CAT 2023 VARC Questions — Slot 2

This is an odd-one-out: locate the four sentences that form one tight chain — a definition followed by a research finding — and the fifth will reveal itself as a sentence doing a different job.

The four that belong together define the phenomenon and report what the research says:

• 2 defines the term: "latchkey children" are children who return to empty homes and look after themselves for long stretches.
• 4 updates the label: in research and practice, "children in self-care" has replaced "latchkey" to describe their situation more accurately.
• 5 sets up the finding: parents may assume self-care helps development, but recent research finds the opposite.
• 1 delivers that finding in detail: self-care links to loneliness, behavioural problems and poor academic outcomes.

Read in the order 2 → 4 → 5 → 1, they move cleanly from what it is to what the evidence shows.

Sentence 3 — "Although self-care generally points to negative outcomes, it is important to consider that the bulk of research has yet to track long-term consequences" — is a cautionary hedge. It steps back to question how complete the research is, which pulls against the paragraph's confident "self-care leads to negative outcomes" line. That qualifying, second-thoughts tone is what makes it the outsider.

Answer: 3

Check each claim against the passage; one will contradict it.

• (A) European productions can be global hits — true; "Lupin," a French caper, is the example.
• (C) only half of Netflix's originals are now American — true; down from 75% in 2015.
• (D) national broadcasters dominate viewing hours — true; streaming is only about a third of viewing hours even where well-established.

Why B is the exception: it says Netflix has become "a truly European entity" — but the passage says "ultimately the big decisions rest with American executives," and its content sits in a "mid-Atlantic" uncanny valley with local quirks stripped out. So B is false.

Answer: B

Separate the author's own view from the worries he merely reports.

The author's verdict is in the final paragraph: Netflix and its rivals "pump the same content into homes across a continent, making culture a cross-border endeavour," giving Europeans "something in common" — an American firm quietly helping European integration. He waves away the politicians' nerves: "They should not be."

So he sees Netflix as a unifying force — option A.

Why the others fail:

• (C) a looming cultural threat and (D) an economic threat are the politicians' fears, which the author rejects.
• (B) filling an entertainment gap is not his framing at all.

Answer: A

Match the show to what the passage says travels across borders.

The passage is clear on what crosses borders: "whodunits and bloodthirsty maelstroms" have "universal appeal," while comedy "sometimes struggles"; and the "mid-Atlantic" look, with local quirks stripped out, is a weakness. "Lupin," a French crime caper, is the global-hit model.

Test the options:

• (A) Italian comedy — comedy struggles across borders.
• (B) German sci-fi — "German television is not always built for export," and sci-fi isn't endorsed.
• (D) a trans-Atlantic romance across Europe and America — repeats the very mid-Atlantic problem the passage criticises.
• (C) a murder mystery set in North Africa and France — a whodunit with a cross-border setting much like Lupin. Best fit.

Answer: C

Identify the conclusion, then find what breaks it.

The final-paragraph conclusion: Netflix creates a shared viewing experience across Europe — the same content, so a shared culture, so a nudge toward integration. To weaken it, show the experience is not actually shared across countries.

Why A weakens it: if the popularity of Netflix shows "varies widely" from country to country, then Netflix is not creating a common experience — the "same content = shared culture" logic collapses.

Why the others miss:

• (B) losing market share doesn't speak to whether it unifies.
• (C) French hits popular in North America is about the wrong continent.
• (D) older vs younger women preferring different genres is a split within audiences, not the country-to-country divergence the claim rests on.

Answer: A

This is a para-summary: the best option must capture the passage's whole scope, not just one true detail from it. So first pin down every point the passage makes.

The passage says two big things about counterfactual thinking ("if only", "what if"):

1. The mind creates counterfactuals for many different reasons — to explain the past, prepare for the future, work out causes, shape intentions and decisions, adjust emotions like regret and relief, and support moral judgments like blame.
2. This ability develops through childhood and helps us reason about other people's beliefs, including their false beliefs.

A correct summary must hold both halves — the many reasons and the developmental dimension.

• Option C — "Counterfactual alternatives to reality are created for a variety of reasons and is part of one's developmental process" — captures exactly these two halves. Most complete. ✓
• Option A keeps only one reason (preparing for the future / decisions) and drops the developmental point.
• Option B mentions "various reasons" but narrows the second half to just reasoning about others' beliefs and omits the childhood-development idea.
• Option D distorts the passage: counterfactuals imagine alternatives — they do not "reverse past and future actions."

