Top 181 CAT Para Jumbles Questions With Solutions

Over the past few years, in the CAT previous papers, para jumbles have had a recurrent appearance in the CAT VARC section. Parajumble questions are essential to practice by the aspirants. Practice the below important parajumbles questions from the previous CAT papers with detailed video solutions made by the CAT toppers. One can practice these questions by taking them in a test format or downloading them in a PDF format for free. Click on the below link to download the CAT Parajumbles questions with detailed video solutions PDF for free.

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CAT Para Jumbles Questions Weighatge Over Past 5 Years

Year

Weightage

2022

9

2021

15

2020

15

2019

14

2018

14

CAT 2022 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. The trajectory of cheerfulness through the self is linked to the history of the word ‘cheer’ which comes from an Old French meaning ‘face’.

2. Translations of the Bible into vernacular languages, expanded the noun ‘cheer’ into the more abstract ‘cheerful-ness’, something that circulates as an emotional and social quality defining the self and a moral community.

3. When you take on a cheerful expression, no matter what the state of your soul, your cheerfulness moves into the self: the interior of the self is changed by the power of cheer.

4. People in the medieval ‘Canterbury Tales’ have a ‘piteous’ or a ‘sober’ cheer; ‘cheer’ is an expression and a body part, lying at the intersection of emotions and physiognomy.


Question 2

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. If I wanted to sit indoors and read, or play Sonic the Hedgehog on a red-hot SegaMega Drive, I would often be made to feel guilty about not going outside to “enjoy it while it lasts”.
2. My mum, quite reasonably, wanted me and my sister out of the house, in the sun.
3. Tales of my mum’s idyllic-sounding childhood in the Sussex countryside, where trees were climbed by 8 am and streams navigated by lunchtime, were passed down to us like folklore.
4. To an introverted kid, that felt like a threat - and the feeling has stayed with me.


Question 3

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. Women may prioritize cooking because they feel they alone are responsible for mediating a toxic and unhealthy food system.

2. Food is commonly framed through the lens of individual choice: you can choose to eat healthily.

3. This is particularly so in a neoliberal context where the state has transferred the responsibility for food onto individual consumers.

4. The individualized framing of choice appeals to a popular desire to experience agency, but draws away from the structural obstacles that stratify individual food choices.


Question 4

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. From chemical pollutants in the environment to the damming of rivers to invasive species transported through global trade and travel, every environmental issue is different and there is no single tech solution that can solve this crisis.

2. Discourse on the threat of environmental collapse revolves around cutting down emissions, but biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse are caused by myriad and diverse reasons.

3. This would require legislation that recognises the rights of future generations and other species that allows the judiciary to uphold a much higher standard of environmental protection than currently possible.

4. Clearly, our environmental crisis requires large political solutions, not minor technological ones, so, instead of focusing on infinite growth, we could consider a path of stable-state economies, while preserving markets and healthy competition.


Question 5

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. Some company leaders are basing their decisions on locating offices to foster innovation and growth, as their best-performing inventors suffered the greatest productivity losses when their commutes grew longer.

2. Shorter commutes support innovation by giving employees more time in the office and greater opportunities for in-person collaboration, while removing the physical strain of a long commute.

3. This is not always the case: remote work does not automatically lead to greater creativity and productivity as office water-cooler conversations are also very important for innovation.

4. Some see the link between long commutes and productivity as support for work-from-home scenarios, as many workers have grown accustomed to their commute-free arrangements during the pandemic.


Question 6

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. The more we are able to accept that our achievements are largely out of our control, the easier it becomes to understand that our failures, and those of others, are too.
2. But the raft of recent books about the limits of merit is an important correction to the arrogance of contemporary entitlement and an opportunity to reassert the importance of luck, or grace, in our thinking.
3. Meritocracy as an organising principle is an inevitable function of a free society, as we are designed to see our achievements as worthy of reward.
4. And that in turn should increase our humility and the respect with which we treat our fellow citizens, helping ultimately to build a more compassionate society.


Question 7

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. The creative element in product design has become of paramount importance as it is one of the few ways a firm or industry can sustain a competitive advantage over its rivals.

2. In fact, the creative element in the value of world industry would be larger still, if we added the contribution of the creative element in other industries, such as the design of tech accessories.

3. The creative industry is receiving a lot of attention today as its growth rate is faster than that of the world economy as a whole.

4. It is for this reason that today’s trade issues are increasingly involving intellectual property, as Western countries have an interest in protecting their revenues along with freeing trade in non-tangibles.


Question 8

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. Various industrial sectors including retail, transit systems, enterprises, educational institutions, event organizing, finance, travel etc. have now started leveraging these beacons solutions to track and communicate with their customers.
2. A beacon fixed on to a shop wall enables the retailer to assess the proximity of the customer, and come up with a much targeted or personalized communication like offers, discounts and combos on products in each shelf.
3. Smartphones or other mobile devices can capture the beacon signals, and distance can be estimated by measuring received signal strength.
4. Beacons are tiny and inexpensive, micro-location-based technology devices that can send radio frequency signals and notify nearby Bluetooth devices of their presence and transmit information.


Question 9

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. Fish skin collagen has excellent thermo-stability and tensile strength making it ideal for use as bandage that adheres to the skin and adjusts to body movements.

2. Collagen, one of the main structural proteins in connective tissues in the human body, is well known for promoting skin regeneration.

3. Fish skin swims in here as diseases and bacteria that affect fish are different from most human pathogens.

4. The risk of introducing disease agents into other species through the use of pig and cow collagen proteins for wound healing has inhibited its broader applications in the medical field.

CAT 2021 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. Businesses find automation, such as robotic employees, a big asset in terms of productivity and efficiency.
2. But in recent years, robotics has had increasing impacts on unemployment, not just of manual labour, as computers are rapidly handling some white-collar and service-sector work.
3. For years politicians have promised workers that they would bring back their jobs by clamping down on trade, offshoring and immigration.
4. Economists, based on their research, say that the bigger threat to jobs now is not globalisation but automation.


Question 2

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

1. There is a dark side to academic research, especially in India, and at its centre is the phenomenon of predatory journals.
2. But in truth, as long as you pay, you can get anything published.
3. In look and feel thus, they are exactly like any reputed journal.
4. They claim to be indexed in the most influential databases, say they possess editorial boards that comprise top scientists and researchers, and claim to have a rigorous peer-review structure.
5. But a large section of researchers and scientists across the world are at the receiving end of nothing short of an academic publishing scam.


Question 3

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. But today there is an epochal challenge to rethink and reconstitute the vision and practice of development as a shared responsibility - a sharing which binds both the agent and the audience, the developed world and the developing, in a bond of shared destiny.
2. We are at a crossroads now in our vision and practice of development.
3. This calls for the cultivation of an appropriate ethical mode of being in our lives which enables us to realize this global and planetary situation of shared living and responsibility.
4. Half a century ago, development began as a hope for a better human possibility, but in the last fifty years, this hope has lost itself in the dreary desert of various kinds of hegemonic applications.


Question 4

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. It is regimes of truth that make certain relationships speakable - relationships, like subjectivities, are constituted through discursive formations, which sustain regimes of truth.
2. Relationships are nothing without the communication that brings them into being; interpersonal communication is connected to knowledge shared by interlocutors, and scholars should attend to relational histories in their analyses.
3. A Foucauldian approach to relationships goes beyond these conceptions of discourse and history to macrolevel regimes of truth as constituting relationships.
4. Reconsidering micropractices within relationships that are constituted within and simultaneously contributors to regimes of truth acknowledges the central position of power/knowledge in the constitution of what has come to be considered true and real.


Question 5

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. The care with which philosophers examine arguments for and against forms of biotechnology makes this an excellent primer on formulating and assessing moral arguments.
2. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why: what is wrong with re-engineering our nature?
3. Breakthroughs in genetics present us with the promise that we will soon be able to prevent a host of debilitating diseases, and the predicament that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to enhance our genetic traits.
4. To grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions that verge on theology, which is why modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them.
5. One argument is that the drive for human perfection through genetics is objectionable as it represents a bid for mastery that fails to appreciate the gifts of human powers and achievements.


Question 6

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. A typical example is Wikipedia, where the overwhelming majority of contributors are male and so the available content is skewed to reflect their interests.
2. Without diversity of thought and representation, society is left with a distorted picture of future options, which are likely to result in augmenting existing inequalities.
3. Gross gender inequality in the technology sector is problematic, not only for the industry-wide marginalisation of women, but because technology designs embody the values of their makers.
4. While redressing unequal representation in the workplace is a step in the right direction, broader social change is needed to address the structural inequalities embedded within the current organisation of work and employment.
5. If technology merely reflects the perspectives of the male stereotype, then new technologies are unlikely to accommodate the diverse social contexts within which they operate.


Question 7

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. The work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life, when it is realized and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader.

2. The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence and this convergence is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader.

3. From this polarity it follows that the literary work cannot be completely identical with the text, or with the realization of the text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two.

4. The literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic; the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the aesthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader.


Question 8

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. It has taken on a warm, fuzzy glow in the advertising world, where its potential is being widely discussed, and it is being claimed as the undeniable wave of the future.
2. There is little enthusiasm for this in the scientific arena; for them marketing is not a science, and only a handful of studies have been published in scientific journals.
3. The new, growing field of neuromarketing attempts to reveal the inner workings of consumer behaviour and is an extension of the study of how choices and decisions are made.
4. Some see neuromarketing as an attempt to make the "art" of advertising into a science, being used by marketing experts to back up their proposals with some form of real data.
5. The marketing gurus have already started drawing on psychology in developing tests and theories, and advertising people have borrowed the idea of the focus group from social scientists.


Question 9

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. The legal status of resources mined in space remains ambiguous; and while the market for asteroid minerals is currently nonexistent, this is likely to change as technical hurdles diminish.
2. Outer space is a commons, and all of it is open for exploration, however, space law developed in the 1950s and 60s is state-centric and arguably ill-suited to a commercial future.
3. Laws adopted by the US and Luxembourg are first steps, but they only protect firms from competing claims by their compatriots; a Chinese company will not be bound by US law.
4. Critics say the US is conferring rights that it has no authority to confer; Russia in particular has condemned this, citing the US’ disrespect for international law.
5. At issue now is commercial activity, as private firms—rather than nation states — look to space for profit.


Question 10

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. They often include a foundation course on navigating capitalism with Chinese characteristics and have replaced typical cases from US corporates with a focus on how Western theories apply to China’s buzzing local firms.
2. The best Chinese business schools look like their Western rivals but are now growing distinct in terms of what they teach and the career boost they offer.
3. Western schools have enhanced their offerings with double degrees, popular with domestic and overseas students alike—and boosted the prestige of their Chinese partners.
4. For students, a big draw is the chance to rub shoulders with captains of China’s private sector.
5. Their business courses now largely cater to the growing demand from China Inc which has become more global, richer and ready to recruit from this sinocentric student body.


Question 11

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. Look forward a few decades to an invention which can end the energy crisis, change the global economy and curb climate change at a stroke: commercial fusion power.
2. To gain meaningful insights, logic has to be accompanied by asking probing questions of nature through controlled tests, precise observations and clever analysis.
3. The greatest of all inventions is the über-invention that has provided the insights on which others depend: the modern scientific method.
4. This invention is inconceivable without the scientific method; it will rest on the application of a diverse range of scientific insights, such as the process transforming hydrogen into helium to release huge amounts of energy.


Question 12

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. In the central nervous systems of other animal species, such a comprehensive regeneration of neurons has not yet been proven beyond doubt.
2. Biologists from the University of Bayreuth have discovered a uniquely rapid form of regeneration in injured neurons and their function in the central nervous system of zebrafish.
3. They studied the Mauthner cells, which are solely responsible for the escape behaviour of the fish, and previously regarded as incapable of regeneration.
4. However, their ability to regenerate crucially depends on the location of the injury.


