Question: The five sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) given in this question, when properly sequenced, from a coherent paragraph. Each sentence is labelled with a number. Decide on the proper order for the sentences and key in this sequence of five numbers as your answer.
The study suggests that the disease did not spread with such intensity, but that it may have driven human migration across Europe and Asia.
The oldest sample came from an individual who lived in southeast Russia about 5,000 years ago.
The ages of the skeletons correspond to a time of mass exodus from today’s Russia and Ukraine into western Europe and central Asia, suggesting that a pandemic could have driven these migrations.
In the analysis of fragments of DNA from 101 Bronze Age skeletons for sequences from Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the disease, seven tested positive.
DNA from Bronze age human skeletons indicate that the black plague could have emerged as early as 3,000 BCE, long before the epidemic that swept through Europe in mid–1300s.
The first clue is that sentence 5 starts the paragraph as it introduces the theme and that it is followed by sentence 4. This gives us the beginning of the paragraph as 5-4. After this, the question becomes difficult as the link to the next sentence is not very clear. However, sentence 1 comes immediately after the 5-4 pair because “the epidemic that swept through Europe” in sentence 5 is now continued in sentence 1 after the interruption of sentence 4. Sentence 4 cannot be placed anywhere else in the paragraph. So, we get the 5-4-1 sequence. After this, it is easy to see that sentence 2 and 3 come next in that order. Sentence 2 states that the oldest sample was of 5000 years ago and sentence 3 says that this age corresponds to a time of mass exodus.