CAT Mock Test- 6 - CAT

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
It is very pleasant to entertain a new idea, a new notion or concept to think about and to look at the world with. Indeed, it can have the exciting and intoxicating feel of discovering hidden treasure.
Unfortunately, most ideas are bad - wrong, misleading, dangerous, or of very limited use or relevance. Even more unfortunately, that doesn't prevent them from gaining our interest and enthusiasm. The problem is that getting an idea is just a matter of understanding it (or thinking that you do) and this is just as easy in the case of bad ideas as it is for good ones. In contrast, checking the quality of ideas by interrogating the arguments for them is laborious and distinctly unrewarding - and so avoided as much as possible. The result is that the world is drowning in bad ideas and their dreadful consequences, from conspiracy theories to religions to academic bloopers like critical race theory.
The attraction of ideas is that they promise to help us make sense of the world. But we are too ready to accept ideas for what they seem to offer, without checking to see if the offer is real. Indeed they do allow us to see the world differently. But while that shift in perspective generates a feeling of insight, that is not in itself evidence that we are now seeing things as they truly are. We confuse the 'oomph' of intellectual novelty, that comes from seeing things differently, with actual significance or value (an entire industry called 'the news' also feasts on this cognitive bias). We allow ideas' psychological effects on us rather their logical qualities to determine how we receive them.
Unfortunately, given the way human minds work, bad ideas are more likely to have these attractive psychological effects than good ones. Consider the perennial attraction of conspiracy theories (and most religions), which offer an alternative simplified way of making sense of the strange and unwelcome things happening in the world by turning them into a meaningful story with ourselves at the centre. This has the benefit of reducing the cognitive burdens of understanding the world. In addition, the structure of these theories is distinctly flattering to believers: since the conspiracists are trying so hard to fool us, we must be important after all; since we can see through their ploys, we must be more powerful than we seemed.
But besides these well-known benefits, novelty plays a particularly significant role in the attractiveness of conspiracy theories and other kooky ideas. It is not merely comforting (a kind of intellectual junk food) but intellectually exciting to come to think that the world is run by Bill Gates or NASA or whoever. It makes you see everything from a fresh perspective, which makes all sorts of new connections and meanings jump out to you. This in turn gives you the feeling of gaining genuinely new and important knowledge, of enlightenment: of seeing further and truer than you did before and than all those other people still stuck in their dark cave.
To sum up. New ideas make our brains light up, but that phenomenology of enlightenment easily misleads us about their value. We need quality control and therefore we need to work through the impartial arguments for the exciting new ideas we come across; but we don't because that would be way more work and way less fun. The result is that our minds are abuzz with things we think we know, and which feel important to know, but which probably aren't either.

Q. According to the author, good ideas and bad ideas 

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The silent treatment goes by many names: shunning, social isolation, stonewalling, ghosting. Although psychologists have nuanced definitions for each term, they are all essentially forms of ostracism. And the tactic is nothing new. Ancient Greeks expelled for 10 years citizens who were thought to be a threat to democracy, and early American settlers banished people accused of practising witchcraft.
“My research suggests that two in three individuals have used the silent treatment against someone else; even more have had it done to them,” Williams said. Experts told me that although they need more data to know for certain, instances of the silent treatment have likely increased over the years as new forms of communication have been invented. “Every new method of connection can be used as a form of disconnection,” Williams said.
Ostracism can also manifest in lesser ways: someone walking out of the room in the middle of a conversation, a friend at school looking the other way when you wave at them, or a person addressing comments from everyone in a message thread except you. “Partial ostracism,” Williams told me, might mean monosyllabic replies—a terse period at the end of a one-word text message. But in serious cases, ostracism can take a heavy toll whereby victims become anxious, withdrawn, depressed, or even suicidal. “Because we humans require social contact for our mental health, the ramifications of isolation can be severe,” Joel Cooper, a psychology professor at Princeton, told me. “In the short term, the silent treatment causes stress. In the long term, the stress can be considered abuse.”
The silent treatment is a particularly insidious form of abuse because it might force the victim to reconcile with the perpetrator in an effort to end the behavior, even if the victim doesn’t know why they’re apologizing. “It’s especially controlling because it deprives both sides from weighing in,” Williams said.
The silent treatment might be employed by passive personality types to avoid conflict and confrontation, while strong personality types use it to punish or control. Some people may not even consciously choose it at all. “A person may be flooded with feelings they can’t put into words, so they just shut down,” Anne Fishel, the director of the Family and Couples Therapy Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. But regardless of the reason for the silent treatment, it can be received by victims as ostracism.
One study found that social rejection provoked a response in its victims similar to that of victims of physical abuse; the anterior cingulate cortex area of the brain—the area thought to interpret emotion and pain—was active in both instances. “Exclusion and rejection literally hurt,” John Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale, told me.
But the silent treatment ultimately harms the person causing it, too. Humans are predisposed to reciprocate social cues, so ignoring someone goes against our nature, Williams said. The perpetrator is therefore forced to justify the behaviour in order to keep doing it; they keep in mind all the reasons they’re choosing to ignore someone. Worse, the silent treatment can become addictive. The father who couldn’t force himself to speak to his son again suffered the way many addicts suffer—through repeating an activity despite knowing its harm. “Most people who start giving the silent treatment never intend for it to go on for as long as it does, but it can be very difficult to stop,” Williams told me. “It’s psychological quicksand.”

