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Actual CAT 2018 Slot I: Section: Verbal Ability

The passage discusses how the relationship between elephants and humans has changed from peaceful coexistence to hostility and violence. Psychologist Gay Bradshaw and colleagues argue that elephant populations are suffering from chronic stress and species-wide trauma due to decades of poaching, culling, and habitat loss disrupting elephant social structures and culture. This social upheaval results in inexperienced mothers, orphaned young elephants witnessing their family's deaths, and impaired brain development, exhibiting behaviors associated with post-traumatic stress disorder in humans like abnormal startle response and hyperaggression. Evidence from elephant researchers supports that decimated herds, especially orphaned elephants, display trauma-related disorders.

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39 views

Actual CAT 2018 Slot I: Section: Verbal Ability

The passage discusses how the relationship between elephants and humans has changed from peaceful coexistence to hostility and violence. Psychologist Gay Bradshaw and colleagues argue that elephant populations are suffering from chronic stress and species-wide trauma due to decades of poaching, culling, and habitat loss disrupting elephant social structures and culture. This social upheaval results in inexperienced mothers, orphaned young elephants witnessing their family's deaths, and impaired brain development, exhibiting behaviors associated with post-traumatic stress disorder in humans like abnormal startle response and hyperaggression. Evidence from elephant researchers supports that decimated herds, especially orphaned elephants, display trauma-related disorders.

Uploaded by

Athira Varrier
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Actual CAT 2018 Slot I

Directions of Test

Test Name Actual CAT 2018 Slot I Total Questions 100 Total Time 180 Mins

Section Name No. of Questions Time limit Marks per Question Negative Marking
Verbal Ability 34 1:0(h:m) 3 1/3
DI & Reasoning 32 1:0(h:m) 3 1/3
Quantitative Ability 34 1:0(h:m) 3 1/3

Section : Verbal Ability

DIRECTIONS for the question: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.

Question No. : 1
“Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between elephants and people has dramatically changed,” [says
psychologist Gay] Bradshaw. . . . “Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful coexistence, there is
now hostility and violence. Now, I use the term ‘violence’ because of the intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression
of humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of elephants.” . .
 
Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male
elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But. . . Bradshaw and several colleagues
argue. . . that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades
of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by
which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that
what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture. . . .
 
Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. . . . Young elephants are raised within an extended,
multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These
relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years. Studies of established herds have shown that young elephants stay
within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young females are socialized into the
matriarchal network, while young males go off for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into the fold as
mature adults. . . .
 
This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues [demonstrate], ha[s] effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss
and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds
to different habitats. . . . As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised by ever younger and
inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants, meanwhile, that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of
poachers are coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines traditional elephant life. “The loss of elephant
elders,” [says] Bradshaw . . . "and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and
behavior development in young elephants.”
 
What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence
that they’ve compiled from various elephant researchers. . . weren’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially
orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated
with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable
asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. . . .
 
[According to Bradshaw], “Elephants are suffering and behaving in the same ways that we recognize in ourselves as a result of
violence. . . . Except perhaps for a few specific features, brain organization and early development of elephants and humans are
extremely similar.”

In the first paragraph, Bradshaw uses the term “violence” to describe the recent change in the human-elephant relationship because,
according to him:

A) both humans and elephants have killed members of each other’s species.
B) elephant herds and their habitat have been systematically destroyed by humans.

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