Para Summary: every CAT question since 2020

Correct option: Globalisation exposes artists to many cultures; respectful inspiration builds understanding, careless borrowing commodifies and stereotypes, reinforcing power imbalances.

A keeps all three parts: the global setting, the line between inspiration and appropriation, and the wider social harm. The closest option drops the global context and the power-imbalance point.

Correct option: With age, clearance of damaged cells weakens, so zombie cells pile up and their inflammatory output drives chronic disease.

C keeps the whole chain: weaker clearance, accumulation, inflammation, disease. The closest option wrongly says the cells resist removal and drops the inflammation and disease links.

Correct option: It is ironic that the creator of an anti-monopoly game lost its credit and royalties to a man who sold a version for a small sum.

A keeps the irony, the creator's lost credit and the meagre payment. The closest option centres the company's motives and leaves out both the man who sold it and the anti-monopoly message.

Correct option: Human activity has been as likely to boost biodiversity as to reduce it, creating varied habitats, contrary to the view that nature thrives only without people.

D keeps both the historical record and the rejection of the human-free ideal. The closest option narrows the claim to one period and one landscape type.

Correct option: Mindful shoppers are leaving uniform, wasteful fast fashion for custom-fit clothing at sensible prices.

B covers all three shifts: away from sameness, away from waste, toward custom fit. The closest option mentions fit and price but drops sameness and waste.

Correct option: Remembering happens in the present and needs no real past, so knowledge of the past is logically independent of the past.

D states the central claim and its reason. The closest option only says a past isn't required, without the conclusion about logical independence.

Correct option: Animals feel emotions like ours because we share the brain structures behind emotion.

B keeps the passage's key reason: a common neural basis. The closest option states the emotional overlap but drops the brain-structure explanation.

Correct option: Because technology has changed what users expect, cartographers must now examine how usable their maps are.

A captures the shift from making maps to testing their usability. The closest option adds "a series of experiments", which the passage never mentions.

Correct option: Some codes are so widespread that they seem natural, hiding the fact that they are constructed.

C keeps both halves: codes seeming natural, and that concealing their coding. The closest option overstates by making the concealment deliberate.

Correct option: States monitor communication networks and deploy online "cyber troops" to shape opinion, typically before any military action.

D includes both monitoring and online manipulation. The closest option says information warfare runs alongside military action, while the passage says it comes first.

Correct option: Despite clashing research cultures, physicists' collaborations with other fields have produced important findings.

A keeps both the friction and the productive outcome. The closest option credits data sets and models for the success, when the passage mentions them mainly as points of friction.

Correct option: Creativity in comedy needs freedom, and fear of giving offence chokes originality.

D captures both the need for freedom and the chilling effect of fear. The closest option limits the point to what comedians may say and overstates it as the death of the art.

Correct option: Existing regulation is outdated, and it is doubtful that any flexible framework can anticipate every turn of so fast-moving a field.

C keeps both the outdated framework and the closing doubt. The closest option asserts that a new framework is urgently needed, a claim the passage doesn't make, and drops its scepticism.

Correct option: Her traditional roles and vintage look throw the performed, superficial side of modern life into relief and unsettle current norms.

C makes her lifestyle itself the challenge, without assigning her an intent. The closest option treats her clothing as the mechanism, while the passage centres on her literal pursuit of an ideal.

Correct option: Lyric poetry's personal focus seems at odds with Marxism, yet it can be read as resistance to an oppressive culture.

C captures both the tension and its resolution (poetry as implicitly critical and utopian). The closest option sees the poetry as merely utopian and drops its critical edge.

Correct option: Sixteenth-century navigation advances let Europeans settle and dominate distant lands, defining modern colonialism.

C keeps the passage's causal claim. The closest option mentions dispossession and global change but drops navigation-driven settlement and control.

Correct option: Spreading misinformation for power is ancient, but technology and social networks have amplified it to an unprecedented scale.

C keeps both the historical continuity and the modern technological driver. The closest option notes the long history but drops today's unprecedented, tech-fuelled scale.

Correct option: People generate alternatives to the past for many purposes, and the ability develops through childhood.

C covers both the range of functions and the developmental angle. The closest option gets the variety of purposes but drops the development point.

Correct option: Heatwaves are a serious, growing threat, and the media have a key role in alerting people.

C has both the threat and the media's role. The closest option claims news coverage must improve, a criticism the passage never makes.

Correct option: The pressure to look flawless is old, but it has shifted from blending in to standing out.

B captures the passage's central contrast between conformist perfection and today's demand for distinctiveness. The closest option lists supporting details (media ideals) but misses that historical shift.

Correct option: With pests gone, the island's birds and plants are reviving together.

B keeps the cause (pest removal) and the shared recovery. The closest option describes a generic positive change without the cause.

Correct option: Petitioning has mattered to democracy because it supplements periodic elections with continuous engagement with government.

C covers what petitioning does and how it complements elections. The closest option calls petitioning an "ideal" form of representative democracy, which the passage never claims.

