Para Summary Questions for CAT

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

A mountain range is easy to think of as something that happened once and then stopped. It is still happening. The rock beneath is being pushed up by a few millimetres a year, about the rate at which a fingernail grows, and rain and frost are taking the top off at a rate not far different. What you see is the difference between two slow processes, not the leftovers of an old event. When the pushing stops, the taking off does not, and the range is worn flat in a span of time that is long by our measure and short by the earth's.

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

A cyclone warning is often treated as a finished product: the forecast is issued, the message goes out, and the job is done. Families in the path of the storm face a different question. Leaving means locking a house that may be looted, abandoning animals that cannot be moved, and reaching a shelter that may be too far to walk to with a child and a grandmother. A warning that does not answer those questions is accurate and useless. The last part of a warning system is not a transmitter. It is a road, a shelter and a reason to trust that the house will still be there.

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

The human brain is a remarkable object. It is the only object that can comprehend the existence and nature of the cosmos, the infinite patterns of numbers, the laws of physics, the moral implications of its actions, its own identity and consciousness. It is also the only object that can achieve extraordinary feats that are beyond the reach of any other object - launching itself into space, predicting and averting a potential collision with a meteor, cooling matter to near absolute zero, detecting and communicating with other brains across vast distances. However, despite its unparalleled capabilities, the human brain remains a mystery to itself. We can’t understand how the brain performs any of these functions. The field of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which attempts to create machines that can emulate the brain’s abilities, has not made any significant progress in its 60-year history. This is because we are plagued by many false assumptions and misconceptions about the brain and intelligence, both among experts and the general public. AGI is also overoptimistic in forecasting its imminent breakthrough.

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

Ask who works nights and you will be told that many of them asked for it. The answer is taken to mean that the hours suit them. Look at why they asked. One has a child at home in the day and no money for care. Another holds a second job that runs from the morning to the afternoon. A third lives where the fare home is cheaper after midnight. The preference is real, but it was produced by the constraint. What looks like a taste for night work is usually the shape that a shortage of options has taken.

Summarize the following paragraph: The art of “not” reading is highly important. This consists in not taking a book into one's hand merely because it is interesting the great public at the time - such as political or religious pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise and reach perhaps several editions in their first and last years of existence. Remember rather that the man who writes for fools always finds a large public: and only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.

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

When released animals keep being killed, the answer is usually a fence. It goes up around the release site, the predators are kept out, and the population inside begins to hold. The fence works. It also settles the question it was built to postpone. Nobody now has to argue about the land outside, because the animals are safe without it, and the money that would have gone into that argument goes into maintaining the wire. A second site is fenced, and then a third. The species survives in a set of enclosures, and the country between them is no closer to holding it than it was on the day the first fence went up.

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

One word is asked to cover two jobs that pull in opposite directions. An examination used to allocate scarce places must spread candidates out, and it works by finding items that a narrow band can answer and the rest cannot; a flat set of results is useless to it. An examination used to certify that someone can practise safely must fix a threshold and let through everyone who reaches it, and a result in which all candidates pass is not a failure but the outcome anybody would want. Set one paper to do both and it cannot. Either the threshold moves to protect the spread, or the spread is manufactured out of items no part of the job requires. The conflict is not in the paper. It is in the word.

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

An observer is placed aboard by a regulator and then lives at the vessel's expense, in its bunks, at its table, for weeks at a time. The decision to raise coverage is made ashore by people who will pay none of that. What a higher target costs is a bunk that was a crew member's, a share of the food, and a working relationship in which the person writing the report depends daily on the people it is about. Coverage percentages therefore rise more easily than the reporting improves. The figure in the annual return is cheap to the body that sets it and expensive to everyone who has to live with an extra passenger in a confined hull.

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

The animals a collection keeps are assumed to have been chosen because they are in danger, the exhibit following from the need. Watch which species arrive and the order looks the other way about. An animal that draws people to the gate earns the enclosure it occupies, and an enclosure is what a species needs before it can be bred, studied and made familiar. Familiarity is then what puts a creature on the public's list of animals worth saving, and the list is what attracts the money. The species most people can name as endangered are in good part the species that were worth exhibiting, and the danger they stand in came to general notice after the ticket had made them famous.

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

A sovereign default is written up as a breakdown, the moment at which a system stopped working. The system rather assumes it. Nobody lends to a government at a premium over the safest borrower available unless the premium is buying something, and what it buys is the chance of not being paid. A creditor who collects that premium for years and then insists on being made whole is asking to be paid twice for one risk. By the same reasoning, a world in which no sovereign ever defaulted would not be a well run world. It would be a world in which lenders had been too cautious, and a great deal of borrowing that ought to have happened had not. The default is the contract finishing rather than the contract failing.

