EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 8 of 120

Correct — C, (c) ‘circumnavigated around the Dal Lake.’ The error is redundancy. ‘Circumnavigate’ is built from the Latin circum, meaning around, and navigare, to sail or travel: the verb already says ‘go all the way around’. Adding ‘around’ after it says the same thing twice, in the way that ‘return back’, ‘revert back’, ‘ascend up’ and ‘repeat again’ do. The verb is transitive and takes its object directly — Magellan’s expedition circumnavigated the globe, not circumnavigated around the globe — so the repair is simply to delete the preposition: ‘circumnavigated the Dal Lake’. Redundancy of this kind is a genuine error in the eyes of an examiner, not a matter of taste, because the offending word contributes nothing and the sentence is well formed without it. That is the test to apply: strike the suspected word out and see whether anything is lost. Strike ‘around’ from this sentence and nothing is lost, which is what convicts it. Once (c) is identified the rest of the sentence clears easily, and it should be cleared rather than skipped. ‘The group of students’ is a properly formed collective subject; ‘on a visit to Srinagar’ uses the standard preposition pairing for a visit; and the past tense is consistent across the sentence. With one deletion inside segment (c) the sentence is correct, which is the sign that the fault was confined to that segment.

• (a)The group of students — ‘The group of students’ is correct. ‘Group’ is the head noun and ‘of students’ merely modifies it, so the subject is singular and any verb would agree with ‘group’, not with ‘students’ — the classic proximity trap, which is not sprung here because the verb is in the past tense and shows no number at all. There is nothing to fix: no article is missing and no agreement is violated.
• (b)on a visit to Srinagar — ‘on a visit to Srinagar’ is idiomatic and correctly built. English pairs a visit with ‘to’ for the place — a visit to Srinagar, a visit to the doctor — and uses ‘on’ for being engaged in one: on a visit, on tour, on leave, on business. A candidate hunting for a preposition error will look hard at this segment, and will find that both prepositions in it are the expected ones.
• (d)No error — ‘No error’ is unavailable because ‘circumnavigated around’ duplicates the sense of the prefix. This is the option that costs candidates who treat redundancy as a stylistic quibble rather than a fault; in the error-spotting format a word that can be deleted without loss of meaning, and whose meaning is already carried by the word before it, counts as an error to be named.

Redundancy, or pleonasm, is a standing category in error-spotting, and it has two recognisable families. The first is the verb that already contains its preposition, usually because it was borrowed whole from Latin. Circumnavigate contains circum, around. Return contains re-, back; so does revert, and so does repeat, which is why ‘return back’, ‘revert back’ and ‘repeat again’ are all faulty. Ascend and descend carry up and down. Enter carries in — you enter a room, you do not enter into it, except in the fixed figurative sense of entering into an agreement. Cooperate and collaborate carry together. The second family is the phrase that pairs two words meaning the same thing: final conclusion, new innovation, advance planning, past history, close proximity, sufficient enough, more preferable, free gift, joint collaboration, mutual cooperation. A nearby category, easy to confuse with these, is the verb that takes no preposition at all and is often given one: discuss the matter, not discuss about it; emphasise the point, not emphasise on it; comprise five parts, not comprise of; investigate a claim, not investigate into it. The test in all three families is the same — delete the suspect word and ask whether the sentence has lost anything.

Q8 is the third item of the spotting-errors set, printing only its sentence; the Directions block that governs the five stands above Q6, and the three underlined segments are labelled (a), (b) and (c) with (d) held for ‘No error’. The item is a fair one because the fault is in a word most candidates half-know. ‘Circumnavigate’ is familiar from accounts of voyages round the world, and the association with sailing is strong enough that some readers will pause over whether students can circumnavigate a lake at all. That is a distraction worth naming: the item is not testing whether the verb is apt for a walk round a lake, it is testing whether the preposition after it is redundant. In error-spotting, register and aptness are only rarely the point; a rule that can be stated is almost always the point.

• ‘Circumnavigate’ contains the Latin circum, around, so it is transitive and takes its object directly: circumnavigate the globe, circumnavigate the lake.
• Redundancy counts as a nameable error in this format: if a word can be deleted with no loss of meaning because the preceding word already carries it, that word is the fault.
• ‘A visit to X’ and ‘on a visit’ are both standard collocations, so segment (b) contains no preposition error.
• ‘The group of students’ has ‘group’ as its head, so the subject is singular; the proximity trap of agreeing with ‘students’ does not arise here because the past-tense verb shows no number.
• Common verbs that already contain their preposition include return, revert, repeat, ascend, descend, enter, cooperate and collaborate.

• Treating redundancy as mere clumsiness rather than as an error. In this format a deletable duplicate is a nameable fault and is regularly the keyed answer.
• Being drawn into a question of aptness — whether students can be said to circumnavigate a lake — instead of testing the preposition that follows the verb.
• Looking for the agreement error in ‘the group of students’ out of habit. The head noun is ‘group’ and the verb is past tense, so no agreement question arises.
• Assuming a long, formal-looking word must be the error in itself. ‘Circumnavigated’ is correctly formed and correctly spelt; only what follows it is wrong.

Redundancy items appear regularly in this section because they can be built out of everyday sentences with no vocabulary burden, and because they defeat reading for sense — the duplicated meaning does no damage to comprehension, so nothing sounds wrong. Sentences in this set of five stay short and describe ordinary situations, and the fault is usually a single word that can be struck out or swapped. Getting into the habit of asking, segment by segment, whether any word is doing no work is worth more here than a wide vocabulary.

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 delegation returned back to Delhi (a) | after a week of talks (b) | with officials of the two ministries. (c) | No error (d)

  • (a)The delegation returned back to Delhi
  • (b)after a week of talks
  • (c)with officials of the two ministries.
  • (d)No error

  Answer(a) The delegation returned back to Delhi — ‘return’ already contains the sense of coming back, so ‘back’ is redundant and should be deleted. Segments (b) and (c) are ordinary time and accompaniment adjuncts with the correct prepositions.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Identify the segment containing the error, or mark (d) if there is none : The board met on Friday (a) | to discuss about the revised estimates (b) | submitted by the regional office. (c) | No error (d)

  • (a)The board met on Friday
  • (b)to discuss about the revised estimates
  • (c)submitted by the regional office.
  • (d)No error

  Answer(b) to discuss about the revised estimates — ‘discuss’ is transitive and takes its object directly, so the preposition must go: ‘to discuss the revised estimates’. The collective subject with a singular verb in (a) and the reduced passive clause in (c) are both correct.