CAT 2002 VARC | Previous Year CAT Paper

Read the following passage and answer the questions.

Cells are the ultimate multitaskers: they can switch on genes and carry out their orders, talk to each other, divide in two and much more, all at the same time. But they couldn't do any of these tricks without a power source to generate movement. The inside of a cell bustles with more traffic than Delhi roads, and, like all vehicles, the cell's moving parts need engines. Physicists and biologists have looked “under the hood” of the cell - and laid out the nuts and bolts of molecular engines.

The ability of such engines to convert chemical energy into motion is the envy of nanotechnology researchers looking for ways to power molecule-sized devices. Medical researchers also want to understand how these engines work. Because these molecules are essential for cell division, scientists hope to shut down the rampant growth of cancer cells by deactivating certain motors. Improving motor-driven transport in nerve cells may also be helpful for treating diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

We wouldn't make it far in life without motor proteins. Our muscles wouldn’t contract. We couldn't grow, because the growth process requires cells to duplicate their machinery and pull the copies apart. And our genes could be silent without the services of messenger RNA, which carries genetic instructions over to the cell’s protein-making factories. The movements that make these cellular activities possible occur along a complex network of threadlike fibers, or polymers, along which bundles of molecules travel like trams. The engines that power the cell’s freight are three families of proteins, called myosin, kinesin and dynein. For fuel, these proteins burn molecules of ATP, which cells make when they break down the carbohydrates and fats from the foods we eat. The energy from burning ATP causes changes in the proteins’ shape that allow them to heave themselves on the polymer track. The results are impressive: In one second, these molecules can travel between 50 and 100 times their own diameter. If a car with a 5- foot-wide engine were as efficient, it would travel 170 to 340 kmph.

Ronald Vale, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of California at San Francisco, and Ronald Milligan of the Scripps Research Institute have realized a long-awaited goal by reconstructing the process by which myosm and kinesm move, almost down to the atom. The dynein motor, on the other hand, is still poorly understood. Myosin molecules, best known for their role in muscle contraction, form chains that lie between filaments of another protein called actin. Each myosin molecule has a tiny head that pokes out from the chain like oars from a canoe. Just as rowers propel their boat by stroking their oars through the water, the myosin molecules stick their heads into the actin and hoist themselves forward along the filament. While myosin moves along in short strokes, its cousin kinesin walks steadily along a different type of filament called a microtubule. Instead of using a projecting head as a lever, kinesin walks on two “legs.” Based on these differences, researchers used to think that myosin and kinesin were virtually unrelated. But newly discovered similarities in the motors’ ATP-processing machinery now suggest that they share a common ancestor -molecule. At this point, scientists can only speculate as to what type of primitive cell-like structure this ancestor occupied as learned to burn ATP and use the energy to change shape. “We'll never really know, because we can't dig up the mains of ancient proteins, but that was probably a big evolutionary leap,” says Vale.

On a slightly larger scale, loner cells like sperm or infectious bacteria are prime movers that resolutely push their way through to other cells. As L. Mahadevan and Paul Matsudaira of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explain, the engines in this case are springs or ratchets that are clusters of molecules, rather than single proteins like myosin and kinesin. Researchers don’t yet fully understand these engines fueling process or the details of how they move, but the result is a force to be reckoned with. For example, one such engine is a spring like stalk connecting a single-celled organism called a vorticellid to the leaf fragment it calls home. When exposed to calcium, the spring contracts, yanking the vorticellid down at speeds approaching 3 inches (8 centimeters) per second.

Springs like this are coiled bundles of filaments that expand or contract in response to chemical cues. A wave of positively charged calcium ions, for example, neutralizes the negative charges that keep the filaments extended. Some sperm use spring like engines made of actin filaments to shoot out a barb that penetrates the layers that surround an egg. And certain viruses use a similar apparatus to shoot their DNA into the host’s cell. Ratchets are also useful for moving whole cells, including some other sperm and pathogens. These engines are filaments that simply grow at one end, attracting chemical building blocks from nearby. Because the other end is anchored in its place, the growing end pushes against any barrier that gets in its way.

