CAT 2027 Sample Paper

SAMPLE PAPER

S A M P L E Q U E S T I O N P A P E R

CAT 2027
Modelled on the actual exam pattern
.

QUESTIONS MAX MARKS TIME MARKING

66 198 120 Min +3 / −1

GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS

1. This paper contains 66 multiple-choice questions. All questions are compulsory.

2. Each question has four options — (A), (B), (C) and (D) — of which only one is correct.

3. Each correct answer carries 3 marks; 1 mark is deducted for each wrong answer.

4. Total time allowed is 120 minutes. Manage your time across all sections.

5. Use of calculators, mobile phones or any electronic device is not permitted.

6. Attempt the paper first, then check your answers against the Answer Key at the end.

Candidate Name: Roll No.: Date:

SAMPLE PAPER

CAT 2027
SAMPLE QUESTION PAPER

Questions 66 Max Marks 198 Time 120 Min Marking +3 / −1

Attempt all questions. Choose the one correct option for each.

VERBAL ABILITY & READING COMPREHENSION

1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.Moutai has been the global booze sensation of the decade.
A bottle of its Flying Fairy which sold in the 1980s for the equivalent of a dollar now retails for $400. Moutai's listed
shares have soared by almost 600% in the past five years, outpacing the likes of Amazon. . . .It does this while
disregarding every Western marketing mantra. It is not global, has meagre digital sales and does not appeal to
millennials. It scores pitifully on environmental, social and governance measures. In the Boy Scout world of Western
business it would leave a bad taste, in more ways than one.Moutai owes its intoxicating success to three factors—not
all of them easy to emulate. First, it profits from Chinese nationalism. Moutai is known as the "national liquor". It was
used to raise spirits and disinfect wounds in Mao's Long March. It was Premier Zhou Enlai's favourite tipple, shared
with Richard Nixon in 1972. Its centuries-old craftsmanship—it is distilled eight times and stored for years in
earthenware jars—is a source of national pride. It also claims to be hangover-proof, which would make it an invention
to rival gunpowder....Second, it chose to serve China's super-rich rather than its middle class. Markets are littered
with the corpses of firms that could not compete in the cut-throat battle for Chinese middle-class wallets. And the
country's premium market is massive—at 73m-strong, bigger than the population of France, notes Euan McLeish of
Bernstein, an investment firm, and still less crowded with prestige brands than advanced economies. Moutai is to
these well-heeled drinkers what vintage champagne is to the rest of the world.....Third, Moutai looks beyond affluent
millennials and digital natives. The elderly and the middle-aged, it found, can be just as lucrative. Its biggest market
now is (male) drinkers in their mid-30s. Many have no siblings, thanks to four decades of China's one-child
policy—which also means their elderly parents can splash out on weddings and banquets. Moutai is often a guest of
honour.Moutai has succeeded thanks to nationalism, elitism and ageism, in other words—not in spite of this unholy
trinity. But it faces risks. The government is its largest shareholder—and a meddlesome one. It appears to want prices
to remain stable. Exorbitantly priced booze is at odds with its professed socialist ideals. Yet minority
investors—including many foreign funds—lament that Moutai's wholesale price is a third of what it sells for in shops.
Raising it could boost the company's profits further. Instead, in what some see as a travesty of corporate governance,
its majority owner has plans to set up its own sales channel.....In the long run, its biggest risk may be millennials. As
they grow older, health concerns, work-life balance and the desire for more wholesome pursuits than binge-drinking
may curb the "Ganbei!" toasting culture [heavy drinking] on which so much of the demand for Moutai rests. For the
time being, though, the party goes on. The phrase "would make it an invention to rival gunpowder" has been used in
the passage in a sense that is

(A) metaphorical

(B) literal

(C) substantive

(D) synonymical

2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. ... [T]he idea of craftsmanship is not simply nostalgic. .. .
Crafts require distinct skills, an all-round approach to work that involves the whole product, rather than individual
parts, and an attitude that necessitates devotion to the job and a focus on the communal interest. The concept of craft
emphasises the human touch and individual judgment. Essentially, the crafts concept seems to run against the
preponderant ethos of management studies which, as the academics note, have long prioritised efficiency and
consistency. . . . Craft skills were portrayed as being primitive and traditionalist. The contrast between artisanship and
efficiency first came to the fore in the 19 century when British manufacturers suddenly faced competition from across
the Atlantic as firms developed the “American system” using standardised parts. . . . the worldwide success of the

Singer sewing machine showed the potential of a mass-produced device. This process created its own reaction, first in
the form of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century, and then again in the “small is beautiful’
movement of the 1970s. A third crafts movement is emerging as people become aware of the environmental impact of
conventional industry. There are two potential markets for those who practise crafts. The first stems from the
existence of consumers who are willing to pay a premium price for goods that are deemed to be of extra quality... .
The second market lies in those consumers who wish to use their purchases to support local workers, or to reduce
their environmental impact by taking goods to craftspeople to be mended, or recycled. For workers, the appeal of
craftsmanship is that it allows them the autonomy to make creative choices, and thus makes a job far more satisfying.
In that sense, it could offer hope for the overall labour market. Let the machines automate dull and repetitive tasks
and let workers focus purely on their skills, judgment and imagination. As a current example, the academics cite the
“agile” manifesto in the software sector, an industry at the heart of technological change. The pioneers behind the
original agile manifesto promised to prioritise “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. By bringing
together experts from different teams, agile working is designed to improve creativity. But the broader question is
whether crafts can create a lot more jobs than they do today. Demand for crafted products may rise but will it be easy
to retrain workers in sectors that might get automated (such as truck drivers) to take advantage? In a world where
products and services often have to pass through regulatory hoops, large companies will usually have the advantage.
History also suggests that the link between crafts and creativity is not automatic. Medieval craft guilds were
monopolies which resisted new entrants. They were also highly hierarchical with young men required to spend long
periods as apprentices and journeymen before they could set up on their own; by that time the innovative spirit may
have been knocked out of them. Craft workers can thrive in the modern era, but only if they don’t get too organised.
The author questions the ability of crafts to create substantial employment opportunities presently because

(A) crafts guilds tend to resist new entrants and are unlikely to accept large numbers of trainees.

(B) regulatory requirements could make it difficult for small crafts outfits to compete.

(C) workers made redundant by automation are unlikely to opt for crafts-related work.

(D) the low scale of crafts production will not be able to absorb the mass of redundant labour.

3. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.The history of any major technological or industrial advance
is inevitably shadowed by a less predictable history of unintended consequences and secondary effects — what
economists sometimes call “externalities.” Sometimes those consequences are innocuous ones, or even beneficial.
Gutenberg invents the printing press, and literacy rates rise, which causes a significant part of the reading public to
require spectacles for the first time, which creates a surge of investment in lens-making across Europe, which leads to
the invention of the telescope and the microscope.Oftentimes the secondary effects seem to belong to an entirely
different sphere of society. When Willis Carrier hit upon the idea of air-conditioning, the technology was primarily
intended for industrial use: ensuring cool, dry air for factories that required low-humidity environments. But...it
touched off one of the largest migrations in the history of the United States, enabling the rise of metropolitan areas
like Phoenix and Las Vegas that barely existed when Carrier first started tinkering with the idea in the early
1900s.Sometimes the unintended consequence comes about when consumers use an invention in a surprising way.
Edison famously thought his phonograph, which he sometimes called “the talking machine,” would primarily be used
to take dictation....But then later innovators... discovered a much larger audience willing to pay for musical recordings
made on descendants of Edison's original invention. In other cases, the original innovation comes into the world
disguised as a plaything...the way the animatronic dolls of the mid-1700s inspired Jacquard to invent the first
“programmable” loom and Charles Babbage to invent the first machine that fit the modern definition of a computer,
setting the stage for the revolution in programmable technology that would transform the 21st century in countless
ways.We live under the gathering storm of modern history’s most momentous unintended consequence....carbon-
based climate change. Imagine the vast sweep of inventors whose ideas started the Industrial Revolution, all the
entrepreneurs and scientists and hobbyists who had a hand in bringing it about. Line up a thousand of them and ask
them all what they had been hoping to do with their work. Not one would say that their intent had been to deposit
enough carbon in the atmosphere to create a greenhouse effect that trapped heat at the surface of the planet. And
yet here we are.Ethyl (leaded fuel) and Freon belonged to the same general class of secondary effect: innovations
whose unintended consequences stem from some kind of waste by-product that they emit. But the potential health
threats of Ethyl (unleaded fuel) were visible in the 1920s, unlike, say, the long-term effects of atmospheric carbon

build up in the early days of the Industrial Revolution....Indeed, it is reasonable to see CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) as a
forerunner of the kind of threat we will most likely face in the coming decades, as it becomes increasingly possible for
individuals or small groups to create new scientific advances — through chemistry or biotechnology or materials
science — setting off unintended consequences that reverberate on a global scale. The author lists all of the following
examples as “externalities” of major technical advances EXCEPT:

(A) build-up of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere

(B) extension of the phonograph to large-scale recording of music

(C) cooling and de-humidifying of factories through air-conditioning

(D) application of the Jacquard loom to modern IT programming

4. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.In [my book “Searches”], I chronicle how big technology
companies have exploited human language for their gain. We let this happen, I argue, because we also benefit
somewhat from using the products. It’s a dynamic that makes us complicit in big tech’s accumulation of wealth and
power: we’re both victims and beneficiaries. I describe this complicity, but I also enact it, through my own internet
archives: my Google searches, my Amazon product reviews and, yes, my ChatGPT dialogues. . . . People often describe
chatbots’ textual output as “bland” or “generic” – the linguistic equivalent of a beige office building. OpenAI’s
products are built to “sound like a colleague”, as OpenAI puts it, using language that, coming from a person, would
sound “polite”, “empathetic”, “kind”, “rationally optimistic” and “engaging”, among other qualities. OpenAI
describes these strategies as helping its products seem “professional” and “approachable”. This appears to be bound
up with making us feel safe . . . Trust is a challenge for artificial intelligence (AI) companies, partly because their
products regularly produce falsehoods and reify sexist, racist, US-centric cultural norms. While the companies are
working on these problems, they persist: OpenAI found that its latest systems generate errors at a higher rate than its
previous system. In the book, I wrote about the inaccuracies and biases and also demonstrated them with the
products. When I prompted Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator to produce a picture of engineers and space explorers, it
gave me an entirely male cast of characters; when my father asked ChatGPT to edit his writing, it transmuted his
perfectly correct Indian English into American English. Those weren’t flukes. Research suggests that both tendencies
are widespread. In my own ChatGPT dialogues, I wanted to enact how the product’s veneer of collegial neutrality could
lull us into absorbing false or biased responses without much critical engagement. Over time, ChatGPT seemed to be
guiding me to write a more positive book about big tech – including editing my description of OpenAI’s CEO, Sam
Altman, to call him “a visionary and a pragmatist”. I’m not aware of research on whether ChatGPT tends to favor big
tech, OpenAI or Altman, and I can only guess why it seemed that way in our conversation. OpenAI explicitly states that
its products shouldn’t attempt to influence users’ thinking. When I asked ChatGPT about some of the issues, it blamed
biases in its training data – though I suspect my arguably leading questions played a role too. When I queried ChatGPT
about its rhetoric, it responded: “The way I communicate is designed to foster trust and confidence in my responses,
which can be both helpful and potentially misleading.”. . . OpenAI has its own goals, of course. Among them, it
emphasizes wanting to build AI that “benefits all of humanity”. But while the company is controlled by a non-profit
with that mission, its funders still seek a return on their investment. That will presumably require getting people using
products such as ChatGPT even more than they already are – a goal that is easier to accomplish if people see those
products as trustworthy collaborators. On the basis of the purpose of the examples in the passage, pick the odd one
out from the following AI-generated responses mentioned in the passage:

(A) “When I queried ChatGPT about its rhetoric, it responded: ‘The way I communicate is designed to foster trust and confidence
in my responses, which can be both helpful and potentially misleading’.”

