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CAT 2025 Lesson : Verbal: Jul '25 to Aug '25 - CAT RC_POV method - 1 Aug 2025

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The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
[CAT 2024 Slot 3]


There is a group in the space community who view the solar system not as an opportunity to expand human potential but as a nature preserve, forever the provenance of an elite group of scientists and their sanitary robotic probes. These planetary protection advocates [call] for avoiding “harmful contamination” of celestial bodies. Under this regime, NASA incurs great expense sterilizing robotic probes in order to prevent the contamination of entirely theoretical biospheres. . . .

Transporting bacteria would matter if Mars were the vital world once imagined by astronomers who mistook optical illusions for canals. Nobody wants to expose Martians to measles, but sadly, robotic exploration reveals a bleak, rusted landscape, lacking oxygen and flooded with radiation ready to sterilize any Earthly microbes. Simple life might exist underground, or down at the bottom of a deep canyon, but it has been very hard to find with robots. . . . The upsides from human exploration and development of Mars clearly outweigh the welfare of purely speculative Martian fungi. . . .

The other likely targets of human exploration, development, and settlement, our moon and the asteroids, exist in a desiccated, radiation-soaked realm of hard vacuum and extreme temperature variations that would kill nearly anything. It’s also important to note that many international competitors will ignore the demands of these protection extremists in any case. For example, China recently sent a terrarium to the moon and germinated a plant seed—with, unsurprisingly, no protest from its own scientific community. In contrast, when it was recently revealed that a researcher had surreptitiously smuggled super-resilient microscopic tardigrades aboard the ill-fated Israeli Beresheet lunar probe, a firestorm was unleashed within the space community. . . .

NASA’s previous human exploration efforts made no serious attempt at sterility, with little notice. As the Mars expert Robert Zubrin noted in the National Review, U.S. lunar landings did not leave the campsites cleaner than they found it. Apollo’s bacteria-infested litter included bags of feces. Forcing NASA’s proposed Mars exploration to do better, scrubbing everything and hauling out all the trash, would destroy NASA’s human exploration budget and encroach on the agency’s other directorates, too. Getting future astronauts off Mars is enough of a challenge, without trying to tote weeks of waste along as well.

A reasonable compromise is to continue on the course laid out by the U.S. government and the National Research Council, which proposed a system of zones on Mars, some for science only, some for habitation, and some for resource exploitation. This approach minimizes contamination, maximizes scientific exploration . . . Mars presents a stark choice of diverging human futures. We can turn inward, pursuing ever more limited futures while we await whichever natural or manmade disaster will eradicate our species and life on Earth. Alternatively, we can choose to propel our biosphere further into the solar system, simultaneously protecting our home planet and providing a backup plan for the only life we know exists in the universe. Are the lives on Earth worth less than some hypothetical microbe lurking under Martian rocks?

1) The author mentions all of the following reasons to dismiss concerns about contaminating Mars EXCEPT:

1. the lack of evidence of living organisms on Mars makes possible contamination from earthly microbes a moot point.
2. the use of similar probes on astronomical bodies like the moon have had little effect on the environment.
3. efforts to contain contamination on Mars are likely to be derailed as competitor countries may not follow similar restrictions.
4. earlier explorations have already contaminated pristine space environments.

2) The contrasting reactions to the Chinese and Israeli “contaminations” of lunar space

1. are valid as the contamination of the lunar environment from animal sources is far greater than from plants.
2. are evidence of China’s reasonable approach towards space contamination.
3. indicate that national scientists may have different sensitivities to issues of biosphere protection.
4. reveal global biases prevalent in attitudes towards different countries.

3) The author is unlikely to disagree with any of the following EXCEPT:

1. the proposal for a zonal segregation of the Martian landscape into regions for different purposes.
2. the exorbitant costs of continuing to keep the space environment pristine may be unsustainable.
3. that while NASA’s earlier missions were not ideal in their approach to space contamination, they likely did no grave damage.
4. space contamination should be minimised until the possibility of life on the astronomical body being explored is ruled out.

4) The author’s overall tone in the first paragraph can be described as

1. indifferent to the elitism of a few scientists aiming to corner space exploration.
2. sceptical about the excessive efforts to sanitise planets where life has not yet been proven to exist.
3. approving of the amount of money NASA spends to restrict the spread of contamination in space.
4. equivocal about the reasons extended by the group of scientists seeking to limit space exploration.

