300+ CAT Verbal Ability Practice Questions PDF With Video Solutions

Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

1. Developments both technological and sociocultural have afforded us far greater freedom over death than we had in the past, and while we are still adapting ourselves to that freedom, we now appreciate the moral importance of this freedom. 

2. But I believe that a type of freedom we can call freedom over death - that is, a freedom in which we shape the timing and circumstances of how we die - should be central to this conversation. 

3. Legalising assisted dying is but a further step in realising this freedom over death. 

4. Many people endorse, through their opinions or their choices, our freedom over death, encompassing a right to medical assistance in hastening our deaths. 

5. Freedom is a notoriously complex and contested philosophical notion, and I won’t pretend to settle any of the big controversies it raises.

Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

1. About half of all the oxygen we breathe is made near the surface of the ocean by phytoplankton that photosynthesize just like land-dwelling plants.

2. A team of scientists that includes Boston University experts has discovered they also produce oxygen on the seafloor.

3. The research team used deep-sea chambers that land on the seafloor and enclose the seawater, sediment, polymetallic nodules, and living organisms.

4. The discovery is a surprise considering oxygen is typically created by plants and organisms with help from the sun—not by rocks on the ocean floor.

5. The deep-sea rocks, called polymetallic nodules, don’t only host a surprising number of sea critters.

The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.

Sentence: While taste is related to judgment, with thinkers at the time often writing, for example, about “judgments of taste” or using the two terms interchangeably, taste retains a vital link to pleasure, embodiment, and personal specificity that is too often elided in post-Kantian ideas about judgment—a link that Arendt herself was working to restore.

Paragraph: ____(1) ____. Denneny focused on taste rather than judgment in order to highlight what he believed was a crucial but neglected historical change. ____(2) ____. Over the course of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, across Western Europe, the word taste took on a new extension of meaning, no longer referring specifically to gustatory sensation and the delights of the palate but becoming, for a time, one of the central categories for aesthetic—and ethical—thinking. ____(3) ____. Tracing the history of taste in Spanish, French, and British aesthetic theory, as Denneny did, also provides a means to recover the compelling and relevant writing of a set of thinkers who have been largely neglected by professional philosophy. ____(4) ____.

Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

1. The profound emotional impact of music has inspired ongoing research into its relationship with emotions.
2. Music is a universal phenomenon that utilizes a myriad brain resources.
3. This inherent connection to musical expression is deeply intertwined with human identity and experience.
4. The proclivity to create and appreciate music is ubiquitous among humans, permeating daily life across diverse societies.
5. Engaging with music is among the most cognitively demanding tasks a human can undergo, and it is identified across cultures.

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

1. But man, woman or otherwise, there is no denying that the quality of our life and character will be significantly shaped by the way we handle our anger.
2. Once the taboos have been broken, women usually experience letting their fists fly as intensely liberating.
3. Though this might seem a stereotype, women—unlike men, who are frequently applauded for unbridled aggression—are often socialized to keep a lid on their ire.
4. Many of them are so at odds with their aggressive feelings that, as a coach, I often have to stop them from pulling their punches and encourage them to extend their arms so their blows might actually reach their fleshy target.

Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

1. Pfas are a class of about 15,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant.
2. New research suggests exposure to some common perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (Pfas) cause changes to gene activity and that these changes are linked to health problems including multiple cancers, neurological disorders and autoimmune disease.
3. These Pfas compounds are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down in the environment.
4. The research may also point toward other diseases potentially caused by Pfas that have not yet been identified.
5. The findings are a major step toward determining the mechanism by which the chemicals cause disease and could help doctors identify, detect and treat health problems for those exposed to Pfas before the issues advance.

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

1. When I ask the distinguished LGBTQ activist and writer Cherie Moraga whether she uses Latinx to refer to herself, she tells me, ‘I worked too hard for the “a” in Latina to give it up! I refer to myself as Xicana.’
2. Of our accumulated ethnic population, only a third use Hispanic to identify themselves, a mere 14 percent use Latino, and less than 2 percent recognize Latinx.
3. They have done this, although gender in languages is grammatical, not sociological or sexual, and found in linguistic families throughout the world, from French to Russian to Japanese.
4. More recently, activists seeking to render our name gender neutral, out of respect for our LGBTQ members, have devised yet another name for us: Latinx.

