The honeybee is a very unusual kind of insect. _____ (46) other insects which live alone, the honeybee lives as a/an _____ (47) of a community. These bees live together in what is known as a bee _____ (48) The head of the bees is called the queen bee. She is _____ (49) than the rest of the bees. Her main task is to _____ (50) eggs. The head of the bees is called the queen bee. She is _____ than the rest of the bees.
- (a)heaviest
- (b)heavier
- (c)largest
- (d)larger
Correct — D, larger. The printed 'than' settles half the question by itself, because 'than' goes with a comparative and never with a superlative, so the two superlatives are out. Of the two comparatives left, the queen bee is the one picked out from the rest of the colony by her size, her body being noticeably longer than a worker's or a drone's, and 'larger' is the word a descriptive passage of this kind uses for overall size.
- (a)heaviest — A superlative cannot be followed by 'than'; it takes 'of' or 'in', as in 'the heaviest of the lot'.
- (b)heavier — Grammatically this is a well-formed comparative and it is the real near-miss, but weight is not how the queen is distinguished in ordinary description. What a reader or a beekeeper notices is her longer body, so 'larger' is the word the passage calls for.
- (c)largest — The same fault as option (a), since a superlative will not sit before 'than'.
A cloze item testing the comparative form against the superlative, with a word-choice decision left over.
One rule and then a judgement. The rule is that 'than' takes the comparative, never the superlative, and it removes options (a) and (c) without any thought about bees at all. What remains is a choice between two well-formed comparatives, and that is decided by usage rather than grammar, because a passage explaining how you can tell the queen apart is talking about her size and 'larger' is the ordinary word for it.
- A comparative is followed by 'than', while a superlative is followed by 'of' or 'in' and usually takes 'the' in front of it.
- The queen bee's abdomen is longer than that of the worker bees around her and longer than a drone's, which is how she is picked out inside a colony.
- 'Larger' compares size and 'heavier' compares weight, so they are not interchangeable even though both are comparatives.
- Reaching for a superlative because the comparison is against a whole group.
- Assuming any correctly formed comparative will do once the superlatives have been eliminated.
Asked as a cloze item in which the printed 'than' rules out half the options and meaning decides the rest.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Choose the word that fits — This road is _____ than the one we took last time.
- (a)narrowest
- (b)narrower
- (c)most narrow
- (d)narrow
Answer(b) narrower — 'than' takes the comparative.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Choose the word that fits — Of all the players in the squad, he is the _____.
- (a)taller
- (b)tall
- (c)tallest
- (d)more tall
Answer(c) tallest — 'of all' calls for the superlative.