Jumbled Paragraphs - CAT 2018 - Elite Grid

Jumbled Paragraphs – CAT 2018
Q1:
A. An unusual candidate in every respect, Trump has long favoured Twitter and the use of his celebrity to leverage free TV
coverage over traditional campaign ads.
B. Dangerous lists the external threats to American security (the Middle East, North Korea and Islamic State but no Russia,
naturally), then accuses Clinton of lacking fortitude with footage of her recent public faint and of her coughing.
C. The latter tend to play like an intro to his benighted Celebrity Apprentice: stolid, explicit and exhausting.
D. Having praised her as a “fighter” in Sunday’s TV debate, Trump neatly encapsulates his contradictory and very loud
campaign.

Q2:
A. The altarpiece, also known as The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, was unveiled in St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent, today.B. The
work, in its entirety or just in part, has been stolen six times, and found itself at the centre of no fewer than 13 crimes and
mysteries, several of which remain unsolved – until now, that is, thanks to the restoration.
C. It has been called “the most influential painting ever” and “the world’s most coveted masterpiece”. It is also the most
frequently stolen.
D. And now, after a four-year restoration to clean away six centuries of dirt and varnish, the Ghent Altarpiece looks the way it
did originally – electric, radiant, gorgeous and glorious.

Q3
A. Among people who know the novel at all, it’s a commonplace that this one is “different” from other Highsmith fiction.
B. The characters are often seen at night, chiaroscuro-style, through rain-obscured windows or in dulled plate-glass reflections.
Even the lovers, presumably smitten and euphoric, mainly appear together enclosed in dim, claustrophobic spaces: deep-
cushioned restaurant booths; sleazy, shuttered motel rooms; the cavernous front seats of Carol’s late-’40s Packard.
C. Haynes artfully captures this off-kilter feeling with a sludgy, miasmic quality in the cinematography. Carol looks as if it were
shot through a pair of thick, occluding spyglass lenses: There’s virtually no daylight, no liberating vistas opening up the visual
field.
D. I disagree. It’s true that no one gets bludgeoned or garroted in The Price of Salt, but once one starts looking, one can’t help
but notice sinister touches throughout—enough to give the work a peculiarly sickly cast. Having first read it in my early
twenties, with, I confess, a fair dose of baby-dyke enthusiasm, I am struck now, rereading it in jaded later-middle age, by how
discomfiting the book is: how gothic and errant in its plotting; how eerie, foreboding, and ultimately diffident as a vindication of
lesbian desire.

Q4:
A. Anna settles herself in her compartment in the overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and takes out an uncut
English novel, probably one by Trollope judging from references to fox hunting and Parliament.
B. In Anna Karenina, the day after the fateful ball, resolved to forget Vronsky and resume her peaceful life with her son and
husband (“my life will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual”),
C. In contrast, very few educated English speakers have read the Russian classics in the original and, until recent years, they
have largely depended on two translations, one by the Englishwoman Constance Garnett and the other by the English couple
Louise and Aylmer Maude, made respectively in 1901 and 1912.
D. Tolstoy, of course, says nothing about a translation—educated Russians knew English as well as French.

Q5:
A. “And in the meantime, he’s actually not very good about art,”
B. Robert Storr said about Dave Hickey in an interview with Yale radio last year, explaining, “he wrote a whole long essay about
Lari Pittman without mentioning Lari is half-Hispanic and gay, which is an awfully big thing to miss when you look at the work.”
C. Storr’s remark shimmers with a worldview about what art criticism ought to be, and how an artist’s “identity” should be
considered not only relevant to, but legible within, their art.
D. I was reminded of this comment while reading reviews of Hickey’s new collection 25 Women: Essays on Their Art, which has
been similarly decried for not foregrounding the artists’ gender in its analysis.

Q6:
A. One bee just back from foraging for nectar traced a figure-of-eight pattern again and again while vibrating her abdomen. The

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bee was telling her sisters where she had been to find nectar — not just the direction of the flowers, but the distance too.
B. I was first introduced to the waggle-dance, this marvel of the animal kingdom, in a laboratory at the University of Sussex.
C. There I plainly witnessed what is described as the most sophisticated form of non-human communication — the waggle-
dance.
D. Francis Ratnieks, professor of apiculture, sat me in front of one of his observation hives where you could watch the colony of
bees at work through a glass panel.
E. Although I kept bees for many years, I had no idea of the work which won Von Frisch a Nobel prize in 1973.

Q7:
A. For the first month, Wilde was tied to a treadmill six hours a day, making an ascent, as it were, of 6,000 feet each day, with
five minutes’ rest after every 20 minutes.
B. Allowed one hour’s exercise a day, he walked in single file in the yard with other prisoners but he was not allowed to
communicate with them. He could not sleep, he was permanently hungry and he suffered from dysentery.
C. In total isolation, first in Pentonville and Wandsworth, and then in Reading gaol, to which he was moved in November 1895,
Wilde slept on a plank bed with no mattress.
D. Towards the end of his sentence, the governor of the jail, Major Nelson, remarked to Wilde’s friend Robert Ross: “He looks
well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a sentence of this kind, he will be dead within two years.” Wilde
was later to praise Nelson, who had arrived at Reading in July 1896, as “the most Christlike man I ever met”.

