In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage carefully and select the most appropriate option to fill in each blank. Social media companies (1)______ claim that they promote democracy and are dedicated to the empowerment of ordinary individuals. The assertion (2)______ entirely unfounded. Recent history shows how (3)______ citizens have been mobilised against totalitarian regimes on social networking sites. Starting from MeToo to Black Lives Matter, digital networks (4)______ indispensable in bringing together critical voices against social and political (5)______ .
Select the most appropriate option to fill in blank no. 3.
- (a)neutral
- (b)alien
- (c)foreign
- (d)common
Answer
Why
Correct — D. The paragraph opens with companies claiming they are 'dedicated to the empowerment of ordinary individuals'.
Sentence 3 is offered as evidence for that claim, so the blank has to keep the same people in view. common citizens is the restatement of ordinary individuals → option (d).
'Common' here means ordinary, of the general public — the sense carried in 'the common man', not 'shared' and not 'coarse'.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)neutral — neutral means taking no side. The same clause says these citizens were mobilised against totalitarian regimes, which is the opposite of neutral.
- (b)alien — alien means belonging to another country or place, so 'alien citizens' contradicts itself — a citizen is by definition someone who belongs to the state.
- (c)foreign — foreign clashes with citizens in the same way, and it would turn a sentence about ordinary people at home into one about outsiders.
Concept
A blank in the middle of a passage is usually anchored by something already written. Here the anchor is ordinary individuals in sentence 1, and sentence 3 exists to back up the claim sentence 1 reported.
So read the blank as a paraphrase slot rather than a free choice among plausible adjectives.
The second filter is collocation. Citizens already carries 'belongs to this state', so any adjective meaning 'from elsewhere' fights the noun it is modifying.
'Common' has a dismissive sense in some contexts, which makes candidates hesitate over it. Before a noun like citizens, man or people it simply means ordinary.
Key facts
- Common before nouns like citizens, man or people means ordinary or of the general public.
- Alien and foreign both mean belonging elsewhere, which collides with the noun citizens.
- Neutral means taking no side, and the clause states the citizens were mobilised against a regime.
Study next
Common traps
- Picking neutral because it sounds balanced, while ignoring 'mobilised against' in the same clause.
- Rejecting common because its dismissive sense feels insulting in a passage about empowerment.
- Choosing an adjective that fits the sentence but breaks the link back to 'ordinary individuals'.
Adjective blanks in these cloze sets are decided by the words around them, not by which adjective reads best in isolation — at 19 Sep 2024, 12:30, English Q.25 only 'fast-paced' can modify 'urban lifestyle', against 'wilderness', 'cosmic' and the adverb 'rapidly'.
The structural blanks in this passage sit at English Q.22 and Q.24, both turning on a missing form of 'be'.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.