EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 2 of 120

Correct — D, (d) QSPR. That sequence assembles 'It is difficult to practise what you preach when your stated principles are at odds with your ground realities.' This item is solved by spotting two forced pairs before looking at a single option. The first is Q + S. Q is 'it is difficult', and the 'it' in that phrase is an anticipatory (dummy) subject: it names nothing, it merely holds the subject position while the real subject — an infinitive clause — waits at the end. Only one part is an infinitive clause, S, 'to practise what you preach'. So 'it is difficult' must be completed by 'to practise what you preach', and nothing may be wedged between them without pushing the reader across the whole sentence holding an unresolved 'it'. The second forced pair is P + R. P is 'when your stated principles' — a subordinator plus a subject noun phrase, with no verb of its own; R is 'are at odds with your ground realities' — a finite predicate with no subject. Each is a half-clause and each supplies exactly what the other lacks, so P is immediately followed by R. That leaves only the question of which block goes first, and the main clause block (Q + S) opens, with the 'when' clause following as the condition under which the difficulty arises. QS + PR = QSPR, option (d). Note that the reverse arrangement — the 'when' clause first, then the main clause — would also be good English, but that sequence is PRQS and the Commission has not printed it; the Directions ask for the most appropriate of the four sequences offered, and (d) is the only one that leaves both forced pairs intact.

• (a)PRSQ — Keeps the second forced pair, P + R, but breaks the first: 'When your stated principles are at odds with your ground realities to practise what you preach it is difficult.' Here the infinitive S has been placed before Q, so the dummy 'it' in 'it is difficult' now points backwards at a clause the reader has already processed. English does allow that shape — 'To practise what you preach, that is difficult' — but only with a pause and a demonstrative, never as a bare run-on. As printed it is a sentence the reader has to re-parse, which is precisely what 'most appropriate' excludes.
• (b)SPRQ — 'To practise what you preach when your stated principles are at odds with your ground realities it is difficult.' This fronts S as a real subject, which English permits in principle — 'To practise what you preach is difficult' is grammatical, if stiff. The failure is that the sequence then also supplies 'it is difficult', so the sentence has two subjects for one predicate: the fronted infinitive and the dummy 'it'. You may have one or the other, never both without a comma-marked dislocation. It also strands the tail 'it is difficult' after a long adverbial clause, so even the intended reading arrives last.
• (c)QPRS — The intended near-miss, and the only wrong option that is fully grammatical: 'It is difficult when your stated principles are at odds with your ground realities to practise what you preach.' Both halves are well formed, but the whole 'when' clause has been driven between the dummy 'it' and the infinitive that resolves it, so the reader carries an unexplained 'it' across eleven words before learning what is difficult. English tolerates this and never prefers it; the extraposed infinitive follows its adjective as closely as the sentence allows. Choosing (c) is the standard error of a candidate who checks only whether an order is possible instead of which order is best.

Two grammatical facts do all the work in this item, and both recur across the whole rearrangement set. The first is extraposition with anticipatory 'it'. In 'It is difficult to practise what you preach', the subject of the sentence is not 'it' but the infinitive clause 'to practise what you preach'; 'it' is a placeholder that English inserts so that the heavy clause can move to the end. The consequence for a jumbled item is a hard adjacency: wherever you see a part reading 'it is difficult', 'it is impossible', 'it is a truth that', you must find the clause it anticipates and set it as close behind as possible. The second fact is that a subordinate clause is built from a subordinator, a subject and a predicate, and an examiner who splits it hands you a free pair — 'when your stated principles' cannot stand without a verb and 'are at odds with your ground realities' cannot stand without a subject. Write down each forced pair before you read the options; a four-part item with two forced pairs collapses to at most two candidate orders, and usually to one.