The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
[CAT 2021 Slot 1]


For the Maya of the Classic period, who lived in Southern Mexico and Central America between 250 and 900 CE, the category of ‘persons’ was not coincident with human beings, as it is for us. That is, human beings were persons – but other, nonhuman entities could be persons, too. ... In order to explore the slippage of categories between ‘humans’ and ‘persons’, I examined a very specific category of ancient Maya images, found painted in scenes on ceramic vessels. I sought out instances in which faces (some combination of eyes, nose, and mouth) are shown on inanimate objects. ... Consider my iPhone, which needs to be fed with electricity every night, swaddled in a protective bumper, and enjoys communicating with other fellow-phone-beings. Does it have personhood (if at all) because it is connected to me, drawing this resource from me as an owner or source? For the Maya (who did have plenty of other communicating objects, if not smartphones), the answer was no. Nonhuman persons were not tethered to specific humans, and they did not derive their personhood from a connection with a human. ... It’s a profoundly democratising way of understanding the world. Humans are not more important persons – we are just one of many kinds of persons who inhabit this world...

The Maya saw personhood as ‘activated’ by experiencing certain bodily needs and through participation in certain social activities. For example, among the faced objects that I examined, persons are marked by personal requirements (such as hunger, tiredness, physical closeness), and by community obligations (communication, interaction, ritual observance). In the images I examined, we see, for instance, faced objects being cradled in humans’ arms; we also see them speaking to humans. These core elements of personhood are both turned inward, what the body or self of a person requires, and outward, what a community expects of the persons who are a part of it, underlining the reciprocal nature of community membership. …

Personhood was a nonbinary proposition for the Maya. Entities were able to be persons while also being something else. The faced objects I looked at indicate that they continue to be functional, doing what objects do (a stone implement continues to chop, an incense burner continues to do its smoky work). Furthermore, the Maya visually depicted many objects in ways that indicated the material category to which they belonged – drawings of the stone implement show that a person-tool is still made of stone. One additional complexity: the incense burner (which would have been made of clay, and decorated with spiky appliques representing the sacred ceiba tree found in this region) is categorised as a person – but also as a tree. With these Maya examples, we are challenged to discard the person/nonperson binary that constitutes our basic ontological outlook. ... The porousness of boundaries that we have seen in the Maya world points towards the possibility of living with a certain uncategorisability of the world.

5) Which one of the following, if true, would not undermine the democratising potential of the Classic Maya worldview?

(1) They understood the stone implement and the incense burner in a purely human form.
(2) They believed that animals like cats and dogs that live in proximity to humans have a more clearly articulated personhood.
(3) They depicted their human healers with physical attributes of local medicinal plants.
(4) While they believed in the personhood of objects and plants, they did not believe in the personhood of rivers and animals.

6) On the basis of the passage, which one of the following worldviews can be inferred to be closest to that of the Classic Maya?

(1) A tribe that perceives plants as person-plants because they form an ecosystem and are marked by needs of nutrition.
(2) A tribe that perceives its hunting weapons as sacred person-artefacts because of their significance to its survival.
(3) A futuristic society that perceives robots to be persons as well as robots because of their similarity to humans.
(4) A tribe that perceives its utensils as person-utensils in light of their functionality and bodily needs.

7) Which one of the following best explains the “additional complexity” that the example of the incense burner illustrates regarding personhood for the Classic Maya?

(1) The example provides an exception to the nonbinary understanding of personhood that the passage had hitherto established.
(2) The example adds a new layer to the nonbinary understanding of personhood by bringing in a third category that shares a similar relation with the previous two.
(3) The example complicates the nonbinary understanding of personhood by bringing in the sacred, establishing the porosity of the divine and the profane.
(4) The example adds a new layer to the nonbinary understanding of personhood by bringing in a third category that shares a dissimilar relation with the previous two.

8) Which one of the following, if true about the Classic Maya, would invalidate the purpose of the iPhone example in the passage?

