Enforcement Officer / Accounts Officer (EO/AO) 2020 recruitment test, advertisement 421. Transcribed from the Commission's own booklet (series A, NMJX-U-GTA); answer as per the official UPSC final answer key. This question is in Part A. Answer last reviewed 24 August 2026.

The elephant fell into a __________ the hunters had set.

(a)track
(b)trap
(c)trick
(d)trunk

Answer

Why

Correct — B, (b) trap.

A trap is a device, a pit or a snare put in position to catch an animal, and the sentence names both halves of the action that goes with it. Hunters set a trap; the animal falls into it. Of the four words offered, only ‘trap’ takes both of those verbs, and it keeps them in the figurative sense as well — a witness walks into a trap, a question is a trap, an argument traps the person who made it.

The words after the blank decide the item more surely than the words before it. ‘Set’ in the sense ‘put in position, ready to work’ governs a small and fixed family of objects: a trap, a snare, a net, a mine, an ambush, an alarm, an examination paper. Hunters do not set a track, a trick or a trunk, so the moment the reader takes in ‘the hunters had set’ three of the four options are gone. A candidate who stops at ‘fell into a ____’ has not narrowed anything, because plenty of things can be fallen into.

Two points of grammar are worth noticing in the printed sentence, because both look like faults and neither is one. First, there is no relative pronoun before ‘the hunters had set’: the full form is ‘a trap that the hunters had set’, and English allows the pronoun to be dropped whenever it is the OBJECT of its own clause — the trap they set, the man I met, the book she wrote. Second, the tense is past perfect. ‘Had set’ places the setting of the trap before the falling of the elephant, which is exactly the sequence the story requires; a plain past, ‘the hunters set’, would leave the order of the two events open.

Why the others are wrong

(a)track — A track is the mark or trail left by something that has passed — the tracks of a tiger, tyre tracks in the mud — or a rough path, a course for running, or a railway line. The verb English attaches to it is ‘follow’: hunters follow a track, they do not set one, and an animal does not fall into a trail of its own footprints. The word is placed here for two reasons at once. It shares three letters with the answer, and it belongs to the vocabulary of hunting, so it looks right to a candidate who is matching the subject matter of the sentence instead of reading the two verbs that surround the blank.
(c)trick — A trick is a cunning act intended to deceive, or a clever feat — to play a trick on somebody, a card trick, a trick of the light. English plays or pulls a trick; it does not set one. The deeper objection is that a trick works on a mind while a trap works on a body: a person may fall FOR a trick or be tricked into something, but an elephant that falls INTO something falls into a physical hole or contrivance. The idiom ‘fall into a trap’ exists in both the literal and the figurative sense precisely because a trap is a thing in a place; there is no parallel ‘fall into a trick’.
(d)trunk — A trunk is an elephant’s proboscis, the main stem of a tree, a large travelling box, the torso of the body, or the main line of a road or telephone network. It is the most tempting wrong option in the set for a reason that has nothing to do with the blank: the subject of the sentence is an elephant, and the first word most readers associate with an elephant is its trunk. Association is not the test. The blank has to take something the hunters prepared and the animal dropped into, and an elephant’s own trunk cannot be either. Falling into a tree trunk or a travelling box is no better.

Concept

The item tests collocation — which verbs habitually keep company with which nouns — reinforced by a second, quieter test of relative-clause grammar.

The collocation is ‘set a trap’. ‘Set’ has dozens of senses, but in the sense of putting a device in position ready to spring it takes a short list of objects: a trap, a snare, a net, a mine, an ambush, a fuse, an alarm clock. In the same field, ‘lay’ works with a trap, a snare, an ambush and a mine; ‘spring’ is what happens when the trap goes off. The animal side of the pairing is equally fixed: something falls into, walks into or is caught in a trap. Learn a collocation as a whole phrase and the wrong options in an item like this eliminate themselves.

The grammar point is the contact clause. A relative pronoun — who, whom, which, that — may be omitted when it is the object of the clause it introduces, so ‘a trap the hunters had set’ is complete and correct English. It may not be omitted when it is the subject of its clause: ‘the hunters who set the trap’ cannot lose its ‘who’. That single test — is the pronoun doing the subject’s work or the object’s? — settles every such sentence.

The past perfect adds the sequence. Two past actions, and the earlier one takes ‘had’: the trap had been set, and then the elephant fell in.

This is the second item of the ‘Fill in the blanks’ set that opens Part A, the English Language section of the EO/AO General Ability Test. The Directions for the whole set are printed once, above Q1, and this item prints nothing but its own sentence — a candidate who skipped the instructions on the first item has none here.

What the set rewards is reading the complete sentence before looking at the options. Every option offered is a real English word and each is a possible noun after ‘into a’, so the choice is settled by the company the noun keeps: the verb in front of it, the verb behind it, the preposition attached to it. The wrong options in this item are built out of two ordinary reading habits — matching the topic of the sentence (an elephant, so a trunk; hunters, so a track) and matching the shape of the word (four short words beginning t-r). Neither habit reads the sentence.

On a language paper of twenty items with no marks to be earned by lingering, the discipline that pays is to find the fixed phrase, confirm it against the words on both sides of the blank, and move on.

