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CAT VARC Practice Test 6

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

The Invention of the Weekend

The weekend feels like a natural feature of the calendar, but it is a recent invention, and a contested one. In the early industrial era, factory owners in Britain often found that workers took Monday off as an informal extension of Sunday, a custom known as 'Saint Monday'. Employers disliked the disruption, and reformers disliked the drinking that accompanied it. The compromise that emerged, a half-day on Saturday in exchange for regular attendance on Monday, spread slowly through the late nineteenth century and only became a full two-day break in the twentieth.

What drove the change was not generosity alone. Employers came to see that rested workers were more productive and that a population with free time was also a population with time to shop. When the American car maker Henry Ford adopted a five-day week in 1926, he explained it partly in these terms. The weekend, in other words, survived because it suited both sides of the bargain, which may be why it has proved harder to abolish than to introduce.

Passage 1 Questions Questions 1-4
1

What is the main idea of the first passage?

2

'Saint Monday' was:

3

According to the passage, what drove the adoption of the weekend?

4

The author's concluding suggestion is that the weekend has been hard to abolish because:

Mapping the Ocean Floor

By the middle of the twentieth century humanity had charted the surface of the Moon in greater detail than most of the floor of its own oceans, and the reason was simple: light and radio waves, the tools of surveying on land and from orbit, do not travel far through water. Early ocean charts were made by lowering weighted lines from ships, which produced a scattering of depth readings, each one a single point in an enormous unknown. The development of echo sounding, in which the time taken by a sound pulse to return from the bottom indicates depth, transformed the work, since a ship could now record a continuous line.

Even so, the ocean floor remains the least explored large surface on the planet. Ships map it in strips, and the seas are so vast that complete high-resolution coverage will take many decades at the present rate. The irony is that the Earth's most extensive landscape, with mountain chains longer than any on land, is still known to us mainly through inference and sampling, while the surfaces of the Moon and Mars are in some respects better mapped.

Passage 2 Questions Questions 5-8
5

Why had the ocean floor been charted less well than the Moon by the mid-twentieth century?

6

What did echo sounding change about ocean mapping?

7

The author says complete high-resolution coverage will take many decades because:

8

Which of the following best describes the 'irony' the author mentions?

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. That discovery undermined the belief that everything in the heavens circled the Earth. 2. The first telescopes, built in the early seventeenth century, magnified distant objects only a few times. 3. Larger instruments followed, and with them came an ever finer view of the sky. 4. Even so, they were enough to reveal the moons of Jupiter.

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. That risk is why humid summers can be more dangerous than dry ones. 2. The body cools itself mainly by sweating, and sweat cools only when it evaporates. 3. In very humid air, evaporation slows and the cooling effect weakens. 4. If the body cannot shed heat, its core temperature climbs, which is dangerous.

11

Four of the five sentences below form a coherent paragraph; one is out of place. Type the number of the odd sentence. 1. Honeybees keep the temperature of the hive steady by fanning their wings or clustering together. 2. In winter the bees form a tight cluster and shiver to generate heat. 3. In summer, workers fan the entrance to draw cooler air through the hive. 4. This careful control protects the developing young, which need a narrow range of temperatures. 5. Marathon runners are advised to drink small amounts of water regularly during a race.

12

Choose the option that best summarises the following paragraph. Museums once measured success by the number of objects they owned and the number of visitors through the door. A growing number now ask a different question: what do visitors do with what they see? Loans of collections to schools, online catalogues and community exhibitions all extend a museum's reach beyond its walls, and the best of them turn passive viewers into participants.

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.