EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 4 of 120

Correct — B, (b) QSPR, so the paragraph runs S1 – Q – S – P – R – S6. This item is decided by two welded pairs and by which sentence is allowed to touch S6. The first pair is Q and S. Q says the effective tax rates are not really progressive with regard to income; S says ‘They are even less so with regard to wealth.’ ‘Even less so’ is a comparative with its adjective left out — less progressive — and an ellipsis of that kind can only be filled from the sentence immediately before. Q must sit directly in front of S, which rules out (d) at once, since (d) opens on S and buries Q at the end. The second pair is P and R. R prints ‘the enormous sums of ‘missing’ income’ — with the quotation marks the writer uses when a term has just been explained rather than borrowed from a technical vocabulary. The explanation is P: the staggering difference between the income metrics and the actual income of the prosperous is what the ‘missing’ income is. A gloss and the term it glosses belong side by side, and only option (b) keeps them so. The last test is the joint with S6. S6 prescribes — the tax regime needs to be progressive and futuristic. The sentence before a prescription should be a prescription, and R is the only one of the four that prescribes anything: they need to be reengineered to bring the missing income into the tax net. R at position 5 and S6 then read as one recommendation in two sentences. So the paragraph moves diagnosis, aggravation, cause, cure: rates not progressive on income; still less on wealth; because a great deal of income never appears in the metrics at all; therefore reengineer them.

• (a)PQSR — PQSR is the near miss, and it is worth knowing exactly where it fails. It keeps Q with S and it ends on R, so two of the three tests pass, and read aloud it is perfectly coherent — the gap between measured and actual income does explain S1’s claim that inequality is worse than most estimates. What it does not do is keep the gloss beside the term it glosses: P defines the ‘missing’ income at position 2 and R uses the phrase at position 5, three sentences later, where the quotation marks have nothing near them to point at. That adjacency is the discriminator the examiner has built the item on.
• (c)QSRP — QSRP keeps Q with S but reverses P and R, so R asks for the ‘missing’ income to be brought into the tax net before any sentence has said what that income is — the quotation marks arrive unexplained. It then closes on P, leaving S6’s call for a progressive and futuristic tax regime to follow a sentence about the size of the income gap rather than a sentence about what should be done, so the recommendation loses its run-up.
• (d)SRPQ — SRPQ breaks the ellipsis at the very first joint: S opens with ‘They are even less so with regard to wealth’, where ‘they’ names nothing in S1 and ‘even less so’ completes a comparison that has not been made. It also strands Q at the end, so the passage finishes by stating the basic defect it should have opened with, and R sits at position 3 asking for a reengineering that no sentence has yet motivated.

Two cohesion devices carry this item, and both are about what a sentence cannot say until something else has been said. The first is comparative ellipsis. ‘They are even less so’ leaves out both the noun and the adjective, and English allows that only when the missing words are recoverable from the immediately preceding sentence. Any sentence containing an elliptical comparative — even more so, less so, the same, not so much — is therefore locked to the sentence in front of it. In a jumbled passage this is the strongest constraint available, because it fixes a pair rather than merely an order. The second is the glossed term. When a writer puts a word in quotation marks in the middle of expository prose, the marks say that the word is being used in a special sense the reader has been given. The sentence that gives it is the gloss, and it should be adjacent. Here ‘missing’ income means income that exists but does not appear in the metrics, which is exactly what P describes and nothing else in the passage does. Both devices are structural, not thematic. Neither requires any view about taxation to apply.

Q4 is the fourth item of the five-item rearrangement set that opens Part A of the EO/AO General Ability Test; it prints its six sentences and nothing else, the Directions block having been printed once above Q1. The reason to work slowly here is that this is the item in the set where two of the four options are genuinely coherent as prose. A candidate who chooses by reading each option aloud will split evenly between the keyed sequence and the near miss, and at two and a half marks with a one-third penalty that is a losing habit. The paper is rewarding a candidate who can name a specific constraint — an ellipsis that must be filled from the sentence before, a gloss that must sit beside its term — and then apply it mechanically. Fluency judgments cannot separate options that were designed to be fluent.

• S is bound to Q by the elliptical comparative ‘even less so’, which must recover both its noun and its adjective from the sentence immediately before it.
• R’s quoted phrase ‘missing’ income is glossed by P, which describes the gap between the recorded income metrics and the actual income of the prosperous.
• S6 is a prescription — the tax regime needs to be progressive and futuristic — so position five is best filled by R, the only jumbled sentence that recommends an action.
• Two of the four options, (a) and (b), keep Q with S and end on R; the adjacency of P and R is what separates them.
• R and S refer to the tax rates only as ‘they’; Q is the one jumbled sentence that names them, so Q must stand before both R and S.

• Choosing on flow when two options both flow. Options (a) and (b) are both readable English and are separated only by whether the gloss stays next to the term it glosses.
• Treating quotation marks as decoration. The marks on ‘missing’ income are a pointer back to a definition and therefore carry positional information.
• Letting a sentence with an unfilled comparative — ‘They are even less so’ — occupy the position right after S1, where there is nothing to complete it.
• Assuming the sentence that best explains S1 must come immediately after it. P does explain S1, and still belongs later, because it is needed more urgently elsewhere.

Across the five rearrangement items in this paper the examiner varies the device rather than the format: a demonstrative in the first item, concession and reversal in the second, first-and-second mention in the third, ellipsis and a glossed term here. The passages are expository, six sentences long, with S1 and S6 given, and the four options are near neighbours of one another. Expect at least one item per set in which two options are both readable, and expect the difference to be a single adjacency.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  S1 : Municipal property tax collections in the state have stagnated for a decade. S6 : Until that is done, no rate revision will make much difference to the receipts. P : A large number of buildings were last measured when they were single-storeyed and have since grown by three floors. Q : The assessment registers are not really current with regard to the size of properties. R : They need to be resurveyed so that the ‘unrecorded’ floor area comes on the books. S : They are even less current with regard to the use to which those properties are put. Select the proper sequence.

  • (a)PQSR
  • (b)QSPR
  • (c)QSRP
  • (d)SRPQ

  Answer(b) QSPR — Q names the registers so the later pronouns have an antecedent; S’s ‘even less current’ is an ellipsis that must be filled from Q; P glosses the ‘unrecorded’ floor area that R then asks to be brought on the books; and R, the only sentence recommending an action, leads into S6’s ‘Until that is done’.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In a jumbled passage, one sentence reads ‘They are even less so with regard to wealth.’ Which conclusion about its position is safe ?

  • (a)It cannot be the first of the jumbled sentences, because both its subject and its comparison must be recoverable from the sentence before it
  • (b)It must be the last of the jumbled sentences
  • (c)It must immediately precede the sentence that mentions wealth again
  • (d)It can occupy any position, since ‘even less so’ is only emphasis

  Answer(a) It cannot be the first of the jumbled sentences, because both its subject and its comparison must be recoverable from the sentence before it — ‘they’ needs an antecedent and ‘even less so’ needs an adjective, and neither is supplied by a first sentence that talks about income inequality in general.