Key facts

‘Set a trap’ is the fixed English collocation, alongside set a snare, set a net, set an ambush and set a mine; ‘lay a trap’ is the equally standard alternative, and a trap that goes off is said to spring.
The other side of the pairing is just as fixed: an animal or a person falls into, walks into, steps into or is caught in a trap — which is why the phrase carries over unchanged into the figurative sense of a trap laid for someone in argument.
A relative pronoun may be dropped when it is the OBJECT of its clause — ‘a trap the hunters had set’ = ‘a trap that the hunters had set’ — but never when it is the subject of its clause.
The past perfect ‘had set’ marks the earlier of two past actions: the hunters set the trap first, and the elephant fell into it afterwards.
‘Track’ pairs with the verb follow and means a trail, a path or a railway line; ‘trick’ pairs with play and means a deception; ‘trunk’ means an elephant’s proboscis, a tree stem, a travelling box or a main line.
Part A of this paper is Q1 to Q20, printed in English only, and the Directions governing Q1 to Q5 appear once, above Q1.

‘The hunters had set’ decides this, not ‘fell into’

trap→A device, pit or snare put in position to catch an animal — and the only option that takes both verbs the sentence supplies: hunters set a trap, and an animal falls into one. ‘Lay a trap’ is the standard alternative, and a trap that goes off is said to spring.

track→The mark or trail left by something that has passed, a rough path, or a railway line. The verb English attaches to it is follow — hunters follow a track, they do not set one.

trick→A cunning act intended to deceive. English plays or pulls a trick; it does not set one. A trick works on a mind and a trap on a body: one falls FOR a trick, but INTO a trap.

trunk→An elephant’s proboscis, a tree stem, a travelling box, the torso. It is tempting only because the subject of the sentence is an elephant — association, not the blank, is doing that work.

‘Set’ governs a short list→In the sense ‘put in position, ready to work’, set takes a trap, a snare, a net, a mine, an ambush, an alarm. Reading to the end of the sentence removes three options at once.

Two things that look like faults→‘a trap the hunters had set’ drops a relative pronoun that is the OBJECT of its clause, which English allows; and the past perfect ‘had set’ marks the earlier of two past actions — trap first, fall afterwards.

Study next

Collocations of the verb ‘set’: set a trap, set a record, set an example, set a precedent, set a date, set the table, set an examination.Contact clauses — when a relative pronoun may be left out, and the one position, subject of its own clause, where it may not.The past perfect and the sequence of past events, including its use after ‘after’, ‘by the time’, ‘no sooner … than’ and ‘hardly … when’.Word sets that trap by association rather than by meaning: track, trail, trace; trap, snare, net; trunk, tusk, proboscis.Figurative extensions of concrete nouns — to fall into a trap, to walk into a trap, a trap question, a speed trap, a poverty trap.

Common traps

Letting the subject of the sentence choose the answer. An elephant suggests ‘trunk’, and hunting suggests ‘track’, but the blank is governed by ‘set’ and ‘fell into’, not by the topic.
Reading only as far as the blank. ‘Fell into a ____’ leaves several words possible; ‘the hunters had set’ leaves one.
Taking the missing relative pronoun in ‘a trap the hunters had set’ for a printing fault and then choosing a word that seems to repair the sentence. The clause is correct as it stands.
Assuming that words which look alike behave alike. Track, trap, trick and trunk share their first three letters and share no collocations at all.

The fill-in-the-blanks items on this paper are decided by fixed phrases rather than by difficult vocabulary — the five here run on earning a living, a trap that hunters set, a fabric that stretches, shoulders that shake and the phrase ‘on behalf of’. Expect the wrong options to come from one of three families: a word from the same subject matter as the sentence, a word of similar shape or sound, and a word whose dictionary meaning is close but whose partners are different. The defence is always the same — read to the end of the sentence, find the noun or verb that fixes the phrase, and say the whole phrase to yourself with each candidate in place.

Related PYQs

EPFO_EOAO_2020_Q1Open & attempt →

Directions : Each of the following sentences in this section has a blank space and four words or group of words given after the sentence. Select the word or group of words you consider most appropriate for the blank space and indicate your response on the Answer Sheet accordingly. It's time you went out and ____________ your own living.

(a) afforded
(b) earned
(c) gained
(d) won

Answer(b) earned

The item that carries this set’s Directions block, decided the same way — the noun ‘living’ chooses its own verb, ‘earned’.

EPFO_EOAO_2020_Q5Open & attempt →

The bereaved mother proudly received the gallantry award _________ her brave son who had laid down his life in the recent war.

(a) in the name of
(b) in lieu of
(c) on behalf of
(d) for the sake of

Answer(c) on behalf of

The last item of this set, where the blank takes a four-word prepositional phrase instead of a single noun, and where the wrong options are again near neighbours in meaning.

Practice

practice — not a real PYQ
In which one of the following sentences may the underlined relative pronoun be omitted without making the sentence incorrect ? (a) The man who lives next door has resigned. (b) The book which is lying on the table belongs to me. (c) The letter which she wrote last week has been lost. (d) The train which leaves at six is running late.
- (a)The man who lives next door has resigned.
- (b)The book which is lying on the table belongs to me.
- (c)The letter which she wrote last week has been lost.
- (d)The train which leaves at six is running late.
Answer(c) The letter which she wrote last week has been lost. — here the pronoun is the OBJECT of ‘wrote’, so it can be dropped: ‘the letter she wrote last week’. In the other three sentences the pronoun is the SUBJECT of its own clause — who lives, which is lying, which leaves — and a subject relative can never be left out, so removing it would leave the clause with no subject at all.
practice — not a real PYQ
Select the word most appropriate for the blank space : The judgment of the tribunal ________ a precedent that later benches found hard to ignore.
- (a)put
- (b)set
- (c)gave
- (d)placed
Answer(b) set — ‘set a precedent’ is the fixed collocation, of the same family as set a record, set an example and set a trap, all of them meaning to put something in place for others to follow or to be caught by. ‘Put’, ‘gave’ and ‘placed’ all mean roughly to position or to hand over, and none of them keeps company with ‘precedent’ in English usage.

Why