The question below has six sentences of a paragraph with the first and the…

2023

The question below has six sentences of a paragraph with the first and the last sentence being in the correct place. Rearrange the four sentences A,B,C,D in order to form a coherent paragraph.

1. Horses and communism were, on the whole, a poor match

A. Fine horses bespoke the nobility the party was supposed to despise

B. Communist leaders, when they visited villages, preferred to see cows and pigs.

C. Although a working horse was just about tolerable, the communists were right to be wary.

D. Peasants from Poland to the Hungarian Pustza preferred their horse to party dogma.

6. “A farmer’s pride is his horse: his cow may be thin but his horse must be fat.” went a Slovak saying.

  1. A.

    ACDB

  2. B.

    DBCA

  3. C.

    ABCD

  4. D.

    DCBA

Attempted by 1 students.

Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C

Concept: In a fixed-start/fixed-end paragraph rearrangement, the correct order is the one where every middle sentence connects smoothly to its neighbours through logical/discourse links (cause-and-effect, contrast markers such as ‘although’, and a consistent point of view), carrying a single argument from the given opening sentence to the given closing sentence.

Application — tracing the correct order between sentence 1 and sentence 6:

  1. Sentence 1 states the thesis: horses and communism did not mix well.

  2. Sentence A supplies the specific reason: a fine horse symbolised the nobility that the party was ideologically opposed to — this directly expands on the ‘poor match’ of sentence 1.

  3. Sentence B shows the practical consequence of that reasoning: party leaders avoided the aristocratic symbol and preferred to be seen with cows and pigs when visiting villages.

  4. Sentence C adds a qualifying nuance — even an ordinary working horse (not just a fine, aristocratic one) was still regarded with wariness, deepening the suspicion introduced in A and B.

  5. Sentence D pivots to the peasants’ contrasting view: ordinary people valued their horse over official party dogma, despite all this official suspicion.

  6. That contrast leads naturally into sentence 6, the peasant proverb about pride in one’s horse, which closes the paragraph on the same peasant perspective that D introduced.

Cross-check — why the other sequences break the flow:

  • Sequence ACDB ends the middle block on the leaders’-preference sentence, right before the peasant-pride proverb — reversing the perspective from peasants back to leaders just before the paragraph closes on the peasants’ side.

  • Sequence DBCA opens straight from the thesis into the peasant-preference sentence, referencing ‘party dogma’ before the paragraph has explained what that dogma even was.

  • Sequence DCBA has the same abrupt opening problem as above, and it additionally ends on the nobility-reason sentence, separating that explanation from the peasant material it is meant to set up.

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