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CAT Full-Length Mock Test 1

CAT Full-Length Mocks • Medium • 68 Questions
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40:00
  1. VARC24 Qs
  2. DILR22 Qs
  3. QA22 Qs

The Street as a Place

For most of the twentieth century, planners measured a street by how quickly it moved cars. Wide lanes, long sightlines and synchronised signals were signs of success, and any element that slowed traffic, from a pedestrian crossing to a row of parked cars, counted as a defect. The result was streets that were efficient as channels but dismal as places: people crossed them, but nobody lingered. A newer school of thought reverses the yardstick. It asks how long people choose to stay, how many of them are children or elderly, and how much commerce spills onto the pavement. By these measures, a narrow street with slow traffic and a busy cafe frontage can outperform a broad avenue that carries three times the vehicles.

The critics of this approach are not wrong that congestion has costs, and that emergency vehicles and deliveries need dependable routes. But their case often rests on a hidden assumption, namely that the volume of traffic is fixed regardless of how the street is designed. Experience in several cities suggests otherwise. When road space is reduced, a share of journeys simply disappears, as people shift to other modes, other times or other destinations. The lesson is not that cars must be banished, but that a street is a shared space whose purpose should be decided before it is engineered.

VARC: Passage 1 Questions Questions 1-5
1

Which of the following best expresses the central argument of the passage?

2

According to the passage, twentieth-century planners judged a street's success mainly by:

3

The 'hidden assumption' in the critics' case is that:

4

Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?

5

The author's attitude towards the newer school of thought is best described as:

The Paradox of Expertise

Expertise is usually described as a store of knowledge, but a growing body of research suggests it is better understood as a store of patterns. A chess master glancing at a board does not calculate more moves than a novice; she recognises configurations she has seen thousands of times and knows almost at once which few moves deserve attention. The same holds for radiologists reading scans and pilots reading instruments. Their advantage lies less in facts than in what they notice.

This has an uncomfortable corollary. Pattern recognition works best in stable environments, where the same cues reliably predict the same outcomes. In fields where conditions shift, such as financial markets or long-range political forecasting, the patterns an expert has learned may cease to apply, yet confidence remains. Studies of forecasters have repeatedly found that highly credentialed commentators do only modestly better than chance on questions about the distant future, while those who hold their views loosely and revise them often do better. The paradox of expertise, then, is that the very fluency which makes experts fast can make them slow to notice that the ground has moved.

VARC: Passage 2 Questions Questions 6-10
6

Which of the following best summarises the passage?

7

According to the passage, how does a chess master differ from a novice?

8

Which group of forecasters does the passage say tends to perform better?

9

In the last sentence, 'the ground has moved' means that:

10

Which of the following would the author most likely reject?

The Digital Dark Age

When information was scarce, the difficulty for historians was finding enough of it. A decree survived because someone thought it worth copying; a letter survived because a family kept it in a drawer. The surviving record was thin, and every scrap could bear weight. The digital age has inverted the problem. Emails, messages, photographs and posts are produced in such quantities that the challenge is no longer scarcity but selection, and future historians may face the opposite of their predecessors' predicament: a record so large that no one can read it, and so fragile that much of it may not be readable at all.

The fragility is easy to overlook. Paper can sit unread in an attic for centuries and remain legible, whereas digital files depend on software, formats and hardware that change every few years. A photograph stored on a device that no longer boots is, for practical purposes, lost. Archivists therefore speak of a 'digital dark age', a period about which we may know less than we know about earlier centuries precisely because we recorded so much of it. Whether the fear proves justified will depend less on technology than on whether institutions take the unglamorous work of preservation seriously.

VARC: Passage 3 Questions Questions 11-15
11

What is the central point of the passage?

12

'The digital age has inverted the problem' means that historians now face:

13

Why, according to the passage, are digital files fragile?

14

The 'digital dark age' refers to:

15

According to the author, the outcome will depend most on:

Type in the answer for the para-jumble and odd-sentence questions. For the rest, choose the best option.

