Verbal Reasoning Question

Question

Does this look correct? It doesnt seem correct to me for some reason. Can someone help elaborate. Thank you.

Given how (i) ________ the shortcomings of the standard economic model are in its portrayal of human behavior, the failure of many economists to respond to them is astonishing. They continue to fill the journals with yet more proofs of yet more (ii) _____ theorems. Others, by contrast, accept the criticisms as a challenge, seeking to expand the basic model to embrace a wider range of things people do.

Blank (i)

1) Overlooked

2) occasional

3) patent (the selected answer)

Blank (ii)

1) comprehensive

2) improbable (selected answer)

3) pervasive

Answer 1

You can use context from the sentence to find the answers to each question:

For the first blank, the phrase "the failure of many economists to respond to them is astonishing" tells you that the "shortcomings" should be very obvious and hard to miss, to the point where it's surprising that economists ignore them. "Overlooked" has the opposite meaning of what this sentence indicates, as does "occasional." Overlooked or occasional shortcomings would be too easy to ignore.

For the second blank, we use the first sentence to tell us that "the standard economic model" has "shortcomings" which "many economists" refuse to address. This tells us their models/ideas/theorems are, for lack of a better term, "bad." For the second blank, we want to look for a negative term to match the tone of the passage, and "comprehensive" and "pervasive" are either positive or neutral. So you go with "improbable."

Answer 2

patent as an adjective means obvious, so it would be the best fit for the first blank.

improbable means not likely to happen, so it would be the best fit for the second blank.