CAT 2023 VARC Slot 1 | Previous Year CAT Paper
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
For early postcolonial literature, the world of the novel was often the nation. Postcolonial novels were usually [concerned with] national questions. Sometimes the whole story of the novel was taken as an allegory of the nation, whether India or Tanzania. This was important for supporting anti-colonial nationalism, but could also be limiting – land-focused and inward-looking.
My new book “Writing Ocean Worlds” explores another kind of world of the novel: not the village or nation, but the Indian Ocean world. The book describes a set of novels in which the Indian Ocean is at the centre of the story. It focuses on the novelists Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Lindsey Collen and Joseph Conrad [who have] centred the Indian Ocean world in the majority of their novels. . . . Their work reveals a world that is outward-looking – full of movement, border-crossing and south-south interconnection. They are all very different – from colonially inclined (Conrad) to radically anti-capitalist (Collen), but together draw on and shape a wider sense of Indian Ocean space through themes, images, metaphors and language. This has the effect of remapping the world in the reader’s mind, as centred in the interconnected global south. . . .
The Indian Ocean world is a term used to describe the very long-lasting connections among the coasts of East Africa, the Arab coasts, and South and East Asia. These connections were made possible by the geography of the Indian Ocean. For much of history, travel by sea was much easier than by land, which meant that port cities very far apart were often more easily connected to each other than to much closer inland cities. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that what we now call globalisation first appeared in the Indian Ocean. This is the interconnected oceanic world referenced and produced by the novels in my book. . . .
For their part Ghosh, Gurnah, Collen and even Conrad reference a different set of histories and geographies than the ones most commonly found in fiction in English. Those [commonly found ones] are mostly centred in Europe or the US, assume a background of Christianity and whiteness, and mention places like Paris and New York. The novels in [my] book highlight instead a largely Islamic space, feature characters of colour and centralise the ports of Malindi, Mombasa, Aden, Java and Bombay. . . . It is a densely imagined, richly sensory image of a southern cosmopolitan culture which provides for an enlarged sense of place in the world.
This remapping is particularly powerful for the representation of Africa. In the fiction, sailors and travellers are not all European. . . . African, as well as Indian and Arab characters, are traders, nakhodas (dhow ship captains), runaways, villains, missionaries and activists. This does not mean that Indian Ocean Africa is romanticised. Migration is often a matter of force; travel is portrayed as abandonment rather than adventure, freedoms are kept from women and slavery is rife. What it does mean is that the African part of the Indian Ocean world plays an active role in its long, rich history and therefore in that of the wider world.
Which one of the following statements is not true about migration in the Indian Ocean world?
- A.
The Indian Ocean world’s migration networks connected the global north with the global south.
- B.
Geographical location rather than geographical proximity determined the choice of destination for migrants.
- C.
Migration in the Indian Ocean world was an ambivalent experience.
- D.
The Indian Ocean world’s migration networks were shaped by religious and commercial histories of the region.
Solution
Discuss
ReportAll of the following claims contribute to the “remapping” discussed by the passage, EXCEPT:
- A.
Indian Ocean novels have gone beyond the specifics of national concerns to explore rich regional pasts.
- B.
cosmopolitanism originated in the West and travelled to the East through globalisation.
- C.
the global south, as opposed to the global north, was the first centre of globalisation.
- D.
the world of early international trade and commerce was not the sole domain of white Europeans.
On the basis of the nature of the relationship between the items in each pair below, choose the odd pair out:
- A.
Indian Ocean world : Slavery
- B.
Postcolonial novels : Anti-colonial nationalism
- C.
Indian Ocean novels : Outward-looking
- D.
Postcolonial novels : Border-crossing
All of the following statements, if true, would weaken the passage’s claim about the relationship between mainstream English-language fiction and Indian Ocean novels EXCEPT:
- A.
most mainstream English-language novels have historically privileged the Christian, white, male experience of travel and adventure.
- B.
the depiction of Africa in most Indian Ocean novels is driven by an Orientalist imagination of its cultural crudeness.
- C.
the depiction of Africa in most Indian Ocean novels is driven by a postcolonial nostalgia for an idyllic past.
- D.
very few mainstream English-language novels have historically been set in American and European metropolitan centres.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
[Fifty] years after its publication in English [in 1972], and just a year since [Marshall] Sahlins himself died—we may ask: why did [his essay] “Original Affluent Society” have such an impact, and how has it fared since? . . . Sahlins’s principal argument was simple but counterintuitive: before being driven into marginal environments by colonial powers, hunter-gatherers, or foragers, were not engaged in a desperate struggle for meager survival. Quite the contrary, they satisfied their needs with far less work than people in agricultural and industrial societies, leaving them more time to use as they wished. Hunters, he quipped, keep bankers’ hours. Refusing to maximize, many were “more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game.” . . . The so-called Neolithic Revolution, rather than improving life, imposed a harsher work regime and set in motion the long history of growing inequality . . .
