Select the most appropriate option to fill in the blank. I like bread made up of corn __________.

Correct — C. Bread is made from ground grain, and the word for ground grain is flour.

Flour and flower are homophones — same sound, different spelling and different meaning. Flour is milled grain; a flower is a blossom.

The deciding words in the sentence are bread and corn, which put it in a kitchen. Corn flour is what bread is made of → option (c).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  failure — Failure neither sounds like the others nor has any food sense. Nothing in a sentence about bread and corn supports it.
• (b)
  floor — Floor is the lower surface of a room. It is close enough in sound to be misheard, but it is spelt differently and is not an ingredient.
• (d)
  flower — Flower is the exact homophone of flour and so the intended trap. A cornflower is a real plant — a blue-flowered one — but you cannot bake bread from blossoms.

Homophone items test spelling against sense. The pair here is flour (grain ground into powder) and flower (the blossom of a plant), with floor joining them as a near-homophone in many Indian and British accents.

The evidence is never the sound, which is identical, but the words around the blank. Bread and corn fix the sense as the edible one.

Cornflower is itself an English word, which is what makes option (d) tempting rather than absurd.

Key facts

• Flour is grain ground into powder.
• Flower is the blossom of a plant, and its exact homophone is flour.
• A cornflower is a blue-flowered garden plant, not a baking ingredient.
• Floor, the lower surface of a room, is the near-homophone that completes this set.

Common traps

• Choosing flower because it is the commoner spelling of that sound
• Ignoring bread and corn, which are the only evidence the sentence offers

No directly related past PYQ was found.