IIM Indore is conducting CAT 2026 on 29 November. It has set CAT three times before, in 2013, 2014 and 2020. We studied every reading comprehension passage from those papers and reverse-engineered their pattern into 40 original passages, each with four CAT-style questions and full explanations.
The author holds a position and defends it. If you cannot state that position in one sentence, the questions will beat you.
A passage on Tang dynasty currency is really about power; one on grammar is really about social coordination. Questions test the argument under the topic.
IIM Indore has set at least one philosophy or political-philosophy passage in each CAT it conducted. CAT 2020 had two: anarchism, and Hobbes against Rousseau.
Distractors use real ideas from the passage but stretch their scope, reverse the author’s stance or answer a different question.
Most questions ask what the author would agree with, what is implied, or what weakens the argument, not what the passage literally says.
We took every RC passage IIM Indore set in 2013, 2014 and 2020 and broke each one down: its length, its subject, the shape of its argument, the type of each question and how each wrong option was built to trap a careful reader.
Every passage below is an original essay written to that specification: an argument, not a summary; a topic that carries a larger idea; and four questions in the CAT mix of main idea, inference, author’s stance and argument structure, with explanations for every option. They are not leaked or official questions. They are the closest practice to the style IIM Indore has shown it sets.
On Earth Day in 1990, New York shut a major street and waited for chaos. The chaos never came, and a 1968 mathematical result may explain why, or may not.
Franz Kafka asked his closest friend to burn everything he had left unpublished. The friend refused, and the world gained a canon whose existence rests on disobedience.
A radio play about Martians is remembered as the night America panicked. The evidence for the panic is thinner than the legend, and the first people to spread it may have been the ones who gained from it.
A newspaper once told New York that dozens of neighbours watched a murder and did nothing. The story built a famous theory, and then the story itself began to fall apart.
Handwashing cut deaths in a Viennese maternity ward within months, and the physician who proved it was ignored. The refusal looks like arrogance in hindsight, yet it came from the same caution that protects science from error.
In 1971 a Stanford basement became a prison, and the world learned that ordinary people turn cruel when given power. The archive suggests that somebody told the guards what the experiment wanted to see.
A cancer machine killed patients in the 1980s although every part did what it was built to do. The case shows how responsibility can vanish when a safeguard moves from metal into code.
A bowl mended with gold looks like a lesson in embracing flaws. The famous story behind it is thin, and the lesson may have arrived long after the craft.
A famous film showed lemmings marching to their deaths in 1958. The scene was staged, and the myth it fed says more about the audience than about the animal.
In 1990 a magazine columnist gave a correct answer to a game show puzzle and was buried in angry letters from people with doctorates. The mistake that followed reached the greatest mathematicians too.
A popular story says Victorian doctors invented the vibrator to treat hysterical women. The tale has been repeated in films, plays and classrooms, and its own evidence is far thinner than its fame.
In 1973 a Stanford psychologist reported that psychiatrists could not tell healthy people from the mentally ill. Half a century later, the study itself is proving hard to tell from fiction.
Islanders in Vanuatu built airstrips and waited for planes that never came, and the world learned to laugh at them. The joke may reveal more about the laughers than about the waiting.
North Korea did not ban mirrors. It did something more precise. It ensured that the only reflection available to its citizens was the one the state had prepared for them.
Daedalus built the wings, warned his son, watched him fall, and flew safely to Sicily. He succeeded at everything Icarus failed at. The myth does not remember him.
Gunter Schabowski had not been briefed. The decision he announced had not been implemented. The gates he declared open were still closed. Within hours, the Berlin Wall had ceased to exist.
The evidence against Lizzie Borden was strong. The jury acquitted her in ninety minutes. What happened in that room had very little to do with the evidence.
The story of Einstein failing his exams has survived a century of correction. The reason it survives tells you more about human psychology than it does about Einstein.
Hiroo Onoda fought in the Philippine jungle until 1974, twenty-nine years after Japan surrendered. He was not deluded. He was doing exactly what a loyal soldier should do.
Desmond Morris had a simple answer. Modern biology has a more complicated one. What changed between 1967 and now reveals as much about science as it does about human anatomy.
Every civilisation in history has built monuments. Jeffrey Greenberg spent decades asking why. His answer changed how psychology thinks about culture, death, and what it means to be human.
Ganesha removes obstacles. Ganesha places them. The same deity, the same tradition, the same prayer. This is not a contradiction. It may be the most honest theology ever written about the nature of difficulty.
There is no Hindi word for independence. My mother told me this once, without ceremony. It took years to understand what she meant.
