Verbal Ability – Parajumble – Talk was the most common way for enslaved men

Slot – 1 – VA

Q. The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4) given below, when properly sequenced would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequence of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.

1. 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.
2. . Even in conditions of extreme violence and unfreedom, their words remained ubiquitous, ephemeral, irrepressible, and potentially transgressive.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

Answer: 3

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Solutions:
Sentence 1 is about slaves being able to talk and thus subvert the rules of their bondage to some extent.
Sentence 2 continues on the pattern of slaves being able to transgress or violate their bondage with the help of words or talks.
Sentence 5 will follow with slave owners never being able to control the speech of slaves.
Sentence 4 closes the paragraph by stating that the talk of slaves could never really be muted or silenced.
Sentence 3 is about where slaves originated from. It does not say anything about the power of speech among slaves. In fact it does not talk about slaves’ speech at all unlike the other four sentences. Therefore, it is the odd sentence out of the paragraph.
Hence, the correct answer is sentence 3.

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