I tried using math strategy and was able to know where the support and contrast were. But, I had problem rephrasing the " tantalising simple to state" inorder to predict the second blank.
Can someone help?
Source: The big book
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can you provide your general approach to tackle this one (don’t have to be right)so that we can identify exactly at which step you’re making the mistake!
Okay. The word " although" in the second sentence means a contrast between " tantalisingly simple to state " and “________ difficult to solve”.
Tantalisingly means " got very near but didn’t get it". So I replaced tantalisingly with almost.
And if a problem is almost simple to state, by contrast, it must be extremely difficult to solve".
And the colon means sentence one and 2 give the same idea. So the problem should be perplexing, confusing.
So blank 1st - perplexing, confusing
Blank 2 - extremely.
But the options don’t match the word extremely.
Where did I go wrong?
In this context, “tantalizingly” is used to describe something that is very appealing or desirable, but just out of reach or difficult to obtain. When it says the problems are “tantalizingly simple to state”, it means that stating the problems is deceptively simple, which can make them seem as if they should be easy to solve. However, the reality is that they are not.
The word “although” is not present in the original sentence, so I have no idea on what are using it for but the colon ( : ) in the question is used to elaborate on the idea presented in the first part of the sentence.
Yeah, I am with you on this one !
For the second blank (ii), we need a word that describes the difficulty level of solving the problems. Since the problems are hard to solve, a fitting word could be “surprisingly”.