Q. Which of the following is not true as per the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The silent treatment goes by many names: shunning, social isolation, stonewalling, ghosting. Although psychologists have nuanced definitions for each term, they are all essentially forms of ostracism. And the tactic is nothing new. Ancient Greeks expelled for 10 years citizens who were thought to be a threat to democracy, and early American settlers banished people accused of practising witchcraft.
“My research suggests that two in three individuals have used the silent treatment against someone else; even more have had it done to them,” Williams said. Experts told me that although they need more data to know for certain, instances of the silent treatment have likely increased over the years as new forms of communication have been invented. “Every new method of connection can be used as a form of disconnection,” Williams said.
Ostracism can also manifest in lesser ways: someone walking out of the room in the middle of a conversation, a friend at school looking the other way when you wave at them, or a person addressing comments from everyone in a message thread except you. “Partial ostracism,” Williams told me, might mean monosyllabic replies—a terse period at the end of a one-word text message. But in serious cases, ostracism can take a heavy toll whereby victims become anxious, withdrawn, depressed, or even suicidal. “Because we humans require social contact for our mental health, the ramifications of isolation can be severe,” Joel Cooper, a psychology professor at Princeton, told me. “In the short term, the silent treatment causes stress. In the long term, the stress can be considered abuse.”
The silent treatment is a particularly insidious form of abuse because it might force the victim to reconcile with the perpetrator in an effort to end the behavior, even if the victim doesn’t know why they’re apologizing. “It’s especially controlling because it deprives both sides from weighing in,” Williams said.
The silent treatment might be employed by passive personality types to avoid conflict and confrontation, while strong personality types use it to punish or control. Some people may not even consciously choose it at all. “A person may be flooded with feelings they can’t put into words, so they just shut down,” Anne Fishel, the director of the Family and Couples Therapy Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. But regardless of the reason for the silent treatment, it can be received by victims as ostracism.
One study found that social rejection provoked a response in its victims similar to that of victims of physical abuse; the anterior cingulate cortex area of the brain—the area thought to interpret emotion and pain—was active in both instances. “Exclusion and rejection literally hurt,” John Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale, told me.
But the silent treatment ultimately harms the person causing it, too. Humans are predisposed to reciprocate social cues, so ignoring someone goes against our nature, Williams said. The perpetrator is therefore forced to justify the behaviour in order to keep doing it; they keep in mind all the reasons they’re choosing to ignore someone. Worse, the silent treatment can become addictive. The father who couldn’t force himself to speak to his son again suffered the way many addicts suffer—through repeating an activity despite knowing its harm. “Most people who start giving the silent treatment never intend for it to go on for as long as it does, but it can be very difficult to stop,” Williams told me. “It’s psychological quicksand.”

