Para Summary Questions for CAT with Solutions

Q 1: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries.

Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. McGurk and MacDonald (1976) reported a powerful multisensory illusion occurring with audio-visual speech. They recorded a voice articulating a consonant ‘ba-ba-ba’ and dubbed it with a face articulating another consonant ‘ga-ga-ga’. Even though the acoustic speech signal was well recognized alone, it was heard as another consonant after dubbing with incongruent visual speech i.e., ‘da-da-da’. The illusion, termed as the McGurk effect, has been replicated many times, and it has sparked an abundance of research. The reason for the great impact is that this is a striking demonstration of multisensory integration, where that auditory and visual information is merged into a unified, integrated percept.

Options:

1. When the auditory speech signal does not match the visual speech movements, the acoustic speech signal is confusing and integration of the two is imperfect.
2. When the quality of auditory information is poor, the visual information wins over the auditory information.
3. Visual speech mismatched with auditory speech can result in the perception of an entirely different message: this illusion is known as the McGurk effect.
4. The McGurk effect which is a demonstration of multisensory integration has been replicated many times.

Q 2: The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the author’s position.

To me, a ‘classic’ means precisely the opposite of what my predecessors understood: a work is classical by reason of its resistance to contemporaneity and supposed universality, by reason of its capacity to indicate human particularity and difference in that past epoch. The classic is not what tells me about shared humanity – or, more truthfully put, what lets me recognize myself as already present in the past, what nourishes in me the illusion that everything has been like me and has existed only to prepare the way for me. Instead, the classic is what gives access to radically different forms of human consciousness for any given generation of readers, and thereby expands for them the range of possibilities of what it means to be a human being.

Options:

1. A classic is able to focus on the contemporary human condition and a unified experience of human consciousness.
2. A classical work seeks to resist particularity and temporal difference even as it focuses on a common humanity.
3. A classic is a work exploring the new, going beyond the universal, the contemporary, and the notion of a unified human consciousness.
4. A classic is a work that provides access to a universal experience of the human race as opposed to radically different forms of human consciousness.

Note: These passages appeared in CAT 2021 and CAT 2017.