The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

Zombie cells may contribute to age-related chronic inflammation: this finding could help scientists understand more about the aging process and why the immune system becomes less effective as we get older. Zombie or “senescent” cells are damaged cells that can no longer divide and grow like normal cells. Scientists think that these cells can contribute to chronic health problems when they accumulate in the body. In younger people, the immune system is more effective at clearing senescent cells from the body through a process called apoptosis, but as we age, this process becomes less efficient. As a result, there is an accumulation of senescent cells in different organs in the body, either through increased production or reduced clearance by the immune system. The zombie cells continue to use energy though they do not divide, and often secrete chemicals that cause inflammation, which if persistent for longer periods of time can damage healthy cells leading to chronic diseases.

The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.

Sentence- The region’s Western customers found it hard to believe that Dhaka muslin could possibly have been made by human hands - there were rumour that it was woven by mermaids, fairies and even ghosts.

Once upon the silty banks of the Meghna River, a miracle was spun — a fabric so light it was called “baft-hawa”, or woven air. This was Dhaka Muslin — the world’s most coveted cloth. ____(1)____. Handspun from a rare cotton called Phuti Karpas, found nowhere else on Earth, and woven with a 16-step sacred ritual — beginning with cleaning the cotton using the teeth of a river catfish! ____(2)____. Every spring, the maple-like leaves pushed up through the grey, silty soil to produce a single daffodil yellow flower twice a year, which gave way to a snowy floret of cotton fibres. ____(3)____. Spun at dawn on boats by sharp-eyed young women, its threads were so fine the elderly could barely see them. Motifs of wildflowers, river breeze, and soul were etched into each piece — some so light, a 91-metre bolt could pass through a ring, or a 60' length fit inside a snuffbox. It draped Greek goddesses, Roman nobles, Mughal emperors, and European aristocrats. Marie Antoinette, Empress Joséphine — even Jane Austen adored its floating grace. ____(4)____.

The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.

Sentence: Productivity gains, once expected to feed through to broader living standards, now primarily serve to enhance returns to wealth.

Paragraph: Economists now argue that inequality is no longer a by-product of growth but a condition of it. ____ (1) ____. Unlike wages, wealth reflects not just income but also access to assets, favourable institutional conditions - such as low interest rates - and public policies like low taxes and housing shortages. ____ (2) ____. In other words, wealth depends on political choices in ways that income currently does not. It’s not just the inequality itself that is the issue but the erosion of mechanisms that once constrained it. ____ (3) ____. Wealth and income inequality are linked, but where wages have stagnated and collective bargaining has weakened, capital income - derived from profits, rents and interest - has been boosted by design. ____ (4) ____.

Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

1. The Bayeux tapestry was, therefore, an obvious way to tell people about the downfall of the English and the rise of the Normans.

2. So if we take expert in Anglo-Saxon culture Gale Owen- Crocker's idea that the tapestry was originally hung in a square with certain scenes facing each other, people would have stood in the centre.

3. Art historian Linda Neagley has argued that pre-Renaissance people interacted with art visually, kinaesthetically (sensory perception through bodily movement) and physically.

4. That would make it an 11th-century immersive space with scenes corresponding and echoing each other, drawing the viewer's attention, playing on their senses and understanding of the story they thought they knew.

5. The Bayeux tapestry would have been hung at eye level to enable this.

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

1. ‘Literature on screen' suggests something more capacious and defining than citation: the possibility that literary adaptations are at once cinema and literature.
2. Even though a growing number of films eligible for Academy Awards for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium borrow that material from print journalism, franchise characters, television series, comic books, video games and toys, academic studies of adaptation remain stubbornly attached to literature as cinema's natural progenitor.
3. It is as if adaptation studies, by borrowing the cultural cachet of literature, sought to claim its institutional respectability and gravitas even while insuring adaptation's enduring aesthetic and methodological subordination to literature proper.
4. Beneath this contradictory notion of film adaptations as not merely hybrid texts but texts holding dual citizenship in two modes of presentation is an even more pervasive legacy that haunts adaptation studies: the assumption that the primary context within which adaptations are to be studied is literature.

