Question:
The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.
Sentence: In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12.
Paragraph: The first suggested evidence of a human genetic mutation associated with aggressive behaviour came from a study in 1993. ____ (1)____. Genetic and metabolic studies were conducted on a large Dutch family in which several of the males has a syndrome of borderline mental retardation and abnormal behaviour. ____ (2)____. The undesirable behaviour included impulsive aggression, arson and exhibitionism. ____ (3)____. A point mutation was identified in the eighth exon of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) structural gene which changes glutamine to a termination codon. ____ (4)____.
The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.
Sentence: In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12.
Paragraph: The first suggested evidence of a human genetic mutation associated with aggressive behaviour came from a study in 1993. ____ (1)____. Genetic and metabolic studies were conducted on a large Dutch family in which several of the males has a syndrome of borderline mental retardation and abnormal behaviour. ____ (2)____. The undesirable behaviour included impulsive aggression, arson and exhibitionism. ____ (3)____. A point mutation was identified in the eighth exon of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) structural gene which changes glutamine to a termination codon. ____ (4)____.
Sentence: In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12.
Paragraph: The first suggested evidence of a human genetic mutation associated with aggressive behaviour came from a study in 1993. ____ (1)____. Genetic and metabolic studies were conducted on a large Dutch family in which several of the males has a syndrome of borderline mental retardation and abnormal behaviour. ____ (2)____. The undesirable behaviour included impulsive aggression, arson and exhibitionism. ____ (3)____. A point mutation was identified in the eighth exon of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) structural gene which changes glutamine to a termination codon. ____ (4)____.
Show Hint
Inserting sentences in a logical order connects ideas and helps maintain the flow of information.
Updated On: Jan 5, 2026
Option 1
Option 2
Option 3
Option 4
Show Solution
Verified By Collegedunia
The Correct Option is C
Approach Solution - 1
To determine the best placement for the given sentence within the paragraph, we need to understand the flow and context of the information provided. The sentence discusses a genetic defect located on the X chromosome in affected males. Let's analyze the paragraph:
The paragraph starts by mentioning a study in 1993 related to human genetic mutation and aggressive behavior. The next sentence introduces the context of the study, which includes genetic and metabolic studies on a Dutch family. This provides a setting for the investigation.
The third part, currently having the placeholder (2), discusses the undesirable behaviors observed. This sequence naturally follows the introduction of the study’s context.
The missing sentence, "In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12", fits well after the sentence describing the undesirable behaviors observed in the family. This is because it provides a crucial detail about the genetic finding related to the behaviors described.
The next sentence elaborates on the nature of the mutation identified, which flows logically after specifying the chromosome region involved.
Thus, the sequence should be:
- Introduction of the study (1993 study related to genetic mutation)
- Context of the study (about the Dutch family)
- Details of the observed behaviors
- The genetic location of the defect that explains these behaviors ("In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12")
- Identification of the type of mutation
After analyzing this structure, it becomes clear that the given sentence logically fits at option 3, right before the discussion of the point mutation.
Was this answer helpful?
0
0
Show Solution
Verified By Collegedunia
Approach Solution -2
To determine where the given sentence best fits within the paragraph, we need to evaluate the logical flow and content of the paragraph and the specific details of the sentence itself.
The given sentence is: "In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12."
Let's break down the paragraph:
- Sentence (1): Introducing a study from 1993 that suggested a link between human genetic mutation and aggressive behavior. This sentence serves as an introductory statement.
- Sentence (2): Discusses the study conducted on a large Dutch family with several males exhibiting certain behaviors. It continues from the introduction, focusing on the demographics and symptoms of the subjects in the study.
- Sentence (3): (missing): This is where we evaluate the fit for the given sentence about locating the genetic defect. It connects the specific details about the genetic mutation discovered in the subjects.
- Sentence (4): Describes the specific genetic mutation identified, providing a molecular detail that follows logically after introducing the presence of a genetic defect.
The correct placement for the missing sentence is at position (3). Here's why:
- The paragraph flows logically by first introducing the study, describing the subjects' characteristics and behavior, then specifying the genetic anomaly linked to their behavior.
