List of top Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Questions asked in CAT

The Republican Party has lost its min(d) To win elections, a party obviously needs votes and constituencies. However first, it needs an ide(a) In 1994–95, the Republican Party had after a long struggle advanced a coherent, compelling set of political ideas expressed in a specific legislative agend(a) The political story of 1996 is that this same party, within the space of six weeks, became totally, shockingly intellectually derange(d) Think back. The singular achievement of the House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s 1994 revolution was that it swept into power united behind one comprehensive ideological goal: dismantling the welfare state. Just about anything in the contract with America and the legislative agenda of the 104th Congress is a mere subheading: welfare reform, tax cuts, entitlement reform, returning power to the states, the balanced budget (a supremely powerful means for keeping the growth of government in check).
The central Republican idea was that the individual, the family, the church, the schools — civil society — were being systematically usurped and strangled by the federal behemoth Republicans who were riding into Washington to slay it.
With this idea they met Clinton head-on in late 1995. And although they were tactically defeated — the government shutdown proved a disaster for Republicans — they won philosophically. Clinton conceded all their principles. He finally embraced their seven year balanced budget. Then, in a State of the Union speech that might have been delivered by a moderate Republican, he declared, “The era of Big Government is over,” the dominant theme of the Gingrich Revolution. It seems so long ago. Because then, astonishingly, on the very morrow of their philosophical victory, just as the Republicans prepared to carry these ideas into battle in November, came cannon fire from the rear. The first Republican renegade to cry ’Wrong!’ and charge was Steve Forbes. With his free-lunch, tax-cutting flat tax, he declared the balanced budget, the centrepiece of the Republican revolution, unnecessary. Then, no sooner had the Forbes mutiny been put down then Pat Buchanan declared a general insurrection. He too declared war on the party’s central ideology in the name not supply side theory but of class welfare, the Democratic weapon of choice against Republicanism.
The enemy, according to Buchanan, is not the welfare state. It is that conservative icon, capitalism, with its ruthless captains of industry, greedy financiers and political elite (Republicans included, of course). All three groups collaborate to let foreigners — immigrants, traders, parasitic foreign-aid loafers — destroy the good life of the ordinary American worker.
Buchanan holds that what is killing the little guy in America is the Big Guy, not Big Government. It blames not an overreaching government that tries to insulate citizens from life’s buffeting to the point where it creates deep dependency and irresponsibility, but an arrogant and unfeeling elite. Buchanan would protect and wield a mighty government apparatus to do so, government that builds trade walls and immigrant — repelling fences, that imposes punitive taxes on imports, that policies the hiring and firing practices of business with the arrogance of the most zealous affirmative action enforcer.
This is Reaganism standing on its hea(d) Republicans have focused too much on the mere technical dangers posed by this assault. Yes, it gives ammunition to the Democrats. Yes, it puts the eventual nominee through a bruising campaign and delivers him tarnished and drained into the ring against Bill Clinton.
But the real danger is philosophical, not tactical. It is axioms, not just policies, that are under fire. The Republican idea of smaller government is being proud to dust — by Republicans. In the middle of an election year, when they should be honing their themes against Democratic liberalism, Buchanan’s rise is forcing a pointless rearguard battle against a philosophical corpse, the obsolete Palaeo conservatism — a mix of nativism, protectionism and isolationism of the 1930s.
As the candidates’ debate in Arizona last week showed, the entire primary campaign will be fought on Buchanan’s grounds, fending off his Smoot-Hawley-Franco populism. And then what? After the convention, what does the nominee do? Try to resurrect the anti-welfare state themes of the historically successful 1994 congressional campaign? Well, yes, but with a terrible loss of energy and focus — and support. Buchanan’s constituency, by then convinced by their leader that the working man’s issues have been pushed aside, may simply walk on election day or, even worse, defect to the Democrats. After all, Democrats fight class war very well.
