CAT Para-jumbles Questions

Para-jumbles ask you to reconstruct a coherent paragraph from sentences presented out of order. A valid sequence introduces ideas before referring to them and preserves the argument's logical progression.

Loading question count…

Key concepts

Opening and concluding sentences
Mandatory pairs and reference words
Chronology, contrast and cause–effect links

CAT para-jumbles practice questions

Loading questions…

Practise Free Tests on InsideIIM

Common mistakes

Choosing an order from a linking word alone.
Placing a pronoun before the sentence that establishes its referent.

Practical solving approaches

Find a strong sentence pair and build the surrounding sequence.
Read the whole proposed paragraph and check that each transition has a clear purpose.

Para-jumbles FAQs

What if two sentence orders look plausible?: Compare every reference and transition. Prefer the order that establishes each idea before using it and preserves the complete argument, not merely one convincing pair.

Loading practice data…

CAT para-jumbles practice questions

Question 1Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

In each of the following questions, the sentences of a paragraph are jumbled up and given. Each sentence is labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4. Find out the order in which the sentences have to be arranged to form a logically coherent paragraph and indicate the correct sequence of sentences

1. Good writers use more verbs.

2. However, it is hard to write without verbs.

3. The reason is that if unnecessary words are reduced, the verb-percentage goes up as a mathematical necessity.

4. So “use verbs” is not really good advice; writers have to use verbs, and trying to add extra ones would not turn out well.

Question 2Type in the answerHARD

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. The French Revolution created a vision for a new moral universe: that sovereignty resides in nations; that a constitution and the rule of law govern politics; that people are equal and enjoy inalienable rights; and that church and state should be separate.

2. The French Revolution invented modern revolution —the idea that humans can transform the world according to a plan—and so has a central place in the study of the social sciences.

3. It ushered in modernity by destroying the foundations of the “Old Regime”—absolutist politics, legal inequality, a “feudal” economy (characterized by guilds, manorialism, and even serfdom), and an alliance of church and state.

4. That vision is enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, whose proclamation of “natural, imprescriptible, and inalienable” rights served as the model for the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Question 3Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. During the 24-hour darkness of the austral autumn and winter, the South Pole Telescope operates nonstop under impeccable conditions for astronomy.

2. The atmosphere is thin (the pole is more than 9,300 feet above sea level, 9,000 of which are ice), stable (due to the absence of the heating and cooling effects of a rising and setting Sun) and the pole has some of the calmest winds on Earth, blowing almost always from the same direction.

3. “The South Pole has the harshest environment on Earth, but also the most benign,” says William Holzapfel, a University of California at Berkeley astrophysicist, the on-site lead researcher at the South Pole Telescope.

4. From an astronomer’s perspective, not until the Sun goes down and stays down—March through September— does the South Pole get “benign.”

Question 4Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. As "operating systems", Latin and French outlived the strategic pre-eminence of Rome and France.

2. Nor will Chinese, Russian, or Indian culture soon shoulder aside the American version-high or low- whose draw is embodied by Harvard and Hollywood.

3. Once a standard exists, it tends to perpetuate itself-just like the dollar, for all its ups and downs will not soon yield to the Euro or the Renminbi.

4. By such measures, no other rival, not even China, comes close to America, whatever the country's many familiar failings and riches of the rising rest.

Question 5Type in the answerHARD

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. The oldest fossil grasses are just 70 million years old, although grass may have evolved a bit earlier than that.

2. There have been land plants for 465 million years, yet there were no flowers for over two-thirds of that time.

3. The equally-familiar grasses appeared even more recently.

4. Flowering plants only appeared in the middle of the dinosaur era.

Question 6Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Nevertheless, the focus of otherwise very different movements - from cultural feminism to environmentalism to radical jihadism - is fundamentally the same: moral regulation.

2. Identity politics constantly demands the creation of new identities and lifestyle groups, often hostile to one another.

