Question:
Although the records of colonial New England are ---- in comparison with those available in France or England, the records of other English colonies in America are even more ----.
Although the records of colonial New England are ---- in comparison with those available in France or England, the records of other English colonies in America are even more ----.
Show Hint
Look for intensifying words like "even more." This is a strong clue that the two blanks must be filled with words that have similar meanings, with the second word possibly being a stronger version of the first.
Updated On: Oct 4, 2025
- sporadic.. irrefutable
- sparse.. incontrovertible
- ambiguous.. authoritative
- sketchy.. fragmentary
- puzzling.. unquestionable
Hide Solution
Verified By Collegedunia
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Understanding the Concept:
This sentence uses "Although" to set up a comparison of three sets of historical records: New England, France/England, and other English colonies in America. The structure is a statement of degree.
Step 2: Key Formula or Approach:
1. The first clause compares New England records to French/English records. The "Although" suggests that the New England records are deficient in some way. So the first blank should be a word meaning "incomplete" or "lacking detail."
2. The second clause states that the records of other English colonies are "even more ----." This means the second blank must be a word that is synonymous with or intensifies the meaning of the word in the first blank.
3. We are looking for a pair of synonyms that both mean "incomplete."
Step 3: Detailed Explanation:
- (D) sketchy.. fragmentary: "Sketchy" means not thorough or detailed. "Fragmentary" means consisting of small, disconnected parts; incomplete. These two words are synonyms and fit the logical structure perfectly. The New England records are incomplete, but the other colonial records are even more so.
- (A), (B), (C), (E): In all these options, the second word is an antonym or has an unrelated meaning to the first word. For example, "sporadic" (occurring at irregular intervals) and "irrefutable" (impossible to deny) are not synonyms. "Sparse" (thinly dispersed) and "incontrovertible" (not able to be disputed) are also not related in the required way. The logic requires two words with similar, negative meanings.
Step 4: Final Answer:
The pair "sketchy" and "fragmentary" correctly conveys the idea that while New England's records are incomplete, the records of other colonies are in an even worse state of incompleteness.
This sentence uses "Although" to set up a comparison of three sets of historical records: New England, France/England, and other English colonies in America. The structure is a statement of degree.
Step 2: Key Formula or Approach:
1. The first clause compares New England records to French/English records. The "Although" suggests that the New England records are deficient in some way. So the first blank should be a word meaning "incomplete" or "lacking detail."
2. The second clause states that the records of other English colonies are "even more ----." This means the second blank must be a word that is synonymous with or intensifies the meaning of the word in the first blank.
3. We are looking for a pair of synonyms that both mean "incomplete."
Step 3: Detailed Explanation:
- (D) sketchy.. fragmentary: "Sketchy" means not thorough or detailed. "Fragmentary" means consisting of small, disconnected parts; incomplete. These two words are synonyms and fit the logical structure perfectly. The New England records are incomplete, but the other colonial records are even more so.
- (A), (B), (C), (E): In all these options, the second word is an antonym or has an unrelated meaning to the first word. For example, "sporadic" (occurring at irregular intervals) and "irrefutable" (impossible to deny) are not synonyms. "Sparse" (thinly dispersed) and "incontrovertible" (not able to be disputed) are also not related in the required way. The logic requires two words with similar, negative meanings.
Step 4: Final Answer:
The pair "sketchy" and "fragmentary" correctly conveys the idea that while New England's records are incomplete, the records of other colonies are in an even worse state of incompleteness.
Was this answer helpful?
0
0
Top Questions on Sentence Completion
Early critics of Emily Dickinson’s poetry mistook for simplemindedness the surface of artlessness that in fact she constructed with ...............
- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Sentence Completion
The macromolecule RNA is common to all living beings, and DNA, which is found in all organisms except some bacteria, is almost as ...............
- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Sentence Completion
Linguistic science confirms what experienced users of ASL—American Sign Language—have always implicitly known: ASL is a grammatically .............. language, as capable of expressing a full range of syntactic relations as any natural spoken language.
- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Sentence Completion
Dreams are .............. in and of themselves, but, when combined with other data, they can tell us much about the dreamer.
- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Sentence Completion
- Each of the following questions includes a short text with two or three blanks, each blank indicating that something has been omitted. Select one entry for each blank from the corresponding column of choices. Fill all blanks in the way that best completes the text.
- GRE - 2025
- Verbal Reasoning
- Sentence Completion
View More Questions
Questions Asked in GRE exam
For the past two years at FasCorp, there has been a policy to advertise any job opening to current employees and to give no job to an applicant from outside the company if a FasCorp employee applies who is qualified for the job. This policy has been strictly followed, yet even though numerous employees of FasCorp have been qualified for any given entry-level position, some entry-level jobs have been filled with people from outside the company.
If the information provided is true, which of the following must on the basis of it also be true about FasCorp during the past two years?- GRE - 2025
- Reading Comprehension
As an example of the devastation wrought on music publishers by the photocopier, one executive noted that for a recent choral festival with 1,200 singers, the festival’s organizing committee purchased only 12 copies of the music published by her company that was 5 performed as part of the festival.
Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the support the example lends to the executive’s contention that music publishers have been devastated by the photocopier?- GRE - 2025
- Reading Comprehension
- In the 1970s, two debates engaged many scholars of early United States history. One focused on the status of women, primarily White women. Turning on the so-called golden age theory, which posited that during the eighteenth-century colonial era, American women enjoyed a brief period of high status relative to their English contemporaries and to nineteenth-century American women, this debate pitted scholars who believed women’s lives deteriorated after 1800 against those who thought women’s lives had been no better before 1800. At issue were the causes of women’s subordination: were these causes already in place when the English first settled North America or did they emerge with the rise of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism?
The second debate, the so-called origins debate, concerned the emergence of racial slavery in the southern colonies: was slavery the inevitable result of the deep-rooted racial prejudice of early British colonists or did racial prejudice arise only after these planters instituted slave labor?
Although these debates are parallel in some respects, key differences distinguished them. Whereas the debate over women’s status revolved around implicit comparisons of colonial women to their counterparts in the antebellum period (1800--1860), thus inviting comment from scholars of both historical periods, the origins debate was primarily confined to a discussion about slavery in colonial America. Second, in contrast to the newness of the debate over women’s status and its continued currency throughout the early 1980s, the debate over race and slavery, begun in the 1950s, had lost some of its urgency with the publication of Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), widely regarded as the last word on the subject.
Each debate also assumed a different relationship to the groups whose histories it concerned. In its heyday, the origins debate focused mainly on White attitudes toward Africans rather than on Africans themselves. With few exceptions, such as Wood’s Black Majority (1974) and Mullin’s Flight and Rebellion (1972), which were centrally concerned with enslaved African men, most works pertaining to the origins debate focused on the White architects, mostly male, of racial slavery. In contrast, although women’s historians were interested in the institutions and ideologies contributing to women’s subordination, they were equally concerned with documenting women’s experiences. As in the origins debate, however, early scholarship on colonial women defined its historical constituency narrowly, women’s historians focusing mainly on affluent White women.
Over time, however, some initial differences between the approaches taken by scholars in the two fields faded. In the 1980s, historians of race and slavery in colonial America shifted their attention to enslaved people; interest in African American culture grew, thereby bringing enslaved women more prominently into view. Historians of early American women moved in similar directions during the decade and began to consider the effect of racial difference on women’s experience.- GRE - 2025
- Reading Comprehension
- The most plausible justification for higher taxes on automobile fuel is that fuel consumption harms the environment and thus adds to the costs of traffic congestion. But the fact that burning fuel creates these “negative externalities” does not imply that no tax on fuel could ever be too high. Economics is precise about the tax that should, in principle, be levied to deal with negative externalities:
the tax on a liter of fuel should be equal to the harm caused by using a liter of fuel.
If the tax is more than that, its costs (including the inconvenience to those who would rather have used their cars) will exceed its benefits (including any reduction in congestion and pollution).- GRE - 2025
- Reading Comprehension
- Objectively, of course, the various ecosystems that sustain life on the planet proceed independently of human agency, just as they operated before the hectic ascendancy of Homo sapiens. But it is also true that it is difficult to think of a single such system that has not, for better or worse, been substantially modified by human culture. Nor is this simply the work of the industrial centuries. It has been happening since the days of ancient Mesopotamia. It is coeval with the origins of writing, and has occurred throughout our social existence. And it is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have.
- GRE - 2025
- Reading Comprehension
View More Questions