CAT Para Completion Questions & Solutions

A sample of real CAT Para Completion past-year questions, each with a worked solution and the correct answer highlighted. AthenaPrep has 27 Para Completion questions in all — sign up free to practise them timed.

1. Q1.CAT 2025

   The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.

   Sentence: In each of the affected males, the genetic defect was located to the X chromosome in the region of p11-12.

   Paragraph: The first suggested evidence of a human genetic mutation associated with aggressive behaviour came from a study in 1993. _____(1)____. Genetic and metabolic studies were conducted on a large Dutch family in which several of the males has a syndrome of borderline mental retardation and abnormal behaviour. _____(2)____. The undesirable behaviour included impulsive aggression, arson and exhibitionism. _____(3)____. A point mutation was identified in the eighth exon of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) structural gene which changes glutamine to a termination codon. _____(4)____.

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2. Q2.CAT 2025

   The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.

   Sentence: "Everything is old-world, traditional techniques from Mexico," Ava emphasizes.

   Paragraph: The sisters embrace the ways their great-grandfather built and repaired instruments. ____(1) ____. When crafting a Mexican guitarron used in mariachi music, they use tacote wood for the top of the instrument. Once the wood is cut, they carve the neck and heel from a single block using tools like hand saws, chisels and sandpaper rather than modern power tools — and believe that this traditional method improves the tone of the instrument. ____(2) ____. Their store has a three-year waitlist for instruments that take months to create. ____(3) ____. The family's artisanship has attracted stars like Los Lobos, who own custom guitars made by all three generations of the Delgado family. ____(4) ____. For the sisters, involvement in the family business started at an early age. They each built their first instruments at age 9.

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3. Q3.CAT 2025

   The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.

   Sentence: While taste is related to judgment, with thinkers at the time often writing, for example, about “judgments of taste” or using the two terms interchangeably, taste retains a vital link to pleasure, embodiment, and personal specificity that is too often elided in post-Kantian ideas about judgment—a link that Arendt herself was working to restore.

   Paragraph: ____(1) ____. Denneny focused on taste rather than judgment in order to highlight what he believed was a crucial but neglected historical change. ____(2) ____. Over the course of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, across Western Europe, the word taste took on a new extension of meaning, no longer referring specifically to gustatory sensation and the delights of the palate but becoming, for a time, one of the central categories for aesthetic—and ethical—thinking. ____(3) ____. Tracing the history of taste in Spanish, French, and British aesthetic theory, as Denneny did, also provides a means to recover the compelling and relevant writing of a set of thinkers who have been largely neglected by professional philosophy. ____(4) ____.

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4. Q4.CAT 2024

   There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

   Sentence: Science has officially crowned us superior to our early-rising brethren.

   Paragraph: My fellow night owls, grab a strong cup of coffee and gather around: I have great news. ___(1)___. For a long time, our kind has been unfairly maligned. Stereotyped as lazy and undisciplined. Told we ought to be morning larks. Advised to go to bed early so we can wake before 5am and run a marathon before breakfast like all high-flyers seem to do. Now, however, we are having the last laugh. ___(2)___. It may be a tad more complicated than that. A study published last week, which you may have already seen while scrolling at 1am, suggests that staying up late could be good for brain power. ___(3)___. Is this study a thinly veiled PR exercise conducted by a caffeine-pill company? Nope, it’s legit. ___(4)___. Research led by academics at Imperial College London studied data on more than 26,000 people and found that “self-declared ‘night owls’ generally tend to have higher cognitive scores”.

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5. Q5.CAT 2024

   There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

   Sentence: Comprehending a wide range of emotions, Renaissance music nevertheless portrayed all emotions in a balanced and moderate fashion.
   
   Paragraph: A volume of translated Italian madrigals were published in London during the year of 1588. This sudden public interest facilitated a surge of English Madrigal writing as well as a spurt of other secular music writing and publication. ___(1)___. This music boom lasted for thirty years and was as much a golden age of music as British literature was with Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I. ___(2)___. The rebirth in both literature and music originated in Italy and migrated to England; the English madrigal became more humorous and lighter in England as compared to Italy. Renaissance music was mostly polyphonic in texture. ___(3)___. Extreme use of and contrasts in dynamics, rhythm, and tone colour do not occur. ___(4)___. The rhythms in Renaissance music tend to have a smooth, soft flow instead of a sharp, well-defined pulse of accents.

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6. Q6.CAT 2024

   There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

   Sentence: The brain isn’t organized the way you might set up your home office or bathroom medicine cabinet.

   Paragraph: ___(1)___. You can’t just put things anywhere you want to. The evolved architecture of the brain is haphazard and disjointed, and incorporates multiple systems, each of which has a mind of its own. ___(2)___. Evolution doesn’t design things and it doesn’t build systems—it settles on systems that, historically, conveyed a survival benefit. There is no overarching, grand planner engineering the systems so that they work harmoniously together. ___(3)___. The brain is more like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction. ___(4)___.

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7. Q7.CAT 2024

   There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

   Sentence: Many have had to leave their homes behind, with more than 1.3 million people being displaced due to the drought.

