The following sentence has been split into four segments. Identify the segment that contains a grammatical error. After I retire, I started a second career / as a writer and published several books / which allowed me to share my stories / and insights with a wider audience.
- (a)which allowed me to share my stories
- (b)After I retire, I started a second career
- (c)and insights with a wider audience
- (d)as a writer and published several books
Answer
Why
Correct — B. The faulty segment is After I retire, I started a second career, and the fault is a tense clash inside it.
Rule: after a past-tense main verb, a time clause introduced by after takes past simple or past perfect — 'After I retired' or 'After I had retired'.
As printed, a present-tense event ('I retire') is made to precede a past-tense consequence ('I started'), which cannot describe the same career.
The remaining segments stay consistently past — published, allowed — so option (b) is the segment that breaks the sequence.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)which allowed me to share my stories — 'which allowed me to share my stories' is a relative clause whose verb allowed is past, matching 'published'. Its 'which' has a clause to refer back to, so nothing here is wrong.
- (c)and insights with a wider audience — 'and insights with a wider audience' merely completes the compound object of 'share' — my stories and insights. There is no verb in it to get a tense wrong.
- (d)as a writer and published several books — 'as a writer and published several books' coordinates a second past verb with 'started'. started ... and published is parallel and correct.
Concept
SSC's four-segment item asks for exactly one wrong segment, so read for the grammatical relation that fails rather than for anything that reads awkwardly.
The relation tested here is the sequence of tenses. A subordinate time clause takes its tense from the main clause: a past main verb wants past or past perfect beside it.
Note that 'After I retire' is perfectly good English in the right company — 'After I retire, I will start a second career'. It is wrong only because the main verb printed is started.
The segment boundaries are given by the slashes in the stem, so the error must lie wholly inside one of the four printed strings, not across a boundary.
Key facts
- After a past-tense main verb, an after / before / when clause takes past simple or past perfect, never present simple.
- 'After I retire, I will start a second career' is correct, which shows the clause is wrong here only relative to started.
- Coordinated verbs share a subject and a tense: started ... and published is the parallel pair in this sentence.
Study next
Common traps
- Looking for a vocabulary or spelling slip. These items turn on a grammatical relation between segments.
- Marking the segment beginning 'and published' because the subject is not repeated. A coordinated verb does not need one.
- Reading 'After I retire' in isolation, where it is good English, instead of against started.
SSC splits one sentence into four segments and asks which segment is wrong.
Also asked 10 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.11 ('will replaced traditional fossil fuels') and 09 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.19 ('I will had graduated from college'), both auxiliary faults rather than clause-sequence faults.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.