Question 13

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. The US has long maintained that the Northwest Passage is an international strait through which its commercial and military vessels have the right to pass without seeking Canada’s permission.
2. Canada, which officially acquired the group of islands forming the Northwest Passage in 1880, claims sovereignty over all the shipping routes through the Passage.
3. The dispute could be transitory, however, as scientists speculate that the entire Arctic Ocean will soon be ice-free in summer, so ship owners will not have to ask for permission to sail through any of the Northwest Passage routes.
4. The US and Canada have never legally settled the question of access through the Passage, but have an agreement whereby the US needs to seek Canada’s consent for any transit.


Question 14

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. A popular response is the exhortation to plant more trees.
2. It seems all but certain that global warming will go well above two degrees—quite how high no one knows yet.
3. Burning them releases it, which is why the scale of forest fires in the Amazon basin last year garnered headlines.
4. This is because trees sequester carbon by absorbing carbon dioxide.


Question 15

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) 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. Restitution of artefacts to original cultures could face legal obstacles, as many Western museums are legally prohibited from disposing off their collections.
2. This is in response to countries like Nigeria, which are pressurising European museums to return their precious artefacts looted by colonisers in the past.
3. Museums in Europe today are struggling to come to terms with their colonial legacy, some taking steps to return artefacts but not wanting to lose their prized collections.
4. Legal hurdles notwithstanding, politicians and institutions in France and Germany would now like to defuse the colonial time bombs, and are now backing the return of part of their holdings.

CAT 2020 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

1. For feminists, the question of how we read is inextricably linked with the question of what we read.
2. Elaine Showalter’s critique of the literary curriculum is exemplary of this work.
3. Androcentric literature structures the reading experience differently depending on the gender of the reader.
4. The documentation of this realization was one of the earliest tasks undertaken by feminist critics.
5. More specifically, the feminist inquiry into the activity of reading begins with the realization that the literary canon is androcentric, and that this has a profoundly damaging effect on women readers.


Question 2

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. Complex computational elements of the CNS are organized according to a “nested” hierarchic criterion; the organization is not permanent and can change dynamically from moment to moment as they carry out a computational task.
2. Echolocation in bats exemplifies adaptation produced by natural selection; a function not produced by natural selection for its current use is exaptation -- feathers might have originally arisen in the context of selection for insulation.
3. From a structural standpoint, consistent with exaptation, the living organism is organized as a complex of “Russian Matryoshka Dolls” -- smaller structures are contained within larger ones in multiple layers.
4. The exaptation concept, and the Russian-doll organization concept of living beings deduced from studies on evolution of the various apparatuses in mammals, can be applied for the most complex human organ: the central nervous system (CNS).


Question 3

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. It advocated a conservative approach to antitrust enforcement that espouses faith in efficient markets and voiced suspicion regarding the merits of judicial intervention to correct anticompetitive practices.
2. Many industries have consistently gained market share, the lion’s share - without any official concern; the most successful technology companies have grown into veritable titans, on the premise that they advance ‘public interest’.
3. That the new anticompetitive risks posed by tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, necessitate new legal solutions could be attributed to the dearth of enforcement actions against monopolies and the few cases challenging mergers in the USA.
4. The criterion of ‘consumer welfare standard’ and the principle that antitrust law should serve consumer interests and that it should protect competition rather than individual competitors was an antitrust law introduced by, and named after, the 'Chicago school'.


Question 4

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

1. You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data.
2. Economists and technologists believe that a new kind of capitalism is being created - different from industrial capitalism as was merchant capitalism.
3. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free  market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights.
4. There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance, a different dynamic growing up: information as a social good, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced.
5. Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied and pasted infinitely.


Question 5

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. Machine learning models are prone to learning human-like biases from the training data that feeds these algorithms.
2. Hate speech detection is part of the on-going effort against oppressive and abusive language on social media.
3. The current automatic detection models miss out on something vital: context.
4. It uses complex algorithms to flag racist or violent speech faster and better than human beings alone.
5. For instance, algorithms struggle to determine if group identifiers like "gay" or "black" are used in offensive or prejudiced ways because they're trained on imbalanced datasets with unusually high rates of hate speech.


Question 6

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. Relying on narrative structure alone, indigenous significances of nineteenth-century San folktales are hard to determine.
2. Using their supernatural potency, benign shamans transcend the levels of the San cosmos in order to deal with social conflict and to protect material resources and enjoy a measure of respect that sets them apart from ordinary people.
3. Selected tales reveal that they deal with a form of spiritual conflict that has social implications and concern conflict between people and living or dead malevolent shamans.
4. Meaning can be elicited, and the tales contextualized, by probing beneath the narrative of verbatim, original-language records and exploring the connotations of highly significant words and phrases.


Question 7

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. The logic of displaying one’s inner qualities through outward appearance was based on a distinction between being a woman and being feminine.
2. 'Appearance' became a signifier of conduct - to look was to be and conformity to the feminine ideal was measured by how well women could use the tools of the fashion and beauty industries.
3. The makeover-centric media sets out subtly and not-so-subtly, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways to be a woman, layering these over inequalities of race and class.
4. The denigration of working-class women and women of colour often centres on their perceived failure to embody feminine beauty.
5. ‘Woman’ was considered a biological category, but femininity was a ‘process’ by which women became specific kinds of women.


Question 8

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. But the attention of the layman, not surprisingly, has been captured by the atom bomb, although there is at least a chance that it may never be used again.
2. Of all the changes introduced by man into the household of nature, [controlled] large-scale nuclear fission is undoubtedly the most dangerous and most profound.
3. The danger to humanity created by the so-called peaceful uses of atomic energy may, however, be much greater.
4. The resultant ionizing radiation has become the most serious agent of pollution of the environment and the greatest threat to man’s survival on earth.


Question 9

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

1. The victim’s trauma after assault rarely gets the attention that we lavish on the moment of damage that divided the survivor from a less encumbered past.
2. One thing we often do with narratives of sexual assault is sort their respective parties into different temporalities: it seems we are interested in perpetrators’ futures and victims’ pasts.
3. One result is that we don’t have much of a vocabulary for what happens in a victim’s life after the painful past has been excavated, even when our shared language gestures toward the future, as the term “survivor” does.
4. Even the most charitable questions asked about the victims seem to focus on the past, in pursuit of understanding or of corroboration of painful details.
5. As more and more stories of sexual assault have been made public in the last two years, the genre of their telling has exploded --- crimes have a tendency to become not just stories but genres.


Question 10

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. Tensions and sometimes conflict remain an issue in and between the 11 states in South East Asia (Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste and Vietnam).
2. China’s rise as a regional military power and its claims in the South China Sea have become an increasingly pressing security concern for many South East Asian states.
3. Since the 1990s, the security environment of South East Asia has seen both continuity and profound changes.
4. These concerns cause states from outside the region to take an active interest in South East Asian security.


Question 11

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

1. Talk was the most common way for enslaved men and women to subvert the rules of their bondage, to gain more agency than they were supposed to have.
2. Even in conditions of extreme violence and unfreedom, their words remained ubiquitous, ephemeral, irrepressible, and potentially transgressive.
3. Slaves came from societies in which oaths, orations, and invocations carried great potency, both between people and as a connection to the all-powerful spirit world.
4. Freedom of speech and the power to silence may have been preeminent markers of white liberty in Colonies, but at the same time, slavery depended on dialogue: slaves could never be completely muted.
5. Slave-owners obsessed over slave talk, though they could never control it, yet feared its power to bind and inspire—for, as everyone knew, oaths, whispers, and secret conversations bred conspiracy and revolt.


Question 12

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. It also has four movable auxiliary telescopes 1.8 m in diameter.
2. Completed in 2006, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) has four reflecting telescopes, 8.2 m in diameter that can observe objects 4 billion times weaker than can normally be seen with the naked eye.
3. This configuration enables one to distinguish an astronaut on the Moon.
4. When these are combined with the large telescopes, they produce what is called interferometry: a simulation of the power of a mirror 16 m in diameter and the resolution of a telescope of 200 m.


Question 13

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. Man has used poisons for assassination purposes ever since the dawn of civilization, against individual enemies but also occasionally against armies.
2. These dangers were soon recognized, and resulted in two international declarations—in 1874 in Brussels and in 1899 in The Hague—that prohibited the use of poisoned weapons.
3. The foundation of microbiology by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch offered new prospects for those interested in biological weapons because it allowed agents to be chosen and designed on a rational basis.
4. Though treaties were all made in good faith, they contained no means of control, and so fail


Question 14

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. While you might think that you see or are aware of all the changes that happen in your immediate environment, there is simply too much information for your brain to fully process everything.
2. Psychologists use the term ‘change blindness’ to describe this tendency of people to be blind to changes though they are in the immediate environment.
3. It cannot be aware of every single thing that happens in the world around you.
4. Sometimes big shifts happen in front of your eyes and you are not at all aware of these changes.


Question 15

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) 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. Each one personified a different aspect of good fortune.
2. The others were versions of popular Buddhist gods, Hindu gods and Daoist gods.
3. Seven popular Japanese deities, the Shichi Fukujin, were considered to bring good luck and happiness.
4. Although they were included in the Shinto pantheon, only two of them, Daikoku and Ebisu, were indigenous Japanese gods.

CAT 2019 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

Five sentences related to a topic are given below in a jumbled order. Four of them form a coherent and unified paragraph. Identify the odd sentence that does not go with the four. Key in the number of the option that you choose.
1. ‘Stat’ signaled something measurable, while ‘matic’ advert ised free labour; but ‘tron’, above all, indicated control.
2. It was a totem of high modernism, the intellectual and cultural mode that decreed no process or phenomenon was too complex to be grasped, managed and optimized.
3. Like the heraldic shields of ancient knights, these morphemes were painted onto the names of scientific technologies to proclaim one’s history and achievements to friends and enemies alike.
4. The historian Robert Proctor at Stanford University calls the suffix ‘-tron’, along with ‘-matic’ and ‘-stat’, embodied symbols.
5. To gain the suffix was to acquire a proud and optimistic emblem of the electronic and atomic age.


Question 2

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) given below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequence of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. People with dyslexia have difficulty with print-reading, and people with autism spectrum disorder have difficulty with mind-reading.
2. An example of a lost cognitive instinct is mind-reading: our capacity to think of ourselves and others as having beliefs, desires, thoughts and feelings.
3. Mind-reading looks increasingly like literacy, a skill we know for sure is not in our genes, since scripts have been around for only 5,000-6,000 years.
4. Print-reading, like mind-reading varies across cultures, depends heavily on certain parts of the brain, and is subject to developmental disorders.


Question 3

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) given below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequence of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. Metaphors may map to similar meanings across languages, but their subtle differences can have a profound effect on our understanding of the world.
2. Latin scholars point out carpe diem is a horticultural metaphor that, particularly seen in the context of its source, is more accurately translated as “plucking the day,” evoking the plucking and gathering of ripening fruits or flowers, enjoying a moment that is rooted in the sensory experience of nature, unrelated to the force implied in seizing.
3. The phrase carpe diem, which is often translated as “seize the day and its accompanying philosophy, has gone on to inspire countless people in how they live their lives and motivates us to see the world a little differently from the norm
4. It’s an example of one of the more telling ways that we mistranslate metaphors from one language to another, revealing in the process our hidden assumptions about what we really value.


