In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. The Kuno Palpur National Park, located in Madhya Pradesh's Chambal (1)__________, has an area of 750 square kilometres. It now has leopards, jackals, spotted deer, sambhar, neelgai, chinkara, wild boar, and four-horned antelope, making it a perfect (2)_________ base for felids. Despite strong objections from Gujarat, which (3)_________ that lions were part of the state's heritage, that MP had a poor (4)________ in wildlife management, and that Kuno Palpur had other big cat species that would (5)___________ lion relocation, the sanctuary was chosen for the lion reintroduction project in 2013.
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank number 2.
- (a)aid
- (b)fun
- (c)guard
- (d)prey
Answer
Why
Correct — D. Read what the blank sits between: a list of animals, then base for felids.
Spotted deer, sambhar, neelgai, chinkara, wild boar and four-horned antelope are hoofed animals that big cats hunt, so what the park offers a felid is food.
Prey base is the standard term for the stock of animals available to a predator in an area, and it is the phrase the sentence is building towards. Option (d) completes it.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)aid — Aid means help or assistance, and aid base is not an English phrase. The animals listed before the blank are what a cat eats, not support supplied to it.
- (b)fun — Fun reads the hunt as recreation. The register is wrong for a passage about relocating lions, and a fun base names nothing a wildlife manager can survey.
- (c)guard — Guard reverses the relation. Deer and antelope do not protect felids from anything — they are what felids live on, which is why the park is called perfect for them.
Concept
Prey base is wildlife-management vocabulary: the population of animals a predator can hunt in a given area. It is surveyed before any big cat is moved anywhere, because a predator without prey starves.
The blank is therefore a collocation test. Prey and base lock together as a fixed pair in this field, the way food chain and water table do elsewhere.
Nothing beyond that is needed. The list of hoofed animals in front of the blank already tells you the sentence is talking about what there is to eat.
The list also holds leopards and jackals, which are predators themselves. They are not part of the argument the blank completes — the ungulates are.
Key facts
- A prey base is the population of animals available for a predator to hunt in an area.
- Felid means a member of the cat family, which includes lions, leopards and cheetahs.
- The passage lists spotted deer, sambhar, neelgai, chinkara, wild boar and four-horned antelope at Kuno Palpur.
Study next
Common traps
- Filling the blank from the nearest noun instead of from the whole phrase
- Reading the animal list as residents of the park rather than as food for a predator
- Rejecting prey because leopards and jackals also appear in that list
The blank falls in the middle of a fixed pair, so the word after it — base — does as much work as the list before it.
Content-word blanks decided by collocation are also set at 18 Sep 2024, 09:00, English Q.22 and Q.23, where a flying squirrel is keyed to glide downwards and the movement gives the impression of flight.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.