Official verbal ability thread for CAT 2014

MBA CAT 2022
1321

RC:


In Edgar Allan Poe's story 'The Imp of the Perverse', the protagonist carries out the perfect murder, inherits the dead man's estate, and lives for years in healthy enjoyment of his ill-gotten gains. Whenever thoughts of the murder appear on the fringes of his consciousness, he murmurs to himself, 'I am safe.' All is well until the day he remodels his mantra to 'I am safe - yes - if I be not fool enough to make open confession.' With that thought, he comes undone. He tries to suppress the thought of confessing, but the harder he tries, the more insistent the thought becomes. He panics, he starts running, people start chasing him, he blacks out, and, when he returns to his senses, he is told that he has made a full confession.

I love this story, for its title above all else. Whenever I am on a cliff, a rooftop, or a high balcony, the imp of the perverse whispers in my ear, 'Jump'. It's not a command, it's just a word that pops into my consciousness. When I'm at a dinner party sitting next to someone I respect, the imp works hard to suggest the most inappropriate things I could possibly say. Who or what is the imp? Dan Wegner, a social psychologist, has dragged the imp into the lab and made it confess to being an aspect of automatic mental processing. In Wegner's studies, participants are asked to try hard not to think about something, such as a white bear, or food, or a stereotype. This is hard to do. More importantly, the moment one stops trying to suppress a thought, the thought comes flooding in and becomes even harder to banish. In other words, Wegner creates minor obsessions in his lab by instructing people not to obsess.

Wegner explains this effect as an 'ironic process' of mental control. When controlled mental processing tries to influence thought ('Don't think about a white bear!'), it sets up an explicit goal. And whenever one pursues a goal, a part of the mind automatically monitors progress, so that it can order corrections or know when success has been achieved. When that goal is an action in the world (such as arriving at the airport on time), this feedback system works well. But when the goal is mental, it backfires. Automatic processes continually check: 'Am I not thinking about a white bear?' As the act of monitoring for the absence of the thought introduces the thought, the person must try even harder to divert consciousness. Automatic and controlled mental processes end up working at cross purposes, firing each other up to ever greater exertions. But because controlled processes tire quickly, eventually the inexhaustible automatic processes run unopposed, conjuring up herds of white bears. Thus, the attempt to remove an unpleasant thought can guarantee it a place on your frequent-play list of mental ruminations.

Why does the passage begin with a summary of an Edgar Allan Poe story?

1) To provide context for the name of the phenomenon studied in the rest of the passage, i.e. the imp of the perverse

2) To vividly depict the negative effects of the phenomenon studied in the rest of the passage

3) To illustrate through a literary example how the phenomenon studied in the rest of the passage works

4) To show that Edgar Allan Poe was the first person to identify and illustrate the phenomenon studied in the rest of the passage

According to Dan Wegner, the phenomenon that the author calls 'imp of the perverse' is the result of:

i] The malfunction of mental control processes.

ii] Two mental processes working against each other.

iii] Automatic mental processes being stronger than controlled mental processes.

1) Only [i] 2) Only [iii] 3) Both [i] and [ii] 4) Both [ii] and [iii]


Which of the following hypothetical experiments would best enable Dan Wegner to study the 'imp of the perverse' phenomenon?

1)The participants are asked to talk among themselves, without ever using the word 'the'.

2) Two films are shown to the participants, who are then instructed to think about the first one.

3) Twenty pens are placed before each of the participants, who are asked not to count them.

4) The participants are asked to write down their three favourite colours, then told not to think about the third one.

If you were to interview the author, what would be the best question to ask him?

1) Are there any other depictions of the 'imp of the perverse' phenomenon in literature?

2) Is there any way to successfully control the 'imp of the perverse' phenomenon?

3) What other experiments has Dan Wegner conducted to study the 'imp of the perverse' phenomenon?

4) Are there any other results of automatic mental processing that are similar to the 'imp of the perverse' phenomenon?

-IMS

1322

 The least considered in the latest moist attacks .............innocent victims.

dnt knw d ans guys...plz explain

  • have been
  • are
  • were
  • was

0 voters

1323

If highly regarded procedures have deficiencies that are frequently noticed and (i) ____________, such techniques may be evaluated as (ii)____________, despite the fact that they are potentially (iii) ____________

Blank (i)
A. unsubstantial
B. induced
C. costly


Blank (ii)
D. effective
E. interesting
F. experimental


Blank (iii)
G. controllable
H. helpful
I. detrimental

1324

is

H is next to the left of A and H is to the left of A same ?

