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 rise in global temperature (1)__________ already occurred is leading to extreme weather events that bring (2)__________ heat waves and droughts, devastating floods and increasingly powerful hurricanes and tropical storms. The combination of these factors means the impact on human health is increasing and is (3)__________ accelerate. But there is room for hope, particularly if governments take action now to (4)__________ the pledges made at Glasgow in November 2021 and to go further in resolving the climate crisis. WHO is (5)__________ governments to lead a just, equitable, and fast phase out of fossil fuels and transition to a clean energy future.
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank number 4.
- (a)take
- (b)watch
- (c)keep
- (d)honour
Answer
Why
Correct — D. The object is the pledges made at Glasgow in November 2021 — pledges that already exist. So the verb has to mean 'carry out what was promised', not 'promise'.
Honour is the verb formal commitments take: honour a pledge, honour a commitment, honour an agreement.
The sentence then asks governments 'to go further', which only makes sense if the first step is delivering on what was already pledged. Option (d) supplies that step.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)take — Take a pledge means to swear one yourself. These pledges were already made at Glasgow, so taking them is not the action the sentence is asking of governments.
- (b)watch — Watch does not combine with pledges in any sense. You watch an event or a person, not a commitment you are meant to carry out.
- (c)keep — Keep attaches most naturally to promise and word — keep a promise, keep your word — and is weaker than the institutional register of a passage that ends on a WHO appeal to governments.
Concept
Collocation is why one verb sounds right with a noun and its synonym does not. The noun here is pledge, a formal public commitment.
Pledges are made, then honoured or broken. That pairing is the settled one in institutional and diplomatic English, alongside honour a commitment and honour an agreement.
The wider sentence confirms the reading: governments are asked to act 'now' on pledges 'made at Glasgow in November 2021' and then to go further, which describes delivery on an existing promise rather than the making of a new one.
'Keep the pledges' is not ungrammatical, and a candidate who chose it has not misread the passage. The item turns on collocation strength rather than on a rule, and the register deciding it is institutional — the passage ends on WHO addressing governments.
The Glasgow pledges of November 2021 that the passage refers to are those of COP26, the UN climate conference held in Glasgow that month.
Key facts
- Honour, used of a promise or an agreement, means to fulfil what was undertaken.
- A pledge is a formal promise, and its usual verbs are make, honour and break.
- The passage places the pledges at Glasgow in November 2021, so the blank needs a verb of fulfilment rather than of promising.
Study next
Common traps
- Choosing 'keep' because 'keep a promise' is familiar, without checking which noun that collocation attaches to.
- Choosing 'take' by reading the blank as the making of a pledge, when the pledges are described as already made.
Cloze blanks of this kind test collocation rather than grammar: every option parses, and the noun decides. In this paper the same passage tests a relative clause at English Q.21 and a phrasal verb at English Q.25, so the blanks are deliberately of different kinds.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.