The following sentence has been split into segments. Identify the segment that contains an error. If you don’t find any error, mark ‘No error’ as your answer. People admired him, for / he lived by the same principals / that he preached.

Correct — A. The segment prints principals. That spelling means heads of institutions, lead performers, or the capital sum of a loan. What a person lives by are principles — rules of conduct.

The two are homophones, so the ear cannot catch this: only the sense can. Read the segment with the head-of-school meaning and it says he lived by the same headmasters that he preached.

Segment (a) is therefore where the error sits → option (a).

Why the others are wrong

• (b)
  People admired him, for — For here is a coordinating conjunction meaning because, and it correctly joins two independent clauses with a comma before it. Nothing in the segment is wrong.
• (c)
  that he preached — A relative clause introduced by that correctly modifies principles, and preached matches the past tense of lived. The segment is clean.
• (d)
  No error — No error cannot stand while principals sits in the second segment. The sentence carries a real word-choice mistake, not merely an awkward turn of phrase.

Error-spotting items do not restrict themselves to grammar. A correctly spelt but wrong word is one of the error types SSC uses, and no rule of syntax will find it.

Principle is a noun only: a rule, a standard, a moral belief. You act on principle and you have principles.

Principal is either an adjective meaning main or chief, or a noun meaning the head of a school, the lead performer, or the sum on which interest is paid.

Only meaning separates them, so read the sentence for sense, not just for structure.

Key facts

• Principle is a noun only, meaning a rule, standard or moral belief.
• Principal works as an adjective meaning chief, and as a noun for a school head or for the capital sum of a loan.
• The pair is a homophone pair, so both spellings pass a spellchecker and only the sense tells them apart.

Common traps

• Reading only for grammar, finding nothing broken, and marking No error while a misspelt homophone sits in the second segment.
• Suspecting the comma before for, when for joining two independent clauses normally takes one.

No directly related past PYQ was found.