Lesson: Sentence Completion - 15

Sentence Completion Structural Key Points

Cause and Effect

In a sentence fitting this pattern, one part describes something that causes, produces, or influences what’s described in another part. Here’s an example:

Example

Solved Example

Explaination

In this sentence, the operative phrase is as a result. What precedes this phrase describes the effect or result of the power and recognition that goes with holding an official position in the government. Put another way, the power and recognition of public office causes or influences what the earlier part of the sentence intends to describe.
Logically, what effects would be caused by the power and recognition of pubic office? One natural effect would be to make it easier to run for reelection, if for no other reason than because the current officeholder is already well known. So, advantages is an apt expression of this natural effect. The most tempting wrong answer choices are probably choices (C) and (D). However, significant contributions or budgets wouldn’t necessarily be logical or natural effects of having power and recognition.
What’s more, thephrase “have . . . contributions” is an awkward idiom. (A more effective and clearer phrase is “receive contributions.”) So choice (C) cannot be the best one. The correct answer is (E).

Word Clue

To understand the preceding sentence, it helps to know that an “incumbent politician” is one who is already in office. But even if you don’t know what incumbent means, you can make an educated guess based on the sentence as a whole. “Incumbent politicians” are depicted here as running against “challengers,” and a “challenger” is typically a person who goes up against a current title holder. So it would be a good guess that an incumbent candidate is the current office holder.
In the above example, the signpost “as a result” marked the cause-and-effect connection. Here are some other signposts that mark this kind of connection:

because	produces
hence	results in
consequently	since
due to	therefore
leads to	thus

You can redraft the sentence about incumbent candidates using any of these signposts in place of “as a result.” If you try it, you’ll see that you can simply plug in some as substitutes for “as a result”; to use others, though, you’d also need to restructure the sentence.
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