CAT (VARC) PYQs

There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

Paragraph: Somalia has been dealing with an enormous humanitarian catastrophe, driven by the longest and most severe drought the country has experienced in at least 40 years. ___ (1) ___ . Five consecutive rainy seasons have failed, causing more than 8million people - almost half of the country's population to experience acute food insecurity. ___ (2) ___ . More than 43,000 people are believed to have lost their lives, with half of the lives lost likely being children under five. The damage the drought has caused is far-reaching. ___ (3) ___ . Farmers have lost all their agricultural income, while pastoralists have lost more than 3 million livestock, impoverishing entire communities, and leaving them on the brink of famine. ___ (4) ___ . Some, like the pastoralists, may never be able to go back as their livelihoods have been irreversibly wiped out.

Sentence: Many have had to leave their homes behind, with more than 1.3 million people being displaced due to the drought.

There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

Paragraph: Early in this century a young Breton schoolboy who preparing himself for a scientific career began to notice a strange fact about hens in his father's poultry yard ___ (1) ___ . As they scratched the soil they constantly seemed to be pecking at specks of mica, a siliceous material dotting the ground ___ (2) ___ . No one could explain to Louis Kervran why the chickens selected the mica, or why each time a bird was killed for the family cooking pot no trace of the mica could be found in its gizzard ___ (3) ___ . It took Kervran many years to establish that the chickens were transmuting one element into another ___ (4) ___ .

Sentence: Yet each day the flock produced eggs with calcareous shells though they apparently had not ingested any calcium from land which was entirely lacking in limestone.

There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

Paragraph: The first phase of globalization occurred long before the introduction of either steam or electric power...Chinese consumers at all social levels consumed vast quantities of spices, fragrant woods and unusual plants. The peoples of Southeast Asia who lived in forests gave up their traditional livelihoods and completely reoriented their economies to supply Chinese consumers ___ (1) ___ . These exchanges of the year 1000 opened some of the routes through which goods and peoples continued to travel after Columbus traversed the mid-Atlantic. ___ (2) ___ . Yet the world of 1000 differed from that of 1492 in important ways....the travellers who encountered one another in the year 1000 were much closer technologically. ___ (3) ___ . They changed and augmented what was already there since 1000. ___ (4) ___ . If globalization hadn't yet begun, Europeans wouldn't have been able to penetrate the markets in so many places as quickly as they did after 1492.

Sentence: The Europeans did not invent globalization.