In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. When Ojeya Cruz Banks moved to Ohio from New Zealand (1) ________ years ago, she was overwhelmed by the logistics of uprooting her life. But Cruz Banks, a Denison University professor and a single mom, who is also my neighbour and friend, was (2) ________ to find a house next to a public elementary school. She assumed that she would be able to walk to pick up her daughter, a needed convenience given that she didn’t yet have a car. Unfortunately, when she went to register her daughter for kindergarten, she was met with an (3) ________ surprise: The only (4) ________ option was a half-day program that would bus students to a day-care centre on the outskirts of the town for the afternoon. The district did offer a limited number of full-day slots, but those had all been claimed in a lottery earlier that spring and came with a tuition cost. “I was like, ‘Cost me? What? Public school costs money here?’” she told me. Many parents across the United States, like Cruz Banks, may assume that free, full-day kindergarten is a (5) ________ part of the country’s public education system. I was one of them, until my youngest had to enter our district’s lottery several months ago. When he was assigned to the half-day program, I swung between alarm and frustration.
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank no. 3.
- (a)unpleasant
- (b)agreeable
- (c)amusing
- (d)enjoyable
Answer
Why
Correct — A. The sentence opens with Unfortunately, and the colon after the blank hands straight over to what the surprise was: a half-day program that would bus students to a day-care centre on the outskirts of the town.
Unfortunately plus that content makes the surprise a bad one, and unpleasant is the option that says so.
All four choices begin with a vowel sound, so the article an rules nothing out here.
Why the others are wrong
- (b)agreeable — Agreeable means pleasant or acceptable. It contradicts Unfortunately and the news that follows the colon.
- (c)amusing — Amusing means mildly funny. Nothing here is played for humour, and an unplanned bussing arrangement is not a joke.
- (d)enjoyable — Enjoyable means giving pleasure, so it points the wrong way, and it collocates badly besides: English says a pleasant surprise, not an enjoyable surprise.
Concept
Three signals fix the polarity of this blank and they all point the same way.
Unfortunately opens the sentence and marks what follows as bad news. The colon after the blank promises an explanation of the surprise. What follows the colon is a restriction: the option on offer was half-day, with an afternoon bus out of town.
Read the three together and the blank has to be negative. Since unpleasant is the one negative choice, the shades of the other three never need weighing.
The article an is a decoy. Candidates are trained to test a against an by the first sound of the following word, and here agreeable, amusing, enjoyable and unpleasant all begin with a vowel sound, so the test returns nothing.
Key facts
- Unfortunately marks the sentence that follows it as bad news.
- A colon after a noun phrase introduces the explanation of that noun phrase.
- An is chosen by the sound that follows it, not by the spelling, as in an hour and a university.
Study next
Common traps
- Testing a against an and expecting it to narrow the field, when every option starts with a vowel sound.
- Reading surprise as a positive word by default, when English uses it for good news and bad alike.
A cloze blank usually has its clue within a line of it — a marker, a punctuation mark, a repeated word — so read the sentence around the blank before you read the options.
Blanks 1, 2, 4 and 5 of this passage are English Q.21, Q.22, Q.24 and Q.25 of this shift (19 Sep 2024, 09:00).
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.