Test: Critical Reasoning - 1 - CAT MCQ

The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the author ’s position.
For each of the past three years, temperatures have hit peaks not seen since the birth of meteorology, and probably not for more than 110,000 years. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is at its highest level in 4 million years. This does not cause storms like Harvey- there have always been storms and hurricanes along the Gulf of Mexico- but it makes them wetter and more powerful. As the seas warm, they evaporate more easily and provide energy to storm fronts. As the air above them warms, it holds more water vapour. For every half a degree Celsius in warming, there is about a 3% increases in atmospheric moisture content. Scientists call this the Clausius-Clapeyron equation. This means the skies fill more quickly and have more to dump. The storm surge was greater because sea levels have risen 20 cm as a result of more than 100 years of humanstorm surge was greater because sea levels have risen 20 cm as a result of more than 100 years of human–related global warming which has melted glaciers and thermally expanded the volume of seawater.

(2017)

The passage below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the author ’s position.
The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the author’s position.
A translator of literary works needs a secure hold upon the two languages involved, supported by a good measure of familiarity with the two cultures. For an Indian translating works in an Indian language into English, finding satisfactory equivalents in a generalized western culture of practices and symbols in the original would be less difficult than gaining fluent control of contemporary English. When a westerner works on texts in Indian languages the interpretation of cultural elements will be the major challenge, rather than control over the grammar and essential vocabulary of the language concerned. It is much easier to remedy lapses in language in a text translated into English, than flaws of content. Since it is easier for an Indian to learn the English language than it is for a Briton or American to comprehend Indian culture, translations of Indian texts is better left to Indians.

(2017)

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.

(2017)

The passage given below is followed by four alternative summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Key in the number of the option you choose as your answer .
Volkswagen, trying to get to the bottom of its emissions-cheating scandal, pressured employees to tell what they know, announcing an amnesty program for informants that will expire soon. The company has yet to explain publicly who was responsible for installing software in 11 million diesel vehicles that was designed to disguise the output of nitrogen oxide, a pollutant harmful to the lungs. Volkswagen also admitted that it underreported the levels of carbon dioxide produced by about 800,000 of its diesel and gasoline vehicles in Europe and that had it exaggerated their fuel economy.

(2015)

The passage given below is followed by four alternative summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. Key in the number of the option you choose as your answer
The study of Buddhism over the past century or so has resembled the encounter of the blind men and the elephant in many ways.
Students of Buddhism have tended to fasten onto a small part of the tradition and assume their conclusions held true about the whole. Often the parts they have seized on have been a little like the elephant’s tusks — a striking, but unrepresentative, part of the whole animal. As a result, many erroneous and sweeping generalizations about Buddhism have been made, such as that it is ‘negative’, ‘world-denying’, ‘pessimistic’, and so forth. Although this tendency to over generalize is now less common, it is still found in some of the older literature where authors tended to exaggerate certain features of the tradition or assume that what was true of Buddhism in one culture or historical period held good everywhere.

(2015)

Read the following arguments and answer the questions that follow.
A letter from a Japanese ex-student to his American Professor: Do you believe if I say that language can make a person different? What I mean is this. Now I can speak Japanese and English. When I was mainly speaking Japanese, I did not express myself much to other people. It can be because of the circumstances I had or the culture I have. Then I started speaking English and learnt how to express myself, and came to know who I was, what I was aiming for in the future ... Now I’m back in Japan and my mind has started thinking in Japanese. Again, I seem to stop expressing myself. If I tell you which part of mine I like better, I prefer me speaking in English even though my Japanese is far better than my English.

(2014)

A possible explanation for the predicament could be

Read the following arguments and answer the questions that follow.
A study of the effect of language on memory was performed by Loftus and Loftus, in 1975. They showed subjects a film of a traffic accident to two groups, and then asked them questions about what they had seen. After a week, the subjects were asked about the film again. One group of subjects was asked, immediately after seeing the film, “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” The other group of subjects was asked, “How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” When they were tested later, the subjects were asked if they had seen any broken glass in the film. (There hadn’t been any.) Those subjects who had heard the word “smashed” remembered seeing broken glass scattered around after the accident.

(2014)

The findings of the study have significant relevance for