IPMAT Indore 2023 · Verbal Ability · Question 22

Blank 3 — the cleanest test. The purpose is “to bring about transparency and ___ the interests of the customers.” Transparency protects consumers, so the second verb must be protective:

\text{safeguard}

incite (a) ✘ — to stir up, usually to violence. You cannot incite an interest in this sense.

capture (b) ✘ — capturing customers’ interests means winning their attention, which serves the advertiser, not the customer. It also clashes with transparency.

multiply (c) ✘ — nonsensical with “interests of the customers”.

Only (d) survives this blank, but the others confirm it.

Blank 1 — who labels posts? The word posts points to social media, and the people required by regulators to disclose paid content are influencers. Distributors (c) do not make posts; advertisers (b) place commercials rather than posts; promoters (a) is vague and, in Indian usage, usually means company founders.

Blank 2 — which posts? What must be labelled is paid or sponsored content:

\text{promotional}

social media posts (a) is redundant — all posts here are social media posts, and labelling every post is not the rule.

commercials (b) are not “posts”.

Facebook (c) is a single platform, far too narrow for a general rule.

Answer: Option 4

Shortcut. Start with blank 3 and the question is over. “Transparency and ___ the interests of the customers” needs a protective verb, and only safeguard is one. The other three serve the seller, not the buyer — a polarity mismatch you can spot without reading the rest of the sentence.

Then sanity-check blank 2 for redundancy. “Influencers have to label their social media posts” repeats information already carried by posts; “label their promotional posts” adds the distinction that makes the rule meaningful.

Redundancy is a reliable wrongness signal in cloze — the correct option almost always adds information rather than restating it.