In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. Now, we have Mr. X as the President of India. It has come as a surprise (1)______ Scheduled Tribes who are (2)______ the most marginalised groups of the country. The Adivasis of India have been (3)______ socially, economically and culturally. Despite various efforts taken by the Government of India, they are still under (4)______ and suffering. Therefore, the (5)______ a leader from a marginalised community or group does not indicate that now the entire community will be uplifted. However, this kind of move may bring certain changes in the status of the Adivasis.
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank no.4
- (a)abundance
- (b)river
- (c)poverty
- (d)forest
Answer
Why
Correct — C. The blank is coordinated with a noun already on the page: still under ____ and suffering.
Coordination forces a match. Suffering is an abstract noun naming a hardship, so its partner must be abstract and negative too. That rules out the two concrete nouns in the set and the one that means plenty.
Poverty is the hardship the paragraph has been building towards, and option (c) supplies it.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)abundance — Abundance means plenty. Coordinating it with suffering after still reverses the paragraph, which has just said that government efforts have not yet worked.
- (b)river — River is a concrete noun and names no condition. Under a river and suffering describes nothing that a government programme could be failing to fix.
- (d)forest — Forest is bait — the passage is about Adivasis, so a forest word reads as topical. But the slot needs a hardship to stand beside suffering, and a forest is a place.
Concept
When and joins a blank to another word, the two have to be the same kind of thing: the same word class, and usually the same semantic field.
That one test settles this gap with no knowledge of the subject at all. Suffering is abstract and negative, so only an abstract negative noun can sit beside it.
The paragraph's own logic agrees. Despite various efforts... they are still under ____ tells you the word names something bad that has persisted.
Under poverty is not the usual English collocation — living in poverty or below the poverty line is more idiomatic. The key is poverty all the same, and it is the one option that is both abstract and negative.
Key facts
- Words joined by and belong to the same word class.
- Suffering here is an abstract noun, so its coordinate partner must be abstract as well.
- Despite and still together mark a hardship that has continued in spite of effort.
- Living in poverty and below the poverty line are the standard English collocations for this idea.
Study next
Common traps
- Choosing forest because the passage is about Adivasis rather than because the slot needs it.
- Rejecting poverty on the ground that under poverty sounds unidiomatic.
- Ignoring the and that ties the blank to suffering.
The middle blanks of a cloze reward grammar as much as vocabulary — coordination, polarity, word class — and here the topical-looking word, forest, is the distractor.
A blank decided the same way is keyed at 13 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.24, where many ____ and injuries needs the abstract fatalities to stand beside injuries.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.