(1) Unlike modern societies equipped with mobile phones, the Classic Maya did not have any communicating objects.
(2) Classic Maya songs represent both humans and non-living objects as characters, talking and interacting with each other.
(3) The clay incense burner with spiky appliques was categorised only as a person and not as a tree by the Classic Maya.
(4) The personhood of the incense burner and the stone chopper was a function of their usefulness to humans.

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
[CAT 2023 Slot 1]


Many human phenomena and characteristics – such as behaviors, beliefs, economies, genes, incomes, life expectancies, and other things – are influenced both by geographic factors and by non-geographic factors. Geographic factors mean physical and biological factors tied to geographic location, including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal species, soils, and topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under the term culture, other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual people. . . .

[T]he differences between the current economies of North and South Korea . . . cannot be attributed to the modest environmental differences between [them] . . . They are instead due entirely to the different [government] policies . . . At the opposite extreme, the Inuit and other traditional peoples living north of the Arctic Circle developed warm fur clothes but no agriculture, while equatorial lowland peoples around the world never developed warm fur clothes but often did develop agriculture. The explanation is straightforwardly geographic, rather than a cultural or historical quirk unrelated to geography. . . . Aboriginal Australia remained the sole continent occupied only by hunter/gatherers and with no indigenous farming or herding . . . [Here the] explanation is biogeographic: the Australian continent has no domesticable native animal species and few domesticable native plant species. Instead, the crops and domestic animals that now make Australia a food and wool exporter are all non-native (mainly Eurasian) species such as sheep, wheat, and grapes, brought to Australia by overseas colonists.

Today, no scholar would be silly enough to deny that culture, history, and individual choices play a big role in many human phenomena. Scholars don't react to cultural, historical, and individual-agent explanations by denouncing "cultural determinism," "historical determinism," or "individual determinism," and then thinking no further. But many scholars do react to any explanation invoking some geographic role, by denouncing "geographic determinism" . . .

Several reasons may underlie this widespread but nonsensical view. One reason is that some geographic explanations advanced a century ago were racist, thereby causing all geographic explanations to become tainted by racist associations in the minds of many scholars other than geographers. But many genetic, historical, psychological, and anthropological explanations advanced a century ago were also racist, yet the validity of newer non-racist genetic etc. explanations is widely accepted today.

Another reason for reflex rejection of geographic explanations is that historians have a tradition, in their discipline, of stressing the role of contingency (a favorite word among historians) based on individual decisions and chance. Often that view is warranted . . . But often, too, that view is unwarranted. The development of warm fur clothes among the Inuit living north of the Arctic Circle was not because one influential Inuit leader persuaded other Inuit in 1783 to adopt warm fur clothes, for no good environmental reason.

A third reason is that geographic explanations usually depend on detailed technical facts of geography and other fields of scholarship . . . Most historians and economists don't acquire that detailed knowledge as part of the professional training.

9) All of the following can be inferred from the passage EXCEPT:

(1) agricultural practices changed drastically in the Australian continent after it was colonised.
(2) individual dictat and contingency were not the causal factors for the use of fur clothing in some very cold climates.
(3) while most human phenomena result from culture and individual choice, some have bio-geographic origins.
(4) several academic studies of human phenomena in the past involved racist interpretations.

10) All of the following are advanced by the author as reasons why non-geographers disregard geographic influences on human phenomena EXCEPT their:

(1) dismissal of explanations that involve geographical causes for human behaviour.
(2) belief in the central role of humans, unrelated to physical surroundings, in influencing phenomena.
(3) lingering impressions of past geographic analyses that were politically offensive.
(4) disciplinary training which typically does not include technical knowledge of geography.

11) The examples of the Inuit and Aboriginal Australians are offered in the passage to show:

(1) how environmental factors lead to comparatively divergent paths in livelihoods and development.
(2) human resourcefulness across cultures in adapting to their surroundings.
(3) how physical circumstances can dictate human behaviour and cultures.
(4) that despite geographical isolation, traditional societies were self-sufficient and adaptive.

12) The author criticises scholars who are not geographers for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

(1) their rejection of the role of biogeographic factors in social and cultural phenomena.
(2) their outdated interpretations of past cultural and historical phenomena.
(3) their labelling of geographic explanations as deterministic.
(4) the importance they place on the role of individual decisions when studying human phenomena.

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