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CAT 2025 Question Paper & Answers

The official CAT 2025 question papers, with the official answer key. Attempt as a real timed exam (with negative marking) or switch to practice mode for instant per-question answers and explanations.

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Official PYQ

CAT 2025 (Slot 1)

120 Mins 204 Marks
68Questions
204Max Marks

Sample questions from CAT 2025 (Slot 1)

1The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given 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. But man, woman or otherwise, there is no denying that the quality of our life and character will be significantly shaped by the way we handle our anger.
  2. Once the taboos have been broken, women usually experience letting their fists fly as intensely liberating.
  3. Though this might seem a stereotype, women—unlike men, who are frequently applauded for unbridled aggression—are often socialized to keep a lid on their ire.
  4. Many of them are so at odds with their aggressive feelings that, as a coach, I often have to stop them from pulling their punches and encourage them to extend their arms so their blows might actually reach their fleshy target.
Answer: 3421
2The 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: Historically, silver has been, and still is, an important element in the business of 'show' visible in private houses, churches, government and diplomacy. Paragraph: (1). Timothy Schroder put it succinctly in suggesting that electric light and eating in the kitchen eroded this need. As he explained to the author, 'Silver, when illuminated by flickering candlelight, comes alive and almost dances before the eyes, but when lit by electric light it becomes flat and dead.' (2). Domestic and economic changes may have worked against the market, but the London silver trade remained buoyant, thanks to the competition of collectors seeking grand display silver at the top end, and the buyers of 'collectables', like spoons and wine labels and 'novelties', at the bottom. (3). Another factor that came into play was the systematic collection building of certain American museums over the period. Boston, Huntington Art Gallery and Williamsburg, among others, were largely supplied by London dealers. (4).
  • A) Option 2
  • B) Option 4
  • C) Option 1
  • D) Option 3
Answer: D
3The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given 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. It can in fact be integrated into any function (education, medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the effect of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of knowledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the processes that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between 'surplus power' and 'surplus production'.
  2. It's a case of 'it's easy once you've thought of it' in the political sphere.
  3. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations.
  4. In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact.
Answer: 2143
4Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.
  1. Developments both technological and sociocultural have afforded us far greater freedom over death than we had in the past, and while we are still adapting ourselves to that freedom, we now appreciate the moral importance of this freedom.
  2. But I believe that a type of freedom we can call freedom over death — that is, a freedom in which we shape the timing and circumstances of how we die — should be central to this conversation.
  3. Legalising assisted dying is but a further step in realising this freedom over death.
  4. Many people endorse, through their opinions or their choices, our freedom over death encompassing a right to medical assistance in hastening our deaths.
  5. Freedom is a notoriously complex and contested philosophical notion, and I won't pretend to settle any of the big controversies it raises.
Answer: 4
5[RC passage — topic gist: a discussion of complex-systems concepts — nonstationarity, heavy-tailed ('fat-tailed') probability distributions, and cascading 'tail events' — illustrated with fish schooling behaviour, COVID−19COVID-19 contact-tracing dynamics, and stock-market crashes and aftershocks. Look it up: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22fat−tailed22fat-tailed%20distributions%20tail%20events%20fish%20schooling%20COVID%20contact%20tracing%20stock%20market%20crashes%22] Which one of the options below best summarises the passage?
  • A) The passage explains how noise can create order, then shows why complex systems with contagion are vulnerable to heavy-tailed cascades. It also explains why early shocks change rules through nonstationarity with a market illustration during the COVID−19COVID-19 disruption.
  • B) The passage explains how social outcomes generally follow normal distributions. So, extreme events are negligible, and policy should stabilise averages rather than learn from large shocks in fast-changing collective settings.
  • C) The passage explains how nonstationarity works in evolutionary biology and rejects applications in markets or public health because adaptation is exclusive to parasite-host systems and cannot arise in technology-mediated social dynamics.
  • D) The passage explains how speculative entrants always produce inefficiency after health shocks. Therefore, long-term investors invariably profit when new participants push prices away from fundamentals under pandemic conditions and comparable crises.
Answer: A

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Official PYQ

CAT 2025 (Slot 2)

120 Mins 204 Marks
68Questions
204Max Marks

Sample questions from CAT 2025 (Slot 2)

