CAT 2021 Slot 2 — VARC Question 24
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:
- It has taken on a warm, fuzzy glow in the advertising world, where its potential is being widely discussed, and it is being claimed as the undeniable wave of the future.
- There is little enthusiasm for this in the scientific arena; for them marketing is not a science, and only a handful of studies have been published in scientific journals.
- The new, growing field of neuromarketing attempts to reveal the inner workings of consumer behaviour and is an extension of the study of how choices and decisions are made.
- Some see neuromarketing as an attempt to make the "art" of advertising into a science, being used by marketing experts to back up their proposals with some form of real data.
- The marketing gurus have already started drawing on psychology in developing tests and theories, and advertising people have borrowed the idea of the focus group from social scientists.
Answer & solution
Answer: 5
Easy
This is a sentence-exclusion (odd one out). Establish the shared topic the four fitting sentences develop, then isolate the sentence on an adjacent-but-different topic. Here the theme is neuromarketing; one sentence is about marketing borrowing from science generally.
Find the theme: neuromarketing. Sentence 3 defines the field: "The new, growing field of neuromarketing attempts to reveal the inner workings of consumer behaviour." Sentence 4 ("Some see neuromarketing as an attempt to make the 'art' of advertising into a science"), sentence 1 ("It has taken on a warm, fuzzy glow in the advertising world...") and sentence 2 ("There is little enthusiasm for this in the scientific arena") all comment specifically on neuromarketing.
Spot the misfit: 5. Sentence 5 talks about marketing gurus drawing on psychology and advertisers borrowing the focus group from social scientists. That is a general point about marketing's past use of science, not about neuromarketing specifically. It does not extend the neuromarketing thread.
Confirm the paragraph without 5. 3 (defines neuromarketing) → 4 (some see it as making advertising a science) → 1 (the advertising world's enthusiasm — "It" = neuromarketing) → 2 (the scientific community's scepticism) reads as a coherent paragraph (order 3412). The pronoun "It" opening sentence 1 needs neuromarketing already named, which 3/4 supply — 5 fits nowhere in this chain.
The odd one out is sentence 5.