Odd one outCAT Previous-Year Questions

39 previous-year questions on Odd one out from CAT, with full solutions. Practise free — check answers as you go; sign in to save your progress.

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39 questions

Odd one out · CAT PYQs

CAT 2020 Slot 1 · VARC
Q1.

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

1. Talk was the most common way for enslaved men and women to subvert the rules of their bondage, to gain more agency than they were supposed to have.

2. Even in conditions of extreme violence and unfreedom, their words remained ubiquitous, ephemeral, irrepressible, and potentially transgressive.

3. Slaves came from societies in which oaths, orations, and invocations carried great potency, both between people and as a connection to the all-powerful spirit world.

4. Freedom of speech and the power to silence may have been preeminent markers of white liberty in Colonies, but at the same time, slavery depended on dialogue: slaves could never be completely muted.

5. Slave-owners obsessed over slave talk, though they could never control it, yet feared its power to bind and inspire—for, as everyone knew, oaths, whispers, and secret conversations bred conspiracy and revolt.

CAT 2020 Slot 1 · VARC
Q2.

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

1. For feminists, the question of how we read is inextricably linked with the question of what we read.

2. Elaine Showalter’s critique of the literary curriculum is exemplary of this work.

3. Androcentric literature structures the reading experience differently depending on the gender of the reader.

4. The documentation of this realization was one of the earliest tasks undertaken by feminist critics.

5. More specifically, the feminist inquiry into the activity of reading begins with the realization that the literary canon is androcentric, and that this has a profoundly damaging effect on women readers.

CAT 2020 Slot 2 · VARC
Q3.

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

1. The victim’s trauma after assault rarely gets the attention that we lavish on the moment of damage that divided the survivor from a less encumbered past.

2. One thing we often do with narratives of sexual assault is sort their respective parties into different temporalities: it seems we are interested in perpetrators’ futures and victims’ pasts.

3. One result is that we don’t have much of a vocabulary for what happens in a victim’s life after the painful past has been excavated, even when our shared language gestures toward the future, as the term “survivor” does.

4. Even the most charitable questions asked about the victims seem to focus on the past, in pursuit of understanding or of corroboration of painful details.

5. As more and more stories of sexual assault have been made public in the last two years, the genre of their telling has exploded --- crimes have a tendency to become not just stories but genres.

CAT 2020 Slot 2 · VARC
Q4.

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

1. You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data.

2. Economists and technologists believe that a new kind of capitalism is being created - different from industrial capitalism as was merchant capitalism.

3. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights.

4. There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance, a different dynamic growing up: information as a social good, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced.

5. Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied and pasted infinitely

CAT 2020 Slot 3 · VARC
Passage / Data

Direction for Reading Comprehension: The pass ages 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

Although one of the most contested concepts in political philosophy, human nature is something on which most people seem to agree. By and large, according to Rutger Bregman in his new book Humankind, we have a rather pessimistic view – not of ourselves exactly, but of everyone else. We see other people as selfish, untrustworthy and dangerous and therefore we behave towards them with defensiveness and suspicion. This was how the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes conceived our natural state to be, believing that all that stood between us and violent anarchy was a strong state and firm leadership.

But in following Hobbes, argues Bregman, we ensure that the negative view we have of human nature is reflected back at us. He instead puts his faith in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century French thinker, who famously declared that man was born free and it was civilisation – with its coercive powers, social classes and restrictive laws – that put him in chains.

Hobbes and Rousseau are seen as the two poles of the human nature argument and it’s no surprise that Bregman strongly sides with the Frenchman. He takes Rousseau’s intuition and paints a picture of a prelapsarian idyll in which, for the better part of 300,000 years, Homo sapiens lived a fulfilling life in harmony with nature . . . Then we discovered agriculture and for the next 10,000 years it was all property, war, greed and injustice. . . .

It was abandoning our nomadic lifestyle and then domesticating animals, says Bregman, that brought about infectious diseases such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, malaria, cholera and plague. This may be true, but what Bregman never really seems to get to grips with is that pathogens were not the only things that grew with agriculture – so did the number of humans. It’s one thing to maintain friendly relations and a property-less mode of living when you’re 30 or 40 hunter-gatherers following the food. But life becomes a great deal more complex and knowledge far more extensive when there are settlements of many thousands.

“Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress and wilderness with war and decline,” writes Bregman. “In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.” Whereas traditional history depicts the collapse of civilisations as “dark ages” in which everything gets worse, modern scholars, he claims, see them more as a reprieve, in which the enslaved gain their freedom and culture flourishes. Like much else in this book, the truth is probably somewhere between the two stated positions.

In any case, the fear of civilisational collapse, Bregman believes, is unfounded. It’s the result of what the Dutch biologist Frans de Waal calls “veneer theory” – the idea that just below the surface, our bestial nature is waiting to break out. . . . There’s a great deal of reassuring human decency to be taken from this bold and thought-provoking book and a wealth of evidence in support of the contention that the sense of who we are as a species has been deleteriously distorted. But it seems equally misleading to offer the false choice of Rousseau and Hobbes when, clearly, humanity encompasses both.

Q5.

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

1. The logic of displaying one’s inner qualities through outward appearance was based on a distinction between being a woman and being feminine.

2. 'Appearance' became a signifier of conduct - to look was to be and conformity to the feminine ideal was measured by how well women could use the tools of the fashion and beauty industries.

3. The makeover-centric media sets out subtly and not-so-subtly, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways to be a woman, layering these over inequalities of race and class.

4. The denigration of working-class women and women of colour often centres on their perceived failure to embody feminine beauty.

5. ‘Woman’ was considered a biological category, but femininity was a ‘process’ by which women became specific kinds of women.

CAT 2020 Slot 3 · VARC
Passage / Data

Direction for Reading Comprehension: The pass ages 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

Although one of the most contested concepts in political philosophy, human nature is something on which most people seem to agree. By and large, according to Rutger Bregman in his new book Humankind, we have a rather pessimistic view – not of ourselves exactly, but of everyone else. We see other people as selfish, untrustworthy and dangerous and therefore we behave towards them with defensiveness and suspicion. This was how the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes conceived our natural state to be, believing that all that stood between us and violent anarchy was a strong state and firm leadership.

But in following Hobbes, argues Bregman, we ensure that the negative view we have of human nature is reflected back at us. He instead puts his faith in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century French thinker, who famously declared that man was born free and it was civilisation – with its coercive powers, social classes and restrictive laws – that put him in chains.

Hobbes and Rousseau are seen as the two poles of the human nature argument and it’s no surprise that Bregman strongly sides with the Frenchman. He takes Rousseau’s intuition and paints a picture of a prelapsarian idyll in which, for the better part of 300,000 years, Homo sapiens lived a fulfilling life in harmony with nature . . . Then we discovered agriculture and for the next 10,000 years it was all property, war, greed and injustice. . . .

It was abandoning our nomadic lifestyle and then domesticating animals, says Bregman, that brought about infectious diseases such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, malaria, cholera and plague. This may be true, but what Bregman never really seems to get to grips with is that pathogens were not the only things that grew with agriculture – so did the number of humans. It’s one thing to maintain friendly relations and a property-less mode of living when you’re 30 or 40 hunter-gatherers following the food. But life becomes a great deal more complex and knowledge far more extensive when there are settlements of many thousands.

“Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress and wilderness with war and decline,” writes Bregman. “In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.” Whereas traditional history depicts the collapse of civilisations as “dark ages” in which everything gets worse, modern scholars, he claims, see them more as a reprieve, in which the enslaved gain their freedom and culture flourishes. Like much else in this book, the truth is probably somewhere between the two stated positions.

In any case, the fear of civilisational collapse, Bregman believes, is unfounded. It’s the result of what the Dutch biologist Frans de Waal calls “veneer theory” – the idea that just below the surface, our bestial nature is waiting to break out. . . . There’s a great deal of reassuring human decency to be taken from this bold and thought-provoking book and a wealth of evidence in support of the contention that the sense of who we are as a species has been deleteriously distorted. But it seems equally misleading to offer the false choice of Rousseau and Hobbes when, clearly, humanity encompasses both.

Q6.

