[Big Book Test-19] The action and Characters in a melodrama

[las]

Hey guys, I have aproblem coming up with a word for the blanks. How will you approach this?

[HoldMyBeer]

This is a very beautifully written question by ETS. I was only able to do it because only one pair fitted my initial guess.

For blank (i) we have to look after the blank and focus on the phrase all observers can hiss the villain → Now, if everyone has the same reception towards a character(villain) then the characteristic of that character (the villain) is already pre-set or pre-defined —> So, there is a label associated it with .

I will fill blank(i) with this idea of pre-set characteristic or label.

Now, for blank(ii), I am not sure about my approach but here it is:

the structure is air of smug but enjoyable _______
and I know that “but enjoyable” is used like It was shameless, but enjoyable. → (My outside knowledge )

So, what I did was but smug in the blank(ii) so, the sentence becomes smug but enjoyable smugness

So, my overall guess were :

• Blank(i) : idea of pre-set characteristic or label.
• Blank(ii): Smug
• Answer : C (classified , self-righteousness)

[las]

The answer is C. Thanks for the explanation.
For the 2nd blank I came up with ‘guilt’ because of the contrast signaled by ‘but’ but now I see it is so off. Moreover enjoyable guilt doesn’t make sense. May be the contrast is between hiss and enjoyable, but this is just my interpretation

[reinardusjoseph]

Hello, I am currently doing Test 19 (Verbal part 2 number 5) and learn my mistakes from Greg’s old GRE (at 58:13), but I do not see clear evidence of how we can get the answer from the keyword/evidence that Greg explains. It seems that it uses outside knowledge/interpretation. Please advise.