CAT Reading Comprehension

Reading Test 2

Five jumbled up 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 and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

Question No : 1

1. Having an appreciation for the workings of another person's mind is considered a prerquisite for natural language acquisition, strategic social interaction, reflexive thought, and moral judgement.
2. It is a 'theory of mind' though some scholars prefer to call it 'mentalizing' or 'mindreading', which is important for the development of one's cognitive abilities.
3. Though we must speculate about its evolutionary origin, we do have indications that the capacity evolved sometime in the last few million years.
4. This capacity developes from early beginnings in the first year of life to the adult's fast and often effortless understanding of other's thoughts, feelings, and intentions.
5. One of the most fascinating human capacities is the ability to perceive and interpret other people's behaviour in terms of their mental states.

Question No : 2

1. The banning of Northern Lights could be considered a precursor to censoring books for "moral", world view or religious reasons.
2. Attempts to ban books are attempts to silence authors who have summoned immense courage in telling their stories.
3. Now the banning and challenging or books in the US has escalated to an unprecedented level.
4. The widely acclaimed fantasy novel Northern Lights was banned in some parts of the US, and was the second most challenged book in the US.
5. he American Library Association documented an unparalleled number of reported book challenges in 2022, about 2,500 unique titles.

Question No : 3

1. Boa Senior, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by Britis settlers, was the last native of th island chain who was fluent in Bo.
2. The indigenous population has been steadily collapsing since the island chain was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.
3. Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolitic human settlement of south-east Asia.
4. The last speaker of an ancient tribal languag has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's oldest cultures.
5. Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Senior sepnt the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.

Question No : 4

1. In English, there is no systematic rule for the naming of numbers; aft ten, we have "eleven" and "twelve" and then the teens:"thirten", "fourteen", "fifteen" and so on.
2. Even more confusingly, some English words invert the numbers they refer to:the word "fourteen" puts the four first, even though it appears last.
3. It can take children a while to learn all these words, ad understand that "fourteen" is different from "forty".
4. For multiples of 10, English speakers switch to a different pattern""twenty", "thirty", "forty" and so on.
5. If you didn't know th word for "eleven", you would be unable to just guess it - you might come up with something like "one-teen".

Question No : 5

1. Self-care particularly links to loneliness, behavioural problems, and negative academic outcomes.
2. "Latchkey children" refers to children who routinely return home from school to empty homes and take care of themselvs for extended periods of time.
3. Although self-care generally points to negative outcomes, it is important to consider that the bulk of research has yet to track long-term consequences.
4. In research and practice, the phrase "children in self-care" has come to replace latchkey in an effort to more accurately reflect the nature of their circumstances.
5. Although parents might believe that self-care would be beneficial for development, recent research has found quite the opposite.

Question No : 6

1. Although hard skills have traditionally ruled the roost, some companies are moving away from choosing prospective hires based on technical abilities alone.
2. Companies are shaking off the old definition of an ideal candidate and ditching the idea of looking for the singularly perfect candidate altogether.
3. Now, some job descriptions are frequencly asking for candidates to demonstrate soft skills, such as leadership or teamwork.
4. That's not to say that practical know-how is no longer required - some jobs still call for higher specific expertise.
5. The move towards prioritising soft sklls "is a natural response to thre years of the pandemic" says a senior recruiter at Cenlar FSB.

Question No : 7

1. There is a dark side to academic research, especially in India, and at its cntre 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 structue.
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 No : 8

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 philisophers 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 No : 9

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 No : 10

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 psycology in developing tests and theories, and advertising people have borrowed the idea of the focus group from social scientists.

Question No : 11

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 common; 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 boud 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 No : 12

1. They often include a foundation course on navigating capitalism with Chinese characteristics and have replaced typical cases from US corporats 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 No : 13

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 readig experience diffently depending on the gender of the reader.
4. The documentation of this realization was on of the earliest tasks undertakn by feminist critics.
5. More specifically, the feminist inquiry into the activity of reading begins with the realization that they literary canon is androcentric, and that this has a profoudly damaging effect on women readers.

Question No : 14

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 economies, 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 No : 15

1. Machine learning models are prone to learning human-like biases from the training data that feeds these algorithms.
2. Hate speach 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 No : 16

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.