In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. I have a recurring dream. Actually, I have a few: one is about dismembering a body , I’d rather not get into it, but the (1) ________ pertinent one is about college. It’s the end of the semester, and I suddenly (2) ________ that there is a class I forgot to attend, ever, and now I have to sit for the final exam. I wake up panicked, my GPA in peril. How could I have done this? Why do I so (3) ________ dissatisfy myself? Then I remember I haven’t been in college in more than a decade. Someone with (4) ________ knowledge of my academic career might point out that this nightmare scenario is not that far removed from my actual collegiate experience, and that at certain times in my life, it did not take the magic of slumber to find me completely unprepared for a final. And, well, (5) ________ of what may or may not be true of my personal scholastic rigour, I suspect the school-stress dream is quite a common one.
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank number 4.
- (a)bleak
- (b)instigate
- (c)distant
- (d)remote
Answer
Why
Correct — D.
The slot needs an adjective in front of the noun knowledge, which removes instigate, a verb, straight away.
Among the adjectives, remote carries a sense the others do not. Applied to something abstract it means slight or faint — a remote possibility, not the remotest idea. Someone with remote knowledge of my academic career is someone who knows only a little of it.
That is the reading the sentence needs, and it is option (d).
Why the others are wrong
- (a)bleak — bleak means cheerless or offering little hope, as in a bleak outlook. It describes a prospect, not how much of something a person knows.
- (b)instigate — instigate is a verb meaning to provoke or set going. The blank is an adjective slot in front of a noun, so no reading of the sentence can take it.
- (c)distant — distant is the near miss. It works for space, time and family — a distant cousin, the distant past — but English does not use it for a small quantity of knowledge, which is what this sentence measures.
Concept
This is a collocation blank rather than a meaning blank. remote and distant overlap heavily in any dictionary, since both mean far off, and the item asks which one English actually puts in front of this noun.
remote has a second, degree sense that distant lacks: a remote chance, a remote possibility, not the remotest idea. Each of those measures how little of something there is.
That is why remote knowledge reads and distant knowledge does not, even though the definitions alone would never tell you so.
Collocation items are the hardest kind to reason into, because the losing option is not wrong in meaning — it is only unidiomatic. Reading builds this, and the shortcut is to store remote in its degree phrases rather than as a synonym of far.
Key facts
- remote has a degree sense meaning slight or faint, as in a remote chance.
- The fixed negative idiom is not the remotest idea, never not the most distant idea.
- distant is used of space, of time and of family relationships.
Study next
Common traps
- Choosing distant because it is a dictionary synonym of remote
- Skipping the word-class check and weighing instigate on its meaning
This blank carries two kinds of wrong option at once — instigate, which fails on word class, and distant, which fails only on idiom. English Q.23 in this passage plants the noun unpredictability in an adverb slot the same way.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.