SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 19 September 2024, Shift 1 · English Comprehension · Question 4 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 10 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.

Parts of the following sentence have been given as options. Select the option that contains an error. The police told the agitators to back in, else they would lathi-charge.

(a)The police told
(b)the agitators to back in
(c)lathi-charge
(d)else they would

Answer

Why

Correct — B. The fault is the particle of the phrasal verb: English has no "back in" meaning to retreat or give way.

The sentence needs back off — stop pressing or threatening — or back down, abandon a demand. Either fits a police warning to agitators.

"Back in" survives only in its literal sense, reversing a vehicle into a space, which is not what is being ordered here.

The particle is what breaks, so the segment to name is option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
The police told — Correct as printed. "Tell + object + to-infinitive" is the standard pattern for a reported command, and "told the agitators" supplies exactly that object.
(c)
lathi-charge — Correct as printed. "Lathi-charge" is established Indian English as both noun and verb, and after "would" the bare infinitive is the right form.
(d)
else they would — Correct as printed. "Else" works here as a conjunction meaning otherwise, and "would" is the properly back-shifted modal after the past reporting verb "told".

Concept

Spot-the-error items are usually decided by a verb form, a particle or an agreement. This one is a particle.

A phrasal verb is verb plus particle, and the particle is not negotiable. "Back off", "back down", "back out" and "back up" all exist and all mean different things.

Change the particle and you change or destroy the verb, so a phrasal verb has to be learnt whole — never assembled from a verb plus whichever preposition sounds plausible.

The stem does not tell you what kind of error to look for, so scan in a fixed order: verb form, then particle or preposition, then agreement, then connector.

Read the segments in sentence order — here that is (a), (b), (d), (c) — not in the order the options are listed.

Key facts

Back off means to stop pressing, threatening or interfering.
Back down means to abandon a claim or demand under pressure.
Back out means to withdraw from an agreement already made.
A phrasal verb's particle is fixed, so changing it changes or destroys the meaning.

Study next

Phrasal verbs built on back: back off, back down, back out, back upReported commands with tell + object + to-infinitiveModal back-shift after a past reporting verb

Common traps

Suspecting "lathi-charge" because it is Indian English rather than because it is ungrammatical.
Hunting for a subject-verb agreement error and walking past the particle.

The four-segment error format recurs steadily: English Q.18 in this same 09:00 shift, 19 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.19, and 19 Sep 2024, 16:00, English Q.6. The fault tested changes each time, so read every segment before you choose.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.