The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

The return to the tailor is the juxtaposition of three key things for the mindful Indian shopper. The first is the conscious shift away from the homogeneity of fast fashion, the idea of a hundred other people owning exactly the same Zara trench coat or H&M pleated skirt. The second is an actual understanding of the waste behind the fast fashion market, and wanting not to contribute to that anymore. The last is the shift toward customisation and fit—the idea of having imaginations brought to life and to have them fit exactly; without paying exorbitant rates for that bespoke tailoring. For the individual with a keen fashion sense and a genuine desire to move away from the waste and uniformity of fast fashion without paying the premium for it that indie brands would invariably demand, the tailor is the perfect crossover.

The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the occurrences which are CALLED knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even if no past had existed.

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1.As books age, the cellulose and lignin in the paper begin to break down, releasing a mix of volatile organic compounds into the air.
2.Old books carry a scent that many people instantly recognize—and even love.
3.These compounds are benzaldehyde, which gives off an almond-like scent, vanillin, which smells like vanilla, ethyl hexanol (floral scent), toluene (sweet), and furfural (which has a slightly bready scent).
4.This familiar aroma isn't just dust or mildew; it's actually a result of slow chemical changes happening inside the paper and ink.

The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

In the dynamic realm of creativity, artists often find themselves at the crossroads between drawing inspiration from diverse cultures and inadvertently crossing into the territory of cultural appropriation. Inspiration is the lifeblood of creativity, driving artists to create works that resonate across borders. The globalized nature of the modern world invites artists to draw from a vast array of cultural influences. When approached respectfully, inspiration becomes a bridge, fostering understanding and appreciation of cultural diversity. However, the line between inspiration and cultural appropriation can be thin and easily blurred. Cultural appropriation occurs when elements from a particular culture are borrowed without proper understanding, respect, or acknowledgement. This leads to the commodification of sacred symbols, the reinforcement of stereotypes, and the erasure of the cultural context from which these elements originated. It's essential to recognize that the impact of cultural appropriation extends beyond the realm of artistic expression, influencing societal perceptions and perpetuating power imbalances.

The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

For millennia, in the process of opening up land for agriculture, gardens, grazing and hunting, humans have created ecological “mosaics”, or “patchworks”: landscapes holding a mixture of habitats, like meadows, gardens and forests. These were not designed as nature reserves, but often catered to hugely diverse animal life. Research indicates that European hay meadows cultivated for animal feed were actually more successful at preserving a vast array of species than meadows explicitly cultivated for biodiversity. Studying the early Holocene, researchers have found that human presence was about as likely to increase biodiversity as reduce it. Of course, not all human-created landscapes have the same value. A paved subdivision with astroturfed lawns is very different to a village with diverse vegetable and flower gardens. But scientists continue to find evidence that the old idea of humans as antithetical to nature is also wrong-headed, and that rosy visions of thriving, human-free environments are more imaginary than real.

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

1. It can in fact be integrated into any function (education, medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the effect of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of knowledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the processes that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between 'surplus power' and 'surplus production'.

2. It's a case of 'it's easy once you've thought of it' in the political sphere.

3. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations

4. In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact.

The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.

Sentence: "Everything is old-world, traditional techniques from Mexico," Ava emphasizes.

Paragraph: The sisters embrace the ways their great-grandfather built and repaired instruments. ____(1) ____. When crafting a Mexican guitarron used in mariachi music, they use tacote wood for the top of the instrument. Once the wood is cut, they carve the neck and heel from a single block using tools like hand saws, chisels and sandpaper rather than modern power tools — and believe that this traditional method improves the tone of the instrument. ____(2) ____. Their store has a three-year waitlist for instruments that take months to create. ____(3) ____. The family's artisanship has attracted stars like Los Lobos, who own custom guitars made by all three generations of the Delgado family. ____(4) ____. For the sisters, involvement in the family business started at an early age. They each built their first instruments at age 9.

The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.

Sentence: In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12.

Paragraph: The first suggested evidence of a human genetic mutation associated with aggressive behaviour came from a study in 1993. _____(1)____. Genetic and metabolic studies were conducted on a large Dutch family in which several of the males has a syndrome of borderline mental retardation and abnormal behaviour. _____(2)____. The undesirable behaviour included impulsive aggression, arson and exhibitionism. _____(3)____. A point mutation was identified in the eighth exon of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) structural gene which changes glutamine to a termination codon. _____(4)____.