CAT Reading Comprehension

Reading Test 2

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 of your answer.

Question No : 1

1. What precisely are the "unusual elemets" that make a particular case so attractive to a certain kind of audience?
2. It might be a particularly savage or unfathomable level of depravity, very often it has something to do with the precise amount of mystery involved.
3. Unsolved, and perhaps unsolvable cases offer something that "ordinary" murder doesn't.
4. Why are some crimes destined for perpetual re-examination and others locked into permanent obscurity?

Question No : 2

1. Like the ants that make up a colony, no single neuron holds complex information like self-awareness, hope or pride.
2. Although the human brain is not yet understood enough to identify the mechanism by which emergnce functions, most neurobiologists agree that complex interconnections among th parts give rise to qualities that belong only to the whole.
3. Noneteless, the sum of all neurons in the nervous system generat complex human emotions like fear and joy, none of which can be attributed to a single neuron.
4. Human consciousness is often called an emergent property of the human brain.

Question No : 3

1. Centuries later formal learning is still mostly based on reading, even with the widespread use of other possible education-affecting techologies such as film, radio, and television.
2. One of the immediate and recognisable impacts of the printing press was on how people learned; in the scribal culture it primarily involved listening, so memorization was paramount.
3. The transformation of learners from listeners to readers was a complex social and cultural phenomenon, and it was not until the industrial era that the concept of universal literacy took root.
4. The printing press shifted the learning process, as listening and memorisation gradually gave way to reading and learning no long required the presence of a mentor, it could be done privately.

Question No : 4

1. Algorithms hosted on the internet are accessed by many, so biases in AI models have resulted in much larger impact, adversely affecting far larg groups of people.
2. Though "algorithmic bias" is the popular term, the foundation of such bias is not in algorithms, but in the data; algorithms are not biased, data is, as algorithms merely reflect persistent patters that are present in the training data.
3. Despite their widespread impact, it is relatively easier to fix AI biases than human-generated biases, as it is simpler to identify the former than to try to make people unlearn behaviours learnt over generations.
4. The impact of biased decisions made by humans is localised and geographically confined, but with the advent of AI, the impact of such decisions is spread over a much wider scale.

Question No : 5

1. Contemporary African writing like 'The Bottled Leopard' voices this theme using two children and two backgrounds to juxtapose two varying cultures.
2. Chukwuemeka Ike explores the conflict, and casts the Western tradition as condescending, enveloping an unaccommodating towards local African practice.
3. However, their views contradict the reality, for a rich and sustaining local African cultural ethos exists for all who care, to see and experience.
4. Western Christian concepts tend to deny or feign ignorance about the existence of a genuine and enduring indigenous African tradition.

Question No : 6

1. Veena Sahajwalla, a materials scientist at the University of New South Wales, believes there is a new way of solving this problem.
2. Her vision is for automated drones and robots to pick out components, put them into a small furnace and smelt them at specific temperatures to extract the metals one by one before they are sent off to manufacturers for reuse.
3. E-waste contains huge quantities of valuable metals, ceramics and plastics that could be salvaged and recycled, althouhg currently not enough of it is.
4. She plans to build microfactories that can tease apart the tangle of materials in mobile phones, computers and other e-waste.

Question No : 7

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 'cher' 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 No : 8

1. If I wanted to sit indoors and read, or play Sonic the Hedgehog on a red-hot SegaMega Drive, I would oftn 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-souding childhood in 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 No : 9

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 healthy.
3. This is particularly so in a neoliberal context where the state has transferred the responsibility for food onto individual consumers.
4. The individualized framng of choice appeals to a popular desire to experience agency, but draws away from the structural obstacles that stratify individual food choices.

Question No : 10

1. From chemical pollutants in the environment to the damming of rivers to invasive species transported through global trade and travel, evy 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 stabl-state economies, while preserving markets and healthy competition.

Question No : 11

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 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 No : 12

1. The more we are able to accept that our achievements are largly out of 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 arroganc of contemporary entitlement and an opportunity to reassert the importance of luck, or grace, in out 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 No : 13

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 competitiv 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 it s growth rate is faster than tha 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 No : 14

1. Various industrial sectors including retail, transit systems, enterprises, educational institutions, event orginizing, financing, travel, etc. have now started leveraging thse beacons solutions to track and communicate with their customers.
2. A beacon fixed on to a shop wall enables the retailer to access the proximity of the customer, and come up with a much targeted or personalized communication like offs, 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 No : 15

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 conective 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.

Question No : 16

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.