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CAT 2025 Lesson : Verbal: Jan '25 to Feb '25 - Intro to Summary - 24 Feb 2025
1. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
The millennium marked what’s called the great digital convergence, an immense but uncelebrated event, when all the old analogue media types coalesced into one digital medium. The era of digital light thus quietly began. It’s a vast field: books, movies, television, electronic games, cell phone displays, app interfaces, virtual reality, weather satellite images, Mars rover pictures – to mention a few categories – even parking meters and dashboards. Nearly all pictures in the world today are digital light, including nearly all printed words. In fact, because of the digital explosion, this includes nearly all the pictures ever made. Art museums and kindergartens are among the few remaining analogue bastions, where pictures fashioned from old media can reliably be found.
(1) The millennium caused the great digital convergence, with an explosion of digital images almost everywhere.
(2) We now have digital light and images everywhere, except in museums and schools.
(3) The digital convergence is the conversion of analogue media into digital.
(4) We have been inundated with digital media everywhere, especially in images, since the millennium.
2. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
Secrets usually hurt their holders most. Keeping a secret is associated with lower life satisfaction, lower-quality relationships, and symptoms of poor psychological and physical health. Our secrets often hurt us, but not for the reasons you might think. While hiding a secret in conversation can feel uncomfortable, the hiding turns out to be the easy part. Simply thinking about a secret outside of a social interaction is associated with feelings of shame, isolation and inauthenticity. These experiences can leave us feeling helpless, at the mercy of our secrets, and unable to cope. And these harms can begin the very moment you decide to keep a secret.
(1) Harbouring secrets affects our physical and mental health and leads to lower-quality relationships.
(2) Thinking about our secrets evokes unpleasant feelings that ultimately make it harmful for our health.
(3) It is only when we think about our secrets that we feel shameful, inauthentic and isolated.
(4) Our secrets don’t hurt us in social interactions unless we think about them.
3. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
Sparta and Athens went to war in 431 B.C. Occupying the lands of the Peloponnese, Sparta enacted a land-based strategy, relying on their disciplined hoplites to defeat the Athenians in the open field. Athenians responded with naval attacks on politically sensitive points in the Peloponnese. The Peloponnesian War would end by fundamentally shifting power in the Mediterranean, but neither Athens’s navy nor Sparta’s soldiers could claim to be the determining factor of the conflict. That honour belongs to an event that nobody could have predicted or planned for: the plague of Athens, which broke out in the war’s second year. A medical mystery to this day, this ancient epidemic would be the most influential factor to shape the war and decide which city-state would be the final victor.
(1) The plague of Athens was an unforeseen factor which had a significant impact in the ancient Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.
(2) Athenian soldiers were countering the Spartan’s military strategies well till they were hit by the plague in 431 B.C..
(3) The Spartans used a land based strategy, but the Athenians’ naval attack strategy led to their defeat.
(4) The plague of Athens brought an end to the long Peloponnesian War and defeated both Athens and Sparta in the Mediterranean.
4. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
We commonly think of life on Earth as an unbroken chain of biological success, beginning shortly after our planet’s formation and continuing, unchallenged, for all the time since. But one event came closer than any other to bringing an end to life on Earth: a catastrophe known as either the Great Oxidation Event or the Great Oxygenation Event. Oxygen, one of the hallmark characteristics of our living Earth, was a tremendous destructive force when it first arrived in any sort of meaningful abundance some ~2 billion years after Earth first took shape. The slow alteration of our atmosphere by the gradual addition of oxygen proved to be fatal to the most common types of organism that were present on Earth at the time. For several hundred million years, the Earth entered a horrific ice age which froze the entire surface: known today as a Snowball Earth scenario. This disaster almost ended life on Earth entirely.
(1) The Great Oxidation Event, considerable oxygen on Earth, triggered a catastrophic ice age and almost extinguished life on the planet.
(2) Atmospheric alteration caused by the Great Oxidation Event almost threatened to end all life on the planet forever.
(3) The narrative that life progressed unchallenged on Earth is not true as proved by the theory of the Great Oxygenation Event.
