Para Jumble: Neolithic Clay Vessels

XAT 2019 · Verbal Ability & Logical Reasoning · Medium · Verbal Reasoning

Read the following statements and answer the question that follows:

  1. They subjected the residues from sherds of the rhyta- vessels to radiocarbon dating to determine their ages and chromatography - mass spectrometry (GC-MS) - to identify their structure and isotopic composition and found that the vessels were used to store cheese.
  2. In many Neolithic sites near the Adriatic Sea, researchers unearthed cone-shaped clay vessels, known as rhyta, with four legs on the bottom and a round opening on the side.
  3. Fresh milk couldn't be kept for long without going bad; cheese, on the other hand, could be stored for months at a time, providing much-needed calories to early farmers between harvests.
  4. Archaeologists who used to assume animals such as cows and goats were mainly used for meat early in their domestication history are thus forced to admit that humans might have been using animals for dairy quite early in their domestication history.
  5. "If you kill one cow, you eat meat for about a week until it goes off; but by milking the animals, the farmer would be spreading the food gain from that animal over several months rather than just one week"

Rank the above five statements so as to make it a logical sequence:

  1. A.

    2, 1, 5, 4, 3

  2. B.

    4, 5, 2, 1, 3

  3. C.

    4, 2, 1, 3, 5

  4. D.

    2, 1, 3, 5, 4

  5. E.

    4, 1, 2, 5, 3

Answer

D

Explanation

Statement 2 introduces the discovery of rhyta. Statement 1 follows by describing how residues on them were analyzed to find cheese. Statement 3 explains why cheese was stored instead of milk. Statement 5 gives a quote illustrating the benefit of dairy vs meat. Statement 4 concludes the implication for archaeologists. Sequence: 2-1-3-5-4.

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