CAT para jumbles practice: 10 questions with answers

The method

1. Find the opener. It introduces the subject and does not depend on anything before it: no "this", "they" or "however".
2. Find a mandatory pair. Two sentences that must sit together because one refers to the other, such as a pronoun and its noun.
3. Build outward. Use connectors (yet, therefore, instead) and time markers to place the rest.
4. Read it back. Read your order as one paragraph. If one link feels forced, revisit it.

Para jumbles and sentence placement: the full guide →

Practice set: 10 questions

1. Question 1

   Arrange the sentences into a coherent paragraph.

   1. 1. Farmers waiting for the morning bus began to linger after their cups were empty.
   2. 2. Within a generation, the tea shop had become the village’s unofficial parliament.
   3. 3. When the first tea shop opened beside the bus stop, it sold only tea.
   4. 4. Arguments about crops, prices and elections soon followed them inside.
   Show answer
2. Question 2

   Arrange the sentences into a coherent paragraph.

   1. 1. Yet every map must leave out almost everything about the place it shows.
   2. 2. A map that included every detail would be as large as the territory, and useless.
   3. 3. We tend to trust maps as faithful pictures of the world.
   4. 4. Its value, then, lies precisely in what it chooses to omit.
   Show answer
3. Question 3

   Arrange the sentences into a coherent paragraph.

   1. 1. Patients who received the sugar pills reported almost the same relief as those given the drug.
   2. 2. In the trial, half the patients were given a new painkiller and half were given identical sugar pills.
   3. 3. This did not mean the drug was useless, but that expectation itself was doing much of the work.
   4. 4. The researchers’ first reaction was to suspect an error in the data.
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4. Question 4

   Arrange the sentences into a coherent paragraph.

   1. 1. In the 1890s, the bicycle became the first machine many women could own and use on their own.
   2. 2. Those warnings proved accurate in a way their authors had not intended.
   3. 3. Its popularity alarmed some commentators, who warned that cycling would make women too independent.
   4. 4. Cycling demanded practical clothing and allowed travel without a chaperone, and both habits spread beyond the bicycle.
   Show answer
5. Question 5

   Arrange the sentences into a coherent paragraph.

   1. 1. Karl von Frisch, who decoded this language, later shared a Nobel Prize for the work.
   2. 2. The direction of the dance, relative to straight up, tells the others where the food lies relative to the sun.
   3. 3. Its duration, meanwhile, encodes how far away the patch is.
   4. 4. A honeybee that finds a rich patch of flowers returns to the hive and performs a curious figure-of-eight dance.
   Show answer
6. Question 6

   Arrange the sentences into a coherent paragraph.

   1. 1. Every transaction was recorded twice, once as a debit and once as a credit.
   2. 2. Merchants in Renaissance Italy faced a simple problem: how to know, at any moment, whether they were making money.
   3. 3. If the two columns did not balance, an error had crept in somewhere.
   4. 4. Their answer was double-entry bookkeeping.
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7. Question 7

   Arrange the sentences into a coherent paragraph.

   1. 1. Instead, employees put on headphones and sent more emails to colleagues sitting a few feet away.
   2. 2. Open-plan offices were meant to make people talk to each other more.
   3. 3. Studies of offices that moved to open plan found that face-to-face conversation fell sharply.
   4. 4. The walls had come down, and so had conversation.
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8. Question 8

   Arrange the sentences into a coherent paragraph.

   1. 1. Through Arab scholars, these rules later reached Europe, where many at first distrusted them.
   2. 2. For most of history, zero was not a number at all, only an empty place.
   3. 3. Brahmagupta, writing in the seventh century, gave rules for calculating with it.
   4. 4. Indian mathematicians were among the first to treat it as a number in its own right.
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9. Question 9

   Arrange the sentences into a coherent paragraph.

   1. 1. What disappeared with them was not only a job but a kind of solitude few people now experience.
   2. 2. By the end of the century, the last keepers had left their towers.
   3. 3. Electric lamps and automatic timers made that work unnecessary.
   4. 4. For centuries, every lighthouse needed a keeper to trim the wick and wind the clockwork.
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10. Question 10

    Arrange the sentences into a coherent paragraph.

    1. 1. In 1906, Francis Galton watched about 800 people at a country fair guess the weight of an ox.
    2. 2. The median guess was within one per cent of the true weight.
    3. 3. Galton, who had little faith in ordinary people’s judgement, was surprised.
    4. 4. Individually, most guesses were far off.
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