EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 2 of 120

Correct — D, (d) RQSP, so the paragraph runs S1 – R – Q – S – P – S6. Both ends are decided by pointing words, and between them they eliminate all three wrong options without any need to read the middle. At the front, R opens ‘However, the real motive behind this development was not necessarily to provide basic amenities to the people but to subserve various colonial interests.’ Two signals fix it at position 2. ‘This development’ can only mean the infrastructure development conceded in S1, and ‘However’ is a reversal connector — it needs the concession to be the sentence immediately before it. S1 concedes that railways, ports, water transport, posts and telegraphs did develop; R takes that concession away. That is a single move in two sentences and nothing may come between them. At the back, S6 reads ‘Naturally, therefore, these areas remained inaccessible to the people.’ ‘These areas’ needs a plural area named just before it, and only P supplies one — the rural areas that the all-weather roads failed to reach in the rainy season. ‘Naturally, therefore’ additionally demands that the previous sentence be the cause of inaccessibility, and a shortage of usable roads is exactly that cause. So P sits at position 5. Only option (d) has R first and P last. The middle then follows the passage’s own chronology: Q says the roads that existed before British rule were unfit for modern transport, which is why roads had to be built at all; S says the roads that were built served army movement and the extraction of raw materials to the nearest railway station — the concrete proof of the ‘colonial interests’ R alleged. Q before S, because Q names roads for the first time and S’s ‘The roads that were built’ presupposes them.

• (a)SPQR — SPQR opens with S, whose subject is ‘The roads that were built’ — but S1 lists railways, ports, water transport, posts and telegraphs and never mentions roads, so the definite article has nothing to refer to. It also puts R last, which wastes ‘However’ on a sentence with no concession before it and leaves S6’s ‘these areas’ pointing at ‘colonial interests’, which are not areas.
• (b)PQSR — PQSR is the mirror image of the right answer: it opens with the sentence that belongs beside S6 and closes with the sentence that belongs beside S1. ‘There always remained an acute shortage’ presupposes a discussion of roads that has not happened yet, and with R at the end the paragraph reverses its own argument in its final line instead of at the turn.
• (c)QPRS — QPRS at least begins with a sentence that carries no backward pointer, which is what makes it tempting. It fails at the other end. S ends the body with the roads serving army movement and raw-material extraction, and S6 then says ‘Naturally, therefore, these areas remained inaccessible’ — but S names no areas and gives no cause of inaccessibility. It also demotes R to position 4, so ‘this development’ has to reach back over two intervening sentences to S1.

This item is built on the concession-and-reversal pattern, one of the commonest shapes in expository prose. The writer first grants what the other side would say — colonial rule did build infrastructure — and then turns it with ‘however’, ‘but’ or ‘yet’ to state the real point. In a jumbled-passage question that pattern is a gift, because the reversal sentence is welded to the concession sentence: nothing can be inserted between them without destroying the turn. The second device here is the definite pointer. ‘This development’, ‘the roads that were built’ and ‘these areas’ are all definite noun phrases, and a definite noun phrase claims that its referent is already known to the reader. Each one therefore constrains what may precede it. Reading a rearrangement passage means reading these claims: every ‘this’, ‘these’, ‘such’ and ‘the’ is a small arrow pointing at a sentence that must already have been read. A third, weaker signal is chronology. Q describes roads before the advent of British rule and S describes the roads then built, so their relative order follows the events themselves.

Q2 is the second item of the five-item rearrangement set that opens Part A. It prints only its six sentences — the Directions block that governs it was printed once, above Q1 — so a candidate who has skipped the instructions has to infer the task from the S1/S6 labelling. The subject matter is standard economic-history exposition on colonial infrastructure, but nothing outside the six sentences is needed or wanted: the item is scored on cohesion, not on knowing why the British built railways. That is worth saying because the strongest temptation on a passage like this is to reorder the sentences by what you believe about colonial policy rather than by what the sentences say about each other. Candidates who do that pick option (c), which tells a perfectly sensible historical story and still breaks the link into S6.

• S1 and S6 are given in every item of this set; only P, Q, R and S are jumbled, so four sentences have to be slotted between two fixed walls.
• R is welded to S1 by two independent signals — the reversal connector ‘However’ and the definite phrase ‘this development’, which names S1’s infrastructure.
• P is welded to S6 by ‘these areas’, which needs the rural areas P names, and by ‘Naturally, therefore’, which needs P’s road shortage as its cause.
• Fixing position 2 as R and position 5 as P leaves only one of the four printed options standing, so the middle order never has to be argued.
• S1 lists railways, ports, water transport, posts and telegraphs but not roads, which is why S cannot open the body with ‘The roads that were built’.

• Ordering the sentences by historical plausibility rather than by the pointing words. Option (c) reads like a sound account of colonial road policy and still fails at the S6 joint.
• Ignoring ‘Naturally, therefore’ in S6. It is not decoration — it asserts that the sentence immediately before it states the cause, which narrows position 5 to exactly one candidate.
• Accepting a definite phrase without checking that its referent has already appeared: ‘the roads that were built’ cannot precede any mention of roads.
• Assuming the sentence with no backward pointer must come first. Q has no pointer, which makes it a plausible opener, but the reversal sentence R has a stronger claim on position 2.

Rearrangement passages in this section are drawn from expository writing and repeatedly use one of three joins: a demonstrative that reaches back (‘such mapping’ in Q1, ‘this development’ here), a reversal connector, or a causal connector in S6 that fixes what must precede it. The examiner also builds the option set so that the same permutation appears more than once across the five items — SRPQ, QSRP and RQSP each occur more than once among the twenty options printed for Q1 to Q5 — so the option strings themselves repeat from item to item and carry no information; each has to be solved on its own hooks.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  S1 : The new bypass has certainly cut travel time between the two towns. S6 : Naturally, therefore, the villages along the old road now see fewer visitors than before. P : Buses and trucks that once stopped at the roadside dhabas now pass eight kilometres to the east. Q : Traffic that used to crawl through the market street was diverted the day it opened. R : However, the saving has not been shared equally by everyone the old road served. S : Even the local taxis have shifted their stands to the new junction. Select the proper sequence.

  • (a)QRPS
  • (b)RQPS
  • (c)PSRQ
  • (d)SRQP

  Answer(b) RQPS — R reverses S1’s concession with ‘However’ and must follow it directly; Q, P and S then give the diversion and its two consequences in narrowing order; S’s shifted taxi stands are the immediate cause that licenses S6’s ‘Naturally, therefore’.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In a jumbled-passage item the given last sentence begins ‘Naturally, therefore, these areas remained inaccessible.’ What does this opening tell a candidate ?

  • (a)That the sentence before it must name the areas and state why they were inaccessible
  • (b)That the passage is about geography
  • (c)That the first jumbled sentence must contain a contrast
  • (d)That two of the four jumbled sentences must be about roads

  Answer(a) That the sentence before it must name the areas and state why they were inaccessible — ‘these’ demands an antecedent in the immediately preceding sentence and ‘naturally, therefore’ demands that the same sentence supply the cause. The other three options read content out of a connector that carries only structural information.