EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 16 of 120

Correct — D, (d) 'the ineffable'. The phrase printed in italics in this stem is 'too great and beautiful to be expressed in words', and the Directions above this item — which govern items 16 to 20 — ask for the option that best describes that phrase. 'Ineffable' means exactly this: too great, too extreme or too sacred to be put into words. Its parts say so — Latin 'in-', not, plus 'effabilis', able to be spoken, from 'effari', to speak out, itself from 'fari', to speak, the root that also gives English 'infant', one not yet able to speak. So the ineffable is, in one word, that which cannot be uttered. The sentence supplies the confirming clue in its verb. The poetry does not state or describe what is too great for words; it 'carries the power to suggest' it, and the whole point of suggestion is that it operates where direct statement fails. What defeats language here is language's own reach, not the reader's ignorance and not any prohibition, and only option (d) locates the barrier there. Note also that all four options use the same construction — the definite article with an adjective, standing for the whole class of things that have that quality, as in 'the sublime' or 'the unknown' — so nothing about their form separates them and the item is decided purely on sense.

• (a)the unknown — Puts the barrier in the wrong place. The unknown is what nobody has apprehended; the ineffable is apprehended perfectly well and simply cannot be said. The sentence makes clear that the poet has hold of the thing — her poetry 'carries the power to suggest' it — so it is not unknown to her, and the reader who receives the suggestion is not being told about something unknown either. This is the strongest of the wrong options because inexpressibility and mystery often travel together, but they are different claims: one is about the limits of language, the other about the limits of knowledge.
• (b)the proscribed — Means what has been forbidden, banned or outlawed. Nothing in the sentence forbids anything; the subject is the beauty of nature and the power of poetry, and the obstacle is that words are not adequate, not that anyone has prohibited their use. The option is also a standing vocabulary trap in its own right, because 'proscribe' — to forbid — is constantly confused with 'prescribe' — to lay down as a rule or to order a remedy. The two are near-opposites, and an examiner offering 'the proscribed' is testing whether the candidate has them straight.
• (c)the intangible — The near-neighbour, and the option most likely to be chosen by a candidate who has the right general area. Intangible means unable to be touched or physically grasped, and it says nothing about whether a thing can be described. Plenty of intangible things are perfectly easy to put into words — goodwill on a balance sheet, a legal right, a change of mood — and the beauty of nature that the poetry captures is anything but immaterial. The italicised phrase names an obstacle to expression, so the answer must be the word whose criterion is expression, not substance.

Items 16 to 20 ask for a single word that names what a whole phrase describes, which is the reverse of the usual vocabulary question: instead of being given a word and asked for its meaning, you are given a meaning and asked for its word. The technique is to state the criterion the phrase sets and then ask which option's criterion is the same. Here the phrase's criterion is expressibility — it is not that the thing is unknown, immaterial or forbidden, but that words are too small for it — so the answer must be the word built on speech, and 'ineffable' is built from the Latin for 'not able to be spoken'. Roots earn their keep in this section: 'fari', to speak, produces effable, ineffable, infant and, through the participle, 'fate', that which has been spoken. Two further points about the construction. All four options are of the form 'the' plus an adjective, a standard English way of naming the class of things possessing a quality — the sublime, the beautiful, the absurd — and it appears again in item 17, where the sentence itself uses 'the homeless, the unemployed'. And the sentence's frame, 'not only … but also', is a correlative pair used for emphasis; its 'not' negates nothing in the question being asked.

This is the first item of the last set in the APFC paper's English section, and the Directions block that governs items 16 to 20 is printed above it, with 'five' in bold and the option letters in italics. The set has a practical difficulty that the earlier ones do not: the phrase being asked about is marked only by italics, and italics do not survive into any plain-text reproduction of the paper. A candidate working from a typed copy of the question rather than from the booklet can be left guessing which part of the sentence is at issue, which is why this card names the phrase explicitly. Within the booklet itself the set is straightforward in form and demanding in vocabulary: four abstract nouns of the same shape, differing only in the criterion each applies. The Commission is testing whether a candidate can hold four near-neighbours apart under time pressure, which is the same skill the vocabulary set at items 6 to 10 tests from the opposite direction.

• 'Ineffable' means too great, too extreme or too sacred to be expressed in words. The noun is 'ineffability' and the adverb 'ineffably'; in religious usage an ineffable name is one too holy to be spoken aloud.
• The word comes from Latin 'ineffabilis' — 'in-', not, with 'effabilis', utterable, from 'effari', to speak out, and ultimately 'fari', to speak. The same root gives 'infant', literally one unable to speak, and 'fate', that which has been spoken.
• 'The' followed by an adjective forms a noun phrase naming the whole class of things with that quality: the ineffable, the unknown, the intangible, the sublime, the poor. All four options in this item use the construction, so grammatical form offers no way to eliminate any of them.
• 'Proscribe' means to forbid or outlaw, and is routinely confused with 'prescribe', which means to lay down as a rule or to order a remedy. The two are close to opposites, and this set uses 'the proscribed' as a distractor precisely to test the distinction.
• 'Not only … but also' is a correlative pair used for emphasis, not a negative construction: the 'not' belongs to the pair and does not make the sentence or the question negative. The item asks what the italicised phrase describes, and nothing in it is asked in the negative.

• Confusing inexpressible with unknown. The poet in this sentence knows what she is pointing at and can suggest it; what she cannot do is say it, and only one option names that limit.
• Settling for 'the intangible' because the subject is abstract. Intangibility is about physical substance, and many intangible things are easy to describe, so the criterion does not match the phrase.
• Reading 'not only … but also' as a negative ask. The 'not' is half of an emphasis construction; the question is entirely positive and asks what the italicised phrase describes.

The last set of the APFC English section gives five sentences, each with a phrase in italics, and asks for the option that best describes the phrase. The options are always four members of one semantic neighbourhood, so eliminating by tone or register does not work; the item is decided by identifying the criterion the phrase applies and finding the option that applies the same one. Expect at least one distractor to be a well-known confusable such as 'proscribed', and expect the sentence's verb — here 'suggest' rather than 'state' — to carry the clue that fixes the criterion.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Choose the option that best describes the phrase in italics: 'The report set out procedures that had never been written down anywhere but that every officer in the division followed without question.'

  • (a)the codified
  • (b)the tacit
  • (c)the obsolete
  • (d)the discretionary

  Answer(b) the tacit — the phrase describes rules that are understood and obeyed without being stated, which is what 'tacit' means, from the Latin for silent. 'Codified' says the opposite, since the procedures were never written down; 'obsolete' would mean disused, and the officers follow them; and 'discretionary' would mean optional, whereas they are followed without question.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following sentences uses 'proscribed' correctly?

  • (a)The physician proscribed a course of antibiotics for the infection.
  • (b)The service rules proscribed the acceptance of gifts from contractors.
  • (c)The syllabus proscribed three chapters of the textbook for the examination.
  • (d)The committee proscribed a new format for the annual return.

  Answer(b) The service rules proscribed the acceptance of gifts from contractors — 'proscribe' means to forbid or outlaw, which is what rules do to gift-taking. The other three sentences all describe laying something down or ordering it — a course of treatment, a set of chapters, a new format — and each of them requires 'prescribed'.