Answer: C

This is a para-jumble: find the sentence that can only open (it introduces the idea with no back-reference), then follow the logical links one at a time.

• 4 is the opener. It names the concept cold: "Human consciousness is often called an emergent property of the human brain." Nothing before it is needed, and everything after explains this idea.
• 1 develops what "emergent" means with an analogy: "Like the ants that make up a colony, no single neuron holds complex information like self-awareness, hope or pride." It naturally follows the concept it illustrates.
• 3 opens with "Nonetheless" and pivots from the "no single neuron" point to its complement: "the sum of all neurons... generate complex human emotions... none of which can be attributed to a single neuron." That contrast word only makes sense after sentence 1's claim, so 1 → 3.
• 2 closes with the general principle: even though science can't yet pin down the mechanism, "complex interconnections among the parts give rise to qualities that belong only to the whole." It rounds off the whole discussion.

💡 Teacher tip: A connector like "Nonetheless" can never begin a paragraph — it needs a prior statement to push against. Spotting that instantly fixes 3 after 1.

Chain: 4 → 1 → 3 → 2.

Answer: 4132

Find the scenario that dissolves the passage's core tension.

The central idea: thrifting is assumed green, but it carries a hidden cost — old, worn clothes shed microfibres into our water — so the real fix is buying high-quality, long-lasting items. The whole critique depends on second-hand clothes being worn and low-quality, and therefore shedding.

Why C undermines it: if second-hand stores "sold only high-quality clothes," that shedding problem disappears, thrifting would simply be green after all, and the passage's central worry falls apart.

Why the others don't:

• (A) buying online is irrelevant to the tension.
• (B) no landfill burning dents the waste problem but not the microfibre critique that is the thesis.
• (D) fast-fashion brands recycling doesn't touch the shedding point.

Answer: C

Gather the passage's stated reasons; the exception is the one it does not support.

Stated reasons ThredUP hasn't caught on in the UK:

• (A) recycling not yet financially attractive — "unless recycling becomes cost-effective."
• (B) protecting brand image — "high-end retailers would rather put brand before sustainability."
• (C) not wanting products devalued — luxury brands "would rather not circulate their latest season stock... to be sold at a cheaper price."

Why D is the exception: it says "the British don't buy second-hand clothing" — but the passage says the opposite: thrifting is "trendy," London is full of vintage shops, and Brits buy more garments than anyone in Europe. The obstacle is second-hand luxury specifically, not second-hand clothing in general.

Answer: D

Read "slow fashion" as the opposite of fast fashion, guided by the passage's own prescription.

The passage's advice is explicit: "buy high-quality items that shed less and last longer," which "combats both microfibre pollution and excess garments ending up in landfills." Fast fashion is cheap, disposable and short-lived, so its opposite is high-quality and long-lasting — option A.

Why the others fail:

• (B) no toxins/dyes is about disposal, not the defining trait.
• (C) sold by genuine vintage stores isn't supported.
• (D) "don't shed microfibres" overstates — the passage says high-quality items shed less, not zero, and the real contrast with fast fashion is durability.

Answer: A

Irony here means the act produces the opposite of its intent.

People thrift to help the planet ("you're cool and you care about the planet"), yet the passage shows the practice feeds microfibre pollution. So an act meant to save the environment ends up harming it — it "has created environmental problems," option A.

Why the others fail:

• (B) not cost-effective for retailers isn't the irony built here.
• (C) luxury at cut-rate prices is a side point, and luxury resale hasn't even taken off.
• (D) anti-consumerist misses — the irony is environmental, and thrifting is itself a bit consumerist ("flash it on Instagram with #vintage").

Answer: A

Place the sentence where "this distinction" has something concrete to point back to.

The sentence to insert states the old assumption: dualism (a split modern/traditional economy) defined developing countries, while developed countries were assumed to enjoy frontier technology and high productivity.

At slot 2, it lands right before: "While this distinction between developing and advanced economies may have made some sense in the 1950s and 1960s, it no longer appears to be very relevant." The inserted sentence sets up that very distinction, and "this distinction... no longer relevant" refers straight back to it — the tightest fit.

Why not the others: at 1, it would jump ahead of the definition of "productive dualism" and lose its link to "this distinction"; at 3 or 4, it would arrive after the discussion has already moved on to widening gaps inside advanced economies — too late to introduce the old dichotomy.

Answer: Option 2 (B)

This is a sentence-insertion question: the inserted sentence must slot into the one blank where it continues the thought right before it. The trick is to find the exact phrase it depends on.

