Text with missing sentence parts

When it is on the paper, the task is worth 8 points of the twenty for reading. It is not guaranteed to be there: the reading part is put together from whole tasks of four types, and a paper takes only as many as add up to twenty. Eight pieces of sentences have been taken out of the text, eleven lettered pieces lie beside it, and two of them are left over.

You will have the shape of the task in three minutes. What stays useful is the order in which a gap gets decided. The grammar of the seam comes first and throws out the pieces that cannot stand there at all. Two or three usually survive it, and the sense decides between them: what the sentence is doing, what the next sentence says, what a small word inside the piece points back to. That is why there are only ten items below: the rest is the trainer's work, linked at the end.

The text, and one gap filled for you

This is a training text, not an exam text. The article in the official sample runs to several paragraphs, and every one of its gaps ends a sentence. This one is a single paragraph, and some of its gaps sit in the middle of a sentence, so that you can see the seam on both sides. For the full length, go to the trainer.

The Rundle Street clock stopped in 1998, and for years nobody (0). The council had no budget for it, and the clockmaker who had built the mechanism (1). Then a retired engineer, Halina Vos, asked whether she could look inside. She found that the fault (2): a single bent lever, which she straightened in an afternoon. The clock ran for six weeks and stopped again. This time Vos left it alone, (3), and waited to see whether anyone would say anything. Fourteen people wrote to the council within a month, (4). The council paid for a full overhaul, (5), and asked Vos to supervise it. She refused the fee, (6), and the money went on a second clock for the station instead. Today both clocks are wound by volunteers, (7), and the list is longer than the town needs. The one thing nobody has repaired (8).

Here is the bank. Eleven pieces, eight gaps, so two of them will be left lying there.

In the exercises on the clock text, the candidates for each gap come from this same bank, under the same letters. A letter from this list is what you write down.

Gap 0 is filled in for you: 0: F. …for years nobody seemed to mind that it was wrong. To the left stands nobody with no verb yet, so a verb has to follow, and that alone throws out most of the bank. It does not throw out had died long before or was smaller than anyone had expected: both are good grammar after nobody. They fail on sense. The sentence is about a stopped clock that nobody reacted to, and only F says that.

The first two gaps

Fill them in straight away; I will explain nothing in advance.

Same four pieces, no hint this time.

Twice the grammar threw out two pieces and left two standing, and twice the sense chose between them: once the half of the sentence before the gap, once the words after the colon. Hence three rules.

The rule and the table

The seam narrows, the sense decides. A gap has two sides, and both set the form: on the left a subject without a verb or a comma after a finished thought, on the right a colon, a conjunction, the end of the sentence. Read the gap whole, with the piece in it: agreement and tense throw out what cannot stand there. A piece that begins with a verb only goes where a subject is still waiting for one; a piece that begins with -ing only goes after a comma when the sentence is already complete.

What survives that is not yet the answer. Ask what the sentence is doing (giving a reason, a result, a contrast, a detail) and what the sentence after the gap goes on to say, and keep the piece that fits both. In the official sample the two left-over pieces are good grammar in several gaps and wrong only on what the text says, so a task solved by grammar alone is not solved.

A reference word needs an owner. This, that, it, they, such, there: many pieces carry one, pointing at something already named to the left of the gap. The piece as she had no use for it needs a particular it, named in that same sentence. No owner on the left, and the piece is not from here, however smoothly it reads. This is the sense check in its most concrete form: you can put a finger on what the word points at.

Every piece is spent once, and two are left over. Hence the order of work: first the gaps where exactly one piece fits, then the contested ones, whose choice narrows by itself. And the price of a mistake: a piece in the wrong gap leaves not one gap unanswered but two.

In the next two gaps the grammar throws out one piece at most. What is left is settled by the sense, and it shows in a small word inside the piece.

Two more gaps, and form is not what settles them

The same question settles the next gap too.

You have followed the reference word twice. Four gaps of the clock text are still empty, and six pieces are left for them, so two will stay behind. This is where the rule that a piece is spent once starts to work.

The rest of the clock text

The two left over were never needed, and here nothing depended on them. The last text shows what one wrong placement costs when two gaps compete for the same piece.

The last text: where one mistake takes its neighbour with it

Three pieces for two gaps, and one of them fits both, by form and by sense.

The station café closed in March (9), and reopened in June under a new owner. He kept the old menu (10), and the regulars came back within a week.

X is spent on the first gap, where nothing else fitted. The second gap takes what is left.

What to take with you

The order of work: read the text without the pieces; at each gap, throw out what the grammar forbids and choose among the rest by sense; place the gaps where exactly one piece is left; come back to the contested ones; check at the end that exactly two are left over. An empty gap is a certain zero, and a guessed letter costs nothing: the official sample paper and its key print no deduction for a wrong answer. The only deduction they print is the word-count table for the blog comment.

Ten items are enough to show the order of work. What comes next is not theory but volume: eight gaps in a row in a full-length text.

Trainer: the same task at full length Word order: what a seam holds on to, and why a verb must follow nobody Connectors: which, though, as and the other words a piece starts with Multiple Choice: there too the option finishes a sentence someone else began