Find the part of the sentence that contains an error: The more senior the position was (1) / the more urgent became the need (2)…

Question

Find the part of the sentence that contains an error: The more senior the position was (1) / the more urgent became the need (2) / for discretion, decorum, and (3) / refraining from premature disclosure. (4)

1. A. (1)
2. B. (2)
3. C. (3)
4. D. (4) (Correct answer)

Correct Answer

Option D — (4)

Detailed Solution & Explanation

The correct answer is part (4).

Key Points

• The sentence lists what the need is "for": discretion, decorum, and refraining from premature disclosure.
• The first two items are nouns, so the third must be a noun too. Refraining is a gerund phrase, which breaks the parallel structure.
• Correcting it to a noun such as restraint — "for discretion, decorum, and restraint" — makes the list consistent.
• Parts (1), (2) and (3) are sound: "The more senior the position was, the more urgent became the need" is a correct double-comparative construction.
• In error-detection questions, read any list of three or more items first; unmatched word forms in a series are the single most common planted error.

Additional Information

• Parallelism requires items in a list to share a grammatical form: all nouns, all gerunds or all infinitives.
• It also governs correlative pairs — *not only … but also*, *either … or*, *neither … nor*, *both … and* — where the structure after each half must match.
• Read any list of three or more items first; an unmatched form in a series is the most frequently planted error in SSC error-detection questions.