📖 VARC

Odd Sentence Out

Find the sentence that does not belong in the paragraph. The other four form a coherent sequence.

of VARC

Why This Topic Matters

Total PYQs📊

of 1002 · 2021–2025

Years featured📅

4/5

of recent CAT years

% of VARC📈

~4%

of section questions

Est. hours⏱️

~8h

to master

~1/24

2021

2022

2/24

2023

~1/24

2024

2/24

2025

What it is

Five sentences are given; four combine into one coherent paragraph and one does not belong. You enter the number of the odd one — TITA, no negative marking.

	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025	Avg/slot
Odd Sentence Out questions	0.7	–	2.0	0.7	2.0	1.1

🎯PYQ Evidence

Skipped in 2022 — back with weight since. After vanishing in 2022, odd-sentence-out returned at about 2 per slot in 2023 and 2025 (~1 per slot in 2024). Treat it as a current fixture, not a legacy type. Like para-jumble it is TITA: never leave it blank.

The odd sentence is rarely off-topic in an obvious way. It is usually on the same broad subject but pulls in a different direction — a specific instance among generalities, a definition among narration, or a contrasting frame.

The method

Find the theme of the majority. Skim for the topic and the angle the four shared sentences take on it.
Build the paragraph. Chain the sentences that link (pronouns, connectors, a continuous line of thought).
The leftover is the answer. The sentence that won't slot into that chain — or that changes the type of statement — is the intruder.

🎯PYQ Evidence

Build-the-four-first is how every recent CAT answer key reasons. : sentences 5→2→1→3 formed one connected case — concept, narrowing, development, conclusion — and the leftover raised a related but different argument. : 1→2→4→5 formed a single account of new health research; the intruder shared the chemical topic but fell outside that research thread. : four sentences each described his show — appearance, delivery, format, the ideas in it — while the odd one broke that angle. The official logic is always: assemble the coherent four; the answer is what's left, never "the weirdest sentence."

A worked example

✏️Worked Example

1. Coral reefs are among the most biologically rich ecosystems on Earth. 2. They occupy less than one percent of the ocean floor yet shelter a quarter of all marine species. 3. Warming seas are now bleaching many reefs faster than they can recover. 4. The Great Barrier Reef stretches more than two thousand kilometres along Australia's coast. 5. This concentration of life makes their decline a loss out of all proportion to their size.

Reasoning. Sentences 1 → 2 → 5 → 3 form one argument: reefs are biologically rich (1); tiny in area but huge in species share (2); this concentration makes their loss outsized (5, picking up "a quarter of all species"); and they are indeed being lost to warming (3). Sentence 4 states a geographic fact about one reef's length — a different kind of claim that the richness-and-threat argument never needs.

Answer: 4.

💡Exam Tip

The tell: the intruder usually has no inbound or outbound link — no other sentence refers to it, and it refers to no other sentence. If every sentence seems linked, you've built the wrong four; try a different chain.

Common traps

⚠️CAT Trap

Topic vs angle. All five sentences often share a topic — PFAS chemicals, one comedian, freedom — so "same subject" proves nothing. The intruder breaks the angle: four explain a mechanism while one gives a history; four describe the show while one reviews its reception. Ask not "is this about the same thing?" but "is this doing the same job?"

Picking the hardest sentence. Difficulty ≠ irrelevance. Judge by fit, not by which sentence you understood least.
Forcing a five-link chain. If your paragraph needs the odd sentence to make sense, you've mis-built it — try a different four.

Checklist

State the shared theme and angle of the majority
Chain the four that link by reference or idea
Confirm the leftover has no link in or out
Re-read the four as a paragraph — it should be seamless without the fifth
TITA — always enter an answer

Sample Questions

17 practice questions

TITAHard

Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. (1) The assassination of Shinzo Abe, perhaps the most significant Japanese politician of the last 50 years, was a brutal and sordid end to what was an important if not uncontroversial life. (2) On Japanese social media, the hashtag 'We want democracy, not violence' was trending throughout Friday, with many users expressing their horror and disgust over the incident. (3) But when we look at the assassination we should not be deluded into thinking that Japanese society is the island of calm that some Japanophiles imagine. (4) Underlying this seemingly rigidly controlled and conforming society, where the levels of crime are a fraction of the West, there is an undercurrent of extreme violence that has long historic roots. (5) Japan is a country and people that cannot escape the fact that its history and culture since the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th Century been drenched in blood.

Your answer

TITAHard

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. (1) In 17th Century Britain, a turbulent period, some attempted to create living, breathing alternative societies. (2) There was a Puritan revolution, the king was overthrown and Cromwell's Leninist-style Commonwealth endured for 15 years — during which time Christmas, dancing, theatre and maypoles were banned. (3) Rather like later communist governments, the natural tendency of the ordinary people to buy and sell products, celebrate pagan rituals and try to enjoy themselves overcame. (4) It is ironic that the closest communism came to establishing a mass movement in Britain was later in the mid 20th Century, when its adherents abandoned revolutionism and emphasised the defence of bourgeois democracy. (5) Cromwell's experiment came to an end with the Restoration of the popular libertine King Charles II.

Your answer

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CAT PYQ Spotlight

Actual CAT questions on this topic

CAT 2025 · Slot 1

TITAHard

Five jumbled 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 out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

1. The Bayeux tapestry was, therefore, an obvious way to tell people about the downfall of the English and the rise of the Normans.

2. So if we take expert in Anglo-Saxon culture Gale Owen-Crocker's idea that the tapestry was originally hung in a square with certain scenes facing each other, people would have stood in the centre.

3. Art historian Linda Neagley has argued that pre-Renaissance people interacted with art visually, kinaesthetically (sensory perception through bodily movement) and physically.

4. That would make it an 11th-century immersive space with scenes corresponding and echoing each other, drawing the viewer's attention, playing on their senses and understanding of the story they thought they knew.

5. The Bayeux tapestry would have been hung at eye level to enable this.

Your answer

Context

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.

CAT 2024 · Slot 3

TITAMedium

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.

Your answer

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