Loading practice questions…

CAT Para-summary Questions | InsideIIM

CAT Para-summary Questions

Para-summary questions ask for the option that captures a paragraph's central claim without adding information or distorting its scope. A strong summary preserves essential relationships while omitting illustrations.

9 free practice questions

Key concepts

Central claim versus supporting examples
Scope and tone
Qualifications and relationships between ideas

CAT para-summary practice questions

Question 1Multiple choiceHARD

Select the correct alternative from the given choices.

Four alternative summaries are given below each text. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the text.

Individual angst is all very well, but as a collective we human beings rate ourselves pretty highly. We know we are unique, fabulous and important because we tell ourselves so all the time. And, although the epithet “terminal uniqueness” was coined in reference to alcoholism, it could also apply quite generally. And we do, of course, possess some interestingly distinguishing features. For example, we are the only species that extracts resources from the ground via mining or quarrying. Unfortunately, it is precisely this kind of unique behaviour that tends to get us into one fine mess after another, as catalogued by the recently released Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. An audit of the world’s ecosystem services, it reveals that 60 per cent of the world’s ecosystem services are being used unsustainably and/or being degraded. Failing to curb our enthusiasm for just about all of the Earth’s resources, including fresh water, fish stocks and virgin forest, means that between 10 and 30 per cent of the world’s species face extinction. The human ego, it seems, is inversely proportional to levels of biodiversity.

A.Despite our anxiety we are unique because we can mine and quarry and we tell ourselves how important we are. Our ‘terminal uniqueness’ leads us to destroy the world around us leading to extinction of species that is 60% of the ecosystem.B.Though we are unique in some ways, we think too highly of ourselves and are probably ‘terminally unique’. Our unique behaviour has got us into a mess as revealed by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Our self- conceit has led us to overexploit resources leading to the extinction of a number of species.C.‘Terminal uniqueness’ is what makes us individually anxious but collectively unique. Our unique features are listed in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Our enthusiasm for exploiting resources has led to the extinction of 60% of the species on Earth.D. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment shows that we have made ourselves unique through mining and quarrying. But our uniqueness has become a threat for our environment as we overexploit resources which leads to extinction.

Question 2Multiple choiceMEDIUM

Select the correct alternative from the given choices.

Four alternative summaries are given below each text. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the text. Totalitarianism is not always operated by diktat. It can be insinuated by suggestion and replication. Dissent does not have to be banned if it is countered by orchestrated mass promo rallies and hypnotizing oratory. Despotic establishments do not need to turn Hitlerian; all they need to do is to let the Reich chemistry work. Self-regulation and self-censorship will click in. Then any dissident who wants to retain his intellectual liberty will find himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.

Question 3Multiple choiceMEDIUM

Select the correct alternative from the given choices.

Four alternative summaries are given below each text. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the text. Modern history abounds with violence fueled by apocalyptic myths, not always explicitly religious in nature. The aim of the Jacobin terror in revolutionary France was the creation of a modern state. If the violent suppression of the peasant revolt in the Vendée is included, the casualties ran into the hundreds of thousands. The myths that possessed these anarchists in their campaigns of assassination were secular myths of social transformation. Lenin avowedly followed the Jacobin example when he used the Cheka to create a modern state in Russia. One of the factors that distinguished Nazism and fascism from conventional tyrannies was the belief that a new society could be fashioned by the systematic use of terror. Violent jihadism has more in common with these modern totalitarian movements than is commonly supposed.

Question 4Multiple choiceMEDIUM

Select the correct alternative from the given choices.

Four alternative summaries are given below each text. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the text. When a language seems especially telegraphic (that is, requiring less to be actually said to put a sentence together), it is usually because enough adults learnt it at a certain stage in its history that, given the difficulty of learning a new language after childhood, it became a kind of stripped-down “schoolroom” version of itself. Because all languages, are, to some extent, busier than they need to be, this streamlining leaves the language thoroughly complex and nuanced, just lighter on the bric-a-brac that so many languages pant under. For example, Indonesian, one of the most economical languages in the world, is a first language to only one in four of its speakers; the language has been used for many centuries as a lingua franca in a vast region, imposed on speakers of several hundred languages. This means that while other languages can be like overgrown lawns, Indonesian’s grammar has been regularly mowed, such that especially the colloquial forms are tidier.