Q8:
A. But barring us from success are the Imps of Inertia and the Wall of Habitual Self.
B. First the Imps.
C. There’s the Disenchanted Imp, who, palm to forehead, points out that no one really reads much these days. They skim and
surf maybe, but they don't read. Who will appreciate the painstaking care with which you've done and presented your
research? Perhaps the handful of other specialists in your subfield, but that’s a paltry audience.
D. Academics must write. Otherwise they don't pass their grad courses, finish their dissertations, or get jobs, promotions, and
raises.

Q9:
A. While there were moments of individual brilliance — Vijay Hazare’s twin hundreds against Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller at
Adelaide in 1948, perhaps the most memorable of them — it wasn’t until 1952 that India won a Test.
B. It is also germane to consider the future, given the fear in some quarters that the shorter versions will cannibalise Test
cricket. There was certainly nothing in the early years to suggest India would become the economic superpower it is today.
C. They also offer a moment’s pause to reflect. As India prepares for its 500th Test — a milestone 84 years in the making — it
seems apposite to assess its legacy in the game’s classical form.
D. Although the great Wally Hammond said new-ball bowler Amar Singh “came off the pitch like the crack of doom” in India’s
first-ever Test, against England at Lord’s in 1932, success proved elusive.
E. Milestones are curious things in cricket. Round numbers — such as fifty, the century, ten-wicket hauls and career runs in
multiples of 1000 allow a measure of achievement in a sport.

Q10:
1. One summer afternoon in the city of Sumter in South Carolina, three men – a farmer, a scholar, and a landscape architect –
stood in a field boiling watermelon juice.
A. They had pressed the juice themselves from Bradford watermelons, a favoured fruit of the antebellum South.
B. The Bradford has white seeds, deep ruby flesh, and a rind so soft it can be scooped with a spoon.
C. It had been thought extinct since the early 1900s, when watermelons with tough rinds suitable for shipping displaced it.
D. But it had been quietly growing for more than 100 years in the backyards of eight generations of Bradfords, endangered but
not dead, like the African southern white rhino.
E. Glenn Roberts (the farmer), David Shields (the scholar) and Nat Bradford (the architect, and heir to the 180-year-old Bradford
watermelon breed) had been labouring under a blistering sun for most of that August day in 2013, cutting open watermelons in
the dusty field, straining the seeds out, pressing and heating the liquid in a sorghum evaporator – a huge steam pan lofted over
a propane-fired field oven – until it flared to a fiery red.
7. Finally, towards evening, it was ready: a molasses that had not been made since the end of the Civil War

Q11:

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A. Or there was the time Mailer drunkenly fought—or tried to fight—nearly every man he invited to a party, arguing with many
and stepping outside at least three times to throw dukes on the sidewalk.
B. Later that same night he stabbed his wife twice with a pen knife after she called him a “little faggot” with no cojones (not
one of my favorite Mailer fights; she almost died).
C. There was the time he head-butted Gore Vidal in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show and then—swaggering on stage
truculent with drink—got himself verbally mauled by Vidal, Cavett, Janet Flanner, and a hooting studio audience.
C. Or maybe my favorite Mailer fight was his 100 percent vérité tussle with Rip Torn in his experimental film Maidstone (capsule
play-by-play: Torn taps Mailer twice on the head with a hammer; Mailer tries to bite off Torn’s ear; they go to the ground;
getting the worst of it, Mailer negotiates a fake truce; Torn relents, Mailer attacks; again getting the worst of it, Mailer is saved
by his ferocious wife; Torn and Mailer exchange verbal haymakers; Mailer whiffs; Torn lands).

Q12:
A. First: It seems important to note that the guys in the Segel anecdote have not in fact read Infinite Jest. This is not about the
writing itself, at least not primarily. Second: It is telling that Segel’s shop clerk is talking about men she once dated — men she
was willing to hang out with, say, three to five times a week for three to five months apiece. In other words: They seemed like
nice enough guys at the time.
B. How did poor David Foster Wallace go from dissecting the pretensions and shortcomings of mid-century men of letters to
holding a central place in the pretensions of their heirs?
C. The literary chauvinist, as we now imagine him, doesn’t go in for anything so blatant as calling your vagina a “sacred several-
lipped gateway to the procreative darkness” (Updike) or stabbing his wife at a party (Mailer). Rather, he is the kind of man
Adelle Waldman pinned in a specimen box with The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., her 2013 novel of contemporary romantic
ethics.
D. Make a passing reference to the “David Foster Wallace fanboy” and you can assume the reader knows whom you’re talking
about; he’s the type who’s pestered at least one woman to the point that she quit reading Infinite Jest in public. Infinite Jest —
a novel that appears high on the list of “Books That Literally All White Men Own.”

Q13:
A. Can I call you yard to yet.
B. And believe you too can fly.
C. The sadness of a humming bird's bet.
D. Is that you both know why.

