IPMAT Indore 2023 · Verbal Ability · Question 6

The idiom. A saving grace is the one redeeming quality of something otherwise poor.

Why it fits. The sentence sets up exactly that structure: the car “has disappointed its buyers in many ways” — but it has one good feature. “Only” confirms a single redeeming quality.

Why the others fail:

(b) saving praise and (c) saving case — neither exists.

(d) saving face — a real idiom, but a different one, and the wrong part of speech here. To save face means to avoid humiliation; it is a verb phrase about a person’s dignity, not a noun phrase naming a product’s good point. “Good mileage is its only saving face” is ungrammatical.

Answer: Option 1

Shortcut. Option (d) is the trap worth studying. Save face is genuinely an idiom, so it feels right — but it is a verb phrase, and the blank follows “is its only”, which demands a noun phrase.

So run the grammar test before the meaning test: what part of speech does the slot need? Here, a noun. Saving grace is a noun; saving face is not used that way. A real idiom in the wrong grammatical slot is still wrong, and distractors exploit this constantly.