Question 1606 : 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.
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.
Video Explanation
Explanatory Answer
Here, Sentences 1, 4, and 5 discuss the general theme of how non-experts or forecasters without specialized
expertise can make accurate predictions, often outperforming experts. Sentence 3 adds context by highlighting
that this success occurs even when experts have access to classified information.
Contrarily, Sentence 2 shifts the focus to the “intelligence community's interest in forecasting models” rather
than continuing the discussion on the accuracy and success of forecasters versus experts. This makes it
unrelated to the main flow of the paragraph.
Let us examine the points presented in each sentence to further understand how the statements link. Sentence
1 introduces the main idea that forecasting is appealing because it works even without requiring specialized
expertise. Building on this idea, Sentence 5 highlights that non-experts can often outperform experts in
forecasting; this, in a way, relates to the appeal of forecasting introduced in the first sentence. Sentence 4
provides evidence to support the claim made in Sentence 5. It refers to a specific study where non-experts
outperformed experts in predicting geopolitical events, solidifying the argument that non-expert forecasting can
be more reliable. Sentence 3 strengthens the previous claim by highlighting that the experts, despite having
access to classified intelligence, were still outperformed by non-experts. In this manner, the arrangement 1-5-4-
3 renders a coherent paragraph.
Hence, Sentence 2 is the odd one out.