CAT 2002 — VARC Question 40
Fill the gaps in the passage below with the most appropriate word from the options given for each gap. The right words are the ones used by the author. Be guided by the author's overall style and meaning when you choose the answers.
In a large company, ______1______ people is about as common as using a gun or a switch-blade to ______2_______ an argument. As a result, most managers have little or no experience of firing people, and they find it emotionally automatic, as result, they often delay the act interminably, much as an unhappy spouse will prolong a bad marriage. And when the firing is done, it's often done clumsily, with far worse side effects than are necessary.
Do the world-class software organizations have a different way of firing people? No. But they do the deed swiftly, humanely, and professionally.
The key point here is to view the fired employee as a "failed product" and to ask how the process ______3_______ such a phenomenon in the first place.
The sentences given in each question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentences is labelled with a letter. Choose the most logical order of sentences from among the four given choices to construct a coherent paragraph.
- This fact was established in the 1730s by French survey expeditions to Equator near the Equator and Lapland in the Arctic, which found that around the middle of the earth the arc was about a kilometer shorter.
- One of the unsettled scientific questions in the late 18th century was the exact nature of the shape of the earth.
- The length of one-degree arc would be less near the equatorial latitudes than at the poles.
- One way of doing that is to determine the length of the arc along a chosen longitude or meridian at one degree latitude separation
- While it was generally known that the earth was not a sphere but an 'oblate spheroid' more curved at the equator and flatter at the poles, the question of 'how much more' was yet to be established.
Answer & solution
- A
BECAD
BEDCA
- C
BDACB
- D
EBDCA
An easier way to approach this question would be to attack the options after a brief scan of the sentences. Sentence B begins the passage; it states the ‘unsettled question’. Sentence E attempts to answer that question. Therefore, BE is a pair. D continues from there (one way of doing that (determining how much is the earth oblate spheroid)) and C gives reasoning for the same. A summarizes it. Sentence A begins with ‘this fact was established…’ and the ‘this’ points to the fact mentioned in sentence C. Therefore, the sequence is BEDCA.
Hence, the correct answer is option 2.