1325

RC:


Since the seventeenth century, people had noticed a remarkable similarity between the coastlines of Africa and South America. Like two giant jigsaw pieces, they appeared to fit together. This was considered no more than a curiosity until the early twentieth century. Then, a German geologist suggested an idea so controversial that he would die unrecognized, having convinced essentially no one of its truth. Alfred Wegener's extraordinary idea was that the continents move. The reason the coastlines of South America and Africa fit is that long ago they were joined. They then split and drifted apart. Wegener's evidence of such continental drift was that not only are the rocks on either side of the join the same but so too are the fossils.

The main reason no one believed Wegener's idea was that he could provide no mechanism for continental drift. Also, South America and Africa were separated by thousands of kilometres of seabed. How could they have crossed such a substantial barrier? What changed everything was the surveying of the Atlantic seabed. Sonar surveys by the US Navy in the 1960s revealed that there was a stupendous mountain range that bisected the Atlantic, stretching 10,000 kilometres from Iceland down to the Falklands. What was it doing there?

A key piece of evidence came from measurements of the magnetic field of the rocks on the seabed. Those rocks were originally spewed out as lava by ancient volcanoes. When the lava was liquid, its atoms were free to align along the direction of the Earth's north-south magnetic field of force; when the lava solidified, the atoms froze for all eternity in the direction of the ancient field. The magnetism of the seabed rocks revealed an extraordinary pattern. On either side of the mid-Atlantic Ridge were symmetric stripes of magnetism: first rocks were magnetized in one direction, then in the opposite direction, over and over again. What did it mean? Actually, measurements of the magnetism of rocks on the land had already shown such magnetic reversals. The Earth's magnetic field is like that of a bar magnet, and at intervals it flips direction. What was the north magnetic pole becomes the south magnetic pole, and vice versa. Dating the rock of the stripes in the Atlantic seabed showed that the oldest were furthest from the mid-Atlantic Ridge while the youngest were closest.

Suddenly, it became clear what was happening. The mid-Atlantic Ridge was manufacturing crust. About 120 million years ago, South America and Africa had indeed been joined at the hip. Then a huge crack in the Earth had opened, spewing forth lava. Water had flooded in. Year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium, lava had gushed out of the tremendous fissure in the Earth's surface, creating ever more crust, which pushed the two continents further and further apart. Something like this is happening today at Afar in Ethiopia, where not two but three chunks of the Earth's crust are pulling apart and a new ocean is being born. Wegener's critics were wrong to ridicule him. It was not necessary for South America and Africa to cross a vast expanse of solid seabed to reach their current positions. At the outset there had been no seabed. It grew between the land masses, in the process pushing them remorselessly apart.

What is the central idea of this passage?


1)Discoveries in the twentieth century led to the realization that Africa and South America had moved apart over 120 million years.

2) New discoveries in the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century showed that the theory that the continents move is correct.

3) The discovery of sea-bed magnetization patterns provided the proof for Alfred Wegener's theory.

4) Alfred Wegener was vindicated when new evidence helped prove his theory that the continents move.


The passage given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.

Which of the following is not true, according to this passage?

1) The symmetry of the stripes of magnetism on either side of the mid-Atlantic Ridge showed that the rocks closest to the Ridge were the youngest.

2) Lava pouring through an ancient crack between South America and Africa solidified into the seabed that pushed the two apart.

3) Until the twentieth century, people attached no significance to the similarity between the coastlines of Africa and South America.

4) The rocks in the Atlantic seabed have different stripes of magnetism because the Earth's magnetic field periodically reverses direction.

Millions of years in the future, there will be an ocean where Ethiopia is now. The prediction in this statement:

1)Is plausible, on the basis of the information in this passage.

2) Is unlikely, given the information in this passage.

3) Contradicts the information in this passage.

4) Cannot be determined on the basis of the limited information in this passage.

-IMS

1326

RC:


The passage given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.

In college at the end of the 1970s, I began to be inculcated with the idea that understanding the internal logic and value system of a past culture was the best way to do archaeology and anthropology. The challenge was to achieve this through sensitivity to context, classification and symbolism. A pot was no longer just a pot but a polyvalent signifier, with a range of case-sensitive meanings. A rubbish pit was no longer an unproblematic heap of trash but a semiotic entity embodying concepts of contagion and purity, sacred and profane. A ritual killing was not to be judged bad but considered valid within a different worldview.

Using such 'contextual' thinking, I no longer saw a lump of slag found in a 5000 BC female grave in Serbia as chance contaminant, byproduct garbage from making copper jewellery. Rather, it was a kind of poetic analogy between biological and cultural reproduction. So far, so good. Relativism worked as a way towards understanding that our idea of industrial waste was not theirs and their idea of how a woman should be appropriately buried not ours. But what happens when relativism says that our concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, kindness and cruelty, are inherently inapplicable? Relativism self-consciously divests itself of a series of anthropocentric and anachronistic skins - modern, white, Western, male-focused, individualist, scientific (or 'scientistic') - to say that the recognition of such value-concepts is radically unstable, the 'objective' outsider opinion a worthless myth.

