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. 4.
- (a)plainest
- (b)slowest
- (c)longest
- (d)strangest
Answer
Why
Correct — B. The blank modifies has moved, so it must describe the pace of that movement — and the sentence then states the pace outright.
Read on: 'it is still not close', and students have started returning only in the past few weeks. Both clauses measure how little distance has been covered, which is a statement about speed.
slowest is the one option on the list that measures speed. Plainest measures clarity, longest measures duration and strangest measures oddity, so none of them can be what the evidence supports.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)plainest — plainest rates how clear or unadorned something is. A district cannot move plainly toward a policy, and nothing in the sentence comments on clarity.
- (c)longest — longest measures duration, and the sentence is not saying Fairfax has been at this longer than other districts. Its complaint is the reverse — that so little has happened so far.
- (d)strangest — strangest rates oddity, and the passage never calls the district's behaviour odd. The evidence it gives is about how little movement there has been.
Concept
All four options here are superlatives, so the grammar decides nothing: plainest, slowest, longest and strangest all fit the slot 'has moved ___'. The choice is entirely about which dimension the sentence measures.
Find that dimension in the evidence around the blank rather than in the blank itself. The clause after it says the district is still not close, and the next clause dates the first returns to the past few weeks. Both are statements about pace, so the superlative has to be one of pace.
The claim is deliberately loose. 'One of the school districts that has moved slowest' places Fairfax in a slow group rather than at the very bottom of a ranking, which is normal in reporting and does not weaken the superlative.
Key facts
- Slowest is the superlative of slow, and here it modifies the verb has moved rather than a noun.
- Plainest, longest and strangest are superlatives too, so the form of the word is not what is being tested.
- The sentence's own evidence for pace is 'it is still not close' and the return of students only in the past few weeks.
Study next
Common traps
- Choosing longest because the passage is about a long delay. Longest measures how long the movement lasted, not how little of it happened.
- Hunting for a grammar reason when every option is already a superlative.
- Stopping at the comma. The evidence that settles the blank comes after it.
A cloze blank keyed on a superlative also runs at 10 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.24, where 'clearest' is keyed against indistinct, nebulous and vague, and at 11 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.24, where 'kindest' is keyed against bitterest, strangest and gloomiest.
Within this passage the run finishes with a quantity noun at Q.25.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.