The sentence to place is: "And probably much earlier, moving the documentation for kissing back 1,000 years compared to what was acknowledged in the scientific community."

Two words carry the whole clue — "much earlier" and "back 1,000 years." For those to make sense, the sentence just before the blank must already have put a specific earlier date on the table. So we hunt for a dating statement.

1. Blank (1) comes right after the opening line — that the earliest evidence dates to South Asia 3,500 years ago. But "back 1,000 years" has nothing yet to measure against, so it can't land here.
2. Blank (2) comes right after: "...kissing was already a well-established practice 4,500 years ago in the Middle East." Now the arithmetic works perfectly: 4,500 minus the earlier-accepted 3,500 = 1,000 years. The inserted sentence simply extends that Middle-East finding — "and probably much earlier" — pushing the record back by exactly that gap. This is the fit.
3. Blank (3) sits inside the description of cuneiform script on clay tablets — a switch of topic, so the dating remark would interrupt it.
4. Blank (4) sits just before the closing quotation about kissing among friends and family — again nothing to do with pushing a date backward.

💡 Teacher tip: When an insert sentence contains a number or a comparison ("earlier", "more", "back 1,000 years"), find the sentence that supplies the other half of that comparison. It almost always sits immediately before the correct blank.

Answer: Blank 2

This is a para-jumble: find the opener, then chase the pronouns and connectors link by link.

• 4 opens: "Western Christian concepts tend to deny or feign ignorance about the existence of a genuine and enduring indigenous African tradition." It states a general position and refers back to nothing — a clean start.
• 3 follows with "However, their views contradict the reality..." — "their views" points straight back to the Western concepts in 4, and "however" flips them, asserting that a rich local African ethos does exist. So 4 → 3.
• 1 then brings in the literary example: "Contemporary African writing like 'The Bottled Leopard' voices this theme..." — "this theme" is exactly the clash between Western denial and African reality just set up in 4 and 3. So 3 → 1.
• 2 elaborates that example: "Chukwuemeka Ike explores the conflict..." — Ike is the author of The Bottled Leopard, so this sentence must come right after the book is named. So 1 → 2.

💡 Teacher tip: Track the pointing words — "their views", "this theme". Each one must have something specific to point back to, and that fixes the order almost by itself.

Chain: 4 → 3 → 1 → 2.

Answer: 4312

This is a para-summary: the winning option must hold the passage's two main strands together. Identify them first.

The passage runs like this:

1. Heatwaves are a serious and growing danger — longer, more frequent, more intense, and hitting the old, the young, the ill and the poor hardest.
2. Even vulnerable people don't see themselves as at risk, so early warnings fail — which is why the news media matter so much: they can narrate the danger and genuinely alert people (and flag impacts on infrastructure and society).

So a good summary needs both the scale of the risk and the central, positive role of the media.

• Option C — "Heatwaves pose an enormous risk; the media plays a pivotal role in alerting people to this danger" — carries both strands cleanly. ✓
• Option A turns the media's role negative ("reports... ineffective") and misses its central alerting function.
• Option B is all doom ("measures taken are ineffective") and leaves the media out entirely.
• Option D shrinks to just news effectiveness and loses the scale of the risk.

Answer: C

Work out what the Davos image is meant to expose.

The author invokes the Davos elite twice, both times to show people who preach liberal, shared-future ideals — "creating a shared future in a fragmented world" — while flying in on "1,000 private planes" and "pil[ing] their plates ever higher with perks and share options."

That gap is the hypocrisy of the liberal rich: professing liberal values while hoarding the wealth — option C.

Why the others fail:

• (A) a return to old liberalism being unlikely isn't argued — the author thinks liberalism can reform.
• (B) the rich capturing the debate is partial and misses the values-versus-wealth clash.
• (D) isn't supported by the text.

Answer: C

Three options are symptoms of liberalism failing; one is a symptom of something else.

• (B) a business aristocracy and vast companies, (C) "democracy... a theatre of the absurd," and (D) the gap between liberalism's claims and citizens' lived reality are all offered as signs of liberalism's political and institutional failure.

Why A is the exception: technology "reducing ever more areas of work into meaningless drudgery" is a consequence of technological change, not of the liberal idea itself; it would happen under almost any economic system. So it is the weakest evidence of liberalism's decline.

Answer: A

Find the one statement the author actually endorses (he disagrees with all the rest).

The author plainly backs C: liberalism was dominant ("driven all its opponents off the battlefield") and it survived by reforming itself — his late-19th-century examples (Roosevelt taking on the trusts, Progressives cleaning up corruption, university reformers building ladders of opportunity), capped by "Rather than dying, liberalism reformed itself."

