21 February 2025 · Shift 2

Preposition after 'good' The adjective 'good' takes the preposition 'at' when the word after it names an activity that a person performs well: good at maths, good at singing, good at dancing. So the sentence reads 'She is very good at dancing.' 'good for' shows benefit (milk is good for you), 'good of' praises kindness (it was good of you to come) and 'good on' is not a standard skill pattern, so none of them can introduce an activity she does well.

Antonym: meticulous 'Meticulous' means showing extreme care about every small detail, so its opposite must describe work done carelessly and untidily. 'Sloppy' means exactly that - done without care or attention - so it is the antonym. 'Orderly', 'Detailed' and 'Categorised' all pull in the same direction as 'meticulous' (neat, thorough, sorted); a near-synonym can never be the antonym.

One-word substitute The underlined segment describes a statement that is at once untrue and damaging to another person's reputation. 'Slanderous' carries precisely that sense - a spoken statement that is false and injures someone's good name (slander is spoken, libel is written). 'Adulatory' means full of praise and 'flattery' is insincere praise, both the opposite of damaging; 'adorable' means lovable. Only 'slanderous' matches 'false and defamatory'.

Spotting the error 'He has won the elections before' is the present perfect used for past experience at an unstated time, and 'before' is exactly the kind of indefinite time adverb that tense takes - so segment (d) and segment (a) are sound. 'but' correctly links that clause to a contrasting one, and 'this time the situation is different' is the simple present describing a present state, so the shift from perfect to present is deliberate and correct. No segment breaks a rule of tense, agreement, article or preposition, so 'No error' is the answer.

Antonym: fade 'Fade' means to lose colour or brightness and slowly pass out of sight. The reverse movement is from unseen to seen, which is what 'Appear' means - to come into view. 'Accept', 'Admire' and 'Achieve' say nothing about visibility, so none of them can reverse 'fade'.

Idiom for similarity The clause after the semicolon - 'they always agree on everything' - tells you the blank must mean 'extremely alike'. 'Like two peas in a pod' is the established idiom for two people who are strikingly similar in looks or in thinking, because peas from one pod look identical. The other three are not idioms at all but invented look-alike phrases, and an idiom must be used in its fixed wording to keep its meaning.

Synonym: candid 'Candid' describes a person who speaks openly and frankly, saying plainly what he really thinks. 'Honest' shares that same core of truthfulness and directness, so it is the synonym. 'Reserved' (holding one's thoughts back) and 'Hesitant' (unsure about speaking) are the opposite of open, and 'Deceptive' is the opposite of truthful.

Adverb spelling The adverb comes from the adjective 'awkward' plus the suffix '-ly'; the base word ends in 'd', not in a silent 'e', so no 'e' may be inserted before '-ly'. 'Awkwardely' therefore carries one extra letter - the correct spelling is 'awkwardly', making (d) the incorrectly spelt option. The other three are all correctly formed: mortal + ly, frank + ly, and deliberate + ly, where the 'e' is part of the adjective 'deliberate' itself.

Correlative 'so ... that' The sentence states a cause (the cold) and the result it produced (numb fingers). English carries that cause-result link with the correlative pair 'so + adjective + that'. The first segment prints 'It was that cold', using 'that' as an intensifier before an adjective. That use is informal and non-standard, and it also leaves the 'that' clause in the second segment without the 'so' it needs as its partner. Replacing it gives 'It was so cold that I could not feel my fingers at night', which restores the pair, so the error lies in the segment 'It was that cold'. The second and third segments are untouched by this rule and are correct exactly as printed, so 'No error' cannot be chosen.

Idiom: under the weather The segment to be replaced is 'feeling unwell', so the idiom must mean 'slightly ill, not in good health'. 'Under the weather' is the fixed idiom for exactly that, and it fits the reason given for taking a break and resting. 'Under the sun' means 'existing anywhere at all', 'under the radar' means 'without being noticed' and 'under pressure' means 'under stress' - none of them says that a person is ill.

