As if Parajumbles of the regular variety weren’t mystifying enough – ever since CAT 2011 there has been a new type that has some of us a little dazed. Seen regularly in singlets in CAT ’11, you will find at least 1-2 in CAT this year. Don’t get caught unawares, treat them like your regular Para Jumbles, here are a few that you can practise right away.

Directions for questions 1 to 10: In each of the questions given below, four sentences are given labeled a, b, c and d. Of these, three statements need to be arranged in a logical order to form a coherent paragraph/passage. From the given options, choose the option that does not fit the sequence.

1. a. Picking up where The Hands of History left off, Simon Hoggart’s brilliant new collection of parliamentary sketches takes us from the dying days of Tony Blair’s leadership, through the shadow-filled days of Gordon Brown and on to the utterly bewildering days of that comedy double-act Cameron and Clegg.
b. He is a striking representative of a great British tradition, of something we do well, and where he stands with his own heroes, George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson.
c. Above all, he gives us incisive and witty pen-portraits of those responsible for our plight: the belligerent Brown, the unintelligible Prescott, the slippery Cameron and the bemused Miliband.
d. He charts the events that made the news, the faux-pas that should have, and the myriad mistakes that have landed us all where we are now.

2. a. Taking his own ignorance as a given, his style of dogged questioning of every certainty and his huge influence over the youths of Athens led to his trial, his defiant comment that “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being”, and ultimately to his execution by hemlock.
b. Socrates established a method of probing into the eternal questions of existence and morality by relentless inquiry and debate.
c. His demeanour is gentle and slow, but his endless questioning of moral norms puts him in direct conflict with authority.
d. Socrates is never mentioned in this book and it’s not necessary to know anything about him, but the parallels are obvious.

3. a. For this was Dickens with the laughter taken out.
b. That Great Expectations achieves its seriousness of purpose by sometimes comic means, that the language bursts with life, that its gusto leaves you breathless and its shame makes the pages curl, that you are implicated in every act of physical and emotional cruelty to the point where you don’t know who’s the more guilty, you or Pip, you or Orlick, you or Magwitch, goes without saying if you are a reader of Dickens.
c. But you would never have guessed any of these things from the BBC’s adaptation.
d. We must guess that the BBC is embarrassed by the eccentricity of the writing, the hyperbole of the characterization, the wild marginalia, the lunatic flights of fancy?

4. a. For me paper wealth and tangible wealth amount to the same thing.
b. If I get more money, I have more wealth because I can spend the money for other things — real things.
c. But if we all get more money overnight, as in a shower of money from helicopters, only our paper wealth increases; our collective tangible wealth doesn’t change because there aren’t more things to buy with the additional money.
d. If it did, the government could cure poverty and increase nation’s wealth simply by printing more money.

5. a. More specifically, it is human beings alone who (a) operate in their everyday activities with an understanding of Being and (b) are able to reflect upon what it means to be.
b. But to think of Being in this way would be to commit the very mistake that the capitalization is supposed to help us avoid.
c. If we look around at beings in general-from particles to planets, ants to apes-it is human beings alone who are able to encounter the question of what it means to be.
d. This gives us a way of understanding statements such as “Dasein is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.”

6. a. Often, those who settled abroad were classified as selfish and self-serving, betraying the homeland.
b. Even in the West, all that we seem to be aware of, and revel in, are the Indians who have made good, not the many more working at low-end jobs or in the shadowy grey market.
c. Now, not only are they more valued but it is their intellectual labour which defines research fashion and priorities.
d. Be it literature or films, social science theorizing or managerial/entrepreneurial models – experience abroad is valorized and sought to be transplanted back home.

7. a. At other times it is the repetitiveness more than the variability of the names that makes them seem less than distinctive, an impression sometimes heightened by their transparent meaning.
b. The heroines of two different myths may have the same name, while the heroine in two versions of the same myth will have a different name.
c. This apparent contradiction reflects the two poles of the heroine’s situation: to be little more than a name in a genealogy, or to be distinct, to suffer, sometimes even to achieve immortality.
d. On the other hand, a few of the most familiar figures have names that are significant and distinctive.

8. a. Doing research is essentially like solving a puzzle.
b. Puzzles have rules and predetermined solutions
c. Research involves extrapolating knowledge to newer territories and unforeseen challenges.
d. A striking feature of doing research is that the aim is to discover what is known in advance.

9. a. As far as we know, death is a great emptiness for us-a threshold beyond which we can directly perceive nothing.
b. Such a threshold is inseparable from the sacred, which aids us in our struggles to reconcile our inherent limitedness with our convictions.
c. Nevertheless, that which is beyond the threshold of death is unavailable to us in any direct or unmediated fashion.
d. Granted, we readily project our fantasies into, and live out of faiths in relation to this void.

10. a. Our culture is full of assumptions and stereotypes about how the mind works, perhaps none so enduring as the legend of the “tortured artist”.
b. However, while the final verdict is still out on the issue, both the folk and the scientific evidence provide tantalizing clues that this legend may be fact.
c. The image is durable, but science has not yet been able to conclusively verify or disprove it.
d. Science stamps natural phenomena with a systemic form, and its theories with a natural
inevitability.