3. The main beneficiary of this shift from explicit political clashes to new forms of culture war has been identity politics.

4. Many of the political battles of the past two decades have actually been battles over cultural values, be it marriage, family, sexuality, abortion, immigration, multiculturalism, Islam or the EU.

Question 7Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Patrilineal ownership of lands and the culture of dowry attached to it have turned daughters into bad debts.

2. The control of such castes on local politics aggravates masculine hubris.

3. The bigotry of our village culture and polity is intrinsically linked to a control of land and agriculture.

4. Land makes certain castes ‘kingly’ in rural communities.

Question 8Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. The Cold War was underpinned by an understanding which allowed the US to maintain hegemony over the capitalist world and which gave the Soviet Union a regional sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

2. The bloody upheavals and wars occurred not in Europe, America or Russia, but in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and were either directly or indirectly a response to the experience of Western colonialism.

3. Despite the aggressive rhetoric of this era, the Cold War was a period of relative peace between hostile geopolitical blocs.

4. In retrospect, what was remarkable about the Cold War was the ability of most of the major players to manage their conflict.

Question 9Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. The Mandate of Heaven indicated divine approval of a king’s right to rule.

2. In other words, the Mandate of Heaven gave divine ruling authority to kings that lived a moral life, administered justice, and protected the welfare of his people.

3. Whereas Medieval Europeans legitimized their ruling authority by the divine right of kings, Confucian societies used a similar concept called the Mandate of Heaven.

4. However, it differed from the divine right of kings in that Heaven’s endorsement depends upon the virtuous conduct of the ruler.

Question 10Type in the answerHARD

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. General Yi knew that the Ming dynasty was more powerful than Mongols were and judged that if he attacked, the Ming would likely invade Korea.

2. Upon his arrival in Kaesŏng, General Yi toppled the government through a military coup and in 1392 CE, he placed himself on the throne —ushering in the Chosŏn Kingdom.

3. Due to his prominence in 1388 CE, the anti-Ming (pro-Mongol) faction sent General Yi to expel a contingent of Ming troops stationed on the northern part of the Korean Peninsula.

4. Seeing the campaign as a potential disaster, General Yi turned his troops south towards the Koryŏ capital, Kaesŏng.

Question 11Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Elite American colleges are now widely suspected of admitting male applicants with lower grades, to even up the numbers.

2. At least in the rich world, that wasteful truth has been triumphantly overcome.

3. Stendhal once wrote that all geniuses who were born women were lost to the public good.

4. Yet, despite this monumental advance, much ability, both male and female, is wasted because of tenacious stereotypes.

Question 12Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Hate speech is characterized by a deliberate targeting of communities rather than beliefs.

2. What the management must seek to do is to not let political discussions and debates to descend into vituperative attacks and hate speech.

3. But such an association will be spurious, as questioning orthodoxy and conservatism is not tantamount to hate speech.

4. The student body's activism has been criticized by detractors and it has been sought to be associated with hate speech.

Question 13Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. The main driving force of the British Empire’s global expansion was the pursuit of commercial interests.

2. That entailed helping the weaker side in order to promote a regional balance of power and preventing the rise of a regional power, or at least reducing its impact on British security and interests.

3. Creating a balance of power and fostering regional stability could help to realize commercial goals; hence these became the core of the British Empire’s strategy.

4. Britain put these practices to use in its continental policy for hundreds of years.

Question 14Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. The crash in the Alps has launched a search for a solution to the problem of accessing the cockpit from outside if the plane has been commandeered from within.

2. Flight safety has so far focused on threats from the passenger side, and the 9/11 terror episode led to fortification of the cockpit.

3. But if they are in a position to act, pilots can override this mechanism.

4. In exceptional circumstances, such as an emergency affecting the pilot and the cockpit area, the crew can use a code that opens the cockpit door briefly, or it even opens automatically if the pilots are immobilized due to depressurization.

Question 15Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Indeed, Indian policy-planners find themselves in a predicament thanks to the continued monetary easing by some nations and the shrinkage in world trade.

