Which one of the following parts of the sentence, “Don’t ask him how he is because if he starts talking about his health you’ll never get off from him”, has an error?

Correct — C, (c) get off from him.

The fault is the preposition ‘from’ standing after the particle ‘off’. ‘Off’ already carries the idea of separation — it means ‘away from’ by itself — so putting ‘from’ after it says the same thing twice. That is why English says ‘get off the bus’ and never ‘get off from the bus’, ‘take it off the shelf’ and not ‘off from the shelf’. The doubling is the same kind of redundancy as ‘return back’ or ‘repeat again’, where a word already containing the idea is given a second word to carry it.

The sense the sentence wants is escape from a person, and English has a fixed phrase for it: to get away from someone. ‘You’ll never get away from him’ is what the sentence should read. ‘Get off’ has plenty of uses of its own — to leave a vehicle, to leave work at a given hour, to escape a punishment lightly (he got off with a warning), to leave a subject (let us get off this topic) — but none of them is escape from a person, and none of them takes ‘from’.

So the error can be reached from either end. A candidate who knows the idiom simply hears that ‘get away from’ was needed. A candidate who does not can still see that ‘off’ and ‘from’ are doing one job between them, and that one of the two has to go.

One caution about reading this stem. The quoted sentence begins ‘Don’t ask him…’, but that negative belongs to the speaker being quoted. The question itself is a plain positive one: which of the three printed parts contains an error. The rest of the sentence is sound — the indirect question in the first part and the conditional in the second are both correctly built — and it is worth checking them rather than assuming, because both are places where errors are usually planted.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)Don’t ask him how he is because — ‘Don’t ask him how he is because’ is correct, and it contains the construction most often got wrong in sentences of this shape. When a question is embedded inside another sentence it stops being a question and takes statement word order: how he is, where the office is, what the rule says — not ‘how is he’ or ‘where is the office’. The sentence has it right. The negative imperative ‘Don’t ask’ is also correctly formed, and ‘because’ is doing ordinary work, attaching the reason to the instruction. Nothing in this part can be faulted.
• (b)if he starts talking about his health you’ll never — ‘If he starts talking about his health you’ll never’ is correct on every count. The conditional is the ordinary open one: present simple in the if-clause and ‘will’ in the main clause — if he starts, you will never get away. ‘Start’ followed by the -ing form is standard, and ‘start to talk’ would have been equally acceptable, since ‘start’ takes either. The adverb ‘never’ sits in its usual position between the auxiliary and the main verb. This part is long, running to two printed lines, which is what tempts a candidate to mark it; length is not a defect.
• (d)No error — ‘No error’ cannot be taken, because ‘get off from him’ is not English: ‘off’ already means ‘away from’, so the preposition after it is redundant, and the phrase for escaping a person is ‘get away from’. The sentence is colloquial in tone and reads quickly, which is precisely why the escape option is dangerous here — a redundancy of this kind slips past the ear far more easily than a broken tense would. Clear each part separately before reaching for (d).

Two ideas decide this item, and both are general.

The first is redundancy after a particle that already contains a preposition. ‘Off’, ‘away’, ‘back’ and ‘out’ each carry the sense of separation or return inside them, so a second word saying the same thing is a fault: get off the bus, not get off from it; return to the office, not return back; repeat the order, not repeat it again; revert to us, not revert back. English tolerates very little of this doubling, and examiners like it because it is invisible to the ear of anyone who has heard the doubled form used in speech.

The second is the indirect or embedded question. A direct question inverts the subject and the verb — how is he? where is the office? — but the moment that question is folded into a larger sentence, the inversion disappears and normal statement order returns: ask him how he is, tell me where the office is, I wonder what the rule says. The same applies after whether and if. Because the first part of this sentence gets it right, it is a good model to keep: ‘ask him how he is’.

What unites the two, and what the whole error-spotting set of this paper is built on, is that a correct sentence has exactly as many words as it needs — no second conjunction at Q7, no wrong particle at Q8, no extra preposition here.

Key facts

• ‘Off’ already means ‘away from’, so ‘get off from him’ says the separation twice; the phrase for escaping a person is ‘get away from’.
• English says ‘get off the bus’ and ‘take it off the shelf’ with no ‘from’, which is the everyday evidence of the same rule.
• ‘Get off’ has its own settled uses — leaving a vehicle, leaving work, escaping punishment lightly, leaving a subject — and none of them means escaping a person.
• An embedded question takes statement word order: ask him how he is, tell me where the office is; the inversion belongs only to a direct question.
• The open conditional pairs a present simple in the if-clause with ‘will’ in the main clause, which is exactly what the second printed part does.
• The negative in this stem sits inside the quoted sentence, not in the ask; the question is the positive one of which part has an error.

Common traps

• Marking the long second part because it is long. The printed parts are of very unequal length here and the error is in the shortest one.
• Reading the ‘Don’t’ inside the quoted sentence as part of the question. The ask is positive: which part has an error.
• Accepting ‘get off from’ because it has been heard in speech. A doubled preposition is exactly the kind of fault that survives in conversation.
• Marking ‘how he is’ as an inversion error, when the statement order is what an embedded question requires.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following parts of the sentence, “Please tell me where is the office of the Regional Commissioner”, has an error?

  • (a)Please tell me
  • (b)where is the office
  • (c)of the Regional Commissioner
  • (d)No error

  Answer(b) where is the office — the question is embedded inside a request, so it takes statement word order: ‘please tell me where the office of the Regional Commissioner is’. The inversion belongs only to a direct question.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following parts of the sentence, “He returned back from the meeting earlier than we expected”, has an error?

  • (a)He returned back
  • (b)from the meeting
  • (c)earlier than we expected
  • (d)No error

  Answer(a) He returned back — ‘return’ already contains the idea of coming back, so ‘back’ repeats it; the sentence should read ‘he returned from the meeting’.