CAT 2024 Slot 3 Question Paper with Solutions: 52 Questions, Answer Key & Section-wise Analysis

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: This reality is putting stress on employees who have to pay for transport, desk lunches, more childcare, clothing and that after-work socialisation - costs they haven’t incurred for nearly two years.
Paragraph: ___(1)___. Prices are rising at their fastest rate in 40 years; consequently, return-to-office-related costs have shot up - think petrol and food, for instance.___(2)___. Yet wages haven’t kept up with inflation - even despite the salary growth many workers have enjoyed during a favourable pandemic labour market. ___(3)___.This is especially jarring for workers who were able to save during remote work, when these expenditures weren’t a factor. ___(4)___. In April 2022, Umus, a London university lecturer, told BBC Worklife that they were spending nearly a quarter of what they made every day on return-to-work costs.

Common Description: Instructions [2 - 5 ]
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Fears of artificial intelligence (AI) have haunted humanity since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto, these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill, enslave or replace people. But over the past couple of years, new AI tools have emerged that threaten the survival of human civilisation from an unexpected direction. AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. AI has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.
Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our DNA. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures….What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new AI tools, they are often drawn to examples like schoolchildren using AI to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of AI tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake news stories and scriptures for new cults…
Through its mastery of language, AI could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although there is no indication that AI has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans, it is enough if the AI can make them feel emotionally attached to it….
What will happen to the course of history when AI takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. AI is fundamentally different. AI can create completely new ideas, completely new culture….Of course, the new power of AI could be used for good purposes as well. I won’t dwell on this because the people who develop AI talk about it enough….
We can still regulate the new AI tools, but we must act quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, AI can make exponentially more powerful AI.… Unregulated AI deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When AI hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy …. And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for AI to disclose that it is an AI. If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an AI—that’s the end of democracy. This text has been generated by a human. Or has it? The author identifies all of the following as dire outcomes of the capture of language by AI EXCEPT that it could

Common Description: Instructions [2 - 5 ]
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Fears of artificial intelligence (AI) have haunted humanity since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto, these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill, enslave or replace people. But over the past couple of years, new AI tools have emerged that threaten the survival of human civilisation from an unexpected direction. AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. AI has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.
Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our DNA. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures….What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new AI tools, they are often drawn to examples like schoolchildren using AI to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of AI tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake news stories and scriptures for new cults…
Through its mastery of language, AI could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although there is no indication that AI has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans, it is enough if the AI can make them feel emotionally attached to it….
What will happen to the course of history when AI takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. AI is fundamentally different. AI can create completely new ideas, completely new culture….Of course, the new power of AI could be used for good purposes as well. I won’t dwell on this because the people who develop AI talk about it enough….
We can still regulate the new AI tools, but we must act quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, AI can make exponentially more powerful AI.… Unregulated AI deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When AI hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy …. And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for AI to disclose that it is an AI. If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an AI—that’s the end of democracy. This text has been generated by a human. Or has it? The author terms language “the operating system of our civilization” for all the following reasons EXCEPT that it

Common Description: Instructions [2 - 5 ]
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Fears of artificial intelligence (AI) have haunted humanity since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto, these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill, enslave or replace people. But over the past couple of years, new AI tools have emerged that threaten the survival of human civilisation from an unexpected direction. AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. AI has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.
Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our DNA. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures….What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new AI tools, they are often drawn to examples like schoolchildren using AI to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of AI tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake news stories and scriptures for new cults…
Through its mastery of language, AI could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although there is no indication that AI has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans, it is enough if the AI can make them feel emotionally attached to it….
What will happen to the course of history when AI takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. AI is fundamentally different. AI can create completely new ideas, completely new culture….Of course, the new power of AI could be used for good purposes as well. I won’t dwell on this because the people who develop AI talk about it enough….
We can still regulate the new AI tools, but we must act quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, AI can make exponentially more powerful AI.… Unregulated AI deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When AI hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy …. And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for AI to disclose that it is an AI. If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an AI—that’s the end of democracy. This text has been generated by a human. Or has it? We can infer that the author is most likely to agree with which of the following statements?

