35+ Parasummary Questions for CAT with SOLUTIONS

Parasummary Questions for the CAT exam are part of the VARC section of the CAT exam. Through Parasummary questions, aspirants are asked to understand Verbal Ability. The difficulty level of the Parasummary questions can be easy to moderate.

Question 1: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

All that we think we know about how life hangs together is really some kind of illusion that we have perpetrated on ourselves because of our limited vision. What appear to be inanimate objects such as stones turn out not only to be alive in the same way that we are, but also in many infinitesimal ways to be affected by stimuli just as humans are. The distinction between animate and inanimate simply cannot be made when you enter the world of quantum mechanics and try to determine how those apparent subatomic particles, of which you and everything else in our universe is composed, are all tied together. The point is that physics and metaphysics show there is a pattern to the universe that goes beyond our capacity to grasp it with our brains.

A. The inanimate world is both sentient and cognizant like its animate counterpart.
B. The effect of stimuli is similar in inanimate objects when compared to animate objects or living beings.
C. Quantum physics indicates that an astigmatic view of reality results in erroneous assumptions about the universe.
D. Arbitrary distinctions between inanimate and animate objects disappear at the scale at which quantum mechanics works.

Answer: B,D,C,A

Question 2: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

It’s not that modern historians of medieval Africa have been ignorant about contacts between Ethiopia and Europe; they just had the power dynamic reversed. The traditional narrative stressed Ethiopia as weak and in trouble in the face of aggression from external forces, so Ethiopia sought military assistance from their fellow Christians to the north. But the real story, buried in plain sight in medieval diplomatic texts, simply had not yet been put together by modern scholars. Recent research pushes scholars of medieval Europe to imagine a much more richly connected medieval world: at the beginning of the so-called Age of Exploration, there is evidence that the kings of Ethiopia were sponsoring their own missions of diplomacy, faith and commerce.

A. Medieval historical sources selectively promoted the narrative that powerful European forces were called on to protect weak African civilisations such as Ethiopia, but this is far from reality.
B. Historians were under the illusion that Ethiopia needed military protection from their neighbours, but in fact the country had close commercial and religious connections with them.
C. Medieval texts have documented how strong connections between the Christian communities of Ethiopia and Europe were invaluable in establishing military and trade links between the two civilisations.
D. Medieval texts have been ‘cherry-picked’ to promote a view of Ethiopia as weak and in need of Europe’s

Answer: 2

Question 3: The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

Petitioning is an expeditious democratic tradition, used frequently in prior centuries, by which citizens can bring issues directly to governments. As expressions of collective voice, they support procedural democracy by shaping agendas. They can also recruit citizens to causes, give voice to the voteless, and apply the discipline of rhetorical argument that clarifies a point of view. By contrast, elections are limited in several respects: they involve only a few candidates, and thus fall far short of a representative democracy. Further,voters’ choices are not specific to particular policies or laws, and elections are episodic, whereas the voice of the people needs to be heard and integrated constantly into democratic government.

A. By giving citizens greater control over shaping political and democratic agendas, political petitions are invaluable as they represent an ideal form of a epresentative democracy.
B. Petitioning has been important to democratic functioning, as it supplements the electoral process by enabling ongoing engagement with the government.
C. Petitioning is definitely more representative of the collective voice, and the functioning of democratic
government could improve if we relied more on petitioning rather than holding periodic elections.
D. Citizens become less inclined to petitioning as it enables vocal citizens to shape political agendas, but this needs to change to strengthen democracies today

Answer: C,B,A,D

All that we think we know about how life hangs together is really some kind of illusion that we have perpetrated on ourselves because of our limited vision. What appear to be inanimate objects such as stones turn out not only to be alive in the same way that we are, but also in many infinitesimal ways to be affected by stimuli just as humans are. The distinction between animate and inanimate simply cannot be made when you enter the world of quantum mechanics and try to determine how those apparent subatomic particles, of which you and everything else in our universe is composed, are all tied together. The point is that physics and metaphysics show there is a pattern to the universe that goes beyond our capacity to grasp it with our brains.

1. Quantum physics indicates that an astigmatic view of reality results in erroneous assumptions about the universe.
2. The inanimate world is both sentient and cognizant like its animate counterpart.
3. The effect of stimuli is similar in inanimate objects when compared to animate objects or living beings.
4. Arbitrary distinctions between inanimate and animate objects disappear at the scale at which quantum mechanics works

Answer: 4

Petitioning is an expeditious democratic tradition, used frequently in prior centuries, by which citizens can bring issues directly to governments. As expressions of collective voice, they support procedural democracy by shaping agendas. They can also recruit citizens to causes, give voice to the voteless, and apply the discipline of rhetorical argument that clarifies a point of view. By contrast, elections are limited in several respects: they involve only a few candidates, and thus fall far short of a representative democracy. Further, voters' choices are not specific to particular policies or laws, and elections are episodic, whereas the voice of the people needs to be heard and integrated constantly into a democratic government.

1. By giving citizens greater control over shaping political and democratic agendas, political petitions are invaluable as they represent an ideal form of a representative democracy.
2. Petitioning has been important to democratic functioning, as it supplements the electoral process by enabling ongoing engagement with the government.
3. Petitioning is definitely more representative of the collective voice, and the functioning of a democratic government could improve if we relied more on petitioning rather than holding periodic elections.
4. Citizens become less inclined to petitioning as it enables vocal citizens to shape political agendas, but this needs to change to strengthen democracies today.

Answer: 2

Para jumble questions are typically asked for the sentence arrangement. The difficulty level of the Parajumble questions can be easy to moderate.

Question 6: 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. In English, there is no systematic rule for the naming of numbers; after ten, we have "eleven" and "twelve" and then the teens: "thirteen", "fourteen", "fifteen" and so on.

2. Even more confusingly, some English words invert the numbers they refer to: the word "fourteen" puts the four first, even though it appears last.

3. It can take children a while to learn all these words, and understand that "fourteen" is different from "forty".

4. For multiples of 10, English speakers switch to a different pattern: "twenty", "thirty", "forty" and so on.

5. If you didn't know the word for "eleven", you would be unable to just guess it you might come up with something like "one-teen".

Answers: 4,1,2,3,5

Antonyms and Synonyms Questions are typically asked in Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension section in the CAT exam. The difficulty level of these questions is a little higher than the other RC questions.