CAT Previous Year Questions 2020: Odd One Out | Verbal Ability (VA) & Reading Comprehension (RC) PDF Download

Q.1. Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:   [2020]
1. Talk was the most common way for enslaved men and women to subvert the rules of their bondage, to gain more agency than they were supposed to have.
2. Even in conditions of extreme violence and unfreedom, their words remained ubiquitous, ephemeral, irrepressible, and potentially transgressive.
3. Slaves came from societies in which oaths, orations, and invocations carried great potency, both between people and as a connection to the all-powerful spirit world.
4. Freedom of speech and the power to silence may have been preeminent markers of white liberty in Colonies, but at the same time, slavery depended on dialogue: slaves could never be completely muted.
5. Slave-owners obsessed over slave talk, though they could never control it, yet feared its power to bind and inspire—for, as everyone knew, oaths, whispers, and secret conversations bred conspiracy and revolt.

Ans: 3
This is a relatively simple question. 4 opens the paragraph by giving us the reference of time and place. It talks about white liberty in colonies, and slavery in those colonies. 4 says “the slaves could never be muted”. 5 comes as an additional information for 4, because 5 clearly says that “slave owners were obsessed over slave talk” and 1 says “talk was the most common way for enslaved men and women to subvert the rules of their bondage” ...2 further adds to the story by stating that “even in conditions of extreme violence.... their words remained ubiquitous”. Thus 4512 form a logical link, with 3 as the odd one out. The sequence may not strictly be 4512, but in all cases 3 is the odd one.

Q.2. Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:    [2020]
1. For feminists, the question of how we read is inextricably linked with the question of what we read.
2. Elaine Showalter’s critique of the literary curriculum is exemplary of this work.
3. Androcentric literature structures the reading experience differently depending on the gender of the reader.
4. The documentation of this realization was one of the earliest tasks undertaken by feminist critics. 

5. More specifically, the feminist inquiry into the activity of reading begins with the realization that the literary canon is androcentric, and that this has a profoundly damaging effect on women readers.

Ans: 3
This could be a challenging question, but we have to look for clues that connect the sentences. This will help us create a new sequence and find the odd one out. 5 says “more specifically, the feminist enquiry...”. thus there must a reference to “more specifically” because this phrase is used to bring in clarity to something. We must try to find a reference to this. The reference can be found in 1, which says “for feminists, the question of ...” (the question of =enquiry). Thus 15 form a pair. 5 has “...the feminist enquiry begins with the realization...and 4 further adds to it by saying “the documentation of this realization...was one of the earliest tasks undertaken by feminist critics...” 2 concludes by stating that “Elaine’s critique of the literary curriculum is exemplary of this work”. 2 serves as an example of 4. 3 is the odd one out.

Q.3. Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:    [2020]
1. You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data.
2. Economists and technologists believe that a new kind of capitalism is being created - different from industrial capitalism as was merchant capitalism.
3. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights.
4. There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance, a different dynamic growing up: information as a social good, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced.
5. Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied and pasted infinitely.

Ans: 2
This is a question of moderate difficulty. 1 points at some truth. We must try to find the sentence that connects with 1. How can we monopolize and protect data? By having intellectual property rights. Thus 31 form a pair. 4 adds another idea to the story; it says “alongside the world of monopolised information (already discussed in 31), we have information as a social good, incapable of being owned. 5 concludes by saying that “information good are freely replicable....it can be copied and pasted infinitely”. In the light of intellectual property rights, and free information goods, 2 seems to be the odd one out.

Q.4. Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:     [2020]
1. The victim’s trauma after assault rarely gets the attention that we lavish on the moment of damage that divided the survivor from a less encumbered past.
2. One thing we often do with narratives of sexual assault is sort their respective parties into different temporalities: it seems we are interested in perpetrators’ futures and victims’ pasts.
3. One result is that we don’t have much of a vocabulary for what happens in a victim’s life after the painful past has been excavated, even when our shared language gestures toward the future, as the term “survivor” does.
4. Even the most charitable questions asked about the victims seem to focus on the past, in pursuit of understanding or of corroboration of painful details.
5. As more and more stories of sexual assault have been made public in the last two years, the genre of their telling has exploded --- crimes have a tendency to become not just stories but genres.

Ans: 4
The official answer for this question seems to be a little weird. Though 4 is the official answer, we believe that sentence 5 should have been the right choice. 2 will open the paragraph. 1 and 4 focus on the victim’s past. 1 says “victim’s trauma after the assault rarely gets the attention...” and 4 says “even the most charitable question seems to focus on the victim’s past...”. 3 finally concludes by saying “the result is that we don’t have much of a vocabulary for what happens in a victim’s life after the painful past...”. 5 should have been the right answer, but the official answer is 4.

Q.5. Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:    [2020]
1. Machine learning models are prone to learning human-like biases from the training data that feeds these algorithms.
2. Hate speech detection is part of the on-going effort against oppressive and abusive language on social media.
3. The current automatic detection models miss out on something vital: context.
4. It uses complex algorithms to flag racist or violent speech faster and better than human beings alone.
5. For instance, algorithms struggle to determine if group identifiers like "gay" or "black" are used in offensive or prejudiced ways because they're trained on imbalanced datasets with unusually high rates of hate speech.

Ans: 3
5 says ‘for instance'. We must find the sentence that logically connects with 5. Also, we must connect the pronoun ‘it’ in sentence 4 with some noun. The pronoun cannot refer to the plural “models” in 1 or the plural ‘algorithms’ in 5. It can refer to the singular noun “hate speech detection” in 2. Thus 24 form a pair. Similarly, 1 and 5 form a pair because the example of ‘human-like biases” in 1 can be found in 5. Also, both the sentences speak about algorithms. Thus 2415 form a logical pair, and 3 is the odd one out.

Q.6. Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:    [2020]
1. The logic of displaying one’s inner qualities through outward appearance was based on a distinction between being a woman and being feminine.
2. 'Appearance' became a signifier of conduct - to look was to be and conformity to the feminine ideal was measured by how well women could use the tools of the fashion and beauty industries.
3. The makeover-centric media sets out subtly and not-so-subtly, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways to be a woman, layering these over inequalities of race and class.
4. The denigration of working-class women and women of colour often centres on their perceived failure to embody feminine beauty.
5. ‘Woman’ was considered a biological category, but femininity was a ‘process’ by which women became specific kinds of women.

Ans: 3
This is a slightly difficult question. The theme of the paragraph seems to be “femininity and woman” 4 is the opening sentence because it introduces the idea of feminine beauty. This idea of feminine beauty is further elaborated in 4. 2 and 1 add to the story of feminine beauty by talking about the importance of feminine beauty and how appearances project feminine beauty. The sequence 4521 form a logical sequence, and 3 becomes the odd one out. 3 and 4 seem to embody the idea of race and class but no other sentence takes ahead the idea of race and class. Thus either 4 or 3 must be the odd one. But since 4 introduces the idea of feminine beauty, it goes well with the other three sentences, but 3 does not. Thus 3 is the right choice.