Free Verbal Reasoning - 13 Practice Test - CAT 

A. In America, highly educated women, who are in stronger position in the labor market than less qualified ones, have higher rates of marriage than other groups.
B. Some work supports the Becker thesis, and some appears to contradict it.
C. And, as with crime, it is equally inconclusive.
D. But regardless of the conclusion of any particular piece of work, it is hard to establish convincing connections between family changes and economic factors using conventional approaches.
E. Indeed, just as with crime, an enormous academic literature exists on the validity of the pure economic approach to the evolution of family structures

(2007)

A. I had six thousand acres of land, and had thus got much spare land besides the coffee plantation. Part of the farm was native forest, and about one thousand acres were squatters' land, what [the KikuyuJ called their shambas.
B. The squatters' land was more intensely alive than the rest of the farm, and was changing with the seasons the year round. The maize grew up higher than your head as you walked on the narrow hard-trampled footpaths in between the tall green rustling regiments.
C. The squatters are Natives, who with their families hold a few acres on a white man's farm, and in return have to work for him a certain number of days in the year. My squatters, I think, saw the relationship in a different light, for many of them were born on the farm, and their fathers before them, and they very likely regarded me as a sort of superior's quatter on their estates.

D. The Kikuyu also grew the sweet potatoes that have a vine like leaf and spread over the ground like a dense entangled mat, and many varieties of big yellow and green speckled pumpkins.
E. The beans ripened in the fields, were gathered and thrashed by the women, and the maize stalks and coffee pods were collected and burned, so that in certain seasons thin blue columns of smoke rose here and there all over the farm

(2007)

A) But this does not mean that death, was the Egyptians' only preoccupation.
B) Even papyri come mainly from pyramid temples.
C) Most of our traditional sources of information about the Old Kingdom are monuments of the rich like pyramids and tombs.
D) Houses in which ordinary Egyptians lived have not been preserved, and when most people died they were buried in simple graves.
E) We know infinitely more about the wealthy people of Egypt than we do about the ordinary people, as most monuments were made for the rich.
(2004)

A) This is now orthodoxy to which I subscribe-up to a point.
B) It emerged from the mathematics of chance and statistics.
C) Therefore, the risk is measurable and manageable.
D) The fundamental concept: Prices are not predictable, but the mathematical laws of chance can describe their fluctuations.
E) This is how what business schools now call modern finance was born.
(2005)

A) Similarly, turning to caste, even though being lower caste is undoubtedly a separate cause of disparity, its impact is all the greater when the lower-caste families also happen to be poor.
B) Belonging to a privileged class can help a woman to overcome many barriers that obstruct women from less thriving classes.
C) It is the interactive presence of these two kinds of deprivation - being low class and being female - that massively impoverishes women from the less privileged classes.
D) A congruence of class deprivation and gender discrimination can blight the lives of poorer women very severely.
E) Gender is certainly a contributor to societal inequality, but it does not act independently of class.
(2005)

A) The two neighbours never fought each other.
B) Fights involving three male fiddler crabs have been recorded, but the status of the participants was unknown.
C) They pushed or grappled only with the intruder.
D) We recorded 17 cases in which a resident that was fighting an intruder was joined by an immediate neighbour, an ally.
E) We, therefore, tracked 268 intruder males until we saw them fighting a resident male.
(2004)

A. In the west, Allied Forces had fought their way through southern Italy as far a Rome.
B. In June 1944, Germany's military position in World War II appeared hopeless.
C. In Britain, the task of amassing the men and materials for the liberation of northern Europe had been completed.
D. The Red Army was poised to drive the Nazis back through Poland.
E. The situation on the eastern front was catastrophic.
(2004)

A. Passivity is not, of course, universal.
B. In areas where there are no lords or laws, or in frontier zones where all men go armed, the attitude of the peasantry may well be different.
C. So indeed it may be on the fringe of the un-submissive.
D. However, for most of the soil-bound peasants the problem is not whether to be normally passive or active, but when to pass from one state to another.
E. This depends on an assessment of the political situation.
(2001)

A) Experts such as Larry Burns, head of research at GM, reckon that only such a full hearted leap will allow the world to cope with the mass motorization that will one day come to China or India.
B) But once hydrogen is being produced from biomass or extracted from underground coal or made from water, using nuclear or renewable electricity, the way will be open for a huge reduction in carbon emissions from the whole system.
C) In theory, once all the bugs have been stored out, fuel cells should deliver better total fuel economy than any existing engines.
D) That is twice as good as the internal combustion engine, but only five percentage points better than a diesel hybrid.
E) Allowing for the resources needed to extract hydrogen from hydrocarbon, oil, coal or gas, the fuel cell has an efficiency of $30\%$.
(2006)

A) In the case of King Merolchazzar's courtship of the Princess of the Outer Isles, there occurs a regrettable hitch.
B) She acknowledges the gifts, but no word of a meeting date follows.
C) The monarch, hearing good reports of a neighboring princess, dispatches messengers with gifts to her court, beseeching an interview.
D) The princess names a date, and a formal meeting takes place; after that everything buzzes along pretty smoothly.
E) Royal love affairs in olden days were conducted on the correspondence method.
(2003)

 

A) He felt justified in bypassing Congress altogether on a variety of moves.
B) At times he was fighting the entire Congress.
C) Bush felt he had a mission to restore power to the presidency.
D) Bush was not fighting just the democrats.
E) Representative democracy is a messy business, and a CEO of the White House does not like a legislature of second guessers and time wasters.
(2004)

A) Luckily the tide of battle moved elsewhere after the American victory at Midway and an Australian victory over Japan at Milne Bay.
B) It could have been no more than a delaying tactic.
C) The Australian military, knowing the position was hopeless, planned to fall back to the south-east in the hope of defending the main cities.
D) They had captured most of the Solomon Islands and much of New Guinea, and seemed poised for an invasion.
E) Not many people outside Australia realize how close the Japanese got.
(2003)

A) Call it the third wave sweeping the Indian media.
B) Now, they are starring in a new role, as suave dealmakers who are in a hurry to strike alliances and agreements.
C) Look around and you will find a host of deals that have been inked or are ready to be finalized.
D) Then the media barons wrested back control from their editors, and turned marketing warriors with the brand as their missile.
E) The first came with those magnificent men in their mahogany chambers who took on the world with their mighty fountain pens
(2003)

A) The wall does not simply divide Israel from a putative Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders.
B) A chilling omission from the road map is the gigantic 'separation wall' now being built in the West Bank by Israel.
C) It is surrounded by trenches, electric wire and moats; there are watch towers at regular intervals.
D) It actually takes in new tracts of Palestinian land, sometimes five or six kilometers at a stretch.
E) Almost a decade after the end of South African apartheid, this ghastly racist wall is going up with scarcely a peep from Israel's American allies who are going to pay for most of it.
(2003)