Sentences of a paragraph are given below in jumbled order. Arrange the sentences in the correct order to form a meaningful and coherent paragraph. A.The door of the flat was ajar. B.The taxi stopped. C.Mr. Satterthwaite flung himself out and raced up the stone stairs to the second floor like a young athlete. D.He pushed it open, and the great voice welcomed him.
- (a)ABCD
- (b)BCAD
- (c)DCBA
- (d)BACD
Answer
Why
Correct — B. Follow the back-references.
D says he pushed it open. The it is the door that A introduces, and the he is Mr. Satterthwaite, named in C, so D comes after both.
C has him fling himself out and race up the stairs. He can only fling himself out of the taxi that stops in B, so C follows B.
A, the door standing ajar, is what he finds at the top of the stairs, just before D pushes it: B-C-A-D, option (b).
Why the others are wrong
- (a)ABCD — ABCD opens at a flat door that no earlier sentence has brought us to, and it leaves C flinging himself out of a taxi that has not yet arrived.
- (c)DCBA — DCBA begins with he pushed it open, so both pronouns arrive before the man and the door have been named at all.
- (d)BACD — BACD notices the door on the second floor in A before C has carried him up the stairs. The climb has to come first.
Concept
Para-jumbles are settled by dependencies, not by which story sounds nicer. Two signals do the work here.
Pronouns point backwards. He pushed it open needs one sentence that has named the man and another that has named the door.
Events follow in time. Flinging yourself out needs a vehicle that has already stopped, and pushing a door open needs you to have reached it.
B can open because nothing in it needs an earlier sentence: it has no pronoun, and the events start there. The word the in The taxi stopped is ordinary story-telling English, not a pointer back to something already named.
Key facts
- D's it can only be the door named in A, and its he is the Mr. Satterthwaite named in C, so D comes after both.
- C's leap out needs the taxi that stops in B, so B comes before C.
- A pronoun normally refers back to something already named, which makes pronoun chains the first tool for a jumble.
Study next
Common traps
- Ordering by plot plausibility instead of by pronoun links
- Letting a vivid sentence open the paragraph because it names the character in full
Narrative jumbles also appear at 26 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.17, with the same Mr. Satterthwaite and the key CBAD, and at 11 Sep 2024, 16:00, English Q.2, a homecoming story keyed BCAD.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.