If x and y are real numbers such that x^{2}+(x-2y-1)^{2}=-4y(x+y), then the value x-2y is · CAT (IIM Common Admission Test)

Progressions & Series

Quantitative Ability · PYQ 2024

The sum of the infinite series \frac{1}{5}\left(\frac{1}{5}-\frac{1}{7}\right)+\left(\frac{1}{5}\right)^{2}\left(\left(\frac{1}{5}\right)^{2}-\left(\frac{1}{7}\right)^{2}\right)+\left(\frac{1}{5}\right)^{3}\left(\left(\frac{1}{5}\right)^{3}-\left(\frac{1}{7}\right)^{3}\right)+\cdots is equal to

RC — Author's Tone, Attitude & Position

Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension · PYQ 2020

Passage

[There is] a curious new reality: Human contact is becoming a luxury good. As more screens appear in the lives of the poor, screens are disappearing from the lives of the rich. The richer you are, the more you spend to be off-screen. . . .

The joy — at least at first — of the internet revolution was its democratic nature. Facebook is the same Facebook whether you are rich or poor. Gmail is the same Gmail. And it’s all free. There is something mass market and unappealing about that. And as studies show that time on these advertisement-support platforms is unhealthy, it all starts to seem déclassé, like drinking soda or smoking cigarettes, which wealthy people do less than poor people. The wealthy can afford to opt out of having their data and their attention sold as a product. The poor and middle class don’t have the same kind of resources to make that happen.

Screen exposure starts young. And children who spent more than two hours a day looking at a screen got lower scores on thinking and language tests, according to early results of a landmark study on brain development of more than 11,000 children that the National Institutes of Health is supporting. Most disturbingly, the study is finding that the brains of children who spend a lot of time on screens are different. For some kids, there is premature thinning of their cerebral cortex. In adults, one study found an association between screen time and depression. . . .

Tech companies worked hard to get public schools to buy into programs that required schools to have one laptop per student, arguing that it would better prepare children for their screen- based future. But this idea isn’t how the people who actually build the screen-based future raise their own children. In Silicon Valley, time on screens is increasingly seen as unhealthy. Here, the popular elementary school is the local Waldorf School, which promises a back-to-nature, nearly screen-free education. So as wealthy kids are growing up with less screen time, poor kids are growing up with more. How comfortable someone is with human engagement could become a new class marker.

Human contact is, of course, not exactly like organic food . . . . But with screen time, there has been a concerted effort on the part of Silicon Valley behemoths to confuse the public. The poor and the middle class are told that screens are good and important for them and their children. There are fleets of psychologists and neuroscientists on staff at big tech companies working to hook eyes and minds to the screen as fast as possible and for as long as possible. And so human contact is rare. . . .

There is a small movement to pass a “right to disconnect” bill, which would allow workers to turn their phones off, but for now a worker can be punished for going oﬄine and not being available. There is also the reality that in our culture of increasing isolation, in which so many of the traditional gathering places and social structures have disappeared, screens are filling a crucial void.

The author is least likely to agree with the view that the increase in screen-time is fuelled by the fact that:

Mensuration (2D & 3D)

Quantitative Ability · PYQ 2020

The sum of the perimeters of an equilateral triangle and a rectangle is 90 cm. The area, T, of the triangle and the area, R, of the rectangle, both in sq cm, satisfy the relationship R=T^{2}. If the sides of the rectangle are in the ratio 1:3, then the length, in cm, of the longer side of the rectangle is

RC — Inference & Implication

Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension · PYQ 2019

Passage

"Free of the taint of manufacture" – that phrase, in particular, is heavily loaded with the ideology of what the Victorian socialist William Morris called the "anti-scrape", or an anti-capitalist conservationism (not conservatism) that solaced itself with the vision of a pre-industrial golden age. In Britain, folk may often appear a cosy, fossilised form, but when you look more closely, the idea of folk – who has the right to sing it, dance it, invoke it, collect it, belong to it or appropriate it for political or cultural ends – has always been contested territory. . . .

In our own time, though, the word "folk" . . . has achieved the rare distinction of occupying fashionable and unfashionable status simultaneously. Just as the effusive floral prints of the radical William Morris now cover genteel sofas, so the revolutionary intentions of many folk historians and revivalists have led to music that is commonly regarded as parochial and conservative. And yet – as newspaper columns periodically rejoice – folk is hip again, influencing artists, clothing and furniture designers, celebrated at music festivals, awards ceremonies and on TV, reissued on countless record labels. Folk is a sonic "shabby chic", containing elements of the uncanny and eerie, as well as an antique veneer, a whiff of Britain's heathen dark ages. The very obscurity and anonymity of folk music's origins open up space for rampant imaginative fancies. . . .

