CAT 2025 Slot 2 · VARC · Question 8

CAT 2025 Slot 2 previous year question on Sentence Completion and Insertion, with the answer and a step-by-step solution.

Sentence Completion and InsertionVerbal AbilityMultiple choiceMedium

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: The region's Western customers found it hard to believe that Dhaka muslin could possibly have been made by human hands – there were rumour that it was woven by mermaids, fairies and even ghosts.

Paragraph: Once upon the silty banks of the Meghna River, a miracle was spun — a fabric so light it was called "baft-hawa", or woven air. This was Dhaka Muslin — the world's most coveted cloth. ____(1)____. Handspun from a rare cotton called Phuti Karpas, found nowhere else on Earth, and woven with a 16-step sacred ritual — beginning with cleaning the cotton using the teeth of a river catfish! ____(2)____. Every spring, the maple-like leaves pushed up through the grey, silty soil to produce a single daffodil-yellow flower twice a year, which gave way to a snowy floret of cotton fibres. ____(3)____. Spun at dawn on boats by sharp-eyed young women, its threads were so fine the elderly could barely see them. Motifs of wildflowers, river breeze, and soul were etched into each piece — some so light, a 91-metre bolt could pass through a ring, or a 60' length fit inside a snuffbox. It draped Greek goddesses, Roman nobles, Mughal emperors, and European aristocrats. Marie Antoinette, Empress Joséphine — even Jane Austen adored its floating grace. ____(4)____.

  1. A

    Option 3

  2. B

    Option 4

  3. C

    Option 1

  4. D

    Option 2

Pick an option, then check.
Answer & solution

Answer: Option C

The missing sentence says Western customers could not believe Dhaka muslin was made by human hands, and rumoured it was woven by mermaids, fairies and ghosts. It is a statement of the cloth's near-magical reputation – the kind of line that belongs with an introduction, not in the middle of a technical account.

Blank 1 comes right after 'Once upon the silty banks of the Meghna River, a miracle was spun' and 'the world's most coveted cloth'. The missing sentence extends that framing exactly: a miracle, so coveted that people thought it was not made by humans at all. The word 'region's' in the missing sentence also picks up the Meghna River just named.

Blank 2 falls between the sentence on handspinning with the catfish-teeth ritual and the sentence about the cotton plant's flowering. Those two are both about how the cloth is made; splitting them with a line about rumours breaks the account.

Blank 3 is inside the same technical run, before the spinning at dawn on boats. Same objection.

Blank 4 is the final slot. The paragraph has by then reached Marie Antoinette and Jane Austen – the cloth's admirers. A sentence introducing the cloth's mythic reputation cannot serve as the conclusion.

Shortcut: identify the stretch of the paragraph that forms an unbroken run on one subject – here the making of the cloth – and rule out every blank inside it. That eliminates blanks 2 and 3 at once, leaving a choice between opening and closing position, which the missing sentence's introductory tone settles.

The answer is 'Option 1', which is listed third. Hence, the answer is option 3.

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