EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 12 of 120

Correct — D, (d) may be doubted. Two things have to be settled here: whether the blank takes a verb or a noun, and, once that is decided, which of the two verb options fits the sentence the author is writing. The first is settled by the subject. The sentence begins the second clause with ‘it’, and this ‘it’ is the anticipatory subject — a placeholder that stands in for the ‘whether’ clause coming later. Anticipatory ‘it’ is regularly completed by a passive verb of thinking or saying: it is believed that, it was reported that, it may be argued that, it may be doubted whether. What it does not take is the count noun ‘doubt’. English expresses that with the existential ‘there’ — there is a doubt whether, there may be some doubt whether — or with the adjective, it is doubtful whether. So both options built on the noun collapse the moment you look at what precedes the blank, and the choice narrows to the two verb forms. The second is settled by the balance of the sentence. The first clause is modal: all effects ‘can be’ connected with immediate causes. The ‘but’ then sets a counterweight against it, and ‘may be doubted’ supplies one in the same key — what can be done on one side, what may be doubted on the other. ‘It may be doubted whether…’ is also the settled formula by which a writer registers his own reservation without attributing it to anybody: it means there is room to doubt this, and it is the note the sentence is struck in. The finished sentence reads: all effects can be connected with immediate causes, but it may be doubted whether they provide the whole explanation.

• (a)is doubted — ‘is doubted’ is the serious rival, because ‘it is doubted whether they provide the whole explanation’ breaks no rule of grammar. It fails on meaning and register, which is what the Directions ask about when they say ‘most appropriate’. The impersonal passive ‘it is doubted’ reports that people actually entertain the doubt, and it normally carries or implies an agent — it is widely doubted, it is doubted by economists. The author is not reporting anyone’s opinion; he is entering a reservation of his own, and he has already pitched the sentence modally with ‘can be connected’. Replacing a modal with a flat assertion of fact loses that balance.
• (b)is a doubt — ‘is a doubt’ produces ‘it is a doubt whether they provide the whole explanation’, which is not idiomatic English. ‘Doubt’ used as a count noun takes the existential subject — there is a doubt whether — because the sentence is asserting that such a doubt exists. Anticipatory ‘it’ with a predicate noun works for some nouns, as in ‘it is a question whether’, but ‘a doubt’ is not among them; the natural equivalents are the adjective, ‘it is doubtful whether’, or the verb, ‘it may be doubted whether’.
• (c)may be a doubt — ‘may be a doubt’ has the right modal and the wrong subject. ‘There may be a doubt whether they provide the whole explanation’ is perfectly good English; the sentence as printed simply does not offer ‘there’, and with the ‘it’ that is printed the phrase is stranded. This option is worth studying as a warning: an option can be a fragment of a correct sentence and still be unusable in the sentence you are given, so each candidate filler has to be read back into the printed words rather than judged on its own.

English has two dummy subjects, and they are not interchangeable. Anticipatory ‘it’ stands in for a clause that has been moved to the end of the sentence for weight. ‘It may be doubted whether they provide the whole explanation’ is a rearrangement of ‘whether they provide the whole explanation may be doubted’. This ‘it’ is completed by an adjective — it is likely that, it is doubtful whether, it is clear that — or by a passive verb of reporting or judging: it is said that, it is believed that, it was decided that, it may be argued that. Existential ‘there’ asserts that something exists. It is completed by a noun phrase: there is a doubt, there are three objections, there may be some difficulty. The test is simple. If the word after the blank names a thing, the subject should be ‘there’; if it describes or judges the clause that follows, the subject should be ‘it’. One further layer sits on top: the modal passive. ‘It may be doubted’, ‘it might be argued’, ‘it could be said’ are the standard way careful expository prose enters a reservation without naming who holds it. They are hedges, and they differ from the plain passive — ‘it is doubted’ — which reports an attitude as a fact about the world.

Q12 is the second item of the cloze set; it prints only its sentence, the Directions block for Q11 to Q15 having been printed above Q11. Those Directions ask for the ‘most appropriate’ filler, not merely a grammatical one, and this is the first item in the set where the distinction does work. That phrasing is the examiner’s licence to set an item in which more than one option produces a well-formed sentence. Candidates who stop at the first option that parses will mark (a) and lose the item, at two and a half marks with a third of that as penalty. The habit being rewarded is to finish the elimination — strike out what is ungrammatical, and then choose between the survivors on meaning, register and the balance of the sentence, which here is set by the modal ‘can’ in the first clause and the contrast introduced by ‘but’.

• Anticipatory ‘it’ stands in for a following clause and is completed by an adjective or a passive verb of judging or reporting: it is doubtful whether, it may be doubted whether, it is said that.
• Existential ‘there’ is completed by a noun phrase and asserts existence: there is a doubt whether, there may be some difficulty.
• The count noun ‘doubt’ therefore takes ‘there’, which is why both noun options fail against the printed ‘it’.
• ‘It may be doubted whether’ is a hedging formula in which the writer enters his own reservation; ‘it is doubted whether’ reports that others hold the doubt.
• The Directions for this set ask for the most appropriate filler, so an option may be grammatical and still be wrong.

• Stopping at the first option that produces a grammatical sentence. The Directions ask for the most appropriate, and two options here parse.
• Reading an option in isolation rather than back into the printed sentence. ‘May be a doubt’ is good English with ‘there’ and unusable with the ‘it’ that is printed.
• Ignoring the modal in the first clause. ‘Can be connected’ sets the key the second clause has to answer in.
• Treating the impersonal passive ‘it is doubted’ as neutral. It reports an existing attitude, which is a stronger claim than the sentence is making.

Cloze items in this section are built so that the options differ by one small element — an auxiliary, an article, a preposition, a noun against a verb — and at least one item per set makes the candidate choose between two grammatical fillers on register alone. Dummy subjects are a favourite testing point because the choice between ‘it’ and ‘there’ is invisible to the ear and mechanical to the rule. The reliable method is to read the printed words on both sides of the blank first, decide what kind of element the sentence demands, and only then rank the survivors.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Select the most appropriate option for the blank : The scheme has met its targets in the southern districts, but ________ some doubt whether the model can be transferred to the hills.

  • (a)it is
  • (b)there remains
  • (c)it may be
  • (d)there is doubted

  Answer(b) there remains — the blank is followed by the noun phrase ‘some doubt’, and a noun phrase asserting existence takes the existential subject ‘there’. The two options built on ‘it’ would need an adjective or a passive verb after them, and ‘there is doubted’ is not a possible form.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Select the most appropriate option for the blank : The figures for the last quarter are accurate as far as they go, but ________ whether they capture the informal sector at all.

  • (a)it is a question
  • (b)there is questioned
  • (c)it may be questioned
  • (d)there may questioned

  Answer(c) it may be questioned — anticipatory ‘it’ takes a passive verb before the ‘whether’ clause, and the modal keeps the writer’s reservation in the same hedged key as ‘as far as they go’. ‘There’ cannot govern a passive verb, and while ‘it is a question whether’ exists, the modal passive matches the sentence’s balance better.