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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. 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.

Entered answer:

Solution

✅ Correct Answer: 4

Step 1: Look for the opening sentence

We need a sentence that introduces the topic broadly -> Sentence 5 works best: "As more and more stories of sexual assault have been made public... the genre of their telling has exploded" - this sets the context for analyzing these narratives.

Step 2: Find the logical flow

After setting the context, we need analysis -> Sentence 2 provides the key insight: "One thing we often do with narratives of sexual assault is sort their respective parties into different temporalities"

Step 3: Connect with keywords

Sentence 1 elaborates on this temporal focus -> "The victim's trauma after assault rarely gets the attention that we lavish on the moment of damage" - continues the past vs future theme

Step 4: Find the conclusion

Sentence 3 wraps up with "One result" -> "we don't have much of a vocabulary for what happens in a victim's life after the painful past"

From passage: The coherent flow is: 5 -> 2 -> 1 -> 3 (context -> analysis -> elaboration -> conclusion)


Now check what doesn't fit:

Sentence 4 talks about "charitable questions asked about the victims seem to focus on the past"

But the rest of the paragraph makes a broader analytical point about:

  1. How assault narratives function as "genres" (sentence 5)
  2. The systematic "temporal division" in how we approach these stories (sentence 2)
  3. The "vocabulary" gap for victims' futures (sentence 3)

This creates a mismatch in scope -> While others discuss broad narrative patterns and systemic issues, sentence 4 focuses narrowly on specific "questions" asked.


The elimination process:

🟢 Sentence 4 is the odd one -> too specific and narrow -> While others analyze broad patterns in how we construct and understand assault narratives, this one gets caught up in the specifics of questioning victims

All other sentences work together to present a systematic critique of how we temporally frame assault narratives, making sentence 4's focus on specific questioning the clear outsider.

Answer: 4

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