CAT 2017 Slot 1 — VARC Question 30
Answer the following question based on the information given below.
Do sports mega events like the Summer Olympic Games benefit the host city economically? It depends, but the prospects are less than rosy. The trick is converting… several billion dollars in operating costs during the 17-day fiesta of the games into a basis for long-term economic returns. These days, the Summer Olympic games themselves generate total revenue of 5 billion, but the lion’s share of this goes to the International Olympics Committee, the National Olympics Committees and the International sports Federations. Any economic benefit would have to flow from the value of the Games as an advertisement for the city, the new transportation and communications infrastructure that was created for the Games, or the ongoing use of the new facilities.
Evidence suggests that the advertising effect is far from certain. The infrastructure benefit depends on the initial condition of the city and the effectiveness of the planning. The facilities benefits is dubious at best for buildings such as velodromes or natatoriums and problematic for 100,000-seat Olympic stadiums. The latter require a conversion plan for future use, the former are usually doomed to near vacancy. Hosting the summer Games generally requires 30-plus sports venues and dozens of training centers. Today, the bird’s Nest in Beijing sits virtually empty, while the Olympic stadium in Sydney costs some $30 million a year to operate.
Part of the problem is that Olympics planning takes place in a frenzied and time-pressured atmosphere of intense competition with the other prospective host cities – not optimal conditions for contemplating the future shape of an urban landscape. Another part of the problem is that urban land is generally scarce and growing scarcer. The new facilities often stand for decades or longer. Even if they have future use, are they the best use of precious urban real estate?Further, cities must consider the human cost, Residential areas often are razed and citizens relocated (without adequate preparation or compensation). Life is made more hectic and congested. There are, after all, other productive uses that can be made of vanishing fiscal resources.
The five sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, from a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer.
- The study suggests that the disease did not spread with such intensity, but that it may have driven human migration across Europe and Asia.
- The oldest sample came from an individual who lived in southeast Russia about 5,000 years ago.
- The ages of the skeletons correspond to a time of mass exodus from today’s Russia and Ukraine into western Europe and central Asia, suggesting that a pandemic could have driven these migrations.
- In the analysis of fragments of DNA from 101 Bronze Age skeletons for sequences from Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the disease, seven tested positive.
- DNA from Bronze age human skeletons indicate that the black plague could have emerged as early as 3,000 BCE, long before the epidemic that swept through Europe in mid–1300s.
Answer & solution
Answer: 54123
The first clue is that sentence 5 starts the paragraph as it introduces the theme and that it is followed by sentence 4. This gives us the beginning of the paragraph as 5-4. After this, the question becomes difficult as the link to the next sentence is not very clear. However, sentence 1 comes immediately after the 5-4 pair because “the epidemic that swept through Europe” in sentence 5 is now continued in sentence 1 after the interruption of sentence 4. Sentence 4 cannot be placed anywhere else in the paragraph. So, we get the 5-4-1 sequence. After this, it is easy to see that sentence 2 and 3 come next in that order. Sentence 2 states that the oldest sample was of 5000 years ago and sentence 3 says that this age corresponds to a time of mass exodus.
Hence, the correct answer is 54123.