What is the context in which this has been given? [closed]
" There are several ________ accounts of ________ what __________ when senior advocate Shyam Divan made a request late in March for an early hearing of a batch of petitions that question the validity of the unique identification scheme."
What I really do not understand here is how to understand the context in such a long question when there are so many blanks given.
There are many possibilities. For example:
There are several differing accounts of exactly what transpired when senior advocate Shyam Divan made a request late in March for an early hearing of a batch of petitions that question the validity of the unique identification scheme.
[Answered before the OP added (and removed) the choices]
The OP requested some explaining:
It's a question of reading and first trying to mentally "hear" what part of speech or function is required so a phrase or the whole sentence will parse. Context helps determine the basic meaning. If you reread after determining the function of the blank, one or more possibilities should come to mind. It's part syntax and part context/meaning; they work together. It's like looking at the space in a jigsaw puzzle to see the contours of the piece you need to find.
-
Accounts (reports) can be conflicting, differing, confusing, funny, rambling, published, recent etc..
-
A verb needs to come after "what". We know about the early request from its description, and the verb has to be appropriate to come before "when". We can say that the description, in the most general terms, is describing an event. Any verb like happened / occurred / transpired / took place / ensued etc. will work.
-
"account of what [transpired/happened]" parses without any intervening word, so we need one that can come before "what" to qualify it without changing the basic meaning. Exactly, precisely and just work. There are probably just a few choices for this blank, and I came up with these three only after realizing what verb is needed after "what".
If you have trouble with a blank, try to complete others and then come back to it. It might be a bit easier: each completed blank adds more meaning to the sentence. Native and fluent speakers have the benefit of knowing likely collocations—the more common choices and arrangements of words that are used together.