English Questions: Fill in the Blanks 116

Direction (1-10): In each question below a sentence is given with two blanks in each. Each question is followed by four options with two words in each. You have to select that option as your answer which can fill both the blanks of the sentence.

1. In May 2016, a few weeks before the EU referendum, I walked 340 miles from Liverpool to London to see what was happening to my country. I was travelling in the footsteps of a 1981 march against unemployment that my late father had helped to organise. In that year, Tory policies had ________________ industry and sent unemployment skyrocketing. In 2016, Tory ________________ was putting the final nail in the coffin of those broken communities.
   destroyed, lenience
   devastated, austerity
   shattered, gentility
   depressed, indulgence
   All are Correct
   Option B
   

    

2. The defence secretary’s brain has gone absent without leave. Gavin Williamson said in a speech today that he intends to send his new aircraft carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, round the world to frighten China. He will equip it with a squadron of F-35 fighter jets, ________________ from America. In addition he wants to build two British military bases, one in Asia and the other “in the Caribbean”. They are to “strengthen our global presence, enhance our ________________ and increase our mass”.
   derivative, paragon
   loaned, wonder
   borrowed, lethality
   obtained, marvel
   All are Correct
   Option C
   

    

3. The outpouring of joy that followed Hosni Mubarak’s resignation was ________________. It was 11 February 2011 – eight years ago to this day. Egyptians of all faiths and ages and backgrounds, united by a desire for freedom, gathered in Tahrir Square to bring 30 years of tyranny to an end. We believed that as the people of the region’s most historic power, ________________ by the success of the Tunisian revolution, we were setting in motion a chain of events that would guarantee Egypt’s freedom.
   apparent, insipid
   obvious, bland
   manifest, drab
   palpable, inspired
   All are Correct
   Option D
   

    

4. As for the voters, they give the impression of impatience rather than ________________. Why can’t the political class just get on with it? If Brexit was ever a principled uprising, it now more closely resembles a form of ________________ longing to be curtailed: it has more in common with a delayed Deliveroo order than a popular revolution.
   trepidation, boredom
   fright, excitement
   dismay, merriment
   disquietude, gaiety
   All are Correct
   Option A
   

    

5. The lack of science, maths and language teachers has been talked about for years. But a shortage of English teachers has gone under the ________________. Although last year’s target for new trainees was met, in the two previous years it was missed. English used to be among the most popular subjects, both to teach and to learn. Lessons had a ________________ for being creative, thought-provoking – and even fun. Philip Pullman, David Almond and Joanne Harris were all teachers before they became authors.
   monitor, disgrace
   radar, reputation
   finder, obscurity
   amplifier, admonish
   All are Correct
   Option B
   

    

6. It’s been one hell of a week in the wide, wide world of racism. On Monday, the Egyptian international Mohamed Salah was ________________ to alleged racist abuse during Liverpool’s match with West Ham. On Wednesday, memories of the Windrush scandal were awoken when 29 people were forcibly expelled from the UK on a charter flight to Jamaica. Then, on Thursday, Gucci released a polo neck jumper that covers the mouth and the chin of the wearer, making them ________________ a blackface minstrel. You know, like you do.
   impinged, contrast
   enslaved, deviate
   subjected, resemble
   subdued, diverge
   All are Correct
   Option C
   

    

7. The annual anachronism known as the National Prayer Breakfast ________________ its usual array of clergy, military, and political leaders in Washington on 7 February. Most prominent of all, of course, was Donald Trump, who used the de facto ________________ to call for outlawing abortion, among other positions dear to the Religious Right.
   nauseated, lectern
   impassive, clergy
   exuded, podium
   attracted, pulpit
   All are Correct
   Option E
   

    

8. And what has the world learned of all this?” is the handwritten question by Holocaust ________________ Henri Obstfeld, which appears beside his image in a 2017 book Survivor. Introducing his portraits of 103 survivors, the photographer Harry Borden writes: “I grew up on a farm in Devon, England. My dad, Charlie, was a resolutely atheist Jew who ________________ nothing from his background except a fear of antisemitism. When I was a boy he once told me that the Nazis would have killed us. I was shocked.
   survivor, derived
   genocide, crucial
   stopper, invented
   sucker, primitive
   All are Correct
   Option A
   

    

9. Weirdly, the supposedly cynical British public still does. Voters damn politicians, but ________________ they will somehow find a way through. I doubt their confidence will last and they will soon see our new United Kingdom of Absurdistan for what it is: a land where civil servants send military advisers into government departments, as if the mandarins were planning a ________________, or draw up emergency measures to lift the Queen fall-of-Saigon style from Buckingham Palace or stockpile medicines as if we were at war.
   imagine, whammy
   presume, putsch
   assume, coup
   surmise, feat
   All are Correct
   Option E
   

    

10. The piece in question, Ivanka Vacuuming, recently opened in Washington DC. A video shows a woman in the Trump-preferred genre – young, high-heeled, blond – impassively pushing a vacuum ________________ around a pink carpet, on to which visitors are invited to throw crumbs, from a ________________ pile on a pedestal. “Inspired by a figure whose public persona incorporates an almost comically wide range of feminine identities – daughter, wife, mother, sister, model, working woman, blond– Ivanka Vacuuming is,” say the organisers, CulturalDC, “simultaneously a visual celebration of a contemporary icon; a portrait of our own relationship to that figure; and a questioning of our complicity in her role playing.”
    cleanest, frugal
    cleaner, generous
    clarifier, narcissistic
    scourer, covetous
    All are Correct
    Option B