Gapped text: referents must already be on the page
A student is doing a five-of-seven gapped-text task. The paragraph under consideration reads:
“Most of us say yes far too often. (38) ___ . Saying no politely and early is not rudeness; it is how you protect the hours you need for the work only you can do. (39) ___ .”
Four of the seven options are quoted here: A. The result is a calendar filled with other people's priorities. B. Guilt, in that case, arrives before the request has even been answered. C. Protecting those hours is not selfishness; it is the condition of doing anything well. D. Some people, of course, refuse everything and help no one.
The student's first pass gives 38 = B, because “guilt is exactly what people feel about saying no”, and 39 = D, because “it's good to show the other side”.
1. Settle gap 38 and explain why B cannot stand there, however true it may be in real life.
Read the worked answer
38 = A.
The sentence before the gap states a cause: people “say yes far too often”. “The result is ...” needs an antecedent consequence, and a calendar filled with other people's priorities is that consequence. It also sets up the next sentence's “protect the hours you need” - the lost hours have to be on the page before they can be protected.
Why B fails: “in that case” requires a case to have been described, and none has been; “guilt” has not been mentioned anywhere above the gap. B would introduce a new emotion with a dangling pointer. That the statement is psychologically true is irrelevant - the task tests whether the text has prepared the sentence, not whether the world confirms it.
Operational rule: if an option opens with a demonstrative, pronoun or “in that case / this / such”, the referent must be findable in the text already read. If you have to supply the referent from your own head, the option is wrong.
2. Settle gap 39 and show what makes D a trap rather than a competitor.
Read the worked answer
39 = C.
- “those hours” is anaphoric to “the hours you need” in the previous sentence - a referent that is genuinely on the page.
- “not selfishness” answers the objection that “not rudeness” only half-answered, so the paragraph closes its own argument instead of opening a new one.
Why D is a trap: it shares the paragraph's topic, which is what makes it attractive, but it does two forbidden things. “of course” concedes an objection nobody raised, and the sentence swings to the opposite extreme (refusing everything), so the paragraph would then need another sentence to get back to its own point. A useful test: insert the option and ask whether the passage must now recover. If it must, the option is off-thread.
Note also the asymmetry: A, B and D are all about yes/no behaviour, but only A and C advance the argument the writer is actually building.
3. Suppose a seventh option read: “E. As a result, the hours you need for your own work simply disappear.” How would you choose between A and E at gap 38?
Read the worked answer
Both open with a consequence marker, so the decision turns on what the following sentence needs.
- E pre-empts the next sentence: it already says “the hours you need”, and the next sentence then says “protect the hours you need”. That near-verbatim repetition is a redundancy signal - good text does not introduce a phrase one clause before using it as new information.
- A adds new information (other people's priorities) and leaves the notion of hours to be introduced where it is needed.
General heuristic: when two options are both cohesive, prefer the one that does not steal the next sentence's material. Repetition across a gap is not cohesion; cohesion is a link where each side contributes something the other lacks.