Numerical answer
The four sentences below, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the correct order.
1. Yet the very features that made maps useful for administration — uniform scale, standard symbols, an implied view from nowhere in particular — also made them powerful instruments of erasure, silently omitting whatever the mapmaker's sponsor had no interest in recording.
2. Before printed maps became common, most people navigated their surroundings through memorised routes, oral landmarks and oral descriptions passed between travellers rather than through any single authoritative document.
3. A river might vanish from the map the moment it stopped mattering to the taxman, regardless of whether it still mattered to the people who lived beside it.
4. The rise of state-sponsored cartography from the sixteenth century onward changed this, replacing scattered local knowledge with a single standardized representation that a distant ruler could consult without ever visiting the territory it depicted.
1. Yet the very features that made maps useful for administration — uniform scale, standard symbols, an implied view from nowhere in particular — also made them powerful instruments of erasure, silently omitting whatever the mapmaker's sponsor had no interest in recording.
2. Before printed maps became common, most people navigated their surroundings through memorised routes, oral landmarks and oral descriptions passed between travellers rather than through any single authoritative document.
3. A river might vanish from the map the moment it stopped mattering to the taxman, regardless of whether it still mattered to the people who lived beside it.
4. The rise of state-sponsored cartography from the sixteenth century onward changed this, replacing scattered local knowledge with a single standardized representation that a distant ruler could consult without ever visiting the territory it depicted.
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Answer: 2413
Sentence 2 sets the baseline: pre-map navigation relied on oral, local knowledge. Sentence 4 introduces the change — state cartography replacing that local knowledge with a standardized document. Sentence 1 then pivots ('Yet') to the cost of this standardization: erasure of whatever the sponsor didn't care about. Sentence 3 gives a concrete illustration of that erasure (a river vanishing once it stops mattering to the taxman), so it must follow the general claim in sentence 1. Order: 2-4-1-3.
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