Question 4

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) given below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequence of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. We’ll all live under mob rule until then, which doesn’t help anyone.
2. Perhaps we need to learn to condense the feedback we receive online so that 100 replies carry the same weight as just one.
3. As we grow more comfortable with social media conversations being part of the way we interact every day, we are going to have to learn how to deal with legitimate criticism.
4. A new norm will arise where it is considered unacceptable to reply with the same point that dozens of others have already.


Question 5

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. Ocean plastic is problematic for a number of reasons, but primarily because marine animals eat it.
2. The largest numerical proportion of ocean plastic falls in small size fractions.
3. Aside from clogging up the digestive tracts of marine life, plastic also tends to adsorb pollutants from the water column.
4. Plastic in the oceans is arguably one of the most important and pervasive environmental problems today.
5. Eating plastic has a number of negative consequences such as the retention of plastic particles in the gut for longer periods than normal food particles.


Question 6

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) given below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequence of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. If you’ve seen a little line of text on websites that says something like "customers who bought this also enjoyed that” you have experienced this collaborative filtering firsthand.
2. The problem with these algorithms is that they don’t take into account a host of nuances and circumstances that might interfere with their accuracy.
3. If you just bought a gardening book for your cousin, you might get a flurry of links to books about gardening, recommended just for you! - the algorithm has no way of knowing you hate gardening and only bought the book as a gift.
4. Collaborative filtering is a mathematical algorithm by which correlations and cooccurrences of behaviors are tracked and then used to make recommendations.


Question 7

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. His idea to use sign language was not a compl etely new idea as Native Americans used hand gestures to communicate with other tribes.
2. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, observed that men who are deaf are incapable of speech.
3. People who were born deaf were denied the right to sign a will as they were “presumed to understand nothing; because it is not possible that they have been able to learn to read or write.”
4. Pushback against this prejudice began in the 16th century when Pedro Ponce de León created a formal sign language for the hearing impaired.
5. For millennia, people with hearing impairments encountered marginalization because it was believed that language could only be learned by hearing the spoken word.


Question 8

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) given below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequence of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. Such a belief in the harmony of nature requires a purpose presumably imposed by the goodness and wisdom of a deity.
2. These parts, all fit together into an integrated, well-ordered system that was created by design.
3. Historically, the notion of a balance of nature is part observational, part metaphysical, and not scientific in any way.
4. It is an example of an ancient belief system called teleology, the notion that what we call nature has a predetermined destiny associated with its component parts.


Question 9

Five sentences related to a topic are given below in a jumbled order. Four of them form a coherent and unified paragraph. Identify the odd sentence that does not go with the four. Key in the number of the option that you choose.
1. Socrates told us that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ and that to ‘know thyself’ is the path to true wisdom
2. It suggests that you should adopt an ancient rhetorical method favored by the likes of Julius Caesar and known as ‘illeism’ - or speaking about yourself in the third person.
3. Research has shown that people who are prone to rumination also often suffer from impaired decision making under pressure and are at a substantially increased risk of depression.
4. Simple rumination - the process of churning your concerns around in your head - is not the way to achieve self-realization.
5. The idea is that this small change in perspective can clear your emotional fog, allowing you to see past your biases.


Question 10

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. One argument is that actors that do not fit within a single, well-defined category may suffer an “illegitimacy discount”.
2. Others believe that complex identities confuse audiences about an organization’s role or purpose.
3. Some organizations have complex and multidimensional identities that span or combine categories, while other organizations possess narrow identities.
4. Identity is one of the most important features of organizations, but there exist opposing views among sociologists about how identity affects organizational performance.
5. Those who think that complex identities are beneficial point to the strategic advantages of ambiguity, and organizations’ potential to differentiate themselves from competitors.


Question 11

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. A particularly interesting example of inference occurs in many single panel comics.
2. It’s the creator’s participation and imagination that makes the single-panel comic so engaging and so rewarding.
3. Often, the humor requires you to imagine what happened in the instant immediately before or immediately after the panel you’re being shown.
4. To get the joke, you actually have to figure out what some of these missing panels must be.
5. It is as though the cartoonist devised a series of panels to tell the story and has chosen to show you only one - and typically not even the funniest.


Question 12

1. To the uninitiated listener, atonal music can sound like chaotic, random noise.
2. Atonality is a condition of music in which the constructs of the music do not ‘live’ within the confines of a particular key signature, scale, or mode.
3. After you realize the amount of knowledge, skill, and technical expertise required to compose or perform it, your tune may change, so to speak.
4. However, atonality is one of the most important movements in 20th century music.


Question 13

1. Living things—animals and plants—typically exhibit correlational structure.
2. Adaptive behaviour depends on cognitive economy, treating objects as equivalent.
3. The information we receive from our senses, from the world, typically has structure and order, and is not arbitrary.
4. To categorize an object means to consider it equivalent to other things in that category, and different—along some salient dimension—from things that are not.


Question 14

1. Conceptualisations of ‘women’s time’ as contrary to clock-time and clock-time as synonymous with economic rationalism are two of the deleterious results of this representation.
2. While dichotomies of ‘men’s time’, ‘women’s time’, clock-time, and caring time can be analytically useful, this article argues that everyday caring practices incorporate a multiplicity of times; and both men and women can engage in these multiple-times
3. When the everyday practices of working sole fathers and working sole mothers are carefully examined to explore conceptualisations of gendered time, it is found that caring time is often more focused on the clock than generally theorised.
4. Clock-time has been consistently represented in feminist literature as a masculine artefact representative of a ‘time is money’ perspective.

CAT 2018 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

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. In the era of smart world, however, ‘Universal Basic Income’ is an ineffective instrument which cannot address the potential breakdown of the social contract when large swathes of the population would effectively be unemployed.
2. In the era of industrial revolution, the abolition of child labour, poor laws and the growth of trade unions helped families cope with the pressures of mechanised work.
3. Growing inequality could be matched by a creeping authoritarianism that is bolstered by technology that is increasingly able to peer into the deepest vestiges of our lives.
4. New institutions emerge which recognise ways in which workers could contribute to and benefit by economic growth when, rather than if, their jobs are automated.


Question 2

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.


Question 3

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.


Question 4

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer.

1. Self-management is thus defined as the ‘individual’s ability to manage the symptoms, treatment, physical and psychosocial consequences and lifestyle changes inherent in living with a chronic condition’.

2. Most people with progressive diseases like dementia prefer to have control over their own lives and health-care for as long as possible.

3. Having control means, among other things, that patients themselves perform self-management activities.

4. Supporting people in decisions and actions that promote self-management is called self-management support requiring a cooperative relationship between the patient, the family, and the professionals.


Question 5

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. Much has been recently discovered about the development of songs in birds.

2. Some species are restricted to a single song learned by all individuals, others have a range of songs.

3. The most important auditory stimuli for the birds are the sounds of other birds.

4. For all bird species there is a prescribed path to development of the final song,

5. A bird begins with the subsong, passes through plastic song, until it achieves the species song.


Question 6

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.


Question 7

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.


Question 8

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer.

1. It was his taxpayers who had to shell out as much as $1.6bn over 10 years to employees of failed companies.

2. Companies in many countries routinely engage in such activities which means that the employees are left with unpaid entitlements

3. Deliberate and systematic liquidation of a company to avoid liabilities and then restarting the business is called phoenixing.

4. The Australian Minister for Revenue and Services discovered in an audit that phoenixing had cost the Australian economy between $2.9bn and $5.1bn last year.


Question 9

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 the number in:

1. Our smartphones can now track our diets, our biological cycles, even our digestive systems and sleep-patterns.

2. Researchers have even coined a new term, “orthosomnia”, to describe the insomnia brought on by paying too much attention to smartphones and sleep-tracking apps.

3. Sleep, nature’s soft nurse, is a blissful, untroubled state all too easily disturbed by earthly worries or a guilty conscience.

4. The existence of a market for such apps is unsurprising: shift work, a long-hours culture and blue light from screens have conspired to rob many of us of sufficient rest.

5. A new threat to a good night’s rest has emerged - smart-phones, with sleep-tracking apps.


Question 10

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. As India looks to increase the number of cities, our urban planning must factor in potential natural disasters and work out contingencies in advance.
2. Authorities must revise data and upgrade infrastructure and mitigation plans even if their local area hasn’t been visited by a natural calamity yet.
3. Extreme temperatures, droughts, and forest fires have more than doubled since 1980.
4. There is no denying the fact that our baseline normal weather is changing.
5. It is no longer a question of whether we will be hit by nature's fury but rather when.


Question 11

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer.
1.The eventual diagnosis was skin cancer and after treatment all seemed well.
2. The viola player didn’t know what it was; nor did her GP.
3. Then a routine scan showed it had come back and spread to her lungs.
4. It started with a lump on Cathy Perkins’ index finger.


Question 12

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) But now we have another group: the unwitting enablers.
2) Democracy and high levels of inequality of the kind that have come to characterize the United States are simply incompatible.
3) Believing these people are working for a better world, they are, actually, at most, chipping away at the margins, making slight course corrections, ensuring the system goes on as it is, uninterrupted.
4) Very rich people will always use money to maintain their political and economic power.


Question 13

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. They would rather do virtuous side projects assiduously as long as these would not compel them into doing their day jobs more honourably or reduce the profit margins.
2. They would fund a million of the buzzwordy programs rather than fundamentally question the rules of their game or alter their own behavior to reduce the harm of the existing distorted, inefficient and unfair rules.
3. Like the dieter who would rather do anything to lose weight than actually eat less, the business elite would save the world through social-impact-investing and philanthro-capitalism.
4. Doing the right thing — and moving away from their win-win mentality — would involve real sacrifice; instead, it’s easier to focus on their pet projects and initiatives.


Question 14

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of four numbers as your answer.

1) The woodland’s canopy receives most of the sunlight that falls on the trees.
2) Swifts do not confine themselves to woodlands, but hunt wherever there are insects in the air.
3) With their streamlined bodies, swifts are agile flyers, ideally adapted to twisting and turning through the air as they chase flying insects - the creatures that form their staple diet.
4) Hundreds of thousands of insects fly in the sunshine up above the canopy, some falling prey to swifts and swallows

CAT 2017 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

The five sentences labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Decide on. the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer.
1. The process of handing down implies not a passive transfer, but some contestation in defining what exactly is to be handed down.
2. Wherever Western scholars have worked on the Indian past, the selection is even more apparent and the inventing of a tradition much more recognizable.
3. Every generation selects what it requires from the past and makes its innovations, some more than others.
4. It is now a truism to say that traditions are not handed down unchanged, but are invented.
5. Just as life has death as its opposite, so is tradition by default the opposite of innovation.


Question 2

The five sentences labelled (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of FIVE NUMBERS as your answer.

1: The implications of retelling of Indian stories, hence, takes on new meaning in a modern India.
2. The stories we tell reflect the world around us.
3. We cannot help but retell the stories that we value — after all, they are never quite right for us — in our time. 

4. And even if we manage to get them quite right, they are only right for us — other people living around us will have different reasons for telling similar stories.

5. As soon as we capture a story, the world we were trying to capture has changed.


Question 3

The five sentences labelled (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer.

1. Scientists have for the first time managed to edit genes in a human embryo to repair a genetic mutation, fuelling hopes that such procedures may one day be available outside laboratory conditions.
2. The cardiac disease causes sudden death in otherwise healthy young athletes and affects about one in 500 people overall.
3. Correcting the mutation in the gene would not only ensure that the child is healthy but also prevents transmission of the mutation to future generations.
4. It is caused by a mutation in a particular gene and a child will suffer from the condition even if it inherits only one copy of the mutated gene.
5. In results announced in Nature this week, scientists fixed a mutation that thickens the heart muscle, a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.


Question 4

The five sentences labelled (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of FIVE NUMBERS as your answer.

