Half Syllabus Test for CAT: 68 Questions with Solutions & Analysis

Common Description: Instructions [5 - 8]
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
When we teach engineering problems now, we ask students to come to a single “best” solution defined by technical ideals like low cost, speed to build, and ability to scale. This way of teaching primes students to believe that their decision-making is purely objective, as it is grounded in math and science. This is known as technical-social dualism, the idea that the technical and social dimensions of engineering problems are readily separable and remain distinct throughout the problem-definition and solution process.
Nontechnical parameters such as access to a technology, cultural relevancy or potential harms are deemed political and invalid in this way of learning. But those technical ideals are at their core social and political choices determined by a dominant culture focused on economic growth for the most privileged segments of society. By choosing to downplay public welfare as a critical parameter for engineering design, we risk creating a culture of disengagement from societal concerns amongst engineers that is antithetical to the ethical code of engineering.
In my field of medical devices, ignoring social dimensions has real consequences. . . . Most FDA-approved drugs are incorrectly dosed for people assigned female at birth, leading to unexpected adverse reactions. This is because they have been inadequately represented in clinical trials.
Beyond physical failings, subjective beliefs treated as facts by those in decision-making roles can encode social inequities. For example, spirometers, routinely used devices that measure lung capacity, still have correction factors that automatically assume smaller lung capacity in Black and Asian individuals. These racially based adjustments are derived from research done by eugenicists who thought these racial differences were biologically determined and who considered nonwhite people as inferior. These machines ignore the influence of social and environmental factors on lung capacity.
Many technologies for systemically marginalized people have not been built because they were not deemed important such as better early diagnostics and treatment for diseases like endometriosis, a disease that afflicts 10 percent of people with uteruses. And we hardly question whether devices are built sustainably, which has led to a crisis of medical waste and health care accounting for 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
Social justice must be made core to the way engineers are trained. Some universities are working on this. . . . Engineers taught this way will be prepared to think critically about what problems we choose to solve, how we do so responsibly and how we build teams that challenge our ways of thinking.
Individual engineering professors are also working to embed societal needs in their pedagogy. Darshan Karwat at the University of Arizona developed activist engineering to challenge engineers to acknowledge their full moral and social responsibility through practical self-reflection. Khalid Kadir at the University of California, Berkeley, created the popular course Engineering, Environment, and Society that teaches engineers how to engage in place-based knowledge, an understanding of the people, context and history, to design better technical approaches in collaboration with communities. When we design and build with equity and justice in mind, we craft better solutions that respond to the complexities of entrenched systemic problems. We can infer that the author would approve of a more evolved engineering pedagogy that includes all of the following EXCEPT:

Common Description:

Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs are able to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes and warn humans of impending heart attacks and strokes. Elephants, whales, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and alligators use low-frequency sounds to communicate over long distances, often miles. Many animals also display wide-ranging emotions, including joy, happiness, empathy, compassion, grief, and even resentment and embarrassment. It's not surprising that animals share many emotions with us because we also share brain structures, located in the limbic system, that are the seat of our emotions.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs are able to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes and warn humans of impending heart attacks and strokes. Elephants, whales, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and alligators use low-frequency sounds to communicate over long distances, often miles. Many animals also display wide-ranging emotions, including joy, happiness, empathy, compassion, grief, and even resentment and embarrassment. It's not surprising that animals share many emotions with us because we also share brain structures, located in the limbic system, that are the seat of our emotions.

