Why is 'harmful' the correct choice in this 'fill in the blank' situation?
Although gossip is not h______ chat that can make conversations exciting, it can also be a way to spread something untrue about other people.
The above sentence is taken from a larger text on the topic of 'Netiquette' - internet manners.
The text is part of an example high-school entrance exam for Chinese students from back in 2016.
Each blank must only be filled with one word. The first letter of the word is provided to help students narrow down the number of possible word choices.
According to the answer sheet, the blank is to be filled by using the word harmful, which (to me) makes very little, if any, sense at all in this structure.
I have double-checked the example's punctuation and ran the "Although gossip is not harmful chat..." search string and its permutations through both Google and Bing, in the hopes of landing a hit that could confirm or refute the usage of harmful - all to no avail.
Below is an excerpt from the text including the sentences surrounding the problematic blank.
The manners also i(nclude) not looking through others' phones and not gossiping about others over mesasges, e(specially) when you choose "reply all" to send a message to a group of people.
Although gossip is not h(armful) chat that can make conversations exciting, it can also be a way to spread something untrue about other people. Gossip can be even stronger on social media than in real life, so it's b(etter) not to gossip.
Other than this being simply a case of Chinglish, is there another explanation as to why the usage of harmful is correct here?
According to the answer sheet, the blank is to be filled by using the word harmful, which (to me) makes very little, if any, sense at all in this structure.
Although I disagree with the statement that is made, the structure actually makes sense.
The basic sentence structure is:
Although [A], [B].
This structure juxtaposes A and B. This means that A and B seemingly argue opposite points.
Although he is a thief, John is also a good man.
Although he is a good man, John is also a thief.
You can't definitively deduce whether A is positive and B is negative (or vice versa), but you can be sure that one of them is positive, the other is negative.
Now let's look at your example:
Although [A], [B].
[A] = gossip is not h______ chat that can make conversations exciting
[B] = it can also be a way to spread something untrue about other people
Since A is incomplete, we cannot deduce whether it's positive or negative. However, when you look at B, you see that it is clearly negative*.
Therefore, A must be positive. So "not h___" must be positive, or in other words, "h___" must be negative.
"Harmful" is negative, and therefore fits the bill.
"Harmless", while more factually correct in my opinion, would cause both A and B to both be negative, and that clashes with the sentence structure of "Although [A], [B]"
Although gossip is not harmful chat that can make conversations exciting, it can also be a way to spread something untrue about other people.
I just want to repeat here that I think the statement is completely wrong. Gossip is harmful, even when not malevolent.
But the point of the question of filling in the blank is not about filling in your opinion, but rather filling in the word that fits in the sentence.
*Unless it's a book written by Niccolò Machiavelli.
Edit
KernelPanic makes a good point in the comments. As per your request, adding it to my answer.
One should consider the sentence to be
Although gossip is (not harmful) chat that can make conversations exciting
As opposed to
Although gossip is not (harmful chat that can make conversations exciting)
The key difference is that the former example directly negates harmful, instead of harmful chat that [..].
This seems a mistake on the part of whoever wrote the example. They are technically correct (not in meaning, but grammatically), but they did not considere that the latter example is much more likely to be understood, compared to the former.