CAT 2024 Slot 3 · VARC · Question 16

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.