Moreover, foragers had other options. The contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who had long been surrounded by farmers, knew they had alternatives and rejected them. To Sahlins, this showed that foragers are not simply examples of human diversity or victimhood but something more profound: they demonstrated that societies make real choices. Culture, a way of living oriented around a distinctive set of values, manifests a fundamental principle of collective self-determination. . . .
But the point [of the essay] is not so much the empirical validity of the data—the real interest for most readers, after all, is not in foragers either today or in the Paleolithic—but rather its conceptual challenge to contemporary economic life and bourgeois individualism. The empirical served a philosophical and political project, a thought experiment and stimulus to the imagination of possibilities.
With its title’s nod toward The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s famously skeptical portrait of America’s postwar prosperity and inequality, and dripping with New Left contempt for consumerism, “The Original Affluent Society” brought this critical perspective to bear on the contemporary world. It did so through the classic anthropological move of showing that radical alternatives to the readers’ lives really exist. If the capitalist world seeks wealth through ever greater material production to meet infinitely expansive desires, foraging societies follow “the Zen road to affluence”: not by getting more, but by wanting less. If it seems that foragers have been left behind by “progress,” this is due only to the ethnocentric self-congratulation of the West. Rather than accumulate material goods, these societies are guided by other values: leisure, mobility, and above all, freedom. . . .
Viewed in today’s context, of course, not every aspect of the essay has aged well. While acknowledging the violence of colonialism, racism, and dispossession, it does not thematize them as heavily as we might today. Rebuking evolutionary anthropologists for treating present-day foragers as “left behind” by progress, it too can succumb to the temptation to use them as proxies for the Paleolithic. Yet these characteristics should not distract us from appreciating Sahlins’s effort to show that if we want to conjure new possibilities, we need to learn about actually inhabitable worlds.
The author mentions Tanzania’s Hadza community to illustrate:
- A.
how two vastly different ways of living and working were able to coexist in proximity for centuries
- B.
that forager communities’ lifestyles derived not from ignorance about alternatives, but from their own choice.
- C.
that hunter-gatherer communities’ subsistence-level techniques equipped them to survive well into contemporary times.
- D.
how pre-agrarian societies did not hamper the emergence of more advanced agrarian practices in contiguous communities.
The author of the passage mentions Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society” to:
- A.
contrast the materialist nature of contemporary growth paths with the pacifist content ways of living among the foragers.
- B.
show how Sahlins’s views complemented Galbraith’s criticism of the consumerism and inequality of contemporary society.
- C.
show how Galbraith’s theories refute Sahlins’s thesis on the contentment of pre-hunter-gatherer communities.
- D.
document the influence of Galbraith’s cynical views on modern consumerism on Sahlins’s analysis of pre-historic societies.
The author of the passage criticises Sahlins’s essay for its:
- A.
cursory treatment of the effects of racism and colonialism on societies.
- B.
outdated values regarding present-day foragers versus ancient foraging communities.
- C.
critique of anthropologists who disparage the choices of foragers in today’s society.
- D.
failure to supplement its thesis with robust empirical data.
We can infer that Sahlins's main goal in writing his essay was to:
- A.
put forth the view that, despite egalitarian origins, economic progress brings greater inequality and social hierarchies.
- B.
counter Galbraith’s pessimistic view of the inevitability of a capitalist trajectory for economic growth.
- C.
highlight the fact that while we started off as a fairly contented egalitarian people, we have progressively degenerated into materialism.
- D.
hold a mirror to an acquisitive society, with examples of other communities that have chosen successfully to be non-materialistic.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
RESIDENTS of Lozère, a hilly department in southern France, recite complaints familiar to many rural corners of Europe. In remote hamlets and villages, with names such as Le Bacon and Le Bacon Vieux, mayors grumble about a lack of local schools, jobs, or phone and internet connections. Farmers of grazing animals add another concern: the return of wolves. Eradicated from France last century, the predators are gradually creeping back to more forests and hillsides. “The wolf must be taken in hand,” said an aspiring parliamentarian, Francis Palombi, when pressed by voters in an election campaign early this summer. Tourists enjoy visiting a wolf park in Lozère, but farmers fret over their livestock and their livelihoods. . . .
