Fill in the Blanks Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The correct word is security: the security officer.

A security officer is a person employed to guard a building such as a bank and watch for suspicious people, which fits someone who noticed a masked man leaving the bank.

An 'emergency officer' and a 'safety officer' have different jobs, dealing with emergencies and workplace hazards. 'Watchman' is itself a noun for a guard, so 'watchman officer' is not idiomatic.

Answer: D

The correct option is inspite of.

The blank is followed by a noun phrase, 'the low attendance', so a preposition meaning 'regardless of' is needed: the meeting will be held in spite of the low attendance. (The standard spelling is 'in spite of'; the paper prints it as one word.)

'Even when', 'although' and 'even if' are conjunctions and must be followed by a clause with a verb, such as 'although attendance is low', not by a noun phrase alone.

Answer: C

The missing word is ones.

The blank stands in for a plural noun already used in the sentence: 'litigation cases' contrasted with 'corporate cases'. To avoid repeating 'cases', English uses the pronoun ones, which must agree in number with the noun it replaces, so the plural ones is needed: 'You can do litigation cases but you also have to do the corporate ones.'

'One' is singular and would not agree with 'cases'. 'Too' is an adverb and cannot follow 'the corporate' as a noun. 'Those' is a demonstrative that cannot take the article 'the' and an adjective before it.

Answer: C

The answer is could: 'When I was a child, I could understand adults but now I don't.'

'Could' is the past form of 'can' and expresses ability in the past, which is what the sentence contrasts with the present ('but now I don't').

'Do' is present tense and does not fit 'When I was a child'. 'Should' expresses obligation or advice, and 'must' expresses necessity; neither describes a past ability.

Answer: D

The answer is may: 'He may be lazy, but he is not stupid.'

'May' here makes a concession: it admits something may be true before the contrast introduced by 'but'.

'Needn't' expresses lack of necessity, 'mustn't' prohibition, and 'shall' future or obligation; none of them fits the pattern of conceding a point before 'but'.

Answer: D

The answer is must: 'He must have escaped by this window because it has been broken open.'

'Must have' with a past participle expresses a confident deduction about the past from present evidence: the broken window is the evidence.

'Need have' is used mainly in negatives and questions, 'dare have' is not used this way, and 'ought have' is ungrammatical (it would need 'ought to have', which expresses obligation, not deduction).

Answer: D

The blanks are filled, in order, by birth, soul, he, sown, it, to.

Read the passage with them in: 'Our country gave birth to a mighty soul, and he shone like a beacon. And yet he was done to death. It could only occur because the seed for it was sown in the poison of hatred and enmity... it is the duty of all of us to fight this poison.' Each word is forced by the grammar. 'Gave birth' is the idiom and 'soul' is the noun a person can be called. 'And he shone' needs a subject pronoun for the one who was killed. 'Seed ... sown' is the standard pairing. 'It is the duty' needs a dummy subject, and 'to fight' is the infinitive after 'duty of all of us'.

Option A has 'berth' (a sleeping place) and 'sole' (a fish or a foot part). Option B has 'shoal' and 'shown', and 'this' cannot be the subject of 'shone'. Option C has 'they', which does not agree with the singular 'he' who was killed, and 'two' for 'to'. These are the homophone traps the question is built on.

Answer: B

The most appropriate word is differentiate: they cannot differentiate the good from the bad.

To differentiate one thing from another is to recognise the difference between them, which is what people confused about values cannot do. The verb also takes the pattern differentiate X from Y that the sentence uses.

Divide means to split into parts, see does not take from in this sense, and alter means to change. None of them expresses telling good and bad apart.

Answer: D

The answer is to avoid: Try to avoid being late for office.

Try to + verb means to make an effort to do something, which is the sense of this advice. The verb avoid is then followed by a gerund, being late, so the full pattern is try to avoid being late.

Try avoid leaves out the needed to, and try avoided uses a past form where a base form is needed. Try avoiding would mean experimenting with avoidance to see the result, a different sense, and it stacks two -ing forms (avoiding being), which the sentence avoids.

Answer: C

The connector is In case: In case you have any doubt, please ask me.

In case here introduces a possible situation and means 'if' or 'should': if you happen to have a doubt, ask me.

Because gives a reason and would assume the doubt already exists, which does not suit an open offer. Unless means 'if not' and would reverse the meaning (ask me unless you have a doubt). Until refers to time and makes no sense with 'have any doubt'.