- Sentence (3) ideally should bridge the description of the subjects' characteristics and the specific genetic findings, which the given sentence does by pointing out the genetic defect's specific location on the X chromosome.
By placing the sentence in option (3), the paragraph maintains a clear and logical progression from the study's introduction through to the detailed findings. Therefore, the correct answer is Option 3.
Was this answer helpful?
0
0
Top CAT Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Questions
- Compare and contrast between Portia and Jessica characters in Merchant of Venice.
- The passages given here are followed by some questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option whose answer best aligns with the passage
In the late 1960s, while studying the northern-elephant-seal population along the coasts of Mexico and California, Burney Le Boeuf and his colleagues couldn’t help but notice that the threat calls of males at some sites sounded different from those of males at other sites. . .. That was the first time dialects were documented in a nonhuman mammal. . ..
All the northern elephant seals that exist today are descendants of the small herd that survived on Isla Guadalupe [after the near extinction of the species in the nineteenth century]. As that tiny population grew, northern elephant seals started to recolonize former breeding locations. It was precisely on the more recently colonized islands where Le Boeuf found that the tempos of the male vocal displays showed stronger differences to the ones from Isla Guadalupe, the founder colony.
In order to test the reliability of these dialects over time, Le Boeuf and other researchers visited Año Nuevo Island in California—the island where males showed the slowest pulse rates in their calls—every winter from 1968 to 1972. “What we found is that the pulse rate increased, but it still remained relatively slow compared to the other colonies we had measured in the past” Le Boeuf told me.
At the individual level, the pulse of the calls stayed the same: A male would maintain his vocal signature throughout his lifetime. But the average pulse rate was changing. Immigration could have been responsible for this increase, as in the early 1970s, 43 percent of the males on Año Nuevo had come from southern rookeries that had a faster pulse rate. This led Le Boeuf and his collaborator, Lewis Petrinovich, to deduce that the dialects were, perhaps, a result of isolation over time, after the breeding sites had been recolonized. For instance, the first settlers of Año Nuevo could have had, by chance, calls with low pulse rates. At other sites, where the scientists found faster pulse rates, the opposite would have happened—seals with faster rates would have happened to arrive first.
As the population continued to expand and the islands kept on receiving immigrants from the original population, the calls in all locations would have eventually regressed to the average pulse rate of the founder colony. In the decades that followed, scientists noticed that the geographical variations reported in 1969 were not obvious anymore. . . . In the early 2010s, while studying northern elephant seals on Año Nuevo Island, [researcher Caroline] Casey noticed, too, that what Le Boeuf had heard decades ago was not what she heard now. . . . By performing more sophisticated statistical analyses on both sets of data, [Casey and Le Boeuf] confirmed that dialects existed back then but had vanished. Yet there are other differences between the males from the late 1960s and their great-greatgrandsons: Modern males exhibit more individual diversity, and their calls are more complex. While 50 years ago the drumming pattern was quite simple and the dialects denoted just a change in tempo, Casey explained, the calls recorded today have more complex structures, sometimes featuring doublets or triplets. . . . - Direction for Reading Comprehension: The passages given here are followed by some questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option whose answer best aligns with the passage
Vocabulary used in speech or writing organizes itself in seven parts of speech (eight, if you count interjections such as Oh! and Gosh! and Fuhgeddaboudit!). Communication composed of these parts of speech must be organized by rules of grammar upon which we agree. When these rules break down, confusion and misunderstanding result. Bad grammar produces bad sentences. My favorite example from Strunk and White is this one: “As a mother of five, with another one on the way, my ironing board is always up.”
Nouns and verbs are the two indispensable parts of writing. Without one of each, no group of words can be a sentence, since a sentence is, by definition, a group of words containing a subject (noun) and a predicate (verb); these strings of words begin with a capital letter, end with a period, and combine to make a complete thought which starts in the writer’s head and then leaps to the reader’s.
Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren’t going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. “It is an old observation,” he writes, “that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric.” Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: “Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules.”
The telling clause here is Unless he is certain of doing well. If you don’t have a rudimentary grasp of how the parts of speech translate into coherent sentences, how can you be certain that you are doing well? How will you know if you’re doing ill, for that matter? The answer, of course, is that you can’t, you won’t. One who does grasp the rudiments of grammar finds a comforting simplicity at its heart, where there need be only nouns, the words that name, and verbs, the words that act.
Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float. These are all perfect sentences. Many such thoughts make little rational sense, but even the stranger ones (Plums deify!) have a kind of poetic weight that’s nice. The simplicity of noun-verb construction is useful—at the very least it can provide a safety net for your writing. Strunk and White caution against too many simple sentences in a row, but simple sentences provide a path you can follow when you fear getting lost in the tangles of rhetoric—all those restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, those modifying phrases, those appositives and compound-complex sentences. If you start to freak out at the sight of such unmapped territory (unmapped by you, at least), just remind yourself that rocks explode, Jane transmits, mountains float, and plums deify. Grammar is . . . the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. - Direction for Reading Comprehension: The passages given here are followed by some questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option whose answer best aligns with the passage
Few realise that the government of China, governing an empire of some 60 million people during the Tang dynasty (618–907), implemented a complex financial system that recognised grain, coins and textiles as money. . . . Coins did have certain advantages: they were durable, recognisable and provided a convenient medium of exchange, especially for smaller transactions. However, there were also disadvantages. A continuing shortage of copper meant that government mints could not produce enough coins for the entire empire, to the extent that for most of the dynasty’s history, coins constituted only a tenth of the money supply. One of the main objections to calls for taxes to be paid in coin was that peasant producers who could weave cloth or grow grain – the other two major currencies of the Tang –would not be able to produce coins, and therefore would not be able to pay their taxes. . . .
As coins had advantages and disadvantages, so too did textiles. If in circulation for a long period of time, they could show signs of wear and tear. Stained, faded and torn bolts of textiles had less value than a brand new bolt. Furthermore, a full bolt had a particular value. If consumers cut textiles into smaller pieces to buy or sell something worth less than a full bolt, that, too, greatly lessened the value of the textiles. Unlike coins, textiles could not be used for small transactions; as [an official] noted, textiles could not “be exchanged by the foot and the inch” . . .
But textiles had some advantages over coins. For a start, textile production was widespread and there were fewer problems with the supply of textiles. For large transactions, textiles weighed less than their equivalent in coins since a string of coins . . . could weigh as much as 4 kg. Furthermore, the dimensions of a bolt of silk held remarkably steady from the third to the tenth century: 56 cm wide and 12 m long . . . The values of different textiles were also more stable than the fluctuating values of coins. . . .
The government also required the use of textiles for large transactions. Coins, on the other hand, were better suited for smaller transactions, and possibly, given the costs of transporting coins, for a more local usage. Grain, because it rotted easily, was not used nearly as much as coins and textiles, but taxpayers were required to pay grain to the government as a share of their annual tax obligations, and official salaries were expressed in weights of grain. . . .
In actuality, our own currency system today has some similarities even as it is changing in front of our eyes. . . . We have cash – coins for small transactions like paying for parking at a meter, and banknotes for other items; cheques and debit/credit cards for other, often larger, types of payments. At the same time, we are shifting to electronic banking and making payments online. Some young people never use cash [and] do not know how to write a cheque . . . - Direction for Reading Comprehension: The passages given here are followed by some questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option whose answer best aligns with the passage
The word ‘anarchy’ comes from the Greek anarkhia, meaning contrary to authority or without a ruler, and was used in a derogatory sense until 1840, when it was adopted by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to describe his political and social ideology. Proudhon argued that organization without government was both possible and desirable. In the evolution of political ideas, anarchism can be seen as an ultimate projection of both liberalism and socialism, and the differing strands of anarchist thought can be related to their emphasis on one or the other of these.
Historically, anarchism arose not only as an explanation of the gulf between the rich and the poor in any community, and of the reason why the poor have been obliged to fight for their share of a common inheritance, but as a radical answer to the question ‘What went wrong?’ that followed the ultimate outcome of the French Revolution. It had ended not only with a reign of terror and the emergence of a newly rich ruling caste, but with a new adored emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, strutting through his conquered territories.
