In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. Rory Cooper was a top aide to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the up-and-coming Virginia Republican who lost a 2014 House primary. He was also a prominent Never Trumper, openly (1)______________ how awful he found the 45th president. The cause Cooper has (2)______________ himself to for the past year, though, is closer to home. He is, as he puts it in his Twitter bio, ‘Apparently Mr. Open the Schools’. A father of a fifth grader, a second grader and a kindergartner, Cooper is (3) ___________ because the public schools in Fairfax, Virginia, where he lives, have not reopened. Fairfax, in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, is one of the school districts that has moved (4) ___________ toward in-person learning, and it is still not close: only in the past few weeks have students started to return to classrooms, and only about half of those eligible have opted to go back, for an (5) ________________ of two days a week.
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank no. 1
- (a)frisking
- (b)ignoring
- (c)skipping
- (d)detailing
Answer
Why
Correct — D. The blank has to govern the clause that follows it, how awful he found the 45th president, so it needs a verb of setting something out in words. detailing is that verb: laying out, point by point, what he thought.
The adverb openly fixes the direction. A prominent Never Trumper is by definition someone who said so in public, so the missing word has to name disclosure, not avoidance.
Read it back: openly detailing how awful he found the president.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)frisking — frisking means running your hands over someone's clothing to search them. It takes a person as its object, so it cannot govern a clause beginning 'how awful he found'.
- (b)ignoring — ignoring points away from speech — to ignore something is to pay it no attention. That contradicts 'openly' and contradicts the prominent Never Trumper the sentence has just introduced.
- (c)skipping — skipping means passing over or leaving out. Like ignoring, it makes the sentence report that he withheld his view, which the rest of the clause has already ruled out.
Concept
A cloze blank is settled by two filters applied in order. First grammar: what can this blank legally take? Here it is followed by a noun clause starting with 'how', so only a verb of saying, describing or knowing will fit the slot.
Second direction: does the option agree with the signals the sentence has already given? 'openly' and 'a prominent Never Trumper' both mark public disclosure, so verbs of hiding, skipping or overlooking are out before their exact shades are weighed.
The passage is American reporting, and the Never Trumper label carries the clue by itself — it names someone who publicly opposed the president. You need none of the politics: the sentence supplies 'prominent' and 'openly'.
Key facts
- To detail something is to describe it fully, item by item.
- Frisk means to search a person by passing the hands over their clothing.
- A clause beginning 'how awful...' works as the object of a verb of saying, knowing or describing.
- The adverb openly marks public disclosure, which rules out verbs of avoidance in the same clause.
Study next
Common traps
- Choosing on the -ing ending. All four options are -ing forms, so the form decides nothing.
- Reading frisking as a form of frisky and treating it as 'playfully'. Frisking is a search.
- Filling the blanks in order without first reading the passage through.
The five blanks in this passage run from a verb here to a fixed collocation at Q.22, an adjective of feeling at Q.23, a superlative at Q.24 and a quantity noun at Q.25.
Verb blanks with four near-miss options also run at 19 Sep 2024, 16:00, English Q.21, where 'simulated' is keyed against revealed, catered and suffocated.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.