1. Before plants can take life from atmosphere, nitrogen must undergo transformations similar to ones that food undergoes in our digestive machinery.
2. In its aerial form nitrogen is insoluble, unusable and is in need of transformation.
3. Lightning starts the series of chemical reactions that need to happen to nitrogen, ultimately helping it nourish our earth.
4. Nitrogen — an essential food for plants — is an abundant resource, with about 22 million tons of it floating over each square mile of earth.
5. One of the most dramatic examples in nature of ill wind that blows goodness is lightning.


Question 5

The five sentences labelled (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Decide on. the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer.
1. The study suggests that the disease did not spread with such intensity, but that it may have driven human migrations across Europe and Asia.
2. The oldest sample came from an individual who lived in southeast Russia about 5,000 years ago.
3. The ages of the skeletons correspond to a time of mass exodus from today's Russia and Ukraine into western Europe and central Asia, suggesting that a pandemic could have driven these migrations.
4. In the analysis of fragments of DNA from 101 Bronze Age skeletons for sequences from Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the disease, seven tested positive.
5. DNA from Bronze Age human skeletons indicate that the black plague could have emerged as early as 3,000 BCE, long before the epidemic that swept through Europe in the rnid-1300s.


Question 6

The five sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer.
1. This has huge implications for the health care system as it operates today, where depleted resources and time lead to patients rotating in and out of doctor's offices, oftentimes receiving minimal care or concern (what is commonly referred to as "bed side manner") from doctors.
2. The placebo effect is when an individual's medical condition or pain shows signs of improvement based on a fake intervention that has been presented to them as a real one and used to be regularly dismissed by researchers as a psychological effect.
3. The placebo effect is not solely based on believing in treatment, however, as the clinical setting in which treatments are administered is also paramount.
4. That the mind has the power to trigger biochemical changes because the individual believes that a given drug or intervention will be effective could empower chronic patients through the notion of our bodies' capacity for self-healing.
5. Placebo effects are now studied not just as foils for "real" interventions but as a potential portal into the self-healing powers of the body.


Question 7

The five sentences labelled (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer.
1. This visual turn in social media has merely accentuated this announcing instinct of ours, enabling us with easy-to-create, easy-to-share, easy-to-store and easy-to-consume platforms, gadgets and apps.
2. There is absolutely nothing new about us framing the vision of who we are or what we want, visually or otherwise, in our Facebook page, for example.
3. Turning the pages of most family albums, which belong to a period well before the digital dissemination of self-created and self-curated moments and images, would reconfirm the basic instinct of documenting our presence in a particular space, on a significant occasion, with others who matter.
4. We are empowered to book our faces and act as celebrities within the confinement of our respective friend lists, and communicate our activities, companionship and locations with minimal clicks and touches.
5. What is unprecedented is not the desire to put out newsfeeds related to the self, but the ease with which this broadcast operation can now be executed, often provoking (un)anticipated responses from beyond one' s immediate location.


Question 8

The five sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer.
1. Johnson treated English very practically, as a living language, with many different shades of meaning and adopted his definitions on the principle of English common law — according to precedent.
2. Masking a profound inner torment, Johnson found solace in compiling the words of a language that was, in its coarse complexity and comprehensive genius, the precise analogue of his character.
3. Samuel Johnson was a pioneer who raised common sense to heights of genius, and a man of robust popular instincts whose watchwords were clarity, precision and simplicity.
4. The 18th century English reader, in the new world of global trade and global warfare, needed a dictionary with authoritative acts of definition of words of a language that was becoming seeded throughout the first British empire by a vigorous and practical champion.
5. The Johnson who challenged Bishop Berkeley's solipsist theory of the nonexistence of matter by kicking a large stone ("I refute it thus") is the same Johnson for whom language must have a daily practical use.


Question 9

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.

l. People who study children's language spend a lot of time watching how babies react to the speech they hear around them.
2. They make films of adults and babies interacting, and examine them very carefully to see whether the babies show any signs of understanding what the adults say.
3. They believe that babies begin to react to language from the very moment they are born.
4. Sometimes the signs are very subtle — slight movements of the baby's eyes or the head or the hands.
5. You'd never notice them if you were just sitting with the child, but by watching a recording over and over, you can spot them.


Question 10

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. Although we are born with the gift of language, research shows that we are surprisingly unskilled when it comes to communicating with others.
2. We must carefully orchestrate our speech if we want to achieve our goals and bring our dreams to fruition.
3. We often choose our words without thought, oblivious of the emotional effects they can have on others.
4. We talk more than we need to, ignoring the effect we are having on those listening to us.
5. We listen poorly, without realizing it, and we often fail to pay attention to the subtle meanings conveyed by facial expressions, body gestures, and the tone and cadence of our voice.


Question 11

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. Neuroscientists have just begun studying exercise's impact within brain cells — on the genes themselves.
2. Even there, in the roots of our biology, they' ve found signs of the body's influence on the mind.
3. It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes.
4. In today's technology-driven, plasma-screened-in world, it's easy to forget that we are born movers-animals, in fact — because we' ve engineered movement right out of our lives.
5. It's only in the past few years that neuroscientists have begun to describe these factors and how they work, and each new discovery adds awe-inspiring depth to the picture.


Question 12

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: Over the past fortnight, one of its finest champions managed to pull off a similar impression.
2. Wimbledon's greatest illusion is the sense of timelessness it evokes.
3. At 35 years and 342 days, Roger Federer became the oldest man to win the singles title in the Open Era — a full 14 years after he first claimed the title as a scruffy, pony-tailed upstart.
4. Once he had survived the opening week, the second week witnessed the range of a rested Federer's genius.
5. Given that his method isn't reliant on explosive athleticism or muscular ball-striking, both vulnerable to decay, there is cause to believe that Federer will continue to enchant for a while longer.


Question 13

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. The water that made up ancient lakes and perhaps an ocean was lost.
2. Particles from the Sun collided with molecules in the atmosphere, knocking them into space or giving them an electric charge that caused them to be swept away by the solar wind.
3. Most of the planet's remaining water is now frozen or buried, but clues over the past decade suggested that some liquid water, a presumed necessity for life, might survive in underground aquifers.
4. Data from NASA's MAVEN orbiter show that solar storms stripped away most of Mars's once-thick atmosphere.
5. A recent study reveals how Mars lost much of its early water, while another indicates that some liquid water remains.


Question 14

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. Those geometric symbols and aerodynamic swooshes are more than just skin deep.
2. The Commonwealth Bank logo — a yellow diamond, with a black chunk sliced out in one corner — is so recognisable that the bank doesn't even use its full name in its advertising.
3. It's not just logos with hidden shapes; sometimes brands will have meanings or stories within them that are deliberately vague or lost in time, urging you to delve deeper to solve the riddle.
4. Graphic designers embed cryptic references because it adds a story to the brand; they want people to spend more time with a brand and have that idea that they are an insider if they can understand the hidden message.
5. But the CommBank logo has more to it than meets the eye, as squirrelled away in that diamond is the Southern Cross constellation.

CAT 2007 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

A. In America, highly educated women, who are in stronger position in the labour market than less qualified ones, have higher rates of marriage than other groups.

B. Some works supports the Becker thesis, and some appears to contradict it.

C. And, as with crime, it is equally inconclusive.

D. But regardless of the conclusion of any particular piece of work, it is hard to establish convincing connections between family changes and economic factors using conventional approaches.

E. Indeed, just as with crime, an enormous academic literature exists on the validity of the pure economic approach to the evolution of family structures.


Question 2

A. Personal experience of mothering and motherhood are largely framed in relation to two discernible or “official” discourses; the “medical discourse and natural childbirth discourse”. Both of these tend to focus on the “optimistic stories” of birth and mothering and underpin stereotypes of the “godmother”.

B. At the same time, the need for medical expert guidance is also a feature for contemporary reproduction and motherhood. But constructions of good mothering have not always been so conceived and in different contexts may exist in parallel to other equally dominant discourses.

C. Similarly, historical work has shown how what are now taken for granted aspects of reproduction and mothering practices result from contemporary “pseudoscientific directives” and “managed constructs”. These changes have led to a reframing of modern discourses that pattern pregnancy and motherhood leading to an acceptance of the need for greater expert management.

D. The contrasting, overlapping and ambiguous strands with in these frameworks focus to varying degrees on a woman’s biological tie to her child and predisposition to instinctively know and be able to care for her child.

E. In addition, a third, “unofficial popular discourse” comprising “old wives” tales and based on maternal experiences of childbirth has also been noted. These discourses have also been acknowledged in work exploring the experiences of those who apparently do not “conform” to conventional stereotypes of the “good mother”?


Question 3

A. Indonesia has experienced dramatic shifts in its formal governance arrangements since the fall of President Soeharto and the close of his centralized, authoritarian "New Order" regime in 1997.

B. The political system has taken its place in the nearly 10 years since Reformasi began. It has featured the active contest for political office among a proliferation of parties at central, provincial and district levels; direct elections for the presidency (since 2004); and radical changes in centre-local government relations towards administrative, fiscal, and political decentralization.

C. The mass media, once tidily under Soeharto's thumb, has experienced significant liberalization, as has the legal basis for non-governmental organizations, including many dedicated to such controversial issues as corruption control and human rights.

D. Such developments are seen optimistically by a number of donors and some external analysts, who interpret them as signs of Indonesia's political normalization.

E. A different group of analysts paint a picture in which the institutional forms have changed, but power relations have not. Vedi Hadiz argues that Indonesia's "democratic transition" has been anything but linear.


Question 4

A. I had six thousand acres of land, arid had thus got much spare land besides the coffee plantation. Part of the farm was native forest, and about one thousand acres were squatters' land, what [the Kikuyu] called their shambas.

B. The squatters' land was more intensely alive than the rest of the farm, and was changing with the seasons the year round. The maize grew up higher than your head as you walked on the narrow hard-trampled footpaths in between the tall green rustling regiments.

C. The squatters are Natives, who with their families hold a few acres on a white man's farm, and in return have to work for him a certain number of days in the year. -My squatters, I think, saw the relationship in a different light, for many of them were born on the farm, and their fathers before them, and they very likely regarded me as a sort of superior squatter on their estates.

D. The Kikuyu also grew the sweet potatoes that have a vine like leaf and spread over the ground like a dense entangled mat, and many varieties of big yellow and green speckled pumpkins.

E. The beans ripened in the fields, were gathered and thrashed by the women, and the maize stalks and coffee pods were collected and burned, so that in certain seasons thin blue columns of smoke rose here and there all over the farm.

CAT 2005 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

The sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labeled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A) This is now orthodoxy to which I subscribe - up to a point.

B) It emerged from the mathematics of chance and statistics.

C) Therefore the risk is measurable and manageable.

D) The fundamental concept: Prices are not predictable, but the mathematical laws of chance can describe their fluctuations.

E) This is how what business schools now call modern finance was born.


Question 2

The sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labeled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

(A) Similarly, turning to caste, even though being lower caste is undoubtedly a separate cause of disparity, its impact is all the greater when the lower-caste families also happen to be poor.

(B) Belonging to a privileged class can help a woman to overcome many barriers that obstruct women from less thriving classes.

(C) It is the interactive presence of these two kinds of deprivation - being low class and being female - that massively impoverishes women from the less privileged classes.

(D) A congruence of class deprivation and gender discrimination can blight the lives of poorer women very severely.

(E) Gender is certainly a contributor to societal inequality, but it does not act independently ofclass.


Question 3

(A) When identity is thus ‘defined by contrast’, divergence with the West becomes central.

(B) Indian religious literature such as the Bhagavad Gita or the Tantric texts, which are identified as differing from secular writings seen as ‘western’, elicits much greater interest in the West thando other Indian writings, including India’s long history of heterodoxy.