Common Description: The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Understanding the key properties of complex systems can help us clarify and deal with many new and existing global challenges, from pandemics to poverty . . . A recent study in Nature Physics found transitions to orderly states such as schooling in fish (all fish swimming in the same direction), can be caused, paradoxically, by randomness, or 'noise' feeding back on itself. That is, a misalignment among the fish causes further misalignment, eventually inducing a transition to schooling. Most of us wouldn't guess that noise can produce predictable behaviour. The result invites us to consider how technology such as contact-tracing apps, although informing us locally, might negatively impact our collective movement. If each of us changes our behaviour to avoid the infected, we might generate a collective pattern we had aimed to avoid: higher levels of interaction between the infected and susceptible, or high levels of interaction among the asymptomatic.
Complex systems also suffer from a special vulnerability to events that don't follow a normal distribution or 'bell curve'. When events are distributed normally, most outcomes are familiar and don't seem particularly striking. Height is a good example: it's pretty unusual for a man to be over 7 feet tall; most adults are between 5 and 6 feet, and there is no known person over 9 feet tall. But in collective settings where contagion shapes behaviour - a run on the banks, a scramble to buy toilet paper - the probability distributions for possible events are often heavy-tailed. There is a much higher probability of extreme events, such as a stock market crash or a massive surge in infections. These events are still unlikely, but they occur more frequently and are larger than would be expected under normal distributions.
What's more, once a rare but hugely significant 'tail' event takes place, this raises the probability of further tail events. We might call them second-order tail events; they include stock market gyrations after a big fall and earthquake aftershocks. The initial probability of second-order tail events is so tiny it's almost impossible to calculate - but once a first-order tail event occurs, the rules change, and the probability of a second-order tail event increases.
The dynamics of tail events are complicated by the fact that they result from cascades of other unlikely events. When COVID-19 first struck, the stock market suffered stunning losses followed by an equally stunning recovery. Some of these dynamics are potentially attributable to former sports bettors, with no sports to bet on, entering the market as speculators rather than investors. The arrival of these new players might have increased inefficiencies and allowed savvy long-term investors to gain an edge over bettors with different goals. . . .
One reason a first-order tail event can induce further tail events is that it changes the perceived costs of our actions and changes the rules that we play by. This game-change is an example of another key complex systems concept: nonstationarity. A second, canonical example of nonstationarity is adaptation, as illustrated by the arms race involved in the coevolution of hosts and parasites [in which] each has to 'run' faster, just to keep up with the novel solutions the other one presents as they battle it out in evolutionary time. All of the following inferences are supported by the passage EXCEPT that:

Common Description: 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, gives them 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 today as the western barred bandicoot—exhibited a genius for survival in the harsh outback, where its ancestors had persisted for some 26 million years. Its births were triggered by rainfall in the bone-dry desert. It carried its breath-mint-size babies in a backward-facing pouch so mothers could forage for food and dig shallow, camouflaged shelters.
Still, these adaptations did not prepare the western barred bandicoot for the colonial-era transformation of its ecosystem, particularly the onslaught of imported British animals, from cattle and rabbits that damaged delicate desert vegetation to ravenous house cats that soon developed a taste for bandicoots. Several of the dozen-odd bandicoot species went extinct, and by the 1940s the western barred bandicoot, whose original range stretched across much of the continent, persisted only on two predator-free islands in Shark Bay, off Australia’s western coast.
“Our isolated fauna had simply not been exposed to these predators,” says Reece Pedler, an ecologist with the Wild Deserts conservation program.
Now Wild Deserts is using descendants of those few thousand island survivors, called Shark Bay bandicoots, in a new effort to seed a mainland bandicoot revival. They've imported 20 bandicoots to a preserve on the edge of the Strzelecki Desert, in the remote interior of New South Wales. This sanctuary is a challenging place, desolate much of the year, with one of the world’s most mercurial rainfall patterns—relentless droughts followed by sudden drenching floods.
The imported bandicoots occupy two fenced “exclosures,” cleared of invasive rabbits (courtesy of Pedler’s sheepdog) and of feral cats (which slunk off once the rabbits disappeared). A third fenced 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 for sucking the brains out of prey) currently share terrain with controlled numbers of cats, learning to evade them. It’s unclear whether the Shark Bay bandicoots, which are perhaps even more predator-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 Wild Deserts population to about 100, with other sanctuaries adding to that number. There are also signs of rebirth in the landscape itself. With their constant digging, the bandicoots trap moisture 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 options does NOT represent the characteristics of the western barred bandicoot?

