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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. 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.

Entered answer:

Solution

✅ Correct Answer: 2

Step 1: Look for the main theme that connects most sentences.

Step 2: Spot which sentence talks about something different.


From passage: "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."

Main theme: Most sentences compare experts vs non-experts in forecasting -> Sentences 1, 4, 5, and 3 all talk about how non-experts can be better at forecasting than experts.

Flow check:

  • Sentence 1 -> forecasting doesn't need special skills
  • Sentence 5 -> non-experts beat experts
  • Sentence 4 -> study proves non-experts beat intelligence experts
  • Sentence 3 -> this happened even though experts had secret information

This flows smoothly - it's all about non-experts being surprisingly good.


Sentence 2 analysis: "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."

This sentence talks about why intelligence community got interested in forecasting historically -> This is about origins, not about performance comparison.

The problem: While others focus on "who forecasts better," sentence 2 focuses on "why intelligence community liked forecasting in the past."

Answer: Sentence 2 is the odd one out because it shifts from comparing performance to explaining historical interest.

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