CAT Reading Comprehension Questions with Answers; Common RC Themes, Full Length CAT RC Passages

Sample CAT Reading Comprehension Questions

Check a total of six questions divided across two CAT Reading Comprehension passages. You can download full CAT RC set PDF further below for practice.

Directions for Q1 to Q3: Reading Comprehension Passage - 1

Based on the passage given below to answer the following questions

Starting in 1957, Noam Chomsky proclaimed a new doctrine: Language, that most human of all attributes, was innate. The grammatical faculty was built into the infant brain, and your average 3-year-old was not a mere apprentice in the great enterprise of absorbing English from his or her parents, but a “linguistic genius.” Since this message was couched in terms of Chomskyan theoretical linguistics, in discourse so opaque that it was nearly incomprehensible even to some scholars, many people did not hear it.

Now, in a brilliant, witty and altogether satisfying book, Mr. Chomsky's colleague Steven Pinker has brought Mr. Chomsky's findings to everyman. In “The Language Instinct” he has gathered persuasive data from such diverse fields as cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology and speech therapy to make his points, and when he disagrees with Mr. Chomsky he tells you so.

For Mr. Chomsky and Mr. Pinker, somewhere in the human brain there is a complex set of neural circuits that have been programmed with “super-rules” (making up what Mr. Chomsky calls “universal grammar”), and that these rules are unconscious and instinctive. A half-century ago, this would have been pooh-poohed as a “black box” theory, since one could not actually pinpoint this grammatical faculty in a specific part of the brain, or describe its functioning. But now things are different. Neurosurgeons have now found that this “black box” is situated in and around Broca's area, on the left side of the forebrain.

Unlike Mr. Chomsky, Mr. Pinker firmly places the wiring of the brain for language within the framework of Darwinian natural selection and evolution. He effectively disposes of all claims that intelligent nonhuman primates like chimps have any abilities to learn and use language. It is not that chimps lack the vocal apparatus to speak; it is just that their brains are unable to produce or use grammar. On the other hand, the “language instinct,” when it first appeared among our most distant hominid ancestors, must have given them a selective reproductive advantage over their competitors (including the ancestral chimps). So according to Mr. Pinker, the roots of language must be in the genes, but there cannot be a “grammar gene” any more than there can be a gene for the heart or any other complex body structure. This proposition will undoubtedly raise the hackles of some behavioural psychologists and anthropologists, for it apparently contradicts the liberal idea that human behaviour may be changed for the better by improvements in culture and environment, and it might seem to invite the twin bugaboos of biological determinism and racism.

Yet Mr. Pinker stresses one point that should allay such fears. Even though there are 4,000 to 6,000 languages today, they are all sufficiently alike to be considered one language by an extraterrestrial observer. In other words, most of the diversity of the world's cultures, so beloved to anthropologists, is superficial and minor compared to the similarities. Racial differences are literally only “skin deep.” The fundamental unity of humanity is the theme of Mr. Chomsky's universal grammar, and of this exciting book.

Q1: On the basis of the information in the passage, Pinker and Chomsky may disagree with each other on which one of the following points?

A.  The Darwinian explanatory paradigm for language.

B.  The language instinct.

C.  The possibility of a universal grammar.

D.  The inborn language acquisition skills of humans.

Q2: According to the passage, all of the following are true about the language instinct EXCEPT that:

A. It confers an evolutionary reproductive advantage.

B. All intelligent primates are gifted with it.

C. Developments in neuroscience have increased its acceptance.

D. Not all intelligent primates are gifted with it.

Q3: From the passage, it can be inferred that all of the following are true about Pinker’s book, “The Language Instinct”, EXCEPT that Pinker:

A. Writes in a different style from Chomsky.

B. Disagrees with Chomsky on certain grounds.

C. Draws extensively from Chomsky’s propositions.

D. Draws from behavioural psychology theories.

Directions for Q4 to Q6: Reading Comprehension Passage - 2

Based on the passage given below to answer the following questions

As software improves, the people using it become less likely to sharpen their own know-how. Applications that offer lots of prompts and tips are often to blame; simpler, less solicitous programs push people harder to think, act and learn.

