NinetynineCAT 2023 Slot 1 VARC Q19 Odd Sentence Out
Question 19 of the Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) section, CAT 2023 Slot 1, with CAT's official answer and a worked solution.
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. In English, there is no systematic rule for the naming of numbers; after ten, we have "eleven" and "twelve" and then the teens: "thirteen", "fourteen", "fifteen" and so on.
2. Even more confusingly, some English words invert the numbers they refer to: the word "fourteen" puts the four first, even though it appears last.
3. It can take children a while to learn all these words, and understand that "fourteen" is different from "forty".
4. For multiples of 10, English speakers switch to a different pattern: "twenty", "thirty", "forty" and so on.
5. If you didn't know the word for "eleven", you would be unable to just guess it – you might come up with something like "one-teen".
1. In English, there is no systematic rule for the naming of numbers; after ten, we have "eleven" and "twelve" and then the teens: "thirteen", "fourteen", "fifteen" and so on.
2. Even more confusingly, some English words invert the numbers they refer to: the word "fourteen" puts the four first, even though it appears last.
3. It can take children a while to learn all these words, and understand that "fourteen" is different from "forty".
4. For multiples of 10, English speakers switch to a different pattern: "twenty", "thirty", "forty" and so on.
5. If you didn't know the word for "eleven", you would be unable to just guess it – you might come up with something like "one-teen".
TITA: type in the answer. There are no options and no negative marking.
Answer: 3 Odd Sentence Out TITA
Solution
- Sentences 1, 5, 4 and 2 describe the irregular naming rules of English numbers: no systematic rule for eleven, twelve and the teens (1); you could not guess 'eleven' (5); a different pattern for multiples of ten (4); 'even more confusingly', inverted words like fourteen (2).
- Sentence 3 moves to children learning the words, a shift from the naming system to language acquisition.
- The order 1-5-4-2 reads smoothly without it, so 3 is the odd one.