Select the most appropriate option to substitute the underlined segment in the given sentence. The cynical investors believed in every word the analysts said.

Correct — D. The trigger is the clash between the underlined adjective and the clause that follows it.

Cynical means distrusting the motives of others, but these investors believed in every word the analysts said. The two cannot describe the same people.

The adjective for someone who believes far too readily is credulous — option (d), which makes the sentence consistent with what the investors actually did.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  persuasive — Persuasive describes the side doing the convincing — the analysts. The blank sits on the people who were convinced, so the word faces the wrong way.
• (b)
  credible — Credible means worth believing, a quality of a claim or a speaker. Investors who swallow everything are not thereby believable themselves.
• (c)
  distrustful — Distrustful is a near-synonym of cynical, so it keeps the very contradiction the substitution is meant to remove.

This substitution item turns less on vocabulary than on logic. It plants an adjective that contradicts the rest of the sentence and asks you to restore the sense.

So read the clause first, decide what the person in it is doing, and only then look at the options. Here the doing is believing every word, which is a description of gullibility.

Credulous and credible both come from Latin credere, to believe, but the suffixes split them: -ulous marks the one who believes, -ible the thing worth believing.

Key facts

• Credulous describes a person who believes things too readily.
• Credible describes a statement or a person worth believing.
• Cynical means distrusting the sincerity or motives of other people.
• Persuasive describes the speaker who convinces, not the listener who is convinced.

Common traps

• Picking credible because it shares a root with credulous
• Reading believed in every word as praise of the analysts and choosing persuasive
• Choosing distrustful, which merely repeats the meaning of cynical

No directly related past PYQ was found.