XAT 2019 — VARC Question 4
Read the following statements and answer the question that follows
- They subjected the residues from sherds of the rhyta- vessels to radiocarbon dating to determine their ages and chromatography – mass spectrometry (GC-MS) – to identify their structure and isotopic composition and found that the vessels were used to store cheese.
- In many Neolithic sites near the Adriatic Sea, researchers unearthed cone-shaped clay vessels, known as rhyta, with four legs on the bottom and a round opening on the side.
- Fresh milk couldn’t be kept for long without going bad; cheese, on the other hand, could be stored for months at a time, providing much-needed calories to early farmers between harvests.
- Archaeologists who used to assume animals such as cows and goats were mainly used for meat early in their domestication history are thus forced to admit that humans might have been using animals for dairy quite early in their domestication history.
- “If you kill one cow, you eat meat for about a week until it goes off; but by milking the animals, the farmer would be spreading the food gain from that animal over several months rather than just one week”
Rank the above five statements so as to make it a logical sequence:
Answer & solution
- A
4, 5, 2, 1, 3
- B
2, 1, 5, 4, 3
2, 1, 3, 5, 4
- D
4, 1, 2, 5, 3
- E
4, 2, 1, 3, 5
We know that this passage is about the clay vessels and its users. Thus sentence 2 is the opening sentence of the paragraph as it mentions where these vessels were found. ‘They’ in sentence 1 refers to the scientists mentioned in sentence 2. Thus we get the 2-1 link. This eliminates option 4. Sentence 1 states that the rhyta were used to store cheese. Sentence 3 gives the reason for storing cheese instead of milk as it has a longer shelf life. Sentence 5 states that farmers could make use of cows for milking as it would last for several months while killing a cow would last only for a week. The phrase ‘are thus forced to admit’ indicates that even the archaeologists had to admit that using animals for dairy made more sense than using them for meat. Thus the link 5-4 is better than the 4-5 link. So we get the correct order 2-1-3-5-4.
Hence, the correct answer is option 3.