Hi team,
I had guessed my semantic words to be reducing/increasing for the 1st blank and important/not important for the second blank. Using this, I picked restricted and domineering as the answers. can i please know where i went wrong? thanks!
Hi team,
The possibilities you filled in weren’t bad choices. If you want to be more precise in your word prediction, it’s worth noting that rhetoric doesn’t increase or decrease anything directly; it persuades, challenges, or influences people to bring about those changes. It’s a subtle, kind of nitpicky distinction that may help in general, but in this case, wasn’t the reason your answer was incorrect.
What did lead to the incorrect answer was not recognizing that the blanks needed to be oppositional. Given the term “previously thought”, we can deduce a contrast between the past beliefs and progressive rhetoric. So whatever changes the rhetoric advocated for must have been the opposite of the old way of thinking.
This shift could have happened two ways:
- negatively, by challenging accepted norms
- positively, by endorsing unpopular norms
As another usage tip, domineering is used to describe someone’s behavior. A person acts in a domineering way. A school subject lacks the agency required to be domineering.