Both springs and ratchets are made up of small units that each move just slightly, but collectively produce a powerful movement. Ultimately, Mahadevan and Matsudaira hope to better understand just how these particles create an effect that seems to be so much more than the sum of its parts. Might such an understanding provide an inspiration for ways to power artificial nano-sized devices in the future? “The short answer is absolutely,” says Mahadevan. “Biology has had a lot more time to evolve enormous richness in design for different organisms; Hopefully, studying these structures will not only improve our understanding of the biological world, it will also enable us to copy them, take apart their components and re-create them for other purposes.

Read the following passage and answer the questions.

There are a seemingly endless variety of laws, restrictions, customs and traditions that affect the practice of abortion around the world. Globally, abortion is probably the single most controversial issue in the whole area of women's rights and family matters. It is an issue that inflames women's right groups, religious institutions, and the self-proclaimed “guardians” of public morality. The growing worldwide belief is that the right to control one’s fertility is a basic human right. This has resulted in a worldwide trend towards liberalization of abortion laws. Forty percent of the world’s population live in countries where induced abortion is permitted on request. An additional 25 percent live in countries where it is allowed if the women's life would be endangered if she were to go ahead with her pregnancy. The estimate is that between 26 and 31 million legal abortions were performed in 1987. However, there were also between 10 and 22 million illegal abortions performed in that year.

Feminists have viewed the patriarchal control of women’s bodies as one of the prime issues facing the contemporary women's movement. They observe that the definition and control of women's reproductive freedom have always been the province of men. Patriarchal religion, as manifest in Islamic fundamentalism, traditionalist Hindu practice, orthodox Judaism, and Roman Catholicism, has been an important historical contributory factor for this and continues to be an important presence in contemporary societies. In recent times, governments, usually controlled by men, have “given” women the right to contraceptive use and abortion access, when their countries were perceived to have an overpopulation problem. When these countries are perceived to be under populated, that right has been absent. Until the nineteenth century, a woman’s rights to an abortion followed English common law; it could only be legally challenged if there was a "quickening", when the first movements of the foetus could be felt. In 1800, drugs to induce abortions were widely advertised in local newspapers. By 1900, abortion was banned in every state except to save the life of the mother. The change was strongly influenced by the medical profession, which focused its campaign ostensibly on health and safety issues for pregnant women and the sanctity of life. Its position was also a means of control of non-licensed medical practitioners such as midwives and women healers who practiced abortion.

The anti-abortion campaign was also influenced by political considerations. The large influx of eastern and southern European immigrants with their large families was seen as a threat to the population balance of the future United States. Middle and Upper class Protestants were advocates of abortion as a form of birth control. By supporting abortion prohibitions the hope was that these Americans would have more children and thus prevent the tide of immigrant babies from overwhelming the demographic characteristics of Protestant America. The anti-abortion legislative position remained in effect in the United States through the first sixty-five years of the twentieth century. In the early 1960s, even when it was widely known that the drug thalidomide taken during pregnancy to alleviate anxiety was shown to contribute to the formation of deformed “flipper-like” hands or legs of children, abortion was illegal in the United States. A second health tragedy was the severe outbreak of rubet during the same time period, which also resulted in major birth defects. These tragedies combined with a change of attitude towards a woman's right to privacy lead a number of states to pass abortion-permitting legislation.

On one side of the controversy are those who call themselves “pro-life”. They view the foetus as a human life rather than as an unformed complex of cells; therefore, they hold to the belief that abortion is essentially murder of an unborn child. These groups cite both legal and religious reasons for their opposition to abortion. Pro-life!! point to the rise in legalized abortion figures and see this as morally intolerable. On the other side of the issue all those who call themselves “pro-choice”, they believe that women, not legislators or judges, should have the right to decide whether and under what circumstances they will bear children. Pro-choicers are of the opinion that law will not prevent women from having abortions and cite the horror stories of the past when many women died in the hands of “backroom” abortionists and in desperate attempts to self-abort. They also observe that legalizing abortion is especially important for rape victims and incest victims who became pregnant. They stress physical and mental health reasons why women should not have unwanted children.