This is the second of the five rearrangement items that open the APFC General Studies paper, and it is deliberately harder than the first: the wrong option (c) is not merely fluent, it is fully grammatical, and only the principle that an extraposed subject should sit near its anticipatory 'it' separates it from the key. That is characteristic of the English section on this paper — the discrimination is between good and better, not between right and gibberish, so a candidate who has settled for 'this one works' will keep landing on the near-miss. The reading habit that pays here is mechanical and fast: scan the four parts once and mark the fragments that cannot stand alone. In this item three of the four are fragments — 'it is difficult' needs a complement, 'when your stated principles' needs a verb, 'are at odds with your ground realities' needs a subject — and each fragment names its own partner. With a third of a mark deducted for a wrong response, this method matters more than speed: it converts a four-way guess into a two-way decision that a rule can settle.

• Anticipatory or dummy 'it': in 'It is difficult to practise what you preach', 'it' refers to nothing at all and the real subject is the infinitive clause at the end. English strongly prefers this extraposed order to the subject-first 'To practise what you preach is difficult', which is why the key places S immediately after Q.
• A subordinate clause needs a subordinator, a subject and a finite verb. 'When your stated principles' has the first two and 'are at odds with your ground realities' has the third, so the two parts are two halves of one clause and can never be separated by another part.
• 'To be at odds with' is a fixed idiom meaning to be in conflict or disagreement with something. It takes 'with', not 'to' or 'against', and the whole phrase behaves as a single predicate — useful because the part boundary in this item falls exactly at the idiom's edge.
• The booklet prints 'to practise what you preach' with the British verb spelling 'practise'; in British usage 'practise' is the verb and 'practice' the noun, a distinction American English does not observe. The phrase itself is an idiom meaning to act in accordance with what one advocates.
• The order PRQS — 'When your stated principles are at odds with your ground realities, it is difficult to practise what you preach' — is equally idiomatic English but is not among the four printed sequences. The Directions ask for the most appropriate of the options offered, not for the best sentence you can build.

• Accepting the first sequence that parses. Option (c) is grammatical and still wrong; this item type asks which ordering is most appropriate, so a candidate who stops at 'this works' will choose the near-miss more often than the key.
• Separating 'it is difficult' from the infinitive that completes it. The longer the material wedged between the dummy 'it' and its clause, the worse the sentence, and examiners build a distractor out of exactly that gap every time.
• Assuming an adverbial clause must open the sentence because such clauses often do. Here the 'when' clause could open it, and the sequence that does so is simply not on offer — check what has actually been printed before applying a stylistic preference.

Rearrangement items in this section are built so that one part is a fragment demanding a specific partner, and the examiner's best distractor separates that pair while keeping the sentence grammatical. Anticipatory 'it' is one of the two or three constructions that generate such pairs most reliably, along with a bare conjunction opening a part, a pronoun with no antecedent, and a subordinator with no verb. Expect at least one item in any five-item APFC set to hinge on where an extraposed clause or a floating modifier lands rather than on whether an order is legal English, and expect the four options to be sequences of the labels rather than prose, so no option can be eliminated by skimming its wording.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Rearrange these parts into the most appropriate sentence: 'unless the accounts are audited (P) / it is pointless (Q) / by an independent firm (R) / to publish the annual results (S)'

  • (a)PRQS
  • (b)QSPR
  • (c)SQPR
  • (d)QPRS

  Answer(b) QSPR — 'It is pointless to publish the annual results unless the accounts are audited by an independent firm.' The dummy 'it' in Q anticipates the infinitive S, so Q and S must stay together; P is a subordinator plus clause that R completes with its agent phrase, so P and R are the second pair. Option (d) keeps both parts legal but drives the whole 'unless' clause between 'it is pointless' and the infinitive it anticipates.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In which one of the following sentences is 'it' used as an anticipatory subject rather than as a pronoun referring to something?

  • (a)The committee published its report; it ran to three hundred pages.
  • (b)It is essential that every applicant submit two references.
  • (c)She picked up the file and put it on the shelf.
  • (d)The scheme was withdrawn because it had failed.

  Answer(b) It is essential that every applicant submit two references — here 'it' names nothing and merely holds the subject position for the real subject, the 'that' clause at the end. In the other three sentences 'it' is an ordinary pronoun pointing back to a stated noun: the report, the file and the scheme respectively.