Directions : Read the passage given below and answer the questions by…
2019
Directions : Read the passage given below and answer the questions by selecting the correct/most appropriate options :
With more than 3,000 languages currently spoken, English undoubtedly is amongst the richest of all languages. The Oxford English Dictionary lists about half a million words of which only 2,00,000 are frequently used. This is because, the balance 3,00,000 words are technical and not found in ordinary dictionaries. The only language that can come near English is Chinese.
Apart from being the richest language, English also boasts of being one of the most widely spoken, second only to Mandarin Chinese. This remarkable achievement is only because of the one thing that we all love to do – copy ! ‘Siesta’ for example is of Spanish origin. ‘Sputnik’ as you must be aware of, has a Russian origin. ‘Restaurant’ is from France and ‘Super’ from Germany. Even before the birth of the ‘genius’ of ‘drama’, William Shakespeare, the words ‘genius’ and ‘drama’ were adapted from Greek. Now, you must be wondering if English has anything original about it. Well, find it out ! Did you ever try to find out how many different words of English we use in our daily life ? Try to guess and then read on. A modern novelist has a vocabulary of anywhere between ten to fifteen thousand words.
William Shakespeare used thirty thousand words and the only writer to come close to him was James Joyce in ‘Ulysses’. We normally have a vocabulary of about ten thousand words of which only five thousand are used in everyday conversation. This leads to a limited variety of words. This is because we repeat a lot of words. In conversation and in writing, it is ‘the’. (Try counting it in this article and you will have proof of it.)
Which of the following words is most often used in English language ?
- A.
a
- B.
the
- C.
is
- D.
one
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B
In a reading-comprehension item, the correct option is whichever choice is directly stated or entailed by the passage's own wording — not the option that merely sounds like a common English word. When a question asks which word appears “most often”, the passage itself supplies the answer as an explicit fact, so the task is to locate that exact sentence.
The final paragraph of the passage states: “We normally have a vocabulary of about ten thousand words of which only five thousand are used in everyday conversation... In conversation and in writing, it is ‘the’.” This sentence directly names the specific word that recurs most often in speech and writing, giving the answer without needing any outside knowledge of English usage statistics.
“a” is an indefinite article restricted to singular countable nouns before a consonant sound; the passage never singles this out as the most-repeated word.
“is” is the third-person singular present form of “to be”; useful in speech, but not the word the passage explicitly names.
“one” functions as a number or pronoun; likewise not the word the passage cites.
Because the passage itself explicitly names the word, and none of the other three options match that citation, the word “the” is confirmed directly from the text as the one most often used.