Correct option: The line between living and non-living is an illusion of our limited perception and dissolves at the quantum level.

D captures the central claim and its quantum evidence. The closest option fixes on a minor detail (stones responding to stimuli) and misses the argument about illusion.

Correct option: The old story of a weak Ethiopia seeking European help rests on selective sources; new work shows an outward-looking kingdom sending its own missions.

C covers both the flawed old view and the corrected picture. The closest option repeats the old narrative without the correction.

Correct option: Artworks are not timeless; they decay from within, and conservation can only slow it.

D matches the central claim. The closest option treats the works as timeless treasures museums can guard, which the passage denies.

Correct option: Easy access to personal data has reopened old debates about freedom and privacy.

B captures the central concern. The closest option narrows the passage to artificial intelligence, which it never mentions.

Correct option: Some ancient cities had egalitarian urban life with little hierarchy, so cities don't require rulers.

D keeps "some" and the broader point. The closest option overgeneralises to all ancient cities.

Correct option: Taking a community's designs without consent, credit or payment is appropriation.

C keeps both the ease of copying via social media and the lack of credit or compensation. The closest option narrows to embroidery and calls all copying theft.

Correct option: Every joke has a target, and in a free society one should be able to joke about anyone, which cancel culture resists.

A keeps both ideas. The closest option adds a claim about whom comedians should target and drops the free-speech argument.

Correct option: Alphabetical ordering took centuries to catch on because of religious deference and because its usefulness wasn't yet seen.

B keeps both the delay and its causes. The closest option describes a formal ban, where the passage describes only reluctance.

Correct option: Mismatched lip movements can change what we hear, showing that sight and sound fuse in perception.

A names the illusion and what it shows. The closest option mentions replication and integration but drops the mismatch-driven illusion.

Correct option: Once suppliers of cheap labour, emerging economies now innovate in business models, climb the value chain and compete abroad.

A captures both the shift and the outward expansion. The closest option adds a claim about competing with former suppliers that the passage doesn't make.

Correct option: Their aloofness is partly justified, but they'd be more effective working closely with local communities.

D keeps both the partial justification and the remedy. The closest option blames lavish lifestyles outright and omits the solution.

Correct option: Capitalists use the anxieties and organisation of the unemployed to steer politics toward their own interests.

A captures the exploitative alliance. The closest option presents the two groups as equal partners with a shared goal.

Correct option: Creativity is so prized that the concept has lost its meaning, and the obsession hinders real creativity.

D keeps both the inflated value and its harmful effect. The closest option stops at "impossible to define" and overstates it.

Correct option: Physicists share work before peer review and speed progress, while conservative biologists frown on it.

B keeps both the contrast between fields and the benefit. The closest option drops the comparison.

Correct option: Glorifying work has trapped people in meaningless jobs and busyness, but it has also brought prosperity and innovation.

D keeps both the critique and the benefits. The closest option keeps the benefits but waves the critique away.

Correct option: Most Brazilians feel better off, but the state still treats the poor unfairly through taxes and services.

C keeps both the sense of improvement and the continuing unfairness. The closest option adds a forecast of destabilisation that the passage doesn't make.

Correct option: Intuition is pattern-recognition producing fast bodily signals, drawing on a rich store of experience.

D keeps both the signals and the store of experience. The closest option says intuition may be unrelated to data, which contradicts the passage.

Correct option: Europe adapted to a multipolar world by reducing its internal political and economic diversity through a common currency and political union.

D keeps both the constant adaptation and how it was achieved. The closest option omits the means and links the union directly to rapid change.

Correct option: TV dramas have convinced people that forensic voice analysis is robust and foolproof.

The passage centres on the false expectations fiction creates (the "CSI effect"). The closest option questions the method's scientific basis, which the passage doesn't.

Correct option: Biologists dispute that intelligence is a single entity and question estimates of its heritability.

A covers both challenges. The closest option makes the same points vaguely and garbles the second.

Correct option: Intuition is fast but hard to explain; information-based decisions are slower but can be justified.

B states the contrast without ranking either. The closest option declares information-based decisions better and ignores intuition.

Correct option: Because places blend, measurable criteria for "urban" need richer combinations and human judgement.

A matches the call for several criteria interpreted with judgement. The closest option places that judgement on the objective method instead.

Correct option: Sovereign states arose from an exchange: insecure people gave up rights to a sovereign in return for protection.

D keeps both the exchange and the insecurity driving it. The closest option mentions only the surrender of rights.

Correct option: Two views coexist: language arose to share facts, or to build social bonds that aided survival.

C presents both hypotheses side by side. The closest option invents a shift in scholarly opinion from one view to the other.

Correct option: It grants representatives autonomy, grounded in a disinterestedness that is not indifference.

B covers both points without adding a relationship. The closest option says the autonomy is "manifested through" disinterestedness, which the passage doesn't state.

Correct option: Genetic theory's many models underpin evolutionary biology; metabolic theory could do the same for ecology.

B keeps both halves and the tentative tone. The closest option says metabolic theory must replicate that success, which overstates it.