SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 25 September 2024, Shift 2 · English Comprehension · Question 7 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.

The following sentence has been split into four segments. Identify the segment that contains a grammatical error. He and his friends / does not / want to / attend the meeting.

(a)attend the meeting
(b)want to
(c)does not
(d)He and his friends

Answer

Why

Correct — C. Rule: two subjects joined by and take a plural verb.

The subject here is He and his friends — a compound subject, and therefore plural, whatever the number of the parts on either side of and.

A plural subject needs do not, not does not. The faulty segment is the one printed does not, so that is what you mark: option (c).

Repaired, the sentence reads He and his friends do not want to attend the meeting.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
attend the meeting — attend the meeting is correct as printed. After the to of want to, the verb stays in its bare infinitive form, which is exactly what the segment shows.
(b)
want to — want to is correct. The tense and number are already carried by the auxiliary do or does, so want itself stays uninflected.
(d)
He and his friends — He and his friends is correct. Opening with the pronoun He is fine, and the compound subject holds no error — the fault lies in the verb that follows it.

Concept

Subject-verb agreement is settled by the whole subject, not by whichever noun happens to stand nearest the verb.

And joins two subjects into one plural subject: He and his friends is plural even though he alone is singular. A plural subject demands do, not does.

Contrast or and nor, where the verb agrees with the nearer subject instead: He or his friends do not want to go, but His friends or he does not want to go.

Error-spotting items reward testing each segment against a named rule in order, rather than scanning for whatever sounds odd.

Note what the instruction asks for. It wants the segment that contains the error, not the correction — so does not is the answer even though do not is the fix.

Key facts

Subjects joined by and take a plural verb.
Subjects joined by or or nor take a verb agreeing with the nearer subject.
After do or does, the main verb stays bare: do not want, never do not wants.

Study next

Agreement with each, every and either of, which stay singularAgreement across an intervening phrase, as in The box of pens is on the tableCollective nouns taking a singular or a plural verb according to sense

Common traps

Letting the singular He standing just before the verb pull you towards does
Marking the correction do not instead of the faulty segment does not

SSC splits one short sentence into four labelled segments and asks which segment is faulty, so the options are the segments themselves rather than corrections. The same format is asked 09 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.4, keyed no informations, and 11 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.14, keyed violent banged.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.