Directions (For the next five items) : Fill in the blanks in the following sentences with the most appropriate options given below : The evening looked ________ against the stretched out sky.
- (a)red, beautiful and soul-quenching
- (b)beautiful, red and soul-quenching
- (c)soul-quenching, beautiful and red
- (d)beautiful, soul-quenching and red
Answer
Why
Correct — D, (d) beautiful, soul-quenching and red.
All four options contain the same three adjectives. Nothing separates them but sequence, so the item is a single test of the order in which English strings adjectives before or after a noun - what grammars call the royal order of adjectives.
That order runs, broadly: opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, colour, origin, material, type, purpose. Two of its rungs decide this item.
First, opinion before colour. Adjectives of opinion or evaluation come early in the string; colour comes late, near the noun. 'Beautiful' and 'soul-quenching' are both judgements the speaker is making about the evening; 'red' is an observable property of it. Colour therefore has to sit last of the three. That removes option (a), which opens on the colour, and option (b), which buries it in the middle.
Second, general opinion before specific opinion. Where two evaluative adjectives appear together, the one that could be applied to almost anything comes first, and the one that describes a particular effect or a particular kind of thing comes second. 'Beautiful' is the general judgement - a face, a poem, a bridge or an evening can be beautiful. 'Soul-quenching' is specific: it names what this evening does to the person watching it. So beautiful precedes soul-quenching, which decides between the two options that both end on the colour, and leaves (d).
The result is the sequence a native speaker produces without thinking: general judgement, particular judgement, plain description - 'beautiful, soul-quenching and red'.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)red, beautiful and soul-quenching — This puts the colour first and both judgements after it. English does the reverse: colour belongs to the group of plain, observable properties that sit closest to the noun, and evaluative adjectives are pushed to the front of the string. 'A red beautiful sky' is the classic error that the royal order exists to describe, and it is the same error here in a list joined by 'and'. The sequence also has a second oddity - it interleaves the two judgements around nothing, so that the reader meets the colour, then a general verdict, then a specific one, with no principle running through the list.
- (b)beautiful, red and soul-quenching — This is the most awkward of the four, because it splits the two judgements and drops the colour between them. Strings of adjectives in English are ordered by category, and once a category has been left it is not returned to: a list that runs opinion, colour, opinion crosses the sequence twice. The result is a sentence a native speaker would not produce and, read aloud, one whose rhythm stalls in the middle. Ordering rules feel arbitrary until an option like this one shows what breaking them sounds like.
- (c)soul-quenching, beautiful and red — This is the near-miss and the option worth arguing carefully, because it gets the main rule right: the colour is last, where it belongs, and both judgements come before it. It loses on the finer rule that orders two judgements against each other. A general evaluation that could attach to almost any noun - beautiful, lovely, wonderful - precedes a specific one that describes a particular quality or effect, which is why English says 'a lovely warm evening' rather than 'a warm lovely evening', and 'a beautiful old house' rather than the reverse. 'Soul-quenching' is the specific judgement here, naming the effect the sky has on the watcher, so it follows 'beautiful' instead of leading it. A candidate who chooses (c) has the principal rule and is one rung short of the answer.
Concept
English orders stacked adjectives by category, and the order is fixed enough that departures from it sound wrong to native speakers who have never been taught the rule. The conventional sequence is: opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, colour, origin, material, type, purpose - hence 'a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife', the standard textbook example that runs the whole ladder.
Two refinements matter more than memorising the full ladder.
The first is that opinion adjectives themselves split in two. General opinions - good, bad, lovely, beautiful, nice, strange - can attach to almost any noun and come first. Specific opinions - delicious, comfortable, friendly, soul-quenching - are tied to a particular kind of noun or a particular effect and come second. That sub-rule is what decides this item.
The second is that the rule survives when the adjectives are separated by commas and 'and' rather than simply stacked. Coordinated adjectives feel freer than stacked ones, and to some extent they are, but where the adjectives belong to different categories the same preference holds and reversing it still sounds wrong.
The practical test, when a rule is half-remembered, is proximity: the adjective that is most nearly a fact about the noun goes nearest the noun, and the adjective that is most nearly a verdict about it goes furthest away. Colour is a fact. Beauty is a verdict.
This item opens the second five-item set of Part A, and it carries the Directions block that governs the whole set: fill the blanks with the most appropriate option. It is the only item in that set whose four options are permutations of one another rather than four different words, which means the ordering is the entire question - no vocabulary, no meaning, no context beyond the noun and the verb.
That construction is deliberate and worth recognising quickly, because it changes the method. Where four options are different words, the work is semantic; where four options are the same words rearranged, the work is syntactic and the answer is decided by a rule rather than by sense. A candidate who reads all four options for meaning here will find all four equally meaningful and will end up choosing by ear, which is exactly the ear the item is testing.