Common Description: Instructions [13 - 16]
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
Keeping time accurately comes with a price. The maximum accuracy of a clock is directly related to how much disorder, or entropy, it creates every time it ticks. Natalia Ares at the University of Oxford and her colleagues made this discovery using a tiny clock with an accuracy that can be controlled. The clock consists of a 50-nanometre-thick membrane of silicon nitride, vibrated by an electric current. Each time the membrane moved up and down once and then returned to its original position, the researchers counted a tick, and the regularity of the spacing between the ticks represented the accuracy of the clock. The researchers found that as they increased the clock’s accuracy, the heat produced in the system grew, increasing the entropy of its surroundings by jostling nearby particles . . . “If a clock is more accurate, you are paying for it somehow,” says Ares. In this case, you pay for it by pouring more ordered energy into the clock, which is then converted into entropy. “By measuring time, we are increasing the entropy of the universe,” says Ares. The more entropy there is in the universe, the closer it may be to its eventual demise. “Maybe we should stop measuring time,” says Ares. The scale of the additional entropy is so small, though, that there is no need to worry about its effects, she says.
The increase in entropy in timekeeping may be related to the “arrow of time”, says Marcus Huber at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, who was part of the research team. It has been suggested that the reason that time only flows forward, not in reverse, is that the total amount of entropy in the universe is constantly increasing, creating disorder that cannot be put in order again.
The relationship that the researchers found is a limit on the accuracy of a clock, so it doesn’t mean that a clock that creates the most possible entropy would be maximally accurate - hence a large, inefficient grandfather clock isn’t more precise than an atomic clock. “It’s a bit like fuel use in a car. Just because I’m using more fuel doesn’t mean that I’m going faster or further,” says Huber.
When the researchers compared their results with theoretical models developed for clocks that rely on quantum effects, they were surprised to find that the relationship between accuracy and entropy seemed to be the same for both. . . . We can’t be sure yet that these results are actually universal, though, because there are many types of clocks for which the relationship between accuracy and entropy haven’t been tested. “It’s still unclear how this principle plays out in real devices such as atomic clocks, which push the ultimate quantum limits of accuracy,” says Mark Mitchison at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. Understanding this relationship could be helpful for designing clocks in the future, particularly those used in quantum computers and other devices where both accuracy and temperature are crucial, says Ares. This finding could also help us understand more generally how the quantum world and the classical world are similar and different in terms of thermodynamics and the passage of time. “It’s a bit like fuel use in a car. Just because I’m using more fuel doesn’t mean that I’m going faster or further . . .” What is the purpose of this example?

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer:
1. Businesses find automation, such as robotic employees, a big asset in terms of productivity and efficiency.
2. But in recent years, robotics has had increasing impacts on unemployment, not just of manual labour, as computers are rapidly handling some white-collar and service-sector work.
3. For years politicians have promised workers that they would bring back their jobs by clamping down on trade, offshoring and immigration.
4. Economists, based on their research, say that the bigger threat to jobs now is not globalisation but automation.

