SSC Selection Post 2025 PYQ — Question 73

Correct Answer

The news are (1)

Explanation

The question asks you to find the segment of the sentence that contains a grammatical error. The mistake here is a subject-verb agreement error in part 1.

Even though the word news ends with an "s," it is an uncountable (mass) noun, not a plural noun. In English grammar, uncountable nouns are always treated as singular entities and must take a singular verb.

Therefore, using the plural verb "are" is incorrect. It must be replaced with the singular verb "is."

Let's look at the correct phrasing:

Incorrect: The news are quite surprising...

Correct: The news is quite surprising...

Let's quickly verify that the remaining parts are accurate:

Part 2 ("quite surprising") correctly uses the adverb "quite" to modify the participle adjective "surprising."

Part 3 ("and hard to believe") is a perfectly valid infinitive phrase connected by a coordinating conjunction.

Part 4 ("for the public") correctly uses the preposition "for" to indicate the affected audience.

Because part 1 uses a plural verb with a singular uncountable noun, Option 1 is the correct answer.

Key Points

To avoid tricky subject-verb agreement traps on competitive exams, remember that several common nouns end in "s" but are strictly singular and take singular verbs:

Subjects/Fields of study: Physics is, Mathematics is, Economics is, Politics is.

Diseases: Measles is, Rickets is, Rabies is.

Games: Billiards is, Darts is, Dominoes is.