CAT (VARC) PYQs

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

With the Treaty of Westphalia, the papacy had been confined to ecclesiastical functions, and the doctrine of sovereign equality reigned. What political theory could then explain the origin and justify the functions of secular political order? In his Leviathan, published in 1651, three years after the Peace of Westphalia, Thomas Hobbes provided such a theory. He imagined a "state of nature" in the past when the absence of authority produced a "war of all against all." To escape such intolerable insecurity, he theorized, people delivered their rights to a sovereign power in return for the sovereign's provision of security for all within the state's border. The sovereign state's monopoly on power was established as the only way to overcome the perpetual fear of violent death and war.

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

For years, movies and television series like Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) paint an unrealistic picture of the "science of voices." In the 1994 movie Clear and Present Danger an expert listens to a brief recorded utterance and declares that the speaker is "Cuban, aged 35 to 45, educated in the eastern United States." The recording is then fed to a supercomputer that matches the voice to that of a suspect, concluding that the probability of correct identification is 90%. This sequence sums up a good number of misimpressions about forensic phonetics, which have led to errors in real-life justice. Indeed, that movie scene exemplifies the so-called "CSI effect" the phenomenon in which judges hold unrealistic expectations of the capabilities of forensic science.

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

As Soviet power declined, the world became to some extent multipolar, and Europe strove to define an independent identity. What a journey Europe has undertaken to reach this point. It had in every century changed its internal structure and invented new ways of thinking about the nature of international order. Now at the culmination of an era, Europe, in order to participate in it, felt obliged to set aside the political mechanisms through which it had conducted its affairs for three and a half centuries. Impelled also by the desire to cushion the emergent unification of Germany, the new European Union established a common currency in 2002 and a formal political structure in 2004. It proclaimed a Europe united, whole, and free, adjusting its differences by peaceful mechanisms.