CAT 2020 Slot 2 — VARC Question 21
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. You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data.
2. Economists and technologists believe that a new kind of capitalism is being created - different from industrial capitalism as was merchant capitalism.
3. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights.
4. There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance, a different dynamic growing up: information as a social good, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced.
5. Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied and pasted infinitely
Answer & solution
Answer: 2
Medium
Pin down the shared theme, then look for the sentence that floats free of the chain. Four sentences here form a single argument about the nature of information - that it is monopolised yet inherently abundant and unownable; one sentence merely makes a broad claim about a "new capitalism" and never links into that thread.
Pair 3-1. Sentence 3 (Kenneth Arrow, 1962) says the purpose of invention in a free market is "to create intellectual property rights." Sentence 1 - "You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model... monopolise and protect data" - the phrase "the truth of this" points back to Arrow's claim about property rights. So 3-1 is a pair: property rights lead to monopolising data.
Add 4, then 5. Sentence 4 introduces a counter-dynamic: "alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance" - explicitly echoing the monopolised data of 3-1 - "information as a social good, incapable of being owned." Sentence 5 then justifies that: "Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable... copied and pasted infinitely." So 3-1-4-5 builds a coherent arc from ownership to un-ownability.
Test sentence 2 - the misfit. Sentence 2 makes a sweeping claim that "a new kind of capitalism is being created - different from industrial capitalism as was merchant capitalism." It speaks about forms of capitalism, not about information being monopolised yet freely replicable. It has no demonstrative or lexical hook tying it into the property-rights / abundant-information chain, so it is the odd one out.
The four sentences cohere as 3-1-4-5; the sentence left out is 2.