Gapped Text with Word Bank

The task is worth 5 marks of the twenty for Language in Use. Words or short phrases have been lifted out of the text, a bank sits beside it, the pieces in it are lettered, and what you write on the answer sheet is a letter.

The bank is built so that it always holds more pieces than there are gaps, and two or three will still be in your hand at the end: that is what finished work looks like. Do not be thrown by the rubric's count. The official sample says "four extra words" for fourteen pieces and ten gaps, most likely because it counts the piece already spent on example 0: the pieces you never use are three.

From here you simply solve. After every check I will say what the gap was holding on to, and the next one will already know that.

The word bank, gap 0 and the first two

This is teaching material, not exam material. In the exam one text holds ten gaps, and one bank of fourteen pieces serves the whole text. Below, the gaps come in twos and threes, and each group has its own bank trimmed to a few pieces: while you are working out what one gap hangs on, fourteen pieces in front of you are only in the way. Short exercises do not train the part where you hold the whole bank in your head and remember what has been spent; for that, go to the trainer.

Here is what a gap looks like when it has been filled in for you. On the real paper the first of these is numbered 0 and carries no marks: it shows the model.

Ravens Lane Community Centre (0) tools to its members since 2019.

0 — A. Notice what settled it. Not the fact that the sentence is about a centre and its tools: since 2019 stands to the right of the gap, and since with a date demands the present perfect, the form with has. The other three pieces say exactly the same thing in meaning and fail on form.

Now it is your turn. Two gaps and a bank of four pieces.

Both gaps closed before the meaning of the sentence was needed: what settled them was what stands immediately left and immediately right. From that come the four rules the whole task rests on.

The rule and the table

A piece has to meet the sentence on both sides. A gap has two sides, and both dictate form. On the left: a verb that wants a continuation, an article with no noun, a phrase already started. On the right: a noun, a subordinate clause (a clause is a part of a sentence with a subject and a verb of its own, attached by a conjunction), the end of the sentence. Put the piece in and read the whole sentence: the side that does not fit is usually the one you were not looking at. A piece of two or three words brings its own grammar into the gap: as well as must be followed by a noun, so that by a clause.

When form lets several through, meaning chooses. Form sieves, but it rarely sieves down to one. The bank usually holds at least one more piece of the same grammatical shape as the answer: two modal phrases, three nouns, four -ing forms. So the work goes in two moves: first throw out everything that does not fit the shape, then choose among the survivors by the meaning of the sentence and by which word the piece attaches to.

Take the piece whole, not by its first word. A bank can hold once and once had, in charge and in charge of, to and to take this. The eye grabs the first word, recognises it and drops the piece in, and along with the first word a tail arrives in the gap that has no room there. Read the piece to the end before you try it on.

The arithmetic of the bank. There are two or three more pieces than gaps, and no piece is used twice: each letter goes into one gap at most. Three things follow. First: a piece you place disappears from the bank, so the last gap chooses among a handful rather than fourteen, which is why you do the gaps with a single possible answer first and the disputed ones after. Second: a piece that fits nowhere is one of the spares, and it does not need a home. Third: a gap that nothing fits means a mistake further up the text, not a shortage in the bank.

The rule has been read; now it gets tested on fifteen gaps in a row. In the next gap all four pieces in the bank fit the shape.

Gaps three to nine

Shape let all four through, and meaning separated them. The next pair does not work that way: there the pieces differ in what each of them demands on its right.

The right-hand side separated two pieces that mean almost the same thing. The next three gaps break earlier than that — on how far into the piece in the bank you actually read.

Three pieces sharing a first word came apart at their tails, and two of the five were left over. Next come four gaps at once, and the bank for them is chosen so that they look identical to the eye.

Gaps ten to seventeen

Two pieces stayed in your hand, and not one gap suffered for it. In the next pair a different two are left over, and what sieves them out is not the number of the subject.

That pair was settled by habit rather than by any rule of grammar, and the only way to check it was by ear. The last pair before the full run comes back to the length of the piece.

Fifteen gaps are behind you, and each time the bank was trimmed to four, five or six pieces. Now the way the paper does it: one text, one bank, no hints between the gaps.

One last pass, a new text

Six gaps in a row in an unfamiliar text and eight pieces in the bank. The commentary comes after the check, as in the exam it comes after you hand the paper in.

What to take away

Three things that are not in the table and that you have just done by hand. The order of work: gaps with a single candidate first, disputed ones after, because the bank shrinks as you go. A piece that fits nowhere is a result, not a loss. And a gap that nothing fits is diagnosed among the pieces you have already placed, not in the bank.

A capital letter inside a piece does give away a gap at the start of a sentence, but banks usually print their pieces in lower case, so a missing capital tells you nothing.

Four articles the gaps pointed to today:

Modals: may, must and what they change Prepositions: which phrases break off without one Set pairs: keep track, take care and why they are never mixed Linkers: condition, contrast and consequence