The anarchists and their precursors were unique on the political Left in affirming that workers and peasants, grasping the chance that arose to bring an end to centuries of exploitation and tyranny, were inevitably betrayed by the new class of politicians, whose first priority was to re-establish a centralized state power. After every revolutionary uprising, usually won at a heavy cost for ordinary populations, the new rulers had no hesitation in applying violence and terror, a secret police, and a professional army to maintain their control.
For anarchists the state itself is the enemy, and they have applied the same interpretation to the outcome of every revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries. This is not merely because every state keeps a watchful and sometimes punitive eye on its dissidents, but because every state protects the privileges of the powerful.
The mainstream of anarchist propaganda for more than a century has been anarchistcommunism, which argues that property in land, natural resources, and the means of production should be held in mutual control by local communities, federating for innumerable joint purposes with other communes. It differs from state socialism in opposing the concept of any central authority. Some anarchists prefer to distinguish between anarchist-communism and collectivist anarchism in order to stress the obviously desirable freedom of an individual or family to possess the resources needed for living, while not implying the right to own the resources needed by others. . . .
There are, unsurprisingly, several traditions of individualist anarchism, one of them deriving from the ‘conscious egoism’ of the German writer Max Stirner (1806–56), and another from a remarkable series of 19th-century American figures who argued that in protecting our own autonomy and associating with others for common advantages, we are promoting the good of all. These thinkers differed from free-market liberals in their absolute mistrust of American capitalism, and in their emphasis on mutualism.
View More Questions
Top CAT Para Completion Questions
- Each of the following questions presents four statements, of which three, when placed in appropriate order, would form a contextually complete paragraph. Pick the statement that is not part of that context.
- Each of the following questions presents four statements, of which three, when placed in appropriate order, would form a contextually complete paragraph. Pick the statement that is not part of that context.
The sentences given, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Choose the most logical order.
(a) In the New York City public schools, the overemphasis on standardized testing has led to test score inflation and numerous cheating scandals.
(b) Campbell’s Law predicts that any time huge stakes are attached to quantitative data, the data itself will become inherently unreliable and distorted through cheating and gaming the system.
(c) Precious resources are diverted to “for-profit” testing companies, and learning time is lost as students spend weeks preparing for the tests, and teachers are pulled out of the classroom for days at a time to score them.
(d) In New York City, class sizes in the early grades are the largest in 13 years.
(e) Meanwhile school budgets are scraped to the bone and class sizes are rising.The sentences given, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Choose the most logical order.
(a) As the grammar of standard English extends to the grammar of code, our errors find themselves embedded in programmes and replicating further and more widely than previously imaginable.
(b) Even a poorly constructed tweet reflects a poorly constructed thought, while grammatically lacking e-mail messages have become the hallmark of password phishing scams.
(c) Language is no less exacting than mathematics.
(d) As the title of a book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” demonstrates, a single comma can change a sentence about the diet of a panda to one describing the behaviour of a dine-and-dash killer.
(e) The emergence of digital technology makes precision in language even more important.- Relations between the factory and the dealer are distant and usually strained as the factory tries to force cars on the dealers to smooth out production. Relations between the dealer and the customer are equally strained because dealers continuously adjust prices — make deals — to adjust demand with supply while maximizing profits. This becomes a system marked by a lack of long-term commitment on either side, which maximizes feelings of mistrust. In order to maximize their bargaining positions, everyone holds back information — the dealer about the product and the consumer about his true desires.
View More Questions
Top CAT Questions
- Compare and contrast between Portia and Jessica characters in Merchant of Venice.
- In a triangle ABC,AB=AC=8cm. A circle drawn with BC as diameter passes through A. Another circle drawn with center at A passes through B and C. Then the area,in sq.cm,of the overlapping region between the two circles is
- The simple interest accrued on an amount of Rs.25,000 at the end of three years is Rs.7,500. What would be the compound interest accrued on the same amount at the same rate in the same period?
- What is the sum of all roots of the equation \(|x+4|^2–10|x+4|=24\)?
- A solid metal sphere is melted and smaller spheres of equal radii are formed. 10% of the volume of the sphere is lost in the process. The smaller spheres have a radius which is \(\frac{1}{9}\text{th}\) the larger sphere. If 10 litres of paint were needed to paint the larger sphere,how many litres are needed to paint all the smaller spheres?
View More Questions