Answers and Explanations

1. b The paragraph presents a review of a book by Simon Hoggart about the political culture and politicians. The tone of the author is critical and scathing (as evident by the words dying days, shadow-filled days, utterly bewildering days, faux-pas, mistakes etc) and the book talks about the political reasons of our plight and the mistakes of the big politicians. Sentence (b) fails to match with the theme and the idea and stands out as heroes and tradition represent positive ideas that are contradictory to the rest of the sentences. (a), (d), (c) is the correct sequence and option (b) is the correct choice.

2. c (b) is the opening sentence as it states the method employed by Socrates. (a) summarizes the consequences of the method in terms of his increased influence over the youth as well as his execution because of those methods. (d) states that the book (in question) never mentions Socrates directly but the parallelism between the protagonist (of the book) and Socrates is obvious. The paragraph is actually from a book review and the first lines form the background. The later lines that will follow will try to explain this parallelism by bringing out the character sketch of the protagonist. (c) does not match with these lines because of the tense inconsistency between it and the other lines. (a), (b) and (d) are in the past tense whereas (c) is in present tense. Moreover (c) is a repetition of the idea already mentioned in (a). Thus, (c) is the correct choice.

3. d The paragraph talks about the BBC’s adaptation of Great Expectations. The author appreciates Great Expectations but criticizes the BBC’s adaptation. (b) introduces the subject. It elaborates the virtues of Great Expectations. C introduces a contrast by presenting a comparison of the book with its BBC’s adaptation. So, BC is a pair. (a) states the shortcoming of the adaptation. Thus, (c) presents a statement and (a) presents the reason behind it making (c) & (a) a mandatory pair. (d) talks about guessing but cannot come after (c) because first person personal pronoun “we” cannot come immediately after a second person personal pronoun “you”. Hence, option (d) is the correct choice.

4. d The author is talking about money and its true value. He discusses two cases; first when increase in money means increase in wealth and second when increase in money does not mean anything. The idea implied by the author’s statements is that money loses its value if it increases without a comparable increase in real output. Thus, (b), (a) & (c) form a sequence. (b) introduces the idea of the author i.e. what happens when he gets more money. (a) is an add on as the author wants to explain what all is considered as money. (c) talks about the second scenario when everybody gets money (becomes rich). (d) is not linked to all these lines. A link is missing. The link should be that increase in money does not increase the wealth of the nation i.e. money does not represent the wealth of the nation. Thus the ‘it’ in (d) does not have an antecedent. Hence, (d) is the correct choice.

5. b Option (c) introduces the concept of Being and states that it is human beings alone who can associate themselves with the question of what it means to be. Option (a) further elaborates the same. ‘More specifically’ in (a) hints at the specific detail of what is mentioned in (c). So, (c) and (a) form a mandatory pair. ‘This’ in option (d) refers to the concept of Being which has been explained in the mandatory pair. Thus (c), (a) and (d) form a passage. Option (b) seems to follow the sequence, but is logically incorrect because it talks about capitalization which has not been introduced in the previous lines. Nothing has been mentioned about the theory of capitalization that can help in understanding that why it is incorrect to think of Being in this way. It is logically incorrect to talk about the concept that a theory discards before introducing the theory itself.

6. b Options (a) and (c) form a mandatory pair. (a) talks about a situation in the past and (c) compares the situation to the present scenario. ‘They’ in (c) refers to ‘people who settled abroad’ in (a). Option (d) further supports (c) by citing examples of various fields which value international concepts and theories. Hence, (a), (c) and (d) form a coherent paragraph. Option (b) talks about a different point of view. It states that we are only aware of Indians who are doing well in foreign countries and not the ones engaged in low end jobs. This statement doe not follow the logical order. Hence, the answer is (b).

7. a Options (b) and (d) entail the points of ‘contradiction’ mentioned in option (c). Thus (b), (d) and (c) form a logical sequence. Option (a) begins with ‘At other times’, but none of the other options begins with ‘At times’. So there is no scope of comparison. In addition, (a) talks about variability of the names which has not been talked about in any of the options. Option (d) only states that the names are distinctive. For (a) to follow, there should be a line in the jumble which states that variability of the names make them less distinctive. Hence, option (a) does not follow.

8. c The sentence in option (c) does not fit the sequence (d-a-c) formed by the rest of the sentences. (d) talks about how in research the aim “is to discover what is known in advance.” (a) and (b) follow (d) by comparing this aspect of research with solving a puzzle. (c) is not in line with the rest as it talks about research as an extrapolation and is not in sync with the characterization of research as essentially a process of discovering what is known in advance.

9. b The sentence in option (b) is not in keeping with the rest which describe death as a great void which we cannot directly perceive (though we try to “live out of faiths in relation to this void”). Sentence (b) talks vaguely about our inherent limitedness without connecting such “limitedness” with death or mortality.

10. d The sentence in option (d) does not contribute to the discussion on the “tortured artist” and how far this characterization is justified.