The following sentence has been split into four segments. Identify the segment that contains a spelling error. Big Data has inandated / the education industry. / It has transformed it / by leaps and bounds.

Correct — A. The faulty word is inandated. The word wanted is inundated — in-un-dat-ed, to flood or overwhelm.

The second syllable is un, not an, and that single vowel is the whole error.

Nothing else in the sentence is misspelled: education, industry, transformed, leaps and bounds are all correct as printed, so the segment to mark is option (a).

Why the others are wrong

• (b)
  It has transformed it — transformed is spelled correctly. The repeated it in It has transformed it reads clumsily, but the question asks for a spelling error, not for style.
• (c)
  by leaps and bounds — by leaps and bounds is a fixed idiom and every word in it is spelled as it should be.
• (d)
  the education industry — education and industry are both correct. Nothing in this segment has been altered.

In the segment format SSC splits one sentence at the slashes and plants a single misspelling in one part. The rest of the sentence is bait.

The planted word is usually a long, Latin-derived verb or noun — the kind a candidate recognises by shape and therefore reads past without checking the letters.

Read each segment on its own, and inside the suspect segment read the long word syllable by syllable rather than as a whole.

Key facts

• The correct spelling is inundated, meaning flooded or overwhelmed.
• Inundate comes from Latin unda, a wave, which is why the second syllable is un.
• By leaps and bounds is an idiom meaning very rapidly.

Common traps

• Marking It has transformed it for the repeated pronoun when the question is about spelling only.
• Skimming inandated because the sentence still makes sense with it.
• Assuming the error must sit in the longest segment.

No directly related past PYQ was found.