List of top Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Questions asked in CAT

In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia. Never had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or in such ignorance of the land it occupied. There had been no reconnaissance. In 1770 Captain James Cook had made landfall on the unexplored east coast of this utterly enigmatic continent, stopped for a short while at a place named Botany Bay and gone north again. Since then, no ship had called – not a word, not an observation, for 17 years, each one of which was exactly like the thousands that had preceded it, locked in its historical immensity of blue heat, blush, sandstone and the measured booming of glassy pacific rollers. Now, this coast was to witness a new colonial experiment, never tried before, not repeated since. An unexplored continent would become a jail. The space around it, the very air and sea, the whole transparent labyrinth of the South Pacific, would become a wall 14,000 miles thick.

The late 18th century abounded in schemes of social goodness thrown off by its burgeoning sense of revolution. But here, the process was to be reversed: not utopia, but Dystopia; not Rousseau’s natural man moving in moral grace amid free social contract, but man coerced, deracinated, in chains. Other parts of the Pacific, especially Tahiti, might seem to conform Rousseau. But the intellectual patrons of Australia, in its first colonial years, were Hobbes and Sade.

In their most sanguine moments, the authorities hoped that it would eventually swallow a whole class – the “criminal class”, whose existence was one of the prime sociological beliefs of late Georgian and early Victorian England. Australia was settled to defend English property not from the frog-eating invader across the Channel but from the marauder within. English lawmakers wished not only to get rid of the “Criminal class” but if possible to forget about it. Australia was a Cloaca, invisible, its contents filthy and unnamable. To most Englishmen this place seemed not just a manout society but another planet-an exiled world, summed up in its popular name, “Botany Bay”. It was remote and anomalous to its white creators. It was strange but close, as the unconscious to the conscious mind. There was as yet no such thing as “Australian” history or culture. For its first forty years, everything that happened in the thief-colony was English. In the whole period of convict transportation, the Crown shipped more than 160,000 men, women and children (due to defects in the records, the true number will never be precisely known) in bondage to Australia. This was the largest forced exile of citizens at the behest of a European government in pre-modern history. Nothing in earlier penology compares with it. In Australia, England drew the sketch for our own century’s vaster and more terrible fresco of repression, the Gulag. No other country had such a birth, and its pangs may be said to have begun on the afternoon of January 26, 1788, when a fleet of eleven vessels carrying 1,030 people, including 548 male and 188 female convicts, under the command of captain Arthur Phillip in his flagship Sirius, entered Port Jackson or, as it would presently be called, Sydney Harbor.

Smith did not invent economics. Joseph Schumpeter observed that “The Wealth of the Nations” did not contain “a single analytic idea, principle or method that was entirely new”. Smith’s achievement was to combine an encyclopedic variety of insight, information and anecdote, and to distill from it a revolutionary doctrine. The resulting masterpiece is the most influential book about economics ever published. Remarkably, much of it speaks directly to questions that are still of pressing concern. The pity is that Smith’s great book, like most classics (of 900 pages), is more quoted than read. All sides in today’s debates about economic policy have conspired to peddle a conveniently distorted version of its idea. If his spirit is still monitoring events, it will undoubtedly have celebrated the collapse of communism. But it must also long to meet the politicians who have taken charge of a fine reputation and not so fine profile. And put them right on one or two points. Today Smith is widely seen as intellectual champion of self-interest. This is a misconception. Smith saw no moral virtue in selfishness; on the contrary he saw its dangers. Still less was he a defender of capital over labour (he talked of the capitalist’s “mean rapacity”), of the rising bourgeoisie over the common folk. His suspicion of self-interest and his regard for the people as a whole come through clearly in one of his best-known remarks: “People of the same trade often meet together, even have merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Far from praising self-interest as a virtue, Smith merely observed it to be a driving economic force. In “The Wealth of Nations” he explained how this potentially destructive impulse is harnessed to the social good. What is to prevent greedy producers raising their prices until their customers cannot afford to pay no more? The answer is competition. If producers raise their prices too high, they create an opportunity for one or more among them to profit by charging less and thus selling more. In this way competition tames selfishness and regulates prices and quality. At the same time it regulates quantities. If buyers want more bread and less cheese, their demand enables bakers to charge more and obliges cheese-mongers to charge less. Profits in bread-making would rise and profits in cheese-making would fall; effort and capital would move from one task to the other.

