Paragraph completion gives you four or five sentences and a blank, usually the final sentence, and asks which option finishes the passage. It looks like a reading question and is really a logic question wearing a paragraph: the missing sentence is decided entirely by the direction the earlier sentences have already set.
The section rewards the same habit as sentence completion — predicting from signals before you read the options — but at the scale of a whole argument instead of a single clause. Candidates who read the passage, then read the options, then re-read the passage, lose three minutes on a question that a signal reader answers in forty seconds.
Read the passage as a short argument with three movable parts.
The model's missing piece: a blank that begins with Thus or Therefore wants a conclusion, while a blank beginning with However wants a reversal. Predict the blank's job from its connectives before you predict its content.
| Signal before the blank | Relationship | What the blank must do |
|---|---|---|
| however, although, yet, nevertheless | Contrast | Oppose or qualify what came before |
| moreover, in addition, similarly | Addition | Continue the same direction with a stronger or parallel point |
| therefore, thus, consequently, hence | Cause and effect / conclusion | State the consequence that follows from the premises |
| for example, for instance, such as | Illustration | Give a specific case of the general claim |
| in short, in sum, overall | Summary | Restate the passage's main claim without adding new scope |
Remote work has cut the daily commute for millions of employees, and companies have saved on office space. Yet surveys repeatedly find that junior staff learn faster when they sit near experienced colleagues. ___.
The blank follows a contrast. The passage first gives benefits, then a cost. A conclusion beginning Thus must therefore state a qualified overall judgement, not a one-sided one: the correct answer is "the shift's gains must be weighed against its cost to early-career learning", not "remote work should be abandoned" (too extreme) nor "commuting is always unpleasant" (off-topic).
Watch the sequence: read the first clause (benefit), the contrast word Yet, the counter-example (cost), then predict a balanced conclusion. Every correct option does exactly the job its connective promised.
Which signal phrase would most likely precede a blank that must state an opposing idea?
A passage argues that a new tax reduced consumption. The final blank begins "Therefore,". Which completion is correct?
Which option should you eliminate first when completing a paragraph?
Without looking back: name the three parts of the model, and state what a blank introduced by Thus must do.
The three parts are topic, direction and scope. A blank introduced by Thus must state the conclusion that follows from the premises already given.
A blank introduced by however must with what came before. A blank introduced by therefore must state a . The correct option never introduces a new .
Write, in one clause, a completion for this passage and justify it by its signal: Many cities have widened roads to ease congestion. Traffic has instead increased on the widened routes. This suggests that ___.
The signal "This suggests that" asks for a cautious inference from the evidence. A strong completion: "adding capacity can invite more traffic rather than relieving it". The word "suggests" keeps the claim measured; the option must not assert a certainty the evidence cannot give.
Predictable distractors: "road-widening is always a mistake" (too extreme), "drivers prefer wide roads because they are safer" (off-topic cause the passage never raised), and "congestion is unrelated to road capacity" (contradicts the passage's contrast).
You can now complete an argument from its signals. The next lesson turns to the mechanical side of verbal accuracy: sentence correction, where an underlined part of a sentence must be rewritten to obey the rules of grammar, agreement and parallelism.