Parajumbles

Those who are meaningfully preparing for the CAT would surely have gone through the past ten years’ actual CAT papers. They would have found that the number of recurring themes is amazingly big. There’s this pattern – Parajumbles – as it is commonly referred to in popular CAT forums (though, it is not what CAT prefers to call it) that is quite a common feature of CAT Verbal Ability section over the years. For them, the last minute revision should consist of revising actual CAT questions alone and nothing else.

Last Minute Revision

For Verbal Reasoning, last minute preparations (after having solved the last ten actual CAT papers, of course) should ideally be solving GMAT actual papers that could be accessed from the Official Guide to the GMAT issued by the Graduate Management Admissions Council of the US. Do not touch anything else.

The CAT Reading Comprehension and Verbal Ability section in both slots last year was quite manageable. The passages were easy to decipher and language was lucid. As many as 27 questions checking student’s English Comprehension and Critical Reasoning skills is a step in right direction to make CAT very scientific like GMAT and GRE.

Sentences in Logical Sequence in a new avatar at CAT

Mock CAT put up on official website this year also contains the same number for above mentioned areas. Sentences in logical sequences pattern (aka Parajumbles) is without options as was the case with last year’s Mock as well as Actual CAT. We could expect the continuity this time around as well. New pattern introduced few years back to figure out Odd sentence out of the given sentences is there in Mock so we should see the same in this year’s CAT as well.

Verbal Reasoning separates the men from the boys. It is not a matter of whopping vocabularies. It is about being able to reason with words, about being able to decide what will lend coherence to expressions. This is not offhand. Solve actual CAT question papers and the proof shall stare you in the face.

Actual CAT Parajumbles Question

Let us see the most challenging pattern from CAT off late by solving an ACTUAL question.

DIRECTIONS for question: The sentences given in the question, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Write the most logical order of sentences in the space provided.

Question

1. As officials, their vision of a country shouldn’t run too far beyond that of the local people with whom they have to deal.
2. Ambassadors have to choose their words.
3. To say what they feel they have to say, they appear to be denying or ignoring part of what they know.
4. So, with ambassadors as with other expatriates in black Africa, there appears at a first meeting a kind of ambivalence.
5. They do a specialised job and it is necessary for them to live ceremonial lives.

Write your answer here: ____________.

Step 1: The Logical Analogy 

Let us consider a logical analogy in order to solve this parajumble. When a father tells his child: “So, you will not overeat hereafter”, there must be a reason. The children may have overeaten and had severe indigestion or diarrhoea and so on.

When someone tells his friends: “So, I will do regular exercise hereafter”, there must be a reason. His doctor would have told him that if he does not do regular exercise, he would need heart surgery soon. 

Step 2: Applying the Logic to solve such Parajumbles

The word “so” at the start of Statement 4 should ring a bell. The sentence immediately preceding 4 should give reason why there is kind of ambivalence with ambassadors and other expatriates.

Look at the word “ambivalence”. Imagine that someone goes to a witch doctor when he has a slight fever but when he has a serious ailment, he goes to a qualified medical practitioner. Neither is he modern nor is he primitive. This ambivalence, which means the coexistence in one person of different emotions or attitudes towards the same thing, would surprise anyone.

Since ambivalence presupposes to only one person, the ambivalence is the different attitude that one has as an ambassador and what the same person feels as an expatriate. This is why 1 should immediately precede 4. That is why, the answer to this tricky parajumble is 25143.

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