List of top Questions asked in CAT- 2019

Amal invests Rs 12000 at 8% interest, compounded annually, and Rs 10000 at 6% interest, compounded semi-annually, both investments being for one year. Bimal invests his money at 7.5% simple interest for one year. If Amal and Bimal get the same amount of interest, then the amount, in Rupees, invested by Bimal is

A shopkeeper sells two tables, each procured at cost price p, to Amal and Asim at a profit of 20% and at a loss of 20%, respectively. Amal sells his table to Bimal at a profit of 30%, while Asim sells his table to Barun at a loss of 30%. If the amounts paid by Bimal and Barun are x and y, respectively, then \(\frac{(x −y) }{ p}\) equals

John gets Rs 57 per hour of regular work and Rs 114 per hour of overtime work. He works altogether 172 hours and his income from overtime hours is 15% of his income from regular hours. Then, for how many hours did he work overtime?

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) given below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequence of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. Conceptualizations of ‘women’s time’ as contrary to clock-time and clock-time as synonymous with economic rationalism are two of the deleterious results of this representation. 
2. While dichotomies of ‘men’s time’, ‘women’s time’, clock-time, and caring time can be analytically useful, this article argues that everyday caring practices incorporate a multiplicity of times; and both men and women can engage in these multiple-times. 
3. When the everyday practices of working sole fathers and working sole mothers are carefully examined to explore conceptualizations of gendered time, it is found that caring time is often more focused on the clock than generally theorized.
4. Clock-time has been consistently represented in feminist literature as a masculine artefact representative of a ‘time is money’ perspective.

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) given below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequence of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. Living things—animals and plants—typically exhibit correlational structure. 
2. Adaptive behavior depends on cognitive economy, treating objects as equivalent. 
3. The information we receive from our senses, from the world, typically has structure and order, and is not arbitrary.
4. To categorize an object means to consider it equivalent to other things in that category, and different—along some salient dimension—from things that are not.

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) given below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequence of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. To the uninitiated listener, atonal music can sound like chaotic, random noise.
2. Atonality is a condition of music in which the constructs of the music do not ‘live’ within the confines of a particular key signature, scale, or mode.
3. After you realize the amount of knowledge, skill, and technical expertise required to compose or perform it, your tune may change, so to speak.
4. However, atonality is one of the most important movements in 20th century music.

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) given below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequence of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. Such a belief in the harmony of nature requires a purpose presumably imposed by the goodness and wisdom of a deity. 
2. These parts, all fit together into an integrated, well-ordered system that was created by design. 
3. Historically, the notion of a balance of nature is part observational, part metaphysical, and not scientific in any way. 
4. It is an example of an ancient belief system called teleology, the notion that what we call nature has a predetermined destiny associated with its component parts.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
Language is an autapomorphy found only in our lineage, and not shared with other branches of our group such as primates. We also have no definitive evidence that any species other than Homo sapiens ever had language. However, it must be noted straightaway that ‘language’ is not a monolithic entity, but rather a complex bundle of traits that must have evolved over a significant time frame…. Moreover, language crucially draws on aspects of cognition that are long established in the primate lineage, such as memory: the language faculty as a whole comprises more than just the uniquely linguistic features.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
Social movement organizations often struggle to mobilize supporters from allied movements in their efforts to achieve critical mass. Organizations with hybrid identities—those whose organizational identities span the boundaries of two or more social movements, issues, or identities—are vital to mobilizing these constituencies. Studies of the post-9/11 U.S. antiwar movement show that individuals with past involvement in non-anti-war movements are more likely to join hybrid organizations than are individuals without involvement in non-anti-war movements. In addition, they show that organizations with hybrid identities occupy relatively more central positions in inter-organizational contact networks within the antiwar movement and thus recruit significantly more participants in demonstrations than do nonhybrid organizations.

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
Privacy-challenged office workers may find it hard to believe, but open-plan offices and cubicles were invented by architects and designers who thought that to break down the social walls that divide people, you had to break down the real walls, too. Modernist architects saw walls and rooms as downright fascist. The spaciousness and flexibility of an open plan would liberate homeowners and office dwellers from the confines of boxes. But companies took up their idea less out of a democratic ideology than a desire to pack in as many workers as they could. The typical open-plan office of the first half of the 20th century was a white-collar assembly line. Cubicles were interior designers’ attempt to put some soul back in.

Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in.

Five sentences related to a topic are given below in a jumbled order. Four of them form a coherent and unified paragraph. Identify the odd sentence that does not go with the four. Key in the number of the option that you choose.

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) given below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequence of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. If you’ve seen a little line of text on websites that says something like "customers who bought this also enjoyed that” you have experienced this collaborative filtering firsthand.
2. The problem with these algorithms is that they don’t take into account a host of nuances and circumstances that might interfere with their accuracy.
3. If you just bought a gardening book for your cousin, you might get a flurry of links to books about gardening, recommended just for you! – the algorithm has no way of knowing you hate gardening and only bought the book as a gift.
4. Collaborative filtering is a mathematical algorithm by which correlations and cooccurrences of behaviors are tracked and then used to make recommendations.

A large store has only three departments, Clothing, Produce, and Electronics. The following figure shows the percentages of revenue and cost from the three departments for the years 2016, 2017 and 2018. The dotted lines depict percentage levels. So for example, in 2016, 50% of store's revenue came from its Electronics department while 40% of its costs were incurred in the Produce department.

In this setup, Profit is computed as (Revenue – Cost) and Percentage Profit as Profit/Cost × 100%.
It is known that 
1. The percentage profit for the store in 2016 was 100%. 
2. The store’s revenue doubled from 2016 to 2017, and its cost doubled from 2016 to 2018. 
3. There was no profit from the Electronics department in 2017. 
4. In 2018, the revenue from the Clothing department was the same as the cost incurred in the Produce department.

Princess, Queen, Rani and Samragni were the four finalists in a dance competition. Ashman, Badal, Gagan and Dyu were the four music composers who individually assigned items to the dancers. Each dancer had to individually perform in two dance items assigned by the different composers. The first items performed by the four dancers were all assigned by different music composers. No dancer performed her second item before the performance of the first item by any other dancers. The dancers performed their second items in the same sequence of their performance of their first items.
The following additional facts are known.
i. No composer who assigned item to Princess, assigned any item to Queen.
ii. No composer who assigned item to Rani, assigned any item to Samragni.
iii. The first performance was by Princess; this item was assigned by Badal.
iv. The last performance was by Rani; this item was assigned by Gagan.
v. The items assigned by Ashman were performed consecutively. The number of performances between items assigned by each of the remaining composers was the same.

The following table represents addition of two six-digit numbers given in the first and the second rows, while the sum is given in the third row. In the representation, each of the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 has been coded with one letter among A, B, C, D, E, F, G,H, J, K, with distinct letters representing distinct digits.

		B	H	A	A	G	F
+		A	H	J	F	K	F
	A	A	F	G	C	A	F

A supermarket has to place 12 items (coded A to L) in shelves numbered 1 to 16. Five of these items are types of biscuits, three are types of candies and the rest are types of savouries. Only one item can be kept in a shelf. Items are to be placed such that all items of same type are clustered together with no empty shelf between items of the same type and at least one empty shelf between two different types of items. At most two empty shelves can have consecutive numbers.
The following additional facts are known.
1. A and B are to be placed in consecutively numbered shelves in increasing order
2. I and J are to be placed in consecutively numbered shelves both higher numbered than the shelves in which A and B are kept.
3. D, E and F are savouries and are to be placed in consecutively numbered shelves in increasing order after all the biscuits and candies.
4. K is to be placed in shelf number 16.
5. L and J are items of the same type, while H is an item of a different type.
6. C is a candy and is to be placed in a shelf preceded by two empty shelves.
7. L is to be placed in a shelf preceded by exactly one empty shelf.

Five vendors are being considered for a service. The evaluation committee evaluated each vendor on six aspects – Cost, Customer Service, Features, Quality, Reach, and Reliability. Each of these evaluations are on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (perfect). The evaluation scores on these aspects are shown in the radar chart. For example, Vendor 1 obtains a score of 52 on Reliability, Vendor 2 obtains a score of 45 on Features and Vendor 3 obtains a score of 90 on Cost.

The Ministry of Home Affairs is analysing crimes committed by foreigners in different states and union territories (UT) of India. All cases refer to the ones registered against foreigners in 2016. The number of cases – classified into three categories: IPC crimes, SLL crimes and other crimes – for nine states/UTs are shown in the figure below. These nine belong to the top ten states/UTs in terms of the total number of cases registered. The remaining state (among top ten) is West Bengal, where all the 520 cases registered were SLL crimes.