Ten years ago, information scientists at Utrecht University in the Netherlands had a group of people carry out complicated analytical and planning tasks using either rudimentary software that provided no assistance or sophisticated software that offered a great deal of aid. The researchers found that the people using the simple software developed better strategies, made fewer mistakes and developed a deeper aptitude for the work. The people using the more advanced software, meanwhile, would often “aimlessly click around” when confronted with a tricky problem. The supposedly helpful software actually short-circuited their thinking and learning.

[According to] philosopher Hubert Dreyfus . . . . our skills get sharper only through practice, when we use them regularly to overcome different sorts of difficult challenges. The goal of modern software, by contrast, is to ease our way through such challenges. Arduous, painstaking work is exactly what programmers are most eager to automate—after all, that is where the immediate efficiency gains tend to lie. In other words, a fundamental tension ripples between the interests of the people doing the automation and the interests of the people doing the work.

Nevertheless, automation’s scope continues to widen. With the rise of electronic health records, physicians increasingly rely on software templates to guide them through patient exams. The programs incorporate valuable checklists and alerts, but they also make medicine more routinized and formulaic—and distance doctors from their patients. . . . Harvard Medical School professor Beth Lown, in a 2012 journal article . . . warned that when doctors become “screen-driven,” following a computer’s prompts rather than “the patient’s narrative thread,” their thinking can become constricted. In the worst cases, they may miss important diagnostic signals. . . .

In a recent paper published in the journal Diagnosis, three medical researchers . . . examined the misdiagnosis of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to die of Ebola in the U.S., at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. They argue that the digital templates used by the hospital’s clinicians to record patient information probably helped to induce a kind of tunnel vision. “These highly constrained tools,” the researchers write, “are optimized for data capture but at the expense of sacrificing their utility for appropriate triage and diagnosis, leading users to miss the forest for the trees.” Medical software, they write, is no “replacement for basic history-taking, examination skills, and critical thinking.” . . .

There is an alternative. In “human-centered automation,” the talents of people take precedence. . . . In this model, software plays an essential but secondary role. It takes over routine functions that a human operator has already mastered, issues alerts when unexpected situations arise, provides fresh information that expands the operator’s perspective and counters the biases that often distort human thinking. The technology becomes the expert’s partner, not the expert’s replacement

Q4: It can be inferred that in the Utrecht University experiment, one group of people was “aimlessly clicking around” because

A. They were hoping that the software would help carry out the tasks.

B. They wanted to avoid making mistakes

C. They did not have the skill-set to address complicated tasks.

D. The other group was carrying out the tasks more efficiently.

Q5: In the context of the passage, all of the following can be considered examples of human centered automation EXCEPT:

A. Software that auto-completes text when the user writes an email.

B. Software that offers interpretations when requested by the human operator.

C. Medical software that provides optional feedback on the doctor’s analysis of the medical situation.

D.A smart-home system that changes the temperature as instructed by the resident.

Q6: From the passage, we can infer that the author is apprehensive about the use of sophisticated automation for all of the following reasons EXCEPT that:

A. It could mislead people.

B. It stunts the development of its users.

C. It stops users from exercising their minds.

D. Computers could replace humans.

Check below reading comprehension topics of CAT 2025 exam. In all the three slots, 2 passages were easy, 1 was medium and 2 were tough. In CAT RC, it is very important to be able to choose the right RC passages questions of which you can solve correctly.

Also Read: Types of Reading Comprehension topics is CAT

CAT RC dominates the VARC section with 14-16 questions on an average, every year. Given below is the weightage of Reading Comprehension in the last 5 years.

Read More:

• CAT exam syllabus - section wise
• CAT previous year question papers
• CAT exam pattern
• CAT mock test for practice

Cracking CAT RC is totally based on how fast and well you can read long passages and understand them. This is not a game of strong English, only. You will need to have a strategy.

• While reading the CAT passage, keep making notes jotting down key points
• Read sentences with break to understand each part and in entirety
• Practice CAT RC passages extensively from previous years’ CAT papers in a time bound manner
• Aim to spend not more than 5-6 minutes on one RC set
• If you find any question tough or confusing. Leave it. Don’t risk negative marking
• First give a cursory glance to all the given passages in the CAT question paper and choose the ones you think you can crack.

Also read:

• CAT score vs percentile calculation 
• CAT college predictor
• CAT percentile predictor

Check here a few Frequently Asked Questions on CAT VARC Preparation: