Lesson: Sentence Completion - 06

Think Up Your Own Completion as a Way to Start

Formulating your own completion gets your mental wheels turning and helps you “get into” the question. If you already have in mind what kind of completion to look for among the choices, the correct answer is more likely to jump out at you.
But this strategy is only a starting point. You won’t always find your homemade completion among the choices. By the same token, spotting your own completion among the choices does not necessarily mean that you’ve pinpointed the correct answer.
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Example

Solved Example

Explaination

Let’s try completing the sentence in our own words. It makes sense that statistics showing many cases of respiratory ailments among construction workers would help prove the connection between asbestos exposure and lung cancer. Now let’s scan the answer choices for our ideas. Choices (B) and (D) complete the first blank much as we just did (incidence means “rate of occurrence”). But choice (A) also completes the second blank much the same as we did. So let’s focus on these three choices.
Although the second completion in choice (A) works well in the sentence by itself, when put together with the first part, you have a pointless sentence telling us that a reason proves a reason. So you can eliminate choice (A). As for choice (B), to say that something “influences a causal connection” is confusing and vague, and so you can eliminate choice (B) on this basis. That leaves choice (D). The word underscore means “emphasize.” This certainly wasn’t the idea we originally had in mind for completing the second blank, but it works well. So remember: Don’t automatically eliminate an answer choice just because it doesn’t express your own ideas.The correct answer is (D).
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