Question 5Multiple choiceMEDIUM

Select the correct alternative from the given choices.

Four alternative summaries are given below each text. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the text. Nineteenth-century liberals recognized that democracy comes in various forms, and dreaded the version advocated by Rousseau, in which an inspired lawgiver interprets and implements the will of the people. Nowadays such fears are dismissed as elitist. But the old-fashioned liberals grasped a vital truth: popular government has no necessary connection with the freedom of individuals or minorities. Of course, liberals today will say this can be remedied by installing the rule of constitutional rights. Such systems are fragile, however, and count for nothing when large sections of society are indifferent or actively hostile to liberal values. Where this is the case, democracy means not much more than the tyranny of the majority.

Question 6Multiple choiceMEDIUM

Select the correct alternative from the given choices.

Four alternative summaries are given below each text. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the text. Cheapness and its cinematic markers, such as hand-held camera work and low or high-contrast light, aren’t themselves guarantors of a tone of artistic authenticity. In fact, they’re often misused by filmmakers short of inspiration as badges of sincerity that take the place of actual artistry. The theatrical realism of many older, ostensibly classic movies have dated terribly and reflect the very exclusions and compromises of the system that produced them. Only the ingenious exertions and inventions of a slender minority of great filmmakers could circumvent and override them. Yet, critics fetishize the styles of studio-era movies and take them for an enduring and immutable aesthetic standard – as if, with an appreciation of Shakespeare came a comparable fixation on lesser Elizabethans and a disdain for latter-day dramatists for not writing in iambic pentameter.

Question 7Multiple choiceMEDIUM

Select the correct alternative from the given choices.

Four alternative summaries are given below each text. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the text. Since the Holocaust is an axial event of modern history, its misunderstanding turns our minds in the wrong direction. When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary. On the political right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves as virtuous. In the 21st century, anarchical protest movements join in a friendly tussle with global oligarchy, in which neither side can be hurt since both see the real enemy as the state. Both the left and the right tend to fear order rather than its destruction or absence.

Question 8Multiple choiceMEDIUM

Select the correct alternative from the given choices.

Four alternative summaries are given below each text. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the text. Journalism may never have been as public-spirited an enterprise as editors and writers liked to think it was. Yet the myth mattered. It pushed journalism to challenge power; it made journalists loath to bend to the whims of their audience; it provided a crucial sense of detachment. The new generation of media giants that dominates journalism today has no patience for the old ethos of detachment. It’s not that these companies don’t have aspirations toward journalistic greatness. BuzzFeed, Vice, and the Huffington Post invest in excellent reporting and employ first-rate journalists—and they have produced some of the most memorable pieces of investigative journalism in this century. But in the pursuit of audience, they have allowed the endless feedback loop of the web to shape their editorial sensibility and determine their editorial investments.

Question 9Multiple choiceHARD

Select the correct alternative from the given choices.

Four alternative summaries are given below each text. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the text. Much has rightly been made of the problem of political polarisation, but not nearly as much has been said about the problem of political homogenisation. Both are toxic to public discourse. While the former makes for awkward conversations at the family dinner table, the latter buries difficult conversations. Where agreement is sought without a decent discussion, opinion corridors form, limiting the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. Where all views are not heard in appropriate discussion, the only alternative is inappropriate discussion. And populist rhetoric cuts through this muffled discussion culture like a hot knife through butter, as the pent-up need to be heard surfaces.

Practise Free Tests on InsideIIM

Common mistakes

Selecting a vivid detail instead of the main argument.
Accepting an option that changes a cautious claim into an absolute statement.

Practical solving approaches

State the main idea in your own words before evaluating options.
Eliminate additions, omissions and distortions, then compare the remaining options with the full paragraph.

Para-summary FAQs

Is the shortest option always the best summary?: No. The best option preserves the essential meaning and scope. Brevity is useful only when it does not remove a necessary idea.

More Verbal Ability practice

Para-jumbles →