1The 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).
  • A) Option 2
  • B) Option 1
  • C) Option 4
  • D) Option 3
Answer: D
2[RC passage — topic gist: an account of how Mexican tetra cavefish lost their eyes through evolution while gaining compensating senses (taste, pressure detection), and researchers' (Misty Riddle's, Nicolas Rohner's) findings on their unusual fat metabolism, inflammation resistance, and carotenoid accumulation. Source: Knowable Magazine, "How the cavefish lost its eyes — again and again" (2025), https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living−world/2025/how−the−cavefish−lost−its−eyesorg/content/article/living-world/2025/how-the-cavefish-lost-its-eyes] Which one of the following results for the cross between surface fish (with eyes) and cavefish (without eyes) would invalidate Riddle's inference from the experiment?
  • A) Some eyeless offspring had white fat.
  • B) Some offspring with eyes had yellow fat.
  • C) Only eyeless offspring had yellow fat.
  • D) Some offspring with eyes had white fat.
Answer: B
3[RC passage — topic gist: an account of how Mexican tetra cavefish lost their eyes through evolution while gaining compensating senses (taste, pressure detection), and researchers' (Misty Riddle's, Nicolas Rohner's) findings on their unusual fat metabolism, inflammation resistance, and carotenoid accumulation. Source: Knowable Magazine, "How the cavefish lost its eyes — again and again" (2025), https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living−world/2025/how−the−cavefish−lost−its−eyesorg/content/article/living-world/2025/how-the-cavefish-lost-its-eyes] All of the following statements from the passage describe adaptation in Mexican tetra cavefish EXCEPT:
  • A) “Since relatively little lives or grows in their caves, the fish are likely surviving on a meager diet of mostly bat feces and organic waste that washes in during the rainy season.”
  • B) “‘But when these cells get too big, they can burst, which is why we often see chronic inflammation in humans and other animals that have stored a lot of fat in their tissues.’”
  • C) “Even in their sparse cave conditions, wild cavefish can sometimes get very fat, says Riddle.”
  • D) “It’s easy to see why cavefish would be at a disadvantage if they were to maintain expensive tissues they aren’t using.”
Answer: B
4[RC passage — topic gist: an account of how Mexican tetra cavefish lost their eyes through evolution while gaining compensating senses (taste, pressure detection), and researchers' (Misty Riddle's, Nicolas Rohner's) findings on their unusual fat metabolism, inflammation resistance, and carotenoid accumulation. Source: Knowable Magazine, "How the cavefish lost its eyes — again and again" (2025), https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living−world/2025/how−the−cavefish−lost−its−eyesorg/content/article/living-world/2025/how-the-cavefish-lost-its-eyes] Which one of the following best explains why the “apparent inefficiency” is “unavoidable”?
  • A) The inefficiency resulting from eyelessness is compensated by enhancements like more tastebuds in Mexican tetra cavefish.
  • B) The lack of light in the caves kills the eye cells in the developing Mexican tetra cavefish embryo.
  • C) The caves have poor and inconsistent availability of food and nutrition for Mexican tetra cavefish.
  • D) Mexican tetra cavefish are similar to non-cave-dwelling variants in their early stages of development.
Answer: D
5[RC passage — topic gist: an account of how Mexican tetra cavefish lost their eyes through evolution while gaining compensating senses (taste, pressure detection), and researchers' (Misty Riddle's, Nicolas Rohner's) findings on their unusual fat metabolism, inflammation resistance, and carotenoid accumulation. Source: Knowable Magazine, "How the cavefish lost its eyes — again and again" (2025), https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living−world/2025/how−the−cavefish−lost−its−eyesorg/content/article/living-world/2025/how-the-cavefish-lost-its-eyes] On the basis of the information in the passage, what is the most likely function of carotenoids in Mexican tetra cavefish?
  • A) To render bright yellow colour to the cavefish.
  • B) To act as a substitute for eyes.
  • C) To control inflammation from the bursting of fat cells.
  • D) To help the fat cells store nutrients.
Answer: C

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Official PYQ

CAT 2025 (Slot 3)

120 Mins 204 Marks
68Questions
204Max Marks

Sample questions from CAT 2025 (Slot 3)