As early as the ninth century, the royal office of the Luparii—wolf-catchers—was created in France to tackle the predators. Those official hunters (and others) completed their job in the 1930s, when the last wolf disappeared from the mainland. Active hunting and improved technology such as rifles in the 19th century, plus the use of poison such as strychnine later on, caused the population collapse. But in the early 1990s the animals reappeared. They crossed the Alps from Italy, upsetting sheep farmers on the French side of the border. Wolves have since spread to areas such as Lozère, delighting environmentalists, who see the predators’ presence as a sign of wider ecological health. Farmers, who say the wolves cause the deaths of thousands of sheep and other grazing animals, are less cheerful. They grumble that green activists and politically correct urban types have allowed the return of an old enemy.
Various factors explain the changes of the past few decades. Rural depopulation is part of the story. In Lozère, for example, farming and a once-flourishing mining industry supported a population of over 140,000 residents in the mid-19th century. Today the department has fewer than 80,000 people, many in its towns. As humans withdraw, forests are expanding. In France, between 1990 and 2015, forest cover increased by an average of 102,000 hectares each year, as more fields were given over to trees. Now, nearly one-third of mainland France is covered by woodland of some sort. The decline of hunting as a sport also means more forests fall quiet. In the mid-to-late 20th century over 2m hunters regularly spent winter weekends tramping in woodland, seeking boars, birds and other prey. Today the Fédération Nationale des Chasseurs, the national body, claims 1.1m people hold hunting licences, though the number of active hunters is probably lower. The mostly protected status of the wolf in Europe—hunting them is now forbidden, other than when occasional culls are sanctioned by the state—plus the efforts of NGOs to track and count the animals, also contribute to the recovery of wolf populations.
As the lupine population of Europe spreads westwards, with occasional reports of wolves seen closer to urban areas, expect to hear of more clashes between farmers and those who celebrate the predators’ return. Farmers’ losses are real, but are not the only economic story. Tourist venues, such as parks where wolves are kept and the animals’ spread is discussed, also generate income and jobs in rural areas.
Which one of the following has NOT contributed to the growing wolf population in Lozère?
- A.
The granting of a protected status to wolves in Europe.
- B.
The shutting down of the royal office of the Luparii.
- C.
An increase in woodlands and forest cover in Lozère.
- D.
A decline in the rural population of Lozère.
The author presents a possible economic solution to an existing issue facing Lozère that takes into account the divergent and competing interests of:
- A.
environmentalists and politicians.
- B.
tourists and environmentalists.
- C.
farmers and environmentalists.
- D.
politicians and farmers.
Which one of the following statements, if true, would weaken the author’s claims?
- A.
The old mining sites of Lozère are now being used as grazing pastures for sheep.
- B.
Having migrated out in the last century, wolves are now returning to Lozère.
- C.
Unemployment concerns the residents of Lozère.
- D.
Wolf attacks on tourists in Lozère are on the rise.
The inhabitants of Lozère have to grapple with all of the following problems, EXCEPT:
- A.
decline in the number of hunting licences.
- B.
poor rural communication infrastructure.
- C.
livestock losses.
- D.
lack of educational facilities.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
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.
All of the following are advanced by the author as reasons why non-geographers disregard geographic influences on human phenomena EXCEPT their:
- A.
dismissal of explanations that involve geographical causes for human behaviour
- B.
belief in the central role of humans, unrelated to physical surroundings, in influencing phenomena.
- C.
lingering impressions of past geographic analyses that were politically offensive.
- D.
disciplinary training which typically does not include technical knowledge of geography.
All of the following can be inferred from the passage EXCEPT:
- A.
individual dictat and contingency were not the causal factors for the use of fur clothing in some very cold climates.
- B.
agricultural practices changed drastically in the Australian continent after it was colonised.
- C.
several academic studies of human phenomena in the past involved racist interpretations.
- D.
while most human phenomena result from culture and individual choice, some have bio-geographic origins.
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 labelling of geographic explanations as deterministic.
- C.
their outdated interpretations of past cultural and historical phenomena.
- D.
their rejection of the role of biogeographic factors in social and cultural phenomena.
The examples of the Inuit and Aboriginal Australians are offered in the passage to show:
- A.
human resourcefulness across cultures in adapting to their surroundings.
- B.
that despite geographical isolation, traditional societies were self-sufficient and adaptive.
- C.
how physical circumstances can dictate human behaviour and cultures.
- D.
how environmental factors lead to comparatively divergent paths in livelihoods and development.
here is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.
Sentence: The discovery helps to explain archeological similarities between the Paleolithic peoples of China, Japan, and the Americas.
