Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank number 2.

Correct — B. All four options are -ing forms, so grammar decides nothing here. The passage does.

The clause reports that the number of such businesses has increased, and the sentences around it record 80% more internship applications and internships gaining steam. Every signal points upward.

The passage even supplies the word further down: industries seeking fresh perspectives.

Option (b) keeps the clause pointing the way the passage does, and actively seeking is the natural pairing with the adverb already printed.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  reducing — Reducing reverses the passage's direction. The clause says the count has increased and the next sentence reports 80% more applications, so businesses cutting back cannot be what is being counted.
• (c)
  neglecting — Neglecting has employers ignoring intern profiles, which nothing in the passage suggests. It also sits badly with actively, an adverb that implies deliberate pursuit.
• (d)
  declining — Declining is the real trap, because decline can mean turn down, so declining intern profiles is grammatical. It still makes businesses reject interns in a passage documenting a rise in internships.

When every option in a cloze shares one grammatical form, the blank is a meaning test. Nothing about -ing separates reducing, seeking, neglecting and declining.

What separates them is direction. Read the sentence the blank sits in and the sentence after it, then decide whether the passage is describing a rise or a fall. Here it is a rise throughout: has increased, 80% more applications, gaining steam.

Then check the collocation. Actively pairs with verbs of pursuit, and the passage reuses seeking a few lines later — a cloze often answers itself if you read to the end before choosing.

Key facts

• The passage supplies the answer word later: an increase in the number of industries seeking fresh perspectives.
• Actively seeking is a fixed collocation in workplace English, as in actively seeking employment.
• Decline is transitive in the sense of refusing, which is what makes declining grammatical here and still wrong.

Common traps

• Testing each option for grammar, finding that all four fit, and then guessing.
• Choosing declining because it parses, without asking whether an employer refusing interns fits a passage about internships gaining steam.

No directly related past PYQ was found.