EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 3 of 120

Correct — A, (a) QPSR. That sequence gives 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that people in dire need reach out to their friends and family for assistance.' One feature of the parts settles most of this item before any option is read: Q ends in the word 'that'. Here 'that' is a complementiser, the word that introduces a subordinate clause, and a complementiser is a hook — it cannot end a sentence and it cannot be followed by anything except a clause. A clause begins with its subject, and among the remaining parts only P, 'people in dire need', is a noun phrase capable of being a subject. So Q is immediately followed by P, and any sequence ending in Q is dead on sight. Next, that clause needs its predicate, and S, 'reach out to their friends and family', is the only finite verb phrase in the set; its plural verb 'reach' also matches the plural subject 'people'. That gives Q + P + S. R, 'for assistance', is a prepositional phrase of purpose that completes the phrasal verb — one reaches out to someone for something — so it belongs immediately after the verb phrase it completes, at the end. Q, P, S, R is option (a). The sentence also carries a deliberate literary echo: 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that…' is the opening formula of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), which is why the part reads as a complete-sounding unit even though grammatically it is only half a sentence waiting for its clause.

• (b)PSRQ — Eliminated instantly, and it is the option that teaches the rule: it ends with Q, so the sentence closes on the word 'that' — 'People in dire need reach out to their friends and family for assistance it is a truth universally acknowledged that.' A complementiser must be followed by the clause it introduces, so no well-formed English sentence can finish on 'that' in this sense. The first three parts are in a sensible order, which is what makes the option tempting to a candidate who reads left to right and stops when the sense arrives; the last part destroys it.
• (c)QRPS — 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that for assistance people in dire need reach out to their friends and family.' The complementiser rule is respected in letter but not in spirit: 'that' is followed by an adverbial, not by the clause's subject. English will tolerate a fronted purpose phrase inside a subordinate clause, but only with a comma and only when the writer wants to stress it, and here it separates 'for assistance' from 'reach out', the phrasal verb that governs it. The result reads as though the assistance is a condition on the acknowledgement rather than what the people are reaching out for.
• (d)RQPS — 'For assistance it is a truth universally acknowledged that people in dire need reach out to their friends and family.' Opening with R places a purpose phrase before the main clause, where the only thing it can modify is 'is a truth universally acknowledged' — as though the truth were acknowledged in order to obtain assistance. The phrase has been pulled away from 'reach out', the verb whose meaning it completes, and lands modifying a verb it has no business with. Sequences that begin with a stray prepositional phrase are almost always the discarded orders in this set.

A single word decides this item, and it is worth learning as a rule of its own: a part that ends in a subordinating word is a hook, and a hook must be followed by whatever that word introduces. 'That', 'which', 'because', 'although', 'so that', 'whether' — each demands a clause after it, so a part ending in one of them can never be the final part of the sentence, and its successor is fixed to be the beginning of a clause, that is, a subject. In this item, 'it is a truth universally acknowledged that' is also an instance of the anticipatory 'it' pattern that appears in item 2 of the same set: 'it' holds the subject slot while the real subject, the 'that' clause, is extraposed to the end. The rest of the ordering follows from two ordinary adjacency facts — a subject sits next to its verb, and a prepositional phrase sits next to the word it modifies. 'Reach out … for assistance' is a phrasal verb with a purpose complement, so 'for assistance' has exactly one home. Taken together, the hook plus the two adjacencies fix all four positions without reading a single option as a sentence.

The English section of the APFC paper opens with five rearrangement items, and the Commission grades them like every other question on the paper — 2·5 marks for a correct response, a third of that deducted for a wrong one — so they reward a method rather than an ear. This item is the friendliest of the five because one option, (b), can be struck out on sight for ending in 'that', which halves the field before any thinking begins. The habit the paper is training is scanning the parts for structural signals — a dangling conjunction, a stranded preposition, a complementiser, a pronoun whose antecedent has not yet appeared — and treating each as a constraint rather than reading four candidate sentences. The literary allusion is a second, softer signal: a candidate who recognises the Austen opening knows at once that the phrase is a frame awaiting a proposition, not a statement that can stand on its own.

• 'That' as a complementiser introduces a subordinate clause and must be followed by that clause. A jumbled part ending in 'that' therefore can never occupy the last position, and the part that follows it must begin a clause — in practice, must be the clause's subject.
• 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that…' is the opening formula of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, whose first sentence continues '…that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife'. The phrase has since become a stock English idiom for introducing a supposedly self-evident claim.
• The construction is another case of anticipatory 'it': the grammatical subject of the main clause is not 'it' but the whole 'that' clause, moved to the end so that the sentence does not open with a long subject. The same pattern, with an infinitive instead of a 'that' clause, decides item 2 of this set.
• 'Reach out to someone for something' is a phrasal verb with a purpose complement: 'to their friends and family' names who is approached and 'for assistance' names what is wanted. Both belong with the verb, which is why 'for assistance' can only sit at the end of the clause here.
• 'In dire need' post-modifies the noun 'people' — 'dire' meaning extremely serious or urgent — and travels with it as one noun phrase. Post-modifiers of this kind never detach from their head noun in a well-formed rearrangement.

• Ignoring the last word of each part. A part ending in 'that', 'and', 'but' or 'which' constrains what follows it far more sharply than the part's meaning does, and one option here can be eliminated on that basis alone.
• Being satisfied by an option whose first three parts read well. Sequence (b) is sensible for three parts and then closes the sentence on a complementiser; always check the final part before committing.
• Fronting an adverbial because it looks emphatic. Both wrong options (c) and (d) move 'for assistance' away from 'reach out', and in each case the phrase silently attaches to a different verb and changes the claim.

In the APFC English section the rearrangement items are constructed so that at least one option can be killed by a purely structural test — a part ending in a conjunction placed last, a verb phrase with no subject in front of it, a preposition detached from its verb. The remaining options are then separated by attachment: which verb does the floating prepositional phrase modify, and does the intended meaning survive. Expect stock frames and quotable openings to appear as one of the parts, since they read as self-contained units and so make an attractive trap when placed at the end. Vocabulary is not being tested in this set; it is tested in the five items that follow.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Rearrange these parts into the most appropriate sentence: 'in remote districts (P) / it is widely believed that (Q) / for treatment (R) / patients travel to the district headquarters (S)'

  • (a)QSPR
  • (b)SPRQ
  • (c)QPSR
  • (d)RQSP

  Answer(c) QPSR — 'It is widely believed that patients in remote districts travel to the district headquarters for treatment.' Q ends in the complementiser 'that', so it cannot be last and must be followed by the subject of the clause; here the subject noun phrase is split, with S carrying the head noun and P its post-modifier, and R is the purpose complement of 'travel', which belongs at the end.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following sentences is NOT well formed?

  • (a)It is well known that the scheme was withdrawn in 2019.
  • (b)The scheme was withdrawn in 2019, it is well known that.
  • (c)That the scheme was withdrawn in 2019 is well known.
  • (d)The scheme, it is well known, was withdrawn in 2019.

  Answer(b) The scheme was withdrawn in 2019, it is well known that — the sentence ends on the complementiser 'that' with no clause after it. Option (a) is ordinary extraposition, option (c) puts the 'that' clause in subject position without extraposition, and option (d) uses 'it is well known' as a parenthetical comment clause; all three are well formed.