Determining support/contrast in Text Completion

Hi everyone, I’m trying to develop my objective/logical skills in text completion rather than defaulting to using my ‘ear’ to subjectively understand the phrase. As Greg says, this is a more reliable and consistent process of approaching the questions.

However, I’m having trouble with this particular prompt from the video on this topic:

Specifically, I can’t figure out how to fill in these blanks only using the objective structure of the sentence.

For example, why can I not fill in the blanks here with false and stability respectively? It obviously makes little sense when using context/knowledge about business forecasts. But using just the prompt -

  • ‘forecasts are usually accurate’ doesn’t give any information about whether the future will be like the past or not.
  • ‘forecasts can be dangerously wrong’ also doesn’t give any information about ‘in times of major ___’

The only thing I can use from the sentence is the contrast between ‘usually’ vs ‘in times’ to determine that the first ‘times’ are normal, and the second ‘times’ are unusual. Then I guess I assume that the future being completely different than the past is probably unusual?

I think I may have just answered my own question while writing this…anyway please let me know if I’m completely off base here, thank you!

The usually supports the idea of “Future=Past” leads to good forecasts. But you can infer if “Future!=past” then its hard to forecast.

The however indicates a contrast with the initial sentence. So we can guess the blanks based on that.

If the past and future are tranquil then its easy to forecast. If there are disruptions then its harder to forecast.

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