UPSC CSAT Mock Tests – Chapter 5: Mock Test 4 – Advanced Level (80 MCQs)

Passage 1

In many cities, a large share of families live in settlements that have grown without formal permission. Their houses are real, often built room by room over decades, but the families hold no title that a bank will accept. It is often argued that giving them titles would unlock credit, since a house could then be mortgaged to start a business. The evidence is more mixed. Where titles have been granted, families have usually invested more in their homes, because the fear of eviction is gone; but banks have not always lent more, since a small house in a poor neighbourhood is hard to sell if a loan goes bad. A title, it seems, buys security first and credit only sometimes. Policies that promise both may disappoint, and the disappointment may be blamed, wrongly, on the families themselves.

Which of the following best reflects the central argument of the passage?

According to the passage, why have banks not always lent more to families with new titles?

The last sentence of the passage suggests that the author is concerned that:

What is the remainder when 1! + 2! + 3! + … + 100! is divided by 12?

What is the largest number that divides 398, 436 and 542, leaving remainders 7, 11 and 15 respectively?

How many of the numbers from 1 to 1,000 are divisible by none of 2, 3 and 5?

Statements:

Some pens are pencils.

All pencils are erasers.

No eraser is a sharpener.

Conclusions:

I. No pencil is a sharpener.

II. Some pens are not sharpeners.

Which of the following is correct?

In a group of 100 students, 50 study French, 40 study German and 30 study Japanese. 15 study French and German, 10 German and Japanese, 12 French and Japanese, and 5 study all three. How many study none of the three?

Passage 2

A company that uses software to screen job applications often believes it has removed human prejudice from hiring. But the software learns what a "good" candidate looks like from the company's own past decisions. If those decisions favoured graduates of a few colleges, or penalised gaps in employment that are more common among women who took time off to raise children, the software will learn the same preferences and apply them faster and to more people. The prejudice has not been removed; it has been made consistent and harder to see.

Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?

The phrase "made consistent and harder to see" implies that the software:

How many four-digit numbers can be formed in which all four digits are even and no digit is repeated?

Which of the following is the smallest?

In a test, A scored 20 per cent more than B, and B scored 10 per cent less than C. If C scored 250, what did A score?

Passage 3

A biodiversity offset allows a project that destroys a natural habitat to go ahead if the developer restores or protects an equal area elsewhere. On paper, the loss and the gain cancel out. In practice, the two are rarely equal. An old forest or wetland holds species and soils that took centuries to form, while a newly planted area may take decades to support even part of them, and some never return. The gain also comes later than the loss, and may not come at all if the restored site is neglected once the project is approved. Offsets can do some good where loss is truly unavoidable. Used as a routine licence to clear, they turn a promise into a permit.

Which of the following best captures the author's view of biodiversity offsets?

Which of the following is NOT given in the passage as a reason why an offset may fail to balance a loss?

"They turn a promise into a permit" most nearly means that routine offsets:

"Unless the budget is approved this month, the project will be stopped." The project was not stopped.

Which of the following must be true?

Argument: "Since the helmet law came into force in the city two years ago, head injuries among two-wheeler riders have fallen by 30 per cent. The law has therefore made riders safer."

Which of the following, if true, most weakens the argument?

Passage 4

When a person breaks a leg, colleagues send good wishes and nobody doubts that rest is needed. When a person suffers from depression, many hide it, fearing that they will be thought weak or unreliable. The silence has a cost: those who hide an illness seek help late, when it is harder to treat. Treating mental illness as an illness – no more and no less – would not cure anyone by itself, but it would let people ask for help at the stage when help works best.

The author suggests that the stigma around mental illness is harmful mainly because:

The phrase "no more and no less" is used to stress that mental illness should be:

A man buys two articles for ₹1,200 in all. He sells one at a profit of 20 per cent and the other at a loss of 10 per cent, and neither gains nor loses on the whole. What did the first article cost?

If the selling price of an article is doubled, the profit is tripled. What is the profit per cent?

Reasoning set 1

Six persons A, B, C, D, E and F live on the six floors of a building, one on each floor. The ground floor is numbered 1 and the top floor 6.

– A lives on an even-numbered floor.

– There are exactly two floors between A and E.

– C lives on the floor immediately below E.

– F lives above D but below C.

– B does not live on floor 1.

Who lives on the top floor?

How many persons live between D and E?

Who lives on the floor immediately above A?