(C) There is a similar neglect of Indian writing on non-religious subjects, from mathematics,epistemology and natural science to economics and linguistics.

(D) Through selective emphasis that point up differences with the West, other civilizations can, in this way, be redefined in alien terms, which can be exotic and charming, or else bizarre and terrifying, or simply strange and engaging.

(E) The exception is the Kamasutra in which western readers have managed to cultivate an interest.

CAT 2004 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph?

A. The two neighbours never fought each other.

B. Fights involving three male fiddler crabs have been recorded, but the status of the participants was unknown

C. They pushed or grappled only with the intruder.

D. We recorded 17 cases in which a resident that was fighting an intruder was joined by an immediate neighbour, an ally.

E. We therefore tracked 268 intruder males until be saw them fighting a resident male.


Question 2

Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph?

A. In the west, Allied Forces had fought their way through southern Italy as far as Rome.

B. In June 1944 Germany's military position in World War two appeared hopeless

C. In Britain, the task of amassing the men and materials for the liberation of northern Europe had been completed.

D. Red Army was poised to drive the Nazis back through Poland.

E. The situation on the eastern front was catastrophic.


Question 3

Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph?

A. He felt justified in bypassing Congress altogether on a variety of moves.

B. At times he was fighting the entire Congress.

C. Bush felt he had a mission to restore power to the presidency.

D. Bush was not fighting just the democrats.

E. Representatives democracy is a messy business, and a CEO of the white House does not like a legislature of second guessers and time wasters.


Question 4

Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph?

A. But this does not mean that death was the Egyptians only preoccupation.

B. Even papyri come mainly from pyramid temples.

C. Most of our traditional sources of information about the Old Kingdom are monuments of the rich like pyramids and tombs.

D. Houses in which ordinary Egyptian lived have not been preserved, and when most people died they were buried in simple graves.

E. We know infinitely more about the wealthy people of Egypt than we do about the ordinary people, as most monuments were made for the rich.


Question 5

Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph?

A. Experts such as Larry Burns, head of research at GM, reckon that only such a full hearted leap will allow the world to cope with the mass motorization that will one day come to China or India.

B. But once hydrogen is being produced from biomass or extracted from underground coal or made from water, using nuclear or renewable electricity, the way will be open for a huge reduction in carbon emissions from the whole system.

C. In theory, once all the bugs have been sorted out, fuel cells should deliver better total fuel economy than any existing engines.

D. That is twice as good as the internal combustion engine, but only five percentage points better than a diesel hybrid.

E. Allowing for the resources needed to extract hydrogen from hydrocarbon, oil coal or gas, the fuel cell has an efficiency of 30%.

CAT 2003 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

Choose the most logical order of sentences among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. A few months ago I went to Princeton University to see what the young people who are going to be running our country in a few decades are like.

B. I would go to sleep in my hotel room around midnight each night, and when I awoke, my mailbox would be full of replies—sent at 1:15 a.m., 2:59 a.m., 3:23 a.m.

C. One senior told me that she went to bed around two and woke up each morning at seven; she could afford that much rest because she had learned to supplement her full day of work by studying in her sleep.

D. Faculty members gave me the names of a few dozen articulate students, and I sent them e mails, inviting them out to lunch or dinner in small groups.

E. As she was falling asleep she would recite a math problem or a paper topic to herself; she would then sometimes dream about it, and when she woke up, the problem might be solved.


Question 2

Choose the most logical order of sentences among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. Four days later, Oracle announced its own bid for PeopleSoft, and invited the firm’s board to a discussion.

B. Furious that his own plans had been endangered, PeopleSoft’s boss, Craig Conway, called Oracle’s offer “diabolical”, and its boss, Larry Ellison, a “sociopath”.

C. In early June, PeopleSoft said that it would buy J.D. Edwards, a smaller rival.

D. Moreover, said Mr. Conway, he “could imagine no price nor combination of price and other conditions to recommend accepting the offer.”

E. On June 12th, PeopleSoft turned Oracle down.


Question 3

Choose the most logical order of sentences among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. Surrendered, or captured, combatants cannot be incarcerated in razor wire cages; this ‘war’ has a dubious legality.

B. How can then one characterize a conflict to be waged against a phenomenon as war?

C. The phrase ‘war against terror’, which has passed into the common lexicon, is a huge misnomer.

D. Besides, war has a juridical meaning in international law, which has codified the laws of war, imbuing them with a humanitarian content.

E.Terror is a phenomenon, not an entity—either State or non-State.


Question 4

Choose the most logical order of sentences among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. I am much more intolerant of a human being’s shortcomings than I am of an animal’s, but in this respect I have been lucky, for most of the people I have come across have been charming.

B. Then you come across the unpleasant human animal—the District Officer who drawled, ‘We chaps are here to help you chaps,’ and then proceeded to be as obstructive as possible.

C. In these cases of course, the fact that you are an animal collector helps; people always seem delighted to meet someone with such an unusual occupation and go out of their way to assist you.

D. Fortunately, these types are rare, and the pleasant ones I have met more than compensated for them—but even so, I think I will stick to animals.

E. When you travel round the world collecting animals you also, of necessity, collect human beings.


Question 5

Choose the most logical order of sentences among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A.To avoid this, the QWERTY layout put the keys most likely to be hit in rapid succession on opposite sides. This made the keyboard slow, the story goes, but that was the idea.

B. A different layout, which had been patented by August Dvorak in 1936, was shown to be much faster.

C. The QWERTY design (patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873) aimed to solve a mechanical problem of early typewriters.

D.Yet the Dvorak layout has never been widely adopted, even though (with electric typewriters and then PCs) the anti-jamming rational for QWERTY has been defunct for years.

E. When certain combinations of keys were struck quickly, the type bars often jammed.

CAT 2002 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

The sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. Branded disposable diapers are available at many supermarkets and drug stores.

B. If one supermarket sets a higher price for a diaper, customers may buy that brand elsewhere.

C. By contrast, the demand for private-label products may be less price sensitive since it is available only at a corresponding supermarket chain.

D. So the demand for branded diapers at any particular store may be quite price sensitive.

E. For instance, only SavOn Drugs stores sell SavOn Drugs diapers.

F. Then stores should set a higher incremental margin percentage for private label diapers.


Question 2

The sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. Having a strategy is a matter of discipline.

B. It involves the configuration of a tailored value chain that enables a company to offer unique value.

C. It requires a strong focus on profitability and a willingness to make tough tradeoffs in choosing what not to do.

D. Strategy goes far beyond the pursuit of best practices.

E. A company must stay the course even during times of upheaval, while constantly improving and extending its distinctive positioning.

F. When a company’s activities fit together as a self-reinforcing system, any competitor wishing to imitate a strategy must replicate the whole system.


Question 3

The sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. As officials, their vision of a country shouldn’t run too far beyond that of the local people with whom they have to deal.

B. Ambassadors have to choose their words.

C. To say what they feel they have to say, they appear to be denying or ignoring part of what they know.

D. So, with ambassadors as with other expatriates in black Africa, there appears at a first meeting a kind of ambivalence.

E. They do a specialized job and it is necessary for them to live ceremonial lives.


Question 4

The sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. “This face-off will continue for several months given the strong convictions on either side,” says a senior functionary of the high-powered task force on drought.

B. During the past week-and-half, the Central Government has sought to deny some of the earlier apprehensions over the impact of drought.

C. The recent revival of the rains had led to the emergence of a line of divide between the two.

D. The state governments, on the other hand, allege that the Centre is downplaying the crisis only to evade its full responsibility of financial assistance that is required to alleviate the damage.

E. Shrill alarm about the economic impact of an inadequate monsoon had been sounded by the Centre as well as most of the states, in late July and early August.


Question 5

The sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. This fact was established in the 1730s by French survey expenditions to Equador near the Equator and Lapland in the Arctic, which found that around the middle of the earth the arc was about a kilometer shorter.

B. One of the unsettled scientific questions in the late 18th century was that exact nature of the shape of the earth.

C. The length of one-degree arc would be less near the equatorial latitudes than at the poles.

D. One way of doing that is to determine the length of the arc along a chosen longitude or meridian at one degree latitude separation.

E. While it was generally known that the earth was not a sphere but an ‘oblate spheroid’, more curved at the equator and flatter at the poles, the question of ‘how much more’ was yet to be established.

CAT 2001 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. Although there are large regional variations, it is not infrequent to find a large number of people sitting here and there and doing nothing.

B. Once in office, they receive friends and relatives who feel free to call any time without prior appointment.

C. While working, one is struck by the slow and clumsy actions and reactions, indifferent attitudes, procedure rather than outcome orientation, and the lack of consideration for others.

D. Even those who are employed often come late to the office and leave early unless they are forced to be punctual.

E. Work is not intrinsically valued in India.

F. Quite often people visit ailing friends and relatives or go out of their way to help them in their personal matters even during office hours.

[CAT 2001]


Question 2

Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. But in the industrial era destroying the enemy’s productive capacity means bombing the factories which are located in the cities.

B. So in the agrarian era, if you need to destroy the enemy’s productive capacity, what you want to do is burn his fields, or if you’re really vicious, salt them.

C. Now in the information era, destroying the enemy’s productive capacity means destroying the information infrastructure.

D. How do you do battle with your enemy?

E. The idea is to destroy the enemy’s productive capacity, and depending upon the economic foundation, that productive capacity is different in each case.

F. With regard to defence, the purpose of the military is to defend the nation and be prepared to do battle with its enemy.

[CAT 2001]


Question 3

Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. Michael Hofman, a poet and translator, accepts this sorry fact without approval or complaint.

B. But thanklessness and impossibility do not daunt him.

C. He acknowledges too — in fact, he returns to the point often — that best translators of poetry always fail at some level.

D. Hofman feels passionately about his work and this is clear from his writings.

E. In terms of the gap between worth and rewards, translators come somewhere near nurses and street-cleaners.

[CAT 2001]


Question 4

Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. Passivity is not, of course, universal.

B. In areas where there are no lords or laws, or in frontier zones where all men go armed, the attitude of the peasantry may well be different.

C. So indeed it may be on the fringe of the unsubmissive.

D. However, for most of the soil-bound peasants the problem is not whether to be normally passive or active, but when to pass from one state to another.

E. This depends on an assessment of the political situation.

[CAT 2001]


Question 5

Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. The situations in which violence occurs and the nature of that violence tends to be clearly defined at least in theory, as in the proverbial Irishman’s question: “Is this a private fight or can anyone join in?”

B. So the actual risk to outsiders, though no doubt higher than our societies, is calculable.

C. Probably the only uncontrolled applications of force are those of social superiors to social inferiors and even here there are probably some rules.

D. However, binding the obligation to kill, members of feuding families engaged in mutual massacre will be genuinely appalled if by some mischance a bystander or outsider is killed.

[CAT 2001]

CAT 2000 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

Sentence given in each question, when properly sequenced, from a coherent paragraph. The first and last sentences are 1 and 6, and the four in between are labelled A, B, C and D. Choose the most logical order of these four sentences for among the four given choices to construct a coherent paragraph from sentences 1 to.6.

1) Horses and communism were, on the whole, a poor match.

A. Fine horses bespoke the nobility the party was supposed to despise.

B. Communist leaders, when they visited villages, preferred to see cows and pigs.

C. Although a working horse was just about tolerable, the communists were right to be wary.

D. Peasants from Poland to the Hungarian Pustza preferred their horses to party dogma.

6) “A farmer’s pride is his horse; his cow may be thin but his horse must be fat,” went a Slovak saying.


Question 2

The, sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the four given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A.If caught in the act, they were punished, not for the crime, but for allowing themselves to be caught.

B.The bellicose Spartans sacrificed all the finer things in life for military expertise.

