CAT 2003 Slot 1 — VARC Question 40
The verse given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the journey is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon – you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one,
may there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbours seen for the first time:
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind –
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting lthaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey,
without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean
Each of the questions below consists of a set of labelled sentences. These sentences, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Choose the most logical order of sentences from the options.
- To avoid this, the QWERTY layout put the keys most likely to be hit in rapid succession on opposite sides. This made the keyboard slow, the story goes, but that was the idea.
- A different layout, which had been patented by August Dvorak in 1936, was shown to be much faster.
- The QWERTY design (patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873) aimed to solve a mechanical problem of early typewriters.
- Yet the Dvorak layout has never been widely adopted, even though (with electric typewriters and then PCs) the anti-jamming rationale for QWERTY has been defunct for years.
- When certain combinations of keys were struck quickly, the type bars often jammed.
Answer & solution
- A
BDACE
CEABD
- C
BCDEA
- D
CAEBD
Statement C begins the paragraph as it introduces the concept of the ‘QUERTY’ design.
E explains the mechanical problem spoken of in C and hence statement E continues immediately after statement C.
Statement A mentions how this problem was solved with the layout.
Statement B describes an alternate layout designed in 1936 and statement D gives the reason why it- the alternate layout- was not adopted. Thus, the logical sequence is CEABD.
Hence, the correct answer is option 2.