(B) “Over time, ChatGPT seemed to be guiding me to write a more positive book about big tech – including editing my description
of OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, to call him ‘a visionary and a pragmatist’.”

(C) “When I prompted Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator to produce a picture of engineers and space explorers, it gave me an
entirely male cast of characters . . .”

(D) “. . . when my father asked ChatGPT to edit his writing, it transmuted his perfectly correct Indian English into American
English.”

5. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. Often the well intentioned music lover or the traditionally-
minded professional composer asks two basic questions when faced with the electronic music phenomena: (1) . . . is
this type of artistic creation music at all? and, (2) given that the product is accepted as music of a new type or order,
is not such music “inhuman”? . . . As Lejaren Hiller points out in his book Experimental Music (co-author Leonard M.
Isaacson), two questions which often arise when music is discussed are: (a) the substance of musical communication
and its symbolic and semantic significance, if any, and (b) the particular processes, both mental and technical, which
are involved in creating and responding to musical composition. The ever-present popular concept of music as a
direct, open, emotional expression and as a subjective form of communication from the composer, is, of course still
that of the nineteenth century, when composers themselves spoke of music in those terms . . . But since the third
decade of our century many composers have preferred more objective definitions of music, epitomized in Stravinsky’s
description of it as “a form of speculation in terms of sound and time”. An acceptance of this more characteristic
twentieth-century view of the art of musical composition will of course immediately bring the layman closer to an
understanding of, and sympathetic response to, electronic music, even if the forms, sounds and approaches it uses
will still be of a foreign nature to him. A communication problem however will still remain. The principal barrier that
electronic music presents at large, in relation to the communication process, is that composers in this medium are
employing a new language of forms . . . where terms like ‘densities’, ‘indefinite pitch relations’, ‘dynamic
serialization’, ‘permutation’, etc., are substitutes (or remote equivalents) for the traditional concepts of harmony,
melody, rhythm, etc. . . . When the new structural procedures of electronic music are at last fully understood by the
listener the barriers between him and the work he faces will be removed. . . . The medium of electronic music has of
course tempted many kinds of composers to try their hand at it . . . But the serious-minded composer approaches the
world of electronic music with a more sophisticated and profound concept of creation. Although he knows that he can
reproduce and employ melodic, rhythmic patterns and timbres of a traditional nature, he feels that it is in the
exploration of sui generis languages and forms that the aesthetic magic of the new medium lies. And, conscientiously,
he plunges into this search. The second objection usually levelled against electronic music is much more innocent in
nature. When people speak—sometimes very vehemently—of the ‘inhuman’ quality of this music they seem to forget
that the composer is the one who fires the machines, collects the sounds, manipulates them, pushes the buttons,
programs the computer, filters the sounds, establishes pitches and scales, splices tape, thinks of forms, and rounds up
the over-all structure of the piece, as well as every detail of it. What relation does the “communication problem”
mentioned in paragraph 2 have to the questions that the author recounts at the beginning of the passage?

(A) Unfamiliar forms and terms might get in the way of our seeing electronic music as music, but this can be overcome.

(B) None; they are unrelated to one another and form parts of different discussions.

(C) Its unfamiliar “language of forms” and novel terms mean that we cannot see electronic music as music since it does not
employ traditional musical concepts.

(D) The communication problem is what allows us to see electronic music as music because music must be difficult to
understand.

6. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.Languages become endangered and die out for many
reasons. Sadly, the physical annihilation of communities of native speakers of a language is all too often the cause of
language extinction. In North America, European colonists brought death and destruction to many Native American
communities. This was followed by US federal policies restricting the use of indigenous languages, including the
removal of native children from their communities to federal boarding schools where native languages and cultural
practices were prohibited. As many as 75 percent of the languages spoken in the territories that became the United
States have gone extinct, with slightly better language survival rates in Central and South America . ..Even without
physical annihilation and prohibitions against language use, the language of the "dominant" cultures may drive other
languages into extinction; young people see education, jobs, culture and technology associated with the dominant
language and focus their attention on that language. The largest language "killers" are English, Spanish, Portuguese,
French, Russian, Hindi, and Chinese, all of which have privileged status as dominant languages threatening minority
languages.When we lose a language, we lose the worldview, culture and knowledge of the people who spoke it,
constituting a loss to all humanity. People around the world live in direct contact with their native environment, their
habitat. When the language they speak goes extinct, the rest of humanity loses their knowledge of that environment,
their wisdom about the relationship between local plants and illness, their philosophical and religious beliefs as well

as their native cultural expression (in music, visual art and poetry) that has enriched both the speakers of that
language and others who would have encountered that culture. . . .As educators deeply immersed in the liberal arts,
we believe that educating students broadly in all facets of language and culture . . . yields immense rewards. Some
individuals educated in the liberal arts tradition will pursue advanced study in linguistics and become actively
engaged in language preservation, setting out for the Amazon, for example, with video recording equipment to
interview the last surviving elders in a community to record and document a language spoken by no
children.Certainly, though, the vast majority of students will not pursue this kind of activity. For these students, a
liberal arts education is absolutely critical from the twin perspectives of language extinction and global citizenship.
When students study languages other than their own, they are sensitized to the existence of different cultural
perspectives and practices. With such an education, students are more likely to be able to articulate insights into their
own cultural biases, be more empathetic to individuals of other cultures, communicate successfully across linguistic
and cultural differences, consider and resolve questions in a way that reflects multiple cultural perspectives, and,
ultimately extend support to people, programs, practices, and policies that support the preservation of endangered
languages.There is ample evidence that such preservation can work in languages spiraling toward extinction. For
example, Navajo, Cree and Inuit communities have established schools in which these languages are the language of
instruction and the number of speakers of each has increased. It can be inferred from the passage that it is likely
South America had a slightly better language survival rate than North America for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

(A) European colonists allowed children of native speakers to stay at home with their families.

(B) the colonial government was unable to mainstream the locals.

(C) locals were provided job opportunities in the colonial administration.

(D) not many native speakers were killed by European colonists.

7. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.Once a society accepts a secular mode of creativity, within
which the creator replaces God, imaginative transactions assume a self-conscious form. The tribal imagination, on the
other hand, is still to a large extent dreamlike and hallucinatory. It admits fusion between various planes of existence
and levels of time in a natural and artless manner. In tribal stories, oceans fly in the sky as birds, mountains swim in
water as fish, animals speak as humans and stars grow like plants. Spatial order and temporal sequence do not
restrict the narrative. This is not to say that tribal creations have no conventions or rules, but simply that they admit
the principle of association between emotion and the narrative motif. Thus stars, seas, mountains, trees, men and
animals can be angry, sad or happy.It might be said that tribal artists work more on the basis of their racial and
sensory memory than on the basis of a cultivated imagination. In order to understand this distinction, we must
understand the difference between imagination and memory. In the animate world, consciousness meets two
immediate material realities: space and time. We put meaning into space by perceiving it in terms of images. The
image-making faculty is a genetic gift to the human mind—this power of imagination helps us understand the space
that envelops us. With regard to time, we make connections with the help of memory; one remembers being the same
person today as one was yesterday.The tribal mind has a more acute sense of time than the sense of space.
Somewhere along the history of human civilization, tribal communities seem to have realized that domination over
territorial space was not their lot. Thus, they seem to have turned almost obsessively to gaining domination over time.
This urge is substantiated in their ritual of conversing with their dead ancestors: year after year, tribals in many parts
of India worship terracotta or carved-wood objects representing their ancestors, aspiring to enter a trance in which
they can converse with the dead. Over the centuries, an amazingly sharp memory has helped tribals classify material
and natural objects into a highly complex system of knowledge. . . .One of the main characteristics of the tribal arts is
their distinct manner of constructing space and imagery, which might be described as 'hallucinatory'. In both oral and
visual forms of representation, tribal artists seem to interpret verbal or pictorial space as demarcated by an extremely
flexible 'frame'. The boundaries between art and non-art become almost invisible. A tribal epic can begin its narration
from a trivial everyday event; tribal paintings merge with living space as if the two were one and the same. And within
the narrative itself, or within the painted imagery, there is no deliberate attempt to follow a sequence. The episodes
retold and the images created take on the apparently chaotic shapes of dreams. In a way, the syntax of language and
the grammar of painting are the same, as if literature were painted words and painting were a song of images. On the
basis of the passage, which one of the following explains the main difference between imagination and memory?

(A) Imagination needs to be cultivated whereas memory is more intuitive because it is racial and sensory.

(B) Imagination helps humans make sense of space while memory helps them understand time.

(C) Imagination is a genetic gift to humans whereas memory is central to human consciousness.

(D) Tribal groups value memory over imagination when it comes to creating art and literature.

8. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.Time and again, whenever a population [of Mexican tetra
fish] was swept into a cave and survived long enough for natural selection to have its way, the eyes disappeared. “But
it’s not that everything has been lost in cavefish . . . Many enhancements have also happened.” . . . Studies have
found that cave-dwelling fish can detect lower levels of amino acids than surface fish can. They also have more
tastebuds and a higher density of sensitive cells alongside their bodies that let them sense water pressure and flow. .
. . Killing the processes that support the formation of the eye is quite literally what happens. Just like non-cave-
dwelling members of the species, all cavefish embryos start making eyes. But after a few hours, cells in the
developing eye start dying, until the entire structure has disappeared. [Developmental biologist Misty] Riddle thinks
this apparent inefficiency may be unavoidable. “The early development of the brain and the eye are completely
intertwined—they happen together,” she says. That means the least disruptive way for eyelessness to evolve may be
to start making an eye and then get rid of it. . . . It’s easy to see why cavefish would be at a disadvantage if they were
to maintain expensive tissues they aren’t using. Since relatively little lives or grows in their caves, the fish are likely
surviving on a meager diet of mostly bat feces and organic waste that washes in during the rainy season. Researchers
keeping cavefish in labs have discovered that, genetically, the creatures are exquisitely adapted to absorbing and
storing nutrients. . . . Fats can be toxic for tissues, [evolutionary physiologist Nicolas] Rohner explains, so they are
stored in fat cells. “But when these cells get too big, they can burst, which is why we often see chronic inflammation
in humans and other animals that have stored a lot of fat in their tissues.” Yet a 2020 study by Rohner, Krishnan and
their colleagues revealed that even very well-fed cavefish had fewer signs of inflammation in their fat tissues than
surface fish do. Even in their sparse cave conditions, wild cavefish can sometimes get very fat, says Riddle. This is
presumably because, whenever food ends up in the cave, the fish eat as much of it as possible, since there may be
nothing else for a long time to come. Intriguingly, Riddle says, their fat is usually bright yellow, because of high levels
of carotenoids, the substance in the carrots that your grandmother used to tell you were good for your…eyes. “The
first thing that came to our mind, of course, was that they were accumulating these because they don’t have eyes,”
says Riddle. In this species, such ideas can be tested: Scientists can cross surface fish (with eyes) and cavefish
(without eyes) and look at what their offspring are like. When that’s done, Riddle says, researchers see no link
between eye presence or size and the accumulation of carotenoids. Some eyeless cavefish had fat that was practically
white, indicating lower carotenoid levels. Instead, Riddle thinks these carotenoids may be another adaptation to
suppress inflammation, which might be important in the wild, as cavefish are likely overeating whenever food arrives.
Which one of the following best explains why the “apparent inefficiency” is “unavoidable”?

