Select the most appropriate homophone to fill in the blank. He ________ his bike as fast as he could to reach home.

Correct — C. The blank needs a past-tense verb that can take "his bike" as its object, and the past of ride is rode.

"as fast as he could" fixes the time as past, so a present form will not fit, and a noun cannot take an object at all.

Rode does every job the slot asks for: it is a verb, it is past, and riding is what you do to a bike.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  rote — Rote is a noun meaning mechanical repetition, as in learning by rote. It is also the odd one out in sound, ending in a /t/, so it is not even a true homophone of rode.
• (b)
  rowed — Rowed is the past of row, to move a boat with oars. It sounds exactly like rode, which is the trap, but you row a boat and you ride a bike.
• (d)
  road — Road is a noun naming the surface you travel on. The slot sits between He and his bike, so it needs a verb, and a noun cannot take that object.

A homophone item is not really a vocabulary test — it is a grammar-first test. The options sound alike, so the sound tells you nothing and the slot's grammar has to decide.

Read what the blank must be before you read the options. The frame here is He ___ his bike: subject, blank, object. That already removes every noun.

Then check the tense marker. Could is past, so the verb must be past. Only after those two cuts does meaning break the last tie, between rode and rowed.

Key facts

• Ride is irregular: ride, rode, ridden.
• Row, meaning to propel a boat with oars, is regular: row, rowed, rowed.
• Rote is a noun meaning mechanical repetition, seen in by rote and rote learning.

Common traps

• Choosing road because the sentence is about travelling, when the blank is a verb position and not a noun position.
• Choosing rowed on sound alone and forgetting that rowing is done to a boat.

No directly related past PYQ was found.