Why he'd reject the others:

• (A) calls the disintegration claims "exaggerated," but the author concedes the recent record is "dismal," so he wouldn't fully agree.
• (B) says find a substitute for a dying liberalism — he argues against "liberation from liberalism itself."
• (D) is Deneen's narrow definition, which the author explicitly rejects.

Answer: C

List the author's actual complaints, then spot the thing he praises instead.

The author faults Deneen for:

• (D) a too-narrow definition of liberalism, reduced to freeing individuals.
• (B) failing to see liberalism's power to reform itself and reverse past declines (the 19th-century example).
• (C) excessive pessimism, predicting terminal decline — hence "read... not as a funeral oration but as a call to action."

Why A is the exception: harking back to premodern notions of liberty is something the author endorses, not a fault — "He is also right to assert that the world has much to learn from the premodern notions of liberty as self-mastery and self-denial."

Answer: A

This is an odd-one-out: four of the five sentences build one connected paragraph, and one stands slightly apart in purpose. Find the single thread the four share, then see which sentence serves a different job.

The unifying thread here is the factual story of how book-banning in the US has grown — a specific case and hard numbers:

• 4 introduces the case: the acclaimed novel Northern Lights was banned in parts of the US and became the second most challenged book.
• 1 builds on it: that banning can be seen as a forerunner of censoring books for "moral", worldview or religious reasons.
• 3 widens the lens: now the banning and challenging of books has escalated to an unprecedented level.
• 5 backs the escalation with evidence: the American Library Association recorded an unparalleled number of challenges in 2022 — about 2,500 titles.

Together, 4 → 1 → 3 → 5 tell one steady, factual arc from a single case to a national trend.

Sentence 2 — "Attempts to ban books are attempts to silence authors who have summoned immense courage in telling their stories" — is different in kind. It doesn't report the phenomenon; it delivers an emotional, argumentative verdict about the motive behind banning. That editorial note breaks the descriptive flow of the other four.

Answer: 2

Pin down the exact role the passage assigns to archaeology.

Archaeology is listed among the "auxiliary sciences" of history — with epigraphy, numismatics and chronology — that the historian leans on "for matters of this kind," meaning getting the basic facts right (dates, places, like the Battle of Hastings in 1066). The author stresses this groundwork is "a necessary condition of his work, but not his essential function."

So archaeology's job is to help ascertain factual accuracy — option B.

Why the others fail:

• (A) finding the oldest civilisations — never claimed.
• (C) the historian's primary duty — the opposite; accuracy is explicitly said not to be the essential function.
• (D) interpreting facts — that is the historian's own work, not archaeology's.

Answer: B

Three options will clash with the author; the exception is the one that agrees with him.

The author's claim: facts don't speak for themselves — meaning comes from the historian's selection, arrangement and context ("it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order").

• (A) a fact's truth is independent of the historian — contradicts him, so it weakens.
• (B) a fact is objective and universal, context aside — denies his point, so it weakens.
• (D) the order of facts has no bearing on meaning — directly denies that arrangement matters, so it weakens.

Why C is the exception: it says facts can be relative — what is a fact for one person may not be for another. That sits with the author, who denies facts are absolute. It supports him rather than weakening him.

Answer: C

Apply the author's own priorities — interpretation over bare facts.

For this author, the historian's essential work is interpretation and choosing what matters, not nailing down dates and timelines (that is "necessary but not essential," handed to the auxiliary sciences). He even says the only reason we care the battle was in 1066 is that historians "regard it as a major historical event" — that is, for its significance.

So his book would focus on interpreting that significance — the socio-political and economic forces behind the battle — option A.

Why the others fail:

• (B) a detailed timeline is exactly the basic-fact work he downgrades.
• (C) deriving facts from documents is the positivist approach he rejects.
• (D) relying on the auxiliary sciences is fact-gathering, not the interpretive heart.

Answer: A

Recall what the "common-sense" (positivist) view holds, then find the outsider.

That view: history is a body of objective, established facts, found in documents and inscriptions; facts speak for themselves; history can be scientific and objective through those facts. So:

• (A) real history in documents/engravings — describes it.
• (B) only positivist methods give real knowledge — describes it.
• (D) history can be objective like science if built from facts — describes it.

Why C is the exception: history as "a selective system of cognitive orientations to reality" is the author's own view (borrowed from Talcott Parsons), stressing that the historian is "necessarily selective." That is the opposite of the common-sense faith in objective facts.

Answer: C