Over the course of the twentieth century, humans built, on average, one large dam a day, hulking structures of steel and concrete designed to control flooding, facilitate irrigation, and generate electricity. Dams were also lucrative contracts, large-scale employers, and the physical instantiation of a messianic drive to conquer territories and control nature. Some of the results of that drive were charismatic mega-infrastructure—the Hoover on the Colorado River or the Aswan on the Nile—but most of the tens of thousands of dams that dot the Earth’s landscape have drawn little attention. These are the smaller, though not inconsequential, barriers that today impede the flow of water on nearly two-thirds of the world’s large waterways. Chances are, what your map calls a “lake” is actually a reservoir, and that thin blue line that emerges from it once flowed very differently.
Damming a river is always a partisan act. Even when explicit infrastructure goals—irrigation, flood control, electrification—were met, other consequences were significant and often deleterious. Across the world, river control displaced millions of people, threatening livelihoods, foodways, and cultures. In the western United States, dams were often an instrument of colonialism, used to dispossess Indigenous people and subsidize settler agriculture. And as dams slowed the flow of water, inhibited the movement of nutrients, and increased the amount of toxic algae and other parasites, they snuffed out entire river ecologies. Declining fish populations are the most evident effect, but dams also threaten a host of other animals—from birds and reptiles to fungi and plants—with extinction. Every major dam, then, is also a sacrifice zone, a place where lives, livelihoods, and ways of life are eliminated so that new sorts of landscapes can support water-intensive agriculture and cities that sprout downstream of new reservoirs.
Such sacrifices have been justified as offerings at the temples of modernity. Justified by—and for—whom, though? Over the course of the twentieth century, rarely were the costs and benefits weighed thoughtfully and decided democratically. As Kader Asmal, chair of the landmark 2000 World Commission on Dams, concluded, “There have been precious few, if any, comprehensive, independent analyses as to why dams came about, how dams perform over time, and whether we are getting a fair return from our 2 trillion Dollar investment.” A quarter-century later, Asmal’s words ring ever truer. A litany of dams built in the mid-twentieth century are approaching the end of their expected lives, with worrying prospects for their durability. Droughts, magnified and multiplied by the effects of climate change, have forced more and more to run below capacity. If ever there were a time to rethink the mania for dams, it would be now.
There is some evidence that a combination of opposition, alternative energy sources, and a lack of viable projects has slowed the construction of major dams. But a wave of recent and ongoing construction, from India and China to Ethiopia and Canada, continues to tilt the global balance firmly in favor of water impoundment.
What does the author wish to communicate by referring to the Hoover and Aswan dams in the first paragraph?
Show Hint
- The Colorado and Nile rivers may be seen as thin blue lines on a map.
- The designers and builders of these mega-structures were highly charismatic individuals.
- The drive to control nature is evident not only in mega-infrastructures like the Hoover and Aswan dams, but in smaller dams as well.
- By building dams like the Hoover and Aswan dams, large-scale employers became messianic figures.
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
The author highlights the large and small dams built as part of a larger drive to control nature, with reference to notable dams like Hoover and Aswan.
Step 2: Analysis of Options.
- (1) Talks about rivers as lines on maps, which is not the author's focus.
- (2) Mentions the charisma of the designers, which is irrelevant to the main point.
- (3) Correct answer: The author connects both large and small dams to the same goal of controlling nature.
- (4) Talks about the role of large employers, but the focus is more on the control of nature.
The word “instantiation” is used in the first paragraph. Which one of the following pairs of terms would be the best substitute for it in the context of its usage in the paragraph?
Show Hint
- Exemplification and manifestation
- Development and construction
- Durability and timeliness
- Concreteness and viability
The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
The author uses the term "instantiation" to describe how the drive to control nature is made manifest through the building of dams.
Step 2: Analysis of Options.
- (1) Correct answer: "Instantiation" refers to how something is exemplified or made manifest, which fits the context.
- (2) Talks about construction and development, which doesn’t fit the meaning of "instantiation."
- (3) Focuses on time and durability, which doesn’t align with the context of exemplifying a concept.
