I made a contrast with “recently”, “traditionally”, and came up with the antonym of “ridiculed” as “lauded” filling the second blank. “Given” and “as” pointed me in the direction of support, and then my guess for blank 1 was “friendly/amicable”. Can someone help critique my reasoning here please? thanks.
Here, I had a really hard time eliminating “guesswork” and “careful”. I am generally finding it difficult to eliminate the answer choices in some of these questions. I find it too close to call. To me an antonym of “creativity” would be “banality” but “brute-force” I thought was too far apart from that. Whereas for “guesswork” it would probably be something like “deliberation” which to me wasn’t too far from “careful” (Both of those would have worked with “systematically” I thought). Where am I going wrong?
You’re right to use the block of 4 technique with “recently” and “traditionally”, but I don’t think using “given” and “as” as a support for blank 1 is correct. I would just continue using the block of 4 for blank 1 too. You’ll find that:
“ridiculed” in blank 2 contrasts with “lauded” (as you’ve mentioned)
I have a similar experience with you, but got different answers than you. Here’s my reasoning:
In blank 3, my initial semantic guess for, “trying all possible solutions until one works”, is “thoroughly”, which is pretty close to “systematically”.
Due to the comma, blank 2 is supported by “systematically trying all possible solutions until one works”. So blank 2 is basically a synonym for the above. Like you’ve said, “careful” is pretty close in meaning. But to me, “brute-force” is even closer. You might have heard of “brute-forcing passwords” as an information security lingo, which means going through ALL possible combination of alphabets and numbers to get the right password.
Blank 1 is the toughest one for me. Obviously, we use block of 4 here too: (a) machines have to try all solutions, but (b) men don’t. To me, “creativity” is better here. Using the same block of 4: (a) machines have to try all solutions to solve complex problems, but (b) men use creativity to solve them. Replacing “creativity” with “guesswork” (even if it feels really close in meaning) in the block of 4 seem to dilute the context of solving complex problems.
EDIT: I just thought of this. “Brute-forcing passwords” also has a connotation that it’s a method that “dumb” hackers use (not necessarily true all the time; I’m sure there contexts where brute-forcing is the right method). “Smart” hackers use more “creative” methods to get passwords.
The advice I’ve heard (from Greg probably) is to use the closest support/contrast word to the blank. “Given” and “as” seem pretty far away from blank 1. The comma is closer.
I’m sure there are exceptions, so a lot of this comes down to practice and getting feedback, unfortunately.