Q. Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The silent treatment goes by many names: shunning, social isolation, stonewalling, ghosting. Although psychologists have nuanced definitions for each term, they are all essentially forms of ostracism. And the tactic is nothing new. Ancient Greeks expelled for 10 years citizens who were thought to be a threat to democracy, and early American settlers banished people accused of practising witchcraft.
“My research suggests that two in three individuals have used the silent treatment against someone else; even more have had it done to them,” Williams said. Experts told me that although they need more data to know for certain, instances of the silent treatment have likely increased over the years as new forms of communication have been invented. “Every new method of connection can be used as a form of disconnection,” Williams said.
Ostracism can also manifest in lesser ways: someone walking out of the room in the middle of a conversation, a friend at school looking the other way when you wave at them, or a person addressing comments from everyone in a message thread except you. “Partial ostracism,” Williams told me, might mean monosyllabic replies—a terse period at the end of a one-word text message. But in serious cases, ostracism can take a heavy toll whereby victims become anxious, withdrawn, depressed, or even suicidal. “Because we humans require social contact for our mental health, the ramifications of isolation can be severe,” Joel Cooper, a psychology professor at Princeton, told me. “In the short term, the silent treatment causes stress. In the long term, the stress can be considered abuse.”
The silent treatment is a particularly insidious form of abuse because it might force the victim to reconcile with the perpetrator in an effort to end the behavior, even if the victim doesn’t know why they’re apologizing. “It’s especially controlling because it deprives both sides from weighing in,” Williams said.
The silent treatment might be employed by passive personality types to avoid conflict and confrontation, while strong personality types use it to punish or control. Some people may not even consciously choose it at all. “A person may be flooded with feelings they can’t put into words, so they just shut down,” Anne Fishel, the director of the Family and Couples Therapy Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. But regardless of the reason for the silent treatment, it can be received by victims as ostracism.
One study found that social rejection provoked a response in its victims similar to that of victims of physical abuse; the anterior cingulate cortex area of the brain—the area thought to interpret emotion and pain—was active in both instances. “Exclusion and rejection literally hurt,” John Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale, told me.
But the silent treatment ultimately harms the person causing it, too. Humans are predisposed to reciprocate social cues, so ignoring someone goes against our nature, Williams said. The perpetrator is therefore forced to justify the behaviour in order to keep doing it; they keep in mind all the reasons they’re choosing to ignore someone. Worse, the silent treatment can become addictive. The father who couldn’t force himself to speak to his son again suffered the way many addicts suffer—through repeating an activity despite knowing its harm. “Most people who start giving the silent treatment never intend for it to go on for as long as it does, but it can be very difficult to stop,” Williams told me. “It’s psychological quicksand.”

Q. According to the passage, the perpetrators of silent treatment are compelled to justify their behavior because

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
The silent treatment goes by many names: shunning, social isolation, stonewalling, ghosting. Although psychologists have nuanced definitions for each term, they are all essentially forms of ostracism. And the tactic is nothing new. Ancient Greeks expelled for 10 years citizens who were thought to be a threat to democracy, and early American settlers banished people accused of practising witchcraft.
“My research suggests that two in three individuals have used the silent treatment against someone else; even more have had it done to them,” Williams said. Experts told me that although they need more data to know for certain, instances of the silent treatment have likely increased over the years as new forms of communication have been invented. “Every new method of connection can be used as a form of disconnection,” Williams said.
Ostracism can also manifest in lesser ways: someone walking out of the room in the middle of a conversation, a friend at school looking the other way when you wave at them, or a person addressing comments from everyone in a message thread except you. “Partial ostracism,” Williams told me, might mean monosyllabic replies—a terse period at the end of a one-word text message. But in serious cases, ostracism can take a heavy toll whereby victims become anxious, withdrawn, depressed, or even suicidal. “Because we humans require social contact for our mental health, the ramifications of isolation can be severe,” Joel Cooper, a psychology professor at Princeton, told me. “In the short term, the silent treatment causes stress. In the long term, the stress can be considered abuse.”
The silent treatment is a particularly insidious form of abuse because it might force the victim to reconcile with the perpetrator in an effort to end the behavior, even if the victim doesn’t know why they’re apologizing. “It’s especially controlling because it deprives both sides from weighing in,” Williams said.
The silent treatment might be employed by passive personality types to avoid conflict and confrontation, while strong personality types use it to punish or control. Some people may not even consciously choose it at all. “A person may be flooded with feelings they can’t put into words, so they just shut down,” Anne Fishel, the director of the Family and Couples Therapy Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. But regardless of the reason for the silent treatment, it can be received by victims as ostracism.
One study found that social rejection provoked a response in its victims similar to that of victims of physical abuse; the anterior cingulate cortex area of the brain—the area thought to interpret emotion and pain—was active in both instances. “Exclusion and rejection literally hurt,” John Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale, told me.
But the silent treatment ultimately harms the person causing it, too. Humans are predisposed to reciprocate social cues, so ignoring someone goes against our nature, Williams said. The perpetrator is therefore forced to justify the behaviour in order to keep doing it; they keep in mind all the reasons they’re choosing to ignore someone. Worse, the silent treatment can become addictive. The father who couldn’t force himself to speak to his son again suffered the way many addicts suffer—through repeating an activity despite knowing its harm. “Most people who start giving the silent treatment never intend for it to go on for as long as it does, but it can be very difficult to stop,” Williams told me. “It’s psychological quicksand.”

