CAT-test-1-verbal

Verbal Reasoning and Reading Comprehension

Directions for Question 1-4
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
Family trees of languages typically show Spanish, French and Italian descending from Latin in the same way
that you are descended from your mother. But this is misleading. There was no birth of Italian, nor any
definitive death of Latin. Instead, there were centuries of infinitesimal changes. Those who noticed them
would, like Cicero, have considered them mistakes. But most people didn't care, which is how such tweaks
took hold, and spread. As they accumulated, Latin did not create Italian and its sister languages. It became
them.
Throughout the Dark Ages, the few literate Europeans continued to write in classical Latin. Or they tried to:
as their speech evolved, their writing sometimes mutated to match it. A list of commonly misspelled words,
written in the third or fourth century, offers a glimpse of what was happening. For example, the list insists on
calida (hot) not calda: the unstressed "i" was evidently disappearing. (Now it is calda in Italian.) Other
sounds were changing, too. Use frigida not fricda, the list advises. The word for "cold" was on its way to
today's fredda.
Nor was pronunciation the only moving part. Modern students of Latin often wrestle
despondently with the language's case system, in which the role a noun plays in a sentence is
signalled by alternative endings. These collapsed into fewer forms in the Dark Ages; in modern
Italian they leave no trace. Meanwhile, Latin's three genders (masculine, neuter and feminine)
merged into two. Words were substituted. People stopped using Latin's loqui, "to speak", and
started using parabolare, which originally had a narrower meaning. It became Italian's parlare.
A millennium or so after Cicero's moans, in other words, Europeans spoke a range of tongues
that were nevertheless related to each other and to Latin. What happened next in Italy had as
much to do with politics as with the dynamics of languages. The contrast with its northern
neighbour is instructive. France was unified by the conquest of territory spreading out from
Paris; the conquerors brought Parisian speech with them, and that became "French". A mighty
state then did its best to teach that language everywhere, and to eradicate local variants.
Italy was unified far later, in the 19th century. "Italian" was thus created by the pen, not the sword.
The 13th- and 14th-century works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio were the peninsula's most
revered literature. So when, in the 16th century, Pietro Bembo sat down to write a grammar for the
prestige language of their texts, he used their (by now rather old) Tuscan dialect as his model. In this
way "Italian" was born-though Bembo titled his book simply "Writings on the Vulgar Tongue". It
soon spread to elites in other regions.
Even then, ordinary folk continued speaking their own dialects, which, across great enough distances-
say from Milan to Naples -were and remain mutually incomprehensible. These are not bad copies of
Italian but its siblings, descendants of Latin in their own right. Over half of Italians proudly speak one
of them still (though nearly all speak Italian, too). A Sicilian who doesn't speak Sicilian is hardly
worthy of the name; Neapolitan plays a crucial role in the celebrated novels of Elena Ferrante.
These days, amid migration and globalisation, Italian continues to develop. Naturally some worry that it is
happening too fast; that young people are derelict in their grammar, or use too many foreign words. In reality, the
same forces that made Latin from its predecessor (called Proto Indo-European), and turned Latin into Italian-the
drift of time and exposure to different influences -are still operating. The only unchanging language is an
unspoken one. Classical Latin may be dead-but as Italian, it lives on. Long live dismal Latin!
2. Which of the following revelations would undermine the author's
viewpoint the most?
 There are certain elements in a language that stop being in use abruptly.
 New languages come into form through the gradual process of
reformation.
 Europeans have been speaking varied tongues that had common origins.
 Unification of a land into a country has no impact on the uniformity of
the language they speak.
"Confuse not the necessary expenses with thy desires. Each of you, together with your good
families, have more desires than your earnings can gratify. Therefore are thy earnings spent
to gratify these desires insofar as they will go. Still thou retainest many ungratified desires.
"All men are burdened with more desires than they can gratify. Because of my wealth
thinkest thou I may gratify every desire? 'Tis a false idea. There are limits to my time. There
are limits to my strength. There are limits to the distance I may travel. There are limits to
what I may eat. There are limits to the zest with which I may enjoy.
"I say to you that just as weeds grow in a field wherever the farmer leaves space for their
roots, even so freely do desires grow in men whenever there is a possibility of their being
gratified. Thy desires are a multitude and those that thou mayest gratify are but few.
