A Brief Note on Passage Rearrangement

What is passage rearrangement?

Today aptitude and language skills are very important for working in any field or discipline. Many competitive exams, banking exams, and Government exams deliberately put questions to test candidates’ analytical and logical reasoning skills as well as vocabulary, grammar, and language-related knowledge. 

Sentence and passage rearrangement is one such section that has become an important part of all these exams. Sentence rearrangement or passage rearrangement is also called para jumbling questions. These questions are asked to assess the candidate’s ability to incorporate given random pieces of information, process, analyze them, and deduce a correct sequence of events to make a meaningful picture or scenario. Students are provided with either random or mixed words in the incorrect order and are expected to make a meaningful sentence out of it. This is called sentence rearrangement. At the same time, most of the questions consist of random, discrete sentences which you have to arrange in proper order or sequence so that at the end, these sentences will make a complete meaningful passage. This is known as passage rearrangement or para jumbling.

The sentences might belong to any subject or discipline. It could be a part of a story or a factual concept of science or geography, or events from history. By looking at the single discrete sentences, you have to identify the context of the given information and then have to arrange the sentences in a respective sequence.

The approach to solving these types of questions is very much like other question patterns in aptitude, language, and reasoning sections. First, read the given words or sentences carefully. Try to get the meaning of a separate entity. Here your vocabulary has to be wide and good enough! 

Then try to interpret the pattern in the given sentences. From this, you will learn the context of the topic from which the random information is taken. Once you deduce the context of the topic, it is quite easy to solve the questions… you have to rearrange the sentences!

Thus the skillset where you have to work hard to get expertise and command on these sentence or passage rearrangement questions are listed here-

• Basic knowledge from various disciplines. For this, you have to enhance your reading habits.
• Analytical skills
• Logical reasoning skills
• Vocabulary
• Grammar
• Language skills, etc.

Let’s discuss one question from passage rearrangement or Para jumbling here.

Example1: here, we have taken apart from a story or novel- The Immortals of Meluha, written by Amish.

Rearrange the given sentences in a proper sequence and make a meaningful passage. 

• If there was a time of weakness for the formidable Gunas, a time when they weren’t a fearsome martial clan,
• It was a well-planned ambush by the Pakratis. 
• The women did their chores by the lakeside.
• Dusk was usually a time when the Guna soldiers took time to thank their gods for a day without a battle.
• But just another mountain tribe trying to survive in a tough, hostile land, this was it.

Now read these sentences first. You might find some of the words new. But let that aside. First, concentrate on the sentences where you can guess the meaning. From these sentences, it is quite clear that there is some description of a tribe and its principles. Some happenings are being narrated. Once this context is clear, now rearrange. 

The complete passage is-

It was a well-planned ambush by the Pakratis. Dusk was usually a time when the Guna soldiers took time to thank their gods for a day without a battle. The women did their chores by the lakeside. If there was a time of weakness for the formidable Gunas, a time when they weren’t a fearsome martial clan but just another mountain tribe trying to survive in a tough, hostile land, this was it.

Example2: now, let’s take a paragraph from information-based, factual concepts from science. The source for the following passage is Homo Deus- Yuval Noah Harari.

Rearrange the given sentences in a proper sequence and make a meaningful passage. 

• According to Epicurus, we are happy when we feel pleasant sensations and are free from unpleasant ones. 
• Bentham’s successor, John Stuart Mill, explained that happiness is nothing but pleasure and freedom from pain and that beyond pleasure and pain, there is no good and no evil.
• On a biological level, both our expectations and our happiness are determined by our biochemistry rather than by our economic, social or political situations. 
• Jeremy Bentham similarly maintained that nature gave dominion over man to two masters- pleasure and pain-and. They alone determine everything we do, say and think. 

Now, here even if you don’t get the complete meaning at the time of the exam, it is fine. From the sentences, it is clear that the passage is about human feelings and scientific explanations for them. So the passage should start from a more general statement and non-quoted facts. 

From the quoted opinions of different persons, you can get the proper sequence by simple logic. For example, if the sentence has w a word similarly (bold format), it means it should be preceded by another sentence on similar lines. Also, if someone’s name is quoted twice, the sequentially first sentence will mention the complete name. But then afterwards, only surname would also work. So considering all these points, the proper arrangement of sentences is as follows: 

On a biological level, both our expectations and our happiness are determined by our biochemistry rather than by our economic, social or political situations. According to Epicurus, we are happy when we feel pleasant sensations and are free from unpleasant ones. Jeremy Bentham similarly maintained that nature gave dominion over man to two masters- pleasure and pain-and. They alone determine everything we do, say and think. Bentham’s successor, John Stuart Mill, explained that happiness is nothing but pleasure and freedom from pain and that beyond pleasure and pain, there is no good and no evil.

So these were just two examples of questions from this section. We hope this will help you to understand the pattern of para jumbling questions.

Conclusion:

Sentence rearrangement and passage rearrangement is an important part of aptitude and other competitive exams. Reading practice, good vocabulary, and reasoning skills are important skills to tackle these questions.