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

More than 5,000 containerships sail the oceans today, and they are in no danger of vanishing from the scene. But the temporary COVID-19 pandemic-driven boom in trade in goods notwithstanding, the cargo these giant vessels carry is becoming steadily less important as the world economy is reshaped by a new form of globalisation. Over time, globalisation will gradually have less to do with exporting material goods across borders and much more to do with trading services and ideas. This will have important consequences for workers, communities, and the health of national economies.

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

A port that kept losing cargo to damp did the sensible thing and narrowed its trade to what survives a long voyage. Pepper, cloves and dried fruit keep, the write offs stopped, and the remedy was judged a success. It also set hard. Sheds were built for sacks, credit was written against goods of a known keeping quality, brokers learned one set of prices, and in time nothing else could be got up the quay. The ruinous years had never really been about damp. They came from a town that lived on a single market. By curing the damage everyone could see, the port made itself less able than before to carry anything else when that market turned.

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

Trials before a jury run longer than trials before a judge alone, and the difference is usually laid at the jurors' door. Everything must be spelled out for amateurs, the argument goes, so lay judgment is slow judgment. The arrow points the other way. A defendant whose case is hopeless pleads and never reaches a jury at all; a defendant with something genuinely arguable is the one who asks for twelve strangers. What arrives in front of a jury has already been filtered for difficulty. The jury is not what makes the trial long. The long trial is what selects the jury, and comparing the two sorts of hearing as though they carried the same work mistakes a consequence for a cause.

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

Offer to pay someone for a favour and the usual prediction is that they will do more of it, since payment is an incentive and incentives raise supply. The prediction fails often enough to be interesting. A neighbour who would collect your parcels for nothing will sometimes refuse once a rate is named, and the refusal is not bargaining. Naming a price moves the exchange into a different set of norms: unpaid, the act is a claim on a relationship; priced, it becomes a small job to be weighed against what an hour is worth. Money did not add to the obligation that was already there. It replaced it, and the replacement was worth less.

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

A certificate is worth something only if it might be withheld, and the body that could withhold it is, in nearly every scheme, paid by the firm it is inspecting. The arrangement is not usually corrupt in any sense a court would recognise. It does not have to be: an auditor who fails a client loses the account to a competitor who is more accommodating, and the pressure works through the ordinary reasonable judgments of people who want to keep working. The scandal, when one arrives, is therefore reported as a lapse by an individual inspector, which is the least informative description available, since the incentive was in the structure before any inspector entered it.

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

An instrument is usually described as a window: it lets us see what was already there, only smaller or fainter or further away. The description holds until one asks what counts as the same thing seen through two instruments. Temperature before the thermometer was a family of sensations; afterwards it was whatever the column of mercury tracked, and the two do not coincide at the edges. The instrument did not simply reveal a pre-existing quantity. It fixed one, by making a particular set of correlations authoritative and pushing the rest out of the concept. What is later discovered about temperature is therefore partly a discovery about the device.

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

A charge for keeping a book past its date was introduced to protect a queue. When a branch held one copy of a title and a dozen names waited behind it, the reader who did not return it was withholding something from somebody identifiable, and a small penalty put the matter right. Almost nothing in that description still holds. Copies are more numerous, renewal takes a moment from a telephone, and the title a reader is waiting for is as likely to be a file as a volume. What the charge now selects for is not promptness but the ability to pay it, and the borrower it keeps away is the one for whom the branch was hardest to reach in the first place.

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

An authority commissioning a plant to take the salt out of seawater keeps an account that is complete on its own terms: capital raised, a tariff set, a supply guaranteed for a given number of households. What the account does not carry is the concentrated return. The brine goes back to a stretch of shallow coast where other people fish, and the power comes off a grid whose emissions are totalled in a national column that no municipal officer is answerable for. Neither entry is hidden; each simply belongs to a different ledger, answerable to a different public. A decision can be scrupulous within its own boundary and still push the greater part of what it costs across that boundary onto people the boundary was not drawn to include.

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

The library that fails is rarely the celebrated one. It is some small component of dependency, written once to solve a problem that recurred, absorbed into thousands of systems on the strength of costing nothing, and thereafter maintained by whoever wrote it, in the evenings, for no pay. When such a component is abandoned the event is reported as neglect, a lapse in somebody's diligence. It is better read as the predicted behaviour of an arrangement in which ubiquity and committed resource vary inversely: the more universally a thing is depended upon, the more thoroughly the obligation to sustain it is diffused, and the harder it becomes to find anyone who owns it. The abandonment is not the arrangement breaking down. It is the arrangement arriving where it was always headed.

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

A visitor to a deaf club notices what looks like a failure of hospitality: nothing is voiced, no interpreter is provided, and a hearing guest who does not sign is left to follow as best they can. Read as an access problem the arrangement is plainly deficient, and clubs are periodically pressed to correct it. The pressure misreads what the room is. Everywhere else its members go, their language is the one that must be converted before it can be heard, and the conversion is paid for by them, in delay, in approximation and in the constant presence of a third person. The club is the one place where that conversion is not performed, which is not a lapse in its provision but the substance of what it provides.