The following sentence has been split into four segments. Identify the segment that contains an error. The principal gave up / the prizes to / the winners on / Republic Day.
- (a)the prizes to
- (b)the winners on
- (c)Republic Day
- (d)The principal gave up
Answer
Why
Correct — D. The error is in the particle, not in the verb.
Give up means to surrender or to stop doing something — you give up smoking, an army gives up a fort. Handing prizes to winners at a ceremony is give away: 'The principal gave away the prizes to the winners on Republic Day.'
The rest of the sentence is sound. 'the prizes to' takes the right preposition for a recipient, 'the winners on' uses on with a named day, and 'Republic Day' is capitalised correctly as a proper noun.
So option (d) is the segment that has to change.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)the prizes to — To is the correct preposition for the recipient of a gift or an award — give something to somebody. The segment is grammatical, and the fault sits earlier in the sentence.
- (b)the winners on — English takes on before a named day or date: on Monday, on Republic Day. 'in' or 'at' would be wrong here, so this segment stands as printed.
- (c)Republic Day — Republic Day is a proper noun and both words are correctly capitalised. Spelling, capitals and word order in this segment are all as they should be.
Concept
A phrasal verb is a verb plus a particle, and the particle carries most of the meaning. Change it and the sense changes completely: give up (surrender), give away (distribute, or reveal a secret), give in (yield), give out (issue, or be exhausted), give off (emit).
Spot-the-error items are written so that one segment is faulty and the rest are clean. Read each segment for its own job — verb form, preposition, article, agreement, capitalisation — instead of reading the sentence for overall sense, because a wrong-particle sentence still gets its meaning across.
'Gave out the prizes' would also be acceptable English. The task is to find the faulty segment, not to supply the single best replacement for it.
Key facts
- Give up means to surrender or to abandon an activity.
- Give away means to distribute or hand over, as with prizes at a ceremony.
- English uses the preposition 'on' before a named day, as in on Republic Day.
Study next
Common traps
- Reading the sentence for meaning and accepting 'gave up the prizes' because the point still comes across.
- Suspecting 'Republic Day' because proper nouns look like a capitalisation trap.
- Looking for a missing article before 'Republic Day', which does not take one.
SSC splits the sentence at slashes and keys one segment. The fault sits in a verb form, an adverb form, a preposition or, as here, a phrasal-verb particle.
A wrong particle is also keyed 17 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.17, where 'brought about a new book' should be 'brought out'. The same four-segment format is also asked 11 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.14 ('violent banged') and 25 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.3 ('very louder'), both adverb-form faults.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.