[Cecil Sharp, who wrote about this subject, believed that] folk songs existed in constant transformation, a living example of an art form in a perpetual state of renewal. "One man sings a song, and then others sing it after him, changing what they do not like" is the most concise summary of his conclusions on its origins. He compared each rendition of a ballad to an acorn falling from an oak tree; every subsequent iteration sows the song anew. But there is tension in newness. In the late 1960s, purists were suspicious of folk songs recast in rock idioms. Electrification, however, comes in many forms. For the early-20th-century composers such as Vaughan Williams and Holst, there were thunderbolts of inspiration from oriental mysticism, angular modernism and the body blow of the first world war, as well as input from the rediscovered folk tradition itself.

For the second wave of folk revivalists, such as Ewan MacColl and AL Lloyd, starting in the 40s, the vital spark was communism's dream of a post-revolutionary New Jerusalem. For their younger successors in the 60s, who thronged the folk clubs set up by the old guard, the lyrical freedom of Dylan and the unchained melodies of psychedelia created the conditions for folk-rock's own golden age, a brief Indian summer that lasted from about 1969 to 1971. . . . Four decades on, even that progressive period has become just one more era ripe for fashionable emulation and pastiche. The idea of a folk tradition being exclusively confined to oral transmission has become a much looser, less severely guarded concept. Recorded music and television, for today's metropolitan generation, are where the equivalent of folk memories are seeded. . . .

Which of the following statements about folk revivalism of the 1940s and 1960s cannot be inferred from the passage?

Mensuration (2D & 3D)

Quantitative Ability · PYQ 2024

The surface area of a closed rectangular box, which is inscribed in a sphere, is 846 sq cm, and the sum of the lengths of all its edges is 144 cm. The volume, in cubic cm, of the sphere is

VA — Para-Jumbles (Sentence Arrangement)

Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension · PYQ 2021

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer:

1.Restitution of artefacts to original cultures could faces legal obstacles, as many Western museums are legally prohibited from disposing off their collections.

2.This is in response to countries like Nigeria, which are pressurising European museums to return their precious artefacts looted by colonisers in the past.

3.Museums in Europe today are struggling to come to terms with their colonial legacy, some taking steps to return artefacts but not wanting to lose their prized collections.

4.Legal hurdles notwithstanding, politicians and institutions in France and Germany would now like to defuse the colonial time bombs, and are now backing the return of part of their holdings.

Answer this one in Coach

Logarithms, Exponents & Surds

Quantitative Ability · PYQ 2021

For a real number a, if \frac{\log_{15}a+\log_{32}a}{(\log_{15}a)(\log_{32}a)}=4, then a must lie in the range

Logic-based DI & Mathematical Reasoning

Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning · PYQ 2023

Case

The schematic diagram below shows 12 rectangular houses in a housing complex. House numbers are mentioned in the rectangles representing the houses. The houses are located in six columns – Column-A through Column-F, and two rows – Row-1 and Row-2. The houses are divided into two blocks - Block XX and Block YY. The diagram also shows two roads, one passing in front of the houses in Row-2 and another between the two blocks.

Diagram layout: Block XX = Columns A, B, C; Block YY = Columns D, E, F. A vertical ROAD runs between Column-C and Column-D (between the two blocks); a horizontal ROAD runs along the front of Row-2, below both blocks.

	Column-A	Column-B	Column-C	(ROAD)	Column-D	Column-E	Column-F
Row-1	A1	B1	C1	ROAD	D1	E1	F1
Row-2	A2	B2	C2	ROAD	D2	E2	F2

(ROAD runs along the bottom of Row-2 across both blocks.)

Some of the houses are occupied. The remaining ones are vacant and are the only ones available for sale.

The road adjacency value of a house is the number of its sides adjacent to a road. For example, the road adjacency values of C2, F2, and B1 are 2, 1, and 0, respectively. The neighbour count of a house is the number of sides of that house adjacent to occupied houses in the same block. For example, E1 and C1 can have the maximum possible neighbour counts of 3 and 2, respectively.

The base price of a vacant house is Rs. 10 lakhs if the house does not have a parking space, and Rs. 12 lakhs if it does. The quoted price (in lakhs of Rs.) of a vacant house is calculated as (base price) + 5 × (road adjacency value) + 3 × (neighbour count).

The following information is also known.

1.The maximum quoted price of a house in Block XX is Rs. 24 lakhs. The minimum quoted price of a house in block YY is Rs. 15 lakhs, and one such house is in Column-E.

2.Row-1 has two occupied houses, one in each block.

3.Both houses in Column-E are vacant. Each of Column-D and Column-F has at least one occupied house.

4.There is only one house with parking space in Block YY.

Which of the following options best describes the number of vacant houses in Row-2?

Time & Work, Pipes & Cisterns

Quantitative Ability · PYQ 2017

A person can complete a job in 120 days. He works alone on Day 1. On Day 2, he is joined by another person who also can complete the job in exactly 120 days. On Day 3, they are joined by another person of equal efficiency. Like this, everyday a new person with the same efficiency joins the work. How many days are required to complete the job?

