Para Summary — XAT Previous-Year Questions
11 previous-year questions on Para Summary from XAT, with full solutions. Practise free — check answers as you go; sign in to save your progress.
Para Summary · XAT PYQs
Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.
That’s how life plays out for all of us. We lose some. Like sportspersons, we too pack our gear and go to work. But unlike them, the gaze of the world is not upon us. Most of us do our business in anonymity, very few of us are emotionally wired to the outcomes of our day jobs. We don’t come back feeling like winners. Or losers. As sports fans we can summon empathy for those who stretch their bodies and minds to the limit in the pursuit of athletic excellence and provide such joys in the process.
But we will never experience the highs that are their reward. And we will never know the depth of their lows, which are their burden.
Still, no one will know better than Rohit and Dravid that its already a new day. There might never be a World Cup win for them. But there are loved ones to go to. Life awaits still.
Which of the following statements BEST summarizes the above passage?
Read the poem carefully, and answer the following question.
I smiled at you because I thought that you
Were someone else; you smiled back; and there grew
Between two strangers in a library
Something that seems like love; but you loved me
(If that’s the word) because you thought that I
Was other than I was. And by and by
We found we’d been mistaken all the while
From that first glance, that first mistaken smile
Which of the following CANNOT be inferred from the poem?
Carefully read the following statement:
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it_____ for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that _____ are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the ________ is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has ________ to rewrite its own history.
Which of the following options will BEST fill up the above blanks meaningfully?
Read the passage carefully and answer the following question.
Geologists have been investigating a potential cycle in geological events for a long time. Back in the 1920s and 30s, scientists of the era had suggested that the geological record had a 30-million-year cycle, while in the 1980s and 90s researchers used the best-dated geological events at the time to give them a range of the length between 'pulses' of 26.2 to 30.6 million years. Now, everything seems to be in order -27.5 million years is right about where we'd expect. A study late last year suggested that this 27.5-million-year mark is when mass extinctions happen, too.
Which of the following statements can be BEST concluded from the passage?
Read the passage carefully and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.
This is easiest to introduce with a tragic case. British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: i.e., as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years.
Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand. In at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalisation.
Stupidity will often arise in cases like this, when an outdated conceptual framework is forced into service,mangling the user’s grip on some new phenomenon. It is important to distinguish this from mere error. We make mistakes for all kinds of reasons. Stupidity is rather one specific and stubborn cause of error. Historically, philosophers have worried a great deal about the irrationality of not taking the available means to achieve goals: Tom wants to get fit, yet his running shoes are quietly gathering dust. The stock solution to Tom’s quandary is simple willpower. Stupidity is very different from this. It is rather a lack of the necessary means, a lack of the necessary intellectual equipment. Combatting it will typically require not brute willpower but the construction of a new way of seeing our self and our world. Such stupidity is perfectly compatible with intelligence: Haig was by any standard a smart man.
Read the excerpt carefully and answer the following question.
The over-whelming preponderance of people have not freely decided what to believe, but, rather, have been socially conditioned (indoctrinated) into their beliefs. They are unreflective thinkers.
Which of the following statements CANNOT be concluded from the excerpt?
Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.
The painting, which is in poor condition, suggests that a highly advanced artistic culture existed some 44,000 years ago, punctuated by folklore, religious myths and spiritual belief. The scene may be regarded not only as the earliest dated figurative art in the world but also as the oldest evidence for the communication of a narrative in Palaeolithic art.
"This is noteworthy, given that the ability to invent fictional stories may have been the last and most crucial stage in the evolutionary history of human language and the development of modern-like patterns of cognition” researchers said.
Which of the following can be BEST concluded from the passage?
Read the following passage and answer the two questions that follow.
We stand before this great world. The truth of our life depends upon our attitude of mind towards it - an attitude which is formed by our habit of dealing with it according to the special circumstance of our surroundings and our temperaments. It guides our attempts to establish relations with the universe either by conquest or by union, either through the cultivation of power or through that of sympathy.
And thus, in our realization of the truth of existence, we put our emphasis either upon the principle of dualism or upon the principle of unity.
Which of the following statements can be BEST inferred from the passage?
Read the following passage and answer the two questions that follow.
We stand before this great world. The truth of our life depends upon our attitude of mind towards it - an attitude which is formed by our habit of dealing with it according to the special circumstance of our surroundings and our temperaments. It guides our attempts to establish relations with the universe either by conquest or by union, either through the cultivation of power or through that of sympathy.
