EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 9 of 120

Correct — D, (d) 'A chance event'. The word underlined in the booklet is 'serendipitous', and the Directions governing items 6 to 10 ask for the option closest in meaning to it. 'Serendipitous' describes something that comes about by accident rather than by design, and that turns out well; the noun 'serendipity' names the faculty of finding valuable things one was not looking for. The word therefore carries two components — an unsought, accidental origin, and a happy result — and the item is decided by asking which component distinguishes it from everything else. That component is chance. Plenty of good things are not serendipitous: a promotion earned by three years of work is fortunate and entirely planned. Nothing that was arranged can be serendipitous, however well it turns out. So 'a chance event' names the part of the meaning that only this word supplies, which is what 'closest in meaning' asks for. The sentence points the same way. An 'encounter with the man on the bus' is the very type of the unplanned meeting — a stranger, a public vehicle, no appointment — and what the sentence then reports is that it 'was to have a profound impact on my life'. A profound impact is not the same as a happy one; the sentence supplies clear evidence of accident and no evidence at all about whether the consequence was welcome. On the evidence actually printed, the accidental origin is the sense the sentence is built to display.

• (a)Fortunate — The closest of the wrong options, and the one a well-prepared candidate can lose the mark to, because good fortune genuinely is part of the word's usual force. It fails as the closest match on two counts. First, it names the component serendipity shares with many other things — any lucky outcome, planned or unplanned, is fortunate — while saying nothing about the accidental origin that makes an event serendipitous rather than merely lucky. Second, the sentence gives it no support: the encounter 'was to have a profound impact', and a profound impact may be for good or ill. Where one option names a word's distinctive component and another names an evaluation it shares with its neighbours, the distinctive one is the answer.
• (b)Of historical significance — Confuses personal importance with public importance. The sentence says the encounter mattered greatly to the speaker's own life, which is a private consequence; 'of historical significance' would make it an event of record, mattering to a community or a period. Nothing in 'serendipitous' concerns scale or posterity at all — a chance find of a coin in a drawer is serendipitous and of no historical significance whatever. The option is built out of the phrase 'profound impact' rather than out of the underlined word.
• (c)Sudden and abrupt — Names the speed of an event rather than the way it came about, and the two are independent. A scheduled demolition is sudden and entirely planned; a chance correspondence that begins with a misdirected letter and unfolds over years is serendipitous and not sudden at all. 'Serendipitous' answers the question 'how did this come to happen?' with 'by accident, and to my benefit'; it says nothing about how quickly it happened. The option appeals to a candidate who has grasped that the word means 'unexpected' and has then slid from unexpected to abrupt.

'Serendipitous' is a word with a compound meaning, and compound meanings are what make a closest-in-meaning item hard, because a distractor can be built from each component. The two components here are the accidental origin and the welcome outcome. Sorting them is a general skill: when a word means 'X and Y', ask which of X and Y the word alone contributes. Many things are fortunate; only the unsought ones are serendipitous, so chance is the load-bearing half. The word's history makes the point vividly. Horace Walpole coined 'serendipity' in a letter of 1754, taking it from the Persian tale of the Three Princes of Serendip — Serendip being an old name for Sri Lanka — whose heroes, he wrote, 'were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of'. The formula contains both halves: accident supplies the encounter, sagacity supplies the ability to see what it is worth. That is also why the word is so at home in the history of science, where the stock example is Alexander Fleming noticing in 1928 that mould contaminating a culture plate had killed the bacteria around it, an observation that led to penicillin.

This is the fourth of the five vocabulary items governed by the Directions block above item 6, and it is the subtlest of the set. Three of the five items in the set can be settled by knowing what the word means; this one can be got wrong by a candidate who knows exactly what it means, because two options each capture a genuine part of the sense and only one captures the part that is distinctive. That is the level of discrimination the APFC English section is pitched at, and it changes how the options should be read. The instruction is 'closest to the meaning', not 'a true statement about the word', so the test to apply is subtractive: for each option, ask whether something could satisfy it without being serendipitous. A fortunate event easily can. A chance event that turned out well cannot. With 2·5 marks on the item and a third of that deducted for a wrong response, the candidate who applies that test converts a coin-toss into a decision.

• 'Serendipitous' means occurring or discovered by chance in a happy or beneficial way. The related noun is 'serendipity', the faculty or fact of finding valuable things one was not looking for, and the adverb is 'serendipitously'.
• Horace Walpole coined 'serendipity' in a letter written in 1754, from the Persian fairy tale of the Three Princes of Serendip — Serendip being an old name for Sri Lanka — whose princes were 'always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of'.
• The meaning has two components, an unsought origin and a welcome result. In a closest-in-meaning item, the option naming the component that is unique to the word beats the option naming the component it shares with its neighbours, which is why 'a chance event' beats 'fortunate' here.
• Serendipity is distinct from mere luck in requiring that the finder recognise the value of what chance has put in the way. Walpole's 'sagacity' is doing that work, and it is why the standard scientific example — Fleming's 1928 observation of a contaminated culture plate that led to penicillin — counts as serendipity rather than accident.
• The sentence in this item supplies evidence for the accidental component and none for the evaluative one: a chance meeting with a stranger on a bus is unplanned by definition, whereas 'a profound impact on my life' is neutral as to whether the consequence was good or bad.

• Picking the evaluative half of a compound meaning. 'Fortunate' is genuinely part of what 'serendipitous' conveys, and it is still not the closest match, because it is true of countless planned events as well.
• Sliding from 'unexpected' to 'sudden'. The word describes how an event came about, not how fast it arrived, and an option about abruptness tests exactly that slide.
• Reading the consequence clause as evidence about the option. 'A profound impact on my life' establishes importance, not good fortune and not historical significance, though two options are built to be chosen from it.

Where the underlined word carries two components of meaning, the APFC examiner reliably offers one option per component and keys the distinctive one. The remaining two options are usually built from the surrounding sentence rather than from the word — here, from 'profound impact' — which is why an option can feel supported by the passage and still be answering the wrong question. Expect at least one item per five-item set to turn on this, and expect the correct answer to be the option that could not be true of anything the word does not describe.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Choose the option closest in meaning to the underlined word: 'The archivist made a serendipitous find while cataloguing an unrelated collection of estate papers.'

  • (a)a discovery made by chance while looking for something else
  • (b)a discovery of great commercial value
  • (c)a discovery made after years of deliberate search
  • (d)a discovery that was later shown to be a forgery

  Answer(a) a discovery made by chance while looking for something else — the word names an unsought find, and the sentence supplies the classic setting for one, a cataloguer working on an unrelated collection. Option (c) states the opposite of chance, while options (b) and (d) add claims about value and authenticity that the word says nothing about.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following pairs of words is closest in meaning to each other?

  • (a)fortuitous and inevitable
  • (b)adventitious and accidental
  • (c)providential and premeditated
  • (d)incidental and deliberate

  Answer(b) adventitious and accidental — both describe something arising from outside the normal course, by chance rather than by design. 'Fortuitous' in its strict sense means happening by chance and so is the opposite of inevitable; 'providential' means occurring by a fortunate intervention and is the opposite of premeditated; and 'incidental' means occurring as a minor accompaniment, the opposite of deliberate.