My colleagues and I recently examined the hair of sacrificed Incan children found on some of the high peaks of the Andes. Contrary to historical chronicles claiming that being ritually killed to join the mountain gods was an honour that the Incan rulers accorded only to their own privileged offspring, diachronic isotopic analyses along the scalp hairs of victims indicate they belonged to peasant children, who, a year before death, were given the outward trappings of high status and a much-improved diet in order to make them acceptable offerings. Thus we see past the self-serving accounts of those of the indigenous elite who survived on into Spanish rule. We now understand that the central command in Cuzco engineered the high-visibility sacrifice of children drawn from newly subject populations. And we can guess that this was a means for social control during the massive shock-and-awe-style imperial expansion southward into what became Argentina.

But the relativists demur from this understanding and have painted us as culturally insensitive, ignorant scientists (the last label a clear pejorative). For them, our isotope work is informative only as it reveals 'the inner fantasy life of, mostly, Euro-American archaeologists, who can't possibly access the inner cognitive/cultural life of those Others'. The capital 'O' is significant - 'the Other' signifies the albatross that post-Enlightenment and, more important, postcolonial scholarship must wear round its neck as a sign of penance. We need relativism as an aid to understanding past cultural logic, but it does not free us from a duty to discriminate morally and to understand that there are regularities in the negatives of human behaviour as well as in its positives. In this case, it seeks to ignore the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement and social control. By denying the basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative, yet consistently claiming the necessary rightness of the internal cultural conduct of 'the Other', relativism steps away from logic into incoherence.

What is the author's opinion of relativism?

1) He thinks that it has limited application to the morality of alien cultures, though it can be useful in understanding their logic.

2) He considers it illogical and incoherent when applied to the moral workings of alien cultures, though not too problematic in certain other contexts.

3) He considers it necessary for understanding the inner workings of past societies, but not required when trying to understand their justice.

4) He thinks it is useful in understanding how past societies thought, but not when judging their values.

Which of these is true about the sacrificed Incan children examined by the author and his colleagues?

1) The children did not consider it an honour to be sacrificed to the mountain gods.

2) The children were not the Incan elite's own children, but those of Spanish peasants.

3) The children were raised to a high status for a year before death in order to make them accept being sacrificed.

4) None of the above.

The relativists think that the author and his colleagues are:

i] Handicapped by their Euro-American viewpoint.

ii] Only revealing their own biases when they try to judge the Incan sacrifices.

iii] Not very good scientists, as their work does not sufficiently explain the practices of the Incas.

iv] Postcolonial scholars attempting penance.

1) [i] and [ii] 2) [iii] and [iv] 3) [i], [ii] and [iii] 4) [i], [ii], [iii] and [iv]

Choose the best title from the following:

1) Relativism Gone Wild

2) Relativism: Friend or Foe?

3) The Problem with Relativism

4) Relativism and Incan Child Sacrifice

-IMS

1327

scored a dismal score of 198 in this aimnmat 😞

And whats worse is that one easy question of lr somehow didn't appear on the screen 😞

1328

#CAT2014 #MBA #PGDM #JIMSRohini in association with #HTCampus presents Online Mock CAT. #Takethetest, http://www.htcampus.com/ 

1329


With the outbreak of hostilities in the Gulf, it has become all the more

imperative to improve the efficiency of PSUs. (________). The

budget deficit is likely to remain uncomfortable apart from the precariousbalance of payments position. Transport will be affected and the economy may move into stagnation if there is no early end to the Gulf war.



  • (1) Iraq is unlikely to be able to supply oil for quite some time to come.
  • (3)PSUs have been proving to be white elephants for the economy.
  • (4) India has been caught in the cross-fire of the Gulf war.
  • (2) India.s oil import bill has already become burdensome.

0 voters

1330

Resources are in severe crunch, first and foremost. With its capital structure consisting of equity and loans from the Government

and public sector undertakings in the ratio of 54 to 46, the plant is naturally expected to service a large debt component, an uphill
task. (________). Its cost overruns are such that the cost estimate with 1990 first quarter as base is Rs.7,850 crores. The expenditure
since its inception is Rs.6,442 crores.

  • (4)It is certainly not too much to expect that the management should have taken this into consideration at the time of setting up the project.
  • (2) In steel plants abroad, the debt component during the set-up stage is closer to a more manageable 25 per cent.
  • (1) The management seems to be unable to reconcile itself to the task of taking the necessary steps towards overcoming such a stiff proposition.
  • (3) The management has been asking for a restructuring of its capital base with an increase in the equity component to 70 or 80 percent so that its debt burden will be lightened in its formative years.

0 voters

1331

Which one of them is grammatically correct?