To get a better understanding of the current abortion controversy, let us examine a very important work by Krist Luker titled Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Luker argues that female pro-choice and pro-life activists hold different world views regarding gender, sex, and the meaning of parenthood. Moral positions on abortion are seen to be tied intimately to views on sexual behaviour, the care of children, family life, technology, and the importance of the individual. Luker identifies “pro-choice” women, as educated, affluent, and liberal. The contrasting counterparts, “pro-life” women, support traditional concepts of women as wives and mothers. It would be instructive to sketch out the differences in the world views of these two sets of women. Luker examines California, with its liberalized abortion law, as a case history. Public documents and newspaper accounts over a twenty-year period were analyzed and over 200 interviews were held with both pro-life and pro-choice activists.

Luker found that pro-life and pro-choice activists have intrinsically different views with respect to gender. Pro-life women have a notion of public and private life. The proper place for men is in the public sphere of work; for women, it is the private sphere of the home. Men benefit through the nurturance of women; women benefit through the protection of men. Children are seen to be the ultimate beneficiaries of this arrangement by having the mother as a full-time loving parent and by having clear role models. “Prochoice” advocates reject the view of separate spheres. They object to the notion of the home being the “women's sphere”. Women's reproductive and family roles are seen as potential barriers to full equality. Motherhood is seen as a voluntary, not a mandatory of “natural” role.

In summarizing her findings, Luker believes that women become activists in either of the two movements as the end result of lives that center around different conceptualizations of motherhood. Their beliefs and values are rooted to the concrete circumstances of their lives, their educations, incomes, occupations, and the different marital and family choices that they have made. They represent two different world views of women’s roles in contemporary society and as such the abortion issues represents the battleground for the justification of the respective views.

Read the following passage and answer the questions.

The production of histories of India has become very frequent in recent years and may well call for some explanation. Why so many and why this one in particular? The reason is a twofold one: changes in the Indian scene requiring a re-interpretation of the facts and changes in attitudes of historians about the essential elements of Indian history. These two considerations are in addition to the normal fact of fresh information, whether in the form of archeological discoveries throwing fresh light on an obscure period or culture, or the revelations caused by the opening of archives or the release of private papers. The changes in the Indian scene are too obvious to need emphasis. Only two generations ago British rule seemed to most Indian as well as British observers likely to extend into an indefinite future. Now there is a teenage generation which knows nothing of it. Changes in the attitudes of historians have occurred everywhere, changes in attitudes to the content of the subject as well as to particular countries, but in India there have been some special features. Prior to the British, Indian historiographers were mostly Muslims, who relied, as in the case of Sayyid Chulam Hussain, on their own recollection of events and on information from friends and men of affairs. Only a few like Abdul Fazl had access to official papers. These were personal narratives of events, varying in value with the nature of the writer. The early British writers were officials. In the eighteenth century they were concerned with some aspect of Company policy, or, like Robert Orme in his Military Transactions, gave a straight narrative in what was essentially a continuation of the Muslim tradition. In the early nineteenth century the writers were still, with two notable exceptions, officials, but they were now engaged in chronicling, in varying moods of zest, pride, and awe, the rise of the British power in India to supremacy. The two exceptions were James Mill, with his critical attitude to the Company and John Marchman, the Baptist missionary. But they, like the officials, were Anglo-centric in their attitude, so that the history of modern India in their hands came to be the history of the rise of the British in India.

The official school dominated the writing of Indian history until we get the first professional historian's approach Ramsay Muir and P.E. Roberts in England and H.H. Dodwell in India. Then Indian historians trained in the English school joined in, of whom the most distinguished was Sir Jadunath Sarkar and the other notable writers Surendranath Sen, Dr. Radhakumud Mukerji, and professor Nilakanta Sastri. They it may be said, restored India to Indian history, but their bias was mainly political. Finally have come the nationalists who range from those who can find nothing good or true in the British to sophisticated historical philosophers like K.M. Panikker.

