CAT 2020 Slot 2 — VARC Question 19
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. The victim’s trauma after assault rarely gets the attention that we lavish on the moment of damage that divided the survivor from a less encumbered past.
2. One thing we often do with narratives of sexual assault is sort their respective parties into different temporalities: it seems we are interested in perpetrators’ futures and victims’ pasts.
3. One result is that we don’t have much of a vocabulary for what happens in a victim’s life after the painful past has been excavated, even when our shared language gestures toward the future, as the term “survivor” does.
4. Even the most charitable questions asked about the victims seem to focus on the past, in pursuit of understanding or of corroboration of painful details.
5. As more and more stories of sexual assault have been made public in the last two years, the genre of their telling has exploded --- crimes have a tendency to become not just stories but genres.
Answer & solution
Answer: 4
Easy
For an odd-one-out, first fix the theme that four sentences share, build their chain, and then test the last sentence: the misfit either introduces a fresh sub-topic or breaks the cause-and-effect flow. Here the theme is how narratives of sexual assault push us to dwell on the victim's past rather than their future.
Find the opener. Sentence 5 is the general entry point: as more assault stories became public, "the genre of their telling has exploded." It sets up the broad context of how these stories get told.
Build the core chain (5-2-3-1). Sentence 2 names the key tendency inside these narratives: we sort the parties into different temporalities, caring about "perpetrators' futures and victims' pasts." Sentence 3 states the result ("One result is that we don't have much of a vocabulary for what happens in a victim's life after"), so it follows 2. Sentence 1 then deepens this same point: the victim's trauma after assault rarely gets attention compared with the moment of damage. So 2-3-1 form a tight thread about over-focusing on the past.
Test sentence 4 - the misfit. Sentence 4 says even charitable questions asked about the victims focus on the past, "in pursuit of understanding or of corroboration of painful details." Though it shares the past-vs-future theme, it pivots to a new sub-topic - the act of interrogating / asking questions of survivors and corroborating details - which the other four never raise. It does not slot between any of the linked pairs without introducing this stray idea, so it is the odd one out.
The four sentences cohere as 5-2-3-1; the sentence left out is 4.