2. In this context, a fund-starved country like India will do well to focus on foreign direct investment rather than get unduly worried about foreign institutional investment, which will have its ebb and flow depending on the environment outside.

3. With everyone waiting for the other to act first, the onus is definitely on the political bosses to devise quick solutions to accelerate the economy.

4. Given this ‘new normal’ kind of an environment, they will have to look at ways to protect the Indian economy from external vicissitudes.

Question 16Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Comments have the potential to turn a news website into a democratic polyphony.

2. But, there is also a danger of it descending to cacophony if readers do not express opinions in a language that behooves the requirements of a matured public sphere.

3. It can become a site for multiple concurrent debates, for registering dissent, for pursuing an idea and finally for building a polity of informed choices.

4. The role of the moderators is to retain the space for polyphony and reject voices that breed cacophony.

Question 17Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Delisting the content under the parameters of "the right to be forgotten" does not mean the information is taken down from the Internet, but that it's no longer readily available to the public through a simple search on an intermediary such as Google.

2. However, those who support this controversial legislation say people shouldn’t be unfairly dogged by inaccurate, irrelevant, or outdated information that turns up when their name is put into a search engine.

3. The Court of Justice of the European Union established a "right to be forgotten" in a landmark decision in May 2014, allowing Europeans to ask search engines to delist certain links from results they show based on searches for that person’s name.

4. A number of other countries, including Russia, have proposed their own versions of the right to be forgotten, which has led campaigners for freedom of expression to warn that such decisions could limit what content is readily available online in these countries.

Question 18Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. But that would require a tough look at the economy, at the dearth of productivity, and at how it might be possible to restore conditions of growth. It would require serious investment, risk-taking, and nerve.

2. If those currently carping about the tax affairs of the rich really did care about raising tax revenues, they would concentrate on raising the volume of wealth that can be taxed.

3. The problem with the eagerness to recast economic problems, from a failure to cut the deficit to the continued inability to restore conditions of growth, as a moral issue and an erring on the part of selfish individuals who just aren’t giving enough back, leaves the real problems untouched.

4. These are not qualities today’s political class have in abundance. So, instead, they continue to project blame, singling out individuals for moral censure in the hope that they will increase their payments to the state.

Question 19Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. A more vital, dynamic and inclusive form of democracy is generated as the risk of corruption reduces, election fever abates and attention to the common good increases.

2. As those who have been drafted are exposed to expert opinion, objective information and public debate, voting is not simply based on gut feel, but careful deliberation.

3. Renaissance states such as Venice and Florence experienced centuries of political stability by practicing democracy on the basis of sortition, or drafting by lot.

4. With sortition, everyone does not vote on an issue few understand, but a random sample of the population is drafted to come to grips with the problem, in order to take a sensible decision.

Question 20Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

In each of the following questions, the sentences of a paragraph are jumbled up and given. Each sentence is labelled 1,2, 3 and 4. Find out the order in which the sentences have to be arranged to form a logically coherent paragraph and indicate the correct sequence of sentences

1. With vaccination, arguably our strongest and most cost-effective defense against infectious disease, urbanization is already presenting challenges.

2. It used to be the case that the one-in-five children missing out on a full course of even the most basic vaccines lived in remote rural communities.

3. Without strong health systems in place, the higher the population density the more difficult it becomes to prevent and control outbreaks, and not just because of the increased risk of contagion.

4. Today, we’re increasingly discovering that many of these hardest-to-reach children are in marginalized urban communities – right in the heart of cities, often hiding in plain sight.

CAT para-jumbles practice questions

Question 1Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Good writers use more verbs.

2. However, it is hard to write without verbs.

3. The reason is that if unnecessary words are reduced, the verb-percentage goes up as a mathematical necessity.

4. So “use verbs” is not really good advice; writers have to use verbs, and trying to add extra ones would not turn out well.