     1.   ABCD
     2.   ACBD
     3.   ADBC
     4.   ABDC

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ANSWER KEYS:
1. Ans - (ACBD)
Source - The Guardian
Explanation - A is the best introductory sentence as it briefs the idea and event.
C is the best continuation, because of the usage of "latter"
BD is another Mandatory Pair, as they talk about Hillary Clinton. B is placed first as it contains details about the subject -
Clinton.

2. Ans - CDAB
Source - The Guardian
Explanation - "Also known as" in A suggests continuation, and hence, this cannot be the introductory sentence.
D contains a name and hence DA is a mandatory pair - because of the "also known as" connection.
C is the best opening sentence as it gives the outlook to the entire Para - by stating the importance of the Painting.
B is the best conclusion and logically follows after D.

3. Ans - ADCB
Source - BookForum
Explanation – “Commonplace” in A suggests an opinion, which can be linked with the Disagreement shown in D. Hence AD is a
Mandatory Pair.
The off-kilter feeling in C refers to the disagreement shown in D. Hence, D follows in the sequence. B is the best concluding
statement.

4. Ans – BADC
Source - NYBooks
Explanation – B introduces the topic, and is the best fit for the opening sentence.
A continues the narrative presented by explaining how the story proceeds.
C gives the second part of the Stem – That Russians read English novels, but not the other way round, and D further build on
the idea.

5. Ans – ABDC
Source –LA Review Of Books
Explanation – AB are a Mandatory pair. A gives a quote, and B introduces the person to whom the quote is attributed to. AB are
also the perfect introductory statements.
D presents a similar reasoning, the keywords here being “similarly decried for not foregrounding the artists’ gender” and thus,
D comes after B.
C further concludes the statement by stating the ideal way reviews should be presented or written.

6. Answer - EBDCA
Source – Spectator- UK
Explanation - E is the best introduction as it provides a line of reasoning - That although the author had been doing that since a
long time, he wasn't aware of the intricacies.
The next few lines need to explain the phenomena.
B continues the explanation by giving a background to where the Author learned of the dance,
D and C, in that order, explain the where.
A gives the observation. Hence, EBDCA.

7. Ans - 3214
Source - The Guardian
Learning Outcome – Usage of Chronology
Explanation -
Chronology based question:
3 introduces the imprisonment.
2 explains the isolation mentioned in 3 and 1 describes the events after a short while (1 month)
4 tells us about the developments towards the end.

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8. Ans - 4123
Source - Chronicle
1 explains the restraints faced.
2 has to be placed after 1 because of the order cited in 1 - "first the Imps and our behavioural self"
3 carries forth the idea presented in 1.
Learning Outcome: Drawing parallels and making mandatory pairs using the structure of the options.

9. Ans - ECBDA
Source – The Hindu
Explanation: 'Milestones' is the key word used in E and C, and make them a Mandatory Pair.
BD is also a Mandatory pair as D continues the idea given in B.

10. Ans - 1ABCDE7
Source – Aeon Essays
Explanation - This doesn't need any, you just need to look at the right order. Identifying mandatory pairs is fairly easy in this
question.
Why E can't be the introductory sentence?
Because of the attached identifiers. We don't know anything about the farmer, the scholar, and the architect. Also, 1A is a
mandatory pair, A continues the idea presented in 1.

11. Ans - 3412
Source – The Daily Beast
Explanation - 3 is the best opening statement as it introduces the series of fights.
4 is the best continuation of the series of fights highlighted as it gives a personal (specific) touch and view to the events
unfolded.
It only makes sense that "later that night" cannot be placed after 4, as he was hit with a hammer in the head. So, 12 makes a
better pair.
If you found the language of the paragraph a tad too difficult to comprehend, then you need to pause, and read the question a
bit slowly, taking in as much detail as you can.
4 explains the HE mentioned in 3. That's the connection.
2 can't be placed after 3, because of chronological order.

12. Ans - DBAC
Source – NY Mag
Explanation - a little background - David Foster Wallace is considered one of the most complex writers in literature. His book -
Infinite Jest features in almost all "Best Books of All times" list and most certainly tops almost all "Toughest Books Ever Written"
list (no, your engineering books don't have a place in this list). That was especially publicized after he committed suicide. Since
then, David has become a cult among Literature enthusiasts.
Option D is the best opening as it introduces the subject and the sarcasm that is followed in B.
"Books that literally all white men own" is a tongue in cheek remark that is best completed by "a central place in the
pretensions of their heirs?"
A answers the questions and is to be placed after B.
C cannot be placed anywhere else and the chauvinism highlighted makes it the best conclusion.

13. Easy solution: The rhyming scheme.
ABAB is the obvious rhyming scheme and in that scheme, ABCD makes perfect sense.
Hence 1.

Detailed Solution: But assume that you didn't notice the rhyming scheme, or were too confused between ABAB and AABB, then
what?
This is taken from a random poem, and so the strategies concerning structure and chronology will fall flat in such a question,
because there isn't any.
To solve this you need to comprehend the essence of the para.
Option A is the obvious introductory sentence, taken from the options.
B follows A, as it directly continues the sentiment conveyed - I can call you and have hopes about you as well.
CD in the same manner, is a mandatory pair. Hence ABCD.

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