"Study thoughtfully thy accustomed habits of living. Herein may be most often found
certain accepted expenses that may wisely be reduced or eliminated. Let thy motto be one
hundred percent of appreciated value demanded for each coin spent.
"Therefore, engrave upon the clay each thing for which thou desireth to spend. Select those that are necessary
and others that are possible through the expenditure of nine-tenths of thy income. Cross out the rest and consider
them but a part of that great multitude of desires that must go unsatisfied and regret them not.
"Budget then thy necessary expenses. Touch not the one-tenth that is fattening thy purse. Let this be thy great
desire that is being fulfilled. Keep working with thy budget, keep adjusting it to help thee. Make it thy first
assistant in defending thy fattening purse."
Hereupon one of the students, wearing a robe of red and gold, arose and said, "I am a free man.
I believe that it is my right to enjoy the good things of life. Therefore do I rebel against the slavery of a budget
which determines just how much I may spend and for what. I feel it would take much pleasure from my life and
make me little more than a pack- ass to carry a burden."
To him Arkad replied, "Who, my friend, would determine thy budget?"
"I would make it for myself," responded the protesting one.
"In that case were a pack-ass to budget his burden would he include therein jewels and rugs and heavy bars of
gold? Not so. He would include hay and grain and a bag of water for the desert trail.
7. Which of the following option most accurately captures the flow of ideas as in the
passage?
 Necessity-Desire- Expenses.
 Expenses-Wants& Needs- Control.
 Necessary expenses- Budget-Luxuries.
 Expenses- Lean purse & necessity- Budget.
8. Based on the passage, which of the following can't be logically concluded about
'expenses'?
 Our expenses are deeply manipulated by our wants.
 Our expenses should not outdo our earnings.
 Our expenses should consider our prospective desires.
 Our expenses consist of a superfluous portion.
Directions for Question 9-12
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each
question.
In biology, evolution is the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of
organisms from one generation to the next. The genes that are passed on to an organism's
offspring produce the inherited traits that are the basis of evolution. Mutations in genes can
produce new or altered traits in individuals, resulting in the appearance of heritable
differences between organisms, but new traits also come from the transfer of genes
between populations, as in migration, or between species, in horizontal gene transfer. In
species that reproduce sexually, new combinations of genes are produced by genetic
recombination, which can increase the variation in traits between organisms. Evolution
occurs when these heritable differences become more common or rare in a population.
There are two major mechanisms that drive evolution. The first is natural selection, a process causing
heritable traits that are helpful for survival and reproduction to become more common in a population,
and harmful traits to become rarer. This occurs because individuals with advantageous traits are more
likely to reproduce, so that more individuals in the next generation inherit these traits. Over many
generations, adaptations occur through a combination of successive, small, random changes in traits,
and natural selection of those variants best-suited for their environment. The second is genetic drift,
an independent process that produces random changes in the frequency of traits in a population.
Genetic drift results from the role probability plays in whether a given trait will be passed on as
individuals survive and reproduce. Though the changes produced in any one generation by drift and
selection are small, differences accumulate with each subsequent generation and can, over time, cause
substantial changes in the organisms. One definition of a species is a group of organisms that can
reproduce with one another and produce fertile offspring. When a species is separated into
populations that are prevented from interbreeding, mutations, genetic drift, and natural selection cause
the accumulation of differences over generations and the emergence of new species. The similarities
between organisms suggest that all known species are descended from a common ancestor (or
ancestral gene pool) through this process of gradual divergence
Evolutionary biology documents the fact that evolution occurs, and also develops and tests theories
that explain its causes. Studies of the fossil record and the diversity of living organisms had convinced
most scientists by the mid-nineteenth century that species changed over time. However, the mechanism
driving these changes remained unclear until the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin
of Species, detailing the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin's work soon led to
overwhelming acceptance of evolution within the scientific community. In the 1930s, Darwinian
natural selection was combined with Mendelian inheritance to form the modern evolutionary synthesis,
in which the connection between the units of evolution (genes) and the mechanism of evolution
(natural selection) was made. This powerful explanatory and predictive theory directs research by
constantly raising new questions, and it has become the central organizing principle of modern
biology, providing a unifying explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.
10. The increase in the variation in traits among organisms can be attributed to:
 Evolutionary biology.
 Inheritance of genes.
 Accumulation of differences among species.
Genetic recombination in species that reproduce sexually