Political parties can survive bruising primary battles. They cannot survive ideological meltdown. Dole and Buchanan say they are fighting for the heart and soul of the Republican Party, heart and soul, however, will get you nowhere when you’ve lost your way — and your min(d)

Icicles — two metres long and, at their tips, as bright and sharp as needles — hang from the caves: wild ice stalactites, dragon’s teeth. I peer through them to see the world transformed to abstract. Little snow tornadoes twirl across the blank. The car is out there somewhere, represented by a subtle bump in the snow-fiel(d) The old jeep truck, a larger beast, is up to its door handles, like a sinking remnant: dinosaur yielding to ice age. The town’s behemoth snow-plow passes on the road, dome light twirling, and casts aside a frozen doe that now lies, neck broken, upon the roadside snow-bank, soon to vanish under the snowfall still to come. There is double-jointed consciousness at work in the dramatics of big weather. Down in the snowstorm, we are as mortal as the deer. I sink to my waist in a drift; I panic, my arms claw for an instant, like a drowning swimmer’s, in the powder. Men up and down the storm collapse with coronaries, snow shovels in their hands, cheeks turned into a deathly colour, like frost-bitten plums.
Yet when we go upstairs to consult the Weather Channel, we settle down, as cosy gods do, to hover high above the earth and watch the play with a divine perspective. Moist air labelled L for low rides up the continent from the Gulf of Mexico and collides with the high that has slid down from the North Pole. And thus is whipped up the egg-white fluff on the studio map that, down in the frozen, messy world, buries mortals.
An odd new metaphysics of weather: It is not that weather has necessarily grown more apocalypti(c) The famous ‘Winter of the Blue Snow’ of 1886–87 turned rivers of the American West into glaciers that when they thawed, carried along inundation of dead cattle. President Theodore Roosevelt was virtually ruined as a rancher by the weather that destroyed 65 per cent of his her(d) In 1811 Mississippi river flowed briefly because of the New Madrid earthquake.
What’s new in America is the theatre of it. Television does not create weather; any more than it creates contemporary politics. However, the ritual ceremonies of televised weather have endowed a subject often previously banal with an amazing life as mass entertainment, nationwide interactive preoccupation and a kind of immense performance art. What we have is weather as electronic American Shintoism, a casual but almost mystic daily religion, wherein nature is not inert but restless, stirring alive with kinetic fronts and meanings and turbulent expectations (forecasts, variables, prophecies). We have installed an elaborate priesthood and technology of interpretation: acolytes and satellites preside over snow and circuses. At least major snowstorms have about them an innocence and moral neutrality that is more refreshing than the last national television spectacle, the O. J. Simpson trial.
One attraction is the fact that these large gestures of nature are political. The weather in the mirabilis mode can, of course, be dragged onto the opened page to start a macro-argument about global warming or a micro-spat over a mayor’s fecklessness in deploying snowplows. Otherwise, traumas of weather do not admit of political interpretation. The snow Shinto reintroduces an element of what is almost charmingly uncontrollable in life. And, as shown last week, surprising, even as the priests predict it. This is welcome — a kind of ideological relief — in a rather stupidly politicised society living under the delusion that everything in life (and death) is arguable, political and therefore manipulable — from diet to DN(a) None of the old earthbound Marxist Whom Whom here in meteorology, but rather sky gods that bang around at higher altitudes and leave the earth in its misery, to submit to the sloppy collateral damage.
The moral difference of weather, even when destructive, is somehow stimulating. Why? The sheer levelling force is pleasing. It overrides routine and organises people into a shared moment that will become a punctuating memory in their lives (‘Lord, remember the blizzard in 1996?’).
Or perhaps one’s reaction is no more complicated than a child’s delight in dramatic disruption. Anyone loves to stand on the beach with a hurricane coming — a darkly lashing Byronism in surf and wind gets the blood up. The God’s, or child’s, part of the mind welcomes big weather — floods and blizzards. The coping, grown-up human part curses it, and sinks.
The paradox of big weather, it makes people feel important even while it, it dramatises their insignificance. In some ways, extreme weather is a brief moral equivalent of war — as stimulating as war can sometimes be, without most of the carnage.