Five jumbled-up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.
1. Part of the appeal of forecasting is not just that it seems to work, but that you don’t seem to need specialized expertise to succeed at it.
2. The tight connection between forecasting and building a model of the world helps explain why so much of the early interest in the idea came from the intelligence community.
3. This was true even though the latter had access to classified intelligence.
4. One frequently cited study found that accurate forecasters’ predictions of geopolitical events, when aggregated using standard scientific methods, were more accurate than the forecasts of members of the US intelligence community who answered the same questions in a confidential prediction market.
5. The aggregated opinions of non-experts doing forecasting have proven to be a better guide to the future than the aggregated opinions of experts.

Common Description: Instructions [8 - 11 ]
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Moutai has been the global booze sensation of the decade. A bottle of its Flying Fairy, which sold in the 1980s for the equivalent of a dollar, now retails for $400. Moutai’s listed shares have soared by almost 600% in the past five years, outpacing the likes of Amazon ...
It does this while disregarding every Western marketing mantra. It is not global, has meagre digital sales and does not appeal to millennials. It scores pitifully on environmental, social and government measures. In the Boy Scout world of Western business, it would leave a bad taste in more ways than one.
Moutai owes its intoxicating success to three factors—not all of them easy to emulate. First, it profits from Chinese nationalism. Moutai is known as the “national liquor”. It was used to raise spirits and disinfect wounds in Mao’s Long March. It was Premier Zhou Enlai’s favourite tipple, shared with Richard Nixon in 1972. Its centuries-old craftsmanship—it is distilled eight times and stored for years in earthenware jars—is a source of national pride. It also claims to be hangover-proof, which would make it an invention to rival gunpowder ...
Second, it chose to serve China’s super-rich rather than its middle class. Markets are littered with the corpses of firms that could not compete in the cut-throat battle for Chinese middle-class wallets. And the country’s premium market is massive—at 73m-strong, bigger than the population of France, notes Euan McLeish of Bernstein, an investment firm, and still less crowded with prestige brands than advanced economies. Moutai is to these well-heeled drinkers what vintage champagne is to the rest of the world ...
Third, Moutai looks beyond affluent millennials and digital natives. The elderly and the middle-aged, it found, can be just as lucrative. Its biggest market now is (male) drinkers in their mid-30s. Many have no siblings, thanks to four decades of China’s one-child policy—which also means their elderly parents can splash out on weddings and banquets. Moutai is often a guest of honour.
Moutai has succeeded thanks to nationalism, elitism and ageism, in other words—not in spite of this unholy trinity. But it faces risks. The government is its largest shareholder—and a meddlesome one. It appears to want prices to remain stable. Exorbitantly priced booze is at odds with its professed socialist ideals. Yet minority investors—including many foreign funds—lament that Moutai’s wholesale price is a third of what it sells for in shops. Raising it could boost the company’s profits further. Instead, in what some see as a travesty of corporate governance, its majority owner has plans to set up its own sales channel ...
In the long run, its biggest risk may be millennials. As they grow older, health concerns, work-life balance and the desire for more wholesome pursuits than binge-drinking may curb the“Ganbei!” toasting culture [heavy drinking] on which so much of the demand for Moutai rests. For the time being, though, the party goes on. The phrase “would make it an invention to rival gunpowder” has been used in the passage in a sense that is

