In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. Americans have been arguing about pandemic (1) ________________ for two years, and the debate is particularly fraught among parents of small children, for good reasons. While (2) ____________ such as masking and isolation mean temporary discomfort or inconvenience for most people, their (3) _______________ for still-developing young children are more mysterious, and possibly more significant and lasting. Children with speech or language disorders offer perhaps the (4) _____________ example of these murky trade-offs. Pandemic restrictions vary by state, county and school district, but I spoke with parents in California, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, New Jersey, Iowa and Maryland, who said their children’s speech therapy has been (5) ______________: first by the loss of in-person therapy and then by masking requirements, in places that have them.
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank no. 5.
- (a)normalised
- (b)disrupted
- (c)measured
- (d)regulated
Answer
Why
Correct — B. The colon promises an explanation, and what follows is 'first by the loss of in-person therapy and then by masking requirements'.
A loss can damage a therapy. It cannot measure one or regulate one, so the blank has to be a verb of harm, and disrupted is that verb.
'Disrupted by' also takes the two agents the colon supplies, and the whole passage is about costs to children, which fixes the direction of the blank as negative. Option (b) fits.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)normalised — Normalised points the other way. It would mean the therapy was brought back to normal, but the sentence then lists two things that took it away.
- (c)measured — Measured would turn the colon into a list of yardsticks. The loss of in-person therapy measures nothing, and the parents are describing damage rather than assessment.
- (d)regulated — Regulated suggests orderly control by a rule. A loss of therapy is not a regulation, and the passage nowhere says the therapy was brought under new rules.
Concept
The punctuation does the work here. A colon promises that what follows explains what came before, so the two items after it define the blank.
Both items are obstacles the passage places in the therapy's way: first the loss of in-person sessions, then masking requirements. Only a word of damage can be explained by a loss.
Direction matters more than shade of meaning in cloze work. Decide first whether the blank is positive, negative or neutral, and most of the options fall away before any dictionary is opened.
The passage does not say how masking affected the therapy, only that parents named it as the second blow. Do not supply a mechanism the text withholds.
Key facts
- A colon introduces an explanation or a list that expands what precedes it.
- Disrupt means to interrupt an activity so that it cannot continue normally.
- The agent of a passive verb is introduced by 'by': disrupted by the loss of in-person therapy.
Study next
Common traps
- Choosing 'regulated' because 'requirements' sits in the same sentence and the two words feel related.
- Choosing 'measured' from the collocation 'measured by', without asking what a loss could measure.
This is the last blank of the Q.21 to Q.25 passage, and its evidence sits after the blank, in the colon list, so a candidate working through the blanks in order still has everything needed.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.