CAT Para Summary questions with solutions
Choose the option that best summarises a given paragraph. 67 questions from our 2016–2025 CAT pattern papers. Each has the answer and a full solution.
CAT 2025
- Urban beekeeping has spread through cities that once seemed inhospitable to bees, with rooftop hives now common in dense commercial districts.…
- Economists studying the 'gig economy' initially framed flexible, on-demand work as a straightforward trade-off: workers gained scheduling freedom in…
- The paradox of automation is that the more reliable a system becomes, the more devastating its rare failures tend to be for the humans supposed to be…
- Museums have long treated the label beside an artwork as a neutral aid: title, date, medium, perhaps a line of historical context. Increasingly…
- Paragraph: Urban planners have long assumed that widening roads reduces traffic congestion by increasing capacity. Decades of data across cities that…
- Paragraph: A recurring finding in behavioural economics is that people evaluate outcomes not in absolute terms but relative to a reference point —…
CAT 2024
- The rise of remote work has forced a quiet renegotiation of what an office is for. When a building is no longer required for the physical act of…
- Urban planners have long debated whether wide, multi-lane roads reduce congestion by increasing capacity or worsen it by inducing additional demand —…
- The rise of remote work has quietly dismantled an assumption that once shaped office design: that visibility, seeing and being seen by colleagues…
- Restoration ecologists increasingly distinguish between recreating an ecosystem's appearance and recreating its function. A wetland replanted with…
- Urban planners have increasingly turned to the concept of the '15-minute city' — a model in which most daily necessities such as work, shopping…
- Behavioural economists have long noted that people tend to weigh potential losses more heavily than equivalent gains, a phenomenon known as loss…
- The domestication of the horse, most archaeologists now agree, occurred on the Pontic-Caspian steppe roughly five and a half thousand years ago…
CAT 2023
- Urban planners have long assumed that adding lanes to congested highways reduces traffic. Decades of data suggest the opposite: new lane capacity is…
- Translation is sometimes described as a purely technical act of substituting words from one language for equivalent words in another. Literary…
- The idea that a single number can capture a country's economic well-being has always been contested, but GDP's dominance persisted for decades…
- Urban planners have long assumed that wider roads reduce congestion by increasing capacity. Yet study after study documents the opposite pattern…
- The restoration of an old painting is as much an act of interpretation as of technical skill. Removing centuries of accumulated varnish can reveal…
- Directions: Urban planners have long assumed that adding lanes to a congested highway relieves traffic. But a robust body of evidence, dating back…
- Directions: The idea that a company's culture can be captured in a values poster — Integrity, Excellence, Teamwork — misunderstands what culture…
- Directions: Predators are often imagined as engines of scarcity, thinning prey populations that would otherwise overrun their habitat. But the…
CAT 2022
- The world's coral reefs, though they occupy less than one percent of the ocean floor, support roughly a quarter of all known marine species, making…
- Early proponents of universal basic income framed it primarily as a technological response to automation: as machines displaced routine labor, a…
- Remote work, once treated as a perk granted to a trusted few, became for many organisations a default arrangement almost overnight. Early studies…
- When a fishery collapses, the standard explanation is overfishing — too many boats chasing too few fish. This is usually true, but it is often only…
- A recipe passed down within a family rarely specifies exact quantities the way a published cookbook does — 'a handful of this, until it looks right'…
- Passage: Urban planners have long assumed that adding lanes to a congested highway will relieve traffic. Decades of data instead reveal a pattern…
- Passage: A recurring complaint against modern art museums is that visitors spend more time photographing paintings than looking at them. Yet…
CAT 2021
- A growing body of research suggests that habitual multitasking with digital devices is associated with poorer performance on tasks requiring…
- Urban planners have increasingly turned to the concept of the '15-minute city' — a neighbourhood designed so that most daily needs, from groceries to…
- Contrary to the assumption that coral reefs are simply passive structures battered by rising ocean temperatures, recent research has documented…
- Economists have long debated whether foreign aid promotes economic growth in recipient countries or, by supplanting local institutions and fostering…
- The rise of remote work has revived a long-dormant debate about the purpose of the office. For decades, offices were justified primarily as sites of…