Through Smith’s eyes, it is possible to marvel afresh at this fabulously powerful mechanism and to relish, as he did, the paradox of private gain yielding social good. Only more so, for the transactions that deliver a modern manufactured good to its customer are infinitely more complicated than those described by Smith. In his day, remember, the factory was still a novel idea: manufacturing meant pins and coats. A modern car is made of raw materials that have been gathered from all over the world, combined into thousands of intermediate products, sub-assembled by scores of separate enterprises. The consumer need know nothing of all this, any more than the worker who tapped the rubber for the tyres knows or cares what its final use will be. Every transaction is voluntary. Self-interest and competition silently process staggering quantities of information and direct the flow of good. Services, capital and labour — just as in Smith’s much simpler world. Far-sighted as he was, he would surely have been impressed. Mind you, modern man has also discovered something else. With great effort and ingenuity, and the systematic denial of personal liberty, governments can supplant self-interest and competition, and replace the invisible hand of market forces with collective endeavour and a visible input-output table. The result is a five-year waiting list for Trabants.

When you first arrive in a new culture, there is a period of confusion that comes from the new situation and from a lack of information. It leaves you quite dependent and in need of help in the form of information and above. The second stage begins as you start to interact with the new culture. It is called the stage of small victories. Each new encounter with the culture is fraught with peril. It is preceded by anxiety and information collection and rehearsal. Then the event occurs and you return home either triumphant or defeated. When successful, the feelings really are very much as though a major victory has been won. A heightened roller coaster effect is particularly characteristic of this stage. The support needed is emotional support, people who appreciate what you are going through and who can cheer you onward. It often happens that once some of the fundamentals of life are mastered, there is time to explore and discover the new culture. This is the honeymoon stage of wonder and infatuation, in it there is a heightened appreciation of the new, the different, the aesthetic. Depending on the degree of cultural immersion and exploration it may continue for a considerable period of time. During this time there is no interest in attending to the less attractive downsides of the culture.

After a while, a self-correction takes place. No honeymoon can last forever. Irritation and anger begin to be experienced. Why in the world would anyone do it that way? Can’t these people get their act together? Now the deficits seem glaringly apparent. For some people, they overwhelm the positive characteristics and become predominant. Finally, if you are lucky enough to chart a course through these stages and not get stuck (and people do get stuck in these stages), there is a rebalance of reality. There is the capacity to understand and enjoy the new culture without ignoring those features that are less desirable. This cultural entry and engagement process is both cognitive and affective. New information is acquired and remembered; old schema and perceptions are revised and qualified. An active learning process occurs. At the same time, anxiety arises in reaction to uncertainties and the challenges of the learning processes. It must be managed, as must the extremes of feeling that occur in this labile period. Thus, I am describing a learning process that results in valuing and affirming the best in the culture while at the same time seeing it in its completeness, seeing it whole. The capacity to affirm the whole — including those aspects that are less desirable yet are part of the whole — is critically important. An appreciative process, “appreciative inquiry” is proposed as a way of helping members of different cultures recognize and value their differences and create a new culture where different values are understood and honoured. Executives — those who must lead this culture–change projects — need to understand that equal employment opportunity, affirmative action and sexual harassment policies, as viewed and implemented in organizations, are problem-oriented change strategies. They focus on correcting what is wrong rather than creating a valued future. Executives themselves will need to inquire appreciatively into cultures that are not known to them before they are equipped to lead cultural change in their own organizations.