The sun rises upon diamond-scattered snow-fields and glistens upon the lucent dragon’s teeth. In the distance, three deer, roused from their shelter under pines, venture forth. They struggle and plunge undulously through the opulent white. 
Upstairs, I switch on the Shinto Weather Channel and the priests at the map show me the next wave —white swirls and serried arrows, advancing inexorably, bringing the next blizzar(d)

Among those who call themselves socialists, two kinds of persons may be distinguishe(d) There are, in the first place, those whose plans for a new order of society, in which private property and individual competition are to be superseded and other motives to action substituted, are on the scale of a village community or township, and would be applied to an entire country by the multiplication of such self-acting units; of this character are the systems of Owen, of Fourier, and the more thoughtful and philosophic socialists generally. The other class, which is more a product of the continent than of Great Britain and may be called the revolutionary socialists, has people who propose to themselves a much bolder stroke. Their scheme is the management of the whole productive resources of the country by one central authority, the general government. And with this view some of them avow as their purpose that the working classes, or somebody on their behalf, should take possession of all the property of the country, and administer it for the general benefit.
Whatever may be the difficulties of the first of these two forms of socialism, the second must evidently involve the same difficulties and many more. The former, too, has the great advantage that it can be brought into operation progressively, and can prove its capabilities by trial. It can be tried first on a select population and extended to others as their education and cultivation permit. It need not, and in the natural order of things would not, become an engine of subversion until it had shown itself capable of being also a means of reconstruction. It is not so with the other; the aim of that is to substitute the new rule for the old at a single stroke, and to exchange the amount of good realised under the present system, and its large possibilities of improvement, for a plunge without any preparation into the most extreme form of the problem of carrying on the whole round of the operations of social life without the motive power which has always hitherto worked the social machinery. It must be acknowledged that those who would play this game on the strength of their own private opinion, unconfirmed as yet by any experimental verification — who would forcibly deprive all who have now a comfortable physical existence of their only present means of preserving it, and would brave the frightful bloodshed and misery that would ensue if the attempt was resisted — must have a serene confidence in their own wisdom on the one hand and the recklessness of other people’s sufferings on the other, surpassing even that of the Danton and St. Just, hitherto the typical instances of those united attributes, scarcely came up to.
Nevertheless this scheme has great elements of popularity because the nature and reasonable form of socialism has not; because what it professes to do, it promises to do quickly, and holds out hope to the enthusiastic of seeing the whole of their aspirations realised in their own time and at a blow.

Whatever philosophy may be, it is in the world and must relate to it. It breaks through the shell of the world in order to move into the infinite. But it turns back in order to find in the finite its always unique historical foundation. It pushes into the furthest horizons beyond being-in-the-world in order to experience the present in the eternal. But even the profoundest meditation acquires its meaning by relating back to man’s existence here and now.
Philosophy glimpses the highest criteria, the starry heaven of the possible, and seeks in the light of the seemingly impossible the way to man’s dignity in the phenomenon of his empirical existence. Philosophy addresses itself to individuals. It creates a free community of those who rely on each other in their will for truth.
Into this community the philosophic man would like to enter. It is there in the world all the time, but cannot become a worldly institution without losing freedom of its truth. He cannot know whether he belongs to it. No authority decides on his acceptance. He wants to live in his thinking in such a way as to make his acceptance possible. But how does the world relate to philosophy? There are chairs of philosophy at the universities. Nowadays they are an embarrassment. Philosophy is politely respected because of tradition, but despised in secret. The general opinion is: it has nothing of importance to say. Neither has it any practical value. It is named in public but does it really exist? Its existence is proved at least by the defence measures it provokes.