The table below shows the ranks of the ten states/UTs mentioned above among ALL states/UTs of India in terms of the number of cases registered in each of the three category of crimes. A state/UT is given rank r for a category of crimes if there are (r―1) states/UTs having a larger number of cases registered in that category of crimes. For example, if two states have the same number of cases in a category, and exactly three other states/UTs have larger numbers of cases registered in the same category, then both the states are given rank 4 in that category. Missing ranks in the table are denoted by *.

	IPC crimes	SLL crimes	Other crimes
Delhi	*	*	*
Goa	*	4	*
Haryana	8	6	*
Karnataka	3	2	*
Kerala	*	9	*
Maharashtra	3	4	8
Puducherry	13	29	*
Tamil Nadu	11	7	*
Telangana	6	9	8
West Bengal	17	*	16

The figure below shows the street map for a certain region with the street intersections marked from a through l. A person standing at an intersection can see along straight lines to other intersections that are in her line of sight and all other people standing at these intersections. For example, a person standing at intersection g can see all people standing at intersections b, c, e, f, h, and k. In particular, the person standing at intersection g can see the person standing at intersection e irrespective of whether there is a person standing at intersection f.

Six people U, V, W, X, Y, and Z, are standing at different intersections. No two people are standing at the same intersection. 
The following additional facts are known. 
1. X, U, and Z are standing at the three corners of a triangle formed by three street segments. 
2. X can see only U and Z. 
3. Y can see only U and W. 
4. U sees V standing in the next intersection behind Z. 
5. W cannot see V or Z. 
6. No one among the six is standing at intersection d.

A new game show on TV has 100 boxes numbered 1, 2, . . . , 100 in a row, each containing a mystery prize. The prizes are items of different types, a, b, c, . . . , in decreasing order of value. The most expensive item is of type a, a diamond ring, and there is exactly one of these. You are told that the number of items at least doubles as you move to the next type. For example, there would be at least twice as many items of type b as of type a, at least twice as many items of type c as of type b and so on. There is no particular order in which the prizes are placed in the boxes.

	Round-1	Round-2	Round-3	Round-4	Round-5	Round-6
Tanzi	-	4	-	5	NP	NP
Umeza	-	-	-	1	2	NP
Wangdu	-	4	-	NP	NP	NP
Xyla	-	-	-	1	5	-
Yonita	-	-	3	5	NP	NP
Zeneca	-	-	-	5	5	NP

Six players – Tanzi, Umeza, Wangdu, Xyla, Yonita and Zeneca competed in an archery tournament. The tournament had three compulsory rounds, Rounds 1 to 3. In each round every player shot an arrow at a target. Hitting the centre of the target (called bull’s eye) fetched the highest score of 5. The only other possible scores that a player could achieve were 4, 3, 2 and 1. Every bull’s eye score in the first three rounds gave a player one additional chance to shoot in the bonus rounds, Rounds 4 to 6. The possible scores in Rounds 4 to 6 were identical to the first three.
A player’s total score in the tournament was the sum of his/her scores in all rounds played by him/her. The table below presents partial information on points scored by the players after completion of the tournament. In the table, NP means that the player did not participate in that round, while a hyphen means that the player participated in that round and the score information is missing.

The following facts are also known. 
1. Tanzi, Umeza and Yonita had the same total score. 
2. Total scores for all players, except one, were in multiples of three. 
3. The highest total score was one more than double of the lowest total score.
4. The number of players hitting bull’s eye in Round 2 was double of that in Round 3.
5. Tanzi and Zeneca had the same score in Round 1 but different scores in Round 3.