Common Description: The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
Over the course of the twentieth century, humans built, on average, one large dam a day, hulking structures of steel and concrete designed to control flooding, facilitate irrigation, and generate electricity. Dams were also lucrative contracts, large-scale employers, and the physical instantiation of a messianic drive to conquer territories and control nature. Some of the results of that drive were charismatic mega-infrastructure—the Hoover on the Colorado River or the Aswan on the Nile—but most of the tens of thousands of dams that dot the Earth's landscape have drawn little attention. These are the smaller, though not inconsequential, barriers that today impede the flow of water on nearly two-thirds of the world's large waterways. Chances are, what your map calls a “lake” is actually a reservoir, and that thin blue line that emerges from it once flowed very differently.
Damming a river is always a partisan act. Even when explicit infrastructure goals— irrigation, flood control, electrification—were met, other consequences were significant and often deleterious. Across the world, river control displaced millions of people, threatening livelihoods, foodways, and cultures. In the western United States, dams were often an instrument of colonialism, used to dispossess Indigenous people and subsidize settler agriculture. And as dams slowed the flow of water, inhibited the movement of nutrients, and increased the amount of toxic algae and other parasites, they snuffed out entire river ecologies. Declining fish populations are the most evident effect, but dams also threaten a host of other animals—from birds and reptiles to fungi and plants—with extinction. Every major dam, then, is also a sacrifice zone, a place where lives, livelihoods, and ways of life are eliminated so that new sorts of landscapes can support water-intensive agriculture and cities that sprout downstream of new reservoirs.
Such sacrifices have been justified as offerings at the temples of modernity. Justified by—and for—whom, though? Over the course of the twentieth century, rarely were the costs and benefits weighed thoughtfully and decided democratically. As Kader Asmal, chair of the landmark 2000 World Commission on Dams, concluded, “There have been precious few, if any, comprehensive, independent analyses as to why dams came about, how dams perform over time, and whether we are getting a fair return from our $2 trillion investment.” A quarter- century later, Asmal’s words ring ever truer. A litany of dams built in the mid-twentieth century are approaching the end of their expected lives, with worrying prospects for their durability. Droughts, magnified and multiplied by the effects of climate change, have forced more and more to run below capacity. If ever there were a time to rethink the mania for dams, it would be now.
There is some evidence that a combination of opposition, alternative energy sources, and a lack of viable projects has slowed the construction of major dams. But a wave of recent and ongoing construction, from India and China to Ethiopia and Canada, continues to tilt the global balance firmly in favor of water impoundment. All of the following statements may be considered valid inferences from the passage EXCEPT that:

Common Description: The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
(. . .) There are three other common drivers for carnivore-human attacks, some of which are more preventable than others. Natural aggression-based conflicts - such as those involving females protecting their young or animals protecting a food source - can often be avoided as long as people stay away from those animals and their food.
Carnivores that recognise humans as a means to get food, are a different story. As they become more reliant on human food they might find at campsites or in rubbish bins, they become less avoidant of humans. Losing that instinctive fear response puts them into more situations where they could get into an altercation with a human, which often results in that bear being put down by humans. “A fed bear is a dead bear,” says Servheen, referring to a common saying among biologists and conservationists. Predatory or predation-related attacks are quite rare, only accounting for 17% of attacks in North America since 1955. They occur when a carnivore views a human as prey and hunts it like it would any other animal it uses for food. (. . .)
Then there are animal attacks provoked by people taking pictures with them or feeding them in natural settings such as national parks which often end with animals being euthanised out of precaution. “Eventually, that animal becomes habituated to people, and [then] bad things happen to the animal. And the folks who initially wanted to make that connection don’t necessarily realise that,” says Christine Wilkinson, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, California, who’s been studying coyote-human conflicts.
After conducting countless postmortems on all types of carnivore-human attacks spanning 75 years, Penteriani’s team believes 50% could have been avoided if humans reacted differently. A 2017 study co-authored by Penteriani found that engaging in risky behaviour around large carnivores increases the likelihood of an attack.
Two of the most common risky behaviours are parents leaving their children to play outside unattended and walking an unleashed dog, according to the study. Wilkinson says 66% of coyote attacks involve a dog. “[People] end up in a situation where their dog is being chased, or their dog chases a coyote, or maybe they’re walking their dog near a den that’s marked, and the coyote wants to escort them away,” says Wilkinson.
Experts believe climate change also plays a part in the escalation of human-carnivore conflicts, but the correlation still needs to be ironed out. “As finite resources become scarcer, carnivores and people are coming into more frequent contact, which means that more conflict could occur,” says Jen Miller, international programme specialist for the US Fish & Wildlife Service. For example, she says, there was an uptick in lion attacks in western India during a drought when lions and people were relying on the same water sources.
(. . .) The likelihood of human-carnivore conflicts appears to be higher in areas of low-income countries dominated by vast rural landscapes and farmland, according to Penteriani’s research. “There are a lot of working landscapes in the Global South that are really heterogeneous, that are interspersed with carnivore habitats, forests and savannahs, which creates a lot more opportunity for these encounters, just statistically,” says Wilkinson. According to the passage, what is a significant factor that contributes to the habituation of carnivores to human presence?