We can see this in the form of comments like: Philosophy is too complicate(d) I don’t understand it. It’s beyond me. It’s something for professionals. I have no gift for it. Therefore it doesn’t concern me. But that is like saying: I don’t need to bother work or scholarship without thinking or questioning its meaning, and, for the rest, have ‘opinions’ and be content with that. The defence becomes fanatical. A benighted vital instinct hates philosophy. It is dangerous. If I understood it I would have to change my life. I would find myself in another frame of mind, see everything in a different light, have to judge anew. Better now think philosophically! Then come the accusers, who want to replace the obsolete philosophy by something new and totally different. It is mistrusted as the utterly mendacious end product of a bankrupt theology. The meaninglessness of philosophical propositions is made fun of. Philosophy is denounced as the willing handmaiden of political and other powers.
For many politicians, their wretched trade would be easier if philosophy did not exist at all. Masses and functionaries are easier to manipulate when they do not think but only have a regimented intelligence. People must be prevented from becoming serious. Therefore, it is better for philosophy to be boring. Let the chairs of philosophy rot. The more piffle is taught, the sooner people will be blinkered against the light of philosophy. Thus philosophy is surrounded by enemies, most of whom are not conscious of being such. Bourgeois complacency only acknowledges the satisfactions of economic prosperity, the appreciation of science only for its technical achievements, the abilities of men only in so far as they produce results capable of exploitation. They do not see philosophy in all values — in all these things people are alienated from philosophy. They do not see philosophy as the absolute will to truth.

Even if we’re a bit snooty about them, we should go down on our knees and thank heaven for movies like Jurassic Park and directors like Steven Spielberg who make them. They fill the cinemas, if only because the hype is virtually irresistible. And because they do so, hundreds of maniacs all over the world continue to finance films. But is this an example of a worldwide jackpot movie? Yes and no. Yes, because it delivers dinosaurs by the dozen, in as weird a fashion as have been seen on the screen before. And no, because the accompanying story, courtesy Michael Crichton, has little of the real imagination that made Spielberg’s E.T. and Close Encounters into the jackpot movies of their time. Technically, it works like a dream but, as a cinematic dream, it’s unmemorable. This may be because of its cardboard human characters, dwarfed by the assemblage of their prehistoric ancestors and serviced by a screenplay that makes the abortive mating calls of this weirdly asexual zoo seem eloquent in comparison.
What kind of park is this?, enquires Sam Neill. “Oh, it’s right up your alley”, says Richard Attenborough. More likely, though it has something to do with the development of the story which at no point engages us properly on the human level, except perhaps to hope that the kids and Neill’s grumpy scientist who learns to love them will finally escape from the grasp of the velociraptors chasing them. We’re looking at nothing but stunts, and they get tiresome laid end to en(d) Crichton’s book was scarcely much better but at least it had a convincing villain in John Hammond, Jurassic Park’s billionaire developer, whereas Attenborough’s approximation seems merely enthusiastically misguide(d) And Crichton’s warning of what might happen if we muck about with nature becomes weaker in the film.
What we actually have in Jurassic Park is a non-animated Disney epic with affiliations to Jaws which seems to amuse and frighten but succeeds in doing neither well enough to count. Its real interest lies in how Spielberg’s obsession with childhood now manifests itself in his middle age. It looks like being on automatic pilot — gestural rather than totally convinced but determined to remain the subject of analytical study. The whole thing, of course, is perfectly adequate fun once the ludicrously simplistic explanation of DNA has been traversed in Hammond’s costly futuristic, computerised den. Even I could understand it. Thereafter, the theme park’s creaky inability to deal with an ordinary old typhoon as its VIPs travel around hoping the investment will work, leads to predictable disasters, proficiently worked out but never truly frightening.
But then this is a film for children of all ages, except perhaps those under 12, and one shouldn’t expect sophistication on other than the technological level. Jurassic Park is more of a roller-coaster ride than a piece of real cinem(a) It delivers, but only on a certain plane. Even the breaking of the barriers between our civilization and a monstrous past doesn’t have the kick it could have ha(d)
Possibly one is asking for a different film which in the end would not have appealed across the box-office spectrum as well as this obviously does. But still one leaves it vaguely disappointe(d) All that work and just a theme park roars. It’s wonderful story, but told with more efficiency than inspiration — possibly a sign of the times, along with the merchandising spree which follows it so readily

The opinion polls had been wrong. Although they were signalling a weakening in Labour’s lead in the days before the general election — which pointed to a hung parliament — many working-class voters had been embarrassed to tell middle-class pollsters that they were intending to vote Labour. The final result on April 9, 1992, which gave Neil Kinnock a working majority of 30, was a turnaround of the century.
