CAT VARC Practice Test 4

Demolition has long been the default answer to an ageing building. A structure that no longer serves its original purpose, the reasoning goes, is an obstacle to be cleared so that something better can replace it. Yet a quiet reversal is under way in many cities, where old factories become apartments, disused railway stations become galleries, and warehouses become offices. Advocates of this adaptive reuse make an environmental case first: a building already standing contains a great deal of embodied energy, the energy spent on making its bricks, steel and concrete, and demolishing it wastes that investment while constructing a replacement spends more.

The argument is not only ecological. Old buildings often occupy prime locations and carry a texture, in their proportions and materials, that new construction struggles to imitate. Critics respond that conversion can cost more than building afresh, and that historic structures rarely meet modern standards for insulation and accessibility without expensive alteration. There is force in these objections. But they tend to compare the cost of conversion with the cost of a new building alone, ignoring what the new building destroys. A fairer accounting would set the full price of demolition and lost character against the price of adaptation, and in many cases the result would be much closer than the critics assume.

Translators have argued for centuries about whether their first duty is to the original or to the reader. The literalist holds that a translation should keep as close as possible to the words and structure of the source, even at the cost of strangeness, because any smoothing alters what the author actually wrote. The advocate of fluency replies that a translation nobody can read comfortably is a failure in its own terms: an author who wrote naturally in one language should not sound clumsy in another. Each camp can point to notable triumphs and disasters, and neither has ever won.

One reason the dispute persists is that the two sides are often answering different questions. A legal or technical text is read for its precise content, and here literal accuracy is rightly prized. A novel or poem, by contrast, is read for the effect its language produces, and a word-for-word rendering may reproduce every word while losing that effect entirely. The sensible position, then, is not to choose a side once and for all but to ask what a given text is for. Translators who ask that question first rarely find the old argument as troubling as it seems.

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.