Direction : Read the passage and choose the correct word/set of words to fill…
2020
Direction : Read the passage and choose the correct word/set of words to fill the blanks.
Hope and fear are marching in lockstep. The arrival of the vaccines represents the ______ (92) _______ (gloom, murk, dawn) of hope. Yet, fears about mutations of the virus and how politics, which defines public policy, will mutate loom large across India’s political economy. Political rhetoric propels public expectations and the declaration by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently of “a budget which is a budget like never before” will be tested against a billion aspirations. The challenge of ______ (93) _______ (revival, amelioration, droop) and recovery is located in a parade of riveting contrasts. India, it is useful to remember, migrated from slowdown to lockdown. The contrast between the message beamed by stock indices and indices of the real economy are striking to say the least. In the period post the high of 2016-17, growth has _______ (94) ________ (limped, slid, stumped) consistently and stock valuations have risen just as consistently. GDP growth slid from 8-plus per cent to hover at around 4 per cent to a contraction in the wake of the pandemic, while the benchmark Sensex has shot up from around 29,000 points to over 47,000 points. How has the fall in growth impacted government _______ (95) _______ (expenditure, asset, revenues)? In theory, drop in output would result in drop in revenues. That though is not necessarily true in the Indian context. This week, the government informed India that the Goods and Services Tax collections “for December 2020 recorded all time high since implementation of GST”. Even as the economy is in what is called a technical recession, which translates into two quarters of negative growth, GST collections which averaged at around Rs 90,000 crore since August 2017, touched the new high of Rs 1.15,174 crore for the month of December. GST revenues grew even as the economy _______ (96) _______ (shrank, dwindled, aggrandized) 7.5 per cent in the July Sept 2020 period.
It is not just the Dalal Street vs Main Street picture or the GDP vs GST revenues imagery which are curious. Conventional economics ________ (97) _________ (postulates, ionates, charges ) a correlation between inflation and interest rates. Consumer Price Inflation, which was under 3 per cent in 2017, has seen a secular rise now touching 7.5 per cent. The RBI’s policy rates though have slid from over 6.5 per cent to 5.15 per cent in 2019 to 4 per cent in 2020. This column has previously highlighted the _________ (98) ________ ( phenomenon, movement, criteria ) affecting savers. Interest rates for depositors with money in a savings account halved to 3 per cent — a 365-day deposit now fetches what the savings account used to.
Fill in blank 93.
- A.
revival
- B.
amelioration
- C.
droop
- D.
revival, amelioration
- E.
droop, amelioration
Attempted by 1 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: D
Concept
Sentence-completion items test whether a word fits the sentence on two counts at once: it must be the right part of speech for the slot, and its meaning (its connotation — positive or negative) must agree with the surrounding ideas. When several candidate words are listed, each one is judged independently; a word is acceptable only if BOTH its grammar and its sense match the context.
Application
The blank sits in: “The challenge of ___ and recovery is located in a parade of riveting contrasts.” The blank is joined by “and” to the noun “recovery,” so the slot needs a noun whose sense is positive and forward-looking, in step with “recovery” (a return to a better state).
revival — a noun meaning a restoration to life, strength or activity. It is positive and pairs naturally with “recovery,” so it fits.
amelioration — a noun meaning the act of making a bad situation better, i.e. improvement. It is also positive and grammatically a noun, so it too fits.
droop — to sag, hang down or lose vigour. Its sense is negative and downward, the opposite of “recovery,” so it clashes with the context and does not fit.
Both “revival” and “amelioration” satisfy the grammar-and-sense test, so the set of words that correctly fills the blank is revival, amelioration.
Cross-check
Read the sentence back with the chosen set: “the challenge of revival and recovery” and “the challenge of amelioration and recovery” both read coherently, while “the challenge of droop and recovery” is self-contradictory — confirming the answer is revival, amelioration.