As John Major cleared his desk in Downing Street, pundit after pundit lined up to criticise his lacklustre campaign. The trouble was, they all agreed, that the Conservative Party no longer had a message or political purpose. Its representation in the north of England was decimated; its future as a national party doubtful.
For Kinnock the victory was a sweet reward for nine years of Herculean labour in making his party electable. Not only had he a working majority, but the divisions in Conservative ranks —between anti-Europeans, free marketers and moderates — threatened to split the party. Having set himself the objective of heading a two or three term government, Kinnock made his cabinet appointments with the long haul in min(d) There were few surprises. John Smith, with whom he coexisted uneasily, was made chancellor; Roy Hattersley became home secretary; Gerald Kaufmann went to the foreign office; inveterate Euro-sceptic Bryan Gould took over environment; and Gordon Brown went to trade. It was, as many commentators conceded, a much more heavyweight cabinet than any of the Conservatives could have mustere(d)
But the new cabinet was to have its first trial of strength very soon. The problem was the foreign exchange markets. Although both Kinnock and Smith had, throughout, the election campaign, reaffirmed their commitment to hold the pound’s parity at 2.95DM inside the ERM, the foreign exchange markets simply did not believe them. Every previous Labour government had devalued; what reason was there to suppose this one would be different? The pressure built up immediately. On Friday, April 10, the Bank of England managed to hold the line only by spending £4 billion — around a sixth of its total reserves — to support the exchange rate. But late that night, as the New York markets closed, the Governor of the Bank of England felt the devaluation to a meeting at 11, Downing Street with Smith and the permanent secretary to the Treasury, Sir Terence Burns. If, said the governor, the pound was to survive the coming week inside the ERM, then Smith would have to demonstrate his resolve by raising interest rates — by at least 2 per cent. It would also help, added the officials, if the government were to commit Britain to full monetary union and to meet the Maastricht criteria for a single currency. This would mean that both the taxation from Smith’s first budget would have to be used to reduce government borrowing and the manifesto promises to raise child benefit and pensions be postpone(d)
Smith listened to Eddie George — number two at the Bank of England and the arbiter of British exchange rate policy — explain that, at the current rate of reserve loss, Britain’s reserves would have run out by the following weeken(d) The markets needed decisive action. 
And they needed to know, by the night of Sunday, April 12, at the very latest, what the government would do when the far-eastern markets opened after the weeken(d) Sir Terence advised that once the markets recognised the government was resolved to hold the exchange rate, pressure would quickly subside and the interest rate increases could be reverse(d) The name of the game was earning credibility.
Although Smith had been warned to expect a Treasury/Bank of England move to assert the cannons of economic orthodoxy, he had hoped to have been more than a few hours into his chancellorship before the pressures started to mount. As it stood, he felt like the victim of a coup and wondered to what extent the foreign exchange market selling had been prompted by the Bank of England’s ham fisted intervention — almost designed to manufacture a run on the poun(d) In any case, he could do nothing without conferring with the prime minister. In fact Kinnock had asked Smith to have the preliminary Bank of England meeting without him. Although he was not at one with his chancellor over economic policy and distrusted his judgement, he wanted to complete his cabinet appointments — and confer with his own advisers about how to react to what he knew the bank and treasury recommendations would be. He was determined to avoid being bounced into decisions before he had decided his line. The alternative was to apply to the EC for a realignment conference, in which many more currencies would be devalue(d) But that could hardly be done then; it would have to wait until the following weeken(d) And it was not clear if the pound could be devalued sufficiently, or if other countries would follow the British lea(d) Not only would such a move be regarded in the EC as a failure of the British government to make a difference; and be accompanied by devaluation.