IPMAT Indore 2023 · Verbal Ability · Question 20

Blank 1 — what kind of scale? The phrase is “on an increasingly ___ scale”. Scales are described by size or reach: a global scale, a national scale, a massive scale.

global ✔ — idiomatic and fits “the culture of the 21st century”, which is a claim about the whole world.

conspicuous, ordinal, nominal ✘ — none collocates with scale in this sense. (Nominal scale exists in statistics, but that is a technical term about measurement types, not about something increasing.)

Blank 2 — complete the list. The list runs: “an idea, an activity, an artwork, a ___ with another person”. The item must be a thing of worth that is shared with someone.

relationship ✔ — the natural fourth item, and the only one that matches the list’s rising abstraction (idea → activity → artwork → relationship).

dialogue and conversation are possible with with, but both are narrower events rather than things whose “worth” is weighed.

dinner (d) ✘ — bathetic, and out of keeping with the list.

Blank 3 — how is worth determined? The passage has just defined instrumentality as “the capacity to produce money or things”. Worth is therefore judged by usefulness:

\text{pragmatically}

diligently (a) ✘ — describes care in the judging, not the criterion.

imaginatively (c) and meaningfully (d) ✘ — both are the opposite of the utilitarian outlook the paragraph is describing, and indeed what the writer implies has been lost.

Answer: Option 2

Shortcut. Blank 3 is the fastest: the paragraph has already defined its own criterion. “Utility, effectiveness, and impact” and “the capacity to produce money or things” all point to one adverb — pragmatically. Two options (imaginatively, meaningfully) contradict the paragraph’s whole argument.

Then blank 1 confirms by collocation: only global goes with scale in this sense.

Note the tonal signal. The writer is describing a utilitarian culture with evident unease. An option offering a warm word like meaningfully is describing what the passage says is missing, not what it says is happening — a very common cloze trap in argumentative passages.