IPMAT Indore 2022 · Verbal Ability · Question 20

Blank 4 is the decisive one. The sentence summarises three activities — “discovery, scientific understanding, and the ___ of that understanding” — and asks what they are elements of. The established term covering discovery and scientific understanding of space is

\text{space exploration}

space vastness (a), space visualisation (b) and space identification (c) are not terms at all, let alone ones that encompass discovery.

Blank 3 — what do you do with understanding “to serve human purposes”? You apply it:

\text{application}

functioning (a) and identification (c) do not take “of that understanding” meaningfully; enormity (b) is a noun of size (and strictly means great wickedness in careful usage).

**Blank 1 — the solar system and the rest of the ___.** The containing whole is the universe.

galaxy (b) is too small a step up from the solar system to be “the rest”, and the paragraph is about space generally.

configuration (a) is meaningless here.

Blank 2 — “the many objects and ___ that are better observed from a space perspective”. Paired with objects, the natural partner is phenomena — events and occurrences, as against things.

ideologies (b) ✘ — absurd in an astronomical context.

materials (c) and elements (a) are both kinds of object, so they would duplicate the first noun rather than complement it.

Answer: Option 4

Shortcut. **Start at blank 4: the phrase “space ___” has only one idiomatic completion among the options — exploration.** That alone answers the question.

**Blank 2 then confirms by the “objects and ___” pairing.** When two nouns are joined by and, they should be complementary, not overlapping — objects and phenomena (things and events) works; objects and materials says the same thing twice.

Note the vocabulary trap in (b): enormity means great evil or moral outrage in careful usage, not great size — a distinction worth teaching, since it is widely misused.