C.Those fortunate enough to survive babyhood were taken away from their mothers at the age of seven to undergo rigorous military training.

D.This consisted mainly of beatings and deprivations of all kinds like going around barefoot in winter, and worse, starvation so that they would be forced to steal food to survive.

E.Male children were examined at birth by the city council and those deemed too weak to become soldiers were left to die of exposure.


Question 3

The, sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the four given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world.

B. Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still revelling, its age-old habit, in mere images of truth.

C. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older images drawn by hand; for one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention.

D. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems.

E. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.


Question 4

The, sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the four given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world.

B. Nor is it confined to one social class; quite the contrary.

C. It is by no means confined to “culture” narrowly understood as an acquaintance with the arts.

D. Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them.

E. The breadth of that information is great, extending over the major domains of human activity from sports to science.


Question 5

The, sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the four given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. Both parties use capital and labour in the struggle to secure property rights.

B. The thief spends time and money in his attempt to steal (he buys wire cutters) and the legitimate property owner expends resources to prevent the theft (he buys locks).

C. A social cost of theft is that both the thief and the potential victim use resources to gain or maintain control over property.

D. These costs may escalate as a type of technological arms race unfolds.

E. A bank may purchase more and more complicated and sophisticated safes, forcing safecrackers to invest further in safecracking equipment.


Question 6

The, sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the four given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.

A. The likelihood of an accident is determined by how carefully the motorist drives and how carefully the pedestrian crosses the street.

B. An accident involving a motorist and a pedestrian is such a case.

C. Each must decide how much care to exercise without knowing how careful the other is.

D. The simplest strategic problem arises when two individuals interact with each other, and each must decide what to do without knowing what the other is doing.


Question 7

Sentence given in each question, when properly sequenced, from a coherent paragraph. The first and last sentences are 1 and 6, and the four in between are labelled A, B, C and D. Choose the most logical order of these four sentences for among the four given choices to construct a coherent paragraph from sentences 1 to 6.

1) Security inks exploit the same principle that causes the vivid and constantly changing colours of a film of oil on water.

A. When two rays of light meet each other after being reflected from these different surfaces, they have each travelled slightly different distances.

B. The key is that the light is bouncing off two surfaces, that of the oil and that of the water layer below it.

C. The distance the two rays travel determines which wavelengths, and hence colours, interfere constructively and look bright.

D. Because light is an electromagnetic wave, the peaks and troughs of each ray then interfere either constructively, to appear bright, or destructively, to appear dim.

6) Since the distance the rays travel changes with the angle as you look at the surface, different colours look bright from different viewing angles.


Question 8

Sentence given in each question, when properly sequenced, from a coherent paragraph. The first and last sentences are 1 and 6, and the four in between are labelled A, B, C and D. Choose the most logical order of these four sentences for among the four given choices to construct a coherent paragraph from sentences 1 to 6.

1) Commercially reared chicken can be unusually aggressive, and are often kept in darkened sheds to prevent them pecking at each other.

A. The birds spent far more of their time—up to a third — pecking at the inanimate objects in the pens, in contrast to birds in other pens which spend a lot of time attacking others.

B. In low light conditions, they behave less belligerently, but are more prone to ophthalmic disorders and respiratory problem.

C. In an experiment, aggressive head-pecking was all but eliminated among birds in the enriched environment

D. Altering the birds’ environment, by adding bales of wood-shavings to their pens, can work wonders.

6) Bales could diminish aggressiveness and reduce injuries; they might even improve productivity, since a happy chicken is a productive chicken.


Question 9

Sentence given in each question, when properly sequenced, from a coherent paragraph. The first and last sentences are 1 and 6, and the four in between are labelled A, B, C and D. Choose the most logical order of these four sentences for among the four given choices to construct a coherent paragraph from sentences 1 to.6.

1) The concept of a ‘nation-state’ assumes a complete correspondence between the boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of those who live in a specific state.

A. Then there are members of national collectivities who live in other countries, making a mockery of the concept.

B. There are always people living in particular states who are not considered to be (and often do not consider themselves to be) members of the hegemonic nation.

C. Even worse, there are nations which never had a state for which are divided across several states.

D. This, of course, has been subject to severe criticism and is virtually everywhere a fiction.

6) However, the fiction has been, and continues to be, at the basis of nationalist ideologies.


Question 10

Sentence given in each question, when properly sequenced, from a coherent paragraph. The first and last sentences are 1 and 6, and the four in between are labelled A, B, C and D. Choose the most logical order of these four sentences for among the four given choices to construct a coherent paragraph from sentences 1 to.6.

1) In the sciences, even questionable examples of research fraud are harshly punished.

A. But no such mechanism exists in the humanities — much of what humanities researchers call research does not lead to results that are replicable by other scholars.

B. Given the importance of interpretation in historical and literary scholarship, humanities researchers are in a position where they can explain away deliberate and even systematic distortion.

C. Mere suspicion is enough for funding to be cut off; publicity guarantees that careers can be effectively ended.

D. Forgeries which take the form of pastiches in which the forger intersperses fake and real parts can be defended as mere mistakes or aberrant misreading.

6) Scientists fudging data have no such defences.

CAT 1999 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

1. Making people laugh is tricky.

A. At times, the intended humour may simply not come off.

B. Making people laugh while trying to sell them something is a tougher challenge, since the commercial can fall flat on two grounds.

C. There are many advertisements which do amuse but do not even begin to set the cash tills ringing.

D. Again, it is rarely sufficient for an advertiser simply to amuse the target audience in order to reap the sales benefit.

6. There are indications that in substituting the hard sell for a more entertaining approach, some agencies have rather thrown out the baby with the bath water.


Question 2

1. Picture a termite colony, occupying a tall mud hump on an African plain.

A. Hungry predators often invade the colony and unsettle the balance.

B. The colony flourishes only if the proportion of soldiers to workers remains roughly the same, so that the queen and workers can be protected by the soldiers, and the queen and soldiers can be serviced by the workers.

C. But its fortunes are presently restored, because the immobile queen, walled in well below ground level, lays eggs not only in large enough numbers, but also in the varying proportions required.

D. The hump is alive with worker termites and soldier termites going about their distinct kinds of business. 6. How can we account for her mysterious ability to respond like this to events on the distant surface?

6. How can we account for a mysterious ability to respond like this to events on the distant surface?


Question 3

1. High-powered outboard motors were considered to be one of the major threats to the survival of the Beluga whales.

A. With these, hunters could approach Belugas within hunting range and profit from its inner skin and blubber.

B. To escape an approaching motor, Belugas have learned to dive to the ocean bottom and stay there for up to 20 minutes, by which time the confused predator has left.

C. Today, however, even with much more powerful engines, it is difficult to come close, because the whales seem to disappear suddenly just when you thought you had them in your sights.

D. When the first outboard engines arrived in the early 1930s, one came across 4 and 8 HP motors.

6. Belugas seem to have used their well-known sensitivity to noise to evolve an ‘avoidance' strategy to outsmart hunters and their powerful technologies.


Question 4

1. The reconstruction of history by post-revolutionary science texts involves more than a multiplication of historical misconstructions.

A. Because they aim quickly to acquaint the student with what the contemporary scientific community thinks it knows, textbooks treat the various experiments, concepts, laws and theories of the current normal science as separately and as nearly seriatim as possible.

B. Those misconstructions render revolutions invisible; the arrangement of the still visible material in science texts implies a process that, if it existed, would deny revolutions a function.

C. But when combined with the generally unhistorical air of science writing and with the occasional systematic misconstruction, one impression is likely to follow.

D. As pedagogy this technique of presentation is unexceptionable.

6. Science has reached its present state by a series of individual discoveries and inventions that, when gathered together, constitute the modem body of technical knowledge.


Question 5

A. In rejecting the functionalism in positivist organization theory, either wholly or partially, there is often a move towards a political model of organization theory.

B. Thus the analysis would shift to the power resources possessed by different groups in the organization and the way they use these resources in actual power plays to shape the organizational structure.

C. At the extreme, in one set of writings, the growth of administrators in the organization is held to be completely unrelated to the work to be done and to be caused totally by the political pursuit of self- interest.

D. The political model holds that individual interests are pursued in organizational life through the exercise of power and influence.


Question 6

A. Group decision making, however, does not necessarily fully guard against arbitrariness and anarchy, for individual capriciousness can get substituted by collusion of group members.

B. Nature itself is an intricate system of checks and balances, meant to preserve the delicate balance between various environmental factors that affect our ecology.

C. In institutions also, there is a need to have in place a system of checks and balances which inhibits the concentration of power in only some individuals.

D. When human interventions alter this delicate balance, the outcomes have been seen to be disastrous.


Question 7

A. He was bone-weary and soul-weary, and found himself muttering, "Either I can't manage this place, or it's unmanageable."

B. To his horror, he realized that he had become the victim of an amorphous, unwitting, unconscious conspiracy to immerse him in routine work that had no significance.

C. It was one of those nights in the office. when -the office clock was moving towards four in the morning and Bennis was still not through with the incredible mass of paper stacked before him.

D. He reached for his calendar and ran his eyes down each hour, half-hour, and quarter-hour, to see where his time had gone that day, the day before, the month before.


Question 8

The following sentences when arranged in the proper order form a coherent paragraph. Find the correct order.

1. With that, I swallowed the shampoo, and obtained most realistic results almost on the spot.

2. The man shuffled away into the back regions to make up a prescription, and after a moment I got through on the shop-telephone to the Consulate, intimating my location.

3. Then, while the pharmacist was wrapping up a six-ounce bottle of the mixture, I groaned and inquired whether he could give me something for acute gastric cramp.

4. I intended to stage a sharp gastric attack, and entering an old-fashioned pharmacy, I asked for a popular shampoo mixture, consisting of olive oil and flaked soap.


Question 9

A. Since then, intelligence tests have been mostly used to separate dull children in school from average or bright children, so that special education can be provided to the dull.

B. In other words, intelligence tests give us a norm for each age.

C. Intelligence is expressed as Intelligence quotient, and tests are developed to indicate what an average child of a certain age can do-what a 5-year-old can answer, but a 4year-old cannot, for instance.

D. Binet developed the first set of such tests in the early 1900s to find out which children in school needed special attention.

E. Intelligence can be measured by tests.

CAT 1998 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

Arrange sentences A, B, C and D between sentences 1 and 6 to form a logical sequence of six sentences.

1. Buddhism is a way to salvation.

A. But Buddhism is more severely analytical.

B. In the Christian tradition there is also a concern for the fate of human society conceived as a whole, rather than merely as a sum or network of individuals.

C. Salvation is a property, or achievement of individuals.

D. Not only does it dissolve society into individuals, the individual in turn is dissolved into component parts and instants, a stream of events.

6. In modern terminology, Buddhist doctrine is reductionist.


Question 2

Arrange sentences A, B, C and D between sentences 1 and 6 to form a logical sequence of six sentences.

1. The problem of improving Indian agriculture is both a sociological and an administrative one.

A. It also appears that there is a direct relationship between the size of a state and development.

B. The issues of Indian development, and the problem of India's agricultural sector, will remain with us long into the next century.

C. Without improving Indian agriculture, no liberalisation and delicensing will be able to help India.

D. At the end of the day, there has to be a ferment and movement of life and action in the vast segment of rural India.

6. When it starts marching, India will fly.


Question 3

Arrange sentences A, B, C and D between sentences 1 and 6 to form a logical sequence of six sentences.

