Directions (For the next five items) : Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow, keeping in mind the contents of the passage alone : Passage Africa is on the move. At least 20 million (i) __________ live outside the continent, a three-fold increase since 1990. Europe accounts for about half of African (ii) __________ outside Africa, but its share has steadily declined since 1990. America, China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have all seen surges in their African-born populations. It may seem otherworldly to predict that this will continue, given the fierce backlash against (iii) __________ across the West. Notwithstanding pushback, African (iv) __________ is an unstoppable force that will long outlast today's populists and help define the 21st century. Demography is one cause. It is well-known that in the developed world the number of people of working age will decline, exacerbating labour shortages. What is less widely appreciated is that emerging countries that are associated with exporting people, such as Mexico and the Philippines, are also getting older and richer — meaning smaller shares of their populations will, in future, wish to emigrate in search of work. In Africa, by contrast, the working-age population is forecast to increase by around 700 million people by 2050. Another cause is economics. Many African countries are entering a phase in their development in which people are still poor enough to wish to leave but, for the first time, rich enough to be able to travel long distances. African countries create only around a fifth of the number of formal jobs required to absorb their expanding workforce. In the above passage there are four blanks numbered (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv). Select the option from those given below in which the most appropriate term has been used for each of the blanks respectively :

Correct — B, (b) (i) emigrants; (ii) migrants; (iii) immigration; (iv) migration.

The item is one question with four blanks, and every option is a complete set of four fillers, so it is decided by whichever blank you can settle most firmly and then by elimination.

English has three nouns for a person who moves country and they differ by point of view, not by meaning. An emigrant is seen leaving; an immigrant is seen arriving; a migrant is the neutral word that names the person without taking either side. The abstract nouns follow the same rule: emigration is departure, immigration is arrival, migration is the whole phenomenon.

Blank (i): 'At least 20 million ______ live outside the continent.' The sentence is written from Africa's side of the journey - the continent is the reference point, and the people counted are the ones who have left it. That is emigrants. Both (a) and (c) print 'immigrants' here, which would mean people who have arrived in Africa, and those people do not 'live outside the continent'. Two options die on the first blank.

Blank (ii): 'Europe accounts for about half of African ______ outside Africa.' The blank must be a countable body of people that can be divided into shares between destinations, and it must work for every destination at once - Europe, America, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey. 'Migrants' is exactly that neutral, destination-free word, which is why the surviving options both use it.

Blank (iii): 'the fierce backlash against ______ across the West'. Here the passage swaps sides. The reference point is no longer Africa but the West, and what the West pushes back against is people coming in. The receiving-end noun is immigration.

Blank (iv): 'African ______ is an unstoppable force that will long outlast today's populists and help define the 21st century.' The blank needs a singular abstract noun broad enough to cover the whole movement the passage has been describing at both ends. That is migration.

Set (b) uses each of the four words once, each in its own proper sense, and it is the only set that switches point of view exactly where the passage does.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)(i) immigrants; (ii) migration; (iii) emigrants; (iv) immigration — It fails on the very first blank. 'At least 20 million immigrants live outside the continent' makes Africa the place being arrived at, when the whole sentence is about people who have left it, and the following clause - 'a three-fold increase since 1990' - is counting Africans abroad, not foreigners in Africa. The set then compounds the error by putting 'emigrants' at (iii), where the blank sits inside a phrase about the West's own politics: a backlash 'across the West' is not directed at people leaving Africa but at people arriving in Europe and America. The set has the two viewpoint words swapped end for end, which is the mistake the item was built to catch.
• (c)(i) immigrants; (ii) emigrants; (iii) immigration; (iv) migrants — This set gets blank (iii) right - 'the fierce backlash against immigration across the West' is good English - and it is still wrong twice over. At (i) it repeats (a)'s error of calling Africans abroad immigrants when the sentence is written from Africa's side. At (iv) it puts a plural noun for people, 'migrants', into a slot that needs a singular abstract noun: 'African migrants is an unstoppable force' does not agree, and the sentence goes on to say the thing will 'help define the 21st century', which is something a phenomenon does, not a group of individuals.
• (d)(i) emigrants; (ii) migrants; (iii) migration; (iv) emigration — This is the near-miss, and it is worth being precise about why it loses rather than dismissing it. It matches the keyed set at blanks (i) and (ii), and both of its remaining fillers make grammatical sense: people do say 'backlash against migration', and 'African emigration' is a real phrase. It is weaker on both. At (iii) the passage has just moved the reader to the Western end of the journey - 'across the West' - and 'immigration' is the word that names movement into that place, where 'migration' leaves the direction unstated and wastes the one blank in the passage that fixes the receiving end's point of view. At (iv) 'emigration' narrows the sentence back to the act of leaving Africa, when the claim being made is about the whole movement of people that will 'help define the 21st century'. Choosing (d) also means the passage never uses the receiving-end word at all, though it spends a third of its length on receiving countries.

Emigrant, immigrant and migrant name the same human being from three different standpoints. Emigrant is the word used by the country being left, immigrant the word used by the country being entered, migrant the neutral word that commits to neither. The Latin prefixes carry the whole distinction: e- (out of) and in- (into), on the same stem migrare, to move.

The corresponding abstract nouns behave identically. Emigration is departure counted at the origin, immigration is arrival counted at the destination, and migration is the umbrella term for the movement as a whole. This is why a single journey generates two different official statistics: one country records an emigrant leaving and another records an immigrant arriving, and the two figures rarely match.

In a cloze item the choice is therefore never about what the words mean - they mean nearly the same thing - but about where the sentence is standing. Find the reference point in the sentence itself. A sentence anchored on Africa ('live outside the continent', 'outside Africa') takes the leaving-end words; a sentence anchored on the West ('across the West') takes the arriving-end word; a sentence describing the phenomenon in general ('an unstoppable force') takes the umbrella word.

A second, purely grammatical filter runs alongside it. Two of these words are count nouns for people (emigrants, migrants) and can be halved, counted and made the subject of a plural verb; the others are mass nouns for a process and take a singular verb. Blank (iv) is followed by 'is an unstoppable force', which admits only a process noun.

Key facts

• An emigrant, an immigrant and a migrant can be the same person: the first word views the journey from the country of departure, the second from the country of arrival, and the third takes no side at all.
• The prefixes carry the direction - e- means out of and in- means into, both attached to the Latin migrare, to move - so emigration is departure, immigration is arrival, and migration is the whole movement.
• Emigrants, immigrants and migrants are count nouns for people and take plural verbs; emigration, immigration and migration are mass nouns for a process and take singular verbs, which is what settles the fourth blank before meaning is considered at all.
• The passage itself changes standpoint mid-way: its first half counts people from Africa's side ('live outside the continent', 'outside Africa'), and the sentence about backlash counts them from the West's side ('across the West').
• The passage states the scale it is talking about - at least 20 million people living outside the continent, a three-fold increase since 1990 - and names Europe, America, China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey as destinations.

Common traps

• Treating the three nouns as loose synonyms and picking by ear. They differ by standpoint, and the sentence around the blank always states the standpoint.
• Filling the blanks left to right and stopping at the first set that reads smoothly. Every set in a well-built item reads smoothly somewhere; the test is whether it reads correctly everywhere.
• Missing that the passage swaps sides between blank (ii) and blank (iii), so the same option must not use the same standpoint word for both.
• Ignoring the verb after a blank. 'is an unstoppable force' rules out a plural people-noun before any question of meaning arises.
• Reading the outside world into the passage. The Directions confine the answer to the passage's own contents, so what real-world migration statistics say is not admissible here.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the sentence 'Kerala has for decades been a State of ______, and the Gulf countries have been the chief destination of its ______', which pair fills the blanks most appropriately ?

  • (a)immigrants; emigration
  • (b)emigrants; migration
  • (c)emigrants; immigration
  • (d)migrants; emigrants

  Answer(b) emigrants; migration - the first blank is anchored on Kerala, the place being left, so it takes the leaving-end people-noun; the second blank follows 'its' and names the movement as a whole rather than the people, and a State's own movement of people outward is described from the neutral umbrella term. 'Immigration' in (a) and (c) would make the Gulf the destination of arrivals into Kerala, which reverses the sentence, and (d) puts a people-noun where a process noun is needed.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following sentences uses the underlined-style word correctly ?

  • (a)Britain saw a sharp rise in emigration from eastern Europe after 2004
  • (b)Ireland lost a fifth of its people to emigration in the nineteenth century
  • (c)The village council counted every immigrant who had left for the city
  • (d)Half of the world's migration live outside their country of birth

  Answer(b) Ireland lost a fifth of its people to emigration in the nineteenth century - the sentence is anchored on the country being left, which is what emigration names. (a) is anchored on Britain, the country being entered, so it needs immigration; (c) calls a person who has left an immigrant; and (d) puts the mass noun 'migration' where a plural people-noun is required.