CAT-astrophic reading

Working as a common admission test (CAT) trainer can be very bad for one's interests and hobbies. I am a member of several reading groups on Facebook and feeds on Digg that keep me occupied for hours. As someone who has never taken much interest in sports, reading of any kind - long-form or short, tweets or blogs - is my haven from anything grim, ordinary or commonplace. (I do see that sounds tiringly elitist!)

But when has life offered free lunches? My work involves setting questions for mock CATs that students at the training institute that employs me will solve. We are supposed to provide them sectional tests and full-length papers. That translates to anywhere close to a thousand questions in total, of different types. All this catholic question-making is playing havoc with my reading, to put it mildly.

Sample a passage picked up from the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) blog:
"That might sound like the title of a very short anthology. Or a startingly inaccurate piece of literary criticism. But don't let the received reputation of the author of Jude the Obscure deceive you. Readers of Angelique Richardson's lead piece on Hardy's letters in this week's TLS will learn that he in fact had 'a fine sense of humour' and was, by one account, a 'happy man.'"

This was an article on Thomas Hardy's sense of humour, and how it was not, as is commonly believed, dour. I looked forward to reading it, but the moment I read the first paragraph, I started constructing CAT questions in my mind. The second sentence says, "Or a startingly inaccurate piece..." That has to follow the first, with "the title of a very..." providing the hook. Then AB is a pair, I said to myself, constructing a parajumble.

Scoot, shut up you, I admonished myself. I read the next paragraph: "He also had an 'amused take on the advances of technology' - hence this footnote to Richardson's observations on the role of letters in Hardy's novels: as she says, letters play a significant part in The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d'Urbevilles, as they did in his own life; and it's 'not only because... he couldn't hear anyone who rang' that the belated appearance of a telephone on the domestic scene didn't transform his habits of communication."

I got thinking: That would make a good parasummary question now. "Which of the following perfectly summarises the passage?" Hardy was a technology freak. Naah. Hardy was a troglodyte. Too extreme. Hardy took a long time adopting new technology. Close but not entirely correct...

You are doing it again, I heard myself say. Stop, will you, my pained inner voice beseeched. I progressed to the third paragraph: "...In A Laodicean (1881), the heroine Paula Power goes off to Nice with her 'phlegmatic and obstinate' uncle Abner. That 'breathing refrigerator', as her admirer George Somerset thinks of him, clearly wants to keep them apart - 900 miles apart. Since George has to remain at his post, overseeing the work of modernizing her home, Stancy Castle, how can he possibly keep up his burning expressions of love over that inconvenient distance?"

Which of the following captures the tone of the passage? Bitterly critical? Guardedly optimistic? Setting up a challenge? Grimly evocative? The third one perhaps, but is that really a tone, I imagined my students protesting. A tone must be an emotion, they said, and I saw myself launching an expansive missive on how even bad answers must at time be selected because they are the best fit.

I suddenly received a thunderous slap. Make that a thunderous metaphorical slap. My alter ego was having no more of this. "You are reading the TLS, for heaven's sake," it said. "Get a grip."

I tried, and tried, and tried. But to no avail. Every time a paragraph tried to suck me in, I spliced it into myriad shapes so it would yield hot-off-the-oven CAT questions. Truth be told, I was getting kinda addicted to this question-making business. Why, I was even doing it with Bollywood stories on the back page of Bombay Times.

Maybe I was just tired. I switched off the TLS website and closed my eyes. I rested for a half hour and woke up feeling energised. I made some pasta and picked up the latest issue of the Caravan. I turned to a story on documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak. The first paragraph read:
"In the middle of a day's march, a band of guerrillas rests in a clearing in the forests of Chattisgarh. They sit in a circle, without speaking. A young woman with short hair and bright eyes, cradling her weapon, breaks their silence. 'I saw what the police did in my village, to the women… and that is why I joined the PLGA' - the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army, the military wing of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist)."

Which of the following, I thought to myself with an odd mix of ennui and horror, is a suitable substitute for "cradling" as used above?

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The author has switched too many jobs in the past and hopes he can hold down this one