سوال ۳ کنکور ارشد ریاضی ۱۴۰۴
Reading about the extensive food directives some parents leave for their babysitters, I was wondering if these lists are meant to ease ................. feeling for leaving the children in someone else's care.
پاسخ صحیح: گزینهٔ D — a guilty
This is a vocabulary-in-context (sentence-completion) item. We must pick the adjective that best fits the emotional logic of the sentence.
Read the context. Parents leave extensive food directives for their babysitters, and the writer wonders whether these lists are meant to ease a ______ feeling for leaving the children in someone else's care. Leaving one's children with another caregiver is the emotional trigger; the parents write long instruction lists to soothe the discomfort it causes them.
What feeling do you ease by over-instructing? A parent who feels bad or self-reproachful about leaving the children compensates by writing detailed lists. The feeling being eased must therefore be a negative, self-directed emotion — precisely guilt. "To ease a guilty feeling" is a natural, idiomatic collocation.
Eliminate the distractors:
- (1) an affectionate feeling — affection is positive; you would not need to ease (relieve) a loving feeling, and it doesn't arise from leaving the children.
- (2) a misguided feeling — "misguided" describes a belief/judgment, not the emotion you soothe with a checklist; it doesn't fit "ease ... feeling for leaving."
- (3) an undisturbed feeling — "undisturbed" means calm/untroubled; one does not ease an already-calm feeling — this is self-contradictory.
- (4) a guilty feeling — correct: over-instructing is a classic way to relieve the guilt of leaving one's children.
Hence the answer is (4) a guilty.
Exam trick: Anchor on the verb ease (= relieve/soothe). You only relieve an unpleasant feeling, which immediately kills the positive/neutral options (affectionate, undisturbed) and leaves the negative emotion that fits the situation — guilt.