EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 17 of 120

Correct — B, (b) 'indigent'. The phrase printed in italics in this stem is 'the poverty-stricken', and the Directions governing items 16 to 20 ask for the option that best describes it. Two features of the phrase settle the item. The first is intensity. 'Stricken' is the old past participle of 'strike', used of being afflicted or struck down — the same element that gives 'grief-stricken', 'panic-stricken' and 'terror-stricken' — so 'poverty-stricken' does not mean short of money but afflicted by poverty, destitute. The word that matches that force is 'indigent', which means lacking the means of subsistence, and whose noun 'indigence' is the standard term for want at that level; it comes from the Latin 'indigere', to be in need. The second feature is register. The sentence is written in the language of government policy and lists the classes of people it addresses in a formal series — 'the homeless, the unemployed and the poverty-stricken sections of society' — and 'indigent' belongs to precisely that register, being the term Indian civil procedure uses for a litigant who cannot pay the prescribed court fee. All four options are bare adjectives that would fit the sentence grammatically, so the item cannot be settled by fit; it is settled by which option matches both the severity and the formality of the phrase, and only (b) matches both.

• (a)needy — True but too weak, and this set is answered on precision rather than on truth. 'Needy' covers everyone who lacks something necessary, from a family that cannot meet a month's rent to one that has nothing at all, whereas 'poverty-stricken' locates a person at the severe end of that range. 'Needy' has also acquired a second, quite different sense in modern usage — emotionally demanding of attention — which pulls it further from the formal policy register of the sentence. Where one option names the general condition and another names the acute form of it, an item asking what a phrase best describes wants the acute one.
• (c)disadvantaged — Names the wider category to which poverty belongs rather than poverty itself. A person may be disadvantaged by disability, by caste, by living far from a school or a hospital, or by an interrupted education, without being poor at all, and public policy uses the word exactly because it reaches all of these. The italicised phrase names one species of disadvantage and names it in its severest form, so an option covering the whole genus describes it too loosely. Genus-for-species is one of the two standard ways this set builds a defensible wrong answer, the other being an intensity mismatch as in option (a).
• (d)challenged — Belongs to a different subject altogether. In current English 'challenged' is a euphemistic formation attached to disability — physically challenged, visually challenged — and it carries no implication of poverty. It also cannot stand alone in the way the other options can: 'the challenged sections of society' would leave a reader asking 'challenged in what respect?', because the word needs the modifier that names the impairment. Nothing in the sentence concerns disability; the list is about housing, employment and income.

This item is decided on two axes that run through the whole of the last set: intensity and register. Intensity is the difference between a word for a condition and a word for its severe form — needy against indigent, tired against exhausted, angry against incensed. English marks severity lexically, and a compound built on 'stricken' is always at the severe end, because 'stricken' means struck down, afflicted. Register is the difference between words that belong to the same level of formality as the sentence around them. The sentence here is written in policy language, complete with the nominalised classes 'the homeless' and 'the unemployed' — the construction of 'the' plus an adjective standing for a whole class of people — and 'indigent' is the word that keeps that level. Beyond the two axes there is a third relation worth naming, because it accounts for option (c): genus and species. 'Disadvantaged' is the genus, covering every kind of structural handicap; poverty is one species within it, and destitution is the acute form of that species. In a question asking what a phrase best describes, the option at the wrong level of generality loses even though it is not false.

The last five items of the APFC English section are all of this shape, and this one is the clearest illustration of what makes them harder than an ordinary synonym question: three of the four options are true of the people the sentence is talking about. Poverty-stricken sections of society are indeed needy, they are indeed disadvantaged, and a policy document might describe them with either word. The item is not asking which words could be applied but which one best describes the italicised phrase, and that turns the exercise into ranking rather than selection. Ranking is best done by naming the axis first — how severe, how formal, how general — instead of comparing the options with each other, since comparison among four near-neighbours tends to end in a coin-toss and a third of a mark is deducted for a wrong response. Note one printing detail: the booklet breaks the italicised compound across a line as 'the poverty-/stricken'. That is line-end hyphenation of an already hyphenated word, not a variant spelling.

• 'Poverty-stricken' means afflicted by poverty, destitute. The element 'stricken' is the old past participle of 'strike' in its sense of afflict, and it appears in the same intensive role in 'grief-stricken', 'panic-stricken' and 'terror-stricken'.
• 'Indigent' means extremely poor, lacking the means of subsistence, and comes from the Latin 'indigere', to be in need; the corresponding noun is 'indigence'. It is a formal word, and Indian civil procedure uses 'indigent person' as a term of art for a litigant unable to pay the prescribed court fee.
• 'Disadvantaged' names the general class of people placed at a structural handicap, whether by disability, caste, location, education or income. Poverty is one species within that genus, so the word is accurate about the sentence's subject and too general to describe the phrase.
• 'Challenged' in current usage is a euphemism bound to disability, as in physically or visually challenged, and it normally requires the modifier that names the impairment. It carries no sense of poverty and does not belong to the subject of this sentence.
• The sentence uses 'the' plus an adjective to name whole classes — the homeless, the unemployed, the poverty-stricken — and all four options are bare adjectives that would fit that frame. Grammatical fit therefore eliminates nothing, and the item is decided on severity and register alone.

• Choosing the option that is merely true. Needy and disadvantaged are both accurate about the people described and neither matches the severity or the specificity of the italicised phrase.
• Ignoring the register of the sentence. A policy sentence listing nominalised classes calls for the formal term, and the informal near-synonym is offered precisely to catch a candidate reading for gist.
• Treating a euphemism as a general-purpose word. 'Challenged' is bound to disability in current usage and says nothing about income or housing.

The italicised-phrase set works by offering four words that a candidate would accept as roughly right, and keying the one that matches the phrase on every dimension at once — severity, register and level of generality. One option is typically the vague general word, one the wider category, and one a word from an adjacent social vocabulary that does not apply at all. Naming the dimension the phrase is marked on before reading the options is the technique that makes the set tractable, and it works uniformly across items 16 to 20.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Choose the option that best describes the phrase in italics: 'The scheme was designed for households that had been left with nothing after the floods and could not meet even a day's expenses.'

  • (a)thrifty
  • (b)destitute
  • (c)underprivileged
  • (d)frugal

  Answer(b) destitute — the phrase describes households left with nothing and unable to meet even a day's expenses, which is want at its most acute, and 'destitute' is the word for exactly that. 'Underprivileged' names the broader category of structural disadvantage; 'thrifty' and 'frugal' describe careful spending by choice, which is a different matter altogether.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In which one of the following sentences is 'indigent' used correctly?

  • (a)The officer was indigent at the suggestion that he had accepted a favour
  • (b)Legal aid is available to indigent litigants who cannot pay the court fee
  • (c)The soil in the district is indigent and yields a single crop a year
  • (d)She gave an indigent reply that ended the discussion

  Answer(b) Legal aid is available to indigent litigants who cannot pay the court fee — 'indigent' means lacking the means of subsistence, and it is the formal term for a litigant in that position. Option (a) needs 'indignant', meaning angry at unfair treatment; option (c) needs a word such as 'poor' or 'infertile' applied to soil; and option (d) needs 'indignant' or 'curt'.