- The conservation of coral reefs has traditionally focused on protecting existing reef structures from direct threats such as overfishing, pollution…
- The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Cities are hotter than the surrounding countryside, a phenomenon long attributed to the heat…
- The passage given below is followed by four summaries. A translator is often praised for invisibility: the best translation, the saying goes, reads…
CAT 2020
- The best summary of the following paragraph: Museums have traditionally organised their collections around the idea of the masterpiece, a small…
- The best summary of the following paragraph: Urban planners have long assumed that wider roads reduce traffic congestion by increasing capacity.…
- Urban planners have long assumed that widening roads reduces congestion by increasing capacity for existing traffic. Decades of data from cities that…
- Economists studying happiness surveys have repeatedly found that, within a given country and year, richer people report being happier than poorer…
- Many species of migratory bird navigate over thousands of kilometres with an accuracy that puzzled naturalists for centuries, since the birds require…
- Cities have long been sold as engines of opportunity, places where a newcomer with nothing but ambition can, in principle, out-earn where she…
- The conventional history of the printing press credits Gutenberg with democratizing knowledge almost overnight, but the diffusion was far slower and…
CAT 2019
- Economists have long debated whether foreign aid helps or hinders development. Some argue that aid fills a critical financing gap, allowing poor…
- Urban planners have increasingly turned to the concept of the '15-minute city', a neighborhood design in which residents can reach most daily needs…
- Coral reefs, though occupying less than one percent of the ocean floor, support roughly a quarter of all marine species, making them among the most…
- Urban planners have long assumed that adding lanes to congested highways reduces traffic. Yet study after study documents the opposite: new capacity…
- Most languages spoken today will not survive the century. Linguists estimate that of the roughly seven thousand languages currently in use, a large…
- Corporate mission statements routinely proclaim commitments to sustainability, diversity and community, yet these declarations rarely specify…
CAT 2018
- The rise of container shipping in the 1950s did not merely make freight cheaper; it restructured the geography of global manufacturing itself. Before…
- It is tempting to treat forgetting as a simple failure of memory — a bug in an otherwise well-designed cognitive system. But a growing body of…
- Urban planners have long debated whether wide, multi-lane roads relieve traffic congestion or, paradoxically, worsen it over time. The phenomenon of…
- The gig economy is often celebrated for the flexibility it offers workers, who can in principle choose when and how much to work. Yet studies of…
- Urban planners have increasingly turned to pocket parks — small, often leftover plots converted into green space — as a low-cost alternative to large…
- Peer review is often defended as the mechanism that separates credible scientific findings from unvetted claims, yet its track record at catching…
CAT 2017
- The gig economy's promise of flexibility often obscures a harder trade-off. Workers value the freedom to choose their hours, but this freedom…
- Bioluminescence evolved independently in bacteria, fungi, fish and insects, each lineage using a chemically distinct luciferin. This repeated…
- A translator rendering a pun faces an unavoidable choice: preserve the source language's exact words and lose the joke, or invent an entirely new pun…
- Microfinance was once celebrated as a near-magical solution to global poverty, a way to let the poor lift themselves out of destitution through…
- The common assumption that forests are simply collections of individual trees competing for sunlight has been undermined by decades of research into…
- Urban planners have long debated whether building more roads actually relieves traffic congestion. A robust empirical pattern known as "induced…
CAT 2016
- Passage: The gig economy was pitched as a liberation from the rigid nine-to-five schedule, promising workers the freedom to log on and off at will.…
- Passage: Coral reefs occupy less than one percent of the ocean floor yet support roughly a quarter of all known marine species, a disproportion that…
- Passage: Encryption is often framed in public debate as a binary choice between privacy and security, as if stronger encryption necessarily makes…
- Urban planners have long assumed that adding more traffic lanes reduces congestion by giving cars more room to move. But data from dozens of cities…
- Behavioural economists have popularized the "nudge" — a small change in how choices are presented, such as making retirement savings the default…
- For centuries, the overland Silk Road is popularly imagined as a single continuous highway along which goods travelled unbroken from China to Rome.…