CAT 1999 — VARC Question 16
Directions: For each of the two questions, indicate which of the statements given with that particular question is consistent with the description of the unseasonable man in the passage below.
Unseasonableness is a tendency to do socially permissible things at the wrong time. The unseasonable man is the sort of person who comes to confide in you when you are busy. He serenades his beloved when she is ill. He asks a man who has just lost money by paying a bill for a friend to pay a bill for him. He invites a friend to go for a ride just after the friend has finished a long car trip. He is eager to offer services which are not wanted, but which cannot be politely refused. If he is present at an arbitration, he stirs up dissension between the two parties, who were really anxious to agree. Such is the unseasonable man.
Directions: In each of the following sentence, a part of the sentence is underlined. Four different ways of phrasing the underlined part are indicated. Choose the best alternative among the four.
It was us who had left before he arrived.
Answer & solution
- A
we who had left before time he had arrived.
- B
us who had went before he arrived.
- C
us who had went before had arrived.
we who had left before he arrived.
(d) is the correct answer choice.
The question relates to choosing the correct pronoun case: Subjective (we) or objective (us). The answer to the question ‘who had left before he arrived?’ is ‘we’, not ‘us’: ‘We’ is the subject of the verb ‘had left’ and the referent of the relative pronoun ‘who,’ which is also in the subjective case.
(b) and (c) are incorrect because they use ‘Us’ the objective case. They also have other obvious errors.
(a) Uses the correct pronoun case (We), but incorrectly places both verbs ‘had left’ and ‘had arrived’ in the past perfect tenses. For indicating that one event has occurred in the past before another, the former should be placed in past perfect tense, while the latter in simple past tense.