And thus, in our realization of the truth of existence, we put our emphasis either upon the principle of dualism or upon the principle of unity.
According to the passage, our emphasis on dualism or on unity is BEST guided by:
In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application of this technique, every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned a specific place in the psychic activities of the walking state, Further, I shall endeavour to elucidate the processes the nature of the psychic forces whose conflict or cooperation is responsible for our dreams. This done, my investigation will terminate, as it will have reached the point where the problem of the dream merges into more comprehensive problems, and to solve these we must have recourse to material of a different kind.
Which of the followings would be closest to the ideas expresses in the first two sentences of the above passages?
Read the definitions below and select the best match between the numbered sentences and the definitions.
Premise: A proposition from which another statement is inferred or follows a conclusion.
Assumption: Something, which is accepted as true.
Facts: Something, which can be checked.
Reason: A cause, explanation or justification for an action or event.
Conclusion: An end, finish or summarization of process or argument.
Proposition: A statement that expresses judgment or opinion.
Question: A sentence worded or expressed so as to elicit opinion.
Inductive inference: An end, finish or summarization reached for “the whole”, based on “a particular” real incidence.
Deductive Inference: An end, finish or summarization reached based on the combining and recombining two or more than two assumptions.
Read the following paragraph carefully and answer the question that follows:
It is one week since Uttarakhand’s worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agriculture fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and buildings – anything that stood in the way.
A week later, media attention remains riveted on the efforts to rescue tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourist visiting the shrines in the uppermost reaches of Uttarakhand’s sacred rivers. But the deluge spread far beyond th Char Dhams – Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath – to cover the entire state. The catchments of many smaller rivers also witnessed flash floods but the media has yet to report on the destruction there. Eyewitness accounts being gathered by official agencies and voluntary organizations have reported devastation from more than 200 villages so far and more affected villages are being reported every day.
Which of the following would the author agree the most with?
Read the following passage and answer the questions.
There is an essential and irreducible ‘duality’ in the normative conceptualization of an individual person. We can see the person in terms of his or her ‘agency’, recognizing and respecting his or her ability to form goals, commitments, values, etc., and we can also see the person in terms of his or her ‘well-being’. This dichotomy is lost in a model of exclusively self-interested motivation, in which a person’s agency must be entirely geared to his or her own well-being. But once that straitjacket of self-interested motivation is removed, it becomes possible to recognize the indisputable fact that the person’s agency can well be geared to considerations not covered – or at least not fully covered – by his or her own well-being. Agency may be seen as important (not just instrumentally for the pursuit of well-being, but also intrinsically), but that still leaves open the question as to how that agency is to be evaluated and appraised. Even though the use of one’s agency is a matter for oneself to judge, the need for careful assessment of aims, objective, allegiances, etc., and the conception of the good, may be important and exacting.
To recognize the distinction between the ‘agency aspect’ and the ‘well-being aspect’ of a person does not require us to take the view that the person’s success as an agent must be independent, or completely separable from, his or her success in terms of well-being. A person may well feel happier and better off as a result of achieving what he or she wanted to achieve – perhaps for his or her family, or community, or class, or party, or some other cause. Also it is quite possible that a person’s well-being will go down as a result of frustration if there is some failure to achieve what he or she wanted to achieve as an agent, even though those achievements are not directly concerned with his or her well-being. There is really no sound basis for demanding that the agency aspect and the well-being aspect of a person should be independent of each other, and it is, I suppose, even possible that every change in one will affect the other as well. However, the point at issue is not the plausibility of their independence, but the sustainability and relevance of the distinction. The fact that two variables may be so related that one cannot change without the other, does not imply that they are the same variable, or that they will have the same values, or that the value of one can be obtained from the other on basis of some simple transformation.
The importance of an agency achievement does not rest entirely on the enhancement of well-being that it may indirectly cause. The agency achievement and well-being achievement, both of which have some distinct importance, may be casually linked with each other, but this fact does not compromise the specific importance of either. In so far as utility – based welfare calculations concentrate only on the well-being of the person, ignoring the agency aspect, or actually fails to distinguish between the agency aspect and well-being aspect altogether, something of real importance is lost.
Most of the Asian countries have trade-deficit with China. Bangladesh’s trade deficit with China this year has increased by 35%. Despite large increases in exports to China, Indonesia’s trade deficit with China continues to increase. So does that of South Korea, home of Samsung Electronics, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electronic gadgets.
Which of the following, if true, would be most inconsistent with the above passage?