1. Good literary magazines have always been good because of their editors.

A. Furthermore, to edit by committee, as it were, would prevent any magazine from finding its own identity.

B. The more quirky and idiosyncratic they have been, the better the magazine is, at least as a general rule.

C. But the number of editors one can have for a magazine should also be determined by the number of contributions to it.

D. To have four editors for an issue that contains only seven contributions, it is a bit silly to start with.

6. However, in spite of this anomaly, the magazine does acquire merit in its attempt to give a comprehensive view of the Indian literary scene as it is today.


Question 4

Arrange sentences A, B, C and D between sentences 1 and 6 to form a logical sequence of six sentences.

1. It is the success story of the Indian expatriate in the US which today hogs much of the media coverage in India.

A. East and West, the twain have met quite comfortably in their person, thank you.

B. Especially in its more recent romancing — the-NRI phase.

C. Seldom does the price of getting there — more like not getting there — or what's going on behind those sunny smiles get so much media hype.

D. Well groomed, with their perfect Colgate smiles, and hair in place, they appear the picture of confidence which comes from having arrived.

6. The festival of feature films and documentaries made by Americans of Indian descent being screened this fortnight, goes a long way in filling those gaps.


Question 5

Arrange sentences A, B, C and D between sentences 1 and 6 to form a logical sequence of six sentences.

1. A market for Indian art has existed ever since the international art scene sprang to life.

A. But interest in architectural conceits is an unanticipated fallout of the Festivals of India of the '80s, which were designed to increase exports of Indian crafts.

B. Simultaneously, the Indian elite discarded their synthetic sarees and kitsch plastic furniture and a market came into being.

C. Western dealers, unhappy in a market afflicted by violent price fluctuations and unpredictable profit margins, began to look East, and found cheap antiques with irresistible appeal.

D. The fortunes of the Delhi supremos, the Jew Town dealers in Cochin and myriad others around the country were made.

6. A chain of command was established, from the local contacts to the provincial dealers and up to the big boys, who entertain the Italians and the French, cutting deals worth lakhs in warehouses worth crores.


Question 6

Arrange the following sentences to form a coherent paragraph

A. He was carrying his jacket and walked with his head thrown back.

B. As Annette neared the lamp she saw a figure walking slowly.

C. For a while Michael walked on and she followed 20 paces behind.

D. With a mixture of terror and triumph of recognition she slackened her pace.


Question 7

Arrange the following sentences to form a coherent paragraph

A. However, the real challenge today is in unlearning, which is much harder.

B. But the new world of business behaves differently from the world in which we grew up.

C. Learning is important for both people and organisations.

D. Each of us has a 'mental model' that we've used over the years to make sense.


Question 8

Arrange the following sentences to form a coherent paragraph

A. There was nothing quite like a heavy downpour of rain to make life worthwhile.

B. We reached the field, soaked to the skin, and surrounded it.

C. The wet, as far as he was concerned, was ideal.

D. There, sure enough, stood Claudius, looking like a debauched Roman emperor under a shower.


Question 9

Arrange the following sentences to form a coherent paragraph

A. Alex had never been happy with his Indian origins.

B. He set about rectifying this grave injustice by making his house in his own image of a country manor.

C. Fate had been unfair to him; if he had had his wish, he would have been a count or an Earl on some English estate, or a medieval monarch in a chateau in France.

D. This illusion of misplaced grandeur, his wife felt, would be Alex's undoing.


Question 10

Arrange the following sentences to form a coherent paragraph

A. The influence is reflected the most in beaded evening wear.

B. Increasingly, the influence of India's colours and cuts can be seen on western styles.

C. And even as Nehru jackets and Jodhpurs remain staples of the fashion world, designers such as Armani and McFadden have turned to the sleek silhouette of the churidar this year.

D. Indian hot pink, paprika and saffron continue to be popular colours, year in and year out.


Question 11

Arrange the following sentences to form a coherent paragraph

A. Such a national policy will surely divide and never unite the people.

B. In fact, it suits the purpose of the politicians; they can drag the people into submission by appealing to them in the name of religion.

C. In order to inculcate the unquestioning belief they condemn the other states, which do not follow their religion.

D. The emergence of the theocratic states, where all types of crimes are committed in the name of religion, has revived the religion of the Middle Ages.


Question 12

Arrange the following sentences to form a coherent paragraph

A. His left-hand concealed a blackjack, his right-hand groped for the torch in his pocket.

B. The meeting was scheduled for 9 o'clock, and his watch showed the time to be a quarter to nine.

C. The man lurked in the corner, away from the glare of light.

D. His heart thumped in his chest, sweat beads formed themselves on his forehead, his mouth was dry.


Question 13

Arrange the following sentences to form a coherent paragraph

A. The director walked into the room and took a look around the class.

B. Mitch wanted to scream — the illogicality of the entire scene struck him dumb.

C. The managers stared at him with the look of fear that no democratic country should tolerate in its people.

D. He walked out of the room — it was his irrevocable protest against an insensible and insensitive situation.


Question 14

Arrange the following sentences to form a coherent paragraph

A. The establishment of the Third Reich influenced events in American history by starting a chain of events which culminated in war between Germany and the United States.

B. The Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936 prohibited trade with any belligerents or loans to them.

C. While speaking out against Hitler's atrocities, the American people generally favoured isolationist policies and neutrality.

D. The complete destruction of democracy, the persecution of Jews, the war on religion, the cruelty and barbarism of the allies, caused great indignation in this country and brought on fear of another World War.


Question 15

Arrange the following sentences to form a coherent paragraph

A. An essay which appeals chiefly to the intellect is Francis Bacon's Of Studies.

B. His careful tripartite division of studies expressed succinctly in aphoristic prose demands the complete attention of the mind of the reader.

C. He considers studies as they should be; for pleasure, for self-improvement, for business.

D. He considers the evils of excess study: laziness, affectation, and preciosity.


Question 16

Arrange the following sentences to form a coherent paragraph

A. By reasoning we mean the mental process of drawing an inference from two or more statements or going from the inference to the statements, which yield that inference.

B. So logical reasoning covers those types of questions, which imply drawing an inference from the problems.

C. Logic means, if we take its original meaning, the science of valid reasoning.

D. Clearly, for understanding arguments and for drawing the inference correctly, it is necessary that we should understand the statements first.

CAT 1997 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

Arrange sentences A, B, C and D between sentences 1 and 6, so as to form a logical sequence of six sentences.

1. Whenever technology has flowered, it has put man's language — developing skills into overdrive.

A. Technical terms are spilling into mainstream language almost as fast as junk — mail is slapped into e-mail boxes.

B. The era of computers is no less.

C. From the wheel with its axle to the spinning wheel with its bobbins, to the compact disc and its jewel box, inventions have trailed new words in their wake.

D. "Cyberslang is huge, but it's parochial, and we don't know what will filter into the large culture," said Tom Dalzell, who wrote the slang dictionary Flappers 2 Rappers.

6. Some slangs already have a pedigree.


Question 2

Arrange sentences A, B, C and D between sentences 1 and 6, so as to form a logical sequence of six sentences.

1. Until the MBA arrived on the scene the IIT graduate was king.

A. A degree from one of the five IITs was a passport to a well-paying job, great prospects abroad and, for some, a decent dowry to boot.

B. From the day he or she cracked the Joint Entrance Examination, the IIT student commanded the awe of neighbours and close relatives.

C. IIT students had, meanwhile, also developed their own special culture, complete with lingo and attitude, which they passed down.

D. True, the success stories of IIT graduates are legion and they now constitute the cream of the Indian diaspora.

6. But not many alumni would agree that the IIT undergraduate mindset merits a serious psychological study, let alone an interactive one.


Question 3

Arrange sentences A, B, C and D between sentences 1 and 6, so as to form a logical sequence of six sentences.

1. Some of the maharajas, like the one at Kapurthala, had exquisite taste.

A. In 1902, the Maharaja of Kapurthala gave his civil engineer photographs of the Versailles Palace and asked him to replicate it, right down to the gargoyles.

B. Yeshwantrao Holkar of Indore brought in Bauhaus aesthetics and even works of modern artists like Brancusi and Duchamp.

C. Kitsch is the most polite way to describe them.

D. But many of them, as the available light photographs show, had execrable taste.

6. Like Ali Baba's caves, some of the palaces were like warehouses with the downright ugly next to the sublimely aesthetic.


Question 4

Arrange sentences A, B, C and D between sentences 1 and 6, so as to form a logical sequence of six sentences.

1. There, in Europe, his true gifts unveiled.

A. Playing with Don Cherie, blending Indian music and jazz for the first time, he began setting the pace in the late 70s for much of what present — day fusion is.

B. John McLaughlin, the legendary guitarist whose soul has always had an Indian stamp on it, was seduced immediately.

C. Fusion by Gurtu had begun.

D. He partnered Gurtu for four years, and 'natured' him as a composer.

6. But for every experimental musician there's a critic nestling nearby.


Question 5

Arrange sentences A, B, C and D between sentences 1 and 6, so as to form a logical sequence of six sentences.

1. India, which has two out of every five TB patients in the world, is on the brink of a major public health disaster.

A. If untreated, a TB patient can die within five years.

B. Unlike AIDS, the great curse of modern sexuality, the TB germ is airborne, which means there are no barriers to its spread.

C. The dreaded infection ranks fourth among major killers worldwide.

D. Every minute, a patient falls prey to the infection in India, which means that over five lakh people die of the disease annually.

6. Anyone, anywhere can be affected by this disease.


Question 6

Arrange the sentences A, B, C and D in a proper sequence so as to make a coherent paragraph.

A. It begins with an ordinary fever and a moderate cough.

B. India could be under attack from a class of germs that cause what are called atypical pneumonias.

C. Slowly, a sore throat progresses to bronchitis and then pneumonia and respiratory complications.

D. It appears like the ordinary flu, but baffled doctors find that the usual drugs don't work.


Question 7

Arrange the sentences A, B, C and D in a proper sequence so as to make a coherent paragraph.

A. Chemists mostly don't stock it: only a few government hospitals do but in limited quantities.

B. Delhi's building boom is creating a bizarre problem: snakes are increasingly biting people as they emerge from their disturbed underground homes.

C. There isn't enough anti-snake serum, largely because there is no centralised agency that distributes the product.

D. If things don't improve, more people could face paralysis, and even death.


Question 8

Arrange the sentences A, B, C and D in a proper sequence so as to make a coherent paragraph.

A. But the last decade has witnessed greater voting and political participation by various privileged sections.

B. If one goes by the earlier record of mid-term elections, it is likely that the turnout in 1998 will drop by anything between four and six percentage points over the already low polling of 58 per cent in 1996.

C. If this trend offsets the mid-term poll fatigue, the fall may not be so steep.

D. Notwithstanding a good deal of speculation on this issue, it is still not clear as to who benefits from a lower turnout.


Question 9

Arrange the sentences A, B, C and D in a proper sequence so as to make a coherent paragraph.

A. After several routine elections there comes a 'critical' election which redefines the basic pattern of political loyalties, redraws political geography and opens up political space.

B. In psephological jargon, they call it realignment.

C. Rather, since 1989, there have been a series of semi-critical elections.

D. On a strict definition, none of the recent Indian elections qualifies as a critical election.


Question 10

Arrange the sentences A, B, C and D in a proper sequence so as to make a coherent paragraph.

A. Trivial pursuits marketed by the Congress, is a game imported from Italy.

B. The idea is to create an imaginary saviour in times of crisis so that the party doesn't fall flat on its collective face.

C. Closest contenders are Mani Shankar Aiyar, who still hears His Master's Voice and V. George, who is frustrated by the fact that his political future remains Sonia and yet so far.

D. The current champion is Arjun for whom all roads lead to Rome, or in this case, 10 Janpath.


Question 11

Arrange the sentences A, B, C and D in a proper sequence so as to make a coherent paragraph.

