SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 11 September 2024, Shift 3 · English Comprehension · Question 2 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.

Sentences of a paragraph are given below in jumbled order. Arrange the sentences in the correct order to form a meaningful and coherent paragraph. A. A big fancy dress ball was arranged to celebrate their homecoming. B. It must have been a terrible shock for a young girl. C. They had been married a month, just home from their honeymoon. D. Just as the guests were starting to arrive, Charnley locked himself into his bedroom and shot himself.

(a)ABCD
(b)DACB
(c)BCAD
(d)BCDA

Answer

Why

Correct — C. Three of the four sentences lock into a fixed chain, and that chain decides the item.

C introduces the couple — "They had been married a month, just home from their honeymoon" — so A's their homecoming finally has something to refer back to.

A then puts the ball and its guests on stage, so D's the guests were starting to arrive has something to refer back to. The order C → A → D is therefore fixed.

Option (c) is the arrangement that keeps that chain, with B — a comment on how the shock must have felt — standing in front as the opening remark the rest explains.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
ABCD — A cannot open the paragraph: its "their homecoming" has nobody to refer to until C introduces the newly married couple.
(b)
DACB — D cannot open the paragraph: "the guests were starting to arrive" presupposes the ball of sentence A, which this order places after it.
(d)
BCDA — This keeps B and C but puts D before A, so the guests arrive at a ball that has not yet been arranged.

Concept

A sentence-order jumble is decided by links, not by story sense. Pronouns, possessives and definite articles point backwards, so a sentence carrying one cannot come before the sentence that supplies what it points to.

Find two or three such links and they fuse the sentences into blocks. Then read the four options and cross out every arrangement that breaks a block.

Usually one arrangement survives, and you never have to judge which opening sounds better.

B narrates nothing — it comments on the events — which is why it can sit outside the C-A-D chain instead of interrupting it.

Key facts

Possessives point backwards: "their homecoming" needs an earlier sentence to name whose homecoming it is.
A definite article does the same work: "the guests" requires guests already introduced.
Once a fixed chain such as C-A-D is established, testing it against the four options settles the answer without reading for style.

Study next

Anchor words that fix order: pronouns, possessives, and the plus a noun not yet introducedParts-of-a-sentence jumbles, where the same backward-pointing logic works inside one sentenceTransition markers such as however, therefore and meanwhile as ordering evidence

Common traps

Opening with the most dramatic sentence, D here, instead of the one the reference links allow.
Ordering all four sentences from scratch when checking one fixed pair against the options is faster.

SSC gives you the arrangement to pick rather than to build, so elimination against one fixed pair is the fastest route.

The same four-sentence format runs at 10 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.12 and 19 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.1.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.