SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 24 September 2024, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 16 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.

Select the most appropriate option to substitute the underlined segment in the given sentence. I had not only helped her by giving hints but also with providing her links.

(a)helped her not only by
(b)helped not only her by
(c)helped her only by
(d)helped her not by

Answer

Why

Correct — A. Not only ... but also is a correlative pair, and what follows the first half has to be the same kind of phrase as what follows the second.

The second half is fixed by the part of the sentence you cannot change: with providing her links, a preposition plus a gerund.

So the first half must be a preposition plus a gerund too — by giving hints — which means not only has to sit immediately before 'by'. That is option (a): I had helped her not only by giving hints but also with providing her links.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
helped not only her by — 'Not only her' puts the correlative in front of the object, so but also would need a second object to balance it. What actually follows is a phrase.
(c)
helped her only by — Deleting not only strands the but also later in the sentence. Plain 'only' has no partner in a correlative pair.
(d)
helped her not by — Not ... but also is not a pair. English has 'not only ... but also' and plain 'not ... but', and this option mixes the two.

Concept

Correlative conjunctions come in fixed pairs — both/and, either/or, neither/nor, not only/but also — and they carry a placement rule as well as a matching rule.

The placement rule: put the first half of the pair immediately before the first of the two elements being joined. Get that wrong and the sentence promises one kind of continuation and delivers another.

The original promises a verb phrase after 'not only' — helped her by giving hints — and then supplies a prepositional phrase after 'but also'. Moving not only two words to the right repairs the balance and touches nothing else.

Careful writing would repeat the preposition: not only by giving hints but also by providing her links. The item does not offer that, and does not need to. Parallelism is satisfied by both members being preposition plus gerund, and only one option delivers even that much.

Key facts

Correlative pairs join elements of the same grammatical kind, so the first half goes immediately before the first element.
In the corrected sentence both joined members are preposition plus gerund — by giving hints and with providing her links.
But also answers not only and nothing else, so an option that deletes 'not only' breaks the sentence.

Study next

Correlative pairs and their placement: both/and, either/or, neither/nor, not only/but alsoParallelism in lists and in comparisonsGerund phrases as objects of prepositions

Common traps

Repairing the sentence by ear and choosing the option that moves 'only' rather than 'not only'.
Assuming the two prepositions have to be identical, and rejecting the right option because it pairs 'by' with 'with'.

SSC also tests these pairs by offering the wrong half among the options. At 10 Sep 2024, 16:00, English Q.16 the sentence continues '... or go for a walk', so the bracketed word has to become 'either', and 'not only' sits in the list as a trap.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.