SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 11 September 2024, Shift 3 · English Comprehension · Question 13 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 the following sentence have been given as options. Select the option that contains an error. Solutions to the country’s interior problems are still a long way away.

(a)a long way away.
(b)the country’s interior
(c)problems are still
(d)Solutions to

Answer

Why

Correct — B. The faulty word is interior. Interior is the adjective of physical inside space: interior design, the interior of a car, the interior of a country meaning its inland region.

Difficulties arising within a state are internal — internal affairs, internal security, internal audit. The sentence should read "Solutions to the country's internal problems are still a long way away."

So the error sits in segment (b), the only segment that contains the word interior.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
a long way away. — "a long way away" is ordinary idiomatic English for far from being reached. The repeated way/away is the sound of the idiom, not a slip.
(c)
problems are still — "problems are still" is sound. The verb are agrees with the plural subject Solutions, and still is correctly placed before the complement.
(d)
Solutions to — "Solutions to" takes the standard preposition. A solution is to a problem, not of or for it, so this segment needs no change.

Concept

When every segment of an error-spotting sentence parses, the fault is a wrong word, not a wrong form.

interior and internal split by domain. Interior is spatial and largely concrete: the inside of a building, a vehicle, a landmass. Internal describes what belongs within a body, an organisation or a state: internal bleeding, internal politics, internal security.

A country's own troubles are internal. Its interior is the land away from the coast — a different claim altogether, and not what this sentence means.

Diction errors are harder than agreement errors precisely because the sentence sounds fluent. Read for meaning once you have checked the grammar and found it clean.

Key facts

Internal is the adjective for what belongs inside a body, organisation or state.
Interior describes physical inside space, as in interior design.
The corrected sentence is: Solutions to the country's internal problems are still a long way away.
"A long way away" is idiomatic for something far from being achieved.

Study next

Confusable adjective pairs: economic and economical, historic and historicalContinual against continuous, and other pairs SSC sets in error-spotting segmentsChecking subject-verb agreement against the head noun rather than the nearest noun

Common traps

Testing each segment for grammar only, and passing a sentence whose grammar is clean.
Marking "a long way away" as a repetition.
Matching are to the nearer noun problems instead of the subject Solutions.

The word interior turns up in a keyed error segment on other dates too. On 13 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.9 the keyed segment is "have no interior", where has is wanted for have and ulterior for interior.

Error spotting also returns in this shift at English Q.20, "They secret / decided / to leave / the town.", where an adjective is doing an adverb's work.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.