   Passage: Somalia has been dealing with an enormous humanitarian catastrophe, driven by the longest and most severe drought the country has experienced in at least 40 years. ___(1)___. Five consecutive rainy seasons have failed, causing more than 8 million people - almost half of the country’s population - to experience acute food insecurity. ___(2)___. More than 43,000 people are believed to have lost their lives, with half of the lives lost likely being children under five. The damage the drought has caused is far-reaching. ___(3)___. Farmers have lost all their agricultural income, while pastoralists have lost more than 3 million livestock, impoverishing entire communities, and leaving them on the brink of famine. ___(4)___. Some, like the pastoralists, may never be able to go back as their livelihoods have been irreversibly wiped out.

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8. Q8.CAT 2023

   There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

   Sentence: The discovery helps to explain archeological similarities between the Paleolithic peoples of China, Japan, and the Americas.

   Paragraph: The researchers also uncovered an unexpected genetic link between Native Americans and Japanese people. ___(1)___. During the deglaciation period, another group branched out from northern coastal China and travelled to Japan. ___(2)___. "We were surprised to find that this ancestral source also contributed to the Japanese gene pool, especially the indigenous Ainus," says Li. ___(3)___. They shared similarities in how they crafted stemmed projectile points for arrowheads and spears. ___(4)___. "This suggests that the Pleistocene connection among the Americas, China, and Japan was not confined to culture but also to genetics," says senior author Qing-Peng Kong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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9. Q9.CAT 2023

   There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

   Sentence: And probably much earlier, moving the documentation for kissing back 1,000 years compared to what was acknowledged in the scientific community.

   Paragraph: Research has hypothesised that the earliest evidence of human lip kissing originated in a very specific geographical location in South Asia 3,500 years ago.___(1)___. From there it may have spread to other regions, simultaneously accelerating the spread of the herpes simplex virus 1. According to Dr Troels Pank Arbøll and Dr Sophie Lund Rasmussen, who in a new article in the journal Science draw on a range of written sources from the earliest Mesopotamian societies, kissing was already a well-established practice 4,500 years ago in the Middle East.___(2)___. In ancient Mesopotamia, people wrote in cuneiform script on clay tablets.___(3)___. Many thousands of these clay tablets have survived to this day, and they contain clear examples that kissing was considered a part of romantic intimacy in ancient times.___(4)___. “Kissing could also have been part of friendships and family members' relations," says Dr Troels Pank Arbøll, an expert on the history of medicine in Mesopotamia.

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10. Q10.CAT 2023

    There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.
    

    Sentence: For theoretical purposes, arguments may be considered as freestanding entities, abstracted from their contexts of use in actual human activities.

    Paragraph : ___(1)___. An argument can be defined as a complex symbolic structure where some parts, known as the premises, offer support to another part, the conclusion. Alternatively, an argument can be viewed as a complex speech act consisting of one or more acts of premising (which assert propositions in favor of the conclusion), an act of concluding, and a stated or implicit marker (“hence”, “therefore”) that indicates that the conclusion follows from the premises.___(2)___. The relation of support between premises and conclusion can be cashed out in different ways: the premises may guarantee the truth of the conclusion, or make its truth more probable; the premises may imply the conclusion; the premises may make the conclusion more acceptable (or assertible).___(3)___. But depending on one’s explanatory goals, there is also much to be gained from considering arguments as they in fact occur in human communicative practices.___(4)___.

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11. Q11.CAT 2022

    There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide in which blank (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

    Sentence: Easing the anxiety and pressure of having a “big day” is part of the appeal for many couples who marry in secret.

    Paragraph: Wedding season is upon us and - after two years of Covid chaos that saw nuptials scaled back- you may think the temptation would be to go all out. ___(1)___. But instead of expanding the guest list, many couples are opting to have entirely secret ceremonies. With Covid case numbers remaining high and the cost of living crisis meaning that many couples are feeling the pinch, it’s no wonder that some are less than eager to send out invites. ___(2)___. Plus, it can’t hurt that in celebrity circles getting married in secret is all the rage. ___(3)___. “I would definitely say that secret weddings are becoming more common,” says Landis Bejar, the founder of a therapy practice, which specialises in helping brides and grooms manage wedding stress. “People are looking for ways to get out of the spotlight and avoid the pomp and circumstance of weddings. ___(4)___. They just want to get to the part where they are married.”

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12. Q12.CAT 2022

    There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide in which blank (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.

    Sentence: This was years in the making but fast-tracked during the pandemic, when "people started being more mindful about their food", he explained.

    Paragraph: For millennia, ghee has been a venerated staple of the subcontinental diet, but it fell out of favour a few decades ago when saturated fats were largely considered to be unhealthy. ___(1)___ But more recently, as the thinking around saturated fats is shifting globally, Indians are finding their own way back to this ingredient that is so integral to their cuisine. ___(2)___ For Karmakar, a renewed interest in ghee is emblematic of a return-to-basics movement in India. ___(3)___ This movement is also part of an overall trend towards "slow food". In keeping with the movement's philosophy, ghee can be produced locally (even at home) and has inextricable cultural ties. ___(4)___ At a basic level, ghee is a type of clarified butter believed to have originated in India as a way to preserve butter from going rancid in the hot climate.

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CAT Para Completion previous year questions with solutions — AthenaPrep