SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 10 September 2024, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 15 of 100

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 6 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

Parts of a sentence are given below in jumbled order. Arrange the parts in the correct order to form a meaningful sentence. O. delicious R. she Q. a P. baked S. chocolate cake

(a)SRPQO
(b)QOSRP
(c)RPQOS
(d)OPQRS

Answer

Why

Correct — C. English fixes the order inside a noun phrase: determiner, then adjective, then noun.

So Q (the article a) comes before O (delicious), which comes before S (chocolate cake), giving "a delicious chocolate cake".

That noun phrase is the object, and a plain statement puts subject and verb in front of it — R (she), then P (baked).

RPQOS reads "She baked a delicious chocolate cake": option (c).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
SRPQO — SRPQO reads "Chocolate cake she baked a delicious", which strands the article a and the adjective delicious at the end with no noun left to attach to.
(b)
QOSRP — QOSRP reads "A delicious chocolate cake she baked", which fronts the object and leaves the sentence without its ordinary subject-verb opening — a marked order, not the plain sentence asked for.
(d)
OPQRS — OPQRS reads "Delicious baked a she chocolate cake", opening on a bare adjective and dropping the subject she into the middle of the noun phrase.

Concept

Word-order items are grammar, not puzzle-solving. Build the phrase first, then the clause.

An English noun phrase runs determiner + adjective + noun, so an article can never follow the adjective it introduces. That one rule pins Q, O and S in that order.

The clause is then built as subject + verb + object, which puts R and P at the front. Nothing else in the set needs testing.

The parts are labelled out of alphabetical sequence, so write them out once in the order an option proposes and read the result aloud, rather than trying to shuffle letters in your head.

Key facts

An English noun phrase orders determiner, then adjective, then noun.
The default order of a declarative English clause is subject, verb, object.
An article such as a belongs to the whole noun phrase and stands at its front, before any adjective.

Study next

Adjective order inside a noun phrase when two or more adjectives stackSegment rearrangement, where a whole clause is rebuilt from labelled partsObject fronting, and when an inverted order is acceptable in English

Common traps

Placing the adjective before the article, as in delicious a cake.
Accepting QOSRP because it can be read aloud without stumbling.
Starting from the longest part, chocolate cake, instead of from the subject.

This shift sets the same skill at more than one scale — single words here, sentence segments in English Q.6, and whole sentences in English Q.12. The word-level version is decided by phrase grammar rather than by sense.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.