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CAT RC: Main Idea and Purpose questions with solutions

Reading comprehension questions on the central idea, purpose and structure of a passage. 277 questions from our 2016–2025 CAT pattern papers. Each has the answer and a full solution.

CAT 2025

Why We Fear the Wrong Things: People routinely rank the danger of flying above the danger of driving to the airport, even though the drive is, mile…CAT 2025 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The Language Left at the Door: A child born in Toronto to Tamil-speaking parents, or in Frankfurt to a Vietnamese-speaking household, typically…CAT 2025 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Data Colonialism: An Extraction by Another Name: Colonialism, in its classical form, extracted physical resources — cotton, rubber, minerals, labour…CAT 2025 Slot 3 · 4-question set

CAT 2024

The Loneliness Epidemic: For most of human history, solitude was a circumstance rarely chosen and rarely prolonged. Villages, extended households…CAT 2024 Slot 1 · 4-question set
Fungal Networks in Forests: Walk into a temperate forest and the visible plants — trunks, branches, leaves — represent only a fraction of the…CAT 2024 Slot 1 · 4-question set
A History of the Passport: It is easy to assume that the passport, in something like its current form — a booklet identifying a citizen and inviting…CAT 2024 Slot 1 · 4-question set
Misinformation and Institutional Trust: The word "misinformation" implies a fairly simple model of how false belief spreads: someone encounters a…CAT 2024 Slot 1 · 4-question set
Deep Time and the Discipline of Geology: When James Hutton stood at Siccar Point in 1788 and looked at the near-vertical layers of grey schist…CAT 2024 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The Attention-Span Debate, Reconsidered: Every few years, a fresh wave of commentary announces that the human attention span is collapsing, usually…CAT 2024 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Craft, Industry, and the Place of Judgement: The distinction between craft and industrial production is usually drawn in terms of scale and…CAT 2024 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Urban Trees and the Case for Slow Public Health: It is tempting to treat the urban tree as a piece of municipal decoration, a line item somewhere…CAT 2024 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The Ethics of Gene Editing: The advent of CRISPR-Cas9 and related gene-editing technologies has compressed what was once a decades-long project of…CAT 2024 Slot 3 · 4-question set
The History of Political Cartoons and Satire: Long before newspapers carried photographs, they carried drawings, and among the earliest and most…CAT 2024 Slot 3 · 4-question set
Ocean Acidification: Discussions of climate change tend to fix on the atmosphere, and understandably so: rising air temperatures produce the…CAT 2024 Slot 3 · 4-question set
The Critique of Meritocracy: The word 'meritocracy' was coined in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young, and it is one of the more…CAT 2024 Slot 3 · 4-question set

CAT 2023

Plastic and the Logic of Disposability: For most of human history, the durability of an object was inseparable from its value. A clay pot, a woven…CAT 2023 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The Fragility Behind Honeybee Decline: Beekeepers first began reporting the phenomenon in the mid-2000s: healthy colonies, provisioned with ample…CAT 2023 Slot 1 · 4-question set
Monuments as Ongoing Civic Argument: Every monument makes an argument, whether or not its builders intended one. A statue erected in bronze does not…CAT 2023 Slot 1 · 4-question set
Machines, Meaning and the Question of Creativity: For decades, creativity was treated as the last redoubt of human exceptionalism, the one faculty…CAT 2023 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Two Roads to Tranquillity: Ask a Stoic and an Epicurean to define the good life and you will get answers that, on first hearing, sound close enough…CAT 2023 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Chokepoints and coercion: rethinking the spice trade: It is tempting to treat the medieval and early modern spice trade as a quaint prologue to…CAT 2023 Slot 3 · 4-question set
Discovered, invented, or both?: Ask a mathematician whether mathematics is discovered or invented, and you will typically get an answer delivered…CAT 2023 Slot 3 · 4-question set

CAT 2022

Sugar: The Manufacture of Demand: Few commodities have reshaped the world as thoroughly, or as violently, as sugar. Before the fifteenth century…CAT 2022 Slot 1 · 4-question set
What Boredom Is Trying to Tell You: Boredom has an image problem. Colloquially it is treated as an absence — a mere lack of stimulation, the dull…CAT 2022 Slot 1 · 4-question set
When a Language Falls Silent: Of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken on Earth today, linguists estimate that half will fall silent within a…CAT 2022 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Free to Use, Costly to Leave: Antitrust law, as developed through most of the twentieth century, was built to catch a fairly specific kind of harm: a…CAT 2022 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The History of the Novel in India: The novel arrived in India not as a native growth but as an import, carried in on the same tide as the printing…CAT 2022 Slot 3 · 4-question set
What Octopus Intelligence Challenges: Among the many claims made for octopus intelligence, the most startling is also the hardest to reconcile with…CAT 2022 Slot 3 · 4-question set
The Many Meanings of Universal Basic Income: Universal basic income has the rare distinction of being championed, at various points over the last…CAT 2022 Slot 3 · 4-question set

