EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 10 of 120

Correct — D, (d) ‘No error’. The sentence is a reported yes/no question and every part of it is correctly built. Take the segments in turn, because on a ‘No error’ item the answer is only earned by clearing all three. Segment (a), ‘He asked me if I would be’. Reporting a yes/no question in English requires three things and this has all three. The reporting verb ‘ask’ takes a direct object for the person addressed — asked me — with no preposition, so ‘asked to me’ would be wrong and ‘asked me’ is right. The reported question is introduced by ‘if’ or ‘whether’, both standard, with ‘whether’ preferred only in stricter registers or where ‘if’ would be ambiguous, before ‘or not’ placed immediately after, after a preposition, or before an infinitive — none of which applies here. And the clause takes statement word order with no inversion and no question mark: ‘if I would be’, never ‘if would I be’. The backshift is also right: a direct ‘Would you be interested… ?’ or ‘Will you be interested… ?’ becomes ‘would be’ in a past-tense report. Segment (b), ‘interested in signing up’. The adjective ‘interested’ takes the preposition ‘in’, and a preposition is followed by a gerund, not an infinitive: interested in signing, not interested to sign. ‘Signing up’ is the correct gerund of the phrasal verb ‘sign up’. Segment (c), ‘as a member of the group.’ ‘Sign up as’ is the standard pattern for the capacity in which one joins, ‘a member’ takes the indefinite article correctly, and ‘of the group’ is the normal partitive. Nothing has to change, so (d) is the answer.

• (a)He asked me if I would be — ‘He asked me if I would be’ is the segment most often wrongly marked on this item, usually for one of three reasons, and none of them holds. Some candidates want ‘whether’ in place of ‘if’: both are standard in reported yes/no questions and ‘if’ is not an error here. Some expect interrogative word order after a reporting verb — ‘asked me would I be’ — which is precisely what the reported form forbids. And some want ‘asked to me’, imposing a preposition on a verb that takes its addressee as a direct object. The tense is right as well: ‘would be’ is the correct backshift under the past-tense ‘asked’.
• (b)interested in signing up — ‘interested in signing up’ is correct. ‘Interested’ is one of the adjectives fixed to ‘in’, and any preposition takes a gerund after it, so ‘interested in signing up’ is required and ‘interested to sign up’ would be the error. Candidates sometimes suspect the phrasal verb, but ‘sign up’ is ordinary English for enrolling, and its gerund is formed in the normal way. The parallel patterns are worth memorising together: interested in, keen on, capable of, good at, averse to, accustomed to — all followed by an -ing form.
• (c)as a member of the group. — ‘as a member of the group.’ is correct. ‘As’ is the preposition English uses for the capacity or role in which someone acts or joins — sign up as a volunteer, serve as chairman, act as guarantor — and it is not interchangeable with ‘like’, which compares rather than identifies. The indefinite article before ‘member’ is required because the person would be one of several, and ‘of the group’ is the ordinary way of naming the body joined.

Reported speech is the grammar this sentence is built on, and three of its rules do all the work. First, word order. A question loses its inversion when reported: ‘Are you free ?’ becomes ‘He asked whether I was free’, not ‘He asked was I free’. A yes/no question is introduced by ‘if’ or ‘whether’; a wh-question keeps its wh-word — ‘He asked where I lived’. Second, backshift. Under a past-tense reporting verb the tense of the original moves one step back: is becomes was, was becomes had been, will becomes would, can becomes could, may becomes might. Must and should usually stay. Backshift is relaxed when the reported statement is still true, which is why both ‘He said the earth is round’ and ‘… was round’ are acceptable. Third, the complementation of the reporting verb. ‘Tell’ needs a person — tell me, told the committee. ‘Say’ takes ‘to’ before a person — said to me. ‘Ask’ takes the person as a direct object — asked me — and can also take an infinitive for a request: asked me to come. A fourth point sits alongside: ‘if’ and ‘whether’ are both correct in reported yes/no questions, and a candidate should not treat one as a correction of the other. ‘Whether’ is required before an immediately following ‘or not’, after a preposition, and before an infinitive.

Q10 closes the spotting-errors set that began at Q6, printing only its sentence. Its three underlined segments carry the letters (a) to (c), which are also the answer choices, and (d) is the ‘No error’ option printed on all five items of the set. A clean sentence is the hardest item in an error-spotting set, because the format trains candidates to expect a fault and a candidate who has found nothing after two readings starts inventing one. The invented fault is almost always a preference dressed up as a rule — ‘whether’ sounds more formal than ‘if’, so ‘if’ must be wrong. The discipline that protects the mark is the same one that answers the other four items: test each segment against a rule you can state, and if all three segments pass a stated test, mark ‘No error’ with confidence rather than as a shrug. Guessing here costs the two and a half marks plus a third of that as penalty, and the guess is usually segment (a).

• A reported yes/no question takes statement word order with no inversion and no question mark: he asked me if I would be, never if would I be.
• ‘If’ and ‘whether’ are both standard for reported yes/no questions; ‘whether’ is required before an immediately following ‘or not’, after a preposition and before an infinitive.
• Under a past-tense reporting verb, ‘will’ backshifts to ‘would’, which is what segment (a) prints.
• ‘Ask’ takes the person addressed as a direct object with no preposition — asked me — while ‘say’ takes ‘to’ before the person.
• A preposition is followed by a gerund, so ‘interested in signing up’ is required and ‘interested to sign up’ would be wrong.

• Inventing an error because the format has trained you to expect one. Two clean readings are evidence for ‘No error’, not a reason to keep hunting.
• Treating ‘whether’ as the correction of ‘if’ in reported questions. Both are standard, and preferring one is a matter of register, not of rule.
• Expecting question word order after a reporting verb. The reported form drops the inversion, and restoring it would create the error, not remove it.
• Adding a preposition to ‘ask’. The verb takes its addressee directly, so ‘asked me’ is right and ‘asked to me’ is not.

Every item of this set prints ‘No error’ as choice (d), so it is always available and always has to be tested rather than assumed away. Where a clean sentence is set, it is usually built from a structure candidates half-remember — reported speech, an adjective plus preposition plus gerund, a phrasal verb — so that a plausible but unfounded correction suggests itself. The counter is to be able to state the rule that licenses each segment. If you can name why a segment is right, you can leave it; if you can only say it feels right, you have not tested it.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Identify the segment containing the error, or mark (d) if there is none : The officer asked the applicant (a) | whether he had submitted (b) | the revised form before the last date. (c) | No error (d)

  • (a)The officer asked the applicant
  • (b)whether he had submitted
  • (c)the revised form before the last date.
  • (d)No error

  Answer(d) No error — ‘ask’ takes the person as a direct object, ‘whether’ correctly introduces a reported yes/no question, the past perfect is the right backshift of a past tense under ‘asked’, and the object and time adjunct in segment (c) are both well formed.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Identify the segment containing the error, or mark (d) if there is none : My colleague asked me (a) | was I interested to join (b) | the training programme in June. (c) | No error (d)

  • (a)My colleague asked me
  • (b)was I interested to join
  • (c)the training programme in June.
  • (d)No error

  Answer(b) was I interested to join — a reported question keeps statement order and needs ‘if’ or ‘whether’, and ‘interested’ takes ‘in’ plus a gerund, so the segment should read ‘if I was interested in joining’. Segments (a) and (c) are correct as they stand.