In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. This Diwali is more significant because we are going to celebrate it after three years, without the evil shadow of Covid-19 that (1)________ looming over all festivities. The lockdowns and endless bad news of death and (2)________ had turned our country into a zone of gloom. But, this season of Diwali (3)________ all the sorrows of people by lighting the candle of hope in their lives. We can see the lights, the candles, the lanterns, and the busy people coming out of their houses and purchasing toys for their children. Let’s (4)________ those people who have made such a huge contribution to (5)________ good thoughts and saving people's lives.
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank number 2.
- (a)new birth
- (b)demonetisation
- (c)economic boom
- (d)disease
Answer
Why
Correct — D. The blank sits inside endless bad news of death and (2) ___, so whatever fills it is a second thing that the bad news is about, in the same register as death.
disease is the one option that pairs with death that way, and it is the field the paragraph has already set with Covid-19 and lockdowns.
Read the clause back whole: bad news of death and disease had turned our country into a zone of gloom — option (d) is what makes the gloom follow.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)new birth — new birth is welcome news, and the phrase governing the blank is bad news of. Coordinating it with death would blame the gloom on something the reader would celebrate.
- (b)demonetisation — demonetisation names a currency measure. The passage never raises money or notes, and the sentence explains the gloom by what the pandemic did.
- (c)economic boom — An economic boom is a rise in output and activity — the opposite of gloom. Bad news of death and an economic boom is a contradiction, not a pair.
Concept
A vocabulary blank in a cloze is decided by what the blank is coordinated with, not by which option sounds most impressive.
and ties this blank to death, and the pair together is governed by bad news of. That is two constraints at once: the word must be a noun, and it must be unwelcome news of the same kind.
Once you see the constraint, three options fall away without any knowledge of the pandemic. Two of them are good news and one belongs to a subject the passage never touches.
The passage names Covid-19 in its first sentence, so the semantic field is fixed before you reach blank number 2.
That is the argument for reading the whole passage once before answering blank number 1: the later blanks are often easier than the earlier ones.
Key facts
- Words joined by and inside one phrase share both the grammar and the sense that phrase imposes.
- Bad news of X and Y forces both X and Y to be unwelcome.
- Death and disease is a standard collocating pair in writing about epidemics.
Study next
Common traps
- Choosing demonetisation because it is the hardest word on offer.
- Testing each option against the blank's own sentence and skipping bad news of, which is the phrase that actually constrains it.
Sense-driven noun blanks are also asked 19 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.21, where the ___ of heart-attacks in young Indians has increased is keyed number over percent, height and amount.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.