NinetynineCAT 2025 Slot 2 VARC Q1 Sentence Placement
Question 1 of the Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) section, CAT 2025 Slot 2, with CAT's official answer and a worked solution.
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) ____.
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) ____.
- AOption 3
- BOption 4
- COption 1
- DOption 2
Answer: (A) Option 3 Sentence Placement MCQ
Solution
- The sentence speaks of \"thinkers at the time\" writing about \"judgments of taste\", so it must come after a specific period has been named.
- The sentence before slot 3 gives that period: over the 17th and early 18th centuries, taste became a central category for aesthetic and ethical thinking.
- Slot 3 then qualifies this new sense of taste against judgment, and the paragraph moves on to tracing that history in Spanish, French and British theory. Slots 1 and 2 come before any period is named. So option 3.
Shortcut. Pointer phrases like \"at the time\" need their time reference in the previous sentence.