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CAT Reading Comprehension questions with solutions

Passage-based questions testing detail retrieval, vocabulary in context and overall understanding. 179 questions from our 2016–2025 CAT pattern papers. Each has the answer and a full solution.

Also practise: Reading Comprehension for NDA

CAT 2025

AI and the Idea of Authorship: When a novelist announces that a chapter was drafted with the help of a large language model, the reaction is rarely…CAT 2025 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The Anthropology of the Gift: It is tempting to think of a gift as the opposite of a commercial transaction: where a sale is calculated and…CAT 2025 Slot 1 · 4-question set
Sleep and the Consolidation of Memory: A student who studies late into the night, convinced that one more hour of review will lock in tomorrow's exam…CAT 2025 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The Orbital Commons: For most of the space age, low Earth orbit was treated as an inexhaustible resource, a vault of empty sky into which rockets…CAT 2025 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The Legal Invisibility of Climate Migration: For most of the twentieth century, migration was studied as a response to war, persecution or economic…CAT 2025 Slot 3 · 4-question set
Competing Theories of Consciousness: Consciousness presents a peculiar problem for science: it is the one phenomenon we know with total certainty…CAT 2025 Slot 3 · 4-question set
Time, Discipline and the Mechanical Clock: Before the mechanical clock, medieval Europe told time the way most agrarian societies always had: by the…CAT 2025 Slot 3 · 4-question set

CAT 2023

The Cult of Productivity: It has become almost impossible to describe a well-lived day without reaching for the vocabulary of output. We speak of…CAT 2023 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The Narrow, Vital World of Mangroves: Mangrove forests occupy a narrow, punishing strip of the planet: the intertidal zone, where salt water floods…CAT 2023 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Rethinking the Informal Economy: The term "informal economy" was coined in the early 1970s by an anthropologist studying urban employment in Ghana…CAT 2023 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The wage behind the heatstroke: Heat, unlike most other hazards that labour economists study, does not announce itself with a single dramatic event…CAT 2023 Slot 3 · 4-question set

CAT 2022

Indigenous Knowledge and the Limits of Recognition: For much of the twentieth century, Western science treated indigenous knowledge — the accumulated…CAT 2022 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The Gap Between Quantum Physics and Quantum Hype: Every few years, a headline announces that quantum computers are about to render modern encryption…CAT 2022 Slot 1 · 4-question set
What the Ice Remembers: Mountain glaciers are often described, a little too neatly, as the world's thermometers: they grow when climate cools and…CAT 2022 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The Self That Isn't There: Among the doctrines that separate classical Buddhist philosophy from most other religious and philosophical traditions…CAT 2022 Slot 2 · 4-question set
The Architecture of Prisons: Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, sketched in a series of letters in 1787, is remembered today chiefly as a piece of…CAT 2022 Slot 3 · 4-question set

CAT 2021

How Birds Find Their Way: Each autumn, the Arctic tern departs its breeding grounds near the North Pole and flies, in stages, toward the edge of…CAT 2021 Slot 1 · 4-question set
What a Single Number Can and Cannot Say: Economists have no shortage of ways to describe how unevenly income or wealth is distributed within a…CAT 2021 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The History of the Tea Trade: Few commodities have rearranged the world as thoroughly as a dried leaf steeped in hot water. For most of its history…CAT 2021 Slot 3 · 4-question set
The Puzzle of Dark Matter: In the 1970s the astronomer Vera Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford measured how fast stars orbit the centres of spiral…CAT 2021 Slot 3 · 4-question set
The Two Faces of Nostalgia: The word 'nostalgia' was coined in 1688 by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, to describe a disease. Combining the…CAT 2021 Slot 3 · 4-question set

CAT 2020

Rethinking the Animal Mind: For much of the twentieth century, comparative psychology was dominated by a cautious minimalism: an animal's behaviour…CAT 2020 Slot 1 · 5-question set
What the Novel Can Do: The novel is often described, with a certain complacency, as the most capacious of literary forms: it can absorb essay…CAT 2020 Slot 1 · 4-question set
Pricing Carbon, Pricing Fairness: Economists have argued for decades, with unusual near-unanimity for the profession, that the most efficient way to…CAT 2020 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The Epistemics of Fake News: The standard diagnosis of the fake-news problem treats it as a supply-side failure: bad actors manufacture false…CAT 2020 Slot 3 · 4-question set

CAT 2019

Who Should Control the Money Supply?: Central bank independence, the principle that decisions over interest rates and money supply should be…CAT 2019 Slot 2 · 4-question set

CAT 2018

The Precision of Modern Attention Capture: In 1971, the economist Herbert Simon observed that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…CAT 2018 Slot 1 · 6-question set
Nodules, Uncertainty, and the Deep Seabed: The floor of the deep ocean, several kilometres below the reach of sunlight, is scattered in places with…CAT 2018 Slot 1 · 4-question set
A Modest Case for Linguistic Relativity: The claim that the language one speaks shapes, or even determines, the way one thinks — commonly known as…CAT 2018 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The Origins of Money: For most of the twentieth century, economics textbooks told a tidy story about the origins of money: barter came first, and…CAT 2018 Slot 2 · 6-question set
Post-Colonial Literature and Double Address: One recurring charge against post-colonial literature, levelled by critics both inside and outside the…CAT 2018 Slot 2 · 4-question set

CAT 2017

What Does Fidelity in Translation Mean?: Every translator inherits an impossible brief: reproduce, in a second language, an effect that was achieved…CAT 2017 Slot 1 · 4-question set
The Silk Road Reconsidered: The phrase "Silk Road" conjures an image of camel caravans plodding across empty deserts, laden with bolts of shimmering…CAT 2017 Slot 2 · 6-question set
Rethinking the Placebo Effect: For most of the twentieth century, the placebo was treated by medicine as a kind of methodological nuisance: an inert…CAT 2017 Slot 2 · 6-question set
The Difficulty of Modernist Poetry: When readers first encountered the fractured syntax and unattributed quotations of high modernist poetry in the…CAT 2017 Slot 2 · 4-question set
Rivers Without Borders: The Politics of Water Governance: Fresh water is often described, in policy documents and popular commentary alike, as a…CAT 2017 Slot 2 · 4-question set

CAT 2016

Mapping the World Anew: For most of recorded history, a map was not a neutral record of terrain but an argument about the world's shape and, more…CAT 2016 Slot 1 · 6-question set
The Precision of Modern Attention Capture: In 1971, the economist Herbert Simon observed that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…CAT 2016 Slot 1 · 6-question set
Nodules, Uncertainty, and the Deep Seabed: The floor of the deep ocean, several kilometres below the reach of sunlight, is scattered in places with…CAT 2016 Slot 1 · 4-question set
A Modest Case for Linguistic Relativity: The claim that the language one speaks shapes, or even determines, the way one thinks — commonly known as…CAT 2016 Slot 1 · 4-question set
Coral Reef Symbiosis: Coral reefs occupy less than one percent of the ocean floor yet support roughly a quarter of all known marine species, a…CAT 2016 Slot 2 · 6-question set

Other VARC topics

Odd Sentence Out 60 Para Jumbles 75 Para Summary 67 Sentence Placement 22 RC: Inference Questions 7 RC: Main Idea and Purpose 64