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: ___ (1) ___ At the core of development economics lies the idea of 'productive dualism': that poor countries' economies are split between a narrow 'modern' sector that uses advanced technologies and a larger 'traditional' sector characterized by very low productivity ___ (2) ___ . While this distinction between developing and advanced economies may have made some sense in the 1950s and 1960s, it no longer appears to be very relevant. A combination of forces have produced a widening gap between the winners and those left behind ___ (3) ___ . Convergence between poor and rich parts of the economy was arrested and regional disparities widened ___ (4) ___ . As a result, policymakers in advanced economies are now grappling with the same questions that have long pre-occupied developing economies: mainly how to close the gap with the more advanced parts of the economy.

Sentence: Dualism was long held as the defining feature of developing countries in contrast to developed countries, where frontier technologies and high productivity were assumed to prevail.

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: ___ (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.