IPMAT Indore 2024 · Verbal Ability · Question 28

Step 1 — note that the blank is the opening sentence, and the second sentence begins:

“This happened after a lorry … went missing.”

So the blank must name a state of affairs that the lorry’s disappearance caused. The pronoun This needs a situation to refer to, not an event that is itself part of the story.

Step 2 — test option (b). “Panic and confusion reigned among traders in the Kolar agricultural produce market” ✔

It is a reaction — exactly what “This happened after…” requires.

It introduces the traders, who are referred to as “the three traders” and “The traders” in the sentences that follow. An opening sentence must introduce the players before they are referred to with the definite article.

It supplies the location (Kolar), which the paragraph never otherwise establishes.

Step 3 — eliminate.

(a) A market-ranking fact with no connection to a theft, and nothing for This to point at.

(c) Contradicts sentence 4, which says the traders “were not sure if the truck had been hijacked”. The paragraph treats the hijacking as unresolved; this option states it as fact — and as the opening line, it would give away an ending the paragraph deliberately withholds.

(d) True to the story but chronologically and logically wrong for the opening. Hiring the lorry happened before the lorry went missing, so “This happened after a lorry went missing” would be nonsense.

Answer: Option 2

Shortcut. When the blank is the first sentence, read the second one for its pronoun. “This happened after…” tells you the blank is a consequence, not a background fact.

That single test disposes of (a) and (d) — both are prior or unrelated facts — and (c) fails on contradiction.

Two further opener tests worth internalising:

Definite articles later in the paragraph (“the traders”) mean those people must be introduced in the opener.

An opener never resolves the paragraph’s central uncertainty. Option (c) answers the very question sentence 4 poses.