In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. 2022 sees us entering a third year of the pandemic, and the harm 1________ children is increasingly evident: A record rise in child poverty. Setbacks to progress on 2_________ vaccinations. Disruption to education for entire generation. That harm 3________ as an unintended side effect of the world's efforts to manage the crisis. COVID has been a uniquely dis-equalizing crisis. Lopsided 4________ vaccines aside, learning losses have been greatest among poorest children, and job losses have been disproportionately borne by women and youth. What next for the world’s children in the year ahead? As in the past two years, prospects for children will continue to hinge 5________ on the pandemic and how it is managed.
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank No. 2.
- (a)irregular
- (b)routine
- (c)different
- (d)similar
Answer
Why
Correct — B. The sentences around the blank are a list of losses: a record rise in child poverty, setbacks to progress, disruption to education. The blank names the thing the setback was to.
routine vaccinations is the standing phrase for the scheduled childhood immunisation a health system delivers year after year — precisely the programme a pandemic interrupts. Setbacks to progress on it is a complaint that makes sense.
The other three adjectives sort vaccinations into kinds, and a kind of vaccination is not something a country makes or loses progress on.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)irregular — Irregular vaccination would itself be the failure, so setbacks to progress on it reads backwards — you do not lose ground on the very problem you are naming.
- (c)different — Different needs a second thing to differ from, and the sentence supplies none. It also gives the reader no reason to care that progress slipped.
- (d)similar — Similar has the same missing comparison, and similar vaccinations is not a category any health programme reports progress against.
Concept
A word-choice cloze blank is decided by collocation — which adjective actually lives beside this noun in real prose — not by which one is loosely plausible.
Routine and vaccination are a set pair. Routine immunisation is the standard term for the scheduled childhood course, as against campaign or emergency vaccination.
Read the frame as well as the gap. Setbacks to progress on X presumes X is something you can make progress on, which rules out adjectives that merely sort X into types.
The paragraph is a list of things that were going one way and stopped, so the adjective has to name a programme with a direction of travel. Of the four, only routine does.
Key facts
- Routine immunisation is the standard term for a country's scheduled childhood vaccination course.
- Setbacks to progress on X presumes X is a programme that can advance or slip.
- Different and similar are comparison words and need a second term stated in the sentence.
Study next
Common traps
- Taking irregular because it sounds negative and the paragraph is negative.
- Filling the blank on meaning alone without checking that the phrase is one English actually uses.
Word-choice blanks like this reward collocation over dictionary meaning. 10 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.21 to Q.25 sets five of them over a pandemic passage, keying restrictions, measures, consequences, clearest and disrupted.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.