A fungal disease is erasing Europe's most familiar tree. What ash dieback reveals about the limits of knowing and caring about the natural world.
47 leopards live inside Sanjay Gandhi National Park, entirely surrounded by Mumbai. They have killed more than thirty people since 2002. Neither the city nor the leopards are going anywhere.
Most animals mate seasonally. Humans do not. The question is not why humans have more sex. It is what human sexuality has become, and why it looks less like animal mating and more like language.
The Manifesto was written in six weeks by two men in their twenties. It inspired revolutions on four continents. The question is not whether its argument is correct. It is why the argument works so well.
Raskolnikov's guilt in Crime and Punishment is not about fear of punishment. Dostoevsky described the phenomenology of guilt more accurately than clinical psychology did for another century.
Holmes notices everything Watson misses. The passage argues this is not because he observes more. It is because he has a better theory of what is worth observing.
The Inuit do not have fifty words for snow. But the story refuses to die because it points toward something real. Does the language we speak shape how we think?
Dark matter has never been directly observed. We are nonetheless highly confident it exists. The gap between these two facts reveals something important about how science actually works.
Most arguments do not change minds. They change voiced positions. Genuine belief revision is neurologically different, phenomenologically distinct and far rarer than it appears.
The Dracula Parrot eats almost nothing but figs from a single genus of tree. Its beauty is the product of extreme specialisation. So is its vulnerability.
Kafka is not an allegorist. He is a describer. His fiction works because it shows the shape of experiences you already knew and had not previously been able to see.
Losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good. Kahneman and Tversky called this loss aversion. Economics has not been the same since.
The printing press spread the Reformation. It did not cause it. The soil was prepared long before Gutenberg printed a single page.
Machiavelli was more than a ruthless strategist. His work reveals a deeper tension between political power, realism, civic virtue and republican freedom.
Whale songs reveal how isolation, imitation and migration can create, preserve and erase cultural differences within animal populations.
Skepticism is not the rejection of knowledge, but a discipline for deciding how much confidence our evidence deserves.
A tiny mark of punctuation opens into a larger question about how conventions create meaning, coordinate behaviour and quietly hold civilisation together.
Free for everyone, every question explained.
Slot 1 · P1Anarchism as a Radical Response to State PowerSlot 1 · P2How Tang Dynasty China Balanced Coins Grain and Cloth as MoneySlot 1 · P3Why Grammar Rules Matter Before You Can Break ThemSlot 1 · P4How Isolation and Immigration Shaped Elephant Seal DialectsSlot 2 · P1Understanding Visual Culture Through Images Practices and PerceptionSlot 2 · P2What Modern Piracy Owes to Poverty and EmpireSlot 2 · P3Understanding Aggression Through Biological and Social TheoriesSlot 2 · P4The Hidden Costs Behind the Renewable Energy BoomSlot 3 · P1How Travel Writing Constructs Identity, Empire and GenderSlot 3 · P2Reassessing Human Nature Between Hobbes and Rousseau's ExtremesSlot 3 · P3Why the Financial Crisis Demands Public Understanding of FinanceSlot 3 · P4How Screen Time Became a New Class DivideIIM Indore is the convening institute for CAT 2026, with the exam scheduled for 29 November 2026. Always confirm dates on the official CAT website, iimcat.ac.in.
Yes. IIM Indore conducted CAT in 2013, 2014 and 2020. Those papers are the best guide to the kind of reading comprehension it sets.
Argumentative passages of roughly 500 to 800 words across philosophy, science, economics, history and culture, with at least one philosophy passage per paper. Questions favour inference, author’s stance and argument structure, with close, plausible wrong options.
Abhishek Leela Pandey studied every IIM Indore RC passage from 2013, 2014 and 2020: their length, subjects, argument shapes, question types and the traps in their wrong options. Each passage on this page is an original essay written to that specification, with four CAT-style questions and full explanations. They are not leaked or official questions.
No one can know the actual paper. Based on IIM Indore’s record, expect argument-driven passages, at least one on philosophy or political thought, and inference-heavy questions. Practising that style is the closest you can get to the real thing.
All CAT 2020 RC passages, from all three slots, are free on GRADFLIX with every question explained, along with CAT RC PYQs from 2021 to 2025.
No. GRADFLIX is an independent reading platform. "Inspired by IIM Indore" describes the style of our passages, based on public past papers.
GRADFLIX is independent and not affiliated with IIM Indore or the CAT conducting body. Dates and patterns can change: confirm on iimcat.ac.in.
