Practice Items — Summary, Odd Sentence, Jumbles

Eight items of the three non-RC types, each carrying its own paragraph: three para summaries, three odd-sentence-out sets and two para jumbles. In recent papers these arrive as type-in questions with no negative marking, so the discipline to practise is not accuracy but always producing an answer — a blank is the only outcome with a guaranteed cost. Ninety seconds each, and if two options survive at ninety seconds, submit the better one and move on. Each paragraph was written and then checked for the property its item type needs: a summary paragraph with exactly one defensible spine, an odd-sentence set with exactly one sentence that has no structural job, and a jumble with exactly one order in which every pronoun and connective points backwards at something.

Ninety Seconds, Three Different Methods

  • Summary: write your own ten-word version in the margin first, then pick the option closest to your sentence rather than closest to the paragraph. Options are written to sound like the paragraph, so comparing them with each other is the comparison the paper-setter prepared for.
  • Odd sentence: find the pair that must be adjacent — linked by a pronoun, a repeated noun or a connective — and build outward. The sentence with no position where it adds anything is the answer, and it is usually true and on topic.
  • Jumble: find the opening sentence, which is the only one that refers to nothing outside itself, then chain forward. "Such a rule", "the result", "he" — each of these is a hand pointing backwards at a sentence that must already have appeared.

Key takeaways

  • Write your own summary before reading the options. Then match the option to your sentence, not to the paragraph.
  • The odd sentence is usually true and on topic. It is the one with no structural job, not the one you disagree with.
  • A sentence containing "such", "therefore", "the result" or a bare pronoun cannot open a jumble — each points backwards at something.
  • A specific statistic dropped into a paragraph of general argument is a classic odd sentence: unobjectionable, on topic, and doing nothing.
  • These are type-in questions with no negative marking. Ninety seconds, then submit your best surviving answer — the blank is the only losing move.

Practice questions (8)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

  1. Summary 1. Cities are often described as having grown outward from a centre, as though expansion were a single process radiating from a point. The record of most Indian cities is less tidy. They absorbed villages that already existed, with their own street patterns, tanks and land ownership, and those absorbed settlements remained legible for generations afterwards — a lane that bends for no visible reason, a temple facing the wrong way for the grid around it. What looks like the edge of a planned expansion is frequently the boundary of a place that was there first.

    Which best summarises the paragraph?

    1. Indian cities grew by absorbing existing villages, whose shapes remain visible in the modern street plan.
    2. Urban planning in India has historically been poor, producing irrational street layouts.
    3. Temples and tanks are the most reliable evidence for the age of an Indian city.
    4. Cities everywhere grow outward from a centre in a single radiating process.
    Show answer

    Answer: A — Indian cities grew by absorbing existing villages, whose shapes remain visible in the modern street plan.

    The spine is the correction: growth by absorption rather than radiation, with the absorbed places still legible. Option B adds a judgement — "poor planning" — that the paragraph never makes; a bending lane is evidence of an older boundary, not of incompetence, and that substitution of blame for explanation is the commonest wrong summary. Option C promotes an example to the point. Option D is the view the paragraph opens by rejecting.

  2. Summary 2. It is widely assumed that a language dies when its last fluent speaker dies. In practice the decisive moment comes much earlier and is almost invisible: it is the point at which parents stop using the language with children. Once transmission stops, the language may still have thousands of speakers and decades of life, and its fate is nonetheless settled, because every remaining speaker is already older than the youngest. Counting speakers therefore measures the past. Counting households in which children are addressed in the language measures the future.

    Which best summarises the paragraph?

    1. A language's fate is decided when parents stop passing it to children, long before its speakers disappear.
    2. Languages with thousands of speakers are not in danger.
    3. Counting speakers is the best available measure of a language's health.
    4. Every language will eventually die as its last fluent speaker dies.
    Show answer

    Answer: A — A language's fate is decided when parents stop passing it to children, long before its speakers disappear.

    The paragraph relocates the decisive moment from the last death to the end of transmission, and closes by saying speaker counts measure the past while household transmission measures the future. Option C states the opposite of that closing sentence. Option B inverts the argument exactly: the point is that a language with many speakers can already be finished. Option D is the assumption the first sentence attributes to others.

  3. Summary 3. Committees are criticised for producing compromises, and the criticism assumes that a sharper decision was available and was avoided. Sometimes that is true. But a committee is often assembled precisely because a decision has consequences for people who disagree about what matters, and in that situation a compromise is not a failure to decide — it is the decision that can actually be implemented by the people who have to implement it. A clearer choice imposed on an unwilling half is frequently reversed within the year, and the reversal is rarely recorded as the cost of the clarity.

    Which best summarises the paragraph?

    1. Committees always produce better decisions than individuals do.
    2. Where a decision affects people who disagree, a compromise may be the only version that survives implementation.
    3. Clear decisions are usually reversed within a year.
    4. The main weakness of committees is that they avoid deciding.
    Show answer

    Answer: B — Where a decision affects people who disagree, a compromise may be the only version that survives implementation.

    The paragraph concedes that the criticism is sometimes true ("sometimes that is true") and then argues the narrower point: with disagreeing stakeholders, the compromise is the implementable decision. Option C overstates a supporting clause — the paragraph says an imposed choice is "frequently reversed", not usually, and that sentence is evidence rather than the claim. Option A is an absolute the paragraph never approaches. Option D is the criticism being answered.