Passage 5

A figure collected to describe a service soon becomes a target by which those who run the service are judged. Once that happens, it begins to change. A hospital judged by the number of patients discharged within a week may discharge some too early; a school judged by its pass rate may discourage weak students from sitting the examination. The number still rises, but it no longer measures what it was meant to measure.

Which of the following is the most logical conclusion from the passage?

A bag contains ₹1, 50-paise and 25-paise coins in the ratio 5 : 6 : 8. The total value is ₹210. How many 50-paise coins are there?

A can holds 80 litres of milk. A certain quantity is drawn off and replaced with water; this is done twice in all, after which the can holds 51.2 litres of milk. How many litres were drawn off each time?

The average of 50 numbers is 38. If two of them, 45 and 55, are removed, what is the average of the rest?

In a class, the average mark of the boys is 70 and that of the girls is 80. The class average is 74. What is the ratio of boys to girls?

Passage 6

A temple in which worship has continued for a thousand years is not only a monument; it is also a place in use. Rules made to protect it as a ruin – no new fixtures, no change to the old fabric – may clash with the needs of those who still pray there. Rules made only for worship may allow changes that destroy what made the place worth keeping. Conservation of a living monument is therefore less a matter of choosing between the two than of negotiating between them, case by case.

Which of the following best states the main point of the passage?

A class has 45 students ranked by marks, with no ties. Ram is 12th from the top, and Shyam is 5 ranks below Ram. What is Shyam's rank from the bottom?

Z is the daughter of the only son of X's mother. How is X related to Z?

Statement: 80 per cent of the candidates who cleared the examination this year had attended a coaching course.

Conclusions:

I. Coaching is necessary to clear the examination.

II. Some candidates cleared the examination without attending a coaching course.

Which of the following is correct?

Passage 7

A farmer with two cows cannot bargain with a large buyer, and cannot afford a chilling plant to keep his milk fresh. A cooperative of a thousand such farmers can do both. It collects milk twice a day, pays by the quality and quantity of what each member brings, and owns the plant that processes it. The strength of the model lies not in the cows but in the trust: once members suspect that the managers favour some or that the accounts are not true, they sell to private traders and the cooperative withers.

According to the passage, the success of a dairy cooperative depends most on:

The passage mentions all of the following as things the dairy cooperative does EXCEPT:

A father is now four times as old as his son. Five years ago he was seven times as old as his son. What is the father's present age?

If students sit 3 to a bench, 4 students are left without a seat. If they sit 4 to a bench, 3 benches are left empty. How many students are there?

Passage 8

It is often said that a person should be free to do whatever he likes so long as he harms no one else. The principle is attractive because it marks out a private sphere that the state may not enter. Its difficulty lies in the word "harm". If harm means only physical injury, the principle permits much that most people think should be checked, such as a campaign of lies that ruins a reputation. If harm includes offence to others' feelings, almost every act offends someone, and the private sphere vanishes. The principle therefore does not settle disputes about liberty; it moves them to a quarrel about what counts as harm.

According to the passage, the main difficulty with the principle is that:

If the author's analysis of the harm principle is accepted, which of the following follows most logically?

The author's attitude to the principle is best described as:

You head a district hospital. A senior doctor, widely respected, is found to have been coming in late for weeks, delaying the morning outpatient clinic. Patients have begun to complain. The doctor's family is going through a serious illness. What should you do first?

A sum of money at compound interest becomes three times itself in 4 years. In how many years will it become 81 times itself?

A loan of ₹2,100 is repaid in two equal yearly instalments at 10 per cent compound interest a year. What is each instalment?

Passage 9

A plant brought from another continent for its flowers may escape into the forest. With none of the insects or diseases that kept it in check at home, it can spread across the forest floor, crowding out the grasses that deer and cattle eat. Clearing it once rarely works; it returns from seed and root unless the cleared land is quickly replanted with native species.

Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?

In a code, "sky is blue" is written as "3 5 7", "blue and green" as "7 2 9" and "green is good" as "5 9 4". What is the code for "and"?

What comes next in the series 4, 6, 12, 30, 90, …?

What comes next in the series AZ, CX, FU, JQ, …?

Passage 10

An electric car has no exhaust pipe, but the electricity that charges it comes from somewhere. Where most power is generated from coal, the emissions are moved from the city street to the power station rather than removed. Even then, there may be a gain: a large power station can be more efficient than many small engines, and its smoke is released away from crowded streets. The full gain, however, arrives only as the grid itself becomes cleaner.

Which of the following best reflects the author's position?

