SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 12 September 2024, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 20 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.

The given sentence is divided into four segments. Select the option that has the segment with a grammatical error. The employees were comfortable / with me and they talked about / their problems since / I has worked there as a manager.

(a)with me and they talked about
(b)I has worked there as a manager.
(c)their problems since
(d)The employees were comfortable

Answer

Why

Correct — B. The faulty segment is 'I has worked there as a manager.'

The trigger is the pairing I + has. 'Has' is the third-person singular form of 'have'; the pronoun I takes 'have' in the present perfect and 'had' in the past perfect. There is no context in which 'I has' is correct.

The rest of the sentence is past — 'were comfortable', 'talked' — so the repair the sentence wants is had worked.

The other three segments are clean, so option (b) is the one to mark.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
with me and they talked about — With me and they talked about is sound. 'Talked about' is a phrasal verb waiting for its object, and the next segment supplies it: 'their problems'.
(c)
their problems since — Their problems since carries no error. 'Since' is doing ordinary work as a conjunction introducing the clause that follows, and the segment break simply falls after it.
(d)
The employees were comfortable — The employees were comfortable is sound: the plural subject 'employees' takes the plural 'were', and 'comfortable' is the adjective that linking verb needs.

Concept

Segment questions ask you to locate the error, not to repair the sentence, so read each segment as a unit and test the smallest agreement inside it.

The rule here is agreement of person and number. 'Has' belongs to he, she, it and singular nouns. 'I', 'you', 'we', 'they' and plural nouns take 'have'.

'I' is first person, so 'I has' fails on person before you even reach the question of which tense the narration needs.

Two things are wrong in the same segment — the agreement and the tense — but SSC keys the segment, not the correction, so naming the segment is enough to score.

Key facts

'Has' is the third-person singular present of 'have', and 'I' never takes it.
In a past narration, the earlier of two past actions takes the past perfect: had worked.
In segment questions the answer is a segment, so one segment may contain more than one fault and still be a single answer.

Study next

Subject-verb agreement with collective nouns and with each, every and neitherSequence of tenses in subordinate clauses introduced by since, after and before'Since' as a conjunction of time against 'since' as a conjunction of reason

Common traps

Reading the four segments as one flowing sentence and losing track of where the fault sits.
Marking 'their problems since' because 'since' looks as though it demands a perfect tense in the main clause.
Repairing 'I has' to 'I have' and never noticing that the narration is in the past.

SSC splits one sentence into four segments and keys the faulty one, leaving the correction to you.

A third-person agreement error is keyed the same way at 13 Sep 2024, 09:00, EC Q.9 ('Mr. Surya / have no interior'), and the adverb version of this format is at EC Q.11 of this shift ('will pay dear').

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.