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.
- 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.
- Even more confusingly, some English words invert the numbers they refer to: the word "fourteen" puts the four first, even though it appears last.
- It can take children a while to learn all these words, and understand that "fourteen" is different from "forty".
- For multiples of 10, English speakers switch to a different pattern: "twenty", "thirty", "forty" and so on.
- 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".
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.
- 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.
- Even more confusingly, some English words invert the numbers they refer to: the word "fourteen" puts the four first, even though it appears last.
- It can take children a while to learn all these words, and understand that "fourteen" is different from "forty".
- For multiples of 10, English speakers switch to a different pattern: "twenty", "thirty", "forty" and so on.
- 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".
Entered answer:
Solution
From passage: "In English, there is no systematic rule for the naming of numbers" and "If you didn't know the word for 'eleven', you would be unable to just guess it"
The main theme here is about how English number words are weird and don't follow patterns -> this makes the language confusing structurally.
Step-by-step elimination process:
Sentences 1, 2, 4, 5 all talk about -> structural problems with English number naming:
- Sentence 1: No systematic rules exist
- Sentence 2: Words are inverted confusingly
- Sentence 4: Different patterns are used
- Sentence 5: You can't guess unknown number words
But sentence 3 talks about -> children learning these words and getting confused between "fourteen" and "forty"
The key difference: Most sentences discuss why English number system is structurally confusing, but sentence 3 shifts to how this affects learners.
š¢ Sentence 3 is the odd one out -> scope-shift -> moves from discussing structural irregularities of English numbers to focusing on children's learning difficulties
The other four sentences work together to explain why English number naming is systematically confusing, while sentence 3 talks about the human impact of this confusion rather than the linguistic structure itself.
Answer: 3