List of top Questions asked in XAT

On 1st March, Timon arrived in a new city and was looking for a place to stay. He met a landlady who offered to rent her apartment at a reasonable price but wanted him to pay the rent on a daily basis. Timon had a silver bar of 31 inches, and an inch of the silver bar was exactly equal to a day’s rent. He agreed to pay an inch of the silver bar towards the daily rent. Timon wanted to make the minimum number of pieces of the silver bar but did not want to pay any advance rent. How many pieces did he make?

Nature is ____________ and unchangeable, and it is ____________ as to whether its hidden reasons and ____________ are ____________ to man or not. The option that best fills the blanks in the above sentence would be:

In spite of being perceived as ________ by all, the club members decided to ________ Arun, a skinny teenager with prominent ________, as the member of the year, so that the whole affair would be ________ to Arun’s father who was recuperating after a serious illness. The option that best fills the blanks in the above sentence would be:

Perhaps this war will pass like the others which divided us, leaving us dead, killing us along with the killers but the shame of this time puts its burning fingers to our faces. Who will erase the ruthlessness hidden in innocent blood? Which of the following is certainly not implied in the above verse?

The author has ____________ his composition to the best of his ____________; yet listen to it with a sympathetic ____________, O ____________ souls, and judge it. The option that best fills the blanks in the above sentence would be:

There is much difficulty __________ getting __________ this place and it is not possible to reach __________ without the grace of the lord. The option that best fills the blanks in the above sentence would be:

__________ you have a doubt, why not go and verify? I shall be waiting in the shade __________ this banyan tree till you come back __________ me. The option that best fills the blanks in the above sentence would be:

Travelling is my hobby. Today in the Himalayas, as I drag my feet through the __________, I cannot but think of the same time last year when I was negotiating the thick __________ of the Ganges delta or for that matter the time I spent with my children __________ about in the waters of the Arabian Sea. The option that best fills the blanks in the above sentence would be:

Pick the odd one out:

Choose the odd one out:

Choose the odd one out:

Read the following sentences and choose the option that best arranges them in a logical order: 1. In law a fiduciary individual is someone who is entrusted with the power to act on behalf of and for the benefit of another.
2. Following the weight of corporate law and legal precedent, the director primacy model positions directors as autonomous fiduciaries, not agents.
3. The term fiduciary derives from the Latin fiducia, or trust, and the fiduciary is expected to act in good faith and honesty for the beneficiary’s interests.
4. A person who accepts the role of fiduciary in law must single-mindedly pursue the interests of his or her beneficiary, in this case the corporation, even when the latter cannot monitor or control the fiduciary’s behaviour.

Read the sentences and choose the option that best arranges them in a logical order:
a. Generally, it is unusual for a new problem in international relations to be considered without at the same time some international organization being developed to deal with it.
b. International society has, in spite of the diversity of culture and political systems, been progressively drawn closer together and become more unified.
c. Despite the fears and concerns of some governments that international organizations are increasing too fast and that they are a burden on their exchequers, they are still proliferating at a considerable rate.
d. People and their governments now look far beyond national frontiers and feel a common responsibility for the major problems of the world and for lesser problems that may subsist within smaller groups of states.
e. More recently in the 1990s the problems of international trade, which was growing increasingly complex, led to the development of the WTO.
f. For instance, concern with the instability of commodities markets led to the establishment in the 1980s of the Common Fund for Commodities and the competition for the newly discovered wealth of the international seabed area resulted in the creation of the ISA under the Law of the Sea Convention of 1982, based on the concept of the “common heritage of mankind”.

Few sentences are given below continuously. Identify the best sequence of punctuations among the given options. (The rule of capitalization at the beginning of sentences has been ignored in the passage given below). Note: the arrows in the options indicate text that would be within the punctuations. A person’s frames of perception and action are narrow in early stages of development focused on social membership and technical competence the early life of the organizations often is focused on survival and efficiency only later and rarely emphasizing process of learning and development however in later stages both individual and organization become more concerned with the learning process itself the way the perceptions and practices are articulated and revised in interactions and how more people can be engaged in mutual learning and inquiry.

Impressions are direct, vivid, and forceful products of immediate experience; ideas are merely feeble copies of these original impressions.
Assuming the above statement is true, which of the statements logically follow from it?
I. Every impression leads to an idea.
II. Ideas must follow an antecedent impression.
III. The colour of the 2011 XAT test booklet right in front of a candidate is an impression to her, whereas the memory of the colour of her television set is an idea.
IV. If one was interested in origin of the idea of the colour of a television set, then one need to understand the impressions from which this idea was derived.

Media are not just passive channels of information. Not only do they supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the internet seems to be doing is chipping away our capacity for concentration. Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the argument presented above?

Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the argument presented in the previous question?