- (4) Refers to substance, which isn't a good substitute for "instantiation" in this context.
All of the following statements may be considered valid inferences from the passage EXCEPT that:
Show Hint
- Despite increasing evidence of opposition to dams as well as alternatives to them, they continue to be built.
- Dam-building has proved to be an extremely costly enterprise that may not be justifiable.
- Processes of colonisation have used dam-building to make people vacate their territories.
- Smaller, though not inconsequential, dams are safer than large dam projects.
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
The passage mentions the dangers and costs associated with large dam projects, but it does not suggest that smaller dams are safer.
Step 2: Analysis of Options.
- (1) is supported by the passage, which mentions the continued construction of dams despite opposition.
- (2) is inferred from the passage’s focus on the costs of dam-building.
- (3) is directly mentioned in the passage regarding colonial practices.
- (4) is not supported, as the passage doesn't compare the safety of small vs. large dams.
Which one of the following sets of terms is closest to mapping the key arguments of the passage?
Show Hint
- Mega-infrastructure – Sacrifice zone – Worshipping modernity – Water impoundment
- Partisan act – Threatened livelihoods – Toxic algae – Quarter century
- Lucrative contracts – Sacrifice zone – Expected lives – Global balance
- Physical instantiation – Partisan act – Decided democratically – Alternative energy
The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
The passage discusses the impact of large dam projects, referring to them as mega-infrastructure and sacrifice zones, where modernity is worshipped at the expense of the environment.
Step 2: Analysis of Options.
- (1) Correct answer: This set closely matches the terms used in the passage.
- (2) refers to consequences but doesn't fit the overall theme.
- (3) touches on certain aspects, but doesn’t fully capture the key terms.
- (4) focuses on alternatives and energy, which is less relevant to the main argument.
Top Questions on Reading Comprehension
Imagine a world in which artificial intelligence is entrusted with the highest moral responsibilities: sentencing criminals, allocating medical resources, and even mediating conflicts between nations. This might seem like the pinnacle of human progress: an entity unburdened by emotion, prejudice or inconsistency, making ethical decisions with impeccable precision. . . .
Yet beneath this vision of an idealised moral arbiter lies a fundamental question: can a machine understand morality as humans do, or is it confined to a simulacrum of ethical reasoning? AI might replicate human decisions without improving on them, carrying forward the same biases, blind spots and cultural distortions from human moral judgment. In trying to emulate us, it might only reproduce our limitations, not transcend them. But there is a deeper concern. Moral judgment draws on intuition, historical awareness and context qualities that resist formalisation. Ethics may be so embedded in lived experience that any attempt to encode it into formal structures risks flattening its most essential features. If so, AI would merely reflect human shortcomings; it would strip morality of the very depth that makes ethical reflection possible in the first place.
Still, many have tried to formalise ethics, by treating certain moral claims not as conclusions, but as starting points. A classic example comes from utilitarianism, which often takes as a foundational axiom the principle that one should act to maximise overall wellbeing. From this, more specific principles can be derived, for example, that it is right to benefit the greatest number, or that actions should be judged by their consequences for total happiness. As computational resources increase, AI becomes increasingly well-suited to the task of starting from fixed ethical assumptions and reasoning through their implications in complex situations.
But, what exactly, does it mean to formalise something like ethics? The question is easier to grasp by looking at fields in which formal systems have long played a central role. Physics, for instance, has relied on formalisation for centuries. There is no single physical theory that explains everything. Instead, we have many physical theories, each designed to describe specific aspects of the Universe: from the behaviour of quarks and electrons to the motion of galaxies. These theories often diverge. Aristotelian physics, for instance, explained falling objects in terms of natural motion toward Earth’s centre; Newtonian mechanics replaced this with a universal force of gravity. These explanations are not just different; they are incompatible. Yet both share a common structure: they begin with basic postulates assumptions about motion, force or mass– and derive increasingly complex consequences. . . .
