CAT 2025 Slot 3 · VARC · RC passage 1: The Tribal Imagination: Memory, Space and Time

Read the stem carefully: three options weaken the passage, one does not. So the task is to find the option that leaves the passage's claims intact – or supports them.

List what the passage claims about the hallucinatory imagination: boundaries between art and non-art are almost invisible, a tribal epic can begin from a trivial everyday event, there is no deliberate attempt to follow a sequence, and planes of existence fuse so that oceans fly as birds and mountains swim as fish.

Option 2 contradicts the art-and-non-art claim. If tribal art excluded mundane everyday reality, the boundary would be sharp, not invisible, and an epic could not begin from a trivial daily event. This weakens the passage.

Option 3 contradicts the non-sequential claim directly. A clear chronological beginning, middle and end is the opposite of episodes taking 'the apparently chaotic shapes of dreams'. This weakens the passage.

Option 4 contradicts the fusion claim. Depicting the natural world by rational scientific knowledge would rule out mountains swimming as fish. This weakens the passage.

Option 1 does not weaken anything. Paragraph 3 states that tribals worship ancestor figures 'aspiring to enter a trance in which they can converse with the dead'. Shamanic rituals of that kind appearing in their stories sits comfortably with the passage – if anything it supports the trance-like, dreamlike character being described.

Shortcut: in a weaken-EXCEPT question, match each option against a specific claim in the text. Three options here map onto three separate claims and reverse them; the fourth maps onto a detail the passage itself reports.

Hence, the answer is option 1.

Paragraph 2 draws the distinction explicitly. Consciousness meets two material realities, space and time. 'The image-making faculty is a genetic gift to the human mind – this power of imagination helps us understand the space that envelops us. With regard to time, we make connections with the help of memory'.

So imagination is paired with space and memory with time. Option 2 states exactly that pairing and is the answer.

Option 1 is a true statement about tribal artists – they work more on racial and sensory memory than on cultivated imagination – but it describes a preference, not the difference between the two faculties.

Option 3 generalises from that same sentence. Saying tribal artists rely on a cultivated imagination less than on memory does not mean imagination as such must be cultivated or that memory as such is racial and sensory.

Option 4 pairs each faculty with a phrase lifted from the paragraph, but the phrases are not contrastive. 'Genetic gift' and 'central to human consciousness' do not distinguish the two – both faculties are part of consciousness.

Shortcut: when a passage defines two terms side by side, the answer will keep the pairing the text sets up. Scan the options for the one with two matched halves – here imagination with space, memory with time.

Hence, the answer is option 2.

The question asks for a reason, so look for the 'thus' or 'because' in the passage. Paragraph 3 supplies the chain: tribal communities realised that domination over territorial space was not their lot, so 'they seem to have turned almost obsessively to gaining domination over time. This urge is substantiated in their ritual of conversing with their dead ancestors'.

Conversing with the dead is therefore the expression of the drive to dominate time. Option 3 says that and is the answer.

Option 1 is true of tribals – sharp memory has helped them build a complex knowledge system – but that is a consequence mentioned at the end of the paragraph, not the reason for the ritual.

Option 2 is also true and is stated in the passage, but it describes how the worship is carried out, not why. A description of the medium is not a reason.

Option 4 reverses the passage. Territorial domination is precisely what tribal communities are said to have given up on.

Shortcut: in a 'why' question, three distractors are usually drawn from the same paragraph as the answer – one is a consequence, one is a method, one is a reversal. Keep only the option that completes the causal sentence.

Hence, the answer is option 3.

The phenomenon in question comes from paragraph 1: 'stars, seas, mountains, trees, men and animals can be angry, sad or happy'. The reason given there is that the tribal imagination 'admits fusion between various planes of existence and levels of time', unrestricted by spatial order or temporal sequence, and admits 'the principle of association between emotion and the narrative motif'.

Fusion between planes of existence is exactly what 'existential fluidity' names. Option 4 is the answer.

Option 1 is a value judgement the passage never makes. It contrasts the tribal imagination with the secular self-conscious mode, but it does not rank them.

Option 2 is explicitly denied. The passage says 'This is not to say that tribal creations have no conventions or rules'.

Option 3 belongs to the other side of the contrast. A self-conscious form is what imaginative transactions take once a society accepts a secular mode of creativity – the opposite of the tribal mode under discussion.

Shortcut: for a 'because' question, find the sentence in which the phenomenon is stated and read the sentence that explains it. Then choose the option that paraphrases that explanation, even in unfamiliar vocabulary; the three distractors here are each contradicted by a line of the first paragraph.

Hence, the answer is option 4.