Re: Text Completion #Q10
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11 Aug 2014, 13:16
Answers: (A), (D)
The issue here is one of publishing a certain number of works. (A) fecund imagination means rich, abundant. The ‘yet’ signals a contrast. Though Joyce had a more fertile imagination, he wrote far fewer works, which leads us to (D).
A tempting answer choice is (B) and (E). One way to interpret the sentence is to think that Joyce wrote really warped (bizarre) novels, yet those works were less controversial than Hemingway's non-warped books.
This interpretation is dangerous, because it breaks a cardinal rule of Text Completion: a correct answer has to, "by definition", relate to the clue in the sentence, or, in this case, the word for the second blank. For instance, "fecund", by definition, means creating lots of something. Therefore, far fewer directly relates to fecund. On the other hand, "warped", by definition, does not relate to controversy. A warped play may be likely to create controversy, but it isn't, by definition, a controversial play.