CAT (VARC) PYQs

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.

Paragraph: Never before has a population, nearly all of whom has enjoyed at a least a secondary school education, been exposed to so much information, whether in newspapers and magazines or through YouTube, Google, and Facebook ___ (1) ___ . Yet it is not clear that people today are more knowledgeable than their barely literate predecessors. Contemporary advances in technology offered more serious and inquisitive students access to realms of knowledge previously unimaginable and unavailable ___ (2) ___ . But such readily available knowledge leads many more students away from serious study, the reading of actual texts, and toward an inability to write effectively and grammatically ___ (3) ___ . It has let people choose sources that reinforce their opinions rather than encouraging them to question inherited beliefs ___ (4) ___ .

Sentence: Having made citizens more and less knowledgeable than their predecessors, the Internet has proved to be both a blessing and a curse.

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.

Paragraph: The experience of reading philosophy is often disquieting. When reading philosophy, the values around which one has heretofore organised one's life may come to look provincial, flatly wrong, or even evil ___ (1) ___ . When beliefs previously held as truths are rendered implausible, new beliefs, values, and ways of living may be required ___ (2) ___ . What's worse, philosophers admonish each other to remain unsutured until such time as a defensible new answer is revealed or constructed. Sometimes philosophical writing is even strictly critical in that it does not even attempt to provide an alternative after tearing down a cultural or conceptual citadel ___ (3) ___ . The reader of philosophy must be prepared for the possibility of this experience. While reading philosophy can help one clarify one's values, and even make one self-conscious for the first time of the fact that there are good reasons for believing what one believes, it can also generate unremediated doubt that is difficult to live with ___ (4) ___ .

Sentence: This philosophical cut at one's core beliefs, values, and way of life is difficult enough.

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.

Paragraph: ___ (1) ___ An argument can be defined as a complex symbolic structure where some parts, known as the premises, offer support to another part, the conclusion. Alternatively, an argument can be viewed as a complex speech act consisting of one or more acts of premising (which assert propositions in favor of the conclusion), an act of concluding, and a stated or implicit marker ("hence", "therefore) that indicates that the conclusion follows from the premises ___ (2) ___ . The relation of support between premises and conclusion can be cashed out in different ways: the premises may guarantee the truth of the conclusion, or make Its truth more probable; the premises may imply the conclusion; the premises may make the conclusion more acceptable (or assertible) ___ (3) ___ . But depending on one's explanatory goals, there is also much to be gained from considering arguments as they in fact occur in human communicative practices ___ (4) ___ .

Sentence: For theoretical purposes, arguments may be considered as freestanding entities, abstracted from their contexts of use in actual human activities.