CAT 2024 Slot 1 — VARC Question 4
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. Part of the appeal of forecasting is not just that it seems to work, but that you don’t seem to need specialized expertise to succeed at it.
2. The tight connection between forecasting and building a model of the world helps explain why so much of the early interest in the idea came from the intelligence community.
3. This was true even though the latter had access to classified intelligence.
4. One frequently cited study found that accurate forecasters’ predictions of geopolitical events, when aggregated using standard scientific methods, were more accurate than the forecasts of members of the US intelligence community who answered the same questions in a confidential prediction market.
5. The aggregated opinions of non-experts doing forecasting have proven to be a better guide to the future than the aggregated opinions of experts.
Answer & solution
Answer: 2
Medium
Find the four sentences that build one argument and isolate the one that breaks the thread. Four sentences make the single point that ordinary non-experts, aggregated, out-forecast credentialed experts; one sentence instead explains why the intelligence community became interested in forecasting, which is a different idea.
Build the core paragraph (1 → 5 → 4 → 3). Sentence 1 opens: part of forecasting's appeal is that you don't seem to need specialized expertise. Sentence 5 develops this: aggregated opinions of non-experts beat aggregated opinions of experts. Sentence 4 gives the supporting study—accurate forecasters beat the US intelligence community on the same questions. Sentence 3 caps it with "This was true even though the latter [the intelligence community] had access to classified intelligence." The pronoun "the latter" in 3 points straight back to the intelligence community of 4, locking 4→3 and the whole chain 1→5→4→3.
Why 2 is the odd one. Sentence 2 is about the "tight connection between forecasting and building a model of the world" and why early interest came from the intelligence community. That is a causal/historical claim about the origin of interest, not about non-experts out-predicting experts. It does not slot into the 1→5→4→3 argument—nothing in that chain needs the "model of the world" idea, and 3's "the latter" already has its referent without 2. So 2 is the misfit.
2. Sentences 1, 5, 4 and 3 form the paragraph on non-experts out-forecasting experts; sentence 2, about why the intelligence community first took interest, is the odd one.