Directions: Choose the pair(s) of words that need to be interchanged to make…

Concept: In an interchange-of-words item, every bold word must fit the grammatical demand of its own slot the verb-complementation pattern it needs, or the collocation with the words sitting around it. The correct pair to swap is the single exchange that resolves every mismatched slot at once without creating a new mismatch.

Application

1. With every bold word kept at its original slot, the sentence reads: The Chief Justice passed that sitting on competent Bills highlighted by a legislature undermines democracy. Here 'passed' is used in its legislative/judicial-ratification sense (to enact or formally approve, as in 'passed a Bill' or 'passed an order'); in that sense it takes a noun-phrase direct object (a Bill, an order, a resolution), not a finite that-clause. Because 'passed' sits directly before the clause 'that sitting on ... undermines democracy', slot A does not fit there.

2. Highlighted sits directly before by a legislature, but the standard passive collocation for legislative Bills is Bills passed by a legislature, not Bills highlighted by a legislature, so slot C does not fit there either.

3. Interchanging passed and highlighted repairs both slots together: slot A becomes highlighted, giving the standard pattern highlighted that ... undermines ...; slot C becomes passed, giving the standard pattern Bills passed by a legislature.

4. Slots B (competent) and D (legislature) already sit correctly as sitting on competent Bills and by a legislature, so no further interchange is needed there.

Cross-check (why the other pairings fail)

• Interchanging only competent and legislature moves competent to sit directly before undermines, leaving it with no noun to modify, and moves legislature to sit before Bills, producing the non-standard string legislature Bills.

• Applying both interchanges together still leaves competent directly before undermines with no noun to modify.

• Interchanging passed and legislature moves legislature to the very start of the sentence (The Chief Justice legislature that ...), which is not a workable opening.

• Leaving every word in its original slot keeps passed directly before the that-clause, which is the exact mismatch identified above.

• A more natural-sounding phrasing, "Bills passed by a competent legislature," is not reachable through any interchange at all: it would need the two words competent and legislature to occupy the single slot D together, but each interchange can only place one word in one slot. Among the five interchanges actually on offer, A-C is the only one that leaves no dangling word, no broken verb-clause link, and no non-standard compound anywhere in the sentence. Its own resulting phrase, competent Bills, has a direct standard legal reading: Bills that fall within a legislature's constitutional (legislative) competence to enact -- the same "competence" used in the standard legal phrase "legislative competence." Every other offered interchange, by contrast, leaves at least one word with no grammatical role to play in the sentence at all.

Result: interchanging only the pair passed-highlighted (A-C) is the single swap that makes the sentence grammatically correct and meaningful.