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CAT VARC Practice Test 3

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

The Case for Boredom

Boredom has a poor reputation. Parents treat it as a problem to be solved, employers as a symptom of disengagement, and technology companies as a market to be filled. Yet a growing body of research suggests that the reflexive flight from boredom may carry a hidden price. When the mind has nothing external to hold its attention, it begins to wander, and this wandering is not idle. Participants in one well-known experiment who first performed a dull copying task later produced more inventive uses for a pair of plastic cups than those who had been given no such task. The researchers' interpretation was that boredom pushes the mind to search for stimulation internally, loosening the associations that focused attention keeps tightly bound.

None of this means boredom is pleasant or that it should be manufactured. Prolonged boredom at work is linked to errors and to dissatisfaction, and some people seek risky thrills merely to escape it. The point is subtler: an environment in which every empty moment is instantly filled by a screen deprives people of a raw material from which original thinking is sometimes made. The sensible conclusion is not that we should court tedium, but that unstructured time deserves defending as deliberately as we defend time for focused work.

Passage 1 Questions Questions 1-4
1

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

2

The experiment involving plastic cups is mentioned in order to:

3

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

4

The author's attitude towards boredom is best described as:

The Lighthouse and the Market

Economists have long used the lighthouse as a textbook example of a public good: a service whose light cannot be withheld from any passing ship, so that no captain has reason to pay for it voluntarily. In 1974, however, Ronald Coase challenged this tidy story. Examining the history of British lighthouses, he found that for a long period many were built and operated by private owners, who were compensated through fees collected from ships when they reached port. The lighthouse, he argued, had been supplied by the market after all, and economists had been careless in reaching for a convenient example without checking the facts.

Coase's account has since been qualified. Critics note that the private lighthouse owners could not have operated without a royal grant of the right to levy fees, and that those fees were enforced by customs officers. The market, in other words, worked only because the state created and protected the conditions in which payment could be collected. Both sides, then, have something right. Coase showed that a service which looks impossible to charge for can sometimes be financed privately; his critics showed that such arrangements often rest on legal machinery that is easy to overlook. The lasting lesson of the episode may be methodological: theories illustrated by a single example are only as sound as the historical evidence behind that example.

Passage 2 Questions Questions 5-8
5

According to the passage, why have economists traditionally treated the lighthouse as a public good?

6

Coase's research into British lighthouses found that:

7

The critics of Coase's account argue that:

8

Which of the following can be inferred from the final sentence of the passage?

This section contains standalone verbal ability questions: para-jumbles, an odd-sentence-out question and a para-summary question. The text needed for each question is given within the question. Type in the answer for the first three, and choose the correct option for the last.

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. Later, highways redrew it again, pulling shops and homes toward junctions and away from centres. 2. Cities once grew around rivers because water carried goods and people more cheaply than any road. 3. Each new transport technology, in this sense, quietly rewrote where people chose to live. 4. When railways arrived, this advantage vanished, and the map of urban growth was redrawn around stations.

10

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. Critics, however, point out that the same feature makes such forecasts hard to falsify. 2. Long-range weather models rely on running the same simulation many times with slightly different starting conditions. 3. The spread among these runs is then read as a measure of how uncertain the forecast is. 4. This approach has become standard because it replaces a single confident prediction with a range of likely outcomes.

11

Four of the five sentences below form a coherent paragraph; one is out of place. Type the number of the odd sentence. 1. Coral reefs cover less than one per cent of the ocean floor yet shelter about a quarter of all marine species. 2. Rising sea temperatures cause corals to expel the algae that feed them, a process known as bleaching. 3. Many sailors in the eighteenth century preferred salted beef because it survived long voyages. 4. Scientists are testing heat-tolerant coral strains to help reefs survive warming waters. 5. Overfishing and pollution add local pressure that leaves reefs less able to recover from bleaching.

12

Choose the option that best summarises the following paragraph. Many organisations treat meetings as a sign of collaboration, yet the more meetings a team holds, the less uninterrupted time its members have to do the work being discussed. Researchers who tracked calendars found that teams with fewer, shorter meetings reported both higher output and higher satisfaction. The lesson is not that discussion is worthless, but that its cost is rarely counted.

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.