Question 2Type in the answerHARD

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

2. The French Revolution invented modern revolution —the idea that humans can transform the world according to a plan—and so has a central place in the study of the social sciences.

Question 3Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. During the 24-hour darkness of the austral autumn and winter, the South Pole Telescope operates nonstop under impeccable conditions for astronomy.

4. From an astronomer’s perspective, not until the Sun goes down and stays down—March through September— does the South Pole get “benign.”

Question 4Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. As "operating systems", Latin and French outlived the strategic pre-eminence of Rome and France.

2. Nor will Chinese, Russian, or Indian culture soon shoulder aside the American version-high or low- whose draw is embodied by Harvard and Hollywood.

3. Once a standard exists, it tends to perpetuate itself-just like the dollar, for all its ups and downs will not soon yield to the Euro or the Renminbi.

4. By such measures, no other rival, not even China, comes close to America, whatever the country's many familiar failings and riches of the rising rest.

Question 5Type in the answerHARD

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. The oldest fossil grasses are just 70 million years old, although grass may have evolved a bit earlier than that.

2. There have been land plants for 465 million years, yet there were no flowers for over two-thirds of that time.

3. The equally-familiar grasses appeared even more recently.

4. Flowering plants only appeared in the middle of the dinosaur era.

Question 6Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Nevertheless, the focus of otherwise very different movements - from cultural feminism to environmentalism to radical jihadism - is fundamentally the same: moral regulation.

2. Identity politics constantly demands the creation of new identities and lifestyle groups, often hostile to one another.

3. The main beneficiary of this shift from explicit political clashes to new forms of culture war has been identity politics.

4. Many of the political battles of the past two decades have actually been battles over cultural values, be it marriage, family, sexuality, abortion, immigration, multiculturalism, Islam or the EU.

Question 7Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Patrilineal ownership of lands and the culture of dowry attached to it have turned daughters into bad debts.

2. The control of such castes on local politics aggravates masculine hubris.

3. The bigotry of our village culture and polity is intrinsically linked to a control of land and agriculture.

4. Land makes certain castes ‘kingly’ in rural communities.

Question 8Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

3. Despite the aggressive rhetoric of this era, the Cold War was a period of relative peace between hostile geopolitical blocs.

4. In retrospect, what was remarkable about the Cold War was the ability of most of the major players to manage their conflict.

Question 9Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. The Mandate of Heaven indicated divine approval of a king’s right to rule.

2. In other words, the Mandate of Heaven gave divine ruling authority to kings that lived a moral life, administered justice, and protected the welfare of his people.

3. Whereas Medieval Europeans legitimized their ruling authority by the divine right of kings, Confucian societies used a similar concept called the Mandate of Heaven.

4. However, it differed from the divine right of kings in that Heaven’s endorsement depends upon the virtuous conduct of the ruler.

Question 10Type in the answerHARD

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. General Yi knew that the Ming dynasty was more powerful than Mongols were and judged that if he attacked, the Ming would likely invade Korea.

2. Upon his arrival in Kaesŏng, General Yi toppled the government through a military coup and in 1392 CE, he placed himself on the throne —ushering in the Chosŏn Kingdom.

3. Due to his prominence in 1388 CE, the anti-Ming (pro-Mongol) faction sent General Yi to expel a contingent of Ming troops stationed on the northern part of the Korean Peninsula.

4. Seeing the campaign as a potential disaster, General Yi turned his troops south towards the Koryŏ capital, Kaesŏng.

Question 11Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Elite American colleges are now widely suspected of admitting male applicants with lower grades, to even up the numbers.

2. At least in the rich world, that wasteful truth has been triumphantly overcome.

3. Stendhal once wrote that all geniuses who were born women were lost to the public good.

4. Yet, despite this monumental advance, much ability, both male and female, is wasted because of tenacious stereotypes.

Question 12Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Hate speech is characterized by a deliberate targeting of communities rather than beliefs.