1The passage given below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the occurrences which are CALLED knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even if no past had existed.
  • A) That which we call ‘knowledge of the past’ is logically independent of the past, since the act of remembering which forms memory-beliefs happens in the present, and does not need to be based in real past occurrences, or even need a past at all.
  • B) When we discuss the concept of memory-beliefs, we must understand that it is not logically impossible for the event remembered to have never happened at all; it could just be a figment of our imagination.
  • C) When investigating memory beliefs, we must keep in mind that an actual past event is not a prerequisite for a memory-belief to exist, and that what we know of the past could theoretically not need a past at all.
  • D) Memory-beliefs depend wholly on what is remembered in the present, and not on anything else; just as it is not logically impossible that the world came into being five minutes ago, and that everyone now just remembers a wholly imaginary past for it.
Answer: A
2Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.
  1. The profound emotional impact of music has inspired ongoing research into its relationship with emotions.
  2. Music is a universal phenomenon that utilizes a myriad brain resources.
  3. This inherent connection to musical expression is deeply intertwined with human identity and experience.
  4. The proclivity to create and appreciate music is ubiquitous among humans, permeating daily life across diverse societies.
  5. Engaging with music is among the most cognitively demanding tasks a human can undergo, and it is identified across cultures.
Answer: 1
3[RC passage — topic gist: an argument that tribal and indigenous artistic imagination is fundamentally different from the 'secular,' self-conscious creativity of post-Enlightenment art — being dreamlike, associative and unbound by spatial or temporal sequence — and that this 'hallucinatory' quality stems from tribal communities historically prioritizing mastery over time (memory, ancestor-worship) rather than territorial space. Look it up: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tribal%20indigenous%20artistic%20imagination%20secular%20self−conscious20self-conscious%20creativity%20post−Enlightenment20post-Enlightenment%20art%20dreamlike%20associative%22] All of the following, if true, would weaken the passage's claims about the hallucinatory tribal imagination EXCEPT that:
  • A) tribal stories depict the natural world in accordance with rational scientific knowledge.
  • B) tribal narratives exhibit a chronological beginning, middle, and end.
  • C) shamanic rituals involving conversing with the dead often feature in tribal stories.
  • D) tribal art excludes the depiction of the mundane reality of everyday life and objects.
Answer: C
4[RC passage — topic gist: an argument that tribal and indigenous artistic imagination is fundamentally different from the 'secular,' self-conscious creativity of post-Enlightenment art — being dreamlike, associative and unbound by spatial or temporal sequence — and that this 'hallucinatory' quality stems from tribal communities historically prioritizing mastery over time (memory, ancestor-worship) rather than territorial space. Look it up: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tribal%20indigenous%20artistic%20imagination%20secular%20self−conscious20self-conscious%20creativity%20post−Enlightenment20post-Enlightenment%20art%20dreamlike%20associative%22] On the basis of the passage, which one of the following explains the main difference between imagination and memory?
  • A) Imagination needs to be cultivated whereas memory is more intuitive because it is racial and sensory.
  • B) Imagination helps humans make sense of space while memory helps them understand time.
  • C) Tribal groups value memory over imagination when it comes to creating art and literature.
  • D) Imagination is a genetic gift to humans whereas memory is central to human consciousness.
Answer: B
5[RC passage — topic gist: an argument that tribal and indigenous artistic imagination is fundamentally different from the 'secular,' self-conscious creativity of post-Enlightenment art — being dreamlike, associative and unbound by spatial or temporal sequence — and that this 'hallucinatory' quality stems from tribal communities historically prioritizing mastery over time (memory, ancestor-worship) rather than territorial space. Look it up: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tribal%20indigenous%20artistic%20imagination%20secular%20self−conscious20self-conscious%20creativity%20post−Enlightenment20post-Enlightenment%20art%20dreamlike%20associative%22] Non-human living forms exhibit human emotions in tribal narratives because tribal narratives:
  • A) are rudimentary and underdeveloped.
  • B) have a self-conscious form.
  • C) accommodate existential fluidity.
  • D) abandon all rules and regulations.
Answer: C

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CAT 2025 Previous Year Question Paper with Answers (PYQ) | ClassScribe