Verbal Ability – Odd One Out – His idea to use sign language was not

Slot – 1 – VA

His idea to use sign language was not – Video

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Q. Five sentences related to a topic are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a meaningful and coherent short paragraph. Identify the odd one out. Choose its number as your answer and key it in.

1. His idea to use sign language was not a completely new idea as Native Americans used hand gestures to communicate with other tribes.
2. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, observed that men who are deaf are incapable of speech.
3. People who were born deaf were denied the right to sign a will as they were “presumed to understand nothing; because it is not possible that they have been able to learn to read or write.”
4. Pushback against this prejudice began in the 16th century when Pedro Ponce de León created a formal sign language for the hearing impaired.
5. For millennia, people with hearing impairments encountered marginalization because it was believed that language could only be learned by hearing the spoken word

Answer: 2

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Solution: Let us solve this question by linking the sentences logically into a coherent paragraph.
The paragraph is about the prejudices that deaf people encountered in the past before Pedro Ponce de Leon created a formal sign language for the hearing impaired in the 16th century.
Sentence 5 would be the first sentence of the paragraph. It mentions the marginalization that the hearing impaired encountered for millennia and the reason for that marginalization or prejudice – it was believed that language could only be learned by hearing the spoken word.
Sentence 3 extends the thought of prejudice by citing one instance of this prejudice; deaf people were not permitted the right to sign wills.
Sentence 4 with the thought reversal “Pushback against this prejudice” will follow sentence 3 with the mention of a formal sign language created by Pedro Ponce Leon.
Sentence 1 closes the paragraph by stating that Pedro’s idea (of using sign language) was not new. Native Americans used hand gestures as well to communicate with other tribes.
We are left with sentence 2 which does not appear to fit anywhere in the paragraph. It states that the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, observed that deaf people were incapable of speech. This sentence clearly is the odd one out since the paragraph is about the prejudices that the deaf people faced and the attempt to redress this prejudice by the creation of a sign language by Pedro Ponce. The fact that the deaf were also incapable of speech is not of any importance or relevance to the paragraph.
Hence, the correct answer is option 2.

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