Question:medium

Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

Updated On: Jul 4, 2026
  • Talk was the most common way for enslaved men and women to subvert the rules of their bondage, to gain more agency than they were supposed to have.
  • Even in conditions of extreme violence and unfreedom, their words remained ubiquitous, ephemeral, irrepressible, and potentially transgressive.
  • Slaves came from societies in which oaths, orations, and invocations carried great potency, both between people and as a connection to the all-powerful spirit world.
  • Freedom of speech and the power to silence may have been preeminent markers of white liberty in Colonies, but at the same time, slavery depended on dialogue: slaves could never be completely muted.
  • Slave-owners obsessed over slave talk, though they could never control it, yet feared its power to bind and inspire—for, as everyone knew, oaths, whispers, and secret conversations bred conspiracy and revolt.
Show Solution

The Correct Option is C

Solution and Explanation

Approach: Run a keyword-cohesion test. Tag each sentence with its core idea; four tags will cluster and one will sit apart.

The cluster: Sentence 1 = talk as subversion of bondage. Sentence 2 = words irrepressible and transgressive under violence. Sentence 4 = slavery "depended on dialogue," slaves never fully silenced. Sentence 5 = owners feared slave talk as a seed of revolt. Every one of these lives inside the colonial slave relationship and treats speech as a contested instrument of power and resistance. They interlock as setup, persistence, dependence and the master's fear.

The outlier: Sentence 3 reaches outside that relationship to the enslaved peoples' homeland cultures, where "oaths, orations, and invocations" linked humans to "the all-powerful spirit world." Its concern is religious and ancestral background, not subversive talk under slavery. The vocabulary (spirit world, invocations) and the temporal frame (before captivity) both diverge.

Conclusion: The sentence that does not fit the paragraph is number 3.
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