Given below are six sentences taken from a paragraph. The first and the last sentences are numbered S1 and S2 and are placed in the first and last positions respectively and are fixed in their positions. The other four sentences between the first and last sentences are jumbled up and are numbered A, B, C, and D. Rearrange the jumbled sentences in a logical sequence keeping the unity and coherence of the paragraph intact. Choose the correct alternative that best describes the sequence.
S1. The widow living with the zamindar Sharadashankar's family, in the big house at Ranihat, had no blood relatives left.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
Correct Answer
CADB
Explanation
This paragraph is an excerpt from Rabindranath Tagore's classic short story, The Living and the Dead. The logical flow relies entirely on establishing the widow's sense of extreme isolation, moving systematically through her background before introducing a single point of emotional connection:
Sentence S1 establishes the baseline situation: a widow living with a zamindar's family who has no blood relatives left.
Sentence C directly follows S1 by clarifying what happened to the blood relatives mentioned in the opening sentence—one by one, they had died.
Sentence A expands the scope of her loneliness to her husband's family, noting that she also has no direct heirs or spouse there to call her own.
Sentence D uses the contrastive conjunction "But" to present the single exception to her complete isolation: a little boy (her brother-in-law's son) who was the apple of her eye.
Sentence B concludes the jumbled sequence by providing the backstory for this specific relationship, explaining that because his own mother was ill for a long time after birth, his Aunt Kadambini raised him.
Key Points
Always track the structural pronouns and transitional words when ordering a paragraph. The phrase "one by one they had died" in sentence C perfectly matches the "no blood relatives left" in sentence S1. Similarly, the mention of "a little boy" in sentence D is mandatory to give meaning to the pronoun "His mother" at the start of sentence B.