(4) If not for the Great Oxidation Event, the Earth wouldn’t have been introduced to oxygen and life would have then evolved very differently.
5. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
Turns out, time, as a concept, is stretchable. With age, more time seems to slide by in a jiffy—as opposed to our childhood, when each year felt so substantial. Dutch psychologist, Douwe Draaisma, published a book in 2004 that addresses the very riddle. He explains that new, unfamiliar experiences make time seem to move slower. Novel situations enable our brains to make and retain more memories. These additional memories stretch and expand our perception of time while routine, unmemorable moments contract time, Draaisma writes. When we’re young, almost everything we experience is new, so the brain makes more memories and time seems to pass by slower. But as we grow older, our experiences become predictable and the mind makes fewer memories, which fastens our sense of time’s passage.
(1) Time feels slower as we age because our brains create more memories, as explained by psychologist Douwe Draaisma.
(2) Time has a stretchable quality that we experience as we get older and gather more and more complex memories, which the brain processes more quickly.
(3) As we age, there are fewer novel experiences for the brain to process which results in a contracted perception of time flow.
(4) As we grow older, new experiences are processed differently by the brain which makes time seem elastic and new.
6. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
For millennials and the younger generation Z and Alphas, who may never be able to afford to buy a home or retire at a reasonable age, there is a growing feeling online that hard work is fortifying a system that, at best, is giving them nothing back and, at worst, is actively screwing them over. And so the “soft life” revolution was born – where the priority is no longer about working yourself to the bone to be a #girlboss or “leaning in” to the corporate male world, as former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote, and pushing until you “have it all”. The goal of a softer life is more time and energy for what makes you happy and as little time as possible focusing on what doesn’t.
(1) Prompted by the dissatisfaction caused by a failing economy and the mental turbulence of being homeless, millennials, gen Zs and Alphas are rejecting hard work.
(2) Corporate success or material success no longer appeal to any of the younger generation due to major economic hardship.
(3) The “soft life” revolution is taking over the imaginations of millennials, gen Zs and Alphas, offering an escapist respite from the hard realities of a capitalist economy.
(4) The younger generations are rejecting traditional hard work ethos for a 'soft life' revolution, prioritizing happiness over capitalistic success.
7. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
Beginnings, all writers will tell you, are the hardest part of storytelling. We struggle with the research and stare at our screens trying to get our heads and hearts to sync, until the perfect words for the perfect introduction flow through us. It needs to have the potential to pull in the reader, to carry them through a nail-biting middle to a satisfying resolution. A compelling ‘inciting incident’, most storytellers agree, is the safest bet that a story will remain resilient till the end. It is the epicentre from which both the back story and the future emanate. Harry receives his invite to Hogwarts. Neo escapes the matrix. Anna Karenina meets Vronsky at the St Petersburg train station.
(1) Writers struggle with a good start to their story, wanting the perfect words to make it nail-biting yet satisfying.
(2) All writers want to write starts that are as compelling as Harry Potter or The Matrix, because these are safe bets.
(3) Writers struggle to write a good start, an incident which will make the reader delve into the story.
(4) The beginning of a story is the hardest part for authors, because it affects both the past and the future of the story.
8. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
[CAT 2023, Slot 3]
Gradually, life for the island's birds is improving. Antarctic prions and white-headed petrels, which also nest in burrows, had managed to cling on in some sites while pests were on the island. Their numbers are now increasing. "It's fantastic and so exciting," Shaw says. As birds return to breed, they also poo. This adds nutrients to the soil, which in turn helps the plants to grow back stronger. Tall plants then help burrowing birds hide from predatory skuas. "It's this wonderful feedback loop," Shaw says. Today, the "pretty paddock" that Houghton first experienced has been transformed. "The tussock is over your head, and you're dodging all these penguin tunnels," she says. The orchids and tiny herb that had been protected by fencing have started turning up all over the place.
(1) There is an increasing number of predatory birds and plants on the island despite the presence of pests which is a positive development.
(2) In the absence of pests, life on the island is now protected, and there has been a revival of a variety of birds and plants.
(3) There is a huge positive transformation of the ecosystem of the island when brought under environmental protection.