Long before I disbanded formally, the Eclipse Group, in order to assist the company in applying for patents on the new machine, had gathered and had tried to figure out which engineers had contributed to Eagle’s patentable features. Some who attended found those meetings painful. There was bickering. Harsh words were occasionally exchanged. Alsing, who during the project had set aside the shield of technical command, came in for some abuse – why should his name go on any patents, what had he done? Someone even asked that question regarding West. Ironically, perhaps, those meetings illustrated that the building of Eagle really did constitute a collective effort, for now that they had finished, they themselves were having a hard time agreeing on what each individual had contributed. But, clearly, the team was losing its glue. ‘It has no function anymore. It’s like an afterbirth,’ said one old hat after the last of the patent meetings. Shortly after those meetings, Wallach, Alsing, Rasala and West received telegrams of congratulations from North-Carolina’s leader. That was a classy gesture, all agreed. The next day Eagle finally went out the Company’s door. In New York City, in faded elegance of the Roosevelt Hotel, under gilded chandeliers, on April 29, 1980, Data General announced Eagle to the world. On days immediately following, in other parts of the country and in Canada and Europe, the machine was presented to salesmen and customers, and some members of the Eclipse Group went off on so-called road shows. About dozen of the team attended the big event in New York. There was a slick slide show. There were speeches. Then there was an impressive display in a dining hall-128 terminals hooked up to a single Eagle. The machine crashed during this part of the program, but no one except the company engineers noticed, the problem was corrected so quickly and deftly. Eagle – this one consisted of the boards from Gollum – looked rather fine in skins of off – white and blue, but also unfamiliar. A surprising large number of reporters attended, and the next day Eagle’s debut was written up at some length in both the Wall Street Journal and the financial pages of the New York Times. But it wasn’t called Eagle anymore. Marketing had rechristened it the Eclipse MV/8000. This also took some getting used to. The people who described the machine to the press had never, of course, had anything to do with making it. Alsing - who was at the premiere and who had seen Marketing present machines before, ones he’s worked on directly - said: After Marketing gets through, you go home and say to yourself, “Wow! Did I do that?” And in front of the press, people who had not even been around when Eagle was conceived were described as having had responsibility for it. All of that was to be expected – just normal flak and protocol. As for the machine’s actual inventors-the engineers, most of whom came, seemed to have a good time, although some did seem to me a little out of place, untutored in this sort of performance. Many of them had brought new suits for the occasion. After the show, there were cocktails and then lunch, they occupied a table all their own. It was a rather formal luncheon, and there was some confusion at the table as to whether it was proper to take first the plate of salad on the right or the one on the left. West came, too. He did not sit with his old team, but he did talk easily and pleasantly with many of them during the day. “I had a great talk with West!”. Remarked one of the Microkids. He wore a brown suit, conservatively tailored. He looked as though he’d been wearing a suit all his life. He had come to this ceremony with some reluctance, and he was decidedly in the background. At the door to the show, where name tags were handed out, West had been asked what his title was. “Business Development” he’d said. At the cocktail party after the formal presentation, a reporter came up to him: “You seem to know something about this machine. What did you have to do with it?” West mumbled something, waving a hand, and changed the subject. Alsing overheard this exchange. It offended his sense of reality. He couldn’t let the matter stand there. So he took the reporter aside and told him, “That guy was the leader of the whole thing”. I had the feeling that West was just going through emotions and was not really present at all. When it was over and we were strolling down a busy street towards Penn Station, his mood altered. Suddenly there was no longer a feeling of forbidden subjects, as there had been around him for many months. I found myself all of a sudden saying to him: “It’s just a computer. It’s really a small thing in the world, you know.” West smiled softly. “I know it”. None of it, he said later, had come out the way he had imagined it would, but it was over and he was glad. The day after the formal announcement, Data General’s famous sales force had been introduced to the computer in New York and elsewhere. At the end of the presentation for the salesmen assembled in New York, the regional sales manager got up and gave his troops a pep talk. “What motivates people?” he asked. He answered his own question, saying, “Ego and the money to buy things that other people and their families want”? It was a different kind of machine. Clearly, the machine no longer belonged to the engineers.