English: Odd Sentence – Set 32

Directions (1-10): Choose the odd sentence out of the given five sentences in each question.

1. Pretty much everyone followed their gut; no one was pondering phytosanitary inspections at busy ports.
   Both would be consistent with the pattern of politics since 2016.
   The referendum did little to inform or elevate national debate on all things European. On balance, the leave campaign was the more duplicitous of the two sides, but that is no reflection on the motive or character of leave voters.
   Then, a year later, we got through a general election campaign with little mention of Europe at all.
   Ignorance of the EU was rife among remainers too.
   Option D
   BCEA

    

2. For the record, I am pro-vegan. I put vegans in the category of Mensa members; I always assumed I’d end up there myself, I just didn’t realise how hard it was.
   Veganism is now at the point that it is only honourable to say where you stand on the spectrum – from scorning vegans to being one – before you comment.
   But we won’t know whether or not I’m right until next March, when Jordi Casamitjana will bring a case against his employer, the League Against Cruel Sports, in which he cites discrimination on the basis of his veganism.
   Employers rarely go into tribunals arguing for the right to discriminate; they tend to situate the dispute in the personal failings of the employee.
   This puts it already in the category of “philosophical belief” if, by that, we mean any system of ideas in which there is no objective truth quotient, and we just have to respect that we don’t all feel the same way, and declare our interest.
   Option D
   BECA

    

3. Could there be a better example of their villainous brand of cognitive dissonance than this?
   But this past weekend’s seemingly coordinated series of visits by Tory MPs to food bank drop-off points has reached new heights of cold-bloodedness.
   But, of course, to borrow Raab’s rationale, this food will only be eaten by “someone who has a cashflow problem episodically.”
   I’ve always found the Conservative facility for audaciously brazening out acts of sheer human callousness to be verging on the sociopathic.
   I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are like the serial killers who taunt the families of their victims, but there is something bloodcurdling about such politicians’ willingness to visit, say, a homeless shelter, when they are responsible for cutting housing benefit.
   Option C
   DEBA

    

4. The news that partners of those new and expectant mothers who suffer from depression or anxiety will be offered mental health checks by the NHS is extremely welcome.
   It is good for men, but also a breakthrough for women.
   This change will help to avoid the potentially tragic cases we hear about at the Fatherhood Institute, a UK charity.
   When the father is supportive, his partner is less likely to become ill, and more likely to recover quickly if they do.
   That’s because the NHS is at last recognising not only that men have postnatal issues too, but that the wellbeing of new mothers is deeply dependent on supporting the skills and capacities of their children’s fathers.
   Option D
   ABEC

    

5. And we can analyse some of the emotional effects of bias – sometimes conscious, often unconscious – including the daily assumption that we are not actually British.
   Bias in Britain is a welcome addition to a badly neglected field of inquiry. But here are a few things it can’t do.
   The data reveals that 43% of BAME people feel that they been overlooked for a job or promotion in a manner that felt unfair in the past five years, more than double the proportion of white British people.
   We can now look properly at the practical effects of bias on life in the workplace.
   Contrary to the perception that being a member of an ethnic minority is an advantage in companies seeking to prove their diversity credentials,
   Option B
   DECA

    

6. An extreme wing of the gilets jaunes has turned towards the nihilist detestation of democratic institutions and symbols of success and wealth.
   But while Saturday’s crowd was mostly white (there are many black and brown gilets jaunes) this movement shows, so far, few outward signs of racism or extreme nationalism.
   The great bulk of the movement represents genuine economic and social distress in a peripheral and middle France which, with some reason, says that it is despised and fiscally exploited by the country’s thriving cities.
   Part of the French media suggests that Saturday’s protests were hijacked by ultra-violent sects of the hard right and hard left. This is also misleading.
   All three had no clear or broadly agreed political objective or manifesto. But the comparisons should not be pushed too far.
   Option E
   ABCD

    

7. The first is that there is little hope of people making the connection between individual cases and immigration policy as a whole.
   Perhaps that’s why the sympathetic response to the video was somehow jarring.
   We’ve been heading here for years, decades even – to a place where a refugee can flee a civil war to Britain’s safe shores, only to face another type of barbarism, and become a refugee again.
   The degradation of the country’s political culture continues to play out: it has been poisoned by Brexit, jaundiced by Islamophobia, while anti-immigrant sentiment has been normalised by the Conservative government.
   The hardest thing to come to terms with, watching the video of a Syrian boy being bullied in a Huddersfield school that circulated last week, was the sense of inevitability to it.
   Option A
   EDCB

    

8. I don’t know about that, but I frequently rewatch it to study how great film-making can make any story fly like a wicked witch’s monkey.
   The Wizard of Oz is such a classic film that I don’t remember the first time I saw it.
   A new study claims the film, which went through a staggering run of directors, writers, songwriters and script edits during its production, is the most influential film ever.
   The combination of imaginative anything-is-possible scale and picaresque narrative style is totally cohesive.
   It seemed to be on TV every Christmas during my childhood and became a part of my cultural education, a formative film language.
   Option D
   BECA

    

9. important book. A book about a Cornish fishing community is good news because the county is an oddly overlooked place and we need writers to tell the truth about it.
   Patrick Gale’s novel A Perfectly Good Man (2012) captures the texture of everyday life in the county, while Helen Dunmore’s description of DH Lawrence walking up the hill my dad lives on in St Ives, in her novel Zennor in Darkness (1993), makes my spine tingle.
   Thanks to the Tate gallery, many people know artists have been drawn to my hometown of St Ives for more than a century.
   The area has nurtured great poets, too, with Peter Redgrove and WS Graham living and writing there in the second half of the 20th century.
   Everybody knows that Cornwall boasts a dramatic coastline and beautiful beaches.
   Option B
   AECD

    

10. It makes you think it’s normal, rather than a hard-won, fragile rarity in history.
    That’s what a seven-decade period of general peace and collective prosperity does for you.
    Mummy and Daddy won’t let anything too bad happen to us.
    I experienced all these things when I was growing up in Kenya. Some were routine; the more severe, mercifully less so.
    It makes most people complacent, and turns a small but unfortunately influential number into the kind of adolescent romantics who think you can smash up everything in the house and stick two fingers up to Mummy and Daddy because, no matter what you do, they will always be there to make it right in the end.
    Option D
    BAEC