Randomness has to be dealt with successfully to ensure a better control over one’s life. Before one can deal effectively with randomness, one must acknowledge its existence. The above statement implies the following \emph{except}:

As the information on air warfare tasks and stressors was being gathered and scenarios were being developed, a parallel effort ensued to identify a test bed simulation for air warfare teams. To maintain experimental control, it was determined by the designers that choosing a low physical fidelity simulation was acceptable as long as cognitive fidelity in a team simulation was maintained through subjecting soldiers to pressure situations in a simulated combat setting and attempting to ensure that naturalistic decision making of soldiers would not be compromised.
Which of the following statements, if true, weakens the logic of the above passage?
i. A number of studies have shown that high levels of physical stress lead to a weakening of the decision-making capabilities of human beings.
ii. It has been convincingly demonstrated by various studies that human beings by nature are not designed to adapt to high levels of mental stress.
iii. Numerous studies have shown that simulated environments can be designed to be good substitutes for real-life combat situations.
iv. Studies have shown that simulated exercises for armed forces personnel have tended to induce a systematic type of “correct” and common behaviour among the trainees.
v. Officers, when short-listing soldiers for critical operations, pick up battle-hardened soldiers rather than those who have been trained through simulations.

The motivation of human beings towards their work is a complicated matter. For a long time, economists, sociologists, and psychologists believed that a carrot and stick approach, with monetary incentives, would be enough to motivate people towards higher levels of performance.
However, recent studies suggest that monetary incentives are only one part of motivation. In fact, studies show that high monetary incentives for tasks requiring higher cognitive abilities often lead to adverse outcomes. Experiments demonstrate that greater autonomy, reduced interference from management, and focusing on non-monetary factors are crucial for motivation in cognitive skill-intensive jobs.
Identify the statement(s) that is (are) logically consistent with the content of the paragraph:
i. The carrot-stick approach essentially requires the use of rewards to get more of a desired behaviour whereas penalties lead to increased undesirable behaviour.
ii. Expending time and effort on the design of monetary incentives is a wasteful exercise.
iii. The study by the group of MIT researchers was a flawed exercise from the start.
iv. There appears to be a need to reorient the existing paradigm prevalent in incentive design.
v. During the process of designing incentives, one should clearly delineate activities into those requiring mechanical skills and those requiring higher-level cognitive skills and design with separate sets of incentives and penalties for each.

Mulchand Textiles produces a single product of only one quality – waterproof synthetic fabric. Mr.Sharma, the cost accountant of Mulchand Textiles, estimated the costs of Mulchand Textiles for different possible monthly output levels. Before he could tabulate his estimates his computer crashed, and Mr. Sharma lost all data. Fortunately he had some printouts of some incomplete tables, charts and diagrams. The table titled “Variable Cost Estimates of Mulchand Textiles” provided the estimates of labour and material costs.

Variable Cost Estimates of Mulchand Textiles
Output (Square feet)	Labour cost (Rs.)	Material cost (Rs.)
25000	21500	11050
50000	41500	22000
75000	60000	33000
100000	78000	44000
125000	95000	54750
150000	111000	65700
175000	133000	76650
200000	160000	88000

Apart from labour and material costs Mulchand Textiles incurs administrative costs of Rs. 40,000 per month, and electricity costs. Mr. Sharma recalled that estimate data of variable electricity cost had certain peculiar characteristics. Values at every 25000 sq ft of output increased in geometric progression till 150000 sq ft of output, after which values increased in arithmetic progression for every 25000 sq ft of output. Mr. Sharma remembered that the electricity cost was estimated to be Rs. 3800 for 25000 sq.ft. of output, Rs. 5700 for 50000 square feet of output and Rs. 38856.50 for 175000 square feet of output.

Given below is an equation where the letters represent digits: \[ (PQ)\,(RQ) = XXX \] Determine the sum of $P+Q+R+X$. % Statement I $X = 9$. % Statement II The digits are unique.

In a list of 7 integers, one integer denoted as $x$ is unknown. The other six integers are $20, 4, 10, 4, 8,$ and $4$. If the mean, median, and mode of these seven integers are arranged in increasing order, they form an arithmetic progression. The sum of all possible values of $x$ is:

There are 240 second year students in a B-School. The Finance area offers 3 electives: Financial Derivatives (FD), Behavioural Finance (BF), and Security Analysis (SA). - 4 students have taken all three electives. - 48 students have taken FD. - The number of students who study FD and SA but not BF is twice the number of students who study FD and BF but not SA, and 4 times the number of students who study all three. - 124 students study SA. - 59 students do not take any of these subjects. - The number of students who study FD and SA but not BF is equal to the number of students who study BF and SA but not FD. Question: How many students study Behavioural Finance (BF) only?