Puzzle questions | Text completion and sentence equivalence | Verbal reasoning

So far, we’ve been leaning on the context in the passage to help us figure out the blanks - but what if there isn’t enough context? We call these puzzle questions, and we have to solve them using logic.

Let’s say I told you that teams A and B played a game of football. A very simple practice sentence might be:

Team A ______ the game and team B ______ the game.

There’s no context here to determine who won or lost. However, the choices can make the answer clear: imagine if you could only choose between won, skipped, and postponed for the first blank, and tied, lost, and won for the second blank. There’s only one pair of words that would logically make sense!

Team A ___(1)___ the game and team B ___(2)___ the game.

(1): won, postponed, arranged
(2): tied, lost, won

Can you determine the only logical match?

(spoiler)

If you picked won for (1) and picked lost for (2), you would be correct!

While postponed and arranged could potentially make sense in the first part of the sentence, it would be hard to find a good match for those in the second part.

For puzzle questions, plugging in the choices and seeing if they make sense is a good strategy. Try mixing and matching choices to find the pairs that feel the most natural!