Single correct option
There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.
Sentence: Yet this stark choice ignored a third possibility that had been operating, unnoticed by theorists, all along.
Paragraph: In 1968 the ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that any resource open to all would inevitably be over-exploited. ___(1)___. Each herder grazing cattle on a shared pasture, he reasoned, gains the full benefit of adding one more animal but bears only a fraction of the cost of overgrazing. ___(2)___. Hardin concluded that the only remedies were privatisation or government control. ___(3)___. The political economist Elinor Ostrom spent decades documenting communities—Swiss alpine villages, Japanese fishing cooperatives, Spanish irrigation systems—that had managed common resources sustainably for centuries. ___(4)___. Her work earned her the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.
Sentence: Yet this stark choice ignored a third possibility that had been operating, unnoticed by theorists, all along.
Paragraph: In 1968 the ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that any resource open to all would inevitably be over-exploited. ___(1)___. Each herder grazing cattle on a shared pasture, he reasoned, gains the full benefit of adding one more animal but bears only a fraction of the cost of overgrazing. ___(2)___. Hardin concluded that the only remedies were privatisation or government control. ___(3)___. The political economist Elinor Ostrom spent decades documenting communities—Swiss alpine villages, Japanese fishing cooperatives, Spanish irrigation systems—that had managed common resources sustainably for centuries. ___(4)___. Her work earned her the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.
- A. Option 1
- B. Option 2
- C. Option 3
- D. Option 4
Show answer and solution
Answer: (C) Option 3
'This stark choice' must refer to a two-way choice that has just been stated. The only such choice is Hardin's 'privatisation or government control', so the sentence must come right after that, at blank (3). It then works as a bridge: 'a third possibility… operating all along' is exactly what Ostrom documented in the next sentence (communities managing commons themselves for centuries).
- (1) and (2) come before any choice has been stated.
- (4) comes after Ostrom's evidence has already been presented, so 'unnoticed by theorists' would be out of order, and it would separate her findings from the sentence about her Nobel prize.
- (1) and (2) come before any choice has been stated.
- (4) comes after Ostrom's evidence has already been presented, so 'unnoticed by theorists' would be out of order, and it would separate her findings from the sentence about her Nobel prize.
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