CAT 2023 Question Paper | VARC Slot 3

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Question 20 : 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.

Explanatory Answer

All sentences except 2 relate to either the language Bo or its last speaker, Boa Senior. Sentence 2, which is about the collapse of the indigenous population on the island, is the odd one out.

If the sentences were to be arranged in a paragraph, 4 is the best starting sentence. 4 mentions 'an ancient tribal language'. 3 names this language and so it follows 4. These sentences are followed by 1 and 5, both of which relate to Boa Senior, the last speaker of the language.

The answer is '2'