CAT Odd One Out Questions & Solutions

A sample of real CAT Odd One Out past-year questions, each with a worked solution and the correct answer highlighted. AthenaPrep has 48 Odd One Out questions in all — sign up free to practise them timed.

1. Q1.CAT 2025

   Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

   1. About half of all the oxygen we breathe is made near the surface of the ocean by phytoplankton that photosynthesize just like land-dwelling plants.

   2. A team of scientists that includes Boston University experts has discovered they also produce oxygen on the seafloor.

   3. The research team used deep-sea chambers that land on the seafloor and enclose the seawater, sediment, polymetallic nodules, and living organisms.

   4. The discovery is a surprise considering oxygen is typically created by plants and organisms with help from the sun—not by rocks on the ocean floor.

   5. The deep-sea rocks, called polymetallic nodules, don’t only host a surprising number of sea critters.

   Answer: 3

2. Q2.CAT 2025

   Five jumbled sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence out and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

   1.Sporting a copper-coloured pixie cut and a pair of pink feather antlers, Torres himself resembles a child’s doodle.
   2.His casual millennial delivery, peppered with “um”s and “ah”s, makes surreal concepts sound like items on a brunch menu.
   3.Though he may have failed so far in his colour-scouting mission (he hasn’t yet found a new one, he admits), this hour leaves you tickled pink.
   4.Like his previous show, My Favourite Shapes, this is an hour of sit-down comedy aided by an overhead camera which relays Torres’s theories - illustrated with crayon squiggles - on to a screen behind him.
   5.His inquisitive mind produces interconnected ideas about Catholicism, the blandness of Pixar and what orange sounds like, while his insights train us to spot “highly purple behaviour”.

   Answer: 3

3. Q3.CAT 2024

   Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

   1. Urbanites also have more and better options for getting around: Uber is ubiquitous; easy-to-rent dockless bicycles are spreading; battery-powered scooters will be next.
   2. When more people use buses or trains the service usually improves because public-transport agencies run more buses and trains.
   3. Worsening services on public transport, terrorist attacks in some urban metros and a rise in fares have been blamed for this trend.
   4. It seems more likely that public transport is being squeezed structurally as people’s need to travel is diminishing as a result of smartphones, videoconferencing, online shopping and so on.
   5. There has been a puzzling decline in the use of urban public transport in many countries in the west, despite the growth in urban populations and rising employment.

   Answer: 2

4. Q4.CAT 2023

   Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

   1. Having an appreciation for the workings of another person’s mind is considered a prerequisite for natural language acquisition, strategic social interaction, reflexive thought, and moral judgment.
   2. It is a ‘theory of mind’ though some scholars prefer to call it ‘mentalizing’ or ‘mindreading’, which is important for the development of one's cognitive abilities.
   3. Though we must speculate about its evolutionary origin, we do have indications that the capacity evolved sometime in the last few million years.
   4. This capacity develops from early beginnings in the first year of life to the adult’s fast and often effortless understanding of others’ thoughts, feelings, and intentions.
   5. One of the most fascinating human capacities is the ability to perceive and interpret other people’s behaviour in terms of their mental states.

   Answer: 2

5. Q5.CAT 2023

   Five jumbled up sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd sentence and key in the number of that sentence as your answer.

   1. Boa Senior, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.
   2. The indigenous population has been steadily collapsing since the island chain was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.
   3. Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.
   4. The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's oldest cultures.
   5. Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Senior spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.

   Answer: 2

6. Q6.CAT 2021

   Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:

   1. The care with which philosophers examine arguments for and against forms of biotechnology makes this an excellent primer on formulating and assessing moral arguments.
   2. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why: what is wrong with re-engineering our nature?
   3. Breakthroughs in genetics present us with the promise that we will soon be able to prevent a host of debilitating diseases, and the predicament that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to enhance our genetic traits.
   4. To grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions that verge on theology, which is why modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them.
   5. One argument is that the drive for human perfection through genetics is objectionable as it represents a bid for mastery that fails to appreciate the gifts of human powers and achievements.

   Answer: 1

7. Q7.CAT 2020

   Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
   

   1. For feminists, the question of how we read is inextricably linked with the question of what we read.
   2. Elaine Showalter’s critique of the literary curriculum is exemplary of this work.
   3. Androcentric literature structures the reading experience differently depending on the gender of the reader.
   4. The documentation of this realization was one of the earliest tasks undertaken by feminist critics.
   5. More specifically, the feminist inquiry into the activity of reading begins with the realization that the literary canon is androcentric, and that this has a profoundly damaging effect on women readers.

   Answer: 3

8. Q8.CAT 2020

   Five jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Four of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out and key in the number of the sentence as your answer:
   

   1. You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data.
   2. Economists and technologists believe that a new kind of capitalism is being created - different from industrial capitalism as was merchant capitalism.
   3. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights.
   4. There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance, a different dynamic growing up: information as a social good, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced.
   5. Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied and pasted infinitely.

   Answer: 2

9. Q9.CAT 2019

   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. A particularly interesting example of inference occurs in many single panel comics.
   2. It’s the creator’s participation and imagination that makes the single-panel comic so engaging and so rewarding.
   3. Often, the humor requires you to imagine what happened in the instant immediately before or immediately after the panel you’re being shown.
   4. To get the joke, you actually have to figure out what some of these missing panels must be.
   5. It is as though the cartoonist devised a series of panels to tell the story and has chosen to show you only one - and typically not even the funniest.

   Answer: 2

10. Q10.CAT 2018

    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. Translators are like bumblebees.
    2. Though long since scientifically disproved, this factoid is still routinely trotted out.
    3. Similar pronouncements about the impossibility of translation have dogged practitioners since Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta, published in 1424.
    4. Bees, unaware of these deliberations, have continued to flit from flower to flower, and translators continue to translate.
    5. In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan pronounced the flight of the bumblebee to be aerodynamically impossible.

    Answer: 2

11. Q11.CAT 2018

    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 the number in:

    1. Our smartphones can now track our diets, our biological cycles, even our digestive systems and sleep-patterns.

    2. Researchers have even coined a new term, “orthosomnia”, to describe the insomnia brought on by paying too much attention to smartphones and sleep-tracking apps.

    3. Sleep, nature’s soft nurse, is a blissful, untroubled state all too easily disturbed by earthly worries or a guilty conscience.

    4. The existence of a market for such apps is unsurprising: shift work, a long-hours culture and blue light from screens have conspired to rob many of us of sufficient rest.

    5. A new threat to a good night’s rest has emerged - smart-phones, with sleep-tracking apps.

    Answer: 3

12. Q12.CAT 2017

    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.

    1. The water that made up ancient lakes and perhaps an ocean was lost.
    2. Particles from the Sun collided with molecules in the atmosphere, knocking them into space or giving them an electric charge that caused them to be swept away by the solar wind.
    3. Most of the planet's remaining water is now frozen or buried, but clues over the past decade suggested that some liquid water, a presumed necessity for life, might survive in underground aquifers.
    4. Data from NASA's MAVEN orbiter show that solar storms stripped away most of Mars's once-thick atmosphere.
    5. A recent study reveals how Mars lost much of its early water, while another indicates that some liquid water remains.

    Answer: 1

CAT Odd One Out previous year questions with solutions — AthenaPrep