In the following passage, there are blanks each of which has been numbered.…
2025
In the following passage, there are blanks each of which has been numbered. These correspond to the question numbers; against each question, five words have been suggested, one of which fills the blank appropriately.
The Sam Kee Building, located at 8 West Pender Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is (____1______) the "shallowest commercial building in the world", according to the Guinness Book of Records. The Sam Kee Company—one of the wealthiest firms in Chinatown— purchased a standard-sized lot in 1903. In 1912, however, Vancouver widened Pender Street and expropriated 24 feet (7.3 m) of the above-ground (____2______) —effectively (or so it was first believed) making conventional commercial use of the remaining frontage impractical, if not impossible. Refusing the neighbors offer to (____3_____), Sam Kee decided to build anyway. In 1913, the architects Brown and Gillam designed this narrow, steel-framed building's ground-floor depth (from storefront to rear of building) to measure 4'11" (1.50 m), with a second-floor depth (from overhanging bay window to rear) of 6' (1.83 m). The basement (_____4____) sidewalk and originally housed public baths, while the ground floor was used for offices and shops and the (_____5_____) for living quarters.
Choose the correct answer from the given options to fill the blanks which are numbered 3
- A.
Buy the remaining land
- B.
Purchase the rest money
- C.
To go through with it
- D.
Land was given
Attempted by 173 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: A
Answer: Buy the remaining land.
Explanation:
The sentence reads: "Refusing the neighbors' offer to (____3_____), Sam Kee decided to build anyway." Filling the blank with "buy the remaining land" produces a grammatically correct and contextually appropriate sentence: "Refusing the neighbors' offer to buy the remaining land, Sam Kee decided to build anyway." The neighbours would logically be offering to acquire the leftover frontage, so this completion matches both meaning and structure.
Why the other choices are incorrect:
“Purchase the rest money” is ungrammatical and meaningless in context; it does not name what would be purchased (the remaining land) and uses an incorrect object.
“To go through with it” does not specify the action being offered (buying land) and would produce an awkward or unclear clause when paired with "offer to." It does not match the passage's meaning.
“Land was given” is a passive statement, not an expression of an offer following "offer to," so it is grammatically incompatible with the sentence structure.
Note: The original solution mentioned an option that did not exist and gave unclear grammatical reasoning. This revised explanation removes that error and clearly links grammar and context to the correct choice.