes one leg, but because we were all so curious to see how long someone could stand on one leg, the lessons suffered, so this particular punishment was rare.

1. The synonym for the term ‘vapid’ is
A. Lively
B. Original
C. Lacklustre
D. Spicy

2. Who is the least talked about character in this passage?
A. Mother
B. Classmates
C. Grandmother
D. Teacher

3. Which among the following cannot be concluded from this passage?
A. The author was a good student but sometimes felt bored in class
B. The author got along fairly well with his classmates
C. The author came from a very authoritarian home environment
D. The author had an imaginative mind

4. What did the teachers do when they get angry?
A. Sent the students to the infirmary
B. Denied them a chance to answer questions
C. Made them’ join their hands together and sit quietly
D. Threatened to send them to the dentist.

 

 

Verbal Ability

1. The 2001 census showed a sharp fall in the literacy rate compared to 1991, but an increase in the literacy rate by 2006 suggests that between 1991 and 2006 India progressed in terms of literacy rate.

Which of the following statements, if true, best refutes the above argument?

A. One of the causes of more literacy is the increased population growth rate.

B. Although there was no census in 2006 the information about the literacy rate is reliable.

C. Many of those who were illiterate in 2001 become literate by 2006.

D. The rate of fall in literacy rate between 1991 and 2001 was more than the rate of rise in literacy rate between 2001 and 2006.

E. The rise in literacy rate between 2001 and 2006 was due to persistent campaign on television and FM radio.

 

2. Read the sentences and choose the option that best arranges them in a logical order.

A. Some of these are tangible while others are not.

B. The micro factors look at brand building, product development, competition, pricing, decision making within organizations etc.

C. Another way to classify these factors is to distinguish which of them are macro in nature and which of them are micro.

D. The macro factors comprise government policies, state of the economy, changing demographics etc.

E. The factors influencing forecasts include social, technological, economic, political, religious, ethnic, governmental, and natural factors.

 

3. Choose the grammatically correct sentence from the options given below.

A. Surprisingly, given the recent labour problems in the factory, the factory manager has enjoyed considerable support from they who had previously challenged his leadership.

B. Surprisingly, given the recent labour problems in the factory, the factory manager has enjoyed considerable support from them who had previously challenged his leadership.

C. Surprisingly, given the recent labour problems in the factory, the factory manager has enjoyed considerable support from he who had previously challenged his leadership.

D. Surprisingly, given the recent labour problems in the factory, the factory manager has enjoyed considerable support from those who had previously challenged his leadership.

E. Surprisingly, given the recent labour problems in the factory, the factory manager has enjoyed considerable support from that who had previously challenged his leadership.

 

4. Ethologists, people who study animal behavior, have traditionally divided an organism’s actions into two categories: learned behavior (based on experience) and instinctive behavior (based on genotype). Some current scholars reject this distinction, claiming that all behavior is a predictable interaction of experience and genotype.

Which of the following, if true, most strengthens the arguments made in the sentence above?

A. All organisms with identical genotypes and identical experience sometimes respond differently in different situations.

B. All organisms with different genotypes and identical experience always respond identically in identical situations.

C. All organisms with similar genotypes and similar experience always respond differently in identical situations.

D. All organisms with identical genotypes and identical experience always respond identically in identical situations.

E. All organisms with identical genotypes and different experience always respond identically in identical situations.

 

5. Read the sentences and choose the option that best arranges them in a logical order.

A. In fact, it is considered as a dumping ground for unwanted people in quite a few organizations.

B. In many parts of the country, traditional castes such as Kothari, Kotwal, Bhandari and Bhandarkar have for generations been dealing in procuring, stocking, distributing goods and merchandise.

C. This is due to the fact that Indian traders have been trading with many parts of the world.

D. However, though the concept of warehousing has been prevalent for over 2000 years, the warehouse has not yet obtained due recognition in modern times.

E. The concept of warehousing or stores function is not new in India.

 

6. Not wanting to present an unwarranted optimistic picture in the board meeting, the CEO estimated the sales growth ________________.

The option that will best fill the blank in the above sentence would be:

A. strictly B. liberally C. fancifully D. pessimistically E. conservatively

 

Directions for questions 7 to 9: Each sentence has a part which is underlined. Beneath the sentence you will find four ways of phrasing the underlined part. Follow the requirements of the standard written English to choose your answer. Selection should make the sentence clear, exact and free of grammatical error. It should minimize awkwardness, ambiguity and redundancy.

 

7. Large and experienced firms are more efficient at acquiring smaller and distressed firms than are large and inexperienced firms, and converting them to profitable ventures.

A. Large and experienced firms are more efficient at acquiring smaller and distressed firms than large and inexperienced firms

B. Large and experienced firms are more efficient than large and inexperienced firms at acquiring smaller and distressed firms

C. Large and experienced firms, acquire smaller and distressed firms more efficiently than large and inexperienced firms

D. Large and experienced firms, more efficient than large and inexperienced firms at acquiring smaller and distressed firms

 

8. The economic growth increased from 7 to 9 per cent in November 2010, supporting the expectations that industrial growth rate in October-December quarter more than doubled that of the 4 per cent growth rate in industrial growth for the previous quarter.

A. that industrial growth in the October-December quarter more than doubled that of

B. of industrial growth in the October-December quarter, that it more than doubled

C. of industrial growth in the October-December quarter, that it would more than double that of

D. that industrial growth in October-December quarter would more than double

 

9. As a result of surging financial greed, the international rating agencies upgraded the rating of the credit derivative instruments, and hence analysts recommended a strong buy, ignoring the advice of Warren Buffett who warned that these instruments would prove not only dangerous but ineffective in the long run.

A. who warned that these instruments would prove to be both dangerous and

B. warning that these instruments would prove not only dangerous and also

C. warning that these instruments would prove itself to be both dangerous and

D. who was warning that these instruments would prove not only dangerous but

 

10. Select the correct sentence from the following.

A. The average male investor expects to see all his investment stocks moving up, and they are often disappointed.

B. The people in my country are smarter than in other countries.

C. The number of failures of product in final quality inspection are increasing every year.

D. Before restructuring a firm, the CEO must consider the employees.

 

The solutions will be posted at the end of the day. Stay tuned to the CAT 2016 Sprint Preparation Series! If you have any queries, post them in the discussion group and we will be happy to reply – CAT Discussion Group

You can go through the entire series by clicking on this link: CAT 2016 Sprint Preparation Series by Learningroots.

Solutions:

Reading Comprehension

1. 3. From paragraph 3

2. 3. From paragraph 4.

3. 3. The scientists initiallt thought that the observers were mistaken in the belief that the lions were maneless. Once the scientists saw the lions themselves, they realized that the observers were not mistaken.

4. 3. As per the hypothesis of Gnoske and Peterhans , Tsavo lions may be similar to the unmanned cave lions of the Pleistocene. But if the Pleistocene were not as violent as believed, then they can’t be similar to Tsavo lions.

5. C. Lively and spicy have the same connotation. Hence, we can eliminate those 2. Now look at the way in which vapid is used – 4th paragraph, 3rd line. The author says that the girl is half-witted and whenever she wrote on the blackboard, the author would turn his attention to other things. Clearly, lackluster is the best fit.

6. C.. Obvious from the passage.

7. C. The others can be concluded.

8. D. Direct from the passage.

Verbal Ability

1. D. If the rate of fall between 1991 and 2001 was greater than the rise between 2001 and 2006, then there would be a net fall not rise.

2. E-A-C-D-B

3. D

4. D. As per the last sentence of the passage.

5. E-C-B-D-A

6. E

7. A has improper word structure. Parallelism is faulty in C. Verb is missing in D.

8. D. Since we are referring to the future from the point of view of the past, we need the conditional tense i.e. ‘would’. Hence, A and B are incorrect. Also, the comparison is faulty in C.

9. B and D use the idiom ‘not only ….but also’ incorrectly. C has an incorrect pronoun ‘itself’. Hence, A is the answer.

10.  A has a pronoun error. B has faulty comparison. C has a subject-verb error.