CAT 2024 Question Paper (Slot 1, PYQ) Practice Questions & Answers

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

Landing in Australia, the British colonists weren't much impressed with the small-bodied,slender-snooted marsupials called bandicoots. "Their muzzle, which is much too long, givesthem an air exceedingly stupid," one naturalist noted in 1805. They nicknamed one type the"zebra rat" because of its black-striped rump.Silly-looking or not, though, the zebra rat-the smallest bandicoot, more commonly known todayas the western barred bandicoot-exhibited a genius for survival in the harsh outback, where itsancestors had persisted for some 26 million years. Its births were triggered by rainfall in thebone-dry desert. It carried its breath-mint-size babies in a backward-facing pouch so motherscould forage for food and dig shallow, camouflaged shelters.Still, these adaptations did not prepare the western barred bandicoot for the colonial-eratransformation of its ecosystem, particularly the onslaught of imported British animals, fromcattle and rabbits that damaged delicate desert vegetation to ravenous house cats that soondeveloped a taste for bandicoots. Several of the dozen-odd bandicoot species went extinct, andby the 1940s the western barred bandicoot, whose original range stretched across much of thecontinent, persisted only on two predator-free islands in Shark Bay, off Australia's westerncoast."Our isolated fauna had simply not been exposed to these predators," says Reece Pedler, anecologist with the Wild Deserts conservation program.Now Wild Deserts is using descendants of those few thousand island survivors, called Shark Baybandicoots, in a new effort to seed a mainland bandicoot revival. They've imported 20bandicoots to a preserve on the edge of the Strzelecki Desert, in the remote interior of NewSouth Wales. This sanctuary is a challenging place, desolate much of the year, with one of theworld's most mercurial rainfall patterns-relentless droughts followed by sudden drenching floods.The imported bandicoots occupy two fenced "exclosures," cleared of invasive rabbits (courtesyof Pedler's sheepdog) and of feral cats (which slunk off once the rabbits disappeared). A thirdfenced area contains the program's Wild Training Zone, where two other rare marsupials(bilbies, a larger type of bandicoot, and mulgaras, a somewhat fearsome fuzzball known forsucking the brains out of prey) currently share terrain with controlled numbers of cats, learningto evade them. It's unclear whether the Shark Bay bandicoots, which are perhaps even morepredator-naive than their now-extinct mainland bandicoot kin, will be able to make that kind of breakthrough.For now, though, a recent surge of rainfall has led to a bandicoot joey boom, raising the WildDeserts population to about 100, with other sanctuaries adding to that number. There are alsosigns of rebirth in the landscape itself. With their constant digging, the bandicoots trapmoisture and allow for seed germination so the cattle-damaged desert can restore itself.They have a new nickname-a flattering one, this time. "We call them ecosystem engineers,"Pedler says.

Which one of the following statements provides a gist of this passage?

The text uses the word 'exclosures' because Wild Deserts has adopted a measure of

Which one of the following options does NOT represent the characteristics of the western barred bandicoot?

According to the text, the western barred bandicoots now have a flattering name because they have

There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

Sentence: Understanding central Asia's role helps developments make more sense not only across Asia but in Europe, the Americas and Africa.

Paragraph: The nations of the Silk Roads are sometimes called 'developing countries', but they are actually some of the world's most highly developed countries, the very crossroads of civilization, in advanced states of disrepair. (1). These countries lie at the centre of global affairs: they have since the beginning of history. Running across the spine of Asia, they form a web of connections fanning out in every direction, routes along which pilgrims and warriors, nomads and merchants have travelled, goods and produce have been bought and sold, and ideas exchanged, adapted and refined. (2) .They have carried not only prosperity, but also deat (3) The Silk Roads are the world's central nervous system, connecting otherwise far-flung peoples and places....__(4)_. It allows us to see patterns and links, causes and effects that remain invisible if one looks only at Europe, or North America.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the bestanswer for each question.

Oftentimes, when economists cross borders, they are less interested in learning from othersthan in invading their garden plots. Gary Becker, for instance, pioneered the idea of humancapital. To do so, he famously tackled topics like crime and domesticity, applying methodshoned in the study of markets to domains of nonmarket life. He projected economics outwardinto new realms: for example, by revealing the extent to which humans calculate marginalutilities when choosing their spouses or stealing from neighbors. At the same time, he did notlet other ways of thinking enter his own economic realm: for example, he did not borrow fromanthropology or history or let observations of nonmarket economics inform his homoeconomicus. Becker was a picture of the imperial economist in the heyday of the discipline'sbravura.Times have changed for the once almighty discipline. Economics has been taken to task, withinand beyond its ramparts. Some economists have reached out, imported, borrowed, andcollaborated—been less imperial, more open. Consider Thomas Piketty and his outreach tohistorians. The booming field of behavioral economics-the fusion of economics and socialpsychology-is another case. Having spawned active subfields, like judgment, decisionmaking and a turn to experimentation, the field aims to go beyond the caricature of Rational Man toexplain how humans make decisions....It is important to underscore how this flips the way we think about economics. For generations,economists have presumed that people have interests-"preferences," in the neoclassical argot-that get revealed in the course of peoples' choices. Interests come before actions anddetermine them. If you are hungry, you buy lunch; if you are cold, you get a sweater. If you onlyhave so much money and can't afford to deal with both your growling stomach and yourshivering, which need you choose to meet using your scarce savings reveals your preference.Psychologists take one look at this simple formulation and shake their heads. Increasingly, evensome mainstream economists have to admit that homo economicus doesn't always behave likethe textbook maximizer; irrational behavior can't simply be waved away as extraeconomicexpressions of passions over interests, and thus the domain of other disciplines.... This is oneplace where the humanist can help the economist. If narrative economics is going to help usunderstand how rivals duke it out, who wins and who loses, we are going to need much morethan lessons from epidemiological studies of viruses or intracranial stimuli.Above all, we need politics and institutions. Shiller [the Nobel prize winning economist]connects perceptions of narratives to changes in behavior and thence to social outcomes. Hecompletes a circle that was key to behavioral economics and brings in storytelling to makesense of how perceptions get framed. This cycle (perception to behavior to society) was oncemediated or dominated by institutions: the political parties, lobby groups, and mediaorganizations that played a vital role in legitimating, representing, and excluding interests. Yetinstitutions have been stripped from Shiller's account, to reveal a bare dynamic of emotionsand economics, without the intermediating place of politics.

The author critiques Schiller's approach to behavioural economics for

Times have changed for the once almighty discipline." We can infer from this statement and the associated paragraph that the author is being

We can infer from the passage that the term "homo economicus" refers to someone who

In the first paragraph the author is making the point that economists like Becker

There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

Sentence: The brain isn't organized the way you might set up your home office or bathroom medicine cabinet.

Paragraph: (1) . You can't just put things anywhere you want to. The evolved architecture of the brain is haphazard and disjointed, and incorporates multiple systems, each of which has a mind of its own. (2). Evolution doesn't design things and it doesn't build systems-it settles on systems that, historically, conveyed a survival benefit. There is no overarching, grand planner engineering the systems so that they work harmoniously together. (3) . The brain is more like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction.