List of top Questions asked in XAT

Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.
DeepSea is a natural gas extraction company that retrieves natural gas from rock formations beneath the seabed. This gas is then transported through its extensive pipeline network to a bottling plant, located at the sea surface, for processing. The gas in rock formations is pressurized, enabling it to flow to the surface and reach the bottling plant. Yet, excessive pressure can cause bursts in the pipeline, leading to uncontrolled gas release, known as blowout. A blowout carries a staggering cost, encompassing not only environmental damage but also reputation loss and financial losses totaling crores of rupees. Additionally, the impacted section of the pipeline requires a complete replacement. Industry safety regulations divide the pipeline network into three levels: Level 3 is the part under the seabed, Level 2 is the part above the seabed but in the deep sea, while Level 1 is near the surface. The safety regulations require multiple blowout preventer valves, from now on simply referred to as valves, to be placed at the three different levels of the pipeline network. The valves are normally kept closed, but when the pressure in any part of the pipeline rises beyond a critical level, nearby valves are opened remotely to release the pressure in a controlled manner to prevent blowout. The number of valves across the pipeline helps localize the pressure release, with a greater number of valves providing a backup mechanism, helping in improving pressure localization in case of a blowout. Given that the valves themselves can occasionally malfunction and not release the pressure when needed, using a higher number of valves ensures that a malfunctioning valve can seek the safety of a nearby functioning valve. 
A valve can malfunction in two ways: it may fail to release pressure when needed, as previously mentioned, or it can leak gas during regular operation, resulting in unwanted losses. When a valve malfunctions, it necessitates manual replacement. 
In the DeepSea Network, 30% of the valves are located at Level 3, which is the deepest level. The remaining valves are evenly distributed between the top two levels. These valves are critical to ensuring safety and are exclusively supplied by GoValve, a highly specialized manufacturer that holds a monopoly in the country’s market.
Read the following poem and answer the TWO questions that follow.
In the darkened room
a woman
cannot find her reflection in the mirror
waiting as usual
at the edge of sleep
In her hands she holds
the oil lamp
whose drunken yellow flames
know where her lonely body hides
Read the following passage and answer the TWO questions that follow.
But as the behavioral economists like to remind us, we are already prone to all sorts of reductions as a species. It’s not just the scientists. We compress complex reality down into abbreviated heuristics that often work beautifully in everyday life for high-frequency, low-significance decisions. Because we are an unusually clever and self-reflective species, we long ago realized that we needed help overcoming those reductive instincts when it really matters. And so we invented a tool called storytelling. At first, some of our stories were even more reductive than the sciences would prove to be: allegories and parables and morality plays that compressed the flux of real life down to archetypal moral messages. But over time the stories grew more adept at describing the true complexity of lived experience, the whorls and the threadlike pressures. One of the crowning achievements of that growth is the realist novel. That, of course, is the latent implication of Prince Andrei’s question: “innumerable conditions made meaningful only in unpredictable moments” would fare well as a description of both War and Peace and Middlemarch, arguably the two totemic works in the realist canon. What gives the novel the grain of truth lies precisely in the way it doesn’t quite run along the expected grooves, the way it dramatizes all the forces and unpredictable variables that shape the choices humans confront at the most meaningful moments of their lives. 
When we read those novels—or similarly rich biographies of historical figures—we are not just entertaining ourselves; we are also rehearsing for our own real-world experiences….
Read the following passage and answer the TWO questions that follow.
Beauty has an aesthetic, but it is not the same as aesthetics, not when it can be embodied, controlled by powerful interests, and when it can be commodified. Beauty can be manners, also a socially contingent set of traits. Whatever power decides that beauty is, it must always be more than reducible to a single thing. Beauty is a wonderful form of capital in a world that organizes everything around gender and then requires a performance of gender that makes some of its members more equal than others. 
Beauty would not be such a useful distinction were it not for the economic and political conditions. It is trite at this point to point out capitalism, which is precisely why it must be pointed out. Systems of exchange tend to generate the kind of ideas that work well as exchanges. Because it can be an idea and a good and a body, beauty serves many useful functions for our economic system. Even better, beauty can be political. It can exclude and include, one of the basic conditions of any politics. Beauty has it all. It can be political, economic, external, individualized, generalizing, exclusionary, and perhaps best of all a story that can be told. Our dominant story of beauty is that it is simultaneously a blessing, of genetics or gods, and a site of conversion. You can become beautiful if you accept the right prophets and their wisdoms with a side of products thrown in for good measure. Forget that these two ideas—unique blessing and earned reward—are antithetical to each other. That makes beauty all the more perfect for our (social and political) time, itself anchored in paradoxes like freedom and property, opportunity and equality
Read the following passage and answer the THREE questions that follow.
What I call fast political thinking is driven by simplified moral frames. These moral frames give us the sense that those who agree with us have the right answer, while those who disagree are unreasonable, or worse. 
Each moral frame sets up an axis of favorable and unfavorable. Progressives use the oppressoroppressed axis. Progressives view most favorably those groups that can be regarded as oppressed or standing with the oppressed, and they view most unfavorably those groups that can be regarded as oppressors. Conservatives use the civilization-barbarism axis. Conservatives view most favorably the institutions that they believe constrain and guide people toward civilized behavior, and they view most unfavorably those people who they see as trying to tear down such institutions. Libertarians use the liberty-coercion axis. Libertarians view most favorably those people who defer to decisions that are made on the basis of personal choice and voluntary agreement, and they view most unfavorably those people who favor government interventions that restrict personal choice. 
If you have a dominant axis, I suggest that you try to learn the languages spoken by those who use the other axes. Don’t worry—learning other languages won’t make it easy for others to convert you to their point of view. By the same token, it will not make it easy to convert others to your point of view. However, you may become aware of assumptions your side makes that others might legitimately question.
What learning the other languages can do is enable you to understand how others think about political issues. Instead of resorting to the theory that people with other views are crazy or stupid or evil, you may concede that they have a coherent point of view. In fact, their point of view could be just as coherent as yours. The problem is that those people apply their point of view in circumstances where you are fairly sure that it is not really appropriate. Consider that there may be situations in which one frame describes the problem much better than the others. For example, I believe that the civil rights movement in the United States is best described using the progressive heuristic of the oppressed and the oppressor. In the 1950s and the early 1960s, the people who had the right model were the people who were fighting for black Americans to have true voting rights, equal access to housing, and an end to the Jim Crow laws. The civilization-barbarism axis and the liberty-coercion axis did not provide the best insight into the issue….
Read the following passage and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all. And over the years, I’ve become convinced of one key, overarching fact about the ignorant mind. One should not think of it as uninformed. Rather, one should think of it as misinformed. 
An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power. As the humorist Josh Billings once put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Ironically, one thing many people “know” about this quote is that it was first uttered by Mark Twain or Will Rogers—which just ain’t so.) Because of the way we are built, and because of the way we learn from our environment, we are all engines of misbelief. And the better we understand how our wonderful yet kludge-ridden, Rube Goldberg engine works, the better we—as individuals and as a society—can harness it to navigate toward a more objective understanding of the truth.
Read the following passage and answer the THREE questions that follow.
If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination. 
Any given vaccine can fail to produce immunity in an individual, and some vaccines, like the influenza vaccine, are less effective than others. But when enough people are vaccinated with even a relatively ineffective vaccine, viruses have trouble moving from host to host and cease to spread, sparing both the unvaccinated and those in whom vaccination has not produced immunity. This is why the chances of contracting measles can be higher for a vaccinated person living in a largely unvaccinated community than they are for an unvaccinated person living in a largely vaccinated community. 
The unvaccinated person is protected by the bodies around her, bodies through which disease is not circulating. But a vaccinated person surrounded by bodies that host disease is left vulnerable to vaccine failure or fading immunity. We are protected not so much by our own skin, but by what is beyond it. The boundaries between our bodies begin to dissolve here. Donations of blood and organs move between us, exiting one body and entering another, and so too with immunity, which is a common trust as much as it is a private account. Those of us who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors.
Direction:Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Arti, CEO of an FMCG company, was under pressure from the Board of Governors (BoG) to increase diversity in the workforce. The board wanted the company to hire candidates with vision impairment*, as it believed that they contributed to organizations in many unique ways.
The CEO was apprehensive of hiring visually impaired candidates; she was not sure about the feasibility of accommodating them in the current setting. Moreover, Arti was unsure as to how the visually impaired could contribute meaningfully to the organization.
(* A person, with a vision impairment in a range of 60-100 percent, is referred to as a visually impaired person. A person with 100 percent vision impairment cannot see at all.)
Arti wanted to follow the suggestion given by the Board of Governors; however, she was not sure if the company was ready to accommodate candidates with 100 percent visual impairment. Also, the concern of involving such employees in meaningful activities was constantly bothering her. Hence, she constituted a committee to come up with recommendations that would help the company in hiring 100 percent visually impaired employees
After two months of deliberations, the committee came up with the following recommendations:
1). Hire visually impaired employees unconditionally as it is any company’s social responsibility
2). Hire visually impaired employees in the activities they can contribute
3). Ensure visually impaired friendly office space, food courts, restrooms, parking etc.
4). Allow guide dogs to assist employees with 100 percent vision impairment in the office premises
Which of the following options will BEST allay concerns as well as be fair to all stakeholders?
Go through the information given below, and answer the questions that follow.
The table captures Age and Gender distribution of COVID positive cases in a country
The table captures the Age and Gender distribution of COVID-19-positive cases in a country. However, a part of the data is missing, represented through unknown categories.
In the unknown age category, the ratio of males (unknown age category) and females (unknown age category) to total unknown cases (unknown age category) is the same as the ratio of males (All) and females (All) to the total (total confirmed COVID positive cases). How many females were in the unknown age category (rounded to the nearest integer)?

Direction: Read the following passage and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Socrates believed that akrasia (meaning procrastination) was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right. Loewenstein, similarly, is inclined to see the procrastinator as led astray by the “visceral” rewards of the present. As the nineteenth-century Scottish economist John Rae put it, “The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp.” Loewenstein also suggests that our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.
Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls “the planning fallacy.” Elster thinks that people underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.”
According to the passage, in regard to time, which of the following statements gives the BEST reason for procrastination?

Direction: Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.
During the floods of 2018-2019, a group of philanthropists led by Niyabuddin, wished to open free food centre for the needy. Their motto was that “no human should be hungry.” Nothing gives more satisfaction to the philanthropists than to see the hungry eat to the fullest.
Post Covid-19, the group started a food centre by the name Win Borne Life Care Food (WBLCF) in a small town called Palakkad. The centre started gaining popularity as the number of people enjoying free meals increased over time. Initially, WBLCF offered a standardized menu consisting of idli, upma, puttu for breakfast, curd rice for lunch, and idli or upma for supper. Six women were employed by WBLCF to prepare all the meals. As the number of diners increased, they started expecting a variety in the menu.
At WBLCF, not all the diners eat "free": while two-thirds of diners get free food, one-third would donate some amount to a transparent charity box kept at the entrance. For example, a man donated Rs. 500 after consuming two idlis, and a woman approached Niyabuddin and inquired about donating 10 kilogrammes of rice. Those who could not afford to donate, were often seen prostrating worshipfully in front of the charity box.
Some caring individuals made monetary donation while others donated rice, fruits and vegetables to WBLCF. Further, the centre received enquiries from many locals on how they could contribute to the cause.
As the centre was lauded for its philanthropic work by people of the town, Niyabuddin intended to replicate the initiative in the nearby districts. However, he is concerned about the cost that goes into running the centre. Almost 75 percent of the donated amount goes into buying the cooking ingredients, while the rest goes into paying salaries, operations and maintenance costs.
Niyabuddin realised that on some days the food was wasted while on other days diners went back hungry. He sought advice from a consultant friend on how to reduce wastage. The consultant suggested the following:
1). Launch a mobile app so that diners can pre-inform their arrival to WBLCF.
2). Ask diners who enjoy free meal to distribute excess food to hungry on streets
3). Ask diners to eat less as it is good for health
4). Preach people to eat less
5). Ration amount of food to be served to the diners
Which of the above ideas will not be consistent with the core ethos of WBLCF?
ABC is a triangle with BC = 5. D is the foot of the perpendicular from A on BC. E is a point on CD such that BE = 3. The value of AB2-AE2+6CD is:
Read the following sentences carefully.
1). The boss accused her employee for stealing information.
2). The boss had better discuss the issue with the employee concerned.
3). The India of 2022 is very different from the India of 1947
4). The government is committed to providing people with food.
5). He is good in playing the piano.
From the following, identify the option with INCORRECT sentences.
Direction: Read the following scenario and answer the TWO questions that follow.
The CEO of the Jamshedpur Tea Factory (JTF) was in a quandary over employees skipping work. It was becoming increasingly difficult for him to identify employees who faked illness to skip work. The work of the employees was complex and intricate, and they had to report to eight supervisors. “Faking illness” made it difficult for JTF to judiciously decide on “Promotion” and “Training” of employees. An employee could only be promoted on the completion of a multi-skilling training program. Further, to be nominated for the training program, an employee must be recommended by a minimum of six supervisors. JTF wanted to promote only sincere and deserving employees.
The CEO was thinking of changing the policy regarding leave, training & promotion.
Which of the following will be the MOST efficient course of action for JTF and yet be fair to the employees?
Consider an+1 = 1/1+1/an for n = 1,2,.......2008,2009. where a1 = 1. Find the value of a1a2 + a2a3 + a3a4+ .......+ a2008a2009.
There are three sections in a question paper, and each section has 10 questions. First section only has multiplechoice questions, and 2 marks will be awarded for each correct answer. For each wrong answer, 0.5 marks will be deducted. Any unattempted question in this section will be treated as a wrong answer. Each question in the second section carries 3 marks, whereas each question in the third section carries 5 marks. For any wrong answer or unattempted question in the second and third sections, no marks will be deducted. A student’s score is the addition of marks obtained in all the three sections. What is the sixth-highest possible score?
Direction: Read the following passage and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Socrates believed that akrasia (meaning procrastination) was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right. Loewenstein, similarly, is inclined to see the procrastinator as led astray by the “visceral” rewards of the present. As the nineteenth-century Scottish economist John Rae put it, “The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp.” Loewenstein also suggests that our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.
Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls “the planning fallacy.” Elster thinks that people underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.”
Which of the following statements can be BEST inferred from the passage about procrastination?
Raju and Sarita play a number game. First, each one of them chooses a positive integer independently. Separately, they both multiply their chosen integers by 2, and then subtract 20 from their resultant numbers. Now, each of them has a new number. Then, they divide their respective new numbers by 5. Finally, they added their results and found that the sum is 16. What can be the maximum possible difference between the positive integers chosen by Raju and Sarita?
Five students appeared for an examination. The average mark obtained by these five students is 40. The maximum mark of the examination is 100, and each of the five students scored more than 10 marks. However, none of them scored exactly 40 marks. Based on the information given, which of the following MUST BE true?
Find the value of  $$ \dfrac{\sin^6 15^\circ + \sin^6 75^\circ + 6 \sin^2 15^\circ + \sin^2 75^\circ}{\sin^4 15^\circ + \sin^4 75^\circ + 5 \sin^2 15^\circ \sin^2 75^\circ} $$ 
Given \( A = |x+3 + |x-2| - |2x-8| \). The maximum value of \( |A| \) is : 
Jose borrowed some money from his friend at a simple interest rate of 10% and invested the entire amount in stocks. At the end of the first year, he repaid 1/5th of the principal amount. At the end of the second year, he repaid half of the remaining principal amount. At the end of third year, he repaid the entire remaining principal amount. At the end of the fourth year, he paid the last three years’ interest amount. As there was no principal amount left, his friend did not charge any interest in the fourth year. At the end of fourth year, he sold out all his stocks. Later, he calculated that he gained Rs. 97500 after paying principal and interest amounts to his friend. If his invested amount in the stocks became double at the end of the fourth year, how much money did he borrow from his friend?
Fill up the blanks with appropriate words. Oil painting did to appearance what capital did to social____________. It reduced everything to the __________of objects. Everything became __________because everything became a commodity. All reality was mechanically__________ by its materiality.
The addition of 7 distinct positive integers is 1740. What is the largest possible “greatest common divisor” of these 7 distinct positive integers?
Read the following statements.
The leave policy is bound to be unpopular either with the management or among workers. If the leave policy is unpopular with the management, it should be modified. We should adopt a new policy if it is unpopular with workers.
If the above statements are true, which one of the following MUST also be true?