VARC: Verbal Ability Questions Questions 16-24
16

The four sentences below, labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4, form a coherent paragraph when arranged in the right order. Type the correct order as a four-digit sequence (for example, 1234). 1. The result was a generation of shoppers who compared prices without leaving the sofa. 2. Online marketplaces lowered the cost of searching for the best deal to almost nothing. 3. Retailers responded by competing on delivery speed rather than on price alone. 4. Once price became easy to compare, it stopped being a source of advantage.

17

The four sentences below, labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4, form a coherent paragraph when arranged in the right order. Type the correct order as a four-digit sequence (for example, 1234). 1. To settle the question, they dated the volcanic rock layers surrounding the bones. 2. In 1974, a team working in Ethiopia uncovered a remarkably complete skeleton of an early human ancestor. 3. Their result, about three million years, pushed back the known origins of upright walking. 4. Its completeness raised an immediate question: how old could it be?

18

The four sentences below, labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4, form a coherent paragraph when arranged in the right order. Type the correct order as a four-digit sequence (for example, 1234). 1. Finally, in the 1990s, personal computers made the technique available to ordinary offices. 2. Statistical sampling was first used by governments in the eighteenth century to estimate population. 3. Later, in the twentieth century, market researchers adopted it to measure public opinion. 4. However, early surveys were limited by the cost of reaching respondents in person.

19

Four of the five sentences below form a coherent paragraph; one is out of place. Type the number of the odd sentence. 1. A lighthouse lamp is placed at the top of the tower so that its beam can be seen from a great distance. 2. The lens used in most lighthouses concentrates the light into a narrow, powerful beam. 3. Each lighthouse flashes in its own pattern so that sailors can tell one from another. 4. Compasses have been used for navigation in China since about the eleventh century. 5. Keepers once had to climb the tower each night to trim the wick and wind the clockwork.

20

Four of the five sentences below form a coherent paragraph; one is out of place. Type the number of the odd sentence. 1. Volcanic soil is rich in minerals, which is why farmers settle near active mountains despite the danger. 2. The printing press spread across Europe within fifty years of its invention. 3. The slopes of Mount Etna, for example, support vineyards and orchards. 4. Regular small eruptions renew the soil more reliably than rainfall or fertiliser. 5. Farmers accept the risk because a harvest here may be twice as large as elsewhere.

21

Choose the option that best summarises the following paragraph. Praise is generally believed to motivate, but its effect depends on what is praised. Children told they are clever tend to avoid challenges that might disprove the label, while those praised for effort are more willing to attempt hard tasks and to persist after failure. The words that seem most encouraging can therefore quietly discourage.

22

Choose the option that best summarises the following paragraph. Supermarkets place staples such as milk and bread at the back of the store, forcing shoppers to walk past tempting displays on the way. Music is slowed to encourage lingering, and the most profitable items sit at eye level. None of this is accidental: store layouts are engineered so that the path of least resistance is also the path of highest spend.

23

Choose the word that best completes the sentence. The minister's assurances, far from ______ the public, only deepened suspicion that the facts were being withheld.

24

Choose the word that best completes the sentence. Her argument was so ______ that even those who disagreed with her conclusion admitted they could find no flaw in its logic.

What is in this test

  • VARC: Passage 1, questions 1-5
  • VARC: Passage 2, questions 6-10
  • VARC: Passage 3, questions 11-15
  • VARC: Verbal Ability, questions 16-24
  • DILR: Set 1, questions 25-30
  • DILR: Set 2, questions 31-35
  • DILR: Set 3, questions 36-40
  • DILR: Set 4, questions 41-46
  • QA: Quantitative Ability, questions 47-68

68 questions in 120 minutes, marked +3 for a correct answer and -1 for a wrong multiple choice answer, with no penalty on type in the answer questions. When you finish you get your marks, a section breakdown and a written explanation for every question. Learn the method first on the topic practice pages and keep the formula sheet handy while you review.