A. In a bid to placate the associate members, the ICC has decided to increase…
2024
A. In a bid to placate the associate members, the ICC has decided to increase the number of participating teams to 16 in the Twenty20 World Cup, as the game's governing body feels these countries will have a greater chance of competing on an equal footing in cricket's shortest format.
B. It is convenient just now to forget that in the last edition of the tournament, considerable criticism was heaped on the governing body for the inordinate length of the tournament, thanks in large part to the presence of the associates.
C. To be fair to the ICC, criticism of the move to restrict the number of teams in the next edition of the Cup is a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
D. The ICC's decision to restrict the number of teams in the 2015 World Cup has evoked mixed responses, with opinion divided among players of the full member teams.
E. Not surprisingly, the associate members aren't too thrilled about the idea of being kept out of cricket's showpiece event.
- A.
ECDAB
- B.
BAECD
- C.
DACEB
- D.
DEACB
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Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: D
Concept: In a sentence-rearrangement question, the opening sentence must stand on its own — it introduces the topic without a pronoun, a definite reference, or a reaction word (‘not surprisingly’, ‘in a bid to...’) that presupposes something the reader hasn't been told yet. Every later sentence is then locked into place by the referent or transition it needs: a phrase such as ‘the associate members’ or ‘to be fair’ only makes sense once the sentence supplying that referent has already been read.
Application: Sentence D stands alone — it states the ICC's decision to restrict the number of teams in the 2015 World Cup and the mixed responses it drew — so D opens the passage. Sentence E follows directly: ‘Not surprisingly’ reacts to exactly the discontent that D's mixed responses imply, naming the associate members as the unhappy party. Sentence A comes next: its opening clause, ‘In a bid to placate the associate members’, needs the associate members' discontent already on the table, which E has just supplied, and reports the ICC's countermeasure — raising the T20 World Cup to 16 teams. Sentence C then reframes the discussion with ‘To be fair to the ICC’, introducing a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don't’ contrast. Sentence B completes that contrast: it recalls that keeping the associates in the previous edition drew criticism for the tournament's length — the other half of the dilemma C names — so B closes the passage.
Cross-check: Testing the two rival D-openings against the opener rule confirms the order: DACEB fails because it places A directly after D, but A's ‘the associate members’ still has no antecedent at that point — only E, not D, tells the reader who the associate members are and why they matter. The remaining two options, ECDAB and BAECD, fail even earlier, since ‘Not surprisingly’ and ‘It is convenient just now to forget’ cannot open a passage. This leaves D-E-A-C-B, i.e. the order DEACB, as the only sequence in which every reference is resolved before it is used.