(4) Flowering plants, herbs and birds are now being protected on this wonderful Antarctic island.
9. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
[CAT 2023, Slot 1]
Manipulating information was a feature of history long before modern journalism established rules of integrity. A record dates back to ancient Rome, when Antony met Cleopatra and his political enemy Octavian launched a smear campaign against him with "short, sharp slogans written upon coins." The perpetrator became the first Roman Emperor and "fake news had allowed Octavian to hack the republican system once and for all". But the 21st century has seen the weaponization of information on an unprecedented scale. Powerful new technology makes the fabrication of content simple, and social networks amplify falsehoods peddled by States, populist politicians, and dishonest corporate entities. The platforms have become fertile ground for computational propaganda, 'trolling' and 'troll armies'.
(1) Disinformation, which is mediated by technology today, is not new and has existed since ancient times.
(2) People need to become critical of what they read, since historically, weaponization of information has led to corruption.
(3) Use of misinformation for attaining power, a practice that is as old as the Octavian era, is currently fuelled by technology.
(4) Octavian used fake news to manipulate people and attain power and influence, just as people do today.
10. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
[CAT 2024 Slot 3]
Humans have managed to tweak the underlying biology of various plants and animals to produce high-tech crops and microbes. But regulating these entities is complicated, as the framework of policies and procedures are outdated and not flexible enough to adapt to emerging technology. The question is whether regulation will ever be able to keep up with human innovation, to regulate living things, which are apt to be unpredictable and unique; to capture all the potential risks when new biological entities are introduced, or when they pass on variations of their genes?
(1) Current regulation of biotechnology is outdated, but it is debatable if we can create a framework, imaginative and flexible, to cover all contingencies in this fast-changing area.
(2) A new framework of rules and procedures for regulating the most recent research emerging from biotechnology is urgently needed, to keep up with this rapidly changing discipline.
(3) The problem with formulating regulation for innovation in the scientific arena it that it is impossible to imagine the outcomes or risks related to the outcomes of all the research.
(4) The mercurial nature of biological entities calls for scientists to shape the regulations governing emerging technology, with regular calibration to handle variations in the field.
The millennium marked what’s called the great digital convergence, an immense but uncelebrated event, when all the old analogue media types coalesced into one digital medium. The era of digital light thus quietly began. It’s a vast field: books, movies, television, electronic games, cell phone displays, app interfaces, virtual reality, weather satellite images, Mars rover pictures – to mention a few categories – even parking meters and dashboards. Nearly all pictures in the world today are digital light, including nearly all printed words. In fact, because of the digital explosion, this includes nearly all the pictures ever made. Art museums and kindergartens are among the few remaining analogue bastions, where pictures fashioned from old media can reliably be found.
(1) The millennium caused the great digital convergence, with an explosion of digital images almost everywhere.
(2) We now have digital light and images everywhere, except in museums and schools.
(3) The digital convergence is the conversion of analogue media into digital.
(4) We have been inundated with digital media everywhere, especially in images, since the millennium.
2. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
Secrets usually hurt their holders most. Keeping a secret is associated with lower life satisfaction, lower-quality relationships, and symptoms of poor psychological and physical health. Our secrets often hurt us, but not for the reasons you might think. While hiding a secret in conversation can feel uncomfortable, the hiding turns out to be the easy part. Simply thinking about a secret outside of a social interaction is associated with feelings of shame, isolation and inauthenticity. These experiences can leave us feeling helpless, at the mercy of our secrets, and unable to cope. And these harms can begin the very moment you decide to keep a secret.
(1) Harbouring secrets affects our physical and mental health and leads to lower-quality relationships.
(2) Thinking about our secrets evokes unpleasant feelings that ultimately make it harmful for our health.
(3) It is only when we think about our secrets that we feel shameful, inauthentic and isolated.
(4) Our secrets don’t hurt us in social interactions unless we think about them.
3. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
Sparta and Athens went to war in 431 B.C. Occupying the lands of the Peloponnese, Sparta enacted a land-based strategy, relying on their disciplined hoplites to defeat the Athenians in the open field. Athenians responded with naval attacks on politically sensitive points in the Peloponnese. The Peloponnesian War would end by fundamentally shifting power in the Mediterranean, but neither Athens’s navy nor Sparta’s soldiers could claim to be the determining factor of the conflict. That honour belongs to an event that nobody could have predicted or planned for: the plague of Athens, which broke out in the war’s second year. A medical mystery to this day, this ancient epidemic would be the most influential factor to shape the war and decide which city-state would be the final victor.
(1) The plague of Athens was an unforeseen factor which had a significant impact in the ancient Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.
(2) Athenian soldiers were countering the Spartan’s military strategies well till they were hit by the plague in 431 B.C..
(3) The Spartans used a land based strategy, but the Athenians’ naval attack strategy led to their defeat.
(4) The plague of Athens brought an end to the long Peloponnesian War and defeated both Athens and Sparta in the Mediterranean.
4. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
We commonly think of life on Earth as an unbroken chain of biological success, beginning shortly after our planet’s formation and continuing, unchallenged, for all the time since. But one event came closer than any other to bringing an end to life on Earth: a catastrophe known as either the Great Oxidation Event or the Great Oxygenation Event. Oxygen, one of the hallmark characteristics of our living Earth, was a tremendous destructive force when it first arrived in any sort of meaningful abundance some ~2 billion years after Earth first took shape. The slow alteration of our atmosphere by the gradual addition of oxygen proved to be fatal to the most common types of organism that were present on Earth at the time. For several hundred million years, the Earth entered a horrific ice age which froze the entire surface: known today as a Snowball Earth scenario. This disaster almost ended life on Earth entirely.
(1) The Great Oxidation Event, considerable oxygen on Earth, triggered a catastrophic ice age and almost extinguished life on the planet.
(2) Atmospheric alteration caused by the Great Oxidation Event almost threatened to end all life on the planet forever.
(3) The narrative that life progressed unchallenged on Earth is not true as proved by the theory of the Great Oxygenation Event.
(4) If not for the Great Oxidation Event, the Earth wouldn’t have been introduced to oxygen and life would have then evolved very differently.
5. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
Turns out, time, as a concept, is stretchable. With age, more time seems to slide by in a jiffy—as opposed to our childhood, when each year felt so substantial. Dutch psychologist, Douwe Draaisma, published a book in 2004 that addresses the very riddle. He explains that new, unfamiliar experiences make time seem to move slower. Novel situations enable our brains to make and retain more memories. These additional memories stretch and expand our perception of time while routine, unmemorable moments contract time, Draaisma writes. When we’re young, almost everything we experience is new, so the brain makes more memories and time seems to pass by slower. But as we grow older, our experiences become predictable and the mind makes fewer memories, which fastens our sense of time’s passage.
(1) Time feels slower as we age because our brains create more memories, as explained by psychologist Douwe Draaisma.
(2) Time has a stretchable quality that we experience as we get older and gather more and more complex memories, which the brain processes more quickly.
(3) As we age, there are fewer novel experiences for the brain to process which results in a contracted perception of time flow.
(4) As we grow older, new experiences are processed differently by the brain which makes time seem elastic and new.
6. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
For millennials and the younger generation Z and Alphas, who may never be able to afford to buy a home or retire at a reasonable age, there is a growing feeling online that hard work is fortifying a system that, at best, is giving them nothing back and, at worst, is actively screwing them over. And so the “soft life” revolution was born – where the priority is no longer about working yourself to the bone to be a #girlboss or “leaning in” to the corporate male world, as former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote, and pushing until you “have it all”. The goal of a softer life is more time and energy for what makes you happy and as little time as possible focusing on what doesn’t.
(1) Prompted by the dissatisfaction caused by a failing economy and the mental turbulence of being homeless, millennials, gen Zs and Alphas are rejecting hard work.
(2) Corporate success or material success no longer appeal to any of the younger generation due to major economic hardship.
(3) The “soft life” revolution is taking over the imaginations of millennials, gen Zs and Alphas, offering an escapist respite from the hard realities of a capitalist economy.
(4) The younger generations are rejecting traditional hard work ethos for a 'soft life' revolution, prioritizing happiness over capitalistic success.
7. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage:
Beginnings, all writers will tell you, are the hardest part of storytelling. We struggle with the research and stare at our screens trying to get our heads and hearts to sync, until the perfect words for the perfect introduction flow through us. It needs to have the potential to pull in the reader, to carry them through a nail-biting middle to a satisfying resolution. A compelling ‘inciting incident’, most storytellers agree, is the safest bet that a story will remain resilient till the end. It is the epicentre from which both the back story and the future emanate. Harry receives his invite to Hogwarts. Neo escapes the matrix. Anna Karenina meets Vronsky at the St Petersburg train station.
(1) Writers struggle with a good start to their story, wanting the perfect words to make it nail-biting yet satisfying.
(2) All writers want to write starts that are as compelling as Harry Potter or The Matrix, because these are safe bets.
(3) Writers struggle to write a good start, an incident which will make the reader delve into the story.
(4) The beginning of a story is the hardest part for authors, because it affects both the past and the future of the story.
8. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
[CAT 2023, Slot 3]
Gradually, life for the island's birds is improving. Antarctic prions and white-headed petrels, which also nest in burrows, had managed to cling on in some sites while pests were on the island. Their numbers are now increasing. "It's fantastic and so exciting," Shaw says. As birds return to breed, they also poo. This adds nutrients to the soil, which in turn helps the plants to grow back stronger. Tall plants then help burrowing birds hide from predatory skuas. "It's this wonderful feedback loop," Shaw says. Today, the "pretty paddock" that Houghton first experienced has been transformed. "The tussock is over your head, and you're dodging all these penguin tunnels," she says. The orchids and tiny herb that had been protected by fencing have started turning up all over the place.
(1) There is an increasing number of predatory birds and plants on the island despite the presence of pests which is a positive development.
(2) In the absence of pests, life on the island is now protected, and there has been a revival of a variety of birds and plants.
(3) There is a huge positive transformation of the ecosystem of the island when brought under environmental protection.
(4) Flowering plants, herbs and birds are now being protected on this wonderful Antarctic island.
9. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
[CAT 2023, Slot 1]
Manipulating information was a feature of history long before modern journalism established rules of integrity. A record dates back to ancient Rome, when Antony met Cleopatra and his political enemy Octavian launched a smear campaign against him with "short, sharp slogans written upon coins." The perpetrator became the first Roman Emperor and "fake news had allowed Octavian to hack the republican system once and for all". But the 21st century has seen the weaponization of information on an unprecedented scale. Powerful new technology makes the fabrication of content simple, and social networks amplify falsehoods peddled by States, populist politicians, and dishonest corporate entities. The platforms have become fertile ground for computational propaganda, 'trolling' and 'troll armies'.
(1) Disinformation, which is mediated by technology today, is not new and has existed since ancient times.
(2) People need to become critical of what they read, since historically, weaponization of information has led to corruption.
(3) Use of misinformation for attaining power, a practice that is as old as the Octavian era, is currently fuelled by technology.
(4) Octavian used fake news to manipulate people and attain power and influence, just as people do today.
10. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
[CAT 2024 Slot 3]
Humans have managed to tweak the underlying biology of various plants and animals to produce high-tech crops and microbes. But regulating these entities is complicated, as the framework of policies and procedures are outdated and not flexible enough to adapt to emerging technology. The question is whether regulation will ever be able to keep up with human innovation, to regulate living things, which are apt to be unpredictable and unique; to capture all the potential risks when new biological entities are introduced, or when they pass on variations of their genes?
(1) Current regulation of biotechnology is outdated, but it is debatable if we can create a framework, imaginative and flexible, to cover all contingencies in this fast-changing area.
(2) A new framework of rules and procedures for regulating the most recent research emerging from biotechnology is urgently needed, to keep up with this rapidly changing discipline.
(3) The problem with formulating regulation for innovation in the scientific arena it that it is impossible to imagine the outcomes or risks related to the outcomes of all the research.
(4) The mercurial nature of biological entities calls for scientists to shape the regulations governing emerging technology, with regular calibration to handle variations in the field.
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