Ethical theories have a similar structure. Like physical theories, they attempt to describe a domain– in this case, the moral landscape. They aim to answer questions about which actions are right or wrong, and why. These theories also diverge, and even when they recommend similar actions, such as giving to charity, they justify them in different ways. Ethical theories also often begin with a small set of foundational principles or claims, from which they reason about more complex moral problems.- CAT - 2025
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Reading Comprehension
In 1982, a raging controversy broke out over a forest act drafted by the Government of India. This act sought to strengthen the already extensive powers enjoyed by the forest bureaucracy in controlling the extraction, disposal and sale of forest produce. It also gave forest officials greater powers to strictly regulate the entry of any person into reserved forest areas. While forest officials justified the act on the grounds that it was necessary to stop the continuing deforestation, it was bitterly opposed by representatives of grassroots organisations, who argued that it was a major violation of the rights of peasants and tribals living in and around forest areas. . . .
The debate over the draft forest act fuelled a larger controversy over the orientation of state forest policy. It was pointed out, for example, that the draft act was closely modelled on its predecessor, the Forest Act of 1878. The earlier Act rested on a usurpation of rights of ownership by the colonial state which had little precedent in precolonial history. It was further argued that the system of forestry introduced by the British—and continued, with little modification, after 1947—emphasised revenue generation and commercial exploitation, while its policing orientation excluded villagers who had the most longstanding claim on forest resources. Critics called for a complete overhaul of forest administration, pressing the government to formulate policy and legislation more appropriate to present needs. . . .
That debate is not over yet. The draft act was shelved, though it has not as yet been formally withdrawn. Meanwhile, the 1878 Act (as modified by an amendment in 1927) continues to be in operation. In response to its critics, the government has made some important changes in forest policy, e.g., no longer treating forests as a source of revenue, and stopping ecologically hazardous practices such as the clearfelling of natural forests. At the same time, it has shown little inclination to meet the major demand of the critics of forest policy—namely, abandoning the principle of state monopoly over forest land by handing over areas of degraded forests to individuals and communities for afforestation.
. . . [The] 1878 Forest Act itself was passed only after a bitter and prolonged debate within the colonial bureaucracy, in which protagonists put forward arguments strikingly similar to those being advanced today. As well known, the Indian Forest Department owes its origin to the requirements of railway companies. The early years of the expansion of the railway network, c. 1853 onwards, led to tremendous deforestation in peninsular India owing to the railway’s requirements of fuelwood and construction timber. Huge quantities of durable timbers were also needed for use as sleepers across the new railway tracks. Inexperienced in forestry, the British called in German experts to commence systematic forest management. The Indian Forest Department was started in 1864, with Dietrich Brandis, formally a Lecturer in Botany, as the first Inspector General of Forests. The early years of the forest department, even as it grew, continued to meet the railway needs for timber and wood. These systems first emerged as part of the needs of the expanding empire.- CAT - 2025
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Reading Comprehension
Once a society accepts a secular mode of creativity, within which the creator replaces God, imaginative transactions assume a self-conscious form. The tribal imagination, on the other hand, is still to a large extent dreamlike and hallucinatory. It admits fusion between various planes of existence and levels of time in a natural and artless manner. In tribal stories, oceans fly in the sky as birds, mountains swim in water as fish, animals speak as humans and stars grow like plants. Spatial order and temporal sequence do not restrict the narrative. This is not to say that tribal creations have no conventions or rules, but simply that they admit the principle of association between emotion and the narrative motif. Thus stars, seas, mountains, trees, men and animals can be angry, sad or happy.
It might be said that tribal artists work more on the basis of their racial and sensory memory than on the basis of a cultivated imagination. In order to understand this distinction, we must understand the difference between imagination and memory. In the animate world, consciousness meets two immediate material realities: space and time. We put meaning into space by perceiving it in terms of images. The image-making faculty is a genetic gift to the human mind—this power of imagination helps us understand the space that envelops us. With regard to time, we make connections with the help of memory; one remembers being the same person today as one was yesterday.
