EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 6 of 120

Correct — A, (a) ‘Ramesh liked’. Read the tail of the sentence first, because it announces what the verb has to be. The sentence ends ‘…to his own’, and that little ‘to’ is not the ordinary preposition of direction. It is the comparative ‘to’, and English licenses it after only a small closed set of words taken over from Latin comparatives: prefer, preferable, senior, junior, superior, inferior, prior. Every one of them compares with ‘to’ and refuses ‘than’ — senior to me, superior to the old model, prefer coffee to tea. The verb printed here, ‘liked’, is not in that set. ‘Like’ compares with ‘better than’ or ‘more than’: Ramesh liked his friend’s music player better than his own. It can never take a bare ‘to’ for the thing rejected, so the sentence as printed has no grammatical reading at all — ‘liked his friend’s music player to his own’ is simply not English. That leaves the question of which segment to name, and the answer follows from what the other two contain. Segment (b) is a correctly formed possessive noun phrase and segment (c) is a correctly formed comparative complement — for the verb the sentence is clearly reaching for. The one word that has to be replaced to make the whole sentence work is the verb, and the verb sits in segment (a): ‘Ramesh preferred his friend’s music player to his own.’ One substitution, in segment (a), repairs everything. A useful way to hold this: the tail is the diagnosis, not the disease. When you see ‘…to X’ at the end of a comparison, look back at the verb or adjective, because that is where the mismatch will be.

• (b)his friend’s music player — ‘his friend’s music player’ is faultless. The possessive is formed correctly on a singular noun — friend plus apostrophe s — the compound noun ‘music player’ needs no hyphen, and the phrase is the direct object the verb requires. Candidates sometimes suspect possessives on reflex, or wonder whether it should be ‘his friends’ music player’, but nothing in the sentence suggests more than one friend, and moving the apostrophe would change the meaning rather than correct an error.
• (c)to his own. — ‘to his own’ is the segment most often misnamed here, because it is where the strangeness is felt. It is nevertheless correct: ‘his own’ is an independent possessive standing for ‘his own music player’, and ‘to’ is exactly the preposition the comparison needs — once the verb is ‘preferred’. Naming (c) treats the symptom: you would be repairing the sentence by writing ‘better than his own’, which works, but it leaves the sentence saying something flatter than the writer intended and it is not the segment that carries the offending word.
• (d)No error — ‘No error’ is not available. ‘Liked … to his own’ is ungrammatical on any reading, so a definite fault exists and must be located. Marking (d) here costs the two and a half marks and a third of that again as penalty, and it is the option to reach for only after all three segments have actually been tested.

English has two ways of expressing preference and they do not mix. The Latinate route uses ‘prefer’ and takes ‘to’: I prefer tea to coffee. When the two things compared are actions expressed with infinitives, the pattern shifts to ‘prefer to … rather than …’ — I prefer to walk rather than drive — because two infinitives cannot be joined by ‘to’. The related adjective behaves the same way: this arrangement is preferable to the old one. The native route uses ‘like’, ‘love’ or ‘enjoy’ and takes a comparative with ‘than’: I like tea better than coffee, she liked the second draft more than the first. There is also ‘would rather X than Y’, which takes bare infinitives on both sides. The same ‘to’ turns up after a family of adjectives borrowed as comparatives — senior, junior, superior, inferior, prior, anterior, posterior. They are already comparative in form, so they take neither ‘more’ nor ‘than’: he is senior to me, not more senior than me in careful usage, and never superior than. This item mixes the two routes, keeping the Latinate tail and swapping in the native verb.

Q6 opens the spotting-errors set, the second of the four five-item sets in Part A, and it is the item that carries the set’s Directions block: the next four questions print only their sentence. The labelling here is unlike anything else in the paper. The letters (a), (b) and (c) sit under three underlined stretches of a single sentence, so each letter is at once a position in the sentence and an answer choice, while (d) is the separate escape option ‘No error’. Elsewhere in this paper (a) to (d) are four ordinary alternatives. What the format rewards is a segment-by-segment audit rather than an impression. Read each underlined stretch and ask what rule it could break — agreement, tense, preposition, article, word form, redundancy, comparative degree — and clear it before moving on. Candidates who read the sentence as a whole and mark wherever it sounds odd will regularly name the segment next to the fault, which is what makes (c) so attractive on this item.

• The Directions block printed above this item governs the five items Q6 to Q10; the followers print only their sentence.
• In this set alone, (a), (b) and (c) label underlined segments of one sentence and are simultaneously the answer choices, with (d) reserved for ‘No error’.
• ‘Prefer’ takes ‘to’ before the rejected item — prefer tea to coffee — and never ‘than’; with two infinitives it becomes ‘prefer to … rather than …’.
• ‘Like’ takes a comparative adverb and ‘than’ — liked it better than his own — so it cannot govern the ‘to his own’ that this sentence ends with.
• The adjectives senior, junior, superior, inferior and prior are comparative in form already and also take ‘to’, which is the same pattern the sentence is imitating.

• Marking the segment where the sentence feels wrong rather than the segment that contains the wrong word. Here the strangeness is felt at ‘to his own’ and caused by ‘liked’.
• Reaching for ‘No error’ once a sentence has been read twice without a rule coming to mind. The escape option is a real answer, but only after each segment has been tested against something specific.
• Suspecting the possessive apostrophe on reflex. ‘His friend’s music player’ is correctly formed and changing it alters the meaning instead of fixing an error.
• Repairing the sentence in your head with a different fix and then hunting for the segment your repair touched. Several repairs may be grammatical; the item asks which segment carries the fault.

The EO/AO spotting-errors set runs to five items and stays inside a narrow band of testing points: preposition and collocation errors of the kind here, wrong word form, comparative and superlative degree, redundancy, and reported speech. Sentences are short, everyday and free of subject knowledge, and ‘No error’ is printed as a real fourth choice on every item, so it has to be tested rather than assumed away. The underlining is reproduced in these cards by the segment breaks in the stem, and the letter under each segment is the letter you mark.

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 new accounting package (a) | is far more superior (b) | to the one it replaced. (c) | No error (d)

  • (a)The new accounting package
  • (b)is far more superior
  • (c)to the one it replaced.
  • (d)No error

  Answer(b) is far more superior — ‘superior’ is already comparative in form, so it takes neither ‘more’ nor ‘than’; the sentence should read ‘is far superior to the one it replaced’. Segment (c) is correct precisely because ‘superior’ is one of the Latin comparatives that governs ‘to’.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Identify the segment containing the error, or mark (d) if there is none : She prefers working from home (a) | than travelling for two hours (b) | on a crowded suburban train. (c) | No error (d)

  • (a)She prefers working from home
  • (b)than travelling for two hours
  • (c)on a crowded suburban train.
  • (d)No error

  Answer(b) than travelling for two hours — ‘prefer’ never pairs with ‘than’; with gerunds the pattern is ‘prefers working from home to travelling’, and with infinitives it becomes ‘prefers to work from home rather than travel’. Segments (a) and (c) are both well formed.