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

1. Machine learning models are prone to learning human-like biases from the training data that feeds these algorithms.

2. Hate speech detection is part of the on-going effort against oppressive and abusive language on social media.

3. The current automatic detection models miss out on something vital: context.

4. It uses complex algorithms to flag racist or violent speech faster and better than human beings alone.

5. For instance, algorithms struggle to determine if group identifiers like "gay" or "black" are used in offensive or prejudiced ways because they're trained on imbalanced datasets with unusually high rates of hate speech.

CAT 1997 · VARC
Q7.

A set of four words has been given. Three of the words are related to in some way. You have to select the word that does not fit in the relation.

CAT 1997 · VARC
Q8.

A set of four words has been given. Three of the words are related to in some way. You have to select the word that does not fit in the relation.

CAT 1997 · VARC
Q9.

A set of four words has been given. Three of the words are related to in some way. You have to select the word that does not fit in the relation.

CAT 1997 · VARC
Q10.

A set of four words has been given. Three of the words are related to in some way. You have to select the word that does not fit in the relation.

CAT 1997 · VARC
Q11.

A set of four words has been given. Three of the words are related to in some way. You have to select the word that does not fit in the relation.

CAT 1997 · VARC
Q12.

A set of four words has been given. Three of the words are related to in some way. You have to select the word that does not fit in the relation.

CAT 1996 · VARC
Q13.

Direction: Find the odd word out from each of the following sets of four word.

a. Impetuosity

b. Equanimity

c. Zealousness

d. Effervescence

CAT 1996 · VARC
Q14.

Direction: Find the odd word out from each of the following sets of four word.

a. Drip

b. Intrusion

c. Percolation

d. Effluence

CAT 1996 · VARC
Q15.

Direction: Find the odd word out from each of the following sets of four word.

a. Duplicity

b. Guilelessness

c. Artfulness

d. Shrewdness

CAT 1996 · VARC
Q16.

Direction: Find the odd word out from each of the following sets of four word.

a. Taxi

b. Cruiser

c. Amble

d. Cab

CAT 1996 · VARC
Q17.

Direction: Find the odd word out from each of the following sets of four word.

a. Hiatus

b. Break

c. Pause

d. End

CAT 1995 · VARC
Q18.

In the following question, a set of four words is given. Three of the words are related in some way, the remaining word is not related to the rest. You have to pick the word which does not fit in the relation and mark that as your answer.

a. Couple

b. Sever

c. Rend

d. Lacerate

CAT 1995 · VARC
Q19.

In the following question, a set of four words is given. Three of the words are related in some way, the remaining word is not related to the rest. You have to pick the word which does not fit in the relation and mark that as your answer.

a. Quell

b. Ruffle

c. Allay

d. Control

CAT 1995 · VARC
Q20.

In the following question, a set of four words is given. Three of the words are related in some way, the remaining word is not related to the rest. You have to pick the word which does not fit in the relation and mark that as your answer.

a. Cease

b. Launch

c. Initiate

d. Commence

CAT 1995 · VARC
Q21.

In the following question, a set of four words is given. Three of the words are related in some way, the remaining word is not related to the rest. You have to pick the word which does not fit in the relation and mark that as your answer.

a. Brink

b. Hub

c. Verge

d. Brim

CAT 1995 · VARC
Q22.

In the following question, a set of four words is given. Three of the words are related in some way, the remaining word is not related to the rest. You have to pick the word which does not fit in the relation and mark that as your answer.

a. Eulogy

b. Panegyric

c. Ignominy

d. Glorification

CAT 1995 · VARC
Q23.

In the following question, a set of four words is given. Three of the words are related in some way, the remaining word is not related to the rest. You have to pick the word which does not fit in the relation and mark that as your answer.

a. Detest

b. Abhor

c. Ardour

d. Loathe

CAT 1995 · VARC
Q24.

In the following question, a set of four words is given. Three of the words are related in some way, the remaining word is not related to the rest. You have to pick the word which does not fit in the relation and mark that as your answer.

a. Adroit

b. Adept

c. Dexterous

d. Awkward

CAT 1995 · VARC
Q25.

In the following question, a set of four words is given. Three of the words are related in some way, the remaining word is not related to the rest. You have to pick the word which does not fit in the relation and mark that as your answer.

a. Taciturn

b. Reserved

c. Clamorous

d. Silent

CAT 1995 · VARC
Q26.