2. What the management must seek to do is to not let political discussions and debates to descend into vituperative attacks and hate speech.

3. But such an association will be spurious, as questioning orthodoxy and conservatism is not tantamount to hate speech.

4. The student body's activism has been criticized by detractors and it has been sought to be associated with hate speech.

Question 13Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. The main driving force of the British Empire’s global expansion was the pursuit of commercial interests.

3. Creating a balance of power and fostering regional stability could help to realize commercial goals; hence these became the core of the British Empire’s strategy.

4. Britain put these practices to use in its continental policy for hundreds of years.

Question 14Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. The crash in the Alps has launched a search for a solution to the problem of accessing the cockpit from outside if the plane has been commandeered from within.

2. Flight safety has so far focused on threats from the passenger side, and the 9/11 terror episode led to fortification of the cockpit.

3. But if they are in a position to act, pilots can override this mechanism.

Question 15Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Indeed, Indian policy-planners find themselves in a predicament thanks to the continued monetary easing by some nations and the shrinkage in world trade.

3. With everyone waiting for the other to act first, the onus is definitely on the political bosses to devise quick solutions to accelerate the economy.

4. Given this ‘new normal’ kind of an environment, they will have to look at ways to protect the Indian economy from external vicissitudes.

Question 16Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. Comments have the potential to turn a news website into a democratic polyphony.

2. But, there is also a danger of it descending to cacophony if readers do not express opinions in a language that behooves the requirements of a matured public sphere.

3. It can become a site for multiple concurrent debates, for registering dissent, for pursuing an idea and finally for building a polity of informed choices.

4. The role of the moderators is to retain the space for polyphony and reject voices that breed cacophony.

Question 17Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

Question 18Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

2. If those currently carping about the tax affairs of the rich really did care about raising tax revenues, they would concentrate on raising the volume of wealth that can be taxed.

Question 19Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

1. A more vital, dynamic and inclusive form of democracy is generated as the risk of corruption reduces, election fever abates and attention to the common good increases.

2. As those who have been drafted are exposed to expert opinion, objective information and public debate, voting is not simply based on gut feel, but careful deliberation.

3. Renaissance states such as Venice and Florence experienced centuries of political stability by practicing democracy on the basis of sortition, or drafting by lot.

4. With sortition, everyone does not vote on an issue few understand, but a random sample of the population is drafted to come to grips with the problem, in order to take a sensible decision.

Question 20Type in the answerMEDIUM

Type in your answer in the input box provided below the question.

In each of the following questions, the sentences of a paragraph are jumbled up and given. Each sentence is labelled 1,2, 3 and 4. Find out the order in which the sentences have to be arranged to form a logically coherent paragraph and indicate the correct sequence of sentences

1. With vaccination, arguably our strongest and most cost-effective defense against infectious disease, urbanization is already presenting challenges.

2. It used to be the case that the one-in-five children missing out on a full course of even the most basic vaccines lived in remote rural communities.

3. Without strong health systems in place, the higher the population density the more difficult it becomes to prevent and control outbreaks, and not just because of the increased risk of contagion.

4. Today, we’re increasingly discovering that many of these hardest-to-reach children are in marginalized urban communities – right in the heart of cities, often hiding in plain sight.

Closing Soon (Grouped by Employer)

Featured Competitions

CAT Para-jumbles Questions

Key concepts

CAT para-jumbles practice questions

Common mistakes

Practical solving approaches

Para-jumbles FAQs

CAT Para-jumbles Questions

Key concepts

CAT para-jumbles practice questions

Common mistakes

Practical solving approaches

Para-jumbles FAQs

More Verbal Ability practice

CAT Para-jumbles Questions

Key concepts

CAT para-jumbles practice questions

Common mistakes

Practical solving approaches

Para-jumbles FAQs

CAT Para-jumbles Questions

Key concepts

CAT para-jumbles practice questions

Common mistakes

Practical solving approaches

Para-jumbles FAQs

More Verbal Ability practice