The following sentence has been split into four segments. Identify the segment that contains a grammatical error. By this time next year / I will had graduated from college / and starting my first job / in the field of marketing.
- (a)in the field of marketing
- (b)By this time next year
- (c)I will had graduated from college
- (d)and starting my first job
Answer
Why
Correct — C. "Will had" is not a possible verb form in English.
"Will" is a modal, and every modal is followed by a bare infinitive — so the future perfect is "will have graduated", never "will had graduated".
The time marker "By this time next year" demands exactly that tense: an action completed before a stated point in the future.
Segment 3 should read "I will have graduated from college".
Why the others are wrong
- (a)in the field of marketing — "In the field of marketing" is a clean prepositional phrase. "In the field of" takes a plain noun after it, and "marketing" is a noun here.
- (b)By this time next year — "By this time next year" is a standard future time expression, correctly built with "by" to mark a deadline. It is in fact the clue that fixes the tense in the segment after it.
- (d)and starting my first job — Ellipsis rescues this one: "and [I will be] starting my first job" holds together. The parallelism is loose, but no rule of form is broken the way "will had" breaks one.
Concept
The future perfect — will + have + past participle — reports an action finished before a stated moment in the future. Its trigger is almost always a "by" phrase: by next year, by the time you arrive, by 2030.
The form itself is fixed, because "will" is a modal and modals take the bare infinitive "have", never the finite "had".
"Will had", "will has" and "will having" are all impossible. That is why this error can be spotted on sight, before you weigh the meaning at all.
Segment 4 is stylistically untidy — the sentence moves from "will have graduated" to a bare participle, "starting".
Only segment 3 contains an error of form, and that is the segment the key marks.
Key facts
- Future perfect = will + have + past participle.
- A "by" phrase — by next year, by the time you arrive, by 2030 — is the usual trigger for the future perfect.
- Modals (will, can, may, shall, must) are always followed by a bare infinitive, so "will had" can never be correct.
- "By this time next year" points forward, so the past perfect "had graduated" would not fit the sentence either.
Study next
Common traps
- Hunting for a meaning error and walking straight past "will had", which is wrong on form alone.
- Choosing segment 4 for its loose parallelism when segment 3 carries an outright breach of verb form.
SSC splits one sentence into four slashed segments and asks which holds the error. Auxiliary faults — "will had", "has went", "did not came" — are the commonest thing planted in this format.
The same shift runs it again at English Q.16 (09 Sep 2024, 12:30), where the fault is agreement instead: "Every students in the hostel".
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.