Though dealers insist that professional art dealers can make money in the art market, even a(n) (i)------ knowledge is not enough: the art world is so fickle that stock-market prices are (ii) ------- by comparison.Lets begin with this sentence fragment below after the colon.
the art world is so fickle that stock-market prices are (ii) ------- by comparison.Comparison is being made between art world and stock market prices. And the art world is described as
so fickle, that the only way to complete the sentence is to state that the stock-market prices are
predictable by comparison.
Now lets go to the fragment containing the blank and before the colon.
even a(n) (i)------ knowledge is not enoughNow, we must keep in mind that what comes after the colon elaborates or defines what came before the colon. So the word for the blank should be such that it supports the idea that the art world is very fickle.
While we could say than an investors knowledge is not enough, the presence of "even" adds a level of emphasis, which makes us want to choose the extreme case - namely - even an
insiders knowledge is not enough.
It is important to understand that the "though" at the beginning of the sentence (
in the fragment though....market) is irrelevant to the solution and is nothing but a trap that we must avoid.
The correct answers are
predictable and
insiders.
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