The passage assumes that:

A can do a piece of work in 20 days, B in 30 days and C in 60 days. A works every day and is helped by B and C together on every third day. In how many days will the work be finished?

Working together, A and B finish a job in t days. A alone would take 10 days more than t, and B alone 40 days more than t. What is t?

Passage 11

A cafeteria that places fruit at eye level and sweets on a lower shelf sells more fruit, though nobody is forbidden anything. Governments have borrowed the idea: making enrolment in a pension scheme the default, with the option to leave, raises savings far more than urging people to join. Such "nudges" are cheap and keep choice open. Their critics ask who decides which way people should be nudged, and whether a choice steered without the chooser's knowledge is fully free.

Which of the following is an example of a "nudge" in the sense used in the passage?

The critics mentioned in the passage are mainly concerned about:

A train passes two men walking in the same direction as the train at 3 km/h and 5 km/h in 10 seconds and 11 seconds respectively. What is the speed of the train?

A and B start running together from the same point on a circular track 600 m long, in the same direction, at 5 m/s and 7 m/s. After how many seconds will they first meet again?

A boat goes 30 km downstream and comes back in 4 hours 30 minutes. Its speed in still water is 15 km/h. What is the speed of the stream?

Passage 12

Time for games is often the first thing cut from a crowded school timetable, on the view that it takes hours away from study. Yet children who play learn to take turns, to lose without despair and to keep to rules that bind both sides – lessons that no textbook teaches as well.

The author would most likely disagree with which of the following?

1 January 2000 was a Saturday. What day of the week was 1 January 2001?

26 January 2027 is a Tuesday. What day of the week is 26 January 2030?

Passage 13

Turning sea water into drinking water is now routine in some dry coastal cities. The process uses a great deal of energy, and it leaves behind a brine far saltier than the sea, which harms marine life if it is poured back carelessly. A city that builds such a plant has not found free water; it has exchanged a shortage of water for a demand for energy and a problem of waste.

Which of the following best expresses the point of the last sentence?

A rectangular field is 40 m long and 30 m wide. How many metres does a man save by walking along the diagonal instead of along two adjacent sides?

The diagonals of a rhombus are 16 cm and 12 cm. What is its perimeter?

How many cubes of side 3 cm can be cut from a cuboid measuring 12 cm × 9 cm × 6 cm?

Passage 14

When the state buys two crops at an assured price and leaves the others to the market, farmers in regions with assured buying grow those two crops, even where the soil and the water table are better suited to others. Telling such farmers to diversify will achieve little while the risks of the two choices remain so unequal; diversification follows when the alternatives are made comparably safe.

Which of the following is the most valid assumption in the passage?

In how many ways can 5 persons be seated around a round table, if only their positions relative to one another matter?

In how many ways can 2 persons be chosen from 10 if two particular persons, X and Y, must not both be chosen?

A fair die is thrown twice. What is the probability that the second number is greater than the first?

Two different numbers are chosen at random from 1 to 20. What is the probability that their sum is even?

In a meeting you are chairing, two officers begin to argue loudly over whose department is to blame for a delayed project, and the meeting is going nowhere. What is the most appropriate step?

A triangle ABC is divided by drawing two straight lines from A to two different points on BC. How many triangles are there in the figure in all?

A clock is laid flat so that at 12 noon its minute hand points to the north-east. In which direction will its hour hand point at 1:30 p.m.?

If 2 ★ 3 = 11, 3 ★ 4 = 19 and 4 ★ 5 = 29, what is 5 ★ 6?

Passage 15

One of Ashoka's rock edicts urges people to honour the sects of others as well as their own, warning that one who praises his own sect while disparaging others in fact injures his own. The thought is that respect for others is not a concession made at the cost of one's own faith but a way of keeping that faith worthy of respect.

According to the passage, the edict holds that disparaging other sects:

Which of the following is closest to (0.99)¹⁰?

If 20 per cent of A is equal to 30 per cent of B, what is A : B?

Data set 1

A household's monthly spending was ₹40,000 in 2025 and ₹50,000 in 2026. The table shows the share of each head in the total (per cent).

Spending on which head rose by the largest percentage from 2025 to 2026?

How did the household's spending on rent change from 2025 to 2026?

What part of the total rise in spending from 2025 to 2026 went to education and transport together?

Question: When the positive integer n is divided by 15, what is left over?

Statement 1: n leaves 2 on division by 3.

Statement 2: n leaves 4 on division by 5.