EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 16 of 120

Correct — D, (d) Education. The answer is stated outright in the passage, and it is stated in the sentence that closes the first paragraph. Having described the General Assembly’s ‘Agenda 2030’ and said that the 17 Sustainable Development Goals describe the framework of our common global efforts, the author writes: within each goal, education holds a key position. Match that against the question and every word of the stem is accounted for. ‘Key position’ is the passage’s own phrase. ‘Common’ answers to ‘within each goal’ — the position is held not in one goal but across all of them, which is what makes it common — and the same word has already been used of ‘our common global efforts’. And the thing said to hold that position is education, which is choice (d). The Directions above the passage are the second half of the reasoning, and they are what make the other three choices wrong rather than merely weaker. They require the answer to be selected ‘based solely on the content of the passage and opinion of the author only’. Under that instruction the test is not whether a candidate believes an area is important to the Goals, and not whether it is in fact important to them; the test is whether the passage says so. Only one of the four is named in the passage as holding a key position within each goal. This is worth doing slowly on the first item of a comprehension set, because the discipline it establishes carries the remaining four questions. Find the sentence. Match the stem to its words. Do not reason beyond it.

• (a)Environment — ‘Environment’ is the answer a candidate supplies from general knowledge rather than from the text. The passage opens on the depletion of the world’s life-supporting resources and speaks throughout of sustainability, so the association is natural — but association is not what the Directions admit. The word ‘environment’ appears nowhere in the passage, and nothing in it says that the environment holds a key position within each of the 17 Goals. What the passage does say occupies that position is education.
• (b)Gender — ‘Gender’ is not mentioned in the passage at all — not the word, and not the idea. It is placed among the options precisely because a candidate who knows something about the Sustainable Development Goals from outside reading may recognise it as one of their concerns and mark it on that recognition. Under Directions that confine the answer to the content of the passage, knowledge brought from outside is not evidence, and here it is the whole of the trap.
• (c)Globalization — ‘Globalization’ is the most tempting wrong choice because, unlike the other two, it really is in the passage. But look at what is said about it: that it is sometimes merely seen as global capitalism, and that it has an inevitability about it — whether we like it or not, we live in an interconnected world. It is described as a condition the author takes for granted, not as an area holding a key position inside the Goals. Appearing in a passage and answering the question asked of it are different things, and this option tests whether a candidate checks which.

A direct-retrieval comprehension question asks for something the passage states in so many words, and it is answered by locating the sentence rather than by reasoning. The method has three steps, and they are worth performing consciously until they become automatic. First, lift the distinctive words out of the stem. Here they are ‘key position’ and ‘Agenda 2030’, both of which are printed in the passage; the third, ‘common’, is a paraphrase of ‘within each goal’. Second, find where those words sit in the passage and read the whole sentence that contains them, not the phrase alone. The sentence is the unit of meaning, and a phrase lifted out of one can be made to support almost anything. Third, test each option against that sentence and reject on a stated ground — not mentioned, mentioned but not in this role, mentioned in a different paragraph about a different question. Options in a well-set comprehension item are graded exactly along that scale, as they are here: one absent from the passage, one associated with its theme but never named, one present but doing something else, and one stated. Outside the passage, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. That is background about what the author is referring to. It plays no part in answering, and under the Directions printed above the passage it cannot.

Q16 opens the reading-comprehension set that closes Part A, and it is the item that carries both the Directions block and the whole passage; Q17 to Q20 print only their own question, which is why Q17’s entire printed stem is a single line about the role of education. The passage runs to two paragraphs on education and sustainable development, and the five questions work down it roughly in order. The Directions on this set are unusually explicit and should be read as a rule of evidence: answers are to be selected ‘based solely on the content of the passage and opinion of the author only’. That sentence does two jobs. It excludes outside knowledge, which is what options (a) and (b) are built to attract. And it tells the candidate that where the author’s view is contestable, the author’s view is nevertheless the standard by which the options are judged — the paper is testing reading, not agreement. In a General Ability Test that also asks a hundred knowledge questions in Part B, this switch of standard between one section and the next is itself something to practise.

• The passage states that the 17 Sustainable Development Goals describe the framework of our common global efforts and that within each goal, education holds a key position.
• The stem’s ‘common key position’ tracks the passage’s ‘within each goal’ and its own phrase ‘key position’.
• The Directions restrict answers to the content of the passage and the opinion of the author only, which makes outside knowledge inadmissible as evidence.
• ‘Globalization’ does appear in the passage, but as an inevitable condition sometimes seen merely as global capitalism, not as an area holding a position within the Goals.
• The words ‘environment’ and ‘gender’ do not appear anywhere in the passage.

• Answering a comprehension question from general knowledge. Both ‘environment’ and ‘gender’ are plausible in the world and absent from the passage.
• Accepting an option because the word occurs in the passage. ‘Globalization’ occurs and is discussed in an entirely different role.
• Reading only the phrase that matches the stem instead of the sentence containing it.
• Carrying the standards of Part B into Part A. In the knowledge questions, what is true decides; in the comprehension set, what the passage says decides.

The comprehension set in this paper prints its Directions and its passage over the first item only, so the four followers cannot be read alone. The five questions descend through the passage in roughly the order of its sentences, and they mix two kinds — direct retrieval, as here, and paraphrase of a quoted phrase, as in the two items that quote a sentence back and ask what it means. In both kinds the wrong options are built from the passage’s own vocabulary or from the general knowledge its subject invites, so the reliable method is to point at the sentence that licenses the answer before marking it.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  A comprehension passage states : ‘The scheme’s registers are maintained at the block level, and within every register the entry for wages paid is the one the auditors examine first.’ Which item is examined first in every register ?

  • (a)The entry for materials purchased
  • (b)The entry for wages paid
  • (c)The list of registered workers
  • (d)The block-level summary

  Answer(b) The entry for wages paid — the passage names it in so many words, and the phrase ‘within every register’ in the passage answers the stem’s ‘in every register’. The other three name items a reader might expect an auditor to look at, none of which the passage mentions in that role.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Directions on a comprehension set say the answer must rest solely on the content of the passage and the opinion of the author. What follows for a candidate who knows the subject well ?

  • (a)Outside knowledge may be used to settle a choice between two options that the passage does not distinguish
  • (b)Outside knowledge is inadmissible, and an option is wrong if the passage does not support it, however true it may be
  • (c)The author’s opinion may be corrected where it is factually mistaken
  • (d)Only the first and last paragraphs count as the content of the passage

  Answer(b) Outside knowledge is inadmissible, and an option is wrong if the passage does not support it, however true it may be — the Directions make the passage the sole evidence, so the candidate’s task is to report what the author says rather than to judge or supplement it.