CAT 2021

The Economics of Behavioural Surplus: Every time a person taps a screen, walks past a sensor, or simply carries a smartphone through a city, a record…CAT 2021 Slot 1 · 4-question set
Memory as Method: Rethinking Oral Tradition: Before the spread of writing, and in many communities long after it, knowledge that a society needed to…CAT 2021 Slot 1 · 4-question set
From Phrenology to Neuroscience: For much of the nineteenth century, the confident claim that character could be read from the shape of a skull…CAT 2021 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The Walkable City and Its Discontents: Urban planners have, in the last two decades, rediscovered a truth that predates the automobile: a city…CAT 2021 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The Trouble with Wilderness: Few words in the environmental vocabulary carry as much emotional charge, and as much conceptual instability, as…CAT 2021 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The Impossibility of Algorithmic Fairness: When a bank denies a loan application, a hospital triages patients, or a court sets bail, the decision was…CAT 2021 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Kuhn and Scientific Revolutions: When Thomas Kuhn published *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* in 1962, the dominant picture of science was…CAT 2021 Slot 3 · 4-question set

CAT 2020

The Promise and Limits of Citizen Science: For most of its history, science was assumed to require credentialed specialists working in controlled…CAT 2020 Slot 1 · 5-question set
Form Follows Function in the History of Type: When Johannes Gutenberg adapted the screw press and oil-based ink to cast, set, and print movable metal…CAT 2020 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Automation and the Future of Work: For most of the twentieth century, automation was something that happened to other people's jobs. Assembly-line…CAT 2020 Slot 3 · 5-question set
Music and Emotion: Ask someone why a particular piece of music moves them and you will usually get an answer in the vocabulary of feeling: the cello…CAT 2020 Slot 3 · 5-question set
Rewilding and Its Discontents: Rewilding began as a modest proposal — reintroduce a missing predator here, let a floodplain flood there — and has…CAT 2020 Slot 3 · 4-question set

CAT 2019

Listening to the Afterglow of Creation: In 1964, two radio astronomers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were troubled by a persistent…CAT 2019 Slot 1 · 6-question set
The Pasture That Belonged to No One: In 1968, the ecologist Garrett Hardin published a short essay in Science that would lend its title to one of the…CAT 2019 Slot 1 · 6-question set
Beauty in the Imperfect: The Japanese aesthetic sensibility known as wabi-sabi resists easy translation, in part because it names not a single…CAT 2019 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The Ecosystem Within: For most of the history of microbiology, bacteria living in and on the human body were regarded chiefly as threats to be…CAT 2019 Slot 1 · 4-question set
Writing the Partition: For nearly four decades after 1947, the historiography of the Partition of British India was dominated by what might be called…CAT 2019 Slot 1 · 4-question set
Free Will and the Architecture of Choice: For centuries, philosophers have circled a question that seems at once trivial and unanswerable: when a…CAT 2019 Slot 2 · 6-question set
The Uneasy Ethics of Invasive Species: When a mongoose escapes a sugarcane plantation and multiplies across an island, or a vine planted for erosion…CAT 2019 Slot 2 · 6-question set
Neorealism and the Streets of Postwar Italy: In the rubble of 1945, with studios bombed out and the state-funded production apparatus of the Fascist…CAT 2019 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Accounting for the Invention of Writing: The oldest writing we possess did not begin as poetry, prayer or proclamation. It began as bookkeeping. In…CAT 2019 Slot 2 · 4-question set

CAT 2018

The Diffuse History of Vaccination: The story of vaccination is often told as a triumph of individual genius — Edward Jenner noticing that milkmaids…CAT 2018 Slot 1 · 6-question set
Engineering a Hybrid Style: The Mughal Karkhana: Mughal miniature painting is frequently described, in survey texts, as a synthesis of Persian…CAT 2018 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The Active Work of Sleep: Sleep has long been treated by science as a kind of biological idling, a state to be endured rather than studied, useful…CAT 2018 Slot 2 · 6-question set
Storing Power for a Renewable Grid: A wind turbine that cannot spin because the air is still, or a solar panel shrouded by cloud, does not simply…CAT 2018 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The Difficult Ethics of Museum Repatriation: When a museum in a wealthy nation returns an object to the country from which it was taken, the act is…CAT 2018 Slot 2 · 4-question set

CAT 2017

The Politics of the Calendar: Every calendar is an argument disguised as a grid. It claims to measure time neutrally, yet each one encodes a decision…CAT 2017 Slot 1 · 6-question set
Flexibility, Control and the Gig Economy: The platform economy sells itself on a single seductive word: flexibility. A driver logs on when she wants…CAT 2017 Slot 1 · 6-question set
Stoicism Beyond the Self-Help Slogan: Popular renderings of Stoicism, particularly the self-help variety that has flourished in recent years, tend to…CAT 2017 Slot 1 · 4-question set
What Animal Contests Owe to Game Theory: It is one of the odder achievements of twentieth-century biology that a mathematical framework invented to…CAT 2017 Slot 2 · 4-question set

CAT 2016

Engineering a Hybrid Style: The Mughal Karkhana: Mughal miniature painting is frequently described, in survey texts, as a synthesis of Persian…CAT 2016 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The Printing Press and the Reformation: It has become a commonplace of intellectual history to credit Gutenberg's printing press with having caused…CAT 2016 Slot 2 · 6-question set
Minimalism in Architecture: Minimalism in architecture is routinely described, by admirers and detractors alike, as an aesthetic of subtraction — a…CAT 2016 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The Economics of Colonial Railways: The railway networks that colonial powers built across nineteenth-century Asia and Africa are often presented, in…CAT 2016 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Memory Reconsolidation: For most of the twentieth century, memory was described, in both scientific and popular writing, using the metaphor of…CAT 2016 Slot 2 · 4-question set

Other VARC topics

Odd Sentence Out 60 Para Jumbles 75 Para Summary 67 Sentence Placement 22 RC: Inference Questions 7 Reading Comprehension 41