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CAT VARC Practice Test 5

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

Why Languages Fade

Languages rarely die because their speakers are forced to abandon them. More often they fade through a series of reasonable individual choices. Parents who want their children to succeed in school or find work speak the dominant language at home, and within a generation or two the older tongue survives only in songs, prayers and the memories of the very old. Linguists who study this process stress that the loss is not merely of words. Each language encodes a distinctive way of dividing up experience, from the names of plants to the ways relationships are described, and when it disappears, the knowledge stored in it usually disappears too.

Efforts to reverse the decline have had uneven results. Programmes that simply teach the language in classrooms often produce learners who can recite but not converse. The more successful revivals, such as those of Welsh and Maori, have depended on making the language useful in daily life: in broadcasting, in public administration and, above all, in homes. The lesson seems to be that a language is kept alive not by being preserved but by being needed.

Passage 1 Questions Questions 1-4
1

Which of the following best states the central idea of the first passage?

2

According to the passage, what is lost when a language disappears?

3

Why have classroom-only programmes had uneven results, according to the passage?

4

What is the main lesson the author draws from successful revivals?

The Economics of Attention

Newspapers once sold their readers to advertisers, and everyone understood the arrangement. The reader paid a small price for the paper, the advertiser paid a larger one for access to the reader, and the editor's job was to make a product good enough to be bought every day. Digital platforms have taken the arrangement to its logical extreme. Their content costs almost nothing to produce, because the users make it, and their product is the attention of those users, sold in slices measured in seconds.

The consequences are easier to see than to fix. A platform that earns more when people stay longer has an incentive to show whatever keeps them, whether or not it informs or pleases them on reflection. It would be a mistake to see this as villainy; it is simply what the incentives reward. Reform therefore needs to change the incentives rather than wait for better intentions, for instance by making platforms answerable for what their systems promote, not merely for what their users post.

Passage 2 Questions Questions 5-8
5

Which of the following best summarises the second passage?

6

How does the passage say platforms differ from newspapers in producing content?

7

The author's view of platforms' behaviour is that it is:

8

Which reform does the author give as an example?

This section contains standalone verbal ability questions: para-jumbles, an odd-sentence-out question and a para-summary 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. Such habits, once established, tend to outlast the reason for which they were formed. 2. Many people begin checking their phones first thing in the morning in order to catch urgent messages. 3. Within weeks the checking becomes automatic, whether or not anything urgent has arrived. 4. The cue is simply waking up, and the reward is a small hit of novelty.

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. Its answer, first sketched in 1859, has shaped biology ever since. 2. Darwin's central question was why so many species seem perfectly fitted to their surroundings. 3. He proposed that small inherited differences, favoured by the environment, accumulate over generations. 4. In this view, fitness is not designed in advance but filtered by survival.

11

Four of the five sentences below form a coherent paragraph; one is out of place. Type the number of the odd sentence. 1. Coffee plants grow best at altitude, where cooler nights slow the ripening of the berries. 2. Slower ripening gives the beans more time to develop complex flavours. 3. This is why the most prized coffees often come from mountain estates. 4. Growers at lower altitudes must therefore compete on volume rather than on flavour. 5. The Great Wall of China was built and rebuilt over many centuries by different dynasties.

12

Choose the option that best summarises the following paragraph. Cities that add bicycle lanes often see an initial backlash from drivers who fear lost road space and lost parking. Yet studies from several cities find that, after the change, shop takings are stable or higher, since people on bicycles and on foot visit more often, even if they spend less each time. The fear of lost trade, it seems, is stronger than the evidence for it.

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.