Skip to main content

CAT Full-Length Mock Test 2

CAT Full-Length Mocks • Medium • 68 Questions
Progress 0 / 68
40:00
  1. VARC24 Qs
  2. DILR22 Qs
  3. QA22 Qs

The Politics of Naming

Renaming a street or a city is rarely a purely administrative act. Names carry memory, and changing them is a way of deciding whose memory counts. When a government replaces a colonial-era name, it signals a break with the past; when residents resist, they are usually defending something less abstract than history, namely the familiarity of a map they have lived on. Postal systems, businesses and legal documents all depend on names staying stable, so the practical cost of a change is real, and it falls mostly on ordinary people rather than on those who decide.

None of this means renaming is illegitimate. Names that honour figures now widely regarded as oppressors can feel like an insult to those descended from their victims, and a name that the public finds painful is also a cost, only a quieter one. The sensible approach is to treat naming as a question of trade-offs rather than principle: to ask who bears the costs, who gains the recognition, and whether the change has been reached through a process that the affected community can accept as fair.

VARC: Passage 1 Questions Questions 1-5
1

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

2

According to the passage, the practical cost of renaming falls mostly on:

3

'A name that the public finds painful is also a cost, only a quieter one' suggests that:

4

Which of the following would the author most likely agree with?

5

The tone of the passage is best described as:

When Targets Backfire

Policies often fail not because they are poorly enforced but because they are well enforced against the wrong target. A well-known story, perhaps embellished in the retelling, describes a colonial administration that offered a bounty for dead snakes to reduce their numbers. Enterprising residents began breeding snakes to collect the reward, and when the scheme was cancelled the breeders released their stock, leaving more snakes than before. Whether or not the story is true, economists use it to illustrate a real pattern: people respond to the incentive that is written down, not the goal that is intended.

The pattern recurs wherever a measurable proxy replaces the thing that matters. Schools judged on test scores may teach to the test; hospitals judged on waiting times may discharge patients early; programmers rewarded for lines of code may write more of it. The remedy is not to abandon measurement but to expect gaming, to monitor the target and its side effects together, and to change the measure when people learn to exploit it.

VARC: Passage 2 Questions Questions 6-10
6

Which of the following best states the main point of the passage?

7

Why does the author mention the snake story?

8

Which of the following is an example of the pattern described in the second paragraph?

9

The phrase 'perhaps embellished in the retelling' shows that the author is:

10

According to the passage, the best remedy for gaming of targets is to:

The Invisible Infrastructure

Public health improved more through plumbing than through medicine. In the nineteenth century, cities such as London were struck by cholera because drinking water and sewage mixed, and the disease retreated only when engineers built systems to separate them. The achievement was extraordinary and almost entirely invisible: a city that works well has no reason to notice its sewers, and so the people who built them are rarely celebrated.

This invisibility has a cost. Infrastructure that nobody sees is easy to underfund, and the damage from neglect arrives slowly, usually long after the officials who skipped the maintenance have left office. Political attention flows to what can be inaugurated, such as a new bridge or a shining terminal, while repairs bring no ribbon to cut. A society that wants reliable water and power has to find ways of making maintenance as rewarding to politicians as construction is.

VARC: Passage 3 Questions Questions 11-15
11

Which of the following best expresses the central argument?

12

Why were the engineers who built sewers 'rarely celebrated'?

13

According to the passage, why is maintenance neglected?

14

'Repairs bring no ribbon to cut' means that repairs:

15

What does the author recommend in the final sentence?

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 surge of small, specialised newsletters written by individual reporters. 2. When large newspapers cut their staff in the 2010s, many journalists found themselves without an outlet. 3. Readers who valued a particular writer could now pay that writer directly. 4. Subscription tools made it easy to charge for a newsletter without a publisher.

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. A halo around the moon, for instance, was taken as a warning of rain. 2. Before modern forecasting, sailors often delayed departure when the sky showed certain signs. 3. That is why their caution was not mere superstition. 4. Thin high cloud, which causes the halo, often arrives ahead of a weather front.

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. Each translator therefore ends up making dozens of small choices that no dictionary settles. 2. Idioms rarely map one to one onto another language. 3. A phrase that sounds warm in Hindi may sound strange when copied word for word into English. 4. Good translation is less about swapping words than about carrying meaning across.

19

Four of the five sentences below form a coherent paragraph; one is out of place. Type the number of the odd sentence. 1. The first public clock in Europe was installed in a cathedral tower in the fourteenth century. 2. Tea plants grow best in cool, misty highlands where the leaves develop slowly. 3. Slow growth concentrates the compounds that give tea its flavour. 4. This is why estates at high altitude often fetch the highest prices. 5. Pickers usually take only the top two leaves and a bud, since these are the most tender.

20

Four of the five sentences below form a coherent paragraph; one is out of place. Type the number of the odd sentence. 1. Salt was once so valuable that Roman soldiers were reportedly paid partly in it. 2. Before refrigeration, it was the main way of preserving meat and fish. 3. Cities with access to salt deposits often grew rich from trading it. 4. Marathon training plans usually increase weekly distance by no more than ten per cent. 5. The word salary is thought to come from the Latin word for salt.

21

Choose the option that best summarises the following paragraph. The spread of smartphones has made photography universal, yet the photographs most people take are rarely looked at again. The camera roll has become less an album than a dumping ground. What has been gained in convenience has been lost in curation, and memories that are never revisited are, in practice, not much better than memories that were never recorded.

22

Choose the option that best summarises the following paragraph. A city's skyline is usually celebrated for its tallest buildings, but its character often comes from the ordinary streets beneath them. Corner shops, small workshops and mixed housing give neighbourhoods their rhythm, and when redevelopment replaces them with uniform towers, the city may gain height while losing texture.

23

Choose the word that best completes the sentence. The report was so ______ that readers of every background could follow its argument without difficulty.

24

Choose the word that best completes the sentence. Although the scheme was widely praised at launch, its long-term benefits proved largely ______.

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 25-29
  • DILR: Set 2, questions 30-34
  • DILR: Set 3, questions 35-40
  • 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.