SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 25 September 2024, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 1 of 99

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 sentence that does NOT have a spelling error.

(a)She is very particular about pronounciation in her classes.
(b)The movie was very successful in the urban areas, but not among rural audiences.
(c)There wedding was during the summer, which is why we didn’t attend it.
(d)There were no intermittent showers in the city, as was predicted during the whether

Answer

Why

Correct — B. Read each option word by word for one bad spelling, not for overall sense.

Option (b) is clean: successful, urban and audiences are all spelt correctly, and no word in it is a homophone standing in for a different word.

Each of the other three carries one faulty word, so (b) is the sentence you can leave untouched.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
She is very particular about pronounciation in her classes. — pronounciation is wrong. The verb pronounce keeps its -oun-, but the noun contracts and loses the o: pronunciation.
(c)
There wedding was during the summer, which is why we didn’t attend it. — There is the wrong homophone. Possession needs Their wedding. There names a place or fills the subject slot, and never shows ownership.
(d)
There were no intermittent showers in the city, as was predicted during the whether — whether is the wrong homophone. Rain and sun are the weather, spelt with an ea. Whether introduces a choice or an indirect question.

Concept

This stem hides two different faults under the single label spelling error.

One is a genuine misspelling — a letter added, dropped or swapped, as in pronounciation for pronunciation.

The other is a homophone substitution: a correctly spelt English word sitting where a different word belongs, as with there for their and whether for weather.

Your ear cannot catch the second kind, because the two words sound identical. Only the meaning of the slot decides, so read each word and ask what it means where it stands.

Option (d) also breaks off mid-sentence in the paper, with no closing word after the whether. That does not change anything — the faulty word is already there.

Key facts

The verb pronounce keeps -oun-, but its noun pronunciation drops the o.
Their shows possession, while there names a place or fills an empty subject slot.
Weather means rain and sun, while whether introduces a choice or an indirect question.

Study next

Homophone pairs SSC reuses: their and there, weather and whether, principal and principleNouns whose spelling moves away from their verb, such as maintain and maintenanceDouble-consonant traps such as accommodate, occurrence and embarrass

Common traps

Reading each option for meaning and choosing whichever sounds most fluent
Treating there for their as a grammar slip and so not counting it as a spelling error

SSC runs this stem in both directions — pick the sentence with no spelling error, and pick the sentence that has one. The identical no-error version is asked 12 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.2 and 17 Sep 2024, 16:00, English Q.8.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.