Q. Why does Williams tag ostracism as " psychological quicksand"?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
Attempts at gun control, the argument goes, contravene the oldest truth of politics in organized society- a myopic minority is more powerful than a distracted majority. Most Americans may well be, as the polls show, in favor of some kind of gun reform. But they have many other issues and desires on their minds, too. For those who are committed to guns, though, no other issue takes equal prominence, or directs their electoral intentions so narrowly. The three-quarters of the people who have, over the years, been for gun regulation... are helpless in the face of the minority who believe that their right to own guns is essential to their personal freedom. 
Yglesias makes an analogy between the regulation of guns and the regulation of alcohol. After a rather vivid era devoted to prohibiting alcohol—driven largely by women activists...the country recognized the practical impossibility of a ban, and has accepted limited, state-level alcohol restrictions ever since.  As with the demon rum, so with the demon gun: we have to learn to live with some things if we’re to go on living with our fellow-citizens. Such thinking is, in its way, both a counsel of pragmatism and a policy of despair—accepting regular gun massacres as a feature of American life. Americans, in the end, like most people, seem to be better at acceptance than at resistance.
Yet this counsel need not be the last word. Positive things can still get done. An instructive, if counterintuitive, example, perhaps, is the fight for the right to life, as it is called, which, has, through small-bore actions, effectively curtailed abortion rights throughout the South, particularly for low-income women and women of color. This is a repellent parallel for progressives, but it makes the point: big change happens through incremental measures. It is often said that the states alone can’t counter the gun lobby, given that guns pass so easily from state to state, but states with strong gun laws already have significantly fewer gun deaths.
That pattern is reflected, to a lesser degree, in state liquor laws, but the analogy of guns to alcohol does not map exactly; alcohol is not the instrument of action in the same way that guns are. A better analogy is to cars, which are dangerous and often deadly, particularly with a drunk driver behind the wheel; nearly thirty people are killed every day in D.U.I. incidents. In fact, there are nearly as many motor-vehicle deaths each year in this country as there are firearm deaths, but far more people have access to cars on a daily basis than to guns. So, what do we do about cars? We regulate them. We have mandatory insurance in nearly all states, we have compulsory lessons, we have universal licensing. We create, at the state and local levels, ever more ingenious ways of preventing people from driving while impaired. According to the Violence Policy Center, auto-related deaths have declined over the past two decades, while gun deaths have risen.
The truth of reform is that it can begin anywhere, on any scale, and, once begun, it tends to be self-renewing. And, as reformers well know, it does not always matter where the reform starts—if it starts at all, it magnetizes other reforms toward it.

