CAT 2017 Slot 1 — VARC Question 31
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.
- This visual turn in social media has merely accentuated this announcing instinct of ours, enabling us with easy-to-create, easy-to-share, easy-to store and easy-to-consume platforms, gadgets and apps.
- There is absolutely nothing new about us farming the vision of who we are or what we want, visually or otherwise, in our Facebook page, for example.
- Turning the pages of most family albums, which belong to a period well before the digital dissemination of self-created and self-curated moments and images, would reconfirm the basic instinct of documenting our presence in a particular space, on a significant occasion, with others who matter.
- We are empowered to book our faces and act as celebrities within the confinement of our respective friend lists, and communicate our activities, companionship and locations with minimal clicks and touches.
- What is unprecedented is not the desire to put out newsfeeds related to the self, but the ease with which this broadcast operation can now be executed, often provoking (un)anticipated responses from beyond one’s immediate location.
Answer & solution
Answer: 32145
Sentence 3 is the only possible starter for the paragraph as all other sentences have incomplete references within them.
Sentence 2 follows sentence 3 as it explains that there is nothing new about our tendency to record ourselves in pictures and albums as was stated in sentence 3.
The end of sentence 2, “our Facebook for example” links to sentence 1 with its ‘this visual turn in social media…’ and gives us the 3-2-1 sequence.
Sentence 4 then elaborates on the same idea with reference to ‘our friend lists and … with minimal clicks and touches.”’
Sentence 5 then concludes by commenting on ‘what is unprecedented…’ about social media that it has made it easy to broadcast ourselves.
Hence, 32145.