Paragraph: The researchers also uncovered an unexpected genetic link between Native Americans and Japanese people. ___(1)___. During the deglaciation period, another group branched out from northern coastal China and travelled to Japan. ___(2)___. "We were surprised to find that this ancestral source also contributed to the Japanese gene pool, especially the indigenous Ainus," says Li. ___(3)___. They shared similarities in how they crafted stemmed projectile points for arrowheads and spears. ___(4)___. "This suggests that the Pleistocene connection among the Americas, China, and Japan was not confined to culture but also to genetics," says senior author Qing-Peng Kong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- A.
Option 3
- B.
Option 2
- C.
Option 1
- D.
Option 4
There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.
Sentence: This philosophical cut at one’s core beliefs, values, and way of life is difficult enough.
Paragraph: The experience of reading philosophy is often disquieting. When reading philosophy, the values around which one has heretofore organised one’s life may come to look provincial, flatly wrong, or even evil. ___(1)___. When beliefs previously held as truths are rendered implausible, new beliefs, values, and ways of living may be required. ___(2)___. What’s worse, philosophers admonish each other to remain unsutured until such time as a defensible new answer is revealed or constructed. Sometimes philosophical writing is even strictly critical in that it does not even attempt to provide an alternative after tearing down a cultural or conceptual citadel. ___(3)___. The reader of philosophy must be prepared for the possibility of this experience. While reading philosophy can help one clarify one’s values, and even make one self-conscious for the first time of the fact that there are good reasons for believing what one believes, it can also generate unremediated doubt that is difficult to live with. ___(4)___.
- A.
Option 1
- B.
Option 3
- C.
Option 4
- D.
Option 2
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.
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.
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.
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".
The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. What precisely are the “unusual elements” that make a particular case so attractive to a certain kind of audience?
2 . It might be a particularly savage or unfathomable level of depravity, very often it has something to do with the precise amount of mystery involved.
3. Unsolved, and perhaps unsolvable cases offer something that “ordinary” murder doesn’t.
4. Why are some crimes destined for perpetual re-examination and others locked into permanent obscurity?
The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. Algorithms hosted on the internet are accessed by many, so biases in AI models have resulted in much larger impact, adversely affecting far larger groups of people.
2. Though “algorithmic bias” is the popular term, the foundation of such bias is not in algorithms, but in the data; algorithms are not biased, data is, as algorithms merely reflect persistent patterns that are present in the training data.
3. Despite their widespread impact, it is relatively easier to fix AI biases than human-generated biases, as it is simpler to identify the former than to try to make people unlearn behaviors learnt over generations.
4. The impact of biased decisions made by humans is localised and geographically confined, but with the advent of AI, the impact of such decisions is spread over a much wider scale.
The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
Manipulating information was a feature of history long before modern journalism established rules of integrity. A record dates back to ancient Rome, when Antony met Cleopatra and his political enemy Octavian launched a smear campaign against him with “short, sharp slogans written upon coins.” The perpetrator became the first Roman Emperor and “fake news had allowed Octavian to hack the republican system once and for all”. But the 21st century has seen the weaponization of information on an unprecedented scale. Powerful new technology makes the fabrication of content simple, and social networks amplify falsehoods peddled by States, populist politicians, and dishonest corporate entities. The platforms have become fertile ground for computational propaganda, ‘trolling’ and ‘troll armies’.
- A.
Disinformation, which is mediated by technology today, is not new and has existed since ancient times.
- B.
People need to become critical of what they read, since historically, weaponization of information has led to corruption.
- C.
Octavian used fake news to manipulate people and attain power and influence, just as people do today.
- D.
Use of misinformation for attaining power, a practice that is as old as the Octavian era, is currently fueled by technology.
The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
Colonialism is not a modern phenomenon. World history is full of examples of one society gradually expanding by incorporating adjacent territory and settling its people on newly conquered territory. In the sixteenth century, colonialism changed decisively because of technological developments in navigation that began to connect more remote parts of the world. The modern European colonial project emerged when it became possible to move large numbers of people across the ocean and to maintain political control in spite of geographical dispersion. The term colonialism is used to describe the process of European settlement, violent dispossession and political domination over the rest of the world, including the Americas, Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia.
- A.
Colonialism surged in the 16th century due to advancements in navigation, enabling British settlements abroad and global dominance.
- B.
As a result of developments in navigation technology, European colonialism, led to the displacement of indigenous populations and global political changes in the 16th century.
- C.
Technological advancements in navigation in the 16th century, transformed colonialism, enabling Europeans to establish settlements and exert political dominance over distant regions.
- D.
Colonialism, conceptualized in the 16th century, allowed colonizers to expand their territories, establish settlements, and exercise political power.