(A) The inefficiency resulting from eyelessness is compensated by enhancements like more tastebuds in Mexican tetra cavefish.

(B) The lack of light in the caves kills the eye cells in the developing Mexican tetra cavefish embryo.

(C) The caves have poor and inconsistent availability of food and nutrition for Mexican tetra cavefish.

(D) Mexican tetra cavefish are similar to non-cave-dwelling variants in their early stages of development.

9. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.Moutai has been the global booze sensation of the decade.
A bottle of its Flying Fairy which sold in the 1980s for the equivalent of a dollar now retails for $400. Moutai's listed
shares have soared by almost 600% in the past five years, outpacing the likes of Amazon. . . .It does this while
disregarding every Western marketing mantra. It is not global, has meagre digital sales and does not appeal to
millennials. It scores pitifully on environmental, social and governance measures. In the Boy Scout world of Western
business it would leave a bad taste, in more ways than one.Moutai owes its intoxicating success to three factors—not
all of them easy to emulate. First, it profits from Chinese nationalism. Moutai is known as the "national liquor". It was
used to raise spirits and disinfect wounds in Mao's Long March. It was Premier Zhou Enlai's favourite tipple, shared
with Richard Nixon in 1972. Its centuries-old craftsmanship—it is distilled eight times and stored for years in
earthenware jars—is a source of national pride. It also claims to be hangover-proof, which would make it an invention
to rival gunpowder....Second, it chose to serve China's super-rich rather than its middle class. Markets are littered
with the corpses of firms that could not compete in the cut-throat battle for Chinese middle-class wallets. And the
country's premium market is massive—at 73m-strong, bigger than the population of France, notes Euan McLeish of

Bernstein, an investment firm, and still less crowded with prestige brands than advanced economies. Moutai is to
these well-heeled drinkers what vintage champagne is to the rest of the world.....Third, Moutai looks beyond affluent
millennials and digital natives. The elderly and the middle-aged, it found, can be just as lucrative. Its biggest market
now is (male) drinkers in their mid-30s. Many have no siblings, thanks to four decades of China's one-child
policy—which also means their elderly parents can splash out on weddings and banquets. Moutai is often a guest of
honour.Moutai has succeeded thanks to nationalism, elitism and ageism, in other words—not in spite of this unholy
trinity. But it faces risks. The government is its largest shareholder—and a meddlesome one. It appears to want prices
to remain stable. Exorbitantly priced booze is at odds with its professed socialist ideals. Yet minority
investors—including many foreign funds—lament that Moutai's wholesale price is a third of what it sells for in shops.
Raising it could boost the company's profits further. Instead, in what some see as a travesty of corporate governance,
its majority owner has plans to set up its own sales channel.....In the long run, its biggest risk may be millennials. As
they grow older, health concerns, work-life balance and the desire for more wholesome pursuits than binge-drinking
may curb the "Ganbei!" toasting culture [heavy drinking] on which so much of the demand for Moutai rests. For the
time being, though, the party goes on. Which one of the following is both a reason for Moutai's success as well as a
possible threat to that success?

(A) Its appeal to the rich.

(B) Chinese love of liquor filled celebration.

(C) Its appeal to the older age group.

(D) Government involvement in its business

10. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.In 1903, left-wing feminist Elizabeth Magie invented The
Landlord’s Game, the original version of what became Monopoly. It was designed as a powerful teaching tool to
illustrate the dangers of monopolies and how wealth could concentrate in the hands of a few. The game featured a
circular path, properties, and a “Go to Jail” space. Magie created two rule sets: one “monopolist” version where
players crushed opponents through accumulation, and another, more radical “Prosperity” version, where everyone
shared in the wealth, promoting fairness and equity. Years later, unemployed Charles Darrow sold a simplified version
to Parker Brothers. They paid Magie only $500 for her patent—without royalties—and credited Darrow as the sole
inventor. For decades, his tale of inventing the game in his basement remained the official story, while Magie’s name
and her original, anti-capitalist message were left in the shadows. The passage given below is followed by four
summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

(A) Celebrated icons of the gaming industry, Charles Darrow and Parker Brothers, snatched the feminist icon Elizabeth Magie’s
original design and transformed Monopoly into a worldwide phenomenon, while barely acknowledging her.

(B) Parker Brothers’ capitalist intent led to them acquiring from Charles Darrow a simplified version of Elizabeth Magie’s original
game, transforming it into a widespread commercial success while providing her only minimal financial compensation and
granting scant public recognition.

(C) Only one version of Monopoly became famous because of Charles Darrow’s relentless basement work, carefully refining
Elizabeth Magie’s original idea into an engaging and entertaining pastime that he successfully patented and sold, symbolizing
what many regarded as the ultimate triumph of individual ingenuity.

(D) It is ironical that a left-wing feminist lost credit for the Landlord’s Game to an unemployed man, who plagiarised and sold one
version of the twin game to Parker Brothers for a meagre sum, denying her royalties.

11. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.[S]pices were a global commodity centuries before
European voyages. There was a complex chain of relations, yet consumers had little knowledge of producers and vice
versa. Desire for spices helped fuel European colonial empires to create political, military and commercial networks
under a single power. Historians know a fair amount about the supply of spices in Europe during the medieval period –
the origins, methods of transportation, the prices – but less about demand. Why go to such extraordinary efforts to
procure expensive products from exotic lands? Still, demand was great enough to inspire the voyages of Christopher
Columbus and Vasco Da Gama, launching the first fateful wave of European colonialism. . . .So, why were spices so
highly prized in Europe in the centuries from about 1000 to 1500? One widely disseminated explanation for medieval
demand for spices was that they covered the taste of spoiled meat. . . . Medieval purchasers consumed meat much

fresher than what the average city-dweller in the developed world of today has at hand. However, refrigeration was
not available, and some hot spices have been shown to serve as an anti-bacterial agent. Salting, smoking or drying
meat were other means of preservation. Most spices used in cooking began as medical ingredients, and throughout
the Middle Ages spices were used as both medicines and condiments. Above all, medieval recipes involve the
combination of medical and culinary lore in order to balance food's humeral properties and prevent disease. Most
spices were hot and dry and so appropriate in sauces to counteract the moist and wet properties supposedly
possessed by most meat and fish. . . .Where spices came from was known in a vague sense centuries before the
voyages of Columbus. Just how vague may be judged by looking at medieval world maps . . . To the medieval European
imagination, the East was exotic and alluring. Medieval maps often placed India close to the so-called Earthly
Paradise, the Garden of Eden described in the Bible.Geographical knowledge has a lot to do with the perceptions of
spices' relative scarcity and the reasons for their high prices. An example of the varying notions of scarcity is the
conflicting information about how pepper is harvested. As far back as the 7th century Europeans thought that pepper
in India grew on trees "guarded" by serpents that would bite and poison anyone who attempted to gather the fruit.
The only way to harvest pepper was to burn the trees, which would drive the snakes underground. Of course, this bit
of lore would explain the shriveled black peppercorns, but not white, pink or other colors.Spices never had the
enduring allure or power of gold and silver or the commercial potential of new products such as tobacco, indigo or
sugar. But the taste for spices did continue for a while beyond the Middle Ages. As late as the 17th century, the
English and the Dutch were struggling for control of the Spice Islands: Dutch New Amsterdam, or New York, was
exchanged by the British for one of the Moluccan Islands where nutmeg was grown. If a trader brought white
peppercorns from India to medieval Europe, all of the following are unlikely to happen, EXCEPT:

(A) medieval maps would be used as navigational aids.

(B) Europeans would doubt the story of pepper harvesting.

(C) the price of spices would decrease.

(D) pepper would no longer be considered exotic.

12. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.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? The author
mentions all of the following reasons to dismiss concerns about contaminating Mars EXCEPT:

(A) the lack of evidence of living organisms on Mars makes possible contamination from earthly microbes a moot point.

(B) the use of similar probes on astronomical bodies like the moon have had little effect on the environment.

(C) efforts to contain contamination on Mars are likely to be derailed as competitor countries may not follow similar restrictions.

(D) earlier explorations have already contaminated pristine space environments.

13. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.Time and again, whenever a population [of Mexican tetra
fish] was swept into a cave and survived long enough for natural selection to have its way, the eyes disappeared. “But
it’s not that everything has been lost in cavefish . . . Many enhancements have also happened.” . . . Studies have
found that cave-dwelling fish can detect lower levels of amino acids than surface fish can. They also have more
tastebuds and a higher density of sensitive cells alongside their bodies that let them sense water pressure and flow. .
. . Killing the processes that support the formation of the eye is quite literally what happens. Just like non-cave-
dwelling members of the species, all cavefish embryos start making eyes. But after a few hours, cells in the
developing eye start dying, until the entire structure has disappeared. [Developmental biologist Misty] Riddle thinks
this apparent inefficiency may be unavoidable. “The early development of the brain and the eye are completely
intertwined—they happen together,” she says. That means the least disruptive way for eyelessness to evolve may be
to start making an eye and then get rid of it. . . . It’s easy to see why cavefish would be at a disadvantage if they were
to maintain expensive tissues they aren’t using. Since relatively little lives or grows in their caves, the fish are likely
surviving on a meager diet of mostly bat feces and organic waste that washes in during the rainy season. Researchers
keeping cavefish in labs have discovered that, genetically, the creatures are exquisitely adapted to absorbing and
storing nutrients. . . . Fats can be toxic for tissues, [evolutionary physiologist Nicolas] Rohner explains, so they are
stored in fat cells. “But when these cells get too big, they can burst, which is why we often see chronic inflammation
in humans and other animals that have stored a lot of fat in their tissues.” Yet a 2020 study by Rohner, Krishnan and
their colleagues revealed that even very well-fed cavefish had fewer signs of inflammation in their fat tissues than
surface fish do. Even in their sparse cave conditions, wild cavefish can sometimes get very fat, says Riddle. This is
presumably because, whenever food ends up in the cave, the fish eat as much of it as possible, since there may be
nothing else for a long time to come. Intriguingly, Riddle says, their fat is usually bright yellow, because of high levels
of carotenoids, the substance in the carrots that your grandmother used to tell you were good for your…eyes. “The
first thing that came to our mind, of course, was that they were accumulating these because they don’t have eyes,”
says Riddle. In this species, such ideas can be tested: Scientists can cross surface fish (with eyes) and cavefish
(without eyes) and look at what their offspring are like. When that’s done, Riddle says, researchers see no link
between eye presence or size and the accumulation of carotenoids. Some eyeless cavefish had fat that was practically
white, indicating lower carotenoid levels. Instead, Riddle thinks these carotenoids may be another adaptation to
suppress inflammation, which might be important in the wild, as cavefish are likely overeating whenever food arrives.
Which one of the following results for the cross between surface fish (with eyes) and cavefish (without eyes) would
invalidate Riddle’s inference from the experiment?