Contextual word choice The tickets sold out within minutes, so the fans spoken of are the ones left with nothing - the blank must name their reaction to missing out. 'Disappointed' means unhappy because something hoped for did not happen, which is exactly that reaction. 'Satisfied' is the opposite response, 'clear' does not describe a feeling at all, and 'screaming' names a noise rather than the state that 'leaving many fans ___' calls for.

Spelling correction Check the sentence word by word: 'horrizon' is the only misspelling, because 'horizon' has a single 'r'. Option (b) prints that correct form, so it is the rectification the question asks for. 'casting', 'tranquil' and 'across' are already spelt correctly in the sentence; choosing (a), (c) or (d) would put a fresh error into a word that has none.

Synonym: grumpy 'Grumpy' describes a bad-tempered person who is annoyed by small things and complains readily. 'Irritable' says exactly that - easily annoyed - so it is the synonym. 'Jubilant' (delighted) is the opposite mood, while 'Competent' and 'Fascinating' speak of ability and of interest, not of temper.

Antonym: credible 'Credible' means believable - worth trusting or relying on. Its opposite must therefore describe something that cannot be trusted. 'Unreliable' means not to be depended on, so it reverses 'credible' exactly. The real trap is 'Credulous'. It shares the Latin root credere (to believe), but it describes the listener who believes too easily, not the statement that cannot be believed - so it is not an antonym of 'credible' at all; the true antonym pair there is credulous / sceptical. 'Fantastic' means excellent or fanciful and 'Friendly' means warm in manner; neither is about trustworthiness.

Collocation: got lost 'Lost' here names the state the hikers ended up in, and English marks a change into such a state with 'get': get lost, get tired, get married. The sentence is in the past - 'but eventually found their way' - so the past form 'got' is needed: 'Pranav and Karan … got lost in the dense forest'. 'had lost' would demand an object (they had lost their map), 'gone lost' is not an English collocation, and 'held lost' is meaningless, so only 'got' completes the fixed pairing.

Cloze: preposition with 'rate' The blank sits between the verb 'rose' and the noun phrase 'a very fast rate', so it must be the preposition that English fixes to words of speed and pace. That preposition is 'at': at a fast rate, at high speed, at a steady pace. The imports 'rose at a very fast rate'. 'about' would turn the rate into an approximation, 'of' cannot follow 'rose' in this structure, and 'beside' is a preposition of place, so none of them can govern a rate.

Cloze: 'leading up to' The blank is followed by 'up to the Boston Tea Party', so the passage is naming the four years that came immediately before that event. 'Leading up to' is the set phrase for the stretch of time just before something happens, so blank (77) takes 'leading'. 'following' would place the four years after the Tea Party and reverse the timeline, while 'lagging' and 'trailing' mean falling behind and never combine with 'up to' in this sense of time.

Cloze: verb from context The sentence compares the 1770 import figure of 55 tonnes with the quantity of tea lying 'in the harbour', and its own last clause repeats the verb: 'the year the tea was dumped'. The passage therefore supplies its own answer - blank (78) is 'dumped', tea got rid of by being tipped into the water at the Boston Tea Party. 'elevated', 'upheld' and 'fostered' all mean lifting, supporting or encouraging something, none of which can describe tea thrown into a harbour.

Cloze: verb of growth The sentence says the population 'was about 2 million people in 1770 and didn't ___ much in that four-year period', so the blank must be the verb that describes a population getting bigger. 'Expand' means to grow larger in size or number, and 'didn't expand much' correctly reports that the figure stayed near 2 million. 'condense', 'shrink' and 'constrict' all mean becoming smaller; placed after 'didn't', each would claim the population grew - the exact opposite of the writer's point that supply rose while the number of customers did not.

Cloze: adjective from data The blank describes the increase the paragraph has just measured: imports went from 55 tonnes to 370 tonnes in four years, which the writer himself calls 'almost seven times'. The adjective must therefore mark the rise as sudden and strikingly large, and 'dramatic' does exactly that. It is also the only choice the argument permits: the sentence concludes that the price of tea 'had to fall', and only a very big jump in supply against an unchanged number of customers can force a price down. 'mundane' (ordinary), 'understated' (played down) and 'dull' (unexciting) all belittle the increase, contradicting the seven-fold figure and destroying the reasoning that follows.