LR — Scheduling & Timetables

Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning · PYQ 2017

Data

Healthy Bites is a fast food joint serving three items: burgers, fries and ice cream. It has two employees Anish and Bani who prepare the items ordered by the clients. Preparation time is 10 minutes for a burger and 2 minutes for an order of ice cream. An employee can prepare only one of these items at a time. The fries are prepared in an automatic fryer which can prepare up to 3 portions of fries at a time, and takes 5 minutes irrespective of the number of portions. The fryer does not need an employee to constantly attend to it, and we can ignore the time taken by an employee to start and stop the fryer; thus, an employee can be engaged in preparing other items while the frying is on. However fries cannot be prepared in anticipation of future orders.

Healthy Bites wishes to serve the orders as early as possible. The individual items in any order are served as and when ready; however, the order is considered to be completely served only when all the items of that order are served.

The table below gives the orders of three clients and the times at which they placed their orders:

Client no.	Time	Order
1	10:00	1 burger, 3 portions of fries, 1 order of ice cream
2	10:05	2 portions of fries, 1 order of ice cream
3	10:07	1 burger, 1 portion of fries

Assume that only one client's order can be processed at any given point of time. So, Anish or Bani cannot start preparing a new order while a previous order is being prepared.

At what time is the order placed by Client 3 completely served?

RC — Strengthen, Weaken & Application

Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension · PYQ 2022

Passage

The Chinese have two different concepts of a copy. Fangzhipin . . . are imitations where the difference from the original is obvious. These are small models or copies that can be purchased in a museum shop, for example. The second concept for a copy is fuzhipin . . . They are exact reproductions of the original, which, for the Chinese, are of equal value to the original. It has absolutely no negative connotations. The discrepancy with regard to the understanding of what a copy is has often led to misunderstandings and arguments between China and Western museums. The Chinese often send copies abroad instead of originals, in the firm belief that they are not essentially different from the originals. The rejection that then comes from the Western museums is perceived by the Chinese as an insult. . . .

The Far Eastern notion of identity is also very confusing to the Western observer. The Ise Grand Shrine [in Japan] is 1,300 years old for the millions of Japanese people who go there on pilgrimage every year. But in reality this temple complex is completely rebuilt from scratch every 20 years. . . .

The cathedral of Freiburg Minster in southwest Germany is covered in scaffolding almost all year round. The sandstone from which it is built is a very soft, porous material that does not withstand natural erosion by rain and wind. After a while, it crumbles. As a result, the cathedral is continually being examined for damage, and eroded stones are replaced. And in the cathedral's dedicated workshop, copies of the damaged sandstone figures are constantly being produced. Of course, attempts are made to preserve the stones from the Middle Ages for as long as possible. But at some point they, too, are removed and replaced with new stones.

Fundamentally, this is the same operation as with the Japanese shrine, except in this case the production of a replica takes place very slowly and over long periods of time. . . . In the field of art as well, the idea of an unassailable original developed historically in the Western world. Back in the 17th century [in the West], excavated artworks from antiquity were treated quite differently from today. They were not restored in a way that was faithful to the original. Instead, there was massive intervention in these works, changing their appearance. . . .

It is probably this intellectual position that explains why Asians have far fewer scruples about cloning than Europeans. The South Korean cloning researcher Hwang Woo-suk, who attracted worldwide attention with his cloning experiments in 2004, is a Buddhist. He found a great deal of support and followers among Buddhists, while Christians called for a ban on human cloning. . . . Hwang legitimised his cloning experiments with his religious affiliation: 'I am Buddhist, and I have no philosophical problem with cloning. And as you know, the basis of Buddhism is that life is recycled through reincarnation. In some ways, I think, therapeutic cloning restarts the circle of life.'

Based on the passage, which one of the following copies would a Chinese museum be unlikely to consider as having less value than the original?

Logic-based DI & Mathematical Reasoning

Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning · PYQ 2022

Case

Adhara, Bithi, Chhaya, Dhanavi, Esther, and Fathima are the interviewers in a process that awards funding for new initiatives. Every interviewer individually interviews each of the candidates individually and awards a token only if she recommends funding. A token has a face value of 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, or 13. Each interviewer awards tokens of a single face value only.

Once all six interviews are over for a candidate, the candidate receives a funding that is Rs.1000 times the product of the face values of all the tokens. For example, if a candidate has tokens with face values 2, 5, and 7, then they get a funding of Rs.1000 × (2 × 5 × 7) = Rs.70,000.

Pragnyaa, Qahira, Rasheeda, Smera, and Tantra were five candidates who received funding. The funds they received, in descending order, were Rs.390,000, Rs.210,000, Rs.165,000, Rs.77,000, and Rs.66,000.

The following additional facts are known:

1.Fathima awarded tokens to everyone except Qahira, while Adhara awarded tokens to no one except Pragnyaa.

2.Rashida received the highest number of tokens that anyone received, but she did not receive one from Esther.

3.Bithi awarded a token to Smera but not to Qahira, while Dhanavi awarded a token to Qahira but not to Smera.

How many tokens did Chhaya award?