Fill in the Blanks
About 5 min · English Language and Comprehension · English
Time worked out from the lesson's 290 words at 150 words a minute, plus a minute for each question.
Fill in the Blanks is a staple question type in SSC MTS English, testing your vocabulary, grammar sense, and contextual understanding. Your job: pick the word or word-pair that makes the sentence grammatically correct and contextually meaningful.
Key ideas
- Context is king: The words around the blank provide essential clues. Read the entire sentence before scanning options. Look for tone (positive/negative), subject-verb agreement, tense indicators, and logical flow.
- Grammatical agreement: The correct answer must fit grammatically. Check if the blank needs a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. Match verb forms to their subjects and tense to time markers in the sentence.
- Collocations matter: Certain words naturally pair together in English — "make a decision," "heavy rain," "commit a crime." Build your collocation bank through reading.
- Double blanks test parallel structure: When filling two blanks, the words often share a logical relationship — synonyms reinforcing one idea, antonyms showing contrast, or cause-effect pairs. Eliminate options where even one word doesn't fit.
- Elimination strategy: Three options are usually flawed. Identify grammar mismatches, meaning contradictions, or awkward phrasing first. This narrows your choice and boosts confidence.
Quick reference
- Read the full sentence first; context eliminates half the options immediately.
- Grammar must be perfect: check subject-verb agreement, tense, and parts of speech.
- For double blanks, both words must fit individually and logically together.
- Learn fixed collocations and preposition pairs.
- When stuck, eliminate clearly wrong options and choose the most natural-sounding phrase.
Check yourself: 3 questions
1. The teacher asked the students to _____ their homework before the weekend.
2. Despite facing many obstacles, she remained _____ and completed the project successfully.
3. The new policy will be _____ from next month and all employees must _____ with the guidelines.
This lesson is cut from the topic's note, not rewritten. Fact-checked on 21 Oct 2026: an AI-assisted check of this note against cited sources; the errors it found were corrected that day. Some errors may remain. The questions are from Shishya's validated question bank.
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