The tribal mind has a more acute sense of time than the sense of space. Somewhere along the history of human civilization, tribal communities seem to have realized that domination over territorial space was not their lot. Thus, they seem to have turned almost obsessively to gaining domination over time. This urge is substantiated in their ritual of conversing with their dead ancestors: year after year, tribals in many parts of India worship terracotta or carved-wood objects representing their ancestors, aspiring to enter a trance in which they can converse with the dead. Over the centuries, an amazingly sharp memory has helped tribals classify material and natural objects into a highly complex system of knowledge. . .
One of the main characteristics of the tribal arts is their distinct manner of constructing space and imagery, which might be described as ‘hallucinary’. In both oral and visual forms of representation, tribal artists seem to interpret verbal or pictorial art as demarcated by an extremely flexible ‘frame’. The boundaries between art and non-art become almost invisible. Atribal epic can begin its narration from a trivial everyday event; tribal paintings merge with living space as if the two were one and the same. And within the narrative itself, or within the painted imagery, there is no deliberate attempt to follow a sequence. The episodes retold and the images created take on the apparently chaotic shapes of dreams. In a way, the syntax of language and the grammar of painting are the same, as if literature were painted words and painting were a song of images.- CAT - 2025
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Reading Comprehension
This book takes the position that setting in literature is more than just backdrop, that important insight into literary texts can be made by paying close attention to how authors craft place, as well as to how place functions in a narrative. The authors included in this reference work engage deeply with either real or imagined geographies. They care about how human decisions have shaped landscapes and how landscapes have shaped human practices and values. Some of the best writing is highly vivid, employing the language of the senses because this is the primary means through which humans know physical space. Literature can offer valuable perspectives on physical and cultural geography. Unlike scientific reports, a literary narrative can provide the emotional component missing from the scientific record. In human experience, geographical places have a spiritual or emotional component in addition to and as part of a physical layout and topography. This emotional component, although subjective, is no less “real” than a surveyor’s map. Human consciousness of place is experienced in a multi-modal manner. Histories of places live on in many forms, one of which is the human memory or imagination.
Both real and imaginary landscapes provide insight into the human experience of place. The pursuit of such a topic speaks to the valuable knowledge produced from bridging disciplines and combining material from both the arts and the sciences to better understand the human condition. The perspectives that most concern cultural geographers are often those regarding movement and migration, cultivation of natural resources, and organization of space. The latter two reflect concerns of the built environment, a topic shared with the field of architectural study. Many of these concerns are also reflected in work sociologists do. Scholars from literary studies can contribute an aesthetic dimension to what might otherwise be a purely ideological approach.
Literature can bring together material that spans different branches of science. For example, a literary description of place may involve not only the environment and geography but the noises and quality of light, or how people from different races or classes can experience the same place in different ways linked to those racial or class disparities. Literary texts can also account for the way in which absence—of other people, animals, and so on—affects a human observer or inhabitant. Both literary and scientific approaches to place are necessary, working in unison, to achieve a complete record of an environment. It is important to note that the interdisciplinary nature of this work teaches us that landscapes are not static, that they are not unchanged by human culture. At least part of their identity derives from the people who inhabit them and from the way space can alter and inspire human perspective. The intersection of scientific and literary expression that happens in the study of literary geography is of prime importance due to the complexity of the personal and political ways that humans experience place.- CAT - 2025
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Reading Comprehension
In my book “Searches,” I chronicle how big technology companies have exploited human language for their gain. We let this happen, I argue, because we also benefit somewhat from using the products. It’s a dynamic that makes up big tech’s accumulation of wealth and power: we’re both victims and beneficiaries. I describe this complicity, but I also enact it, through my own internet archives: my Google searches, my Amazon product reviews, and my ChatGPT dialogues. . . .
People often describe chatbots’ output as “bland” or “generic”– the linguistic equivalent of a beige office building. OpenAI’s products are built to “sound like a colleague”, as OpenAI puts it, using language that, coming from a person, would sound “polite”, “empathetic”, “kind”, “rationally optimistic” and “engaging”, among other qualities. OpenAI describes these strategies as helping its products seem “professional” and “approachable”. This appears to be bound up with making us feel safe . . .
