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CAT VARC Practice Test 10

CAT VARC • Medium • 12 Questions
Progress 0 / 12
25:00

The Value of a Second Draft

Writers often speak of the first draft as the place where ideas are found and the later drafts as the place where they are made clear. Cognitive scientists have a similar view: the effort of putting thoughts into sentences shows us which of them are vague. A person who believes she understands a topic may discover, when she tries to explain it in writing, that the steps do not connect.

Revision, then, is not mere polishing of style. It is a second round of thinking, carried out with the advantage of having a complete text to examine. Experienced editors tend to begin with the structure, asking whether the argument moves in a sensible order, and only afterwards turn to word choice and punctuation. Beginners often reverse the order, correcting commas in paragraphs that will later be cut.

The practical advice is modest. Leave time between drafts so that the text looks less familiar, read it aloud to catch awkward passages, and decide what the piece is trying to say in a single sentence before adjusting anything else.

Passage 1 Questions Questions 1-4
1

The central idea of the passage is that:

2

According to the passage, writing a first draft helps because it:

3

The author's comment about beginners 'correcting commas in paragraphs that will later be cut' suggests that they:

4

Which of the following is NOT part of the advice given in the last paragraph?

Shared Bicycles and the City

Bicycle sharing schemes were welcomed as a cheap way to cut traffic, and many cities have introduced them. The results have been mixed. Where docking stations are close together and the cycle lanes are safe, ridership grows steadily, and a good share of trips replace short car journeys. Where bikes are left anywhere and lanes are missing, they are damaged or abandoned, and operators struggle to cover costs.

The difference lies less in the bicycles than in the surrounding streets. A shared bike is only as useful as the route it can take. Cities that built the lanes first and the schemes afterwards found that the schemes needed little promotion, while those that launched the bikes first often faced complaints about clutter and accidents.

This suggests a general rule for new urban services: the infrastructure should come before the product. A service that depends on conditions the city has not yet created will be blamed for problems that its users did not cause.

Passage 2 Questions Questions 5-8
5

The passage is chiefly concerned with:

6

According to the passage, what distinguishes the successful schemes?

7

Cities that 'built the lanes first' found that:

8

The general rule suggested in the last paragraph is that:

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

Verbal Ability Questions Questions 9-12
9

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 first vaccine came from the observation that milkmaids who caught cowpox rarely suffered from smallpox. 2. The success of the method led, over almost two centuries, to the end of smallpox. 3. Before vaccines, outbreaks of infectious disease regularly emptied villages and cities. 4. Doctors tested the idea by deliberately exposing patients to the milder disease.

10

Four of the five sentences below form a coherent paragraph; one is out of place. Type the number of the odd sentence. 1. Tea plants grow best in cool, misty highlands with plenty of rain. 2. The leaves are picked by hand and then dried and rolled. 3. Darjeeling and Assam are well known tea growing regions of India. 4. The telephone was patented in the 1870s. 5. Different processing methods produce black, green and oolong teas.

11

Choose the option that best summarises the following paragraph. Scientists have long argued that a diverse mix of crops makes farms more resilient, since a pest or a drought is unlikely to damage every variety at once. Yet farmers are often tied to a single crop by contracts, machinery and local markets. The science is clear; the difficulty lies in changing the system around the farm.

12

Choose the option that best summarises the following paragraph. The first impression of a candidate at an interview often shapes how all later answers are heard. Interviewers who notice this tendency can reduce its effect by using the same questions for every candidate and scoring each answer separately.

What is in this test

  • Passage 1, questions 1-4
  • Passage 2, questions 5-8
  • Verbal Ability, questions 9-12

12 questions in 25 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.