A) He wanted to know that when the play would resume.

B) He wanted to know when the play would resume.

1332

what would u not give up to get inside these buildings...!!

❤ 

https://www.facebook.com/IIMA.Official/photos/a.148583421947496.32939.144845782321260/14859097861340...

1333


https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-S7r4rCQ8AOb0p0SWdjaWJqVDA/edit?usp=sharing

1334

If 13x +17y = 643 where x and y are natural numbers. Find the value of two times the product of x and y.

1335

What is wrong in this sentence :

if we want to progress we must listen and learn from the people who have performed better than us.

1336

guys... can anybody please help me how to prepare for Latin words asked in IIFT exam??


1337

Well, was quite much in hibernation, when I got a hard pinch and woke up. It is now that I want to kickstart my preparation for CAT. Please, I really need tips on how-to-prepare. Totally confused and clueless. Please help.

Thanx in advance

1338

IS SAYING     " MORE SLOWLY"     CORRECT  !!  


@scrabbler    help!!

1339

RC:


The popular belief is that texting (SMS messaging) has evolved as a twenty-first-century phenomenon - as a highly distinctive writing style (textspeak), full of abbreviations and deviant uses of language, used by a young generation that doesn't care about standards. There is a widely voiced concern that the practice is fostering a decline in literacy. And some even think it is harming language as a whole. 'Text messages destroying our language', headed a recent report in a Washington paper, and the writer goes on: 'I knew this was coming. From the first time one of my friends sent me the message "I've got 2 go, talk to U later," I knew the end was near. The English language as we once knew it is out the window, and replacing it is this hip and cool slang-induced language, obsessed with taking the vowels out of words and spelling fonetikally.'

There are dozens of such reports, which cumulatively have generated a sense of 'moral panic' in the population. There is now a widespread folk belief that, whatever texting is, it must be a bad thing.

It isn't just the USA that is panicking. In the UK, broadcaster John Humphrys exploded in the Daily Mail. In an article headed 'I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language', he uses some of the most apocalyptic language I have ever read to condemn it. Texters are: 'vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.' The end is nigh! If I had a pound for every time I have heard of someone predicting a language disaster because of a new technological development, I would be a very rich man. My bank balance would have started to grow with the arrival in the Middle Ages of printing, thought by many to be the invention of the devil because it would put all kinds of false opinions into people's minds. It would have increased with the arrival of the telegraph, telephone and broadcasting, each of which generated short-lived fears that the fabric of society was under threat. And I would have been able to retire on the profits from text messaging, the latest innovation to bring out the prophets of doom.

All the popular beliefs about texting are wrong, or at least debatable. The graphic distinctiveness of textspeak is not a totally new phenomenon. Nor is its use restricted to the young generation. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy. And only a very tiny part of the language uses its distinctive orthography. A trillion text messages may seem a lot, but when we set these alongside the multi-trillion instances of standard orthography in everyday life, they appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, indeed, but its long-term impact on the already existing varieties of language is likely to be negligible. It is not a bad thing.

Choose a suitable title for this passage.

1) Txting: +ves and -ves

2) Why we h8 txt msgs

3) Txting ain't ur nme

4) 4got10 art of language

The author's tone in this passage is:

1) Ironic and facetious.

2) scathing and mocking.

3) humorous and light-hearted.

4) disdainful and condescending.


Which of the following, if true, would strengthen the author's main argument in this passage?

i] Texting is a convenient way to communicate privately and without disturbing other people.

ii] The kind of linguistic wordplay used in textspeak requires a good grounding in grammar and sentence structure.

iii] Studies have shown that texting in languages other than English has no adverse effect on people's command over those languages.

1) Only [ii]

2) [i] and [ii]

3) [i] and [iii]

4) [ii] and [iii]

-IMS

1340

The poem given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful, The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles.

I have looked at it so long I think it is part of my heart.

But it flickers. Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake.

A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. I am important to her.

She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Which of the following best describes this poem?

1) A mirror narrates its own life story.

2) A mirror talks about its hopes and fears.

3) A mirror describes the people it reflects on a daily basis.

4) A mirror describes its own characteristics and experiences.

'In me she has drowned a young girl'. What does this sentence mean in the context of the poem?

1) The mirror has been reflecting the woman ever since she was a young girl.

2) The woman that the mirror reflects is no longer a young girl.

3) The woman that the mirror reflects drowned her young daughter in the lake.

4) The woman that the mirror reflects is lost in the memories of her young daughter.

What can be inferred about the woman reflected by the mirror?

i] She prefers to see herself in dim light.

ii] She is upset at the thought of growing old.

iii] She spends an inordinate amount of time looking at herself in the mirror.

1) Only [ii]

2) [i] and [ii]

3) [i] and [iii]

4) [i], [ii] and [iii]

-IMS