CAT 2018 Slot 1 Question Paper
Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:
[The] Indian government [has] announced an international competition to design a National War Memorial in New Delhi, to honour all of the Indian soldiers who served in the various wars and counterinsurgency campaigns from 1947 onwards. The terms of the competition also specified that the new structure would be built adjacent to the India Gate - a memorial to the Indian soldiers who died in the First World War. Between the old imperialist memorial and the proposed nationalist one, India’s contribution to the Second World War is airbrushed out of existence.
The Indian government’s conception of the war memorial was not merely absent-minded. Rather, it accurately reflected the fact that both academic history and popular memory have yet to come to terms with India’s Second World War, which continues to be seen as little more than mood music in the drama of India’s advance towards independence and partition in 1947. Further, the political trajectory of the postwar subcontinent has militated against popular remembrance of the war. With partition and the onset of the India-Pakistan rivalry, both of the new nations needed fresh stories for self-legitimisation rather than focusing on shared wartime experiences.
The Indian army recruited, trained and deployed some 2.5 million men, almost 90,000 of which were killed and many more injured. Even at the time, it was recognised as the largest volunteer force in the war. . . . India’s material and financial contribution to the war was equally significant. India emerged as a major military-industrial and logistical base for Allied operations in south-east Asia and the Middle East. This led the United States to take considerable interest in the country’s future and ensured that this was no longer the preserve of the British government.
However, the Second World War played a crucial role in both the independence and partition of India and wartime developments pointed in the direction of India’s independence. In a stunning reversal of its long-standing financial relationship with Britain, India finished the war as one of the largest creditors to the imperial power. Such extraordinary mobilization for war was achieved at a great human cost, with the Bengal famine the most extreme manifestation of widespread wartime deprivation. The costs on India’s home front must be counted in millions of lives. Indians signed up to serve on the war and home fronts for a variety of reasons. . . . [M]any were convinced that their contribution would open the doors to India’s freedom. . . . The political and social churn triggered by the war was evident in the massive waves of popular protest and unrest that washed over rural and urban India in the aftermath of the conflict. This turmoil was crucial in persuading the Attlee government to rid itself of the incubus of ruling India. . . .
Seventy years on, it is time that India engaged with the complex legacies of the Second World War. Bringing the war into the ambit of the new national memorial would be a fitting - if not overdue - recognition that this was India’s War.
The phrase “mood music” is used in the second paragraph to indicate that the Second World War is viewed as:
The author claims that omitting mention of Indians who served in the Second World War from the new National War Memorial is:
For the following questions answer them individually
The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the author’s position.
Production and legitimation of scientific knowledge can be approached from a number of perspectives. To study knowledge production from the sociology of professions perspective would mean a focus on the institutionalization of a body of knowledge. The professions-approach informed earlier research on managerial occupation, business schools and management knowledge. It however tends to reify institutional power structures in its understanding of the links between knowledge and authority. Knowledge production is restricted in the perspective to the selected members of the professional community, most notably to the university faculties and professional colleges. Power is understood as a negative mechanism, which prevents the non-professional actors from offering their ideas and information as legitimate knowledge.
Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the ODD ONE out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in.
1) Translators are like bumblebees.
2) Though long since scientifically disproved, this factoid is still routinely trotted out.
3) Similar pronouncements about the impossibility of translation have dogged practitioners since Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta, published in 1424.
4) Bees, unaware of these deliberations, have continued to flit from flower to flower, and translators continue to translate.
5) In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan pronounced the flight of the bumblebee to be aerodynamically impossible.
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Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out.
1) Displacement in Bengal is thus not very significant in view of its magnitude.
2) A factor of displacement in Bengal is the shifting course of the Ganges leading to erosion of river banks.
3) The nature of displacement in Bengal makes it an interesting case study.
4) Since displacement due to erosion is well spread over a long period of time, it remains invisible.
5) Rapid displacement would have helped sensitize the public to its human costs.
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The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the author’s position.
The conceptualization of landscape as a geometric object first occurred in Europe and is historically related to the European conceptualization of the organism, particularly the human body, as a geometric object with parts having a rational, three-dimensional organization and integration. The European idea of landscape appeared before the science of landscape emerged, and it is no coincidence that Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, who studied the structure of the human body, also facilitated an understanding of the structure of landscape. Landscape which had been a subordinate background to religious or historical narratives, became an independent genre or subject of art by the end of sixteenth century or the beginning of the seventeenth century.
The four sentences (labelled 1,2,3,4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Decide on the proper sequence of order of the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer.
1. Impartiality and objectivity are fiendishly difficult concepts that can cause all sorts of injustices even if transparently implemented.
2. It encourages us into bubbles of people we know and like, while blinding us to different perspectives, but the deeper problem of ‘transparency’ lies in the words “…and much more”.
3. Twitter’s website says that “tweets you are likely to care about most will show up first in your timeline…based on accounts you interact with most, tweets you engage with, and much more.”
4. We are only told some of the basic principles, and we can’t see the algorithm itself, making it hard for citizens to analyse the system sensibly or fairly or be convinced of its impartiality and objectivity.
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Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out.
1) In many cases time inconsistency is what prevents our going from intention to action.
2) For people to continuously postpone getting their children immunized, they would need to be constantly fooled by themselves.
3) In the specific case of immunization, however, it is hard to believe that time inconsistency by itself would be sufficient to make people permanently postpone the decision if they were fully cognizant of its benefits.
4) In most cases, even a small cost of immunization was large enough to discourage most people.
5) Not only do they have to think that they prefer to spend time going to the camp next month rather than today, they also have to believe that they will indeed go next month.
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