CAT 2023 Slot 1 VARC Question Paper with Solution: PDF Download

DIRECTIONS for the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

Question

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". 

Answer:- 3 

DIRECTIONS for the question: Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

Question

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.

Answer:- 2

DIRECTIONS for the question: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.

Many human phenomena and characteristics - such as behaviors, beliefs, economies, genes, incomes, life expectancies, and other things - are influenced both by geographic factors and by non-geographic factors. Geographic factors mean physical and biological factors tied to geographic location, including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal species, soils, and topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under the term culture, other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual people. . . . [T]he differences between the current economies of North and South Korea cannot be attributed to the modest environmental differences between [them] They are instead due entirely to the different [government] policies.....At the opposite extreme, the Inuit and other traditional peoples living north of the Arctic Circle developed warm fur clothes but no agriculture, while equatorial lowland peoples around the world never developed warm fur clothes but often did develop agriculture. The explanation is straightforwardly geographic, rather than a cultural or historical quirk unrelated to geography....... Aboriginal Australia remained the sole continent occupied only by hunter/gatherers and with no indigenous farming or herding [Here the] explanation is biogeographic: the Australian continent has no domesticable native animal species and few domesticable native plant species. Instead, the crops and domestic animals that now make Australia a food and wool exporter are all non-native (mainly Eurasian) species such as sheep, wheat, and grapes, brought to Australia by overseas colonists.

Today, no scholar would be silly enough to deny that culture, history, and individual choices play a big role in many human phenomena. Scholars don't react to cultural, historical, and individual-agent explanations by denouncing "cultural determinism," "historical determinism," or "individual determinism," and then thinking no further. But many scholars do react to any explanation invoking some geographic role, by denouncing "geographic determinism"...

Several reasons may underlie this widespread but nonsensical view. One reason is that some geographic explanations advanced a century ago were racist, thereby

 causing all geographic explanations to become tainted by racist associations in the minds of many scholars other than geographers. But many genetic, historical, psychological, and anthropological explanations advanced a century ago were also racist, yet the validity of newer non-racist genetic etc. explanations is widely accepted today.

Another reason for reflex rejection of geographic explanations is that historians have a tradition, in their discipline, of stressing the role of contingency (a favorite word among historians) based on individual decisions and chance. Often that view is warranted......But often, too, that view is unwarranted. The development of warm fur clothes among the Inuit living north of the Arctic Circle was not because one influential Inuit leader persuaded other Inuit in 1783 to adopt warm fur clothes, for no good environmental reason. A third reason is that geographic explanations usually depend on detailed technical facts of geography and other fields of scholarship ......Most historians and economists don't acquire that detailed knowledge as part of the professional training.

Question: All of the following can be inferred from the passage EXCEPT:

A) several academic studies of human phenomena in the past involved racist interpretations.

B) agricultural practices changed drastically in the Australian continent after it was colonised.

C) while most human phenomena result from culture and individual choice, some have bio-geographic origins.

D) individual dictat and contingency were not the causal factors for the use of fur clothing in some very cold climates. 

Answer:- C

Question: The author criticises scholars who are not geographers for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

A) the importance they place on the role of individual decisions when studying human phenomena.

B) their outdated interpretations of past cultural and historical phenomena.

C) their labelling of geographic explanations as deterministic.

D) their rejection of the role of biogeographic factors in social and cultural phenomena. 

Answer:- B

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