In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. According to a poll conducted in 2018–19 by an online internship and training platform, (1)__________ number of businesses actively (2)__________ intern profiles has increased over the previous five years. This study demonstrates that India received 80% more internship applications in 2018, with 2.2 million applications (3)________ 1.27 million in 2017. The rise was influenced (4)__________ part by an increase in the number of industries seeking fresh perspectives and innovative ideas to improve (5)__________ on existing projects. Obtaining an internship prior to entering the job market, which was once viewed as a Western concept, is quickly gaining steam in Indian workplaces.
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank number 5.
- (a)effortless
- (b)effecting
- (c)efficient
- (d)efficiencies
Answer
Why
Correct — D. Improve is transitive here, so the blank has to hold its object, and an object is a noun.
Run the options through that one test. Effortless and efficient are adjectives, effecting is a participle, and none of the three can serve as an object.
Efficiencies is the plural noun, and improve efficiencies on existing projects is ordinary business phrasing for making current work faster or cheaper.
Option (d) is the noun in the set, so the slot settles it.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)effortless — Effortless is an adjective meaning requiring no effort. Improve effortless leaves the verb without an object, and there is no noun after the blank for the adjective to attach to.
- (b)effecting — Effecting means bringing about, as in effecting a change. It is a verb form rather than an object, and improve effecting is not English.
- (c)efficient — Efficient is the adjective that belongs to efficiency, and it traps anyone matching meaning instead of word class. Improve efficient processes would work, but the passage gives no noun for efficient to modify.
Concept
Word-class items are decided by the slot, not by the meaning. Look at the word immediately before the blank and ask what class it demands.
Here that word is the transitive verb improve, which takes a noun-phrase object. Meaning is not in dispute — all four options are built on the effort or effect stem and all gesture at doing things well.
Both efficiency and efficiencies exist as nouns. The plural is standard in business and management writing, where efficiencies means specific savings or gains, as in the merger delivered efficiencies.
The infinitive to improve reports the purpose of the industries in the sentence, so the blank names what they are trying to raise. That is a thing, and things are nouns.
Key facts
- Improve is transitive in this sentence, so the blank must be a noun phrase.
- Efficiency is the noun, efficient the adjective and efficiently the adverb.
- Effect as a verb means bring about, while affect means influence.
Study next
Common traps
- Choosing efficient because it is the familiar word, without checking that improve needs an object.
- Reading effecting as a form of affecting and losing the word-class question altogether.
A same-stem option set is how a cloze tests word class rather than vocabulary — the meanings are held constant so that only the slot can decide.
23 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.24 does the same with transmit, transmitted, transmits and transmitting.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.