UPSC CDS English Ordering of Words in a Sentence Part 1 Questions

The subject is already given and it is followed by the pair SP as P grammatically cannot follow S and this pair informs about the feature of the noun, hence it follows the noun ‘the man’. Other logical pair is QR as Q is the verb and R is the object. As per rules, the pair QR follows the pair SP. Thus, it is clear that the correct option is (a).