For students who are intermediately good at sentence completion exercises, they have easy time solving questions with one blank; they just need to find what the blank should mean, and find the words with the meaning among multiple choice.
However, when there are two blanks in a question, most students find it hard to get the correct words.
There is a technique to do such problems well. You should find the blank separately!
The storm ______ our efforts to hold a company picnic last weekend. It was impossible to stay outdoors in such a ______.
A. destroyed … squalor
B. bolstered … torrent
C. thwarted … downpour
D. increased … monsoon
E. ruined … tragedy
In this case, you can easily get that the first blank should mean destroy, and second word means raining. Like this, you can separate what two blanks should mean and solve it.
In this question, the answer would be C.
However, some questions do not give hints on what two blanks should be. In this case, you must find the relationship between two blanks.
For example,
Because of the professor’s reputation for being ______, the students in her class were surprised by her ______ in the first lecture of the semester.
A. garrulous … bombast
B. pithy … terseness
C. succinct … congeniality
D. loquacious … brevity
E. erudite … intellect
In this question, you are not sure of which words should go into the blanks. However, you can easily find the relationship between two blanks. Because the students were surprised, we can figure out that the professor is acting completely different from her normal behaviour. The two words should have opposite in meaning.
In the question, only D has words with opposite meanings.
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This article was written for you by Edmond, one of the tutors with TestPrep Academy.
