Select the most appropriate option to fill in the blank. Vinod had a ________ escape in the car accident.

Correct — C. Narrow escape is a fixed collocation meaning an escape by the smallest of margins, and a car accident is exactly the situation that calls for it. Of the four adjectives offered, only option (c) is one English puts in front of escape.

The adverb form shows the same pairing: he narrowly escaped injury.

Notice what the blank is not asking. It does not ask which adjective is true of the escape; it asks which adjective goes with the noun.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  comfortable — Comfortable pairs with margins of success — a comfortable win, a comfortable lead. Set against escape it would say the escape was pleasant, which the accident rules out.
• (b)
  full — Full goes with words like recovery and refund, not with escape. Full escape is not an English phrase, and it says nothing about how close the danger came.
• (d)
  wide — Wide is the tempting opposite, because a wide berth means a large distance and a wide escape sounds like a big one. English does not use it here. The phrase is fixed on narrow.

This is a collocation item, not a meaning item. All four adjectives are ordinary English words, and the other three are not used before escape in standard English.

A narrow escape is one that only just came off. The narrowness is the gap between you and the harm, and the same picture drives close shave and close call.

Collocations are learnt as whole phrases. No rule predicts narrow rather than wide here, which is exactly why the blank is testable.

Key facts

• A narrow escape is an escape by a very small margin.
• The adverb form is narrowly escaped, as in he narrowly escaped injury.
• Close shave and close call carry the same meaning as narrow escape.

Common traps

• Choosing wide on the feeling that a big escape must be a good escape.
• Treating the blank as a meaning test and reasoning about the accident instead of about the phrase.

No directly related past PYQ was found.