CAT 2024 Slot 3 — 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
Easy
Build the coherent paragraph from the four that connect by topic and pronoun reference; the leftover sentence is the odd one.
Find the spine. The cohesive thread is "non-experts forecasting beat the experts." Sentence 5 states the claim: aggregated opinions of non-experts are a better guide than those of experts. Sentence 4 gives the "frequently cited study" backing it — accurate forecasters beat US intelligence-community members. Sentence 3 ("This was true even though the latter had access to classified intelligence") refers back to that comparison, with "the latter" = the intelligence community of sentence 4. Sentence 1 ("Part of the appeal ... you don't seem to need specialized expertise") generalises from this. So 5–4–3 plus 1 form the non-expert-vs-expert paragraph.
Test sentence 2. Sentence 2 shifts the subject to why the intelligence community was first interested in forecasting, via "the tight connection between forecasting and building a model of the world." That is a different angle (origins of interest / world-modelling) and breaks the running argument that lay forecasters outperform experts.
Conclude. Sentences 1, 3, 4, 5 cohere around amateurs out-forecasting experts; sentence 2 is the intruder.
The odd sentence is 2.