(A) Some eyeless offspring had white fat.

(B) Some offspring with eyes had yellow fat.

(C) Only eyeless offspring had yellow fat.

(D) Some offspring with eyes had white fat.

14. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.(...) 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, which of the following scenarios would MOST
likely exacerbate the frequency of carnivore-human conflicts?

(A) Unleashing dogs by pet owners in areas with known high concentrations of large carnivores.

(B) Attempting to photograph wild animals from within secured viewing areas in national parks and protected zones.

(C) Addressing the impact of climate change on the availability of resources for wildlife.

(D) Implementing ‘food waste’ management strategies to prevent wild animals being attracted to human food sources.

15. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.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? The
contrasting reactions to the Chinese and Israeli "contaminations" of lunar space

(A) are valid as the contamination of the lunar environment from animal sources is far greater than from plants.

(B) reveal global biases prevalent in attitudes towards different countries.

(C) indicate that national scientists may have different sensitivities to issues of biosphere protection.

(D) are evidence of China's reasonable approach towards space contamination.

16. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. In the summer of 2022, subscribers to the US streaming
service HBO MAX were alarmed to discover that dozens of the platform’s offerings — from the Covid-themed heist
thriller Locked Down to the recent remake of The Witches — had been quietly removed from the service . . . The news
seemed like vindication to those who had long warned that streaming was more about controlling access to the
cultural commons than expanding it, as did reports (since denied by the show’s creators) that Netflix had begun
editing old episodes of Stranger Things to retroactively improve their visual effects. What's less clear is whether the
commonly prescribed cure for these cultural ills — a return to the material pleasures of physical media — is the right
one. While the makers of Blu-ray discs claim they have a shelf life of 100 years, such statistics remain largely
theoretical until they come to pass, and are dependent on storage conditions, not to mention the continued
availability of playback equipment. The humble DVD has already proved far less resilient, with many early releases
already beginning to deteriorate in quality Digital movie purchases provide even less security. Any film “bought” on
iTunes could disappear if you move to another territory with a different rights agreement and try to redownload it. It’s
a bold new frontier in the commodification of art: the birth of the product recall. After a man took to Twitter to
bemoan losing access to Cars 2 after moving from Canada to Australia, Apple clarified that users who downloaded
films to their devices would retain permanent access to those downloads, even if they relocated to a hemisphere
where the [content was] subject to a different set of rights agreements. Thanks to the company’s ironclad digital
rights management technology, however, such files cannot be moved or backed up, locking you into watching with
your Apple account. Anyone who does manage to acquire Digital Rights Management free (DRM-free) copies of their
favourite films must nonetheless grapple with ever-changing file format standards, not to mention data decay — the
gradual process by which electronic information slowly but surely corrupts. Only the regular migration of files from
hard drive to hard drive can delay the inevitable, in a sisyphean battle against the ravages of digital time. In a sense,
none of this is new. Charlie Chaplin burned the negative of his 1926 film A Woman of the Sea as a tax write-off. Many
more films have been lost through accident, negligence or plain indifference. During a heat wave in July 1937, a Fox
film vault in New Jersey burned down, destroying a majority of the silent films produced by the studio. Back then, at
least, cinema was defined by its ephemerality: the sense that a film was as good as gone once it left your local
cinema. Today, with film studios keen to stress the breadth of their back catalogues (or to put in Hollywood terms, the
value of their IPs), audiences may start to wonder why those same studios seem happy to set the vault alight
themselves if it'll help next quarter’s numbers. Which of the following statements is suggested by the sentence “Back
then, at least, cinema was defined by its ephemerality: the sense that a film was as good as gone once it left your
local cinema”?

(A) Today, films are expected to be available for a long time, since they are no longer tied solely to their stay at the local cinema.

(B) Cinema is now no longer as ephemeral as it used to be earlier, because the technology used for creating and preserving films
has improved manifold.

(C) Presently, there is no reason why film studios should remove access to films once they have left the local cinema.

(D) Around a century ago, people were more accepting of not having access to films once they left the local cinema.

17. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.In 1982, a raging controversy broke out over a forest act
drafted by the Government of India. This act sought to strengthen the already extensive powers enjoyed by the forest
bureaucracy in controlling the extraction, disposal and sale of forest produce. It also gave forest officials greater
powers to strictly regulate the entry of any person into reserved forest areas. While forest officials justified the act on
the grounds that it was necessary to stop the continuing deforestation, it was bitterly opposed by representatives of
grassroots organisations, who argued that it was a major violation of the rights of peasants and tribals living in and
around forest areas. . . .The debate over the draft forest act fuelled a larger controversy over the orientation of state
forest policy. It was pointed out, for example, that the draft act was closely modelled on its predecessor, the Forest
Act of 1878. The earlier Act rested on a usurpation of rights of ownership by the colonial state which had little
precedent in precolonial history. It was further argued that the system of forestry introduced by the British—and
continued, with little modification, after 1947—emphasised revenue generation and commercial exploitation, while its
policing orientation excluded villagers who had the most longstanding claim on forest resources. Critics called for a
complete overhaul of forest administration, pressing the government to formulate policy and legislation more
appropriate to present needs. . . .That debate is not over yet. The draft act was shelved, though it has not as yet been
formally withdrawn. Meanwhile, the 1878 Act (as modified by an amendment in 1927) continues to be in operation. In
response to its critics, the government has made some important changes in forest policy, e.g., no longer treating
forests as a source of revenue, and stopping ecologically hazardous practices such as the clearfelling of natural
forests. At the same time, it has shown little inclination to meet the major demand of the critics of forest
policy—namely, abandoning the principle of state monopoly over forest land by handing over areas of degraded
forests to individuals and communities for afforestation.. . . [The] 1878 Forest Act itself was passed only after a bitter
and prolonged debate within the colonial bureaucracy, in which protagonists put forward arguments strikingly similar
to those being advanced today. As is well known, the Indian Forest Department owes its origin to the requirements of
railway companies. The early years of the expansion of the railway network, c. 1853 onwards, led to tremendous
deforestation in peninsular India owing to the railway's requirements of fuelwood and construction timber. Huge
quantities of durable timbers were also needed for use as sleepers across the newly laid tracks. Inexperienced in
forestry, the British called in German experts to commence systematic forest management. The Indian Forest
Department was started in 1864, with Dietrich Brandis, formerly a Lecturer at Bonn, as the first Inspector General of
Forests. The new department needed legislative backing to function effectively, and in the following year, 1865, the
first forest act was passed. . . . According to the passage, which one of the following reforms is yet to happen in
India's forest policies?

(A) Recognising the significance of forests to ecology.

(B) Recognising the state's claim to forest land use.

(C) Involving local people in cultivating forests.

(D) A ban on deforestation.

18. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.Different sciences exhibit different science cultures and
practices. For example, in astronomy, observation – until what is today called the new astronomy – had always been
limited to what could be seen within the limits of optical light. Indeed, until early modernity the limits to optical light
were also limits of what humans could themselves see within their limited and relative perceptual spectrum of human
vision. With early modernity and the invention of lensed optical instruments – telescopes – astronomers could begin to
observe phenomena never seen before. Magnification and resolution began to allow what was previously
imperceptible to be perceived – but within the familiar limits of optical vision. Galileo, having learned of the Dutch
invention of a telescope by Hans Lippershey, went on to build some hundred of his own, improving from the Dutch 3x
to nearly 30x telescopes – which turn out to be the limit of magnificational power without chromatic distortion. And it
was with his own telescopes that he made the observations launching early modern astronomy (phases of Venus,
satellites of Jupiter, etc.). Isaac Newton’s later improvement with reflecting telescopes expanded upon the
magnificational-resolution capacity of optical observation; and, from Newton to the twentieth century, improvement
continued on to the later very large array of light telescopes today – following the usual technological trajectory of
“more-is-better” but still remaining within the limits of the light spectrum. Today’s astronomy has now had the
benefit of some four centuries of optical telescopy. The “new astronomy,” however, opens the full known
electromagnetic spectrum to observation, beginning with the accidental discovery of radio astronomy early in the

twentieth century, and leading today to the diverse variety of EMS telescopes which can explore the range from
gamma to radio waves. Thus, astronomy, now outfitted with new instruments, “smart” adaptive optics, very large
arrays, etc., illustrates one style of instrumentally embodied science – a technoscience. Of course astronomy, with the
very recent exceptions of probes to solar system bodies (Moon, Mars, Venus, asteroids), remains largely a “receptive”
science, dependent upon instrumentation which can detect and receive emissions. Contemporary biology displays a
quite different instrument array and, according to Evelyn Fox-Keller, also a different scientific culture. She cites her
own experience, coming from mathematical physics into microbiology, and takes account of the distinctive
instrumental culture in her Making Sense of Life (2002). Here, particularly with the development of biotechnology,
instrumentation is far more interventional than in the astronomy case. Microscopic instrumentation can be and often
is interventional in style: “gene-splicing” and other techniques of biotechnology, while still in their infancy, are clearly
part of the interventional trajectory of biological instrumentation. Yet, in both disciplines, the sciences involved are
today highly instrumentalized and could not progress successfully without constant improvements upon the
respective instrumental trajectories. So, minimalistically, one may conclude that the sciences are technologically,
instrumentally embodied. But the styles of embodiment differ, and perhaps the last of the scientific disciplines to
move into such technical embodiment is mathematics, which only contemporarily has come to rely more and more
upon the computational machinery now in common use. All of the following statements may be rejected as valid
inferences from the passage EXCEPT:

(A) the advances in telescopy made by Newton with reflecting telescopes allowed early modern astronomers to observe the
phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter.

(B) interventionist instruments, or instruments that intervene directly in scientific inquiry, are different from embodied
instruments, or instruments that embody scientific inquiry.

(C) the author distinguishes between the receptive and interventionist uses of instruments in the sciences by comparing
astronomy and biology, respectively.

(D) Isaac Newton’s experiments with reflecting telescopes were the earliest versions of the “new astronomy” referred to in the
passage.

19. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.Once a society accepts a secular mode of creativity, within
which the creator replaces God, imaginative transactions assume a self-conscious form. The tribal imagination, on the
other hand, is still to a large extent dreamlike and hallucinatory. It admits fusion between various planes of existence
and levels of time in a natural and artless manner. In tribal stories, oceans fly in the sky as birds, mountains swim in
water as fish, animals speak as humans and stars grow like plants. Spatial order and temporal sequence do not
restrict the narrative. This is not to say that tribal creations have no conventions or rules, but simply that they admit
the principle of association between emotion and the narrative motif. Thus stars, seas, mountains, trees, men and
animals can be angry, sad or happy.It might be said that tribal artists work more on the basis of their racial and
sensory memory than on the basis of a cultivated imagination. In order to understand this distinction, we must
understand the difference between imagination and memory. In the animate world, consciousness meets two
immediate material realities: space and time. We put meaning into space by perceiving it in terms of images. The
image-making faculty is a genetic gift to the human mind—this power of imagination helps us understand the space
that envelops us. With regard to time, we make connections with the help of memory; one remembers being the same
person today as one was yesterday.The tribal mind has a more acute sense of time than the sense of space.
Somewhere along the history of human civilization, tribal communities seem to have realized that domination over
territorial space was not their lot. Thus, they seem to have turned almost obsessively to gaining domination over time.
This urge is substantiated in their ritual of conversing with their dead ancestors: year after year, tribals in many parts
of India worship terracotta or carved-wood objects representing their ancestors, aspiring to enter a trance in which
they can converse with the dead. Over the centuries, an amazingly sharp memory has helped tribals classify material
and natural objects into a highly complex system of knowledge. . . .One of the main characteristics of the tribal arts is
their distinct manner of constructing space and imagery, which might be described as 'hallucinatory'. In both oral and
visual forms of representation, tribal artists seem to interpret verbal or pictorial space as demarcated by an extremely
flexible 'frame'. The boundaries between art and non-art become almost invisible. A tribal epic can begin its narration
from a trivial everyday event; tribal paintings merge with living space as if the two were one and the same. And within
the narrative itself, or within the painted imagery, there is no deliberate attempt to follow a sequence. The episodes

retold and the images created take on the apparently chaotic shapes of dreams. In a way, the syntax of language and
the grammar of painting are the same, as if literature were painted words and painting were a song of images. All of
the following, if true, would weaken the passage's claims about the hallucinatory tribal imagination EXCEPT that:

(A) tribal stories depict the natural world in accordance with rational scientific knowledge.

(B) tribal narratives exhibit a chronological beginning, middle, and end.

(C) shamanic rituals involving conversing with the dead often feature in tribal stories.

(D) tribal art excludes the depiction of the mundane reality of everyday life and objects.

20. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.This book takes the position that setting in literature is
more than just backdrop, that important insight into literary texts can be made by paying close attention to how
authors craft place, as well as to how place functions in a narrative. The authors included in this reference work
engage deeply with either real or imagined geographies. They care about how human decisions have shaped
landscapes and how landscapes have shaped human practices and values. Some of the best writing is highly vivid,
employing the language of the senses because this is the primary means through which humans know physical space.
Literature can offer valuable perspectives on physical and cultural geography. Unlike scientific reports, a literary
narrative can provide the emotional component missing from the scientific record. In human experience, geographical
places have a spiritual or emotional component in addition to and as part of a physical layout and topography. This
emotional component, although subjective, is no less “real” than a surveyor’s map. Human consciousness of place is
experienced in a multi-modal manner. Histories of places live on in many forms, one of which is the human memory or
imagination. Both real and imaginary landscapes provide insight into the human experience of place. The pursuit of
such a topic speaks to the valuable knowledge produced from bridging disciplines and combining material from both
the arts and the sciences to better understand the human condition. The perspectives that most concern cultural
geographers are often those regarding movement and migration, cultivation of natural resources, and organization of
space. The latter two reflect concerns of the built environment, a topic shared with the field of architectural study.
Many of these concerns are also reflected in work sociologists do. Scholars from literary studies can contribute an
aesthetic dimension to what might otherwise be a purely ideological approach. Literature can bring together material
that spans different branches of science. For example, a literary description of place may involve not only the
environment and geography but the noises and quality of light, or how people from different races or classes can
experience the same place in different ways linked to those racial or class disparities. Literary texts can also account
for the way in which absence—of other people, animals, and so on—affects a human observer or inhabitant. Both
literary and scientific approaches to place are necessary, working in unison, to achieve a complete record of an
environment. It is important to note that the interdisciplinary nature of this work teaches us that landscapes are not
static, that they are not unchanged by human culture. At least part of their identity derives from the people who
inhabit them and from the way space can alter and inspire human perspective. The intersection of scientific and
literary expression that happens in the study of literary geography is of prime importance due to the complexity of the
personal and political ways that humans experience place. Which one of the following is not true of the argument in
the second paragraph?

(A) The emotional and spiritual experience of a place can replace a surveyor’s map.

(B) Analysing the literary descriptions of a place can give us a sense of how people relate emotionally to it.

(C) The spiritual experience of a place may be considered as real as the physical experience of it.

(D) Literary accounts of places can be filled with histories, manifested as memory or imagination.

21. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.Imagine a world in which artificial intelligence is entrusted
with the highest moral responsibilities: sentencing criminals, allocating medical resources, and even mediating
conflicts between nations. This might seem like the pinnacle of human progress: an entity unburdened by emotion,
prejudice or inconsistency, making ethical decisions with impeccable precision. . . . Yet beneath this vision of an
idealised moral arbiter lies a fundamental question: can a machine understand morality as humans do, or is it confined
to a simulacrum of ethical reasoning? AI might replicate human decisions without improving on them, carrying forward
the same biases, blind spots and cultural distortions from human moral judgment. In trying to emulate us, it might
only reproduce our limitations, not transcend them. But there is a deeper concern. Moral judgment draws on intuition,

historical awareness and context - qualities that resist formalisation. Ethics may be so embedded in lived experience
that any attempt to encode it into formal structures risks flattening its most essential features. If so, AI would not
merely reflect human shortcomings; it would strip morality of the very depth that makes ethical reflection possible in
the first place.Still, many have tried to formalise ethics, by treating certain moral claims not as conclusions, but as
starting points. A classic example comes from utilitarianism, which often takes as a foundational axiom the principle
that one should act to maximise overall wellbeing. From this, more specific principles can be derived, for example,
that it is right to benefit the greatest number, or that actions should be judged by their consequences for total
happiness. As computational resources increase, AI becomes increasingly well-suited to the task of starting from fixed
ethical assumptions and reasoning through their implications in complex situations.But what, exactly, does it mean to
formalise something like ethics? The question is easier to grasp by looking at fields in which formal systems have long
played a central role. Physics, for instance, has relied on formalisation for centuries. There is no single physical theory
that explains everything. Instead, we have many physical theories, each designed to describe specific aspects of the
Universe: from the behaviour of quarks and electrons to the motion of galaxies. These theories often diverge.
Aristotelian physics, for instance, explained falling objects in terms of natural motion toward Earth's centre;
Newtonian mechanics replaced this with a universal force of gravity. These explanations are not just different; they
are incompatible. Yet both share a common structure: they begin with basic postulates - assumptions about motion,
force or mass - and derive increasingly complex consequences. . . .Ethical theories have a similar structure. Like
physical theories, they attempt to describe a domain - in this case, the moral landscape. They aim to answer questions
about which actions are right or wrong, and why. These theories also diverge and, even when they recommend similar
actions, such as giving to charity, they justify them in different ways. Ethical theories also often begin with a small set
of foundational principles or claims, from which they reason about more complex moral problems. All of the following
can reasonably be inferred from the passage EXCEPT:

(A) with fixed moral starting points and expanding computational resources, the argument forecasts convergence on one ethical
system and treats contextual judgement as unnecessary once formal reasoning scales across domains and cultures.

(B) by analogy with physics, compact postulates can yield broad predictions across incompatible theories and ethics can likewise
share structure while continuing to diverge rather than close on a single comprehensive framework.

(C) the appeal of an AI judge rests on immunity to bribery, partiality, and fatigue; yet the text questions whether procedural
cleanliness amounts to moral understanding without lived context and interpretive depth.

(D) encoding ethics into fixed structures risks stripping away intuition, history, and context and, if that occurs, the depth that
enables reflective judgement disappears. So, machines would mirror our limits rather than exceed them.

22. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.Fears of artificial intelligence (AI) have haunted humanity
since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill,
enslave or replace people. But over the past couple of years new AI tools have emerged that threaten the survival of
human civilisation from an unexpected direction. AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate
language, whether with words, sounds or images. AI has thereby hacked the operating system of our
civilisation.Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren't inscribed in
our DNA. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren't physical
realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures….What would
happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing
melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new AI tools,
they are often drawn to examples like school children using AI to write their essays. What will happen to the school
system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the
next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of AI tools that can be made to mass-produce
political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults…Through its mastery of language, AI could even form
intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although
there is no indication that AI has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans it is
enough if the AI can make them feel emotionally attached to it….What will happen to the course of history when AI
takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press
and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. AI is
fundamentally different. AI can create completely new ideas, completely new culture….Of course, the new power of AI

could be used for good purposes as well. I won't dwell on this, because the people who develop AI talk about it
enough….We can still regulate the new AI tools, but we must act quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful
nukes, AI can make exponentially more powerful AI.… Unregulated AI deployments would create social chaos, which
would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language.
When AI hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying
democracy….And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for AI to disclose that it is an AI. If I am
having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an AI—that's the end of democracy.
This text has been generated by a human. Or has it? Lyric poetry is a genre of private meditation rather than public
commitment. The impulse in Marxism toward changing a society deemed unacceptable in its basic design would seem
to place demands on lyric poetry that such poetry, with its tendency toward the personal, the small scale, and the
idiosyncratic, could never answer. There is within Marxism, however, also a strand of thought that would locate in lyric
poetry alternative modes of perception and description that call forth a vision of worlds at odds with a repressive
reality or that draw attention to the workings of ideology within the hegemonic culture. The poetic imagination may
indeed deflect larger social concerns, but it may also be implicitly critical and utopian.

(A) Marxism has internal contradictions due to which one strand of Marxism sees no merit in lyric poetry while another
appreciates the alternative modes of perception in poetry.

(B) The focus of lyric poetry as personal may not seem compatible with Marxism. However, it is possible to envisage lyric poetry
as a symbol of resistance against an oppressive culture.

(C) The focus of lyric poetry is largely personal while that of Marxism is bringing change in society. Unless the difference is
resolved, poetry will remain largely utopian.

(D) Marxism makes unreasonable demands on lyric poetry. However, lyric poetry has its own merits that are largely ignored by
Marxism due to its personal nature.

23. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.The history of any major technological or industrial
advance is inevitably shadowed by a less predictable history of unintended consequences and secondary effects —
what economists sometimes call “externalities.” Sometimes those consequences are innocuous ones, or even
beneficial. Gutenberg invents the printing press, and literacy rates rise, which causes a significant part of the reading
public to require spectacles for the first time, which creates a surge of investment in lens-making across Europe,
which leads to the invention of the telescope and the microscope.Oftentimes the secondary effects seem to belong to
an entirely different sphere of society. When Willis Carrier hit upon the idea of air-conditioning, the technology was
primarily intended for industrial use: ensuring cool, dry air for factories that required low-humidity environments.
But...it touched off one of the largest migrations in the history of the United States, enabling the rise of metropolitan
areas like Phoenix and Las Vegas that barely existed when Carrier first started tinkering with the idea in the early
1900s.Sometimes the unintended consequence comes about when consumers use an invention in a surprising way.
Edison famously thought his phonograph, which he sometimes called “the talking machine,” would primarily be used
to take dictation....But then later innovators... discovered a much larger audience willing to pay for musical recordings
made on descendants of Edison's original invention. In other cases, the original innovation comes into the world
disguised as a plaything...the way the animatronic dolls of the mid-1700s inspired Jacquard to invent the first
“programmable” loom and Charles Babbage to invent the first machine that fit the modern definition of a computer,
setting the stage for the revolution in programmable technology that would transform the 21st century in countless
ways.We live under the gathering storm of modern history’s most momentous unintended consequence....carbon-
based climate change. Imagine the vast sweep of inventors whose ideas started the Industrial Revolution, all the
entrepreneurs and scientists and hobbyists who had a hand in bringing it about. Line up a thousand of them and ask
them all what they had been hoping to do with their work. Not one would say that their intent had been to deposit
enough carbon in the atmosphere to create a greenhouse effect that trapped heat at the surface of the planet. And
yet here we are.Ethyl (leaded fuel) and Freon belonged to the same general class of secondary effect: innovations
whose unintended consequences stem from some kind of waste by-product that they emit. But the potential health
threats of Ethyl (unleaded fuel) were visible in the 1920s, unlike, say, the long-term effects of atmospheric carbon
build up in the early days of the Industrial Revolution....Indeed, it is reasonable to see CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) as a
forerunner of the kind of threat we will most likely face in the coming decades, as it becomes increasingly possible for
individuals or small groups to create new scientific advances — through chemistry or biotechnology or materials

science — setting off unintended consequences that reverberate on a global scale. Which of the following best
conveys the main point of the first paragraph?

(A) The full impact of technological advances cannot be estimated in the short run as the ripple effects often extend far beyond
the original intent.

(B) It is important to judge an invention not by its immediate outcomes, but by the holistic impact of its secondary effects.

(C) The secondary effects of most major technological advances in the past, especially if they were unintended, have turned out
to be beneficial.

(D) The entire impact of a technological advance should be evaluated by the boost its secondary effects gives to generating
further technological advances.

24. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.Languages become endangered and die out for many
reasons. Sadly, the physical annihilation of communities of native speakers of a language is all too often the cause of
language extinction. In North America, European colonists brought death and destruction to many Native American
communities. This was followed by US federal policies restricting the use of indigenous languages, including the
removal of native children from their communities to federal boarding schools where native languages and cultural
practices were prohibited. As many as 75 percent of the languages spoken in the territories that became the United
States have gone extinct, with slightly better language survival rates in Central and South America . ..Even without
physical annihilation and prohibitions against language use, the language of the "dominant" cultures may drive other
languages into extinction; young people see education, jobs, culture and technology associated with the dominant
language and focus their attention on that language. The largest language "killers" are English, Spanish, Portuguese,
French, Russian, Hindi, and Chinese, all of which have privileged status as dominant languages threatening minority
languages.When we lose a language, we lose the worldview, culture and knowledge of the people who spoke it,
constituting a loss to all humanity. People around the world live in direct contact with their native environment, their
habitat. When the language they speak goes extinct, the rest of humanity loses their knowledge of that environment,
their wisdom about the relationship between local plants and illness, their philosophical and religious beliefs as well
as their native cultural expression (in music, visual art and poetry) that has enriched both the speakers of that
language and others who would have encountered that culture. . . .As educators deeply immersed in the liberal arts,
we believe that educating students broadly in all facets of language and culture . . . yields immense rewards. Some
individuals educated in the liberal arts tradition will pursue advanced study in linguistics and become actively
engaged in language preservation, setting out for the Amazon, for example, with video recording equipment to
interview the last surviving elders in a community to record and document a language spoken by no
children.Certainly, though, the vast majority of students will not pursue this kind of activity. For these students, a
liberal arts education is absolutely critical from the twin perspectives of language extinction and global citizenship.
When students study languages other than their own, they are sensitized to the existence of different cultural
perspectives and practices. With such an education, students are more likely to be able to articulate insights into their
own cultural biases, be more empathetic to individuals of other cultures, communicate successfully across linguistic
and cultural differences, consider and resolve questions in a way that reflects multiple cultural perspectives, and,
ultimately extend support to people, programs, practices, and policies that support the preservation of endangered
languages.There is ample evidence that such preservation can work in languages spiraling toward extinction. For
example, Navajo, Cree and Inuit communities have established schools in which these languages are the language of
instruction and the number of speakers of each has increased. 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?

(A) 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.

(B) 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.

(C) 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.

(D) 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.

DATA INTERPRETATION & LOGICAL REASONING

25. There are six spherical balls, B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, and B6, and four circular hoops H1, H2, H3, and H4. Each ball was
tested on each hoop once, by attempting to pass the ball through the hoop. If the diameter of a ball is not larger than
the diameter of the hoop, the ball passes through the hoop and makes a “ping”. Any ball having a diameter larger
than that of the hoop gets stuck on that hoop and does not make a ping. The following additional information is
known: B1 and B6 each made a ping on H4, but B5 did not. B4 made a ping on H3, but B1 did not. All balls, except B3,
made pings on H1. None of the balls, except B2, made a ping on H2. Which of the following statements about the
relative sizes of the hoops is true?

(A) H2 H4 H3 H1

(B) H1 H4 H3 H2

(C) H2 H3 H4 H1

(D) H1 H3 H4 H2

26. The following charts depict details of research papers written by four authors, Arman, Brajen, Chintan, and Devon.
The papers were of four types, single-author, two-author, three-author, and four-author, that is, written by one, two,
three, or all four of these authors, respectively. No other authors were involved in writing these papers. Number of
papers by each author and Number of papers by type. The following additional facts are known. Each of the authors
wrote at least one of each of the four types of papers. The four authors wrote different numbers of single-author
papers. Both Chintan and Devon wrote more three-author papers than Brajen. The number of single-author and two-

author papers written by Brajen were the same. Which of

the following statements is/are NECESSARILY true? i. Arman wrote three-author papers only with Chintan and Devon.
ii. Brajen wrote three-author papers only with Chintan and Devon.

(A) Neither i or ii

(B) Both i and ii

(C) Only ii

(D) Only i

27. Alia, Badal, Clive, Dilshan, and Ehsaan played a game in which each asks a unique question to all the others and
they respond by tapping their feet, either once or twice or thrice. One tap means "Yes", two taps mean "No", and three
taps mean "Maybe". A total of 40 taps were heard across the five questions. Each question received at least one "Yes",
one "No", and one "Maybe." The following information is known. Alia tapped a total of 6 times and received 9 taps to
her question. She responded "Yes" to the questions asked by both Clive and Dilshan. Dilshan and Ehsaan tapped a
total of 11 and 9 times respectively. Dilshan responded "No" to Badal. Badal, Dilshan, and Ehsaan received equal
number of taps to their respective questions. No one responded "Yes" more than twice. No one's answer to Alia's
question matched the answer that Alia gave to that person's question. This was also true for Ehsaan. Clive tapped
more times in total than Badal. What was Clive's response to Ehsaan's question?

(A) No

(B) Maybe

(C) Cannot be determined

(D) Yes

28. Out of 10 countries — Country 1 through Country 10 — Country 9 has the highest gross domestic product (GDP),
and Country 10 has the highest GDP per capita. GDP per capita is the GDP of a country divided by its population. The
table below provides the following data about Country 1 through Country 8 for the year 2024. Column 1 gives the
country's identity. Column 2 gives the country’s GDP as a fraction of the GDP of Country 9. Column 3 gives the
country’s GDP per capita as a fraction of the GDP per capita of Country 10. Column 4 gives the country’s annual GDP
growth rate. Column 5 gives the country’s annual population growth rate. CountryGDPGDP per capitaGDP growth
ratePopulation growth rate Country 10.150.410.2%–0.12% Country 20.140.250.9%–0.41% Country 30.130.026.5%0.70%
Country 40.120.380.5%0.49% Country 50.100.360.7%0.31% Country 60.080.083.2%0.61% Country
70.080.300.7%–0.11% Country 80.070.411.2%0.71% Assume that the GDP growth rates and population growth rates of
the countries will remain constant for the next three years. Which one among the countries 1 through 8, has the
smallest population in 2024?

(A) Country 8

(B) Country 5

(C) Country 3

(D) Country 7

29. The game of QUIET is played between two teams. Six teams, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, play in a QUIET
tournament. These teams are divided equally into two groups. In the tournament, each team plays every other team in
the same group only once, and each team in the other group exactly twice. The tournament has several rounds, each
of which consists of a few games. Every team plays exactly one game in each round. The following additional facts are
known about the schedule of games in the tournament. Each team played against a team from the other group in
Round 8. In Round 4 and Round 7, the match-ups, that is the pair of teams playing against each other, were identical.
In Round 5 and Round 8, the match-ups were identical. Team 4 played Team 6 in both Round 1 and Round 2. Team 1
played Team 5 ONLY once and that was in Round 2. Team 3 played Team 4 in Round 3. Team 1 played Team 6 in Round
6. In Round 8, Team 3 played Team 6, while Team 2 played Team 5. Which team among the teams numbered 2, 3, 4,
and 5 was not part of the same group?

(A) 4

(B) 5

(C) 3

(D) 2

30. Two students, Amiya and Ramya are the only candidates in an election for the position of class representative.
Students will vote based on the intensity level of Amiya’s and Ramya’s campaigns and the type of campaigns they run.
Each campaign is said to have a level of 1 if it is a staid campaign and a level of 2 if it is a vigorous campaign.
Campaigns can be of two types, they can either focus on issues, or on attacking the other candidate. If Amiya and
Ramya both run campaigns focusing on issues, then The percentage of students voting in the election will be 20 times
the sum of the levels of campaigning of the two students. For example, if Amiya and Ramya both run vigorous
campaigns, then 20 x (2+2)%, that is, 80% of the students will vote in the election. Among voting students, the
percentage of votes for each candidate will be proportional to the levels of their campaigns. For example, if Amiya
runs a staid (i.e., level 1) campaign while Ramya runs a vigorous (i.e., level 2) campaign, then Amiya will receive 1/3 of
the votes cast, and Ramya will receive the other 2/3. The above-mentioned percentages change as follows if at least
one of them runs a campaign attacking their opponent. If Amiya runs a campaign attacking Ramya and Ramya runs a
campaign focusing on issues, then 10% of the students who would have otherwise voted for Amiya will vote for
Ramya, and another 10% who would have otherwise voted for Amiya, will not vote at all. If Ramya runs a campaign
attacking Amiya and Amiya runs a campaign focusing on issues, then 20% of the students who would have otherwise
voted for Ramya will vote for Amiya, and another 5% who would have otherwise voted for Ramya, will not vote at all. If

both run campaigns attacking each other, then 10% of the students who would have otherwise voted for them had
they run campaigns focusing on issues, will not vote at all. What is the maximum possible voting margin with which
one of the candidates can win?

