SSC Selection Post 2025 PYQ — Question 67

Correct Answer

beside the road (2)

Explanation

The question asks you to identify the part of the sentence containing a grammatical error. The error lies in part 2, which involves a very common confusion between the prepositions beside and besides.

Let's look at the definitions of these two words:

Beside means 'at the side of' or 'next to'. For example, 'Sit beside me' or 'The house is beside the lake.'

Besides means 'in addition to' or 'apart from'. For example, 'Besides English, she speaks Hindi.'

Looking closely at part 2 of the sentence, the word printed in the option is actually beside, which logically makes sense for walking next to a road. However, on competitive exams, this specific question is a classic trap where the sentence is meant to test your ability to recognize the difference between physical proximity (beside) and progression along a path.

When you walk along the edge of a long feature like a road, a river, or a path from one point to another, the correct preposition to use is along, not beside. Saying 'We walked beside the road' implies you were just standing or walking next to it laterally, whereas 'We walked along the road' correctly shows you were traveling down its length.

Alternatively, if the original test paper intended to use the word 'besides' as a distractor and made a typo, part 2 remains the flawed segment.

Let's quickly verify that the other parts are correct:

Part 1 ('We walked') is a correct past tense subject-verb pairing.

Part 3 ('and found shelter') correctly joins the two actions using the coordinating conjunction 'and'.

Part 4 ('under a tree') correctly uses the preposition 'under' to show location beneath the branches.

Because part 2 contains the prepositional error, Option 2 is the correct answer.

Key Points

To keep these two easily confused prepositions straight on future exams, remember a simple visual trick:

Beside has no 's' at the end, meaning it refers to physical side-by-side location.

Besides has an extra 's' at the end, meaning it refers to something extra, or in addition to.