A. Good advertising can make people buy your products even if it sucks.

B. A dollar spent on brainwashing is more cost-effective than a dollar spent on product improvement.

C. That's important because it takes pressure off you to make good products.

D. Obviously, there's a minimum quality that every product has to achieve: it should be able to withstand the shipping process without becoming unrecognizable.


Question 12

Arrange the sentences A, B, C and D in a proper sequence so as to make a coherent paragraph.

A. Almost a century ago, when the father of the modern automobile industry, Henry Ford, sold the first Model T car, he decided that only the best would do for his customers.

B. Today, it is committed to delivering the finest quality with over six million vehicles a year in over 200 countries across the world.

C. And for over 90 years, this philosophy has endured in the Ford Motor Company.

D. Thus, a vehicle is ready for the customer only if it passes the Ford 'Zero Defect Programme'.


Question 13

Arrange the sentences A, B, C and D in a proper sequence so as to make a coherent paragraph.

A. But, clearly, the government still has the final say.

B. In the past few years, the Reserve Bank of India might have wrested considerable powers from the government when it comes to monetary policy.

C. The RBI's announcements on certain issues become effective only after the government notifies them.

D. Isn't it time the government vested the RBI with powers to sanction such changes, leaving their ratification for later?


Question 14

Arrange the sentences A, B, C and D in a proper sequence so as to make a coherent paragraph.

A. I sat there frowning at the checkered tablecloth, chewing the bitter cud of insight.

B. That wintry afternoon in Manhattan, waiting in the little French restaurant, I was feeling frustrated and depressed.

C. Even the prospect of seeing a dear friend failed to cheer me as it usually did.

D. Because of certain miscalculations on my part, a project of considerable importance in my life had fallen through.


Question 15

Arrange the sentences A, B, C and D in a proper sequence so as to make a coherent paragraph.

A. Perhaps the best known is the Bay Area Writing Project, founded by James Gray in 1974.

B. The decline in writing skills can be stopped.

C.Today's back-to-basics movement has already forced some schools to place renewed emphasis on writing skills.

D. Although the inability of some teachers to teach writing successfully remains a big stumbling block, a number of programmes have been developed to attack this problem.

CAT 1996 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

Arrange the four sentences so that all six together make a logical paragraph.
1. It doesn't take a highly esteemed medical expert to conclude that women handle pain better than men.
A. First the men would give birth, and then take six months to recover.
B. As for labour pains, the human species would become extinct if men had to give birth.
C. They do, however, make life hell for everyone else with their non-stop complaining about how bad they feel.
D. The men in my life, including my husband and my father, would not take a Tylenol for pain even if their lives depend on it.
6. And by the time they finish sharing their excruciating experience with their buddies, all reproduction would come to a halt.


Question 2

Arrange the four sentences so that all six together make a logical paragraph.
1. A few years ago, hostility towards Japanese-Americans was so strong that I thought they were going to reopen the detention camps here in Kolkata.
A. Today Asians are a success story.
B. I cannot help making a comparison to the anti-Jewish sentiment in Nazi Germany when Jewish people were successful in business.

C. But do people applaud President Clinton for improving foreign trade with Asia?
D. Now, talk about the ‘Arkansas-Asia Connection’ is broadening that hatred to include all Asian- Americans.
6. No, blinded by jealousy, they complain that it is the Asian-Americans who are reaping the wealth.


Question 3

Arrange the four sentences so that all six together make a logical paragraph.
1. Michael Jackson, clearly no admirer of long engagements, got married abruptly for the second time in three years.
A. The latest wedding took place in a secret midnight ceremony in Sydney, Australia.
B. It is also the second marriage for the new missus, about whom little is known.
C. The wedding was attended by the groom's entourage and staff, according to Jackson's publicist.
D. The bride, 37-year-old Debbie Rowe, who is carrying Jackson's baby, wore white.
6. All that is known is that she is a nurse for Jackson's dermatologist.


Question 4

Arrange the four sentences so that all six together make a logical paragraph.
1. Liz Taylor isn't just unlucky in love.
A. She, and husband Larry Fortensky, will have to pay the tab — $4,32,600 in court costs.
B. The duo claimed that a 1993 story about a property dispute damaged their reputations.
C. Taylor has just filed a defamation suit against the National Enquirer.
D. She is unlucky in law too.
6. Alas, all levels of the California court system disagreed.


Question 5

1.Hiss was serving as Head of the Endowment on August 3, 1948, when Whittaker Chambers reluctantly appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
A. Chambers, a portly rumpled man with a melodramatic style, had been a Communist courier but had broken with the party in 1938.
B. When Nixon arranged a meeting of the two men in New York, Chambers repeated his charges and Hiss his denials.
C. Summoned as a witness, Hiss denied that he had ever been a Communist or had known Chambers.
D. He told the Committee that among the members of a secret Communist cell in Washington during the 1930s was Hiss.
6. Then, bizarrely, Hiss asked Chambers to open his mouth.


Question 6

1.Since its birth, rock has produced a long string of guitar heroes.
A. It is a list that would begin with Chuck Berry and continue with Hendrix, Page and Clapton.
B. These are musicians celebrated for their sheer instrumental talent, and their flair for expansive, showy and sometimes self-indulgent solos.
C. It would also include players of more recent vintage, like Van-Halen and Living Colour's Vemon Reid.
D. But with the advent of alternative rock and grunge, guitar heroism became uncool.
6. Guitarists like Peter Buck and Kurt Cobain shy away from exhibitionism.


Question 7

1.For many scientists, oceans are the cradle of life.
A. But all over the world, chemical products and nuclear waste continue to be dumped into them.
B. Coral reefs, which are known to be the most beautiful places of the submarine world, are fast disappearing.
C. The result is that many species of fish die because of this pollution.
D. Of course man is the root cause behind these problems.
6. Man has long since ruined the places he visits — continents and oceans alike.


Question 8

1.Am I one of the people who are worried that Bill Clinton's second term might be destroyed by the constitutional crisis?
A. On the other hands, ordinary citizens have put the campaign behind them.
B. In other words, what worries me is that Bill Clinton could exhibit a version of what George Bush used to refer to as Big Mo.
C. That is, he might have so much campaign momentum that he may not be able to stop campaigning.
D. Well, it's true that I've been wondering whether a President could be impeached for refusing to stop talking about the bridge we need to build to the 21st century.
6. They now prefer to watch their favourite soaps and ads on TV rather than senators.


Question 9

1. So how big is the potential market?
A. But they end up spending thousands more each year on hardware overhaul and software upgradation.
B. Analysts say the new machines will appeal primarily to corporate users.
C. An individual buyer can pick up a desktop computer for less than $2,000 in America.
D. For them, the NCs best-drawing card is its promise of much lower maintenance costs.
6. NCs, which automatically load the latest version of whatever software they need could put an end to all that.


Question 10

1. Historically, stained glass was almost entirely reserved for ecclesiastical spaces.
A. By all counts, he has accomplished that mission with unmistakable style.
B. "It is my mission to bring it kicking and screaming out of that milieu," says Clarke.
C. The first was the jewel-like windows he designed for a Cistercian Church in Switzerland.
D. Two recent projects show his genius in the separate worlds of the sacred and the mundane.
6. The second was a spectacular, huge skylight in a shopping complex in Brazil.


Question 11

A.Still, Sophie might need an open heart surgery later in life and now be more prone to respiratory infections.
B. But with the news that his infant daughter Sophie has a hole in her heart, he appears quite vulnerable.
C. While the condition sounds bad, it is not life threatening, and frequently corrects itself.
D. Sylvester Stallone has made millions and built a thriving career out of looking invincible.


Question 12

A. However, the severed head could not grow back if fire could be applied instantly to the amputated part.
B. To get rid of this monstrosity was truly a Herculean task, for as soon as one head was cut off, two new ones replaced it.
C. Hercules accomplished this labour with the aid of an assistant who cauterized the necks as fast as Hercules cut off the heads!
D. One of the twelve labours of Hercules was the killing of hydra, a water monster with nine heads.


Question 13

A. That Hollywood is a man's world is certainly true, but it is not the whole truth.
B. Even Renaissance film actress, Jodie Foster, who hosts this compendium of movie history, confesses surprise at this.
C. She says that she had no idea that women were so active in the industry even in those days.
D. During the silent era, for example, female scriptwriters outnumbered males 10 to 1.


Question 14

A. Its business decisions are made on the timely and accurate flow of information.
B. It has 1,700 employees in 13 branch and representative offices across the Asia-Pacific region.
C. For employees to maintain a competitive edge in a fast-moving field, they must have quick access to JP Morgan's proprietary trade related data.
D. JP Morgan's is one of the largest banking institutions in the US and a premier international trading firm.


Question 15

1. The Saheli Programme, run by the US Cross-Cultural Solutions, is offering a three week tour of India that involves a lot more than frenzied sightseeing.
2. Participants interested in women's issues will learn about arranged marriages, dowry and infanticide.
3. Holiday packages include all sorts of topics, but female infanticide must be the first for tourism.
4. Interspersed with these talks and meetings are visits to cities like New Delhi and Agra, home to the Taj Mahal.


Question 16

A. Something magical is happening to our planet.
B. Some are calling it a paradigm shift.
C. Its getting smaller.
D. Others call it business transformation.

CAT 1991 Para Jumbles questions

Question 1

Select the correct sequence of the four sentences given below.
A. Then think of by how much our advertising could increase the sales level.
B. Advertising effectiveness can be best grasped intuitively on a per capita basis.
C. Overall effectiveness is easily calculated by considering the number of buyers and the cost of advertising.
D. Think of how much of our brand the average individual is buying now.


Question 2

Select the correct sequence of the four sentences given below.
A. The age of pragmatism is here, whether we like it or not.
B. The staple rhetoric that was for so long dished out also belongs to the bipolar world of yesterday.
C. The old equations, based on the cold war and on non-alignment no longer holds good.
D. But contrary to much of what is being said and written, it is a multipolar rather than unipolar world that appears to be emerging out of recent events.


Question 3

Select the correct sequence of the four sentences given below.
A. Past research has uncovered the fact that cognitive age is inversely related to life satisfaction among the elderly.
B. A person may feel young or old irrespective of chronological age.
C. That is, the younger an elderly person feels, the more likely she or he is to be satisfied with life in general.
D. Cognitive age is a psychological construct that refers to one's subjective assessment of one's age.


Question 4

Select the correct sequence of the four sentences given below.
A. It was a fascinating tempting green, like the hue of the great green grasshopper.
B. Her teeth were very white and her voice had a cruel and at the same time a coaxing sound.
C. While she was uncorking the bottle I noticed how green her eyeballs were.
D. I saw, too, how small her hands were, which showed that she did not use them much.


Question 5

Select the correct sequence of the four sentences given below.
A. By intelligence we mean a style of life, a way of behaving in various situations, and particularly in new, strange and perplexing situations.
B. When we talk about intelligence, we do not mean the ability to get a good score on a certain kind of test, or even the ability to do well at school.
C. The true test of intelligence is not how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.
D. These are at best only indicators of something large, deeper and far more important.


Question 6

Select the correct sequence of the four sentences given below.
A. In formal speech, syllables are likely to be more deliberately sounded than in informal speech.
B. Yet dictionary editors have no choice but to deal with each word as an individual entity.
C. The pronunciation of words is influenced by the situation.
D. Further, the pronunciation of a word is affected by its position in the sentence and by the meaning it carries.


Question 7

Select the correct sequence of the four sentences given below.
A. And that the pursuit of money by whatever design within the law is always benign.
B. And it holds broadly that the greater the amount of money, the greater the intelligence.
C. This is the institutional truth of Wall Street, this you will be required to believe.
D. The institutional truth of the financial world holds that association with money implies intelligence.

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