CAT 2020 Slot 1 — VARC Question 20
Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
1. Talk was the most common way for enslaved men and women to subvert the rules of their bondage, to gain more agency than they were supposed to have.
2. Even in conditions of extreme violence and unfreedom, their words remained ubiquitous, ephemeral, irrepressible, and potentially transgressive.
3. Slaves came from societies in which oaths, orations, and invocations carried great potency, both between people and as a connection to the all-powerful spirit world.
4. Freedom of speech and the power to silence may have been preeminent markers of white liberty in Colonies, but at the same time, slavery depended on dialogue: slaves could never be completely muted.
5. Slave-owners obsessed over slave talk, though they could never control it, yet feared its power to bind and inspire—for, as everyone knew, oaths, whispers, and secret conversations bred conspiracy and revolt.
Answer & solution
Answer: 3
Easy
For odd-one-out, first fix the common theme the four coherent sentences share, then test each sentence against it. The misfit sits at a different angle or breaks the chain. The theme here: enslaved people’s talk as a tool of resistance in the colonies.
Opener: 4. Sentence 4 sets time and place — “markers of white liberty in Colonies … slavery depended on dialogue: slaves could never be completely muted.” It frames the paradox that anchors the paragraph.
4→5→1→2 cohere. 5 extends 4: slave-owners “obsessed over slave talk … could never control it.” 1 explains why it mattered — “Talk was the most common way … to subvert the rules of their bondage.” 2 caps it — “their words remained ubiquitous, ephemeral … transgressive.” This thread is about talk as resistance the owners could not suppress.
Test 3 — the misfit. Sentence 3 looks backward to origins: “Slaves came from societies in which oaths, orations, and invocations carried great potency … a connection to the spirit world.” That is about the cultural/ancestral source of speech, not about talk subverting bondage in the colonies. It changes the angle and breaks the chain.
The four that cohere are 4–5–1–2 (the order may vary, but all four belong). The odd one out is sentence 3. Key in 3.