Trust is a challenge for artificial intelligence (AI) companies, partly because their products regularly produce falsehoods and reify sexist, racist, US-centric cultural norms. While the companies are working on these problems, they persist: OpenAI found that its latest systems generate errors at a higher rate than its previous system. In the book, I wrote about the inaccuracies and biases and also demonstrated them with the products. When I prompted Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator to produce a picture of engineers and space explorers, it gave me an entirely male cast of characters; when my father asked ChatGPT to edit his writing, it transmuted his perfectly correct Indian English into American English. Those weren’t flukes. Research suggests that both tendencies are widespread.
In my own ChatGPT dialogues, I wanted to enact how the product’s veneer of collegial neutrality could lull us into absorbing false or biased responses without much critical engagement. Over time, ChatGPT seemed to be guiding me to write a more positive book about big tech– including editing my description of OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, to call him “a visionary and a pragmatist”. I’m not aware of research on whether ChatGPT tends to favor big tech, OpenAI or Altman, and I can only guess why it seemed that way in our conversation. OpenAI explicitly states that its products shouldn’t attempt to influence users’ thinking. When I asked ChatGPT about some of the issues, it blamed biases in its training data– though I suspect my arguably leading questions played a role too. When I queried ChatGPT about its rhetoric, it responded: “The way I communicate is designed to foster trust and confidence in my responses, which can be both helpful and potentially misleading.” . . . OpenAI has its own goals, of course. Among them, it emphasizes wanting to build AI that “benefits all of humanity”. But while the company is controlled by a non-profit with that mission, its funders still seek a return on their investment. That will presumably require getting people using products such as ChatGPT even more than they already are– a goal that is easier to accomplish if people see those products as trustworthy collaborators.- CAT - 2025
- Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
- Reading Comprehension
Questions Asked in CAT exam
- The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.
Sentence: In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12.
Paragraph: The first suggested evidence of a human genetic mutation associated with aggressive behaviour came from a study in 1993. ____ (1)____. Genetic and metabolic studies were conducted on a large Dutch family in which several of the males has a syndrome of borderline mental retardation and abnormal behaviour. ____ (2)____. The undesirable behaviour included impulsive aggression, arson and exhibitionism. ____ (3)____. A point mutation was identified in the eighth exon of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) structural gene which changes glutamine to a termination codon. ____ (4)____.- CAT - 2025
- Para Completion
- The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the occurrences which are CALLED knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even if no past had existed.- CAT - 2025
- Para Summary
- Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.
- CAT - 2025
- Para Jumbles
- The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
(1) The effigy of a candidate establishes a personal link between him and the voters; the candidate does not only offer a programme for judgement, he suggests a physical climate, a set of daily choices expressed in a morphology, a way of dressing, a posture.
(2) Some candidates for Parliament adorn their electoral prospectus with a portrait; this presupposes that photography has a power to convert which must be analysed.
(3) Inasmuch as photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an ‘ineffable’ social whole, it constitutes an anti-intellectual weapon and tends to spirit away ‘politics’ (that is to say a body of problems and solutions) to the advantage of a ‘manner of being’, a socio-moral status.
(4) Photography tends to restore the paternalistic nature of elections, whose elitist essence has been disrupted by proportional representation and the rule of parties (The Right seems to use it more than the Left).- CAT - 2025
- Jumbled Paragraphs
- The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
The return to the tailor is the juxtaposition of three key things for the mindful Indian shopper. The first is the conscious shift away from the homogeneity of fast fashion, the idea of a hundred other people owning exactly the same Zara trench coat or H & M pleated skirt. The second is an actual understanding of the waste behind the fast fashion market, and wanting not to contribute to that anymore. The last is the shift toward customisation and fit—the idea of having imaginations brought to life and to have them fit exactly; without paying exorbitant rates for that bespoke tailoring. For the individual with a keen fashion sense and a genuine desire to move away from the waste and uniformity of fast fashion without paying the premium for it that indie brands would invariably demand, the tailor is the perfect crossover.- CAT - 2025
- Para Summary