Common Description: Instructions [8 - 11 ]
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Moutai has been the global booze sensation of the decade. A bottle of its Flying Fairy, which sold in the 1980s for the equivalent of a dollar, now retails for $400. Moutai’s listed shares have soared by almost 600% in the past five years, outpacing the likes of Amazon ...
It does this while disregarding every Western marketing mantra. It is not global, has meagre digital sales and does not appeal to millennials. It scores pitifully on environmental, social and government measures. In the Boy Scout world of Western business, it would leave a bad taste in more ways than one.
Moutai owes its intoxicating success to three factors—not all of them easy to emulate. First, it profits from Chinese nationalism. Moutai is known as the “national liquor”. It was used to raise spirits and disinfect wounds in Mao’s Long March. It was Premier Zhou Enlai’s favourite tipple, shared with Richard Nixon in 1972. Its centuries-old craftsmanship—it is distilled eight times and stored for years in earthenware jars—is a source of national pride. It also claims to be hangover-proof, which would make it an invention to rival gunpowder ...
Second, it chose to serve China’s super-rich rather than its middle class. Markets are littered with the corpses of firms that could not compete in the cut-throat battle for Chinese middle-class wallets. And the country’s premium market is massive—at 73m-strong, bigger than the population of France, notes Euan McLeish of Bernstein, an investment firm, and still less crowded with prestige brands than advanced economies. Moutai is to these well-heeled drinkers what vintage champagne is to the rest of the world ...
Third, Moutai looks beyond affluent millennials and digital natives. The elderly and the middle-aged, it found, can be just as lucrative. Its biggest market now is (male) drinkers in their mid-30s. Many have no siblings, thanks to four decades of China’s one-child policy—which also means their elderly parents can splash out on weddings and banquets. Moutai is often a guest of honour.
Moutai has succeeded thanks to nationalism, elitism and ageism, in other words—not in spite of this unholy trinity. But it faces risks. The government is its largest shareholder—and a meddlesome one. It appears to want prices to remain stable. Exorbitantly priced booze is at odds with its professed socialist ideals. Yet minority investors—including many foreign funds—lament that Moutai’s wholesale price is a third of what it sells for in shops. Raising it could boost the company’s profits further. Instead, in what some see as a travesty of corporate governance, its majority owner has plans to set up its own sales channel ...
In the long run, its biggest risk may be millennials. As they grow older, health concerns, work-life balance and the desire for more wholesome pursuits than binge-drinking may curb the“Ganbei!” toasting culture [heavy drinking] on which so much of the demand for Moutai rests. For the time being, though, the party goes on. Which one of the following is both a reason for Moutai’s success as well as a possible threat to that success?

Common Description: Instructions [8 - 11 ]
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Moutai has been the global booze sensation of the decade. A bottle of its Flying Fairy, which sold in the 1980s for the equivalent of a dollar, now retails for $400. Moutai’s listed shares have soared by almost 600% in the past five years, outpacing the likes of Amazon ...
It does this while disregarding every Western marketing mantra. It is not global, has meagre digital sales and does not appeal to millennials. It scores pitifully on environmental, social and government measures. In the Boy Scout world of Western business, it would leave a bad taste in more ways than one.
Moutai owes its intoxicating success to three factors—not all of them easy to emulate. First, it profits from Chinese nationalism. Moutai is known as the “national liquor”. It was used to raise spirits and disinfect wounds in Mao’s Long March. It was Premier Zhou Enlai’s favourite tipple, shared with Richard Nixon in 1972. Its centuries-old craftsmanship—it is distilled eight times and stored for years in earthenware jars—is a source of national pride. It also claims to be hangover-proof, which would make it an invention to rival gunpowder ...
Second, it chose to serve China’s super-rich rather than its middle class. Markets are littered with the corpses of firms that could not compete in the cut-throat battle for Chinese middle-class wallets. And the country’s premium market is massive—at 73m-strong, bigger than the population of France, notes Euan McLeish of Bernstein, an investment firm, and still less crowded with prestige brands than advanced economies. Moutai is to these well-heeled drinkers what vintage champagne is to the rest of the world ...
Third, Moutai looks beyond affluent millennials and digital natives. The elderly and the middle-aged, it found, can be just as lucrative. Its biggest market now is (male) drinkers in their mid-30s. Many have no siblings, thanks to four decades of China’s one-child policy—which also means their elderly parents can splash out on weddings and banquets. Moutai is often a guest of honour.
Moutai has succeeded thanks to nationalism, elitism and ageism, in other words—not in spite of this unholy trinity. But it faces risks. The government is its largest shareholder—and a meddlesome one. It appears to want prices to remain stable. Exorbitantly priced booze is at odds with its professed socialist ideals. Yet minority investors—including many foreign funds—lament that Moutai’s wholesale price is a third of what it sells for in shops. Raising it could boost the company’s profits further. Instead, in what some see as a travesty of corporate governance, its majority owner has plans to set up its own sales channel ...
In the long run, its biggest risk may be millennials. As they grow older, health concerns, work-life balance and the desire for more wholesome pursuits than binge-drinking may curb the“Ganbei!” toasting culture [heavy drinking] on which so much of the demand for Moutai rests. For the time being, though, the party goes on. In the context of the passage, it is most likely that the author refers to Moutai’s marketing strategy as “the unholy trinity” because