Select the most appropriate option to fill in the blank. He is ____ most…
2025
Select the most appropriate option to fill in the blank.
He is ____ most diligent employee in this office, therefore I will recommend his name for promotion.
Answer: C. the — Concept: A superlative adjective (formed with “most” + adjective, or the “-est” suffix) singles out ONE member of a defined group as possessing a quality to…
- A.
an
- B.
a
- C.
the
- D.
no article required
Attempted by 140 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
Concept: A superlative adjective (formed with “most” + adjective, or the “-est” suffix) singles out ONE member of a defined group as possessing a quality to the highest degree among all the members being compared. Because the noun it modifies now refers to one specific, uniquely identified member of that group, English requires the definite article “the” immediately before a superlative adjective form.
Application: In “He is ___ most diligent employee in this office, therefore I will recommend his name for promotion,” the adjective “diligent” appears in its superlative form, “most diligent,” modifying the singular countable noun “employee.” The phrase “in this office” supplies the comparison group: all employees of that office. Since only one person in that group can hold the top rank of diligence, the noun phrase names a single, uniquely identified individual — exactly what “the” marks. The completed sentence is therefore “He is the most diligent employee in this office.”
Cross-check / contrast with the other options:
Option | Standard use, and how it reads in this sentence |
|---|---|
an | Indefinite article before a singular countable noun whose next sound is a vowel sound. “most” begins with a consonant sound, so “an most diligent employee” is not even phonetically possible. |
a | Indefinite article for any one non-specific member of a class. “a most diligent employee” is possible only as the separate emphatic idiom “a most” meaning “very”, which is reserved for a subjective quality with no comparison-group phrase attached. |
the | Definite article marking a noun already narrowed to one unique referent — exactly what the superlative “most diligent … in this office” does, so this is what completes the sentence. |
no article required | Zero article is standard before plural or uncountable nouns used in a general sense and before most proper nouns, not before a singular countable noun such as “employee”. |
Separately, English also has an unrelated use of “a most” + adjective as an emphatic intensifier meaning “very” (for example, “it was a most interesting film”), reserved for a subjective quality stated with NO following comparison-group phrase. Standard grammar convention treats an explicit group-scope phrase such as “in this office,” “in the class,” or “of all the students” as fixing a comparison set for the adjective that precedes it — which is exactly why grammar and competitive-exam references pair “the” + superlative with such phrases, and why the emphatic “a most” idiom is not used alongside one. Reading “in this office” as a mere aside about employment (rather than as fixing the comparison group) runs against that convention, so the standard, exam-intended completion here is the group-ranking superlative with “the.”
Hence the sentence is correctly completed with “the”: “He is the most diligent employee in this office, therefore I will recommend his name for promotion.”