In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. The adverse (1)__________ of climate change and environmental degradation are increasingly driving human mobility the world over, particularly in countries with high exposure and low (2)__________ capacity. While most climate-related mobility currently occurs within countries, desperation and deteriorating environments can also compel people to seek a livelihood elsewhere through (3)__________ migration. While climate change negatively impacts everyone, everywhere, those already in vulnerable situations due to geography, poverty, gender, age, disability, origin, or other status, including migrant women who (4)__________ climate-sensitive livelihoods, and children who are less able to survive extreme weather events, are at the greatest risk of suffering harm. It is (5)__________ to recognise this reality and take meaningful action to protect the human rights of those most affected by climate change, including migrants.
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank number 2.
- (a)adaptive
- (b)affective
- (c)adoptive
- (d)minimum
Answer
Why
Correct — A. The blank modifies the noun capacity inside the phrase countries with high exposure and low ______ capacity, so it needs an adjective.
Adaptive is the adjective built on adapt, to adjust to new conditions, and adaptive capacity is the settled term for how well a place can cope with a changing climate.
It also balances the sentence. High exposure to climate harm together with a low ability to adjust is exactly what makes those countries the ones people leave → option (a).
Why the others are wrong
- (b)affective — Affective means relating to emotion or mood. The sentence is measuring how well a country can cope with climate impacts, not how it feels.
- (c)adoptive — Adoptive belongs to adoption — adoptive parents, an adoptive country. It differs from adaptive by a letter and says nothing about adjusting to change.
- (d)minimum — Minimum is a word of quantity, so low minimum capacity is both redundant and empty. It names no particular ability that the country lacks.
Concept
Three of the four options here are -ive adjectives built on different verbs, so this is a word-formation item.
adapt gives adaptive — adjusting to conditions.
adopt gives adoptive — taking as one's own.
affect gives affective — to do with feeling.
Trace each adjective back to its verb and the choice settles itself, because only adjusting has anything to do with a country's capacity to face climate change.
If the term adaptive capacity is new to you, you do not need it. Tracing the adjective back to the verb adapt reaches the same answer without any climate vocabulary at all.
Key facts
- Adaptive comes from adapt and adoptive from adopt — one letter apart, unrelated in meaning.
- Adaptive capacity names the ability of a community or system to adjust to a changing climate.
- Affective relates to emotion, while its near-twin effective relates to results.
Study next
Common traps
- Picking adoptive on sound alone
- Reading affective as effective and choosing it for the sense of results
A cloze blank of this kind hinges on a pair of adjectives that differ by a letter, and the noun after the blank decides between them — here capacity does the deciding. The word adaptive also turns up as a distractor in a synonym item at 23 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.1.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.