CAT 2023 Slot 3 — VARC Question 19
Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.
1. Boa Senior, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.
2. The indigenous population has been steadily collapsing since the island chain was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.
3. Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.
4. The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's oldest cultures.
5. Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Senior spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.
Answer & solution
Answer: 2
Easy
Odd-sentence: find the single theme that binds four of the five lines, then spot the outlier. Here the binding theme is the Andamanese language Bo and its last fluent speaker, Boa Senior.
Sentence 4 opens the story: the last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died, breaking a 65,000-year link — the death of the language.
Sentence 3 identifies that language as Bo, one of the Great Andamanese languages dating to pre-Neolithic times — describing Bo.
Sentences 1 and 5 are about Boa Senior herself — her life through the tsunami and occupation (1) and her final years unable to speak her mother tongue to anyone (5).
Sentence 2 shifts to the indigenous population "steadily collapsing" since British colonisation in 1858 and the penal colony — about demographics/colonial history, not about Bo or Boa Senior. It is the outlier.
2 — sentence 2 is about the declining population, not about the language Bo or its last speaker.