Contemporary internet shopping conjures a perfect storm of choice anxiety. Research has
consistently held that people who are presented with a few options make better, easier decisions than those presented with many. . . . Helping consumers figure out what to buy amid an endless sea of choice online has become a cottage industry unto itself. Many brands and retailers now wield marketing buzzwords such as curation, differentiation, and discovery as they attempt to sell an assortment of stuff targeted to their ideal customer. Companies find such shoppers through the data gold mine of digital advertising, which can catalog people by gender, income level, personal interests, and more. Since Americans have lost the ability to sort through the sheer volume of the consumer choices available to them, a ghost now has to be inthe retail machine, whether it’s an algorithm, an influencer, or some snazzy ad tech to help a product follow you around the internet. Indeed, choice fatigue is one reason so many people gravitate toward lifestyle influencers on Instagram—the relentlessly chic young moms and perpetually vacationing 20-somethings—who present an aspirational worldview, and then
recommend the products and services that help achieve it. . . .
For a relatively new class of consumer-products start-ups, there’s another method entirely.
Instead of making sense of a sea of existing stuff, these companies claim to disrupt stuff as
Americans know it. Casper (mattresses), Glossier (makeup), Away (suitcases), and many others have sprouted up to offer consumers freedom from choice: The companies have a few
aesthetically pleasing and supposedly highly functional options, usually at mid-range prices.
They’re selling nice things, but maybe more importantly, they’re selling a confidence in those
things, and an ability to opt out of the stuff rat race. . . .
One-thousand-dollar mattresses and $300 suitcases might solve choice anxiety for a certain tier of consumer, but the companies that sell them, along with those that attempt to massage the larger stuff economy into something navigable, are still just working within a consumer market that’s broken in systemic ways. The presence of so much stuff in America might be more valuable if it were more evenly distributed, but stuff’s creators tend to focus their energy on those who already have plenty. As options have expanded for people with disposable income, the opportunity to buy even basic things such as fresh food or quality diapers has contracted for much of America’s lower classes.
For start-ups that promise accessible simplicity, their very structure still might eventually push
them toward overwhelming variety. Most of these companies are based on hundreds of
millions of dollars of venture capital, the investors of which tend to expect a steep growth rate
that can’t be achieved by selling one great mattress or one great sneaker. Casper has expanded into bedroom furniture and bed linens. Glossier, after years of marketing itself as no-makeup makeup that requires little skill to apply, recently launched a full line of glittering color cosmetics. There may be no way to opt out of stuff by buying into the right thing.

Scientists recently discovered that Emperor Penguins—one of Antarctica’s most celebrated species—employ a particularly unusual technique for surviving the daily chill. As detailed in an article published today in the journal Biology Letters, the birds minimize heat loss by keeping the outer surface of their plumage below the temperature of the surrounding air. At the same time, the penguins’ thick plumage insulates their body and keeps it toasty. . . .
The researchers analyzed thermographic images . . . taken over roughly a month during June 2008. During that period, the average air temperature was 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit. At the same time, the majority of the plumage covering the penguins’ bodies was even colder: the surface of their warmest body part, their feet, was an average 1.76 degrees Fahrenheit, but the plumage on their heads, chests and backs were -1.84, -7.24 and -9.76 degrees Fahrenheit respectively. Overall, nearly the entire outer surface of the penguins’ bodies was below freezing at all times, except for their eyes and beaks. The scientists also used a computer simulation to determine how much heat was lost or gained from each part of the body—and discovered that by keeping their outer surface below air temperature, the birds might paradoxically be able to draw very slight amounts of heat from the air around them. The key to their trick is the difference between two different types of heat transfer: radiation and convection.
The penguins do lose internal body heat to the surrounding air through thermal radiation, just as our bodies do on a cold day. Because their bodies (but not surface plumage) are warmer than the surrounding air, heat gradually radiates outward over time, moving from a warmer material to a colder one. To maintain body temperature while losing heat, penguins, like all warm-blooded animals, rely on the metabolism of food. The penguins, though, have an additional strategy. Since their outer plumage is even colder than the air, the simulation showed that they might gain back a little of this heat through thermal convection—the transfer of heat via the movement of a fluid (in this case, the air). As the cold Antarctic air cycles around their bodies, slightly warmer air comes into contact with the plumage and donates minute amounts of heat back to the penguins, then cycles away at a slightly colder temperature.
Most of this heat, the researchers note, probably doesn’t make it all the way through the plumage and back to the penguins’ bodies, but it could make a slight difference. At the very least, the method by which a penguin’s plumage wicks heat from the bitterly cold air that surrounds it helps to cancel out some of the heat that’s radiating from its interior. And given the Emperors’ unusually demanding breeding cycle, every bit of warmth counts. . . . Since [penguins trek as far as 75 miles to the coast to breed and male penguins] don’t eat anything during [the incubation period of 64 days], conserving calories by giving up as little heat as possible is absolutely crucial.