Cloze under the clock: buying marks with collocation before coherence
Li Wei is doing a timed cloze: one passage, 20 blanks, 15 minutes. The passage argues that right-to-repair laws will change how long consumer goods last. He has already spent 11 minutes on the first ten blanks because he keeps re-reading whole paragraphs. Six blanks remain and four minutes are left. Three of them look tractable without the full passage: 'consumers' enthusiasm shows no sign of ___' (abating / declining / receding / fading); 'whether the law will ___ its stated goals' (achieve / meet / attain / realise); and blank 9, 'The rules, ___ , apply only to appliances sold after 2021' (however / therefore / moreover / otherwise), where the preceding sentence says the law was widely praised but he has not read the sentence after. Blank 17 depends on a clause he has not reached. In his last mock he scored 6/10 on the first half and 1/4 on the rushed final blanks.
1. With four minutes and six blanks left, in what order should Li Wei attack them, and what principle justifies that order?
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Principle: every blank is worth the same, so the goal is to maximise the number of correct answers, not to solve the hardest item. Expected marks per second, not intellectual satisfaction.
Order he should use:
meet its stated goalsandshow no sign of abating- fixed chunks, answerable in 15–20 seconds with zero context. Take them first.- Blank 9 - needs only one adjacent sentence, not the whole passage. Read the clause after the comma, decide, move on.
- The clause-dependent blank last - but never blank. Use grammar-only elimination (part of speech, singular/plural, transitive vs intransitive) and commit.
What he must stop doing: re-reading paragraphs. In cloze, the sentence plus one neighbour resolves most items; a third reading rarely changes the answer but reliably costs 40 seconds. He should also reserve 20 seconds at the end to check that no blank is empty - an unmarked blank is a guaranteed zero, a guess is roughly 25%.
2. How should he settle blank 9 using only the sentence that follows it, and why are the other three options wrong?
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The clause after the comma is apply only to appliances sold after 2021 - a restriction of scope. The preceding sentence is praise. Limiting a praised law's reach is a concession, and concession against expectation requires a contrastive adverb: however.
Test each option by substitution:
- therefore would need the restriction to be a consequence of the praise. It is not; praise does not logically produce a narrow scope.
- moreover adds a point in the same direction. Restricting scope weakens the praise, so it runs against the current.
- otherwise needs an explicit alternative scenario ('otherwise, firms would…'). None is present.
The pair of commas also marks the adverb as parenthetical, which fits however naturally. Practical rule for cloze discourse markers: locate the relation between the two clauses (contrast, cause, addition, alternative) before looking at the options; the marker is then almost forced.
3. Between 'abating' and 'fading', what should decide his choice - and what does that reveal about how cloze items are built?
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The decision is made at phrase level, not word level. The frame is show no sign of + -ing, and the conventional collocation for an unwanted force (enthusiasm, pressure, a storm) is show no sign of abating. Fading would normally appear as showing no signs of fading, with a plural signs; the singular frame makes it the weaker fit. Declining and receding do not collocate naturally with no sign of in this sense at all.
This is typical of cloze design: the item is not testing whether he knows what 'abate' means, but whether he can retrieve the whole chunk and notice grammatical furniture (articles, singular/plural, preposition) that goes with it. So the exam-hall method is: recall the frame, slot the verb, check the small words agree, then move. Importing real-world logic ('e-bikes are declining in popularity') is how candidates talk themselves out of a correct collocation answer.