Q. "A myopic minority is more powerful than a distracted majority." Which of the following statements best captures the essence of this statement?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
Attempts at gun control, the argument goes, contravene the oldest truth of politics in organized society- a myopic minority is more powerful than a distracted majority. Most Americans may well be, as the polls show, in favor of some kind of gun reform. But they have many other issues and desires on their minds, too. For those who are committed to guns, though, no other issue takes equal prominence, or directs their electoral intentions so narrowly. The three-quarters of the people who have, over the years, been for gun regulation... are helpless in the face of the minority who believe that their right to own guns is essential to their personal freedom. 
Yglesias makes an analogy between the regulation of guns and the regulation of alcohol. After a rather vivid era devoted to prohibiting alcohol—driven largely by women activists...the country recognized the practical impossibility of a ban, and has accepted limited, state-level alcohol restrictions ever since.  As with the demon rum, so with the demon gun: we have to learn to live with some things if we’re to go on living with our fellow-citizens. Such thinking is, in its way, both a counsel of pragmatism and a policy of despair—accepting regular gun massacres as a feature of American life. Americans, in the end, like most people, seem to be better at acceptance than at resistance.
Yet this counsel need not be the last word. Positive things can still get done. An instructive, if counterintuitive, example, perhaps, is the fight for the right to life, as it is called, which, has, through small-bore actions, effectively curtailed abortion rights throughout the South, particularly for low-income women and women of color. This is a repellent parallel for progressives, but it makes the point: big change happens through incremental measures. It is often said that the states alone can’t counter the gun lobby, given that guns pass so easily from state to state, but states with strong gun laws already have significantly fewer gun deaths.
That pattern is reflected, to a lesser degree, in state liquor laws, but the analogy of guns to alcohol does not map exactly; alcohol is not the instrument of action in the same way that guns are. A better analogy is to cars, which are dangerous and often deadly, particularly with a drunk driver behind the wheel; nearly thirty people are killed every day in D.U.I. incidents. In fact, there are nearly as many motor-vehicle deaths each year in this country as there are firearm deaths, but far more people have access to cars on a daily basis than to guns. So, what do we do about cars? We regulate them. We have mandatory insurance in nearly all states, we have compulsory lessons, we have universal licensing. We create, at the state and local levels, ever more ingenious ways of preventing people from driving while impaired. According to the Violence Policy Center, auto-related deaths have declined over the past two decades, while gun deaths have risen.
The truth of reform is that it can begin anywhere, on any scale, and, once begun, it tends to be self-renewing. And, as reformers well know, it does not always matter where the reform starts—if it starts at all, it magnetizes other reforms toward it.

Q. Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage?

Read the passage carefully and answer the following questions:
Attempts at gun control, the argument goes, contravene the oldest truth of politics in organized society- a myopic minority is more powerful than a distracted majority. Most Americans may well be, as the polls show, in favor of some kind of gun reform. But they have many other issues and desires on their minds, too. For those who are committed to guns, though, no other issue takes equal prominence, or directs their electoral intentions so narrowly. The three-quarters of the people who have, over the years, been for gun regulation... are helpless in the face of the minority who believe that their right to own guns is essential to their personal freedom. 
Yglesias makes an analogy between the regulation of guns and the regulation of alcohol. After a rather vivid era devoted to prohibiting alcohol—driven largely by women activists...the country recognized the practical impossibility of a ban, and has accepted limited, state-level alcohol restrictions ever since.  As with the demon rum, so with the demon gun: we have to learn to live with some things if we’re to go on living with our fellow-citizens. Such thinking is, in its way, both a counsel of pragmatism and a policy of despair—accepting regular gun massacres as a feature of American life. Americans, in the end, like most people, seem to be better at acceptance than at resistance.
Yet this counsel need not be the last word. Positive things can still get done. An instructive, if counterintuitive, example, perhaps, is the fight for the right to life, as it is called, which, has, through small-bore actions, effectively curtailed abortion rights throughout the South, particularly for low-income women and women of color. This is a repellent parallel for progressives, but it makes the point: big change happens through incremental measures. It is often said that the states alone can’t counter the gun lobby, given that guns pass so easily from state to state, but states with strong gun laws already have significantly fewer gun deaths.
That pattern is reflected, to a lesser degree, in state liquor laws, but the analogy of guns to alcohol does not map exactly; alcohol is not the instrument of action in the same way that guns are. A better analogy is to cars, which are dangerous and often deadly, particularly with a drunk driver behind the wheel; nearly thirty people are killed every day in D.U.I. incidents. In fact, there are nearly as many motor-vehicle deaths each year in this country as there are firearm deaths, but far more people have access to cars on a daily basis than to guns. So, what do we do about cars? We regulate them. We have mandatory insurance in nearly all states, we have compulsory lessons, we have universal licensing. We create, at the state and local levels, ever more ingenious ways of preventing people from driving while impaired. According to the Violence Policy Center, auto-related deaths have declined over the past two decades, while gun deaths have risen.
The truth of reform is that it can begin anywhere, on any scale, and, once begun, it tends to be self-renewing. And, as reformers well know, it does not always matter where the reform starts—if it starts at all, it magnetizes other reforms toward it.

Q. Which of the following statements is the author LEAST likely to agree with?