  4. Odd sentence 1. Four sentences are given. Three form a coherent paragraph; one does not belong.

    (1) Handloom weaving in India survived industrial competition in part because it never competed on the same terms.
    (2) Power looms took the market for plain, uniform cloth, where cost per metre decides everything.
    (3) India's cotton exports were worth more in 1900 than in 1800.
    (4) What remained for the handloom was the short run, the unusual width and the pattern that a machine could not be reset cheaply enough to produce.

    Which sentence does NOT belong?

    1. Sentence 1
    2. Sentence 2
    3. Sentence 3
    4. Sentence 4
    Show answer

    Answer: C — Sentence 3

    Sentences 1, 2 and 4 form a chain: a claim, the market the power loom took, and the market that was therefore left. Sentence 3 is a true statistic about cotton exports which nothing in the chain uses and nothing develops — it neither explains why the handloom survived nor follows from it. Note that it is the most concrete and checkable sentence of the four, which is exactly what makes it feel like it belongs.

  5. Odd sentence 2. Four sentences are given. Three form a coherent paragraph; one does not belong.

    (1) A public library lends far fewer books than its shelves would allow, and its defenders sometimes treat that as a problem to be solved.
    (2) Reading rooms are used most heavily in the hour after school closes.
    (3) But circulation was never the whole point: a library is also the one indoor space a citizen may occupy for an afternoon without buying anything.
    (4) Measured as lending machines, libraries look inefficient; measured as unpriced space, they have no rival in most Indian towns.

    Which sentence does NOT belong?

    1. Sentence 1
    2. Sentence 2
    3. Sentence 3
    4. Sentence 4
    Show answer

    Answer: B — Sentence 2

    Sentence 1 states the apparent problem, 3 turns against it ("But circulation was never the whole point"), and 4 draws the conclusion by contrasting two ways of measuring. Sentence 2, about the busiest hour in the reading room, is a fact about usage patterns that plays no part in that argument — it is about when the library is used, while the paragraph is about what for. Sentences 1 and 3 are locked together by "But", so neither can be the answer.

  6. Odd sentence 3. Four sentences are given. Three form a coherent paragraph; one does not belong.

    (1) The monsoon is usually described as arriving, as though it were a front that crosses a line on a particular date.
    (2) Forecasting has improved considerably since satellite data became available.
    (3) Onset is in fact declared from a set of criteria — rainfall over several days at a group of stations, wind at a given height, cloud cover — so the date is a reading of a definition rather than an observation of an event.
    (4) Two agencies applying slightly different criteria to the same week can therefore announce onset days apart without either being wrong.

    Which sentence does NOT belong?

    1. Sentence 1
    2. Sentence 2
    3. Sentence 3
    4. Sentence 4
    Show answer

    Answer: B — Sentence 2

    The paragraph argues that monsoon onset is a reading of a definition rather than an observation of an event: 1 states the common picture, 3 corrects it, and 4 draws the consequence ("therefore two agencies …"). Sentence 2, about forecasting improving with satellite data, is about prediction, while the paragraph is about definition — a distinction easy to miss because both sentences sound like meteorology. Accuracy of forecasts has no bearing on whether a declared date is a reading of criteria.

  7. Jumble 1. Arrange the four sentences into a coherent paragraph.

    (A) The result was a map that showed cholera cases as dots and public water pumps as crosses.
    (B) In 1854 a London physician doubted the prevailing view that cholera spread through bad air.
    (C) The dots clustered around one pump on Broad Street, and the cluster stopped where residents used a different pump.
    (D) He went door to door in an affected district, recording where each death had occurred and where the household drew its water.

    What is the correct order?

    1. BDAC
    2. BADC
    3. DBAC
    4. ABDC
    Show answer

    Answer: A — BDAC

    B must open: it is the only sentence that introduces its subject rather than referring back — "a London physician", not "he". D follows, because "He went door to door" needs that physician to exist first. A comes next, since "the result" is the result of the door-to-door recording. C is last, because "the dots" are the dots A has just introduced. BDAC. Each of the wrong orders puts a backward-pointing phrase before what it points at, which is the one test a jumble ever needs.

  8. Jumble 2. Arrange the four sentences into a coherent paragraph.

    (A) Such a rule sounds harsh until one notices what it replaced.
    (B) Most bridges built before the nineteenth century were designed by rules of proportion carried in a builder's head and adjusted by experience.
    (C) The engineer who first insisted on calculating a bridge before building it was therefore not adding rigour to an exact craft, but replacing an inherited approximation with an argument that could be checked.
    (D) When such a bridge failed, the lesson was learnt by the next builder and not by the design.

    What is the correct order?

    1. CABD
    2. BDCA
    3. BDAC
    4. ACBD
    Show answer

    Answer: B — BDCA

    B opens: it is the only sentence with no backward reference. D follows directly — "when such a bridge failed" requires the bridges of B. Then C, whose "therefore" draws the conclusion from B and D together, and which contains the rule. A is last, because "such a rule" points at the rule C has just described. BDCA. Option C (BDAC) is the near-miss and is the one to reason past: it places "such a rule" before any rule has been mentioned, and a backward reference with nothing behind it is the only error a jumble can actually contain.