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Difficulty: Very hardParallel Structure

Read the sentence below. What single word must be placed in the blank to ensure the sentence maintains a correct parallel structure?

Answer:The economic report suggested that the country's recovery would depend not only on how quickly the central bank lowered interest rates but also on 【how】 effectively the government implemented its fiscal stimulus package.

Answer

how
To maintain parallel structure, the two clauses joined by the correlative conjunction 'not only... but also' must share the same grammatical form. The first clause, 'how quickly the central bank lowered interest rates', begins with the adverbial question word 'how' modifying 'quickly'. To match this structure, the second clause, which features the adverb 'effectively', must also begin with the word 'how' to form the parallel clause 'how effectively the government implemented its fiscal stimulus package'.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the correlative conjunction structure.
The sentence uses the correlative conjunction 'not only... but also...' to connect two parallel elements following the preposition 'on'.
Correlative conjunctions require the structures they connect to be grammatically parallel.
2
Analyze the grammatical structure of the first parallel element.
The phrase following 'not only on' is the noun clause 'how quickly the central bank lowered interest rates', which begins with the adverbial phrase 'how quickly'.
Understanding the exact grammatical form of the first element determines the required form of the second element.
3
Determine the necessary word to make the second element parallel.
The second element is 'but also on [blank] effectively the government implemented...', which contains the adverb 'effectively'. To match the 'how + adverb' pattern of 'how quickly', the blank must be filled with 'how'.
Using 'how' creates the parallel noun clause 'how effectively the government implemented its fiscal stimulus package', matching the structure of the first clause.

Key Concept

Parallelism with Correlative Conjunctions and Dependent Noun Clauses
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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Topics

Parallel Structure

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