In the following question, a set of four words is given. Three of the words are related in some way, the remaining word is not related to the rest. You have to pick the word which does not fit in the relation and mark that as your answer.

a. Sporadic

b. Frequent

c. Intermittent

d. Scarce

CAT 1995 · VARC
Q27.

In the following question, a set of four words is given. Three of the words are related in some way, the remaining word is not related to the rest. You have to pick the word which does not fit in the relation and mark that as your answer.

a. Fanatic

b. Zealot

c. Maniac

d. Rational

CAT 1993 · VARC
Q28.

Each of the following questions has four items. Mark the one that does not belong to this group.

CAT 1993 · VARC
Q29.

Each of the following questions has four items. Mark the one that does not belong to this group.

CAT 1993 · VARC
Q30.

Each of the following questions has four items. Mark the one that does not belong to this group.

CAT 1993 · VARC
Q31.

Each of the following questions has four items. Mark the one that does not belong to this group.

CAT 1993 · VARC
Q32.

Each of the following questions has four items. Mark the one that does not belong to this group.

CAT 1992 · VARC
Passage / Data

Kya –Kya is an obscure island which is inhabited by two types of people: the ‘Yes’ type and the ‘No’ type. Native of type ‘Yes’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘Yes’ while those of type ‘No’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘No’. For example. The ‘Yes’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to 4?” while the ‘No’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to five?” The following questions are based on your visit to the island of Kya – Kya.

Q33.

Each of these questions has four items. You are required to select that item which does not belong to the group.

CAT 1992 · VARC
Passage / Data

Kya –Kya is an obscure island which is inhabited by two types of people: the ‘Yes’ type and the ‘No’ type. Native of type ‘Yes’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘Yes’ while those of type ‘No’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘No’. For example. The ‘Yes’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to 4?” while the ‘No’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to five?” The following questions are based on your visit to the island of Kya – Kya.

Q34.

Each of these questions has four items. You are required to select that item which does not belong to the group.

CAT 1992 · VARC
Passage / Data

Kya –Kya is an obscure island which is inhabited by two types of people: the ‘Yes’ type and the ‘No’ type. Native of type ‘Yes’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘Yes’ while those of type ‘No’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘No’. For example. The ‘Yes’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to 4?” while the ‘No’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to five?” The following questions are based on your visit to the island of Kya – Kya.

Q35.

Each of these questions has four items. You are required to select that item which does not belong to the group.

CAT 1992 · VARC
Passage / Data

Kya –Kya is an obscure island which is inhabited by two types of people: the ‘Yes’ type and the ‘No’ type. Native of type ‘Yes’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘Yes’ while those of type ‘No’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘No’. For example. The ‘Yes’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to 4?” while the ‘No’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to five?” The following questions are based on your visit to the island of Kya – Kya.

Q36.

Each of these questions has four items. You are required to select that item which does not belong to the group.

CAT 1992 · VARC
Passage / Data

Kya –Kya is an obscure island which is inhabited by two types of people: the ‘Yes’ type and the ‘No’ type. Native of type ‘Yes’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘Yes’ while those of type ‘No’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘No’. For example. The ‘Yes’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to 4?” while the ‘No’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to five?” The following questions are based on your visit to the island of Kya – Kya.

Q37.

Each of these questions has four items. You are required to select that item which does not belong to the group.

CAT 1992 · VARC
Passage / Data

Kya –Kya is an obscure island which is inhabited by two types of people: the ‘Yes’ type and the ‘No’ type. Native of type ‘Yes’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘Yes’ while those of type ‘No’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘No’. For example. The ‘Yes’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to 4?” while the ‘No’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to five?” The following questions are based on your visit to the island of Kya – Kya.

Q38.

Each of these questions has four items. You are required to select that item which does not belong to the group.

CAT 1992 · VARC
Passage / Data

Kya –Kya is an obscure island which is inhabited by two types of people: the ‘Yes’ type and the ‘No’ type. Native of type ‘Yes’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘Yes’ while those of type ‘No’ ask only questions the right answer to which is ‘No’. For example. The ‘Yes’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to 4?” while the ‘No’ type will ask questions like “Is 2 plus 2 equal to five?” The following questions are based on your visit to the island of Kya – Kya.

Q39.

Each of these questions has four items. You are required to select that item which does not belong to the group.