Common Description: Instructions [25 - 29]
The following facts are known about the goals scored by these four players only. All the questions refer only to the goals scored by these four players.
The management of a university hockey team was evaluating performance of four women players - Amla, Bimla, Harita and Sarita for their possible selection in the university team for next year. For this purpose, the management was looking at the number of goals scored by them in the past 8 matches, numbered 1 through 8. The four players together had scored a total of 12 goals in these matches. In the 8 matches, each of them had scored at least one goal. No two players had scored the same total number of goals.
1. Only one goal was scored in every even numbered match.
2. Harita scored more goals than Bimla.
3. The highest goal scorer scored goals in exactly 3 matches including Match 4 and Match 8.
4. Bimla scored a goal in Match 1 and one each in three other consecutive matches.
5. An equal number of goals were scored in Match 3 and Match 7, which was different from the number of goals scored in either Match 1 or Match 5.
6. The match in which the highest number of goals was scored was unique and it was not Match 5. Which of the following statement(s) is/are false?
Statement-1: In every match at least one player scored a goal.
Statement-2: No two players scored goals in the same number of matches.

Common Description: At InnovateX, six employees, Asha, Bunty, Chintu, Dolly, Eklavya, and Falguni, were split into two groups of three each: Elite led by Manager Kuku, and Novice led by Manager Lalu.
At the end of each quarter, Kuku and Lalu handed out ratings to all members in their respective groups. In each group, each employee received a distinct integer rating from 1 to 3.
The score for an employee at the end of a quarter is defined as their cumulative rating from the beginning of the year. At the end of each quarter the employee in Novice with the highest score was promoted to Elite, and the employee in Elite with the minimum score was demoted to Novice. If there was a tie in scores, the employee with a higher rating in the latest quarter was ranked higher.
1. Asha, Bunty, and Chintu were in Elite at the beginning of Quarter 1. All of them were in Novice at the beginning of Quarter 4.
2. Dolly and Falguni were the only employees who got the same rating across all the quarters.
3. The following is known about ratings given by Lalu:
• Bunty received a rating of 1 in Quarter 2.
• Asha and Dolly received ratings of 1 and 2, respectively, in Quarter 3. Which of the following statements is/are NECESSARILY true?
I. Asha received a rating of 2 in Quarter 1.
II. Asha received a rating of 1 in Quarter 2.

Common Description: Instructions [29 - 34]
Ten objects o1, o2, …, o10 were distributed among Amar, Barat, Charles, Disha, and Elise. Each item went to exactly one person. Each person got exactly two of the items, and this pair of objects is called her/his bundle.
The following table shows how each person values each object.

	o1	o2	o3	o4	o5	o6	o7	o8	o9	o10
Amar	4	9	9	3	7	3	8	7	9	5
Barat	5	9	7	5	5	3	6	8	10	8
Charles	8	8	8	3	6	4	5	8	9	6
Disha	8	8	8	5	5	3	6	4	9	8
Elise	6	8	9	5	6	5	6	3	7	10

The value of any bundle by a person is the sum of that person’s values of the objects in that bundle. A person X envies another person Y if X values Y’s bundle more than X’s own bundle.
For example, hypothetically suppose Amar’s bundle consists of o1 and o2, and Barat’s bundle consists of o3 and o4. Then Amar values his own bundle at 4 + 9 = 13 and Barat’s bundle at 9 + 3 = 12. Hence Amar does not envy Barat. On the other hand, Barat values his own bundle at 7 + 5 = 12 and Amar’s bundle at 5 + 9 = 14. Hence Barat envies Amar.
The following facts are known about the actual distribution of the objects among the five people.
1. If someone’s value for an object is 10, then she/he received that object.
2. Objects o1, o2, and o3 were given to three different people.
3. Objects o1 and o8 were given to different people.
4. Three people value their own bundles at 16. No one values her/his own bundle at a number higher than 16.
5. Disha values her own bundle at an odd number. All others value their own bundles at an even number.
6. Some people who value their own bundles less than 16 envy some other people who value their own bundle at 16. No one else envies others. Object o5 was given to