(A) 20%

(B) 29%

(C) 26%

(D) 28%

31. Ananya Raga, Bhaskar Tala, Charu Veena, and Devendra Sur are four musicians. Each of them started and
completed their training as students under each of three Gurus — Pandit Meghnath, Ustad Samiran, and Acharya
Raghunath between 2013 and 2024, including both the years. Each Guru trains any student for consecutive years only,
for a span of 2, 3, or 4 years, with each Guru having a different span. During some of these years, a student may not
have trained under these Gurus; however, they never trained under multiple Gurus in the same year. In none of these
years, any of these Gurus trained more than two of these students at the same time. When two students train under
the same Guru at the same time, they are referred to as Gurubhai, irrespective of their gender. The following
additional facts are known. Ustad Samiran never trained more than one of these students in the same year. Acharya
Raghunath did not train any of these students during 2015-2018, as well as during 2021-24. Ananya and Devendra
were never Gurubhai; neither were Bhaskar and Charu. All other pairs of musicians were Gurubhai for exactly 2 years.
In 2013, Ananya and Bhaskar started their trainings under Pandit Meghnath and under Ustad Samiran, respectively. In
which of the following years were Ananya and Bhaskar Gurubhai?

(A) 2020

(B) 2018

(C) 2021

(D) 2014

32. Ananya Raga, Bhaskar Tala, Charu Veena, and Devendra Sur are four musicians. Each of them started and
completed their training as students under each of three Gurus — Pandit Meghnath, Ustad Samiran, and Acharya
Raghunath between 2013 and 2024, including both the years. Each Guru trains any student for consecutive years only,
for a span of 2, 3, or 4 years, with each Guru having a different span. During some of these years, a student may not
have trained under these Gurus; however, they never trained under multiple Gurus in the same year. In none of these
years, any of these Gurus trained more than two of these students at the same time. When two students train under
the same Guru at the same time, they are referred to as Gurubhai, irrespective of their gender. The following
additional facts are known. Ustad Samiran never trained more than one of these students in the same year. Acharya
Raghunath did not train any of these students during 2015-2018, as well as during 2021-24. Ananya and Devendra
were never Gurubhai; neither were Bhaskar and Charu. All other pairs of musicians were Gurubhai for exactly 2 years.
In 2013, Ananya and Bhaskar started their trainings under Pandit Meghnath and under Ustad Samiran, respectively.
Which of the following statements is TRUE?

(A) Ananya was training under Ustad Samiran in 2015.

(B) Charu was training under Ustad Samiran in 2019.

(C) Ananya was training under Ustad Samiran in 2018.

(D) Charu was training under Ustad Samiran in 2018.

33. Alia, Badal, Clive, Dilshan, and Ehsaan played a game in which each asks a unique question to all the others and
they respond by tapping their feet, either once or twice or thrice. One tap means "Yes", two taps mean "No", and three
taps mean "Maybe". A total of 40 taps were heard across the five questions. Each question received at least one "Yes",
one "No", and one "Maybe." The following information is known. Alia tapped a total of 6 times and received 9 taps to
her question. She responded "Yes" to the questions asked by both Clive and Dilshan. Dilshan and Ehsaan tapped a
total of 11 and 9 times respectively. Dilshan responded "No" to Badal. Badal, Dilshan, and Ehsaan received equal
number of taps to their respective questions. No one responded "Yes" more than twice. No one's answer to Alia's

question matched the answer that Alia gave to that person's question. This was also true for Ehsaan. Clive tapped
more times in total than Badal. Which two people tapped an equal number of times in total?

(A) Alia and Badal

(B) Clive and Ehsaan

(C) Dilshan and Clive

(D) Badal and Dilshan

34. There are six spherical balls, B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, and B6, and four circular hoops H1, H2, H3, and H4. Each ball was
tested on each hoop once, by attempting to pass the ball through the hoop. If the diameter of a ball is not larger than
the diameter of the hoop, the ball passes through the hoop and makes a “ping”. Any ball having a diameter larger
than that of the hoop gets stuck on that hoop and does not make a ping. The following additional information is
known: B1 and B6 each made a ping on H4, but B5 did not. B4 made a ping on H3, but B1 did not. All balls, except B3,
made pings on H1. None of the balls, except B2, made a ping on H2. What BEST can be said about the total number of
pings from all the tests undertaken?

(A) 13 or 14

(B) 12 or 13

(C) At least 9

(D) 12 or 13 or 14

35. 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. 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. Dolly and Falguni were the only employees who
got the same rating across all the quarters. 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.

(A) Both I and II

(B) Neither I nor II

(C) Only I

(D) Only II

36. The two most populous cities and the non-urban region (NUR) of each of three states, Whimshire, Fogglia, and
Humbleset, are assigned Pollution Measures (PMs). These nine PMs are all distinct multiples of 10, ranging from 10 to
90. The six cities in increasing order of their PMs are: Blusterburg, Noodleton, Splutterville, Quackford, Mumpypore,
Zingaloo. The Pollution Index (PI) of a state is a weighted average of the PMs of its NUR and cities, with a weight of
50% for the NUR, and 25% each for its two cities. There is only one pair of an NUR and a city (considering all cities and
all NURs) where the PM of the NUR is greater than that of the city. That NUR and the city both belong to Humbleset.
The PIs of all three states are distinct integers, with Humbleset and Fogglia having the highest and the lowest PI
respectively. Which pair of cities definitely belong to the same state?

(A) Splutterville, Quackford

(B) Mumpypore, Zingaloo

(C) Noodleton, Quackford

(D) Blusterburg, Mumpypore

37. A round table has seven chairs around it. The chairs are numbered 1 through 7 in a clockwise direction. Four
friends, Aslam, Bashir, Chhavi, and Davies, sit on four of the chairs. In the starting position, Aslam and Chhavi are
sitting next to each other, while for Bashir as well as Davies, there are empty chairs on either side of the chairs that
are sitting on. The friends take turns moving either clockwise or counterclockwise from their chair. The friend who has
to move in a turn occupies the first empty chair in whichever direction (s)he chooses to move. Aslam moves first (Turn
1), followed by Bashir, Chhavi, and Davies (Turns 2, 3, and 4, respectively). Then Aslam moves again followed by
Bashir, and Chhavi (Turns 5, 6, and 7, respectively). The following information is known. The four friends occupy
adjacent chairs only at the end of Turn 2 and Turn 6. Davies occupies Chair 2 after Turn 1 and Chair 4 after Turn 5, and
Chhavi occupies Chair 7 after Turn 2. Which of the chairs are occupied at the end of Turn 6?

(A) Chairs numbered 4, 5, 6, and 7

(B) Chairs numbered 2, 3, 4, and 5

(C) Chairs numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4

(D) Chairs numbered 1, 2, 6, and 7

38. Over the top (OTT) subscribers of a platform are segregated into three categories: i) Kid, ii) Elder, and iii) Others.
Some of the subscribers used one app and the others used multiple apps to access the platform. The figure below
shows the percentage of the total number of subscribers in 2023 and 2024 who belong to the ‘Kid’ and ‘Elder’
categories. Percentage of total subscribers in the ‘Kid’ and ‘Elder’ categories, 2023 vs 2024. The following additional
facts are known about the numbers of subscribers. The total number of subscribers increased by 10% from 2023 to
2024. In 2024, 1/2 of the subscribers from the ‘Kid’ category and 2/3 of the subscribers from the ‘Elder’ category use
one app. In 2023, the number of subscribers from the ‘Kid’ category who used multiple apps was the same as the
number of subscribers from the ‘Elder’ category who used one app. 10,000 subscribers from the ‘Kid’ category used
one app and 15,000 subscribers from the ‘Elder’ category used multiple apps in 2023.

What was the percentage increase in the number of subscribers in the

‘Elder’ category from 2023 to 2024?

(A) 50%

(B) 65%

(C) 60%

(D) 40%

39. Six web surfers M, N, O, P, X, and Y each had 30 stars which they distributed among four bloggers A, B, C, and D.
The number of stars received by A and B from the six web surfers is shown in the figure below. No. of stars received
by Bloggers A and B from surfers M, N, O, P, X, Y The following additional facts are known regarding the number of
stars received by the bloggers from the surfers. The numbers of stars received by the bloggers from the surfers were
all multiples of 5 (including Q). The total numbers of stars received by the bloggers were the same. Each blogger
received a different number of stars from M. Two surfers gave all their stars to a single blogger. D received more stars

than C from Y. What was the number of stars received by D from Y?

(A) 10

(B) 0

(C) 5

(D) cannot be determined

40. An online e-commerce firm receives daily integer product ratings from 1 through 5 given by buyers. The daily
average is the average of the ratings given on that day. The cumulative average is the average of all ratings given on
or before that day. The rating system began on Day 1, and the cumulative averages were 3 and 3.1 at the end of Day 1
and Day 2, respectively. The distribution of ratings on Day 2 is given in the figure below. Distribution of Ratings on
Day 2 (number of buyers by rating). The following information is known about ratings on Day 3. 100 buyers gave
product ratings on Day 3. The modes of the product ratings were 4 and 5. The numbers of buyers giving each product
rating are non-zero multiples of 10. The same number of buyers gave product ratings of 1 and 2, and that number is

half the number of buyers who gave a rating of 3. Which of the following is

true about the cumulative average ratings of Day 2 and Day 3?

(A) The cumulative average of Day 3 decreased from Day 2.

(B) The cumulative average of Day 3 increased by more than 8% from Day 2.

(C) The cumulative average of Day 3 increased by less than 5% from Day 2.

(D) The cumulative average of Day 3 increased by a percentage between 5% and 8% from Day 2.

41. The chart below shows the price data for seven shares– A, B, C, D, E, F, and G as a candlestick plot for a particular
day. The vertical axis shows the price of the share in rupees. A share whose closing price (price at the end of the day)
is more than its opening price (price at the start of the day) is called a bullish share; otherwise, it is called a bearish
share. All bullish and bearish shares are shown in green and red colour respectively. Candlestick plot of daily share

prices for shares A–G, with legend Daily Share Price Variability

(SPV) is defined as (Day’s high price - Day’s low price) /(Average of the opening and closing prices during the day).
Which among the shares A, C, D and F had the highest SPV on that day?

