Sentence Placement and Para-Jumbles in CAT: How to Solve Them, With Worked Examples

Four of the eight verbal ability questions in recent CAT papers have been about the order of ideas: para-jumbles, and sentence placement, where you decide where a sentence fits in a paragraph. Para-jumbles are type-in-the-answer questions with no negative marking. Sentence placement questions are multiple choice, so a wrong answer costs a mark. Both can be solved with the same method.

The clues that link sentences

• Pronouns and references: 'this', 'such', 'these findings', 'the latter' point back to something already said.
• Connectors: 'however', 'yet' and 'but' signal a turn; 'therefore' and 'thus' signal a conclusion; 'for instance' needs a general claim before it.
• Introduced names: a full name or definition usually comes before a shortened one.
• Time markers: 'once', 'later', 'by then' and dates give a natural sequence.
• General to specific: a broad claim usually precedes its example, and a question usually precedes its answer.

Para-jumbles: a step-by-step method

1. Find the opening sentence: it introduces the subject and does not depend on anything before it.
2. Look for a mandatory pair: two sentences that must sit together because one refers to the other.
3. Build outward from the pair, using connectors and references.
4. Read the final order once as a paragraph. If one link feels forced, revisit it.

Worked example. (1) The printers, short of money, cut the size of the type to fit more text on each page. (2) The first cheap newspapers in Britain were printed on expensive, heavily taxed paper. (3) Smaller type made the papers harder to read but far cheaper to buy. (4) That trade-off, between legibility and price, shaped the look of newspapers for a century.

Sentence 2 introduces the newspapers and the costly paper, so it opens. Sentence 1 is the printers' response to that cost. Sentence 3 refers to 'smaller type', which needs sentence 1 before it, and sentence 4 names 'that trade-off', which needs sentence 3. The answer is 2134.

Sentence placement: a step-by-step method

1. Read the given sentence first and ask what it needs before it and what it leads to.
2. Read the paragraph and note the role of each gap: after a claim, after an example, before a turn.
3. Test the two most likely gaps by reading the sentences on both sides aloud in your head.
4. Reject any position that breaks a reference: if the sentence says 'this shift', the shift must already have been named.

Worked example. Sentence to place: 'The change was less a technical decision than a cultural one.' If the paragraph describes how a company moved its staff to new software, then notes that employees resisted it for reasons that had nothing to do with the software itself, the sentence belongs right after the move is described and before the discussion of resistance. It names 'the change', so the change must already exist, and it sets up the cultural explanation that follows.

Common traps

• Choosing the order that tells a nice story, rather than the one the references force
• Ignoring a pronoun that has nothing to point to
• In sentence placement, picking the first gap that sounds acceptable without checking the others

How to practise

Do two para-jumbles and two sentence placement questions a day, and write down the clue that settled each one. Then test yourself in full sectional mocks, where these questions sit between long RC sets and you must decide quickly whether to attempt them. Remember that para-jumbles carry no penalty: attempt every one.