The adjectives themselves are chosen with some care. Two are evaluative and one is factual, so the main rule bites; and the two evaluative ones sit at different levels of generality, so the sub-rule decides between the two survivors. An item built this way has a single correct answer and a single serious rival, and knowing which rung of the ladder separates them is the whole of the preparation.
Key facts
- The royal order of adjectives in English runs opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, colour, origin, material, type, purpose - and colour sits late in that sequence, close to the noun.
- Where two evaluative adjectives appear together, the general one comes first and the specific one second: 'a lovely warm evening', not 'a warm lovely evening'.
- 'Beautiful' is a general opinion applicable to almost any noun; 'soul-quenching' is a specific opinion naming an effect on the observer, so beautiful precedes it.
- 'Red' is an observable property rather than a judgement, which is why it takes the final position in all the orderings that respect the rule.
- When four options are permutations of the same words, the item is testing a syntactic rule and not meaning, and reading the options for sense cannot separate them.
Study next
Common traps
- Choosing by ear without naming the rule; the ear is reliable for the colour but often not for the order of two judgements.
- Assuming that a list joined by commas and 'and' escapes the ordering rule, when the category-based preference still holds.
- Stopping at the first option that puts the colour last, which leaves two options standing and no way to choose.
- Treating 'soul-quenching' as a general adjective because it is unfamiliar; its specificity is exactly what places it after 'beautiful'.
- Reading permutation options for meaning, which cannot separate four sets built from identical words.
EPFO's fill-in-the-blank set tests one grammatical point per item, and it signals which point through the shape of the option list. Four modal verbs mean the item is about modality; four negated modals mean it is about negative deduction; four intensifiers mean it is about which adverbs a gradable or absolute adjective admits; and four permutations of the same adjectives mean it is about ordering. The set on this paper does all four in five items. The efficient response is to read the four options first, name the grammatical category they share, and only then return to the sentence, because the category tells you which rule to apply and the sentence merely supplies the details.
Related PYQs
EPFO_APFC_2016_Q10Arrange the following to form a grammatically correct sentence : 1. Einstein was 2. although a great scientist 3. weak in Arithmetic 4. right from his school days Select the correct answer using the codes given below :
- (a) 4, 1, 3 and 2
- (b) 2, 1, 3 and 4
- (c) 4, 3, 1 and 2
- (d) 2, 3, 1 and 4
Answer(b) 2, 1, 3 and 4
Asks the candidate to arrange four labelled fragments into a grammatically correct sentence - the same syntactic-ordering task at sentence level rather than within a noun phrase.
EPFO_APFC_2023_Q1Directions : Each of the following five items in this section consists of a sentence, parts of which have been jumbled. These parts are labelled as P, Q, R and S. Given below each sentence are four sequences, namely (a), (b), (c) and (d). You are required to rearrange the jumbled parts to form the most appropriate sentence and mark your response in the Answer Sheet accordingly. before the judge (P) given that he was clearly innocent (Q) was incomprehensible (R) his decision to plead guilty (S)
- (a) SQRP
- (b) QPSR
- (c) QSPR
- (d) SRQP
Answer(c) QSPR
Heads the 2023 paper's jumbled-parts set, where the options are permutations of labelled fragments and the item is decided by structure rather than by meaning.
EPFO_EOAO_2017_Q7Which one of the following parts of the sentence, “As you know that the ignorant are easily duped”, has an error?
- (a) As you know
- (b) that the ignorant
- (c) are easily duped
- (d) No error
Answer(b) that the ignorant
An error-spotting item on 'the ignorant are easily duped', testing whether a candidate can locate a grammatical fault rather than judge a sentence by ear.
Practice
- practice — not a real PYQ
The museum displayed a ________ statue in its central hall.
- (a)bronze ancient magnificent
- (b)magnificent ancient bronze
- (c)ancient magnificent bronze
- (d)magnificent bronze ancient
Answer(b) magnificent ancient bronze - the order runs opinion (magnificent), age (ancient), material (bronze), which is the royal order of adjectives. Every other option moves the material or the age ahead of the opinion.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Which one of the following adjective sequences is correctly ordered ?
- (a)a comfortable lovely old chair
- (b)a lovely comfortable old chair
- (c)an old lovely comfortable chair
- (d)a lovely old comfortable chair
Answer(b) a lovely comfortable old chair - the general opinion 'lovely' precedes the specific opinion 'comfortable', and both precede the age adjective 'old'. (a) reverses the two opinions, and (c) and (d) move age ahead of an opinion adjective.