Punctuate the following sentence: “Whatever is is right.”

The correct answer is C. The sentence is a line from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man (Epistle I), and the punctuation has to mark the boundary between the subject clause and the main predicate. 'Whatever is' is a noun clause acting as subject, and 'is right' is the main clause. A comma after the first 'is' separates them, giving 'Whatever is, is right.'

Why the others fail:

• A adds a question mark and changes the sentence into an interrogative, which reverses the meaning. The original is an assertion.
• B splits off 'Whatever' as a fragment and leaves 'Is is right', which has no sensible grammatical structure.
• D puts commas on both sides of 'is', breaking the clause 'whatever is' and leaving an unintelligible string.

Core concept: punctuation as a carrier of clause structure and meaning. Pope's line is often discussed in Mains answers on optimism and theodicy, but this question tests only the grammar of the sentence.

Trap: Aspirants pick A because the line looks like a rhetorical query, or they assume commas must surround every verb. Test each option by reading it aloud as a statement and checking whether it makes grammatical sense.