Along with types of historians with their varying bias have gone changes in the attitude to the content of Indian history. Here Indian historians have been influenced both by their local situation and by changes of thought elsewhere. It is in this field that this work can claim some attention since it seeks to break new ground, or perhaps it deepens a freshly turned furrow in the field of Indian history. The early official historians were content with the glamour and drama of political history from Plassey to the Mutiny, from Duplex to the Sikhs. But when the Raj was settled down, glamour departed from politics, and they turned to the less glorious but more solid ground of administration. Not how India was conquered but how it was governed was the theme of this school of historians. It found its archpriest in H.H. Dodwell, its priestess in Dame Lilian Penson, and its chief shrine in the Volume V of the Cambridge History of India. Meanwhile in Britain other currents were moving, which led historical study into the economic and social fields. R.C. Dutt entered the first of these currents with his Economic History of India to be followed more recently by the whole group of Indian economic historians. W.E. Moreland extended these studies to the Mughal Period. Social history is now being increasingly studied and there is also of course school of nationalist historians who see modern Indian history in terms of the rise and the fulfillment of the national movement.

All these approaches have value, but all share in the quality of being compartmental. It is enough to remove political history from its pedestal of being the only kind of history worth having if it is merely to put other types of history in its place. Too exclusive an attention to economic, social, or administrative history can be as sterile and misleading as too much concentration on politics. A whole subject needs a whole treatment for understanding. A historian must dissect his subject into its elements and then fuse them together again into an integrated whole. The true history of a country must contain all the features just cited but must present them as parts of a single consistent theme.

Read the following passage and answer the questions.

If translated into English, most of the ways economists talk among themselves would sound plausible enough to poets, journalists, businesspeople, and other thoughtful though non economical folk. Like serious talk anywhere-among boat designers and baseball fans, say -the talk is hard to follow when one has not made a habit of listening to it for a while. The culture of the conversation makes the words arcane. But the people in the unfamiliar conversation are not Martians. Underneath it all (the economist's favorite phrase) conversational habits are similar. Economics uses mathematical models and statistical tests and market arguments, all of which look alien to the literary eye. But looked at closely they are not so alien. They may be seen as figures of speech- metaphors, analogies, and appeals to authority.

Figures of speech are not mere frills. They think for us. Someone who thinks of a market as an “invisible hand” and the organization of work as a “production function” and his coefficients as being “significant,” as an economist does is giving the language a lot of responsibility. It seems a good idea to look hard at his language.

If the economic conversation were found to depend a lot on its verbal forms, this would not mean that economics would be not a science, or just a matter of opinion, or some sort of confidence game. Good poets, though not scientists, are serious thinkers about symbols; good historians, though not scientists, are serious thinkers about data. Good scientists also use language. What is more (though it remains to be shown) they use the cunning of language, without particularly meaning to. The language used is a social object, and using language is a social act. It requires cunning (or, if you prefer, consideration), attention to the other minds present when one speaks.

The paying of attention to one's audience is called “rhetoric,” a word that I later exercise hard. One uses rhetoric, of course, to warn of a fire in a theatre or to arouse the xenophobia of the electorate. This sort of yelling is the vulgar meaning of the word, like the president's “heated rhetoric” in a press conference or the “mere rhetoric” to which our enemies stoop. Since the Greek flame was lit, though, the word has been used also in a broader and more amiable sense, to mean the study of all the ways of accomplishing things with language inciting a mob to lynch the accused, to be sure, but also persuading readers of a novel that its characters breathe, or bringing scholars to accept the better argument and reject the worse.

The question is whether the scholar- who usually fancies himself an announcer of “results” or a stater of “conclusions” free of rhetoric -speaks rhetorically. Does he try to persuade? It would seem so. Language, I just said, is not a solitary accomplishment. The scholar doesn’t speak into the void, or to himself. He speaks to a community of voices. He desires to be heeded, praised, published, imitated, honored, en-nobeled. These are the desires. The devices of language are the means.

Rhetoric is the proportioning of means to desires in speech. Rhetoric is an economics of language, the study of how scarce means are allocated to the insatiable desires of people to be heard. It seems on the face of it, a reasonable hypothesis that economists are like other people in being talkers, who desire listeners that they go to the library or the laboratory as much as when they go to the office on the polls. The purpose here is to see if this is true, and to see if it is useful to study the rhetoric of economic scholarship.