(A) A

(B) C

(C) F

(D) D

42. Two students, Amiya and Ramya are the only candidates in an election for the position of class representative.
Students will vote based on the intensity level of Amiya’s and Ramya’s campaigns and the type of campaigns they run.
Each campaign is said to have a level of 1 if it is a staid campaign and a level of 2 if it is a vigorous campaign.
Campaigns can be of two types, they can either focus on issues, or on attacking the other candidate. If Amiya and
Ramya both run campaigns focusing on issues, then The percentage of students voting in the election will be 20 times
the sum of the levels of campaigning of the two students. For example, if Amiya and Ramya both run vigorous

campaigns, then 20 x (2+2)%, that is, 80% of the students will vote in the election. Among voting students, the
percentage of votes for each candidate will be proportional to the levels of their campaigns. For example, if Amiya
runs a staid (i.e., level 1) campaign while Ramya runs a vigorous (i.e., level 2) campaign, then Amiya will receive 1/3 of
the votes cast, and Ramya will receive the other 2/3. The above-mentioned percentages change as follows if at least
one of them runs a campaign attacking their opponent. If Amiya runs a campaign attacking Ramya and Ramya runs a
campaign focusing on issues, then 10% of the students who would have otherwise voted for Amiya will vote for
Ramya, and another 10% who would have otherwise voted for Amiya, will not vote at all. If Ramya runs a campaign
attacking Amiya and Amiya runs a campaign focusing on issues, then 20% of the students who would have otherwise
voted for Ramya will vote for Amiya, and another 5% who would have otherwise voted for Ramya, will not vote at all. If
both run campaigns attacking each other, then 10% of the students who would have otherwise voted for them had
they run campaigns focusing on issues, will not vote at all. What is the minimum percentage of students who will vote
in the election?

(A) 32%

(B) 40%

(C) 36%

(D) 38%

43. Out of 10 countries — Country 1 through Country 10 — Country 9 has the highest gross domestic product (GDP),
and Country 10 has the highest GDP per capita. GDP per capita is the GDP of a country divided by its population. The
table below provides the following data about Country 1 through Country 8 for the year 2024. Column 1 gives the
country's identity. Column 2 gives the country’s GDP as a fraction of the GDP of Country 9. Column 3 gives the
country’s GDP per capita as a fraction of the GDP per capita of Country 10. Column 4 gives the country’s annual GDP
growth rate. Column 5 gives the country’s annual population growth rate. CountryGDPGDP per capitaGDP growth
ratePopulation growth rate Country 10.150.410.2%–0.12% Country 20.140.250.9%–0.41% Country 30.130.026.5%0.70%
Country 40.120.380.5%0.49% Country 50.100.360.7%0.31% Country 60.080.083.2%0.61% Country
70.080.300.7%–0.11% Country 80.070.411.2%0.71% Assume that the GDP growth rates and population growth rates of
the countries will remain constant for the next three years. Which one among the countries 1, 4, 5, and 7 will have the
largest population in 2027?

(A) Country 7

(B) Country 4

(C) Country 5

(D) Country 1

44. Seven children, Aarav, Bina, Chirag, Diya, Eshan, Farhan, and Gaurav, are sitting in a circle facing inside (not
necessarily in the same order) and playing a game of 'Passing the Buck'. The game is played over 10 rounds. In each
round, the child holding the Buck must pass it directly to a child sitting in one of the following positions: Immediately
to the left; Immediate to the right; Second to the left; or Second to the right. The game starts with Bina passing the
Buck and ends with Chirag receiving the Buck. The table below provides some information about the pass types and
the child receiving the Buck. Some information is missing and labelled as '?'. RoundPass TypeReceived by
1Immediately to the leftAarav 2Second to the right? 3Immediately to the rightDiya 4?? 5?Aarav 6Second to the left?
7Immediately to the leftGaurav 8Immediately to the left? 9?Farhan 10?Chirag For which of the following pass types
can the total number of occurrences be uniquely determined?

(A) Immediately to the left

(B) Second to the right

(C) Immediately to the right

(D) Second to the left

QUANTITATIVE APTITUDE

45. If (a + b√(3))2 = 52 + 30√(3) , where a and b are 46. In September, the incomes of Kamal, Amal and Vimal
natural numbers, then a + b equals are in the ratio 8 : 6 : 5 . They rent a house together, and
Kamal pays 15%, Amal pays 12% and Vimal pays 18% of
(A) 8
their respective incomes to cover the total house rent in
(B) 10
that month. In October, the house rent remains
(C) 7 unchanged while their incomes increase by 10%, 12% and
(D) 9 15%, respectively. In October, the percentage of their
total income that will be paid as house rent, is nearest to

(A) 13.26

(B) 14.84

(C) 12.75

(D) 15.18

47. In a ABC , points D and E are on the sides BC and AC , 48. In a class of 150 students, 75 students chose physics,
respectively. BE and AD intersect at point T such that 111 students chose mathematics and 40 students chose
AD:AT = 4:3 , and BE:BT = 5:4 . Point F lies on AC such chemistry. All students chose at least one of the three
that DF is parallel to BE . Then, BD:CD is subjects and at least one student chose all three
subjects. The number of students who chose both physics
(A) 7:4
and chemistry is equal to the number of students who
(B) 15:4
chose both chemistry and mathematics, and this is half
(C) 9:4 the number of students who chose both physics and
(D) 11:4 mathematics. The maximum possible number of students
who chose physics but not mathematics, is

(A) 35

(B) 55

(C) 30

(D) 40

49. Consider the sequence t = 1 , t = -1 and t = (n-3n- 50. The monthly sales of a product from January to April
1 2 n
1) t for n ≥ 3 . Then, the value of the sum 1t + 1t + were 120, 135, 150 and 165 units, respectively. The cost
n-2 2 4
1t + ⋯ + 1t + 1t , is price of the product was Rs. 240 per unit, and a fixed
6 2022 2024
marked price was used for the product in all the four
(A) -1022121
months. Discounts of 20%, 10% and 5% were given on the
(B) -1026169
marked price per unit in January, February and March,
(C) -1024144 respectively, while no discounts were given in April. If
(D) -1023132 the total profit from January to April was Rs. 138825,
then the marked price per unit, in rupees, was

(A) 525

(B) 520

(C) 510

(D) 515

51. The sum of all possible real values of x for which (x 52. A train travelled a certain distance at a uniform
x-3
2-9) = (x+1) + 2 , is speed. Had the speed been 6 km per hour more, it would
x-3
have needed 4 hours less. Had the speed been 6 km per
(A) 3+√(33)2
hour less, it would have needed 6 hours more. The
(B) √(33)
distance, in km, travelled by the train is
(C) 3
(A) 800
(D) -3
(B) 720

(C) 780

(D) 640

53. When 3333 is divided by 11, the remainder is 54. Let ABCDEF be a regular hexagon and P and Q be the
midpoints of AB and CD , respectively. Then, the ratio of
(A) 10
the areas of trapezium PBCQ and hexagon ABCDEF is
(B) 1
(A) 6:19
(C) 6
(B) 7:24
(D) 5
(C) 5:24

(D) 6:25

55. A glass is filled with milk. Two-thirds of its content is 56. The rate of water flow through three pipes A , B and C
poured out and replaced with water. If this process of are in the ratio 4:9:36 . An empty tank can be filled up
pouring out two-thirds the content and replacing with completely by pipe A in 15 hours. If all the three pipes
water is repeated three more times, then the final ratio are used simultaneously to fill up this empty tank, the
of milk to water in the glass, is time, in minutes, required to fill up the entire tank
completely is nearest to
(A) 1 : 26

(B) 1 : 80 (A) 78

(C) 1 : 27 (B) 71

(D) 1 : 81 (C) 73

(D) 76

57. For real values of x , the range of the function f(x) = 58. For any natural number k , let a = 3k . The smallest
k
2x-32x2+4x-6 is natural number m for which \(a )1 × (a )2 × ⋯ × (a )20\
1 2 20
< \a ×a ×⋯×a \ , is
(A) (-∞, 14] [1, ∞) 21 22 (20+m)

(B) (-∞, 14] [12, ∞) (A) 56

(C) (-∞, 18] [12, ∞) (B) 57

(D) (-∞, 18] [1, ∞) (C) 58

(D) 59

59. If f(x) = (x2+3x)(x2+3x+2) , then the sum of all real 60. In the XY-plane, the area, in sq. units, of the region
roots of the equation √(f(x)+1) = 9701 is defined by the inequalities y ≥ x + 4 and -4 ≤ x2 + y2 +
5(x - y) ≤ 0 is
(A) -3

(B) 3 (A) 3π

(C) -6 (B) 2π

(D) 6 (C) π

(D) 4π

61. The (x, y) coordinates of vertices P , Q and R of a
parallelogram PQRS are (-3, -2) , (1, -5) and (9, 1) ,
respectively. If the diagonal SQ intersects the x -axis at
(a, 0) , then the value of a is

(A) 299

(B) 134

(C) 277

(D) 103

62. Teams A , B , and C consist of five, eight, and ten members, respectively, such that every member within a team is
equally productive. Working separately, teams A , B , and C can complete a certain job in 40 hours, 50 hours, and 4
hours, respectively. Two members from team A , three members from team B , and one member from team C together
start the job, and the member from team C leaves after 23 hours. The number of additional member(s) from team B ,
that would be required to replace the member from team C , to finish the job in the next one hour, is

(A) 2

(B) 3

(C) 4

(D) 1

63. A circular plot of land is divided into two regions by a 64. A vessel contained a certain amount of a solution of
chord of length 10√(3) meters such that the chord acid and water. When 2 litres of water was added to it,
subtends an angle of 120^° at the center. Then, the area, the new solution had 50% acid concentration. When 15
in square meters, of the smaller region is litres of acid was further added to this new solution, the
final solution had 80% acid concentration. The ratio of
(A) 20(4π3 + √(3))
water and acid in the original solution was
(B) 20(4π3 - √(3))
(A) 4 : 5
(C) 25(4π3 - √(3))
(B) 3 : 5
(D) 25(4π3 + √(3))
(C) 5 : 3

(D) 5 : 4

65. For any non-zero real number x , let f(x) + 2f(1x) = 3x 66. The sum of the infinite series 15(15 - 17) + (15)2((15)
. Then, the sum of all possible values of x for which f(x) = 2 - (17)2) + (15)3((15)3 - (17)3) + … is equal to

3 , is
(A) 5408
(A) -2 (B) 7816
(B) 3 (C) 7408
(C) 2 (D) 5816
(D) -3

ANSWER KEY

1. (A) 2. (B) 3. (C) 4. (A) 5. (A) 6. (C) 7. (B)

8. (D) 9. (C) 10. (D) 11. (B) 12. (B) 13. (C) 14. (A)

15. (C) 16. (A) 17. (C) 18. (C) 19. (C) 20. (A) 21. (A)

22. (B) 23. (A) 24. (C) 25. (C) 26. (B) 27. (A) 28. (A)

29. (B) 30. (B) 31. (A) 32. (B) 33. (A) 34. (B) 35. (D)

36. (C) 37. (A) 38. (B) 39. (C) 40. (D) 41. (D) 42. (C)

43. (D) 44. (C) 45. (A) 46. (A) 47. (D) 48. (A) 49. (C)

50. (A) 51. (A) 52. (B) 53. (D) 54. (C) 55. (B) 56. (C)

57. (C) 58. (C) 59. (A) 60. (B) 61. (A) 62. (A) 63. (C)

64. (B) 65. (D) 66. (A)