The subject is scholarship. It is not the economy, or the adequacy of economic theory as a description of the economy, or even mainly the economist’s role in the economy. The subject is the conversation economists have among themselves, for purposes of persuading each other that the interest elasticity of demand for investment is zero or that the money supply is controlled by the Federal Reserve.

Unfortunately, though, the conclusions are of more than academic interest. The conversations of classicists or of astronomers rarely affect the lives of other people. Those of economists do so on a large scale. A well known joke describes a May Day parade through Red Square with the usual mass of soldiers, guided missiles, rocket launchers. At last come rank upon rank of people in gray business suits. A bystander asks, “Who are those?” “Aha!” comes the reply, “those are economists: you have no idea what damage they can do!” Their conversations do it.

Read the following passage and answer the questions.

The conceptions of life and the world which we call ‘philosophical’ are a product of two factors: one, inherited religious and ethical conceptions; the other, the sort of investigation which may be called ‘scientific’, using this word in its broadest sense. Individual philosophers have differed widely in regard to the proportions in which these two factors entered into their systems, but it is the presence of both, in some degree, that characterizes philosophy.

Philosophy' is a word which has been used in many ways, some wider, some narrower. I propose to use it in a very wide sense, which I will now try to explain.

Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge-so I should contend-belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a ‘No man's Land’, exposed to attack from both sides; this ‘No Man's Land’ is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries. Is the world divided into mind and matter, and if so, what is mind and what is matter? Is mind subject to matter, or is it possessed of independent powers? Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards some goal? Are there really laws of nature, or do we believe in them only because of our innate love of power? Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of carbon and water impotently crawling on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both at once? Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile? If there is a way of living that is noble, in what does it consist, and how shall we achieve it? Must the good be eternal in order to deserve to be valued, or is it worth seeking even if the universe is inexorably moving towards death? Is there such a thing as wisdom, or is what seems such merely the ultimate refinement of folly? To such questions no answer can be found in the laboratory. Theologies have professed to give answers, all to definite; but their definiteness causes “modern minds to view them with suspicion. The studying of these questions, if not the answering of them, is the business of philosophy.

Why, then, you may ask, waste time on such insoluble problems? To this one may answer as a historian, or as an individual facing the terror of cosmic loneliness.

The answer of the historian, in so far as I am capable of giving it, will appear in the course of this work. Ever since men became capable of free speculation, their actions in innumerable important respects, have depended upon their theories as to the world and human life, as to what is good and what is evil. This is as true in the present day as at any former time. To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers. There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men’s lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances.

There is also, however, a more personal answer. Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we may become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other band, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge, where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

Fill the gaps in the passage below with the most appropriate word from the options given for each gap. The right words are the ones used by the author. Be guided by the author's overall style and meaning when you choose the answers.

Von Neumann and Morgenstern assume a decision framework in which all options are thoroughly considered, each option being independent of the others, with a numerical value derived for the utility of each possible outcome (these outcomes reflecting, in turn, all possible combinations of choices). The decision is then made to maximize the expected utility.

_______1______ such a model reflects major simplifications of the way decisions are made in the real world. Humans are not able to process information as quickly and effectively as the model assumes; they tend not to think ______2_______ as easily as the model calls for; they often deal with a particular option without really assessing its ______3_______ and when they do assess alternatives, they may be externally nebulous about their criteria of evaluation.

Fill the gaps in the passage below with the most appropriate word from the options given for each gap. The right words are the ones used by the author. Be guided by the author's overall style and meaning when you choose the answers.

In a large company, ______1______ people is about as common as using a gun or a switch-blade to ______2_______ an argument. As a result, most managers have little or no experience of firing people, and they find it emotionally automatic, as result, they often delay the act interminably, much as an unhappy spouse will prolong a bad marriage. And when the firing is done, it's often done clumsily, with far worse side effects than are necessary.

Do the world-class software organizations have a different way of firing people? No. But they do